by Kate Hubbard
Map of Derbyshire
Hardwick Family Tree
Dedication
For Rebecca Nicolson
And in memory of my father
Epigraph
I have sene throwlie into your devices and desires.
Earl of Shrewsbury to Bess of Hardwick, 23 October 1585
Almightie and moste merciful father, we have erred and straied from thy waies, lyke lost shepe. We have folowed to much the devyses and desires of our owne harts.
Book of Common Prayer, 1552
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Map
Family Tree
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Prologue: Hardwick Hall, 1590
1:Derbyshire Beginnings
2:Sir William Cavendish
3:Acquisition
4:‘Every man almost is a Builder’
5:‘My honest swete Chatesworth’
6:‘This devil’s devices’
7:Countess of Shrewsbury
8:The Scots Queen
9:A Dubious Honour
10:‘Close dealing’
11:‘Great turmoil doth two houses breed’
12:‘The old song’
13:‘Send me Accres’
14:‘Civil wars’
15:Mocking and Mowing
16:The Old Hall
17:Smythson’s Platt
18:London, 1591
19:‘More glass than wall’
20:‘Houshold stuff’
21:‘A scribbling melancholy’
22:‘It doth stick sore in her teeth’
23:‘Not over sumptuous’
Afterword: Hardwick Post Bess
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Notes on Sources
Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by Kate Hubbard
Copyright
About the Publisher
List of Illustrations
Chapter headings: Masons’ marks, used at Hardwick and still visible today
Picture section 1:
1.Bess, c. 1560, by a follower of Hans Eworth (National Trust Images)
2.The Cavendish Hanging, c. 1570 (National Trust Images/John Hammond)
3.Sir William Cavendish, c. 1550, after John Bettes the elder (National Trust Images/Hawkley Studios)
4.Penelope, Virtues hanging, c. 1570s (National Trust Images/John Hammond)
5.Needlework cushion of Chatsworth House (Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth)
6.Elizabethan Chatsworth, before 1750, Richard Wilson (Bridgeman)
7.George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, 1580, Rowland Lockey (National Trust/Robert Thrift)
8.Mary, Queen of Scots, c. 1578, by or after Rowland Lockey (National Trust Images/John Hammond)
9. Elizabeth I, c. 1599, studio of Nicholas Hilliard (National Trust Images/ John Hammond)
10.Embroidered panel (National Trust Images/John Hammond)
11.Bess’s letter to Mary Talbot, 1580s (Lambeth Palace Library)
12.Evidence Room, Hardwick (National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel)
13.Longleat, south front, 1717, Colen Campbell (RIBA Collections)
14.Design for a window at Longleat, c. 1568, Robert Smythson (RIBA Collections)
15.Designs for tools, Robert Smythson (RIBA Collections)
16.Hardwick Old Hall, 17th century, artist unknown (Historic England Archive)
17.Hardwick New Hall, 1959, Edwin Smith (Edwin Smith/RIBA Collections)
Picture section 2:
1.Architecture, Liberal Arts hanging, c. 1580 (National Trust Images/Brenda Norrish)
2.Design for Wollaton, 1580, Robert Smythson (RIBA Collections)
3.Wollaton Hall, c. 1880, Alexander Francis Lydon (Bridgeman)
4.Design for a screen at Worksop, Robert Smythson (RIBA Collections)
5.Variant ground floor plan for Hardwick, Robert Smythson (RIBA Collections)
6.Hardwick, north elevation, 1831, James Deason (RIBA Collections)
7.Long gallery, Hardwick, 1839, David Cox (Bridgeman)
8.Plasterwork frieze, High Great Chamber, 1590s (National Trust Images/ Andreas von Einsiedel)
9.William Cavendish, 1st Earl of Devonshire, 1576, artist unknown (National Trust Images/John Hammond)
10.Arbella Stuart, 1577, artist unknown (Bridgeman)
11.Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, late 16th century, artist unknown (National Trust/Robert Thrift)
12.Mary Talbot, 16th century, artist unknown (National Trust/Robert Thrift)
13.Overmantel in Bess’s bedchamber (National Trust Images/John Hammond)
14.Map of Hardwick, 1610, William Senior (Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth)
15.Faith and Muhammad hanging, 1580s (Bridgeman)
16.Drawing of Owlcotes, 1590, Robert Smythson (RIBA Collections)
17.Bess’s silver livery badge (Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth)
18.Design for Bess’s tomb, 1596, Robert Smythson (RIBA Collections)
19.Bess, 1590s, attributed to Rowland Lockey (National Trust Images/John Hammond)
Introduction
If you find yourself driving north along the M1, twenty miles or so past Nottingham, and look up to the right, you will see a remarkable house sitting high and proud on an escarpment, gracing the Derbyshire skyline. This is Hardwick Hall, built in the 1590s by a woman in her seventies. You may note that its vast windows increase, rather than diminish, in height as they rise storey by storey; that its six turrets are crowned with what appear to be outsize ‘ES’s. These are the initials of the house’s builder, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, more commonly known as Bess of Hardwick.
