Devices and Desires

by Kate Hubbard

  ‘I knew a nobleman of England’, wrote Francis Bacon, ‘that had the greatest audits of any man in my time, a great grazier, a great sheep-master, a great timber-man, a great collier, a great corn-master, a great lead-man, and so of iron, and a number of the like points of husbandry; so as the earth seemed a sea to him in respect of the perpetual importation.’14 It has been said that he was referring to Shrewsbury – and if he wasn’t, he could have been. The Earl was not just a great landowner, but an industrialist-in-the-making, a producer of coal, iron, lead and glass, a trader in foreign goods.

  Taking advantage of new technology – water-powered smelting – the Earl became the largest supplier of lead in England, with, by the 1580s, four smelting mills, producing 600–750 fothers (a fother was just over a ton) of lead a year.15 From the smelting works, lead was sent to the Earl’s storehouse at Bawtry (an inland port), then on by river to Hull, where it was sold to London merchants or exported directly, on one of Shrewsbury’s three ships, to Rouen. From Rouen he imported luxuries such as wine and silks (in 1575, 14 lb of ‘fine sleyed silk’ – floss silk, used for embroidery – in ‘all colours’, costing a hefty £22 8s., was bought for Bess).16 Other goods – cloth, carpets, foodstuffs – were imported from the Far East. The Talbot, the largest of the Earl’s ships, became a privateer and was sent on two commercial voyages to Newfoundland. And Shrewsbury had regular dealings with the London merchants Sir Richard Staper and Sir Edward Osborne, who began trading with Turkey in the 1570s.*

  By 1566, there were two Talbot iron furnaces and a forge, near Sheffield, which by the early 1590s were producing up to 160 tons of bar iron per year, with further furnaces and forges in Shropshire. The Earl also built a steelworks, to furnish the expanding cutlery trade of Sheffield. Sheffield knives were highly prized – when Shrewsbury sent a case of knives to William Cecil, Cecil thought them so ‘well wrought’ that he kept them in his bedchamber.17 By the 1590s, the steelworks was producing between thirty and forty-five tons a year, with a cash profit of £200–400.18

  Shrewsbury did his best to keep a grip on his businesses – watching the pennies, scrutinising accounts and reports sent by stewards and bailiffs, sending detailed orders and instructions himself. When it came to letter-writing, whether to servants, friends or family, he was indefatigable – he wrote often, at enormous length and quite illegibly. Amongst impossible sixteenth-century hands, Shrewsbury’s is notorious, and all the more so for the ‘gout’ (probably arthritis or rheumatism) that crippled his hands as the years went on (when the ‘pain and stiffness’ were insupportable, he resorted to a scribe). His letters range from the affectionate to the furious, with a persistent undertow of complaint – the gout that plagues him, the tenants who malign him, the wife who undermines him, the children who disappoint him. ‘Toiling’ is a much-used verb – the Earl is forever ‘toiling’.

  In a portrait from 1567, Shrewsbury appears slim of build, with a high, narrow forehead, a feeble beard, and an air of anxiety. With all the trappings of a tycoon, he lacked the temperament, the requisite toughness and ruthlessness, the confidence to know when to delegate and when to step in, the ability to distinguish between the important and the trivial. He was a worrier and a neurotic: emotional – given to public weeping – immensely sensitive, especially where his honour was concerned, quick to take offence and easily overwhelmed. Conscientious, dutiful and honest to a fault, he proved a most loyal servant to the Queen, but he was no more cut out for the duties that Her Majesty would impose upon him than for managing a great empire. He was certainly no match for the cool head and implacable will of his wife.

  Bess would have known Shrewsbury. His father, the 5th Earl, had been a friend of William Cavendish, and a godfather to their daughter Temperance. They were neighbours of a kind – the Earl’s main residence at Sheffield was not a great distance from Chatsworth. They would have met in London, at court. Shortly after the death of his first wife, Shrewsbury must have turned his attentions to Bess.

