by Kate Hubbard
Chatsworth provided a permanent or temporary home and refuge for Bess’s extended family, her mother, brother, sisters and half-sisters (when smallpox swept through Derbyshire, her mother sent some of her daughters from her home at nearby Hardstoft, to Chatsworth, which was smallpox-free). Within her family, Bess, at forty-three, was firmly established as matriarch, both deferred and appealed to. James Hardwick, her brother, who did not share her head for business, was a regular supplicant. James was living in the old family home at Hardwick. Due to lack of funds, he made few improvements to the house – although there is some evidence that he began building a new wing, to the east – but he did add substantially to the estate, buying land and manors in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, mostly around Hardwick.20 To finance these acquisitions, he borrowed heavily and was soon in debt and appealing to Bess for help.
In December 1564, James was testing the waters, with vague references to a Master Clark, whom he hoped might bail him out, especially, he suggested, if urged on by a letter from Bess. He was otherwise preoccupied by ill health – since he had the ‘emeroydes’, the pain in his head had gone, ‘but I feel age [he was thirty-nine] were upon me for I may not abide cold’.21 James Hardwick was either rather sickly or rather hypochondriacal. By the new year, his health and finances had both taken a turn for the worse. He explained that he would have come to Chatsworth, but for having had ‘such hoarseness that never could you hear me speak’, not to mention a ‘coughe of the longes that hath put me in marvellous pain’. The hoarseness had improved, but not the cough – ‘specially in the night it holdeth me sore’ – so he would wait until the weather became ‘fair’ before seeing Bess. Meanwhile, all hopes of Master Clark had come to nothing. Could Bess lend him £100? Even £50? As security he offered the lease of a coal mine at Heath, or a mortgage on his land at Aldwark (acquired in 1561).22 There’s a note of desperation here – he needed the money by 27 January, only a week away.
Bess, who in later years established a lucrative line in money-lending, did not immediately oblige. She was not lacking in family feeling, and was indeed clearly fond of her sisters, but family feeling was not allowed to trump good business sense. A bad deal was a bad deal. Nor was she likely to have been particularly sympathetic to James’s plight, brought about as it was by poor judgement and reckless borrowing.
Elizabeth Leche, Bess’s mother, who was certainly more indulgent towards James than his sister, waded in to lend support. After thanking Bess for the ‘great kindness’ she’d showed her daughter Margaret (Bess’s half-sister), she continued: ‘I perceive that my son stands in great need of money for payments he has to make. Daughter, seeing my son and you cannot agree of the price of the land at Aldwark it were much to my comfort if you would be so good to lend so much money as you think it to be worth and if the money be not paid by the day appointed, the land to be full bought and sold to you.’ Alternatively, Bess could buy James’s estate at Little Hallam – ‘I assure you it is very good land and better than Aldwark and the tenants handsome men and the land stands upon coal which I think is very good for you daughter.’ She admitted that she was particularly anxious to prevent a neighbour and relation, Sir Francis Leake, who had been negotiating with James, from buying the land himself. ‘I heartily pray you good daughter somewhat to strain yourself for my sake.’23 Whether or not Bess strained herself and provided the money, we don’t know. But James Hardwick continued to borrow.
Shortly after Elizabeth Leche’s plea on her son’s behalf, around February 1565, Sir William St Loe died in London. It was seemingly quite sudden – if he had been seriously ill, one might have expected Bess to have been at his side, rather than, as she was, at Chatsworth. On the other hand, during six years of marriage she had clearly always preferred to remain at Chatsworth. Instead, during his last days, William had the dubious pleasure of the company of his brother Edward, though there is no reason to think that Edward was making free with the poison once again. It seems unlikely that Bess greatly grieved. In St Loe she could hardly have had a more devoted or obliging husband, yet there’s a definite sense that their frequent separations pained her rather less than they did him. If many marriages have an adorer and an adored, in this Bess was certainly the latter. St Loe was buried in the church of Great St Helen, at Bishopsgate, beside his father.
