by Kate Hubbard
Her second husband, Ralph Leche, was a younger son of the Leches of Chatsworth. Neither party had much to offer: Ralph an annuity of £6 13s., from Chatsworth, and a few leases in the Midlands; Elizabeth a home, at Hardwick, temporarily at least. It was at Hardwick that Bess most likely spent the remainder of her childhood, along with her siblings and younger half-sisters. The Leches had three known daughters (and possibly more): another Jane, to whom Bess would be close throughout her life, another Elizabeth (Elizabeth Leche’s stock of girls’ names was apparently limited) and Margaret. The Leches’ marriage does not seem to have been easy, with claims from Elizabeth in 1538 that Ralph had deserted her and the children, and there were financial problems from the outset.9 Elizabeth struggled to pay her rent, while Ralph tried to make money from buying leaseholds and wardships, speculations that led to debts and legal suits.
While the Leches were squabbling and penny-pinching and producing more daughters, the King was ridding himself of Catherine of Aragon in order to marry his new love, Anne Boleyn. The alluring Anne had first caught Henry’s eye in 1527, when eighteen years of marriage to good, dutiful, and now sadly stout Catherine had produced no more than one daughter, Princess Mary. Such was Henry’s longing for Anne that it was easy enough to square his conscience by convincing himself that the Pope should never have granted him a special dispensation to marry Catherine, as his sister-in-law, in the first place (Catherine had been married to Henry’s brother Arthur, though she emphatically denied consummation). In Henry’s mind, his marriage to Catherine was cursed, and the proof was in the absence of a son. The Pope, he felt, must surely grant him an annulment, and he looked to Cardinal Wolsey, his Lord Chancellor, to bring it about.
When Wolsey failed, his downfall was inevitable, and in 1530, shortly after his arrest, he died. Henry promptly appropriated the Cardinal’s properties, including Hampton Court and York Place (renamed Whitehall), and, with the encouragement of Anne Boleyn, began remodelling and expanding both. Henry, like Wolsey, who had acted as his architectural mentor, was an inveterate builder. He did not just commission buildings, he was actively involved in their design – he owned drawing instruments and was probably capable of drawing up basic plans. In 1532, impatient to see results at Whitehall, Henry had canvas tents put up over the works, so workmen could carry on in the rain, and on one occasion provided emergency midnight rations of beer, bread and cheese as they stood knee-deep in mud, digging foundations.10
Impatient with waiting for his annulment too, the King decided to take matters into his own hands. Without renouncing Catholicism, Henry, urged on by Anne, was open to new interpretations, and in particular to the evangelical ideas coming from the Continent. Evangelicals sought to reform the Catholic Church by taking it back to its bare essentials, by placing the word of God, as found in the Bible, over that of the Pope and scorning empty ritual. The seeds of the new faith were being sown. The first step in the break with Rome came in May 1532, when Thomas Cromwell, former right-hand man to Wolsey, now to Henry and a staunch evangelical (he had learned the New Testament, translated from the Greek by the Dutch humanist Erasmus, by heart), engineered the submission of the clergy to the King. In early 1533, Henry married Anne, who was already pregnant. That May, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, another evangelical and a firm ally of the Boleyns, declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine null and void and Anne was crowned Queen. Four months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby – a girl, to Henry’s chagrin – Princess Elizabeth. The following year, the Act of Supremacy made the King head of the Church.
Derbyshire was a long way from London, but the ripples following Henry’s marriage to Anne and the break with Rome would have been felt. At Hardwick, the Leches were no doubt too preoccupied with the business of survival to take much notice of national events. Still, the shocking news, in May 1535, that a group of Carthusian monks, regarded as some of the holiest men in England, had been hanged, drawn and quartered (under the Treason Act of 1535, denial of royal supremacy was punishable by death) would have filtered its way to them; so too the executions of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Thomas More, who refused to accept the King as head of the Church or to support the Act of Succession, by which Princess Mary, Henry’s elder daughter, was declared illegitimate.
