Devices and Desires

by Kate Hubbard

  Princess Elizabeth was also in the Tower, accused of treason and fearing for her life – the memory of Jane Grey’s execution so recent and raw. But she vehemently denied all knowledge of the rebellion and indeed was exonerated by Wyatt himself, in a last speech as he went to the block. Mary chose to believe in her innocence, and in May 1554, Elizabeth was released and placed under house arrest at Woodstock. Her servant William St Loe remained in the Tower, but in June was removed to the Fleet prison. Six months later, a free man, he was given a command on the south coast, though the Somerset lands granted to him by Edward VI were confiscated. Unlike his father and his brother Edward, Sir William was not involved in a further plot, in 1556, to put Elizabeth on the throne. By 1558, he was serving in her household at Hatfield.

  It was there that he and Bess might have met. Equally, they could have been introduced by Sir John Thynne, who was a friend and neighbour of St Loe. Bess was in need of a husband. She had six children, a large, unfinished house, and an even larger debt. And Sir William St Loe had much to offer. Socially, from an old and titled Somerset family, he was William Cavendish’s superior. On his father’s death in December 1558, he inherited the St Loe Somerset and Gloucestershire estates (he appeared as a member of Parliament for Somerset in the parliament of 1559), which brought in an annual income of about £500.11 His loyalty to Elizabeth was rewarded on her accession with two court posts: Captain of the Guard and Chief Butler of England, positions that required near constant attendance at court. Here was a man who was solidly wealthy, highly respectable, well connected and a widower.

  On 15 August 1559, William St Loe wrote to his old friend John Thynne with the news that his marriage to Bess was to take place ‘upon Sunday this sevennight’, as ordained by the Queen. He and Bess hoped that Thynne would be there. ‘She hath with terrible threatenings commanded me not to forget making her hearty commendations unto you and to my Lady your wife’ – Bess was clearly hovering at his elbow.12 The invitation to Thynne suggests that the marriage took place in Somerset, but September saw the St Loes in London, as William had been called back to court to take part in a ceremony at St Paul’s to honour the memory of Henry II, King of France, who had died in a jousting accident. The new French King, Francis II, was just fifteen, and his wife Mary, who would loom large in Bess’s life, a year older. In the first happy flush of marriage the St Loes handed out presents: William’s sister Elizabeth St Loe, one of the Queen’s ladies of the privy chamber, was given two gold chains, costing £21 20s., while his brother Clement had five marks (£4).13

  There is no surviving portrait of St Loe, but he was said to be unusually tall, like all the men in his family.14 What little we know of him rests on a handful of letters and an account book, kept over five months by one of his servants. But from such slim pickings something can be gleaned: he was partial to nuts – filberts and walnuts in particular; he loved lyre music; he was open-handed and generous – a present-giver, with a teasing humour and graceful manners; and he was a devoted husband. His letters to Bess are spiked with longing – court business kept him in London for much of the time, while building kept her at Chatsworth – and syrupy with endearments. ‘My own, more dearer to me than I am to myself’, he wrote, ‘most heartily farewell by thine who is wholly and only thine.’15

  That St Loe was willing to take on a woman no longer young – by sixteenth-century standards – encumbered with children and debt, says much about Bess’s capacity to charm and allure. We must take this on trust. Reading her peremptory letters – husbands are frequently addressed in much the same tone as stewards – charm is not to the fore. What comes across is force of will, steely determination, powers of organisation and control. But spirit and energy are attractive, and Bess had plenty of both. And as a consummate manager, she found in St Loe a husband who was happy to be managed.

  A portrait of Bess, painted about 1560 by a follower of Hans Eworth, when she was nearly forty and newly married to St Loe, shows her gazing benignly into the middle distance. Her cheeks are plump, her hair red, her eyes blue and rather small and her nose long. Her loose black velvet gown – worn over a bodice and skirt – is lined with mink, trimmed with bands of bone-work and fastened with gold aiglets (metal pins, used in place of buttons). Her sleeves and partlet are elaborately embroidered in red silk. She wears enamelled bracelets, a pearl choker, a French hood (made fashionable by Anne Boleyn) decorated with black pearls – Bess would always love pearls – and a gold billament (headdress) set with diamonds. In her beringed, capable-looking hands she holds a pair of leather gloves, a traditional wedding gift. It’s not so much a record of beauty as a portrait of wealth and status. Here, it says, is a woman of consequence.