  In an age when so many died young, remarriage was common enough, whether for financial security, social advancement or love and companionship. Bess had found all these in William Cavendish, while William St Loe’s chief attraction was most probably his ample means and the generosity with which he dispensed them. However, it was not unknown for women, having made one advantageous match, to marry again for love. Frances Grey may have married her Master of the Horse, Adrian Stokes, a younger man and a commoner, to distance herself from the disgraced Henry Grey, but she may, as some believed, have simply been carried along on a love tide. Similarly Frances’s stepmother, the Duchess of Suffolk, took humble Richard Bertie, her gentleman usher, as her second husband.

  The Shrewsburys’ marriage, though, like most sixteenth-century unions, especially amongst the aristocracy, was not a love match, but primarily an economic and dynastic contract, a practical and mutually beneficial arrangement. To Shrewsbury went Bess’s property and estates, many of which adjoined his, and her £1,600 a year (he lost £550 of this when Henry Cavendish came of age in 1571 and took possession of the Chatsworth lands settled on him by his father). Her Derbyshire lead mines, including one at Barley, part of her jointure from Robert Barley, would provide ore for his smelting works, while the St Loe lands would give him a presence in the West Country. For Bess, remarriage brought loss as well as gain. Why did Lady St Loe, with her splendid house, her extensive estates and her handsome income, choose to take another husband, thereby forfeiting control of said house, estates and income, not to mention her independence and her freedom? It was true that Chatsworth was entailed on Henry Cavendish, but since Bess had a life interest, she could have lived there in style and comfort, mistress of her own home and her own means.

  Many years later, in 1586, when the Shrewsbury marriage had irretrievably broken down, the Earl, harking back to the old gossip peddled by the tutor Henry Jackson, would claim that he had both rescued and elevated Bess: ‘where you were defamed and to the world a byword when you were St Loe’s widow, I covered those imperfections (by my intermarriage with you) and brought you to all the honour you have and to the most part of that wealth you now enjoy’.19 He may have helped restore Bess’s reputation, or at least silenced the tongue-waggers, though she could surely have managed that herself. Nor was she lacking for wealth, though since a few years later, in 1572, there was mention of her debts, it’s possible that she did need Shrewsbury’s money. More powerful, surely, was the lure of an earl. Lady St Loe did well enough, but as Countess of Shrewsbury, Bess entered a different league entirely. And, crucially, she saw a chance to further the interests of her children, only one of whom, her daughter Frances, was married.

  The Shrewsburys’ marriage settlement, most likely negotiated by Bess herself, on favourable terms, has vanished, and with it details of her jointure – the third of the Earl’s estate that she would receive on his death. This, however, would only be for her lifetime, and Bess would not have expected to have more children with the Earl. But there was a way of ensuring that not all the Shrewsbury lands and properties were lost to the Cavendishes after her death. The union between Bess and the Earl was cemented by the intermarriages of four of their children.

  The indenture for this, dated 7 January 1568, survives: Gilbert Talbot, the Earl’s second son, aged fourteen, was to marry Mary Cavendish, aged twelve, before Easter. If Mary died before the marriage, or ‘before carnal knowledge betwixt them’, then Gilbert was to marry Elizabeth Cavendish.20 If anything happened to Gilbert, then Mary was to marry either Edward or Henry Talbot. Lip service was paid to the feelings of the parties concerned, with the insertion of if ‘Mary agrees’, but the point about this arrangement was that it should be absolutely watertight. Furthermore, Henry Cavendish, Bess’s eldest son, aged seventeen, was to marry Grace, the Earl’s youngest daughter, aged eight – and various alternative siblings were put forward in the event of untimely deaths. All parties apparently agreed, though they could hardly have done otherwise, and the double
wedding took place on 9 February 1568 at the church of St Peter and St Paul, in Sheffield. The lands involved in these marriages were to be enjoyed by the Earl and Bess for their lifetimes, then by the two couples and their heirs. The marriage of Gilbert and Mary Talbot proved successful enough; that of Henry and Grace Cavendish wretched.

  Some historians – hostile and male – have claimed that Bess made this marital package deal a condition of her acceptance of Shrewsbury.21 They may well be right, though in point of fact, in marrying Grace Talbot to Henry Cavendish, Bess’s heir, the Talbots had much to gain. And at a time when marriage amongst the nobility was designed to preserve and consolidate inheritance, such cold-blooded arrangements were common enough – Shrewsbury had already married his eldest son, Francis, to the Earl of Pembroke’s eldest daughter, and his eldest daughter, Catherine, to Pembroke’s son.