Bess was left a wealthy, and highly eligible, widow. Now in her early forties, she was probably past childbearing, but she was still vigorous and attractive. The St Loe western lands, in Somerset and Gloucestershire – valued, in the 1580s, as bringing in at least £500, and possibly as much as £700, a year – were all, according to the terms of St Loe’s will made in 1563, now hers. And this of course in addition to her life interest in the Chatsworth estates and her jointure from her marriage to Robert Barley. Bess’s income in 1566 stood at around £1,600 a year.24 These were assets that considerably upped the ante in the marriage market, as she well knew. Since she was a great deal more likely to acquire a new husband, or at least a husband worth the having, in London than in Derbyshire, it was to London that she decamped for much of 1565 and 1566.
7.
Countess of Shrewsbury
By 1565, Bess had not travelled very far geographically – she remained based in her beloved Derbyshire – but materially and socially she had come a very long way indeed. She was now a woman of considerable wealth and property. She had powerful friends and allies at court, such as William Cecil and Robert Dudley (now the Earl of Leicester), and the good opinion of the Queen herself. With such advantages came notoriety, and she found herself the subject of gossip and speculation. There was talk about the terms of William St Loe’s will and, unsurprisingly, noisy objections on the part of the St Loe family – from Edward, naturally, but also from Margaret, William St Loe’s younger daughter by his first marriage, who contested the will, although it was upheld by the Court of Probate. There was some sympathy for Margaret, who was married to Thomas Norton, and her sister Mary – a feeling that they had been unfairly cheated of their inheritance.
Edward would not be silenced, claiming that all had been ‘unnaturally given and bestowed upon’ Bess, who had enriched herself at the expense of the St Loe family.1 If nothing else, Edward was determined to hang on to Chew Stoke. He claimed that he had an indenture, signed by Sir William before his death, giving him and his wife Margaret a lifetime’s interest in the property. He also claimed that William had forgotten legacies due to Edward and his siblings under their father’s will. Bess countered by insisting that the counterpart of the conveyance of 1564 had gone missing in London at the time of William’s death, when Edward was with him and she in Derbyshire. She also pointed out, rightly, that Sir John St Loe had left nothing to Edward. Quarrels rumbled on. Edward stopped paying Bess rent; Bess stopped making payments against backdated sums that Sir William had agreed to give to Edward. It finally went to court, where it was settled that Chew Stoke was Margaret St Loe’s for her lifetime but would revert to Bess and her heirs after Margaret’s death (not to the St Loe family, as Edward had wished). In 1566, Edward was sent to Ireland, in the Queen’s service, for which Bess can only have been thankful.
Bess was quite as capable of defending her inheritance as she was of managing her own affairs in general. In March 1565, shortly after St Loe’s death, she was negotiating with Henry Babington, a Derbyshire neighbour, over land that Babington was clearly hoping to sell. Bess was not to be rushed into a deal until Babington provided more information. She wanted ‘notes of the whole value of your lands, how much is assigned for jointure, or otherwise, which shall descend to your son immediately after you . . . so as I may understand truly your estate’. With such details, and given sufficient time, she would ‘very gladly proceed into further talk, as I well hope to a good end, otherwise being destitute of counsel for so weighty a matter I dare not talk further’.2 In reality Bess hardly needed ‘counsel’.
With Bess in London, Chatsworth was left in the care of her stewards, who supervised buildin
g works, oversaw estate matters (the grievances of tenants, the care of livestock), kept Bess supplied with money, and reported on the progress of the children. By the winter of 1565, Henry and William Cavendish had left Eton (William went to Cambridge in 1567) and Charles was being tutored at Chatsworth. In November, James Crompe told Bess that William, who already seemed to be putting himself forward as head of the family, felt that it would be a mistake to send ‘Master Charles’ to a new school (Tideswall), since then ‘all this learning that he now hath shall do him small pleasure, for the schoolmaster that he should go to will teach him after another sort so that he shall forget these teachings which he hath had’ at the hands of his present tutors, Masters Jackson and Taylor. William, according to Crompe, would see that Charles ‘applies his book’. William himself needed no such urging: he ‘doth study and apply his book day and night, there need none to call on him for going to his book’. There is no mention of Henry Cavendish’s scholarly habits; he was due to come to London soon, but ‘hath no boots that will keep out water, so there must be a pair made’.