  In January 1560, William Marchington, one of Bess’s stewards along with James Crompe, reported the news from Chatsworth. Bess’s daughters, Frances, Elizabeth and Mary, as well as ‘Mistress Kniveton’s’ children (Jane Leche, Bess’s half-sister, had married Thomas Kniveton), had all recovered their health, but did ‘not prosper well in learning’. The orchard had been hedged and ditched and hay had been given to the cattle since Christmas. Preparations for building work were in train, with the arrival of timber, and marble from Ashford. Should Thomas Allen (one of Bess’s long-serving labourers and still working at Chatsworth, quarrying blackstone, in the 1570s), asked Marchington, work ‘by the day or by the great’?16

  Labourers generally received a daily wage, but the more skilled craftsmen, plasterers and joiners for example, were paid either according to the job, on a contract basis, known as ‘bargains-in-great’ (or ‘piece work’), or by ‘measure’, according to the quantity. A ‘bargain’ drawn up in 1580 between Bess and Christopher Sedgefield, a joiner, for the ‘parlour’ at Chatsworth, gives a sense of how such contracts read. Specifications, both in terms of what was to be done and what was to be provided, are precise: Sedgefield is to lay the floor, make a doorway and doors, put up French panelling to a height of four feet ten inches, and set an architrave and cornice. On top of his wage, he is to get food, drink and lodging for himself and his ‘folks’ (men), materials – timber, nails and glue – and money for candles.17

  Marriage to St Loe brought an injection of funds, and with that, building work at Chatsworth could resume after a two-year hiatus. This was partly a question of finishing off – there were floors to be laid, roofs and doors to be made, and walls and ceilings to be plastered. But it was probably at this point that Bess added a long gallery, on the first floor, so making the west front two, rather than one, rooms deep.18 Long galleries, used to display family portraits and for wet-weather exercise, were becoming fashionable – John Thynne was building his at Longleat – and whatever was most current and desirable Bess wanted for Chatsworth. It was important that Chatsworth should measure up against other great houses under construction – Longleat, or Burghley. That Bess hoped the Queen might grace her house is unlikely – Elizabeth didn’t venture much further north than Warwickshire on her summer progresses, and Chatsworth was particularly remote – but Chatsworth would pass to Henry Cavendish, and future generations of Cavendishes. It had to be worthy.

  Gearing up for building in the spring of 1560, trees (mostly oak) were felled, sawpits dug and limestone and coal procured for the lime kilns.*19 Lime kilns, originally introduced by the Romans, were a feature of any large-scale Tudor building site – domed, beehive-like structures, made of brick or stone. Limestone was burned in the coal- or wood-fired kilns, which needed tending twenty-four hours a day, to produce lime – also known as ‘quicklime’ or ‘burnt lime’.* The lime was ‘drawn’ from the kiln, ‘slaked’ (mixed) with water, beaten well to make a lard-like substance – lime putty – and left to rest. When needed, the putty was mixed with sand, resulting in mortar and, with the addition of strengthening chopped straw or horse hair, plaster. It was a labour-intensive but cost-efficient process – lime could also be used to make lime-wash, for whitening walls, while ash from the kilns could be mixed with water to make hard-wearing
floors, like those on the upper storeys of Hardwick. Lime had an agricultural use too – as a fertiliser.

  William St Loe’s duties at court kept him mostly in London, and wifely duty kept Bess, for some of the time at least, by his side. But when St Loe visited his estates, and his mother, in Somerset, he was not accompanied by Bess, who remained in Derbyshire. Just as with Cavendish, the husband accommodated himself to the wife. St Loe understood and accepted that Bess’s heart lay at Chatsworth – ‘my honest swete chatesworth’, he addressed her in one letter. He acknowledged her as ‘chief overseer of my works’ and confined himself to offering advice about estate matters, such as fishing leases and horses. ‘Trust none of your men to ride any your housed [stabled] horses but only James Cromp or William Marchington but neither of them without good cause . . . for nags there be enough about the house to serve other purposes. One handful of oats to every one of the geldings at a watering will be sufficient . . . you must cause someone to oversee the horsekeeper for that he is very well learned in loitering.’20

