Devices and Desires

by Kate Hubbard

  How much of a part Bess played in the building of Worksop is unclear, but the Shrewsburys, though often at loggerheads, were not estranged when work began. Bess made regular visits to Sheffield, and Worksop must have been discussed; it may well have been on her suggestion that the Earl brought in Smythson, though he would have been much occupied with Wollaton during the early stages of Worksop. By 1583, when the Queen of Scots stayed there (the Earl was ticked off for allowing Mary to walk in Sherwood Forest, a charge he denied), Worksop was clearly habitable, but it was probably no more than a ground and first floor.9 Smythson came in for the second floor, with its great gallery and projecting bays, the glory of the house. Surviving drawings include a survey plan of Worksop by his son John, and a design for a hall screen, by Robert, that was never executed. Stylistically, Worksop shows distinctive Smythsonian features – domed turrets, bay windows, height, expanses of glass. As the architectural historian John Summerson put it: ‘It was as if Longleat had been compressed into one of its shorter sides and then built upwards half as high again.’10

  The house was pretty much complete by the summer of 1585, when Richard Torre, the Worksop bailiff, told Shrewsbury that ‘all your Lord’s things at Worksop and your Ld’s lodging at Worksop are well’. Work was ongoing in the gardens. Torre had taken delivery of thirty orange trees, sent from London by ship to Hull, but found all but two to be dead on arrival.11 And the plumbers had made the pipes for the waterworks, though Torre was scandalised at the cost of the lead. Inside the house it was a question of finishing touches – in the gallery, Giles Greve, a mason, had almost set up the chimney-piece, which was then to be plastered, and the panelling was very nearly complete.12 Bess, however, was never to enjoy Worksop’s sky-high gallery, or water features, or orange trees. By 1585, the Shrewsburys had long since ceased to share a roof.

  ‘I am most quiet when I have the fewest women here’, wrote Shrewsbury wearily to Thomas Baldwin in February 1582. He was at Sheffield Castle, where Mary Talbot had recently given birth to a second daughter. Bess had returned to Chatsworth, having failed to persuade her husband to take on Elizabeth Lennox’s servants. The Earl felt that he already had ‘too many spies’ in his house.13

  Shrewsbury was feeling more than usually beleaguered. His eldest son, thirty-two-year-old Francis, died in the summer of 1582, leaving no heir and a great many debts, in addition to which came a demand from the Earl of Pembroke, the brother of Francis’s widow, for his sister’s jointure to be paid to him, and if possible increased, according to the terms of his father’s will.14 Gilbert now became Shrewsbury’s heir; always a ‘costly child’, he was shaping up to be no less profligate than his brother. He was also, so his father believed, hopelessly under his wife’s thumb and therefore would inevitably side with her, and Bess, against him. The Earl dated his alienation from Bess to the loss of his eldest son: ‘till Francis Talbot’s death she and her children sought my favour, but since those times they have sought for themselves and never for me’.15 It was less important to solicit Shrewsbury’s goodwill now that Gilbert and Mary were destined to become the next Earl and Countess – their inheritance was secure.

  And yet again, the Earl was facing criticism for showing too much leniency towards the Queen of Scots. A letter came from Burghley informing him that Elizabeth had heard that he allowed Mary to hunt and fish ‘and that she is more lusty now than she was these 7 years and that she hath her mind in all things’.16 Shrewsbury, writing to Walsingham, ‘from the bottom of my afflicted spirit’, could only insist that Mary ‘hath showed herself an enemy unto me and to my fortune’.17

  Mary, who was nothing if not manipulative, would have been perfectly aware that the Earl was increasingly at odds with Bess – here was a chance to play the husband off against the wife. As anyone who had any contact with her attested, she had a great gift for listening, for directing the full beam of her attention on the speaker, for making him, or her, feel that no one could be more interesting; it was key to her charm. If the Earl was occasionally tempted to unburden himself, to allow himself the luxury of a little feminine sympathy, it would hardly have been surprising.

