Devices and Desires

by Kate Hubbard

  All this of course was immensely divisive, with families and neighbours informing on and betraying one another. Bess had friends and family on both sides – Francis Leake was a relation through her mother, Thomas Kniveton was married to her half-sister, Jane, and William was her nephew; the Babingtons and Foljambes she’d known all her life. Her daughter Frances had married into the Pierrepont family, a member of whom had sheltered the Jesuit priest Father Edward Campion, who brought the Jesuit mission to England in 1580. Frances herself was suspected of Catholicism and Mary Talbot was a known convert. Mary may have been turned by such as Campion, and she certainly knew the Derbyshire-born Jesuit priest Henry Garnett, who returned to England in 1586. Mary openly wore a crucifix around her neck and found herself in hot water in 1595 for holding Mass in her home.29 Bess, who seems to have taken a characteristically pragmatic approach to matters of religion, showed no Catholic leanings; as to how she felt about the persecution of Catholic friends and acquaintances, we have no record. Nor indeed do we know how she felt about the death of the Queen of Scots, though since her stocks of sympathy for Mary had long been exhausted, it’s unlikely that she was greatly moved. Besides, Mary’s death meant that Arbella edged a little nearer to the English throne.

  The winter of 1586–7 was particularly long and hard, and both Shrewsbury and Burghley suffered for it. In March 1587, Burghley told the Earl that he doubted ‘not but a nosegay of cowslips or damask of roses of your own gathering shall recover all your strength lost this winter, as I am in good hope to recover the like for myself’.30 Once again he urged Shrewsbury to help Gilbert with his debts, but the Earl, for all his regard for Burghley, was obdurate, and Gilbert was informed that he couldn’t ‘expect any more’ at his father’s hands. Shrewsbury still had plenty of affection for his son; his animosity was directed at Mary Talbot, on whose ‘pomp and courtlike manner of life’ he blamed Gilbert’s penury.31 Gilbert was welcome to come and visit, so long as he didn’t bring his wife – the Earl couldn’t stand the sight of her. Where Mary was concerned the Earl saw ‘repentance in speeches, but not in actions’.32

  Charles Cavendish reported on the progress, or lack thereof, of the Cavendishes’ ‘case’, which he thought would soon be heard, since Burghley, Walsingham and the Queen herself were all anxious to see an end to it.33 True to her word, the Queen made a final attempt to unite the Shrewsburys in April. Gilbert told John Manners how she had summoned Mary Talbot and questioned her as to what her mother wanted. Mary’s reply was straightforward – Bess wished to live with her husband. Subsequently, in an audience with Shrewsbury, the Queen applied pressure, compelling him to agree to taking Bess to Wingfield, where they would ‘keep house together’, and to receiving her in his other homes. He was to give Bess £300 a year, and ‘certain provisions for housekeeping’, and to drop all legal suits for the return of the Chatsworth plate and furnishings. Before setting out for Wingfield, Bess was to join the Earl at his Chelsea house.34

  From Chelsea, in April, Bess wrote her last (surviving) letter to her husband, a letter full of affection and humility: ‘I longed greatly to hear from you and thank you most heartily for your letter which was a great comfort to me, next to your self there is not anything could be more welcome. I was in some fear that your early journey might bring you to some pain in your hands or legs. I have thought the time long since your going, you have been little out of my mind.’ ‘Bear sweetheart’, read a postscript, ‘with my bleating, of late I have used to write little with my own hand, but could not now forbear.’35 Marital harmony had apparently been restored.

  Not for long. By October, Bess was complaining to Burghley that since she had been at Wingfield, the Earl had visited a mere three times, never staying more than a day and appearing ‘not unquiet, neither well pleased’. Having received a letter from Burghley, at which he’d taken offence – ‘the more honourable and friendly it pleases your lordship to write of me, the more is he discontented’ – he had been withholding Bess’s provisions – firewood, beef, mutton and corn. And these provisions, as the Queen had assured Bess, were meant to be worth £700, ‘over and beyond’ her £300 allowance. ‘I humbly beseech your Lord’, she begged, ‘that my long delayed matters may now receive end, till then my enemies will take great advantage to stir up my Lord against me and mine and still divide us.’36

  The Shrewsburys remained divided, but by now energies were flagging, the heat had gone out of the battle and all parties were more or less willing to accept the status quo. Elizabeth had more pressing matters to hand. The execution of the Queen of Scots had left her feeling vulnerable – betrayed by her councillors (who she blamed for Mary’s death) and apprehensive as to how Catholic Europe, and France in particular, would react or retaliate. The Earl, his health worsening – it was rumoured, in 1587, that gout had actually killed him – struggled to manage his affairs and spent much of his time at Handsworth Lodge, Sheffield, where he was consoled by his housekeeper and mistress Eleanor Britton. And Bess threw herself into her new building project – the transformation of her father’s manor into Hardwick Old Hall.