But events moved fast at Henry’s court. When Anne suffered a series of miscarriages, and with no sign of the male heir that Henry so badly needed, marital relations soured and the King began to look elsewhere. In May 1536, just eleven days after Anne’s execution for alleged multiple adulteries and treason, Henry married Jane Seymour, who would, at last, produce a son. That autumn, the northern rebellion, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, a riposte to Henry’s perceived attacks on the Church, as well as a show of support for Princess Mary as his legitimate heir, began not far from Derbyshire, in Lincolnshire, before spreading north as far as the Scottish border. The scale of the rebellion took Henry by surprise, but merely hardened his determination to accelerate the process of Dissolution. Smaller monasteries, all over the country, went first. By 1540, in just four years, all England’s monasteries had been suppressed; their libraries, art and relics destroyed; their monks and nuns pensioned off. The Dissolution and its after-effects left few corners of England untouched.
However, the King was busy constructing as well as destroying. ‘Certainly, masonry did never better flourish in England than in his time’, wrote William Harrison.11 Aside from Whitehall and Hampton Court, Henry improved his palaces at Greenwich and Oatlands; he had work done at the Tower of London; and in 1538 he began to build the charmingly decorative Nonsuch, a glorified hunting lodge in Surrey, intended as a pleasure palace for informal entertaining. Nonsuch was timber-framed and constructed around two courtyards, with stucco plaster panels depicting classical and mythological figures lining the walls of the inner courtyard, and miniature onion domes. Its foundations were built of stone from Merton Priory. Former monasteries proved a rich resource for Tudor builders – they could be incorporated into and reworked as private houses, or demolished and used as quarries.
The building and maintenance of royal palaces, as well as of fortifications, throughout England was undertaken by the Royal Works. The Works was based in Scotland Yard, Whitehall, with an outpost at Berwick, on the Scottish border, and satellites at the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and Chester. It was headed by a surveyor – the most powerful position in the Tudor building world – seconded by a comptroller, who oversaw financial and administrative affairs, then a master mason, master carpenter and master bricklayer, a chief joiner and chief glazier, a serjeant plumber and a serjeant painter, each of whom was responsible for his team of craftsmen.12 A post in the Works brought status, security and a guaranteed income – salaries were modest, but as with court positions, there was ample opportunity to boost them with backhanders and bribes. Henry VIII kept the Works busy; under Elizabeth I they were not called upon for new royal buildings and simply maintained those existing. However, for private patrons they offered an extremely useful source of skilled craftsmen and draughtsmen (Lord Burghley used officers from the Royal Works to draw up plans for both Theobalds and his Chelsea house), bearing in mind that in theory such men could be commandeered at any time for a royal or military building project.13
Whitehall, Hampton Court, Nonsuch – all would become familiar to Bess. But as twenty-something Elizabeth Hardwick she would not have set her sights much beyond a husband. Marriage, for Bess and her sisters, was by far the best, indeed the only, option, but not one to be counted on, considering that all they had were their dowries of forty marks. The first step in Bess’s marital career was unspectacular, no more than could be expected for a girl in her position, but presented with an offer, she took it. In about 1542, around the same time that her stepfather Ralph Leche was sent to the Fleet prison for debt (he died in 1549), Bess married Robert Barley (or Barlow) of Barlow, Derbyshire.14 We know that the marriage took place within the lifetime of Robert’s father, Arthur, a
nd Arthur died in May 1543, when Robert was just thirteen and Bess twenty or twenty-one.
According to Nathaniel Johnson, the Yorkshire antiquarian, in his seven-volume history of the Earls of Shrewsbury, written at Chatsworth in 1692, ‘some ancient gentlemen’ told him that Bess and Robert Barley met in London, in the household of Lady Zouch, where Robert lay sick with ‘Chronical Distemper’. ‘In which time this young gentlewoman making him many visits upon account of their neighbourhood in the country and out of kindness to him, being very solicitous to afford him all the help she was able to do in his sickness, by ordering his diet and attendance, being then young and very handsome, he fell deeply in love with her, of whose great affections to her she took such advantage, that for lack of issue by her he settled a large inheritance in lands upon herself and her heirs, which by his death a short time after she fully enjoyed.’15
Johnson was writing some 150 years after the event and the ‘ancient gentlemen’ may not have been the most reliable of sources. But his account probably has some truth in it. The Zouches came from Codnor Castle in Derbyshire, and Lady Zouch was distantly related to the Hardwicks. It was common practice for gentry sons and daughters of slender means to be placed in noble households, where they acted as obliging companions, performing light duties and acquiring some social polish along the way (Bess would have several such upper servants in her own household). Bess may well have been sent to attend on Lady Zouch, and Robert too, as a page.