As regards other Chatsworth news, Crompe reported that the ‘fat wethers’ were not yet sold, and the paving, outside the house, was nearly completed, except for one ‘piece before the garden door’.3 Building work was drawing to an end, apart from finishing off the long gallery. In early 1566, Bess told Crompe that she wanted a door made between the gallery and the great chamber. ‘You did write that you would not have the end of the great gallery next the great chamber seeled [panelled]’, he replied, ‘but a portal [door] there to be made. James Joiner is in hand with the portal . . . I do not understand your meaning for the cornice, I am sure you will have the cornice to be as the rest is and of like height. Let me know your pleasure further therein.’4 The gallery was eventually panelled from floor to ceiling.
The smooth running of Chatsworth depended on competent servants, but such could not always be counted on. Word reached Bess in December 1565 that her warrener, Edward Fox, had been neglecting his duties. Rabbit skins were highly valued, and the warren (or ‘cuningree’) played an important part on the Elizabethan estate. Sir Thomas Tresham (of whom more later) built his Triangular Lodge, an exquisite slice of a building, at Rushton, Northamptonshire, for the use of his warrener, though Edward Fox was housed less elaborately, in a simple ‘lodge’ in Bess’s warren. Fox had received a sound ticking-off for being absent for three days about his ‘pleasure’. Feeling himself unfairly maligned, he put up a spirited defence: ‘if the report of them that have no knowledge is better to be credited than mine, I am not meet to be in an office.’ There were, he assured Bess, a great many conies (mature rabbits), as anyone could see. As for burrow-making, a group of neighbours were all set to ‘cast burrows’ after Christmas, and in the meantime he himself had made two burrows and covered them with thorns. Moreover, he had seen off two pairs of hounds that had found their way into the warren: ‘I ran up and down the wood and were angry at them . . . and at length I with my bill cut three of them very sore that I think they will not live.’5
There was trouble from an old employee, too. Henry Jackson, recently a fellow at Merton College Oxford, and former tutor to the Cavendish boys (the same mentioned in Crompe’s letter), began spreading ‘scandalous reports’ about Bess. What these were is unclear. It sounds as though Jackson bore a grudge, for dismissal from his post perhaps, and had been reviving the old tales of Bess unjustly appropriating the St Loe inheritance. Or possibly it was something more defamatory – some impropriety on Bess’s part during the months that she had spent alone at Chatsworth. At any rate, whatever he was claiming was considered serious enough for Cecil, on behalf of the Privy Council, to inform the Archbishop of Canterbury (Jackson had become a minor canon at St Paul’s Cathedral) that ‘the matter’ was to be examined ‘thoroughly and speedily . . . that the good lady’s name may be preserved’. The Queen, mindful that this was the widow of her valued servant William St Loe, waded in too: if Jackson had defamed Bess, who ‘has long served with credit in our Court’, then he should face ‘extreme punishment, by corporal or otherwise’.6 What form, if any, of ‘extreme punishment’ Jackson received is not recorded. But that Bess could command such high-placed defenders of her reputation says much about her standing.
Gossip of a more harmless nature also swirled around court – who might become Bess’s fourth husband? In January 1566, William Cecil received a letter: ‘either Lord Darcy or Sir John Thynne shall marry Lady St Loe and not Harry Cobham’.7 Harry Cobham’s brother had married Bess’s stepdaughter Catherine, and Thynne of course was an old friend. There is no evidence that Bess had any intention of marrying any of them.
In April 1567, a great fire swept through John Thynne’s Longleat, raging for five hours and virtually destroying the house that he’d been working on for twenty years.* Thynne seemingly took this in his stride: he moved into another house on the estate and started building again. For this third Longleat, he took on a new mason – Robert Smythson. In March 1568, Humphrey Lovell, the Queen’s master mason, wrote to Thynne: ‘According to my promise I have sent unto you this bearer Robert Smythson freemason, who of late was with Master Vice Chamberlain [Sir Francis Knollys], not doubting him to be a man fit for your worship.’ Smythson, stipulated Lovell, was to have 16d a day and a ‘nage’ (horse), kept at Thynne’s expense, while his men – the five masons who came with him – were to have 12d day; Thynne should pay for their travel expenses and the carriage of their tools.8
Smythson is one of those fascinating Elizabethans of whom we know all too little. We have the legacy of his houses – high, compact, full of drama and light – and his drawings, but Smythson the man remains elusive. We do know that he was born in 1534 or 1535, that his family came from Westmorland and that he was probably brought up in or near London, where he was apprenticed to a member of the London Masons’ Company.9 Somewhere along the line he learned to draw, exceptionally well. He may have worked on Somerset House, as an apprentice under Humphrey Lovell; by the 1560s, he was certainly working for Sir Francis Knollys on Knollys’ house at Caversham, near Reading. Lovell clearly rated Smythson highly and thought he could be of use at Longleat.