  Whilst away from Chatsworth, Bess fretted about the progress of the building work. Her stewards kept her informed, but as always, there were problems with unsatisfactory, unreliable or absent workmen. In March, Bess told Crompe not to listen to a certain Worth, ‘for where he doth tell you that he is to any penny behind for work done to Master Cavendish he doth lie like a false knave, for I am most sure he did never make any thing for me but two vanes to stand upon the house’. She was glad to hear that Crompe had sent ‘sawyers’ to cut up timber at Pentrich and Medowpleck, ‘for that will further my works’, and keen that Thomas Mason (trades could stand in for surnames) should come to Chatsworth. ‘I will let you know by my next letter what work Thomas Mason shall begin on first when he does come.’ However, she was losing patience with another mason, recommended by Sir James Foljambe, a neighbour: ‘if he will not apply his work you will know he is no meet man for me and the masons work which I have to do is not much and Thomas Mason will very well over see that work’.21

  Within towns, at least those with a corporation granted by a royal charter, trade guilds operated – apprentices were trained, usually for seven years, before becoming members, and standards of work were regulated and supervised. But the monopoly of the guilds did not extend into the country – you might find craftsmen working on a house like Chatsworth who had been trained in, and were members of, a guild, but were outside of the guild’s control, something that on the whole suited patrons who could hire and dismiss at will, so long as quality wasn’t compromised. Skilled craftsmen, like Thomas Mason perhaps, tended to be itinerant, moving around the country, singly or in groups, from site to site (hence the term ‘freemason’), according to demand. However, they could also remain in one area with a high concentration of building, such as the north Midlands, for many years. At least sixteen craftsmen who worked on Chatsworth went on to Hardwick.

  The basic construction of a sixteenth-century house was straightforward enough, and there was certainly no shortage of cheap, unskilled labour, but the quality of the finishing and detailing of the interiors depended on skilled craftsmanship, and here plasterers and masons were key. Demand for such, however, outstripped supply, and finding them, let alone keeping them, was no easy matter. In April, Bess wrote to John Thynne – once again she was after the plasterer ‘that flowered your hall’. Presumably Thynne hadn’t been able to spare him back in 1555, or he had, but she needed him again. She wanted him either sent to her in London, or directly to Chatsworth, where Crompe would instruct him as to what was to be done. ‘I pray you if your man cannot be had to send me yet some other, wherein you shall do me great pleasure for that my house is much imperfect in that respect and lacketh meet men for the same.’22

  By 1560, Thynne was reaching the end of the second phase of his building at Longleat – a new wing and the great hall so admired by Bess (and eventually replaced). For this second phase, he’d taken on more sophisticated craftsmen, like John Chapman, a decorative stone carver. In 1553, Thynne had begged Chapman off Sir William Sharrington, for whom Chapman had been working on Lacock Abbey, also in Wiltshire, where Thynne had presumably seen his work. Sharrington explained that Chapman had temporarily gone to Dudley Castle, to install a chimney-piece he’d been carving for the Duke of Northumberland – Thynne would have to ‘take patience for a time’.23 Patience was not Thynne’s strong suit; Chapman was with him within the year.

  Key among Thynne’s craftsmen was William Spicer, a local mason, though clearly, like Roger Worde and Robert Smythson, a great deal more than that. In 1559, when work began on a suite of grand rooms, including a great chamber, a dining chamber and a long gallery, Spicer was given the contract to oversee ‘the new piece of building’ according to a ‘platt’ drawn up by himself and Thynne. Thynne was to provide all materials – stone, lime, sand, scaffolding, timber, ropes – as well as lodging for the men and as much beer ‘as they shall have need of’.24 Spicer was also made bailiff and rent-collector of Thynne’s manor, Lullington, in Somerset. However, relations deteriorated, and after numerous rows, he left in 1563, his contract unfinished, £34 of the Lullington rent money in his pocket and the house still pretty much a shell. To fit up the interiors, Thynne took on two Frenchmen, Alan Maynard, a sculptor and mason, and Adrian Gaunt, a joiner, both of whom came armed with knowledge of and experience in classical detail. Longleat, much like Somerset House, was becoming ‘a school or magnet for talent’.25 As for Spicer, he subsequently flourished, going on to work for the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle in the 1570s, becoming Surveyor of the Queen’s Works at Berwick in 1584, and, in 1596, Surveyor of the Royal Works, the plum job in the Elizabethan building world.