  The Shrewsbury servants were no less willing than the Queen of Scots to exploit the differences between their master and mistress, who both complained of their insulting behaviour. The state of the Shrewsbury marriage and the atmosphere at Sheffield are spelled out in a letter from Marmyon, a servant loyal to Bess – and therefore a spy in the eyes of Shrewsbury – to Sir Francis Willoughby. Marmyon described the ‘civil wars’ at Sheffield, which was ‘a hell’ thanks to ‘a broil or kind of tragedy betwixt my Lord and Lady’. The Earl had accused Bess and Marmyon of being ‘devisors for the disabling of his service to Her Majesty’; if Bess didn’t dismiss Marmyon, he had threatened to ‘shut her Ladyship up without suffering any servants about her than of his own placing’. This, thought Marmyon, would have consequences: ‘the sequel is in doubt to breed afterclaps’.18 He begged Sir Francis for a position in his household, apparently unaware that the backbiting and tale-telling amongst the Shrewsbury servants was as nothing compared to that at Wollaton (by 1584, he had joined the Willoughby household, a move he may have lived to regret).

  Yet affection between the Shrewsburys had not entirely dried up, and the Earl could still be solicitous towards his wife. In May 1582, he instructed Thomas Baldwin to procure her a ‘very handsome’ horse litter. He took trouble with the details – it was to be large, light, covered with leather, able to open on both sides, with curtains, a small chair, and a long rein so she could ‘both rise and steer herself’.*19

  With the Earl chained to the Queen of Scots at Sheffield, he relied on Baldwin to carry out commissions, transact business and keep an ear to the ground. Baldwin reported on news from court; he arranged loans for the Earl’s sons, and for Bess to have £100 as the Queen’s New Year’s gift; he escorted Henry and Edward Talbot on their trip to France (after a year at Oxford); he had the Earl’s cloak mended; he dispensed venison pasties,* sent from Sheffield, amongst court officials; he arranged for lead to be transported to Lord Burghley at Theobalds; he commissioned satin nightcaps for the Queen of Scots; he purchased black rabbit fur for a nightgown for the Earl.20 And, on Shrewsbury’s instructions, he bought goods not readily available outside London – yards of ‘scarlet’ (the most expensive variety of woollen cloth, often dyed scarlet), almonds, saffron, mace, cloves, pepper, garden seeds, cinnamon, canary seed, cassia, plate, glasses, candlesticks, tons of claret, a jerkin of Spanish leather, feathers for mattresses, copper pans, and oil of roses for the Earl’s feet – and had them sent up to Hull, by sea, then on to Sheffield. When, in 1583, a bride was being sought for Edward Talbot, Shrewsbury’s third son, Baldwin was dispatched to Bothal Castle to assess the suitability of Jane Ogle, the daughter of Lord Ogle (Charles Cavendish was married to Jane’s sister Catherine); he considered her rather short, but ‘of very good complexion’.21 In the smooth running of Shrewsbury’s affairs, from arranging loans, to obtaining soothing foot oil and looking over brides, Baldwin was key. It must have been a blow when, in 1584, he was arrested for ‘having secret intelligence with the Queen of Scots’ (accepting coded letters from Mary’s secretary Gilbert Curle).22 Shrewsbury’s paranoia was not entirely unfounded: Mary, her servants, his own servants, his wife, her children, all appeared to be working against him.

  In February 1583, Bess was at Sheffield, from where she wrote, somewhat nervously, to Walsingham. She had heard that the Queen was displeased by the marriage of Bess’s nephew, John Wingfield, to Susan Bertie, the widowed Countess of Kent (this sounds like Bess matchmaking), that had taken place without royal consent. She hoped that Walsingham would do what he could to bring the Queen round.23 And she was back at Sheffield in the early summer, for Mary Talbot’s lying-in – she had a baby boy, John, who died young.

  Bess’s subsequent departure to Chatsworth would be a point of much dispute between the Shrewsburys. Did she go ‘voluntarily’ (the Earl’s version), or
was she sent away, on the pretext of the ‘littleness’ of his (very large) house, and a lack of beds for her grooms and women? According to Bess, the Earl ‘picked no quarrel’ when she left and assured her that he would send for her again within a month.24 He didn’t, and Bess would never return to Sheffield. From this moment, the Earl stopped paying her £1,000 annual allowance. He also claimed that she had broken the terms of the 1572 deed of gift by selling land without his agreement, thereby rendering the deed null and void; henceforth he intended to appropriate the rents from Bess’s lands – those that had been settled on William and Charles in 1572 – since they had now reverted to him. When the tenants of the western lands, who recognised no allegiance to Shrewsbury, refused to comply, the bailiffs were instructed to tell them to pay the Earl, not Bess, ‘at their uttermost peril’.25 Shrewsbury had declared war.