In other respects, Johnson’s account is quite wrong. Many Tudor marriages were political and economic contracts, and that of Bess and Robert Barley had a great deal more to do with money and property than with love, and was clearly arranged by their elders. The legal age of consent was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, though early marriage was mostly favoured by the aristocracy, as a means of securing and consolidating inheritance. Bess, as a gentry daughter, would have expected to marry in her early twenties. For Robert, however, to be married so young, most likely in haste, was unusual.
At some point between 1533 and 1538, Arthur Barley had sold his son’s wardship to Ralph Leche, along with part of the Barley estate (Ralph claimed that he had in turn sold on the wardship and marriage, though this was disputed).16 Some years later, Bess explained how Arthur Barley had contacted her mother and stepfather, seeking a match between Robert and Bess ‘in consideration of divers great sums of money paid . . . to the said Arthur for the same’.17 ‘Great sums’ sounds like an exaggeration – the Leches were in no position to pay out great sums; Bess may simply have been referring to her own (modest) dowry. The marriage has every appearance of being an attempt to thwart the Office of Wards (as practised by Bess’s own parents) and to secure the Barley estate. If the underage heir was already married at the time of his father’s death, then at least he could not be married off by whoever bought the wardship. Arthur could die in the knowledge that his estate would remain within his family, while the Leches had a daughter off their hands and some additional land.
Where the Barleys lived as man and wife, if they lived together at all, is unknown – possibly with Robert’s mother – but on 24 December 1544, Robert died. Given that he was still only fourteen, the marriage was probably unconsummated, or so at least family history had it – the Duchess of Newcastle wrote in her 1667 Life of her husband, the first Duke (and one of Bess’s grandsons), that Robert ‘died before they were bedded together, they both being very young’. Robert’s younger brother George became the new heir, and the wardship was up for sale once again. This time it was bought by Sir Peter Frecheville, from Staveley, Derbyshire, who eventually married his daughter to George, so gaining permanent control of the Barley estates.
Bess, as Robert’s widow, could expect her widow’s jointure. Jointures, which were negotiated at the time of marriage, had a twofold purpose: to provide for the widow, and to preserve family estates for the heir. When a woman married in sixteenth-century England, her lands and property became her husband’s for the duration of the marriage. Moveable property (plate, cash, livestock, etc.) was permanently lost to her; her freehold land could be sold off by her husband, but only with her consent; she might get back leases after her husband’s death, if he hadn’t already disposed of them. In return for her cash dowry, or ‘portion’, the groom and his family promised to convey specific estates, or pieces of land, to the couple, to be held jointly during their marriage, and solely during the life of the survivor. The income from these estates – generally a third of the total – was known as a jointure, and was intended to support a widow for her lifetime. This, at least, was the theory. In practice, heirs frequently proved reluctant to accept the widow’s life interest in their estates, with the consequent loss of income. Chancery was clogged with jointure cases. Now, and not for the last time, Bess had a fight on her hands.