Smythson and his family rented the parsonage and farm at Monkton Deverill, with Smythson presumably commuting the six miles to Longleat on his ‘nage’. He was joining a crack team of craftsmen, including the French mason Alan Maynard and the joiner Adrian Gaunt, but he had plenty to contribute himself. Craftsmen who could turn their hands to design were not uncommon – men like Roger Worde, or William Spicer, or Richard Kirby, who worked on Thomas Smith’s Hill Hall. Kirby was a carpenter, from the London Carpenters’ Company (whose members built London’s theatres), but he also worked closely with Smith on the design of his house. When Smith died, in 1577, Hill Hall unfinished, he left a will appointing Kirby ‘as chief Architect, overseer and Mr of my works for the perfecting of my house’.10 Smythson was similarly multi-skilled. He combined his mason’s training, in a late-medieval indigenous tradition, with a familiarity with classical ornament and detail gleaned from working with foreign craftsmen. From studying architectural works coming from the Continent by such as Sebastiano Serlio and Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, he learned about symmetry, geometry, order and proportion. And to such disparate influences he brought his own ideas and preferences.
Longleat’s eight charming rooftop banqueting houses, with their domes and stone fish-scale tiles, capped by miniature classical lanterns, are Smythson’s earliest known works. Banqueting houses, where diners repaired after the main meal to eat a dessert course, such as ‘comfits’ made from seeds, spices and fruits covered with sugar, were a desirable feature of any great Tudor house. Generally they were separate from the main body of the house and involved an element of surprise, delight or discovery – an ascent culminating in a view, as at Longleat (the ‘prospect’ room in the gatehouse of Henry VIII’s Nonsuch was an early prototype), or a meandering walk, as at Hampton Court, where little banqueting house
s were dotted around the gardens.
On 27 August 1567, Bess wrote to Thynne: ‘I have earnestly moved my lord to grant your suit which I can not obtain [perhaps this was in connection with the loss of his house] . . . in the mean time I will not fail to do for you what I can for the furthering of your desire therein.’11 She was writing from Sheffield Castle, one of the many properties belonging to her ‘lord’, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury.
The exact date of Bess’s marriage to Shrewsbury is unknown, but it was most likely in the summer of 1567 shortly before her letter to Thynne. That October, Elizabeth Wingfield, one of Bess’s half-sisters, married to Anthony Wingfield, a gentleman usher to the Queen, informed Bess that her husband had safely delivered the Shrewsburys’ venison to Her Majesty. The Queen had spent an hour talking about the Earl and Countess in the most flattering terms, anxious to know when they intended to come to court and full of praise for Bess – ‘I have been glad to see my Lady St Loe, but now more desirous to see my Lady Shrewsbury . . . there is no lady in this land that I better love and like.’12
In marrying Shrewsbury, Bess allied herself with one of the great northern earls, a Midlands magnate, a man of immense wealth and assets. George Talbot was born in 1528 and was thus some six or seven years her junior. In 1560, on the death of his father, Francis, he became the 6th Earl of Shrewsbury. He held a number of high offices, including Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, Chief Justice in Eyre, Chamberlain of the Receipt of the Exchequer and Knight of the Garter. His first wife, Gertrude Manners, a daughter of the Earl of Rutland, died in January 1567, leaving four sons and three daughters.
Shrewsbury owned vast tracts of land in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire. Profits, from rents and the sales of corn, cattle, sheep, wool and hides, were substantial: in 1591, sales from just one of his estates brought in over £3,000.13 With land came property: Sheffield Manor, Sheffield Castle, South Wingfield Manor, Rufford Abbey, Welbeck Abbey and Tutbury Castle, the latter leased from the Crown. He owned two houses in London – one at Cold Harbour near London Bridge, and another, smaller, near Charing Cross – and one outside it: Shrewsbury House, in Chelsea. Once married to Bess, he became an enthusiastic builder in his own right, embarking on major works at Sheffield, a hall to accommodate visitors to the baths at Buxton, improvements to Shrewsbury House and finally the great Worksop Manor. Competing building programmes would be just one source of friction between husband and wife.