  Something of his state of mind comes across in a letter from Gilbert to Bess, in which Gilbert reported a conversation he’d had with his father at Worksop in September. The Earl had raged incoherently, at times ‘so out of purpose as it were in vain to write it’, with occasional lurches into sentimentality. He saw all around him as ranged either with him, or against him. He didn’t want Gilbert to take his wife Mary to London because he was convinced that Bess would join them there and then they would all join ‘in exclaiming against him’ (the Earl was petitioning desperately for permission to go to London himself). William Cavendish was demanding £1,800 for ‘lott and cope’ (lead mining dues), which presumably the Earl had appropriated. Henry Cavendish was ‘commended exceedingly . . . for maintaining his honour’, as was the Earl’s servant George Bentall, a ‘traitor’ according to Bess, but ‘the truest and faithfullest servant that ever he had’ in Shrewsbury’s eyes (Bentall was a gentleman porter at Sheffield, who later came under suspicion for carrying letters for the Queen of Scots). Whenever Gilbert tried to speak, he was cut off, but his father assured him that he loved him best of all his children, and that Gilbert had never given cause for offence ‘but in tarrying so long at chatsworth’.26

  Those around Shrewsbury urged him to reconcile with Bess. The Queen wrote with the sympathetic concern of a kindly aunt, enquiring after her ‘good old man’, though no doubt she was most anxious about how the turmoil at Sheffield, and the Earl’s erratic behaviour, would affect Mary. Leicester, who was a friend to both Shrewsburys and had been called in as mediator before, wrote in July 1583 sending his compliments on the return of the Earl’s youngest sons Edward and Henry from France and hoping ‘in God’s name to hear better of these matters between my Lady and you and it would be no small sorrow to me if she should justly give your Lordship any ill causes both because she is your wife and a very wise gentlewoman’.27 This fell on deaf ears. The Earl told Baldwin that he wanted the boys to come to Sheffield, where they were to be ‘stout’ with Bess and their stepbrothers, since Bess had ‘set her children to give evil speeches against him’ and Charles Cavendish had been spreading ‘false rumours’.28

  Bess, naturally, was keeping her cards close to her chest. Privately she must have seethed at the withholding of her allowance and at the Earl’s decision to disregard the deed of gift and appropriate her rents. But her public stance was one of bewildered distress. A letter to Walsingham sounds a most uncharacteristic note of defeat. Having done all she could to placate her husband, she could now only look to the Queen for justice. She hoped that Her Majesty would allow her sons ‘to seek their livings in some other place’, keeping only their deer. ‘Their banishment will I trust pacify his [Shrewsbury’s] indignation, for my self I shall find some friend for meat and drink and so end my life’.29 She did not of course intend anything of the sort.

  14.

  ‘Civil wars’

  The breakdown of the Shrewsbury marriage, played out over four long years, grew out of resentments and jealousies, escalated into an ugly battle over money and property – the issues on which both Shrewsburys sharpened their knives – and ended mired in pettiness and trivia. That it was treated as a matter of national importance, with several inquiries ordered by the Queen, may seem surprising, but it wasn’t unknown for Elizabeth to step in and adjudicate between estranged couples – as with the Willoughbys. Shrewsbury was a great earl and a loyal servant, but more importantly, dissension between him and Bess threatened the security of the Queen of Scots. An entire volume of State Papers charts the dissolution of the Shrewsbury marriage: letters, appeals and counter-appeals, accusations and rebuttals, charters, lists of expenditure made and losses sustained (a typical list sets out ‘his griefs’ and ‘her griefs’ in two long columns). Much hinged on the terms of the marriage settlement – now lost to us – and the 1572 deed of gift. Much is tortuous, impenetrable and repetitive, the same old grievances resurrected, the same old arguments rehashed. However, two leitmotifs come through: Shrewsbury’s conviction that Bess and her sons were out to bleed him dry, and Bess’s determination to hold on to what she believed was rightly hers.

  Both Bess and the Earl were enthusiasts for pecuniary nit-picking, and both had very long memories – no expense was too minor to be raked up and added to the balance sheet: servants’ wages, New Year’s gifts for the Queen, building work at Chatsworth, supplies of timber, iron and lead, payments of debts, gifts of plate and linen, Elizabeth Lennox’s dowry, twenty pounds here and forty pounds there.1 The Earl claimed he’d given Bess ‘over and above’ £27,000 in money, chattels, timber, lead and iron during their marriage; Bess insisted that since being separated from her husband she’d suffered £22,700 worth of losses (her allowance, rents appropriated by the Earl, expenses of servants, etc.).2 These are huge sums; by way of perspective, Charles Cavendish lived very comfortably on his £400 annual allowance.