A document recording the Chancery case Bess brought in 1546 in pursuit of her jointure survives, torn on one side and the ink so faded in places as to be barely legible. Her voice is muffled by legalese, but her indignation, her sense of injustice still comes through. Here is a young woman of twenty-three or -four, demanding to be heard. She explains how she had applied to her brother-in-law George, through his guardian Sir Peter Frecheville, ‘who hath the custody of the body of George’, for her ‘third part’. There was no one else she could look to for financial aid, since her mother was ‘very poor and not able to relieve her self and much less’ her daughter, and her stepfather was ‘condemned in great sums of money’.18
Initially George Barley and Frecheville declined to pay up – ‘they unjustly and against all the laws of equity refused’. Sir Peter threw up some obstacle and then tried to make a deal, offering Bess an annual sum if she would waive her rights to her jointure. Bess, on advice and for lack of alternatives, accepted the offer ‘with misgivings’, but then Sir John Chaworth, Robert Barley’s uncle, made an objection and the agreement was overturned. In October 1546, Bess was awarded her third, though, so she claimed, it was somewhat less than her due. She was not prepared to give up. It took years of legal wrangling and three Chancery cases, but finally, in 1553, she received her full entitlement – about £24 a year – and damages of £14 as compensation for the delay.*19
This was hardly ‘a large inheritance’, but it was worth the having. A brief marriage had provided Bess with an income, small to be sure, but bringing a measure of independence. These early years of loss and financial insecurity help explain her drive to fortify herself with land, assets and cash, though for Bess the process of acquisition became compulsive, not merely a question of security, but of power and control. She had learned that the rights of a widow were considerably superior to those of a wife: as a widow, her goods and chattels were her own; she could hold, buy and sell freehold land and property; she could bring a lawsuit and write a will. She had discovered that she could expect no one to look out for her interests other than herself. And she had borne witness to the determined efforts on the part of both her parents to keep intact a small Derbyshire estate, Hardwick, a place that would come to exert a similar hold on Bess.
2.
Sir William Cavendish
‘Memorandum: That I was married unto Elizabeth Hardwick my third Wife in Leicestershire at Bradgate House the 20th August in the first year of King Edward the 6 at 2 of the Clock after midnight.’1 So reads the entry in a notebook belonging to Sir William Cavendish. The year was 1547 and King Henry had died in January, succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Edward VI. It seems curious that Bess is ‘Elizabeth Hardwick’, not Barley, as though her first marriage has been excised. Did she choose to revert to her maiden name? Or, since an unconsummated marriage was not legally binding, did she regard Barley as not worthy of record, although she had been quite prepared to go to court in pursuit of her jointure? Curious too to conduct a marriage at 2 a.m., though the hour was more likely chosen for astrological, than furtive, reasons.*
In the years following Robert Barley’s death, Bess disappears from view. Howeve
r, the mention of Bradgate House in William Cavendish’s memorandum offers a clue to her whereabouts. Bradgate was the north Leicestershire home of Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, and his wife, Lady Frances, formerly Frances Brandon, the daughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. The Greys were very distantly related to the Hardwicks through Bess’s mother and it seems likely that after Robert Barley’s death, around 1545, Bess joined Lady Frances’s household as one of her gentlewomen, much as she had Lady Zouch’s, though the Greys were considerably grander. Bess would always maintain close ties to the Grey family, both to Henry and Frances, whom she would make godparents to her children, and to their three daughters, Jane, Katherine and Mary.
Bradgate was a substantial manor of diamond-patterned red brick, set in a great deer park six miles in circumference. The Greys were an attractive couple, passionate about hunting and gambling, presiding over an extravagant, sociable household, but they also placed the highest possible value on scholarship and religion, in their case, as reformers (evangelicals), on the ‘new learning’. Reformers put the Bible, not the Mass, at the heart of their faith; since purgatory and transubstantiation were not mentioned in the Bible, so they did not exist; salvation could be attained by faith alone.
Frances was just a few years older than Bess, socially far her superior and officially her employer. Nevertheless, the two became friends. Henry Grey was not a man of any great ability as a statesman, regarded by his contemporaries as lacking in sense, naïve and easily led. However, he’d had the benefit of a first-class education (he had learned Latin from a pupil of Erasmus) and he wanted the same for his daughters – a humanist education, based on the classics. They were tutored in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, in addition to French and Italian, by John Aylmer, a brilliant young Cambridge graduate and protégé of Grey, who had paid for his schooling (Aylmer later became Bishop of London). Jane Grey grew to be a noted scholar, famously described by Roger Ascham, tutor to Princess Elizabeth, on a visit to Bradgate, as reading Plato in Greek while her family hunted in the park.