  When it came to her house, Bess was clearly making decisions herself, rather than deferring to her new husband. In fact it was easy to forget she had a new husband at all. ‘Elizabeth Cavendish’, she signed off her letter to Thynne, in a moment of inattention, before correcting herself: ‘Seyntlo’. And it wasn’t only decisions about which craftsmen were employed, but how the work was to be carried out, how the house was to look. Instructions came thick and fast: ‘I will not now have the porch botched’, she told Francis Whitfield, ‘seeing I have been at so great charges.’ The battlement was not to be started before the porch was ‘covered’ and dry, and the crest, she felt, should be made of the same stone as the porch.26 She was thinking about the garden too, on which Crompe was to tell aunt Linnacre to begin work. ‘I care not whether she bestow any great cost thereof but to sow it with all kinds of herbs and flowers and some piece of it with mallows. I have sent you by this carrier three bundles of garden seeds all written with William Marchington’s hand and by the next you shall know how to use them in every point.’27 Her children, however, were not entirely forgotten amongst the bricks and mortar, and interspersed with instructions to the stewards were messages for them: ‘tell Bessie Knowles and Frances that I say if they play their virginals that they are good girls’.

  June 1560 saw Bess back at Chatsworth, with St Loe joining her in August. She must have cracked the whip, as her arrival brought a surge of activity: plasterers, joiners, glaziers, carpenters and painters were all hard at work on the ‘new building’, in which the St Loes were living, despite what must have been a good deal of chaos.28 A plumber leaded the roof over the buttery window, while a slater mended the roof on the old house, parts of which were still in use.29 At the end of August, stone-breakers, rough-wallers and masons appear on the payroll, suggesting that construction – the gallery perhaps – was under way.30 Inside, tailors were busy making bed hangings.

  Building work took place alongside the steady rhythms of agriculture – by 1560, the Chatsworth estate supported large numbers of livestock, particularly sheep: forty drawing oxen, forty milk cows, twenty heifers, twenty steers, five hundred ewes and six hundred wethers (castrated male sheep).31 A new cog-wheel was made for the mill; pasture at Ashford was enclosed; a boy was paid for keeping the cows. In the summer,
extra labour – including a number of women – was drafted in for mowing and haymaking, threshing and binding corn into sheaves.32 Labourers moved easily between house and farm – a woman might be carrying water to the plasterers one week and making hay the next.* Bess’s house was taking shape, her estates were flourishing, her children healthy and her husband doting. Not all, however, delighted in her good fortune or wished her well.

  6.

  ‘This devil’s devices’

  Bess’s letter to Thynne in April 1560 makes no mention of the drama of the previous months: an attempt by Edward St Loe, William’s brother, to poison her. Edward St Loe was a rogue. He had been imprisoned, for an unknown offence, in 1556 (the St Loes seem to have had a strain of criminality – Edward’s uncle, another William, another bad hat, was accused of murder and poaching), and had done his best, according to William, to make trouble between William and their father. And he had form when it came to poisoning.

  In 1557, Edward had married Bridget Scutt, ‘a very lustye yonge woman’, the widow of John Scutt, owner of an estate at Stanton Drew, near the St Loe family home, Sutton, in Somerset.1 According to William St Loe, when John Scutt died, aged ninety, ‘the world both spoke and suspected his poisoning’; William pointed the finger at his brother, Edward. Not long after Scutt’s death, Edward and Bridget, who was pregnant, were married, and Edward, already looking to the future, set about cajoling Bridget to settle the manors of Stanton Drew and Stanton Wick, with some other estates, on him for his lifetime. He also persuaded his brother William ‘not to marry the gentlewoman his father had provided for him’.2 But within two months Bridget too was dead, possibly also poisoned (she left a twelve-year-old son, Anthony Scutt, whose wardship was bought by William St Loe in March 1560), whereupon Edward promptly married the selfsame ‘gentlewoman’ who had been marked out for William. Further muddying already muddy waters, this was Margaret Scutt, a relative of old John Scutt.3 In early 1560, Edward, now married to Margaret, visited William and Bess, who were lodging at a house they sometimes used, belonging to a John Mann, in Red Cross Street, London. Shortly afterwards, Bess was poisoned.