  16.

  The Old Hall

  Today, adjacent to Hardwick New Hall, looms the gaunt and blackened ruin of the Old, equally large and lofty, but awkward and ungainly beside its glamorous, perfectly formed sibling. It’s little more than a shell, but you have only to climb the stairs to the fourth floor to get a sense of its former splendour. Here are not one, but two great chambers – the Hill Great Chamber and the Forest Great Chamber, both with vast windows, fine plasterwork, rooftop walks and glorious views. They would have been among the most spectacular rooms to be found in sixteenth-century England.

  But in 1587, this was all to come. The existing house at Hardwick, the house in which Bess had spent her girlhood and to which she had retreated in July 1584 had originally been built by her grandfather, with additions by her father and brother, but what kind of state she found it in is impossible to determine. It was most probably a dilapidated half-timbered manor centred around an old hall, built by John Hardwick, Bess’s father, with possibly some kind of wing to the east, begun by her brother James, and a scattering of outbuildings – a barn, a dovecote and some ‘old lodgings’. It was certainly not at all the kind of house Bess had grown accustomed to, nor was it remotely sufficient for her needs – she had a large household to accommodate, as well as William Cavendish and his wife, who lived with her.

  Bess was not exactly homeless – Wingfield was at her disposal, but Shrewsbury had made it clear that she was not welcome in any of his other properties and, thanks to his programme of harassment, made it impossible for her to live at Chatsworth, which for now, no doubt to her rage, was lost to her. She badly needed a home of her own, and a suitably large and grand one at that. After thirty years of working on Chatsworth, she had plenty of building know-how, but lacking the time or leisure to deliberate over the kind of house she wanted, she embarked on the Old Hall without any specific plan, or any one overseer. The house would evolve piecemeal, a collaboration between Bess and her craftsmen. During the building, she based herself at Wingfield, just six miles from Hardwick, and thus convenient for making site visits.

  The building accounts for the Old Hall, kept by David Flood, known as ‘Davy’, don’t begin until July 1587, but work was already in progress: Bess had replaced her father’s hall with a two-storey transverse hall – running crossways, not lengthways – and had begun work on a new three-storey east wing.1 Work continued on the east wing through the summer and autumn: old buildings and lodgings were demolished; masons and wallers erected walls that were then rough-cast and plastered; joists and lathes were laid for floors; interior walls were studded, windows glassed, roof trusses cut, slates laid; and a gallery was panelled and wainscoted. By December, the new wing, complete with gallery and a suite of rooms for Bess (a priority) on the third floor, had been roofed over – in time for winter – and connected to the main block by a staircase leading off the hall.

 
; Why Bess decided on a transverse hall is interesting. Such halls were highly unusual in sixteenth-century England – medieval halls ran lengthways. It may have simply been a happy accident, dictated by pre-existing buildings, or the fact that the Old Hall was built on the edge of an escarpment, which imposed its own constraints. Equally she may have seen transverse halls illustrated in architectural books by Serlio, du Cerceau or Palladio. It’s possible too that she might have visited the earliest known example in England, that in Sir Christopher Hatton’s banqueting house – actually more of a lodge – built in the gardens of Holdenby sometime after 1580. Bess’s only recorded visit to Holdenby didn’t take place until 1592, though since it was but a short detour on her route from Derbyshire to London, it may not have been her first.

  Historians have not been kind to Hatton, dismissing him as a somewhat ineffectual, effete figure. This is not quite fair. He was one of the principal sponsors of Sir Francis Drake’s round-the-world voyage; when he became Lord Chancellor, in 1587, he proved himself perfectly competent; and he was the builder of two very fine houses. By 1578, work had started on Holdenby, Hatton’s Northamptonshire family home. Three years earlier, he had bought the half-built Kirby Hall from Humphrey Stafford. Work continued on both Kirby and Holdenby well into the 1580s.