  If the Shrewsbury marriage was conceived as a merging of assets, familiarity bred affection and in the early days the Earl’s letters were unfailingly loving. ‘My dear none’ (a contraction of ‘my own’), he wrote to her in June 1568, from Wingfield Manor, ‘though weary in toiling about yet thinking you would be desirous to hear from me, scribbled these few lines to let you understand I was in health and wished you anights with me.’ He hoped to join her at Chatsworth the following day, ‘and in the meantime as occurrences befall to me you shall be the partaker of them. I thank you sweet none for your baked capon and chiefest of all for remembering of me.’22 Bess was good about sending foodstuffs and treats.

  Six months later, in December, Shrewsbury was at Hampton Court, where the Queen had decamped to avoid the plague that was raging in London, leaving Bess at Tutbury Castle. Having not heard from her for some time, ‘which drove me in dumps’, he was ‘now relieved’ by her letter and grateful for her venison and puddings, some of which he’d given away to Bess’s friend Lady Cobham, to the Lord Steward and to the Earl of Leicester, keeping the rest for himself. He told her that he’d thanked the Queen for having ‘little regard to the clamorous people of Bolsover’ – some of his tenants who had drawn up a petition against him – and Her Majesty had replied that ‘she did so trust me as she did few’, a reference, he suspected, to ‘the custody of the Scots Queen’. ‘As the pen writes’, he finished, ‘so the heart thinks that of all the earthly joys that have happened unto me I thank God chiefest for you, for with you I have all joy and contentation of mind and without you death is more pleasant to me than life, if I thought I should be long from you . . . farewell dear sweet none from Hampton court this Monday at midnight, for it is every night so late before I go to my bed being at play in the privy chamber at primero [Elizabethan poker] where I have lost almost a hundred pounds and lacked my sleep.’23

  The question of ‘the custody of the Scots Queen’ was one that had been preoccupying Elizabeth ever since Mary Stuart had arrived in England in May. Shrewsbury, as he must have known, was in the running for the custodianship and Tutbury for a possible place of custody. Tutbury was horribly damp and dreary, by far the least comfortable of Shrewsbury’s houses and generally used as a hunting lodge. Bess was there to assess its suitability.

  8.

  The Scots Queen

  In the summer of 1561, eighteen-year-old Mary Stuart returned to Scotland, a country that she’d left thirteen years earlier to go to France as the betrothed of the young Dauphin, Francis. Her mother, James V’s widow, Mary of Guise, as capable and shrewd as any amongst the Guises (one of France’s most powerful and ambitious families), was left to rule Scotland as regent. In 1559, Henry II died in a jousting accident and fifteen-year-old Francis, now married to Mary, became King. But just a year later, Mary suffered a double bereavement: the deaths of both her mother and her husband. Her brief reign as Queen of France, a position for which she’d been groomed for most of her life, was over. With Francis succeeded by his ten-year-old brother and his mother Catherine de Medici as regent, there was no place for Mary in France. She decided to return to Scotland to take up her throne.

  Still grieving, Mary was propelled from the luxury and sophistication of the French court into a brutal and barbarous Scotland, a place she could scarcely remember, where the Protestant lords, a ruthless, self-seeking lot, headed by the Earl of Moray, James V’s illegitimate son, held sway. The lords had led a Protestant rebellion against Mary of Guise as she lay dying in 1560, and, with the backing of English forces, had driven out the French, who, according to the treaty of Edinburgh, agreed to recognise Elizabeth, not Mary, as the legitimate Queen of England. Now the lords appeared biddable enough, and Moray successfully concealed his own designs on the throne. For her part, Mary accepted Scotland’s Protestantism so long as she, as a Catholic, was allowed to celebrate Mass privately. Negotiations began between the respective Queens’ advisers. If Mary would ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh and thereby renounce her claim to the English throne, then she would be recognised as Elizabeth’s successor, providing Elizabeth had no children. Mary declined. Could Mary have an audience with her cousin? Elizabeth demurred.