According to William Harrison, an Essex clergyman, writing in 1577, the Elizabethan builder ‘desireth to set his house aloft on the hill, to be seen afar off, and cast forth his beams of stately and curious workmanship into every quarter of the country’.1 Bess’s Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire neighbours would certainly have marvelled at the sight of Hardwick, but today the house still casts forth its beams, still astonishes. From the outside its masses seem to recede and advance, its towers to shift and regroup, and with its clean, regular lines and great grids of windows, it appears both sober and surprisingly modern.* Yet there’s something feminine about the lacy stonework along the parapet, with the delicate Hardwick stags (Bess’s family arms) rearing up at the centre. And there’s ego here too. At once romantic and austere, ostentatious and restrained, of its time and forward-looking, Hardwick is a house whose compact, regular exterior belies the ingenious and dramatic use of interior space, whose contradictions reflect the foibles and preferences of its builder.
‘You shall have sometimes Faire Houses so full of Glasse, that one cannot tell where to become to be out of the Sunne or Cold’, wrote Sir Francis Bacon in 1625.2 Beside other so-called ‘lantern houses’ of the late sixteenth century – houses that gloried in large, expensive and status-enhancing windows, such as Sir Christopher Hatton’s Holdenby or the Earl of Leicester’s Kenilworth – ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’, could more than hold its own.* The sun, low in the sky, would have – and still does – set alight Hardwick’s diamond panes, so the whole house glittered – or ‘glistered’, as the Elizabethans said – and shimmered gold. At night, lit by candles and torches, it became ‘a great glass Lanthorne’, much like those that hung throughout the house.
Standing on the ‘leads’ (the flat part of the roof) of Hardwick on a clear day is to survey Bess’s domain. Down on the left can be seen the ruins of another great house – Hardwick Old Hall, also built
by Bess, but not to her satisfaction. Looking westwards, across the park with its oaks and fish ponds, out over the valley of the Doe Lea river, towards the moors and hills of the Peak District, the view is not so very different today from that of four hundred years ago. Less wooded and more populated, of course, and bisected by the motorway, but the same open, rolling landscape. Sixteen miles to the north-west lies Chatsworth, Bess’s first building project, undertaken with her second husband, Sir William Cavendish. Three miles north, just out of sight on the other side of the valley, is the site of Owlcotes, her final house, built for her son William. Six miles to the south-west is the imposing ruin of South Wingfield Manor, which belonged to her fourth husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, a property never much loved by Bess, but a convenient base during the building of Hardwick. Further north along the ridge from Hardwick sits Bolsover, the enchanting castle built by Charles Cavendish, Bess’s third son, who shared his mother’s passion for building.