  Hatton claimed that Holdenby, built around two large courtyards, with six great towers, was modelled on Burghley’s Theobalds – a ‘young Theobalds’, though a poor relation. In 1579, in anticipation of a visit from Burghley, he wrote, full of apologies: ‘I fear me that as your Lordship shall find my house unbuilt and very far from good order, so through the newness you shall find it dampish and full of evil air . . . I humbly beseech you, my honourable Lord, for your opinion to the surveyor of such lacks and faults as shall appear to you in this rude building, for as the same is done hitherto in direct observation of your house and plot at Tyball’s.’2 In terms of layout, there were similarities between the two houses, but Holdenby, like Leicester’s Kenilworth, was a ‘lantern house’, famous for its astonishing expanses of glass. ‘As bright as Holdenby’ went the local saying.

  There is much that we don’t know about Holdenby. Who designed it? And why was it so enormous? Was it simply to impress the Queen, who disappointed Hatton and never actually visited? Or was it intended not so much to imitate Theobalds as to outdo it? Burghley, writing with his usual urbane courtesy after he had made his visit, had nothing but praise: ‘approaching to the house, being led by a large, long, straight fairway, I found a great magnificence in the front, or front pieces of the house, and so every part answerable to other, to allure liking. I found no one thing of greater grace than your stately ascent from your hall to your great chamber; and your chamber answerable with largeness and lightsomeness, that truly a Momus could find no fault. I visited all your rooms, high and low, and only the contentation of mine eyes made me forget the infirmity of my legs.’3 At Holdenby he found those features so prized by Elizabethan builders – a sense of proportion and symmetry, large windows, an eye for the approach, both external (the drive to the house) and internal (the route from the great hall to the state rooms). All things that Bess would try and create at Hardwick, though in the case of the Old Hall, with very mixed results.

  Since exterior work was impossible during the winter frosts, Bess laid off many labourers, rough-wallers and masons at the Old Hall in December 1587, though work on the interiors – carpentry and plastering, for example – carried on. During January, ninety-three loads of hair were delivered for the plasterers (animal hair acted as a binding agent). The ‘plomer’ (plumber) was paid for four and a half pounds of pitch, to fix lead flashing onto a roof. And ‘stonebreakers’ and ‘stonegetters’ cut and hauled sandstone from the quarry just below the Old Hall, in readiness for the spring.

  It wasn’t just stone that Bess had on her doorstep. Within a twenty-mile radius she could source all her own building materials: limestone from a quarry at Hardwick (now vanished), iron from her blast furnaces and glass from her glassworks (both at South Wingfield), timber from Heath and Stainsby, lime from Skegby and Crich, alabaster from Creswell, lead from Winster, Aldwark and Bonsall, slate from Whittington, East Moor, Walton Old Hay and Walton Spring, blackstone from Ashford and gypsum from Tutbury. The fact that the cost of building the Old and New Halls came to a modest £5,500 was largely because Bess was able to supply her own materials.4

  By far her greatest outlay was labour. Finding unskilled local labour was easy enough, though at especially busy times extra men were drafted in from further afield – Sheffield, Edensor and Chesterfield. Bess was a fair and even generous employer. Labourers were well paid, at 6d a day, but the work was hard (quarrying and carting stone, clearing rubbish, making mortar, digging foundations). On top of that she provided food and drink – bread, made cheaply from dredge (a mix of oats and barley, grown together) and peas, butter, milk, oatmeal and, occasionally, herrings.

  Wages stayed pretty much static during the second half of the sixteenth century, though they varied considerably from site to site, and within sites. At Wollaton, masons were paid between 9d and 14d per day, and labourers 6d, but without food, while at Longleat the majority of masons were on 10d, with some on 6d and the more skilled on 14d.5 Masons and carpenters at William Dickenson’s Sheffield house were paid 8d, and were fed by his wife. In the 1590s, Sir Thomas Tresham paid his rough-wallers 10d a day, and his labourers 6d, again without food. Bess’s masons were on 6d, which sounds low, but these were ‘board’ wages, with food and lodging included. Masons had ‘lodges’ – simple lean-tos, made of wood – in which to work, while the plumbers had a ‘plummery’. Valued craftsmen were sometimes given their own rooms, as was the glazier at Shrewsbury House in 1575. The accounts for the Old Hall refer to the cleaning of the ‘work folks chamber’, which sounds like some kind of dormitory, but many probably just bedded down amongst the walls, in any corner that offered shelter.