  Elizabeth was now faced with a Catholic claimant to the throne just across the border. And not just any claimant, but one whose claim was nearest in blood, who was unmarried, young and famously attractive. For many Catholics, in England and Europe, Elizabeth was a bastard and a usurper and Mary the rightful Queen. For William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Mary was, and always would be, a mortal threat: to exclude her from the succession and thus safeguard Protestantism, the true faith, and at the same time persuade Elizabeth to marry and produce an heir became his life’s work.

  Cecil was an ideologue; the Queen a hedger. There was ambivalence in her feelings about religion, and even more so about Mary. The 1559 Act of Uniformity, which compelled the clergy to use the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, officially established Protestantism in England, but Elizabeth, for whom souls were not to be examined too closely, chose to adopt a policy of moderation – if Catholics continued to practise their faith, privately and discreetly, that was a matter of conscience. Elizabeth was equivocal about Mary too: she could never entirely disregard the fact that Mary was Queen of Scotland, and nor could she dismiss Mary’s claim to the English throne. At the same time she couldn’t bring herself to recognise Mary as her successor. To do so was simply too dangerous: how could she love her ‘own winding sheet’? There was personal rivalry too. Elizabeth was avid for details about Mary’s looks, yet shrank from meeting her face to face.

  It is generally held that Mary was ruled by her heart, and Elizabeth by her head, which, like many simplifications, has a good deal of truth in it. Mary was no scholar, unlike Elizabeth, but she was intelligent, energetic, impulsive and brave – sometimes recklessly so. Where Elizabeth preferred to sidestep decisions, Mary careered headlong into disastrous ones. Having reclaimed the Scottish throne, Mary, not unreasonably, wished to remarry. Marriage – to the right husband – was one way of clipping her wings, and Elizabeth even considered Leicester, a Protestant and a loyal subject, as a possible candidate, though no one, least of all Leicester himself, seems to have entertained this very seriously. As far as Elizabeth and Cecil were concerned, Mary’s actual choice of groom could hardly have been worse.

  As the son of the Earl of Lennox and Margaret Douglas (Henry VIII’s niece), Henry, Lord Darnley, like Mary herself, was a great-grandchild of Henry VII. A match between Mary and Darnley united two individuals with claims to the throne and was therefore doubly threatening to Elizabeth, who had the Countess of Lennox sent to the Tower for her part in promoting it. Hardly had the marriage taken place, in July 1565, than Darnley revealed himself to be as worthless as he was (excessively) handsome – a ‘polished trifler’, spoilt, vain and dissolute. Initial infatuation soon palled, though not before Mary had conceived.

  In the spring of 1566, a group of men, including Darnley, burst into the room where Mary was dining with some friends at Holyrood, Edinburgh, seized her Italian secretary David Riccio, Darnley’s former lover – whom Darnley now c
hose to believe was also his wife’s – and stabbed him fifty-six times. Despite this, Mary gave birth to a healthy son, James, in June, which further strengthened her claim to the English throne. Then, in February 1567, Darnley himself was found dead after an explosion at his lodgings at Kirk o’ Field, Edinburgh, killed not by the explosion but by strangulation.

  Just three months later, in one of her many catastrophic errors of judgement, Mary married the swashbuckling, vicious Earl of Bothwell, but only, so she said, after he had abducted and raped her. She may have hoped that Bothwell would act as a protector and help her control the Protestant lords – her traitorous half-brother and Bothwell’s sworn enemy, the Earl of Moray, in particular. She insisted that she did not know that Bothwell was one of the chief suspects in Darnley’s murder. The lords, who loathed Bothwell, rose up in protest. That Mary largely still had the support of the Scottish people was not enough; after surrendering, she was imprisoned in the island fortress of Lochleven and forced to abdicate in favour of her baby son James. Moray was declared regent; Bothwell fled. Eleven months later, in May 1568, Mary escaped her prison. Briefly it looked as if the tables might turn, as she gathered an army of supporters that outnumbered Moray’s own. But defeat followed and Mary took what she felt to be her only course of action: she fled to England, where she threw herself on the mercy of her cousin and fellow Queen.