Looking east, the landscape has seen more change, although now, as then, on a particularly crystalline day, you might just glimpse the spires of Lincoln Cathedral in the far distance. But gone is the rough pasture of Bess’s ‘lawn’, replaced by formal tree-planting in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth coal, first mined by Bess, who had pits at Heath and Hardstoft, blackened the house and transformed the landscape. Up until the 1980s, the view eastwards from Hardwick’s rooftop would have been dominated by colliery chimneys rising from flat Nottinghamshire farmland, at Teversal, Silverhill, Glapwell and Pleasley, with some to the west too, at Tibshelf and Holmewood: D. H. Lawrence country. In some respects, the landscape today appears returned to its pre-industrial state, apart from the very twenty-first-century wind turbines revolving gently on the horizon. But coal has left its traces: slag heaps, scars from defunct pits, disembowelled mining villages with their boarded-up shops and tanning salons. At Pleasley, once the oldest and deepest of the East Midlands coal fields, now optimistically rebranded as a ‘country park’, stands a lone chimney, from which Hardwick’s towers can be seen floating in the distance.
Bess lived in an age of great builders, though Crown and Church, hitherto England’s principal architectural patrons, played almost no part at all. Thanks to Henry VIII’s enthusiasm for building – many of his forty-two houses and palaces had been bought, built or remodelled by the King himself – his daughter Elizabeth was positively over-housed. Ever careful and parsimonious, she chose to pass the building baton on to her subjects. Her courtiers, especially those newly ennobled, without inherited family seats, such as Sir Christopher Hatton, or Lord Burghley, risked bankruptcy by building enormous, spectacular ‘prodigy houses’, in the hope of entertaining the Queen (in fact this was a fearfully expensive honour that few actually sought). ‘God send us both long to enjoy Her, for whom we both meant to exceed our purses in these’, wrote Burghley to Hatton, referring to the building of Theobalds and Holdenby respectively.3 At the same time the ‘old’ aristocracy, like the Earl of Shrewsbury, were busily improving existing houses or castles as well as building new: the fact that Shrewsbury inherited half a dozen very substantial houses didn’t stop him from building several more.
These builders took a close and competitive interest in each other’s projects. They visited, praised and criticised each other’s houses, scrutinised each other’s plans, recommended, exchanged and competed over sought-after craftsmen. They vied to outdo each other, to create buildings more extravagant, more original, more ingenious. Some patrons had travelled to France and Italy, or owned architectural works, or, later in the century, pattern books and engravings from the Low Countries, but few had any real understanding of the principles of Renaissance architecture. The Renaissance, as an intellectual movement, had barely touched sixteenth-century England, though some of its features – symmetrical design and classical ornament, both of which were employed at Hardwick – were borrowed by patrons and their craftsmen as architectural frills to be grafted onto an indigenous Gothic tradition. Elizabethan houses fire the imagination precisely because of their eclecticism, their lack of allegiance to any single controlling mind or architectural school, the magpie spirit with which their builders adopted and adapted.
But what motivated these Elizabethans to build so extravagantly and compulsively? Why build two great houses simultaneously in the same county; even, as did Bess, alongside each other? Some hoped to entice the Queen. Others wished to house children and heirs. A few, such as the recusant Sir Thomas Tresham, built to honour and celebrate faith and advertise learning. But most builders were aspirational and their houses concrete expressions of wealth and status: the twenty-first-century self-made millionaire, or multi-millionaire, might buy him- or herself a Tudor mansion; the sixteenth-century equivalent built one.
Bess built in the spirit of her times, as a materialist rather than an aesthete, though it mattered to her how things looked, and she was culturally literate too, drawing on classical and biblical sources for the decoration of Hardwick’s interiors. However, as a female builder she was an anomaly. An ideal of Elizabethan womanhood posited a passive, obedient creature, producing children, managing her husband’s household, tied to her embroidery. According to the ‘Homily on Marriage’, read in church every Sunday, a woman was a ‘weak creature not endued with like strength and constancy of mind; therefore they be the sooner disquieted, and they be the more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of mind, more than men be’.4 The reality, of course, was rather different, especially amongst the nobility. There were plenty of independent-minded, forceful women who defied their husbands, like Elizabeth Willoughby, wife of Sir Francis, builder of Wollaton; or interested themselves in their husbands’ affairs, like Joan Thynne, who took on much of the running of Sir John Thynne’s estates in the 1580s and 90s while he was in London. With husbands often away from home – attending Parliament, or court, or visiting other properties – wives were left in charge.