  The 1563 Statute of Artificers went some way towards regulating employment: day labourers were to work a six-day week, from 5 a.m. until 7 or 8 p.m. between mid March and September, and for the rest of the year ‘from the spring of the day’ until dusk; meals were to take up no more than two and a half hours; every additional hour’s absence carried a 1d fine.6 Extra pay was given for working on Sundays or ‘holy days’, and a candle allowance for interior work in winter. In practice, working hours must have varied according to employer, weather and season.

  ‘Bargains’ (contracts) were drawn up between Bess and Thomas Fogge, a carpenter, for making lathes and joists, Richard Snidall the glazier, for glass, John Beighton, a carpenter, for floors and roofs, and James Hindle, a plasterer, for rough-casting the gallery. Contract work was by its nature short-term and without any job security many craftsmen kept small agricultural holdings – a cow, a few sheep – to fall back on during lean times, when the work dried up. The lucky ones received an annual wage, paid every three or six months. One such was Abraham Smith, the great plaster modeller and stone carver, who first appears at Chatsworth in 1581, in a bargain for making plasterer’s wooden moulds.7 By 1589, he was on the payroll at the Old Hall.

  Abraham Smith was not the only craftsman already known to Bess. John Hibard and John Rowarth, both carpenters, and Thomas Outram, a mason, had also worked at Chatsworth in the 1560s. John Balechouse, a painter – often referred to as John Painter, perhaps because no one could pronounce his Flemish or French name (he may have been Jehan Balechou, a painter recorded in Tours in 1557) – is first mentioned in the Chatsworth accounts in 1578; by 1589, he was at Hardwick, with a ‘garate’ in the Old Hall. Balechouse was a great deal more than a painter and would become crucial to the building of the New Hall, as a general supervisor; he may have played a similar role at the Old.8

  Bess now had a suite of apartments in the east wing of the Old Hall, though the house was not yet large enough to accommodate William Cavendish and his family, not to mention Arbella. For much of the time Arbella was shunted between her
aunts and uncles, Gilbert and Mary Talbot in particular. Whilst staying with the Talbots in 1587, she wrote, in a beautifully clear and regular italic hand, her first surviving letter to her ‘Good Lady Grandmother’: ‘I have sent your ladyship the ends of my hair, which were cut the sixth day of the moon [for astrological purposes perhaps], on Saturday last, and with them a pot of jelly, which my servant made.’9 Her cousin Mary (Talbot) had suffered ‘three little fits of ague’, but was now well and merry. Arbella was now twelve, and her immaculate handwriting bore testament to the expensive humanist education that Bess, ever mindful of her ‘consanguinity’ to the Queen, and ever hopeful of her prospects, had provided for her, an education superior to that of her mother, and certainly that of her grandmother. It was hardly surprising that, clever and accomplished as she was, Arbella also developed a powerful sense of entitlement.

  In the summer of 1587, Arbella made her first appearance at court, at Theobalds, where the Queen was making a month-long visit as part of her summer progress. Elizabeth was now fifty-three, prospects of husbands and heirs had long receded and the question of the succession remained unresolved. With the death of the Queen of Scots, Arbella had moved up to second place in the line for the throne, after James VI. This was a fact to which the Queen seemed to attach little importance, though according to Arbella, she had pronounced her ‘an eaglet of her own kind’ and apparently told the wife of the French ambassador, ‘Look to her well: she will one day be even as I am and a lady mistress.’10 Bess may have been heartened by such pronouncements, but even if true, they counted for little. No one was more adept than the Queen at a policy of equivocation. Nevertheless, she was perfectly aware that Arbella’s royal blood gave her currency in the marriage market: she was a commodity. Just as Elizabeth had once dangled the possibility of her own hand before a variety of European princes, so could Arbella be offered, a lesser prize to be sure, but still one endowed with a certain lustre, especially if named as the Queen’s heir. Several candidates had been considered and rejected: Esmé Stuart, Duke of Lennox, his son Ludovic, even James VI (this altogether too dangerous a prospect for Elizabeth). In 1587, the Queen and her councillors were discussing Rainutio Farnese, son of the Duke of Parma, who commanded the Spanish forces fighting the French in the Spanish Netherlands. Rainutio was a Catholic, but a marriage between him and Arbella might detach Parma from Philip II. It might bring an end to the Dutch wars too. There was an agenda behind Arbella’s invitation to court – she was being looked over. Bess, knowing this, waited impatiently for news.