  A portrait of Shrewsbury from 1582, when he was fifty-four, shows a man aged beyond his years, worn-looking and pained, his eyes shadowed and his forehead deeply lined, a man hollowed out by rage and bitterness, a man who struggled to hold a pen in hands twisted and swollen by arthritis as he composed page after page of bile directed at his wife. There is something unbalanced about Shrewsbury’s behaviour in the face of the collapse of his marriage, about the extremity of his feelings, which so often seem disproportionate to their purported causes. There may have been some physiological explanation – incessant pain from the gout that plagued him, or possibly he’d suffered minor strokes that made him irascible and irrational.* There is something of Lear in the violence of the Earl’s language, in his ‘ungoverned rage’, his self-pity, his resistance to reason.* ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’ And not just a thankless son – Gilbert – but a thankless wife too.

  As Shrewsbury flailed around, hurling accusations and abuse, Bess, at the centre of the storm, remained still, calm and resolute, holding her course. Whatever financial depredations she was suffering at Shrewsbury’s hands, they were not such that prevented her from buying the Hardwick estate in June 1583, for £9,500, in William Cavendish’s name (as a wife, she could not buy freehold property in her own). Shrewsbury, who was applied to for the money, refused.3 Two years earlier, Bess’s brother, James Hardwick, whose grandiose land-buying, using borrowed money, ended in bankruptcy and the Fleet prison, had died.* Bess had had Hardwick in her sights for some time, even exercising some kind of occupancy, on the expectation that James’s ownership was doomed (from about 1578, his estate was in the hands of the receivers).4 In 1577, her daughter Elizabeth addressed a letter to her at Hardwick, and three years later, Bess asked, or rather ordered, Shrewsbury to have timber carried there, indicating some kind of building work, or repairs. Hardwick, the place of Bess’s birth, the home that she could enjoy independently of any husband, was now hers. Whatever became of her marriage, she was looking to the future. And to that of her granddaughter, Arbella, too.

  Bess was plotting a match between Arbella and Leicester’s two-year-old son Robert, Lord Denbigh, by his second wife, Lettice Knollys. During the unravelling of the Shrewsbury marr
iage, Bess had regularly sent Arbella to Gilbert and Mary Talbot (Arbella’s godmother), who could offer a calmer, more congenial home for a little girl, and the company of their own daughters. But she had by no means abandoned her ambitions for her. A match between Arbella and Robert would unite royal blood on her part and powerful connections on his, and for those very reasons it was not likely to be welcomed by the Queen, who was kept in the dark. It certainly infuriated the Queen of Scots. She had been willing enough to lend support to Arbella’s claim to the Lennox inheritance, but Bess pushing her granddaughter towards the English throne was quite another matter. ‘Nothing has ever alienated the Countess of Shrewsbury from me more’, she raged to the French ambassador in March 1584, ‘than this imaginary hope, which she has conceived, of setting this crown on the head of Arbella, her granddaughter, by means of marrying her to the son of the Earl of Leicester.’5

  However, the match came to nothing, as little Robert died in July. This, as Leicester wrote to Shrewsbury, in reply to his letter of condolence, was ‘a great grief . . . for that I have no others [sons] and more unlikely to have any, growing now old’. This was not strictly true, as he had an illegitimate son by Douglas (named after Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, her godmother) Sheffield, of whom he was very fond. He felt the Earl was too hard on Gilbert – sons, after all, were there to be cherished.

  But Shrewsbury couldn’t stop himself from railing against Gilbert, who as he told Leicester was claiming that he was being forced to either ‘forsake’ his father or ‘hate his wife’. The Earl denied this, though admitted that he had asked Gilbert to keep away from his ‘wicked and malicious wife, who has set me at nought in his own hearing’, but that contrary to his wishes Gilbert had been seeing Bess regularly and carrying letters for her. The Earl put this down to Mary Talbot’s ‘wicked persuasion and her mother’s together, for I think neither barrel better herring of them both . . . to be plain, he shall either leave his indirect dealings with my wife, seeing I take her as my professed enemy, or else indeed will I do that to him I would be loth, seeing I have heretofore loved him so well’.6 That Gilbert, his favourite child, should side with Bess was a source of particular bitterness.