But however powerful and effective women might be in the domestic sphere, Tudor England was a strictly patriarchal society. Wives were legally and financially subordinate to their husbands. Those who wished to separate from their husbands couldn’t expect any kind of restitution unless, in the rarest of cases, the Queen stepped in. Bess was only able to live apart from her estranged husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, in the latter years of their marriage because she enjoyed an unusual degree of financial independence. She was a highly efficient manager of her husbands’ houses and estates, but she went further, amassing property and estates of her own, pursuing her dynastic ambitions and business interests, extending her influence, and, as a four-times widow, capitalising and building on her inheritance with spectacular results.
Bess was not the first female architectural patron. In the fifteenth century, the building projects of Alice de la Pole, Duchess of Suffolk, included hospitals, a college for priests, parish churches, an almshouse, a market cross, and monuments to her husband. Lady Margaret Beaufort built a school, restored a church and founded two Cambridge colleges in the early 1500s. Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland, built the circular Beamsley Hospital, in Yorkshire, as an almshouse for women in the 1590s (and also, like Bess, interested herself in mining works).5
The seventeenth century saw a number of women who commissioned buildings, or managed projects. Margaret Clifford’s daughter, Lady Anne Clifford – perhaps Bess’s closest rival in the building stakes – having fought a long battle to secure her father’s estates in the north of England, set to work restoring her six castles, repairing her churches and chapels, and building a school, a bridge and a parish church. The widowed Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, commissioned a house at Houghton, Bedfordshire, possibly designed by Inigo Jones. Alethea Howard, Countess of Arundel, Bess’s granddaughter, oversaw many of her husband’s projects, as well as building her own house in St James’s Park.6
But generally all these aristocratic female patrons confined themselves to restoration, family memorials and public works. None of
which much interested Bess, who did not come trailing a string of ancestral castles and churches, who was not motivated by piety, and who, although not uncharitable, did not have the benefactress’s compulsion born of aristocratic privilege. Bess’s motives for building were different, much closer in fact to her male contemporaries: she wished to make her mark, to leave a legacy in the shape of bricks and mortar, to honour and glorify the dynasty she founded. As a woman, and as the initiator and driving force behind four great houses in sixteenth-century England, she was unique.
Lytton Strachey had this to say about the Elizabethan world: ‘With very few exceptions – possibly with the single exception of Shakespeare – the creatures in it meet us without intimacy; they are exterior visions, which we know, but do not truly understand . . . It is so hard to gauge, from the exuberance of their decoration, the subtle, secret lines of their inner nature.’7 It’s easy to feel baffled by the ‘mystery of the Elizabethans’, by their sheer strangeness, their unknowableness. Letters are curiously unrevealing and impersonal; their writers are solicitous over matters of health, occasionally tender, frequently furious, much preoccupied with financial and legal affairs. But what made these people laugh? What or whom did they love? What caused them pain? Or anxiety? Bess’s own letters tell us much about her forcefulness and determination, much about what made her a brilliant manager and formidable woman of business, but little as to what made her attractive and lovable.
In an age of political and religious upheaval, of shifting alliances and sudden betrayals, obfuscation and concealment paid. Therein lay survival. It’s hardly surprising that nothing delighted the Elizabethan mind more than the device – a trick or invention designed to intrigue and amaze, the harder to decipher, the more worthy of admiration. Artists scattered their portraits with emblems and symbols; poets wrote acrostic verse and employed conceits; letter-writers obscured meaning with convoluted courtesies; builders constructed houses in the shape of a letter, or inspired by biblical symbolism. Equally devices could be found in the wider arena of the personal and the political, in the pervasive love of intrigue and deception that animated Tudor England and proved irresistible to Bess.