Devices and Desires

by Kate Hubbard

  Of Bess’s feelings on Shrewsbury’s death we have no record. Theirs had been a marriage of more than twenty years, but one that had been over in all but name for the last five. Bess could not have had much sense of loss in November 1590; indeed, there must have been more relief than regret. She was now free from marital harassment. Free to enjoy Chatsworth. To buy more land. To do business. And free to devote herself to the building of the house she’d always wanted, in the place she loved best. By the time of Shrewsbury’s death, work had already begun on Hardwick New Hall.

  17.

  Smythson’s Platt

  ‘Your Lordship’s kind letter is an exceeding comfort to me’, wrote Bess to Burghley in December 1590, ‘and your judgement therein of my late husband’s disposition most true, as some circumstances before his death declared, with the general spoil of his goods by those bad instruments which continued the separation begun by a mightier hand.’ By ‘bad instruments’ she meant the Earl’s mistress, Eleanor Britton, and her nephew, who, on Shrewsbury’s death, had promptly set about removing money, jewels, plate, furniture and bedding from Sheffield. One chest in the Earl’s bedchamber had allegedly been emptied of £8,000 in silver and another of £10,000 in gold.1 This, however, was a battle that Bess could leave to Gilbert Talbot, the new Earl of Shrewsbury. For her part, so she told Burghley, she now looked forward to a more peaceable future: ‘I hope, my good Lord, that all disagreement (in this family) died with him, quiet is my principal desire and I shall rather suffer than enter into controversy.’2

  Shrewsbury’s body was embalmed, with the funeral finally taking place on 13 January 1591, at the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Sheffield. It was on a princely scale, with crowds of 20,000 and attendant casualties – three men were crushed by a falling tree. Shrewsbury had designed himself an elaborate tomb, with an epitaph – self-justifying till the end – that dwelt at length on his innocence of any impropriety towards the Queen of Scots and made no mention of Bess. The date of death was left blank, but, as the Earl had predicted, it was not supplied by his executors, who were busy fighting amongst themselves.

  Shrewsbury had appointed Burghley as supervisor of his will, with Edward and Henry Talbot, his younger sons, as executors. When Edward and Henry declined – no doubt foreseeing trouble – Bess was approached. This met with immediate objections from Gilbert, who then became sole executor himself. As he soon discovered, the Talbot estates were cash poor – his father had left debts, as had his brother Francis (these still unpaid), while Gilbert had large debts of his own. He had Bess awaiting payment of her widow’s jointure – the income from one third of the Talbot estates, for her lifetime – and Eleanor Britton merrily helping herself to Shrewsbury’s valuables.

  We know almost nothing of Eleanor Britton, other than the fact that in 1586 she put so much wine and spirit into her venison pasties that they disintegrated on the journey from Sheffield to London.3 She may have brought some comfort and affection to Shrewsbury’s last years, but, inevitably, she was regarded by his heirs as rapacious and venal, and perhaps she was. According to Gilbert, instead of nursing his father, Eleanor ‘did continually lead him as all those who were about him did well know’. The Earl had ‘suffered’ her to embezzle his goods during his lifetime, and she had continued to do so after his death. Gilbert told Burghley that he would have indicted Eleanor and her nephew, these ‘impudent, clamorous persons’, but had refrained because he hoped they would confess. The Brittons, however, fought back and made accusations of their own: Gilbert had proceeded against them in a ‘cruel and unlawful manner’, including imprisoning them in his house.4 Gilbert therefore decided to proceed with charges of felony, though not, it seems, with much success.

  Like his father, Gilbert was thin-skinned and quick to take offence; like Bess, he was a committed feuder. He declared war on Eleanor Britton, his brothers, his neighbours and his mother-in-law. He claimed that Edward and Henry Talbot had behaved treacherously towards him – over the question of land and inheritance – both before and since their father’s death.5 When Edward accused him of trying to cheat him over a lease, Gilbert challenged him to a duel, which Edward flatly refused (subsequently Gilbert claimed that Edward had tried to murder him with poisoned gloves).6 Gilbert famously conducted a long-running and pointless feud with the Stanhope family about a weir built, perfectly legitimately, over the River Trent, near the Stanhope home in Nottinghamshire, to which he objected ostensibly on behalf of local people, who were deprived of fish. Taunts and insults flew: Sir Thomas Stanhope, according to Gilbert, was ‘one of the most ambitious, proud, covetous and subtle persons that ever I was acquainted with’, and had long made trouble for him and Mary Talbot, telling his father that Mary and Bess ‘did wholly rule and govern me in all things’.7 The Stanhopes claimed Gilbert was a ‘papist’, an accusation that would have been more justly levelled at his wife.

  Gilbert’s enemies, as the Earl of Essex warned him, were only too happy to alarm the Queen with tales of his violent temper, ‘which they tell her is dangerous in great men’.8 The fact that Gilbert did not succeed to the high offices held by his father may simply have been because he was seen as too volatile and unstable. So he did not become Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire, which, being Gilbert, he felt to be a slight and for which he blamed Thomas Stanhope – hence his campaign against the weir. Matters came to a head when Charles Cavendish, whose friendship Gilbert, almost uniquely, retained, challenged John Stanhope, Sir Thomas’s son, to a duel, with rapiers, at Lambeth Bridge. This descended into farce when Stanhope appeared encased in a doublet so thickly padded as to repel any rapier. Charles offered to fight in shirtsleeves; Stanhope, claiming ‘he had taken cold’, refused, as he did the loan of Charles’s waistcoat.9 In the face of such unsportsmanlike behaviour, the duel was aborted.

  Bess, hitherto Gilbert’s ally and defender, now became his foe, as hostilities were transferred from father to son. Gilbert no longer required Bess’s support; instead, she required him to pay her substantial sums of money. Hints that relations between Bess and the new Earl and Countess were not entirely amicable come through in a letter Bess wrote to Mary Talbot in February 1591, about the murder of one of her Leake cousins. Bess hoped that Mary would persuade Gilbert to bring the murderer to ‘due judgement’, though Gilbert was seemingly rather too friendly with a certain Sir John Berrone, who was thought to be protecting the murderer. ‘I assure myself that you both would have right prevail and your cousin’s blood so foully spilt requires your reasonable assistance to bring the murderer to his trial.’10 It sounds like Bess was by no means sure that the Shrewsburys ‘would have right prevail’. Behind Gilbert’s failure to cooperate lay the question of Bess’s jointure.

  Extracting this from Gilbert was no easy matter. Gilbert’s recalcitrance was hardly surprising. He faced the unwelcome prospect of paying his mother-in-law some £3,000 a year for the rest of her life, and given Bess’s robust health, there was every indication that it might be a long life.11 He saw his much-needed income draining away. Bess wrote to Burghley in April 1591, complaining of Gilbert’s ‘strange and unkind dealing . . . in respect of my widow’s part’. Gilbert had sent his man, ‘Master Markham’, who was bound by £6,000 to make sure the Earl met his obligations by the end of March, but, and this for the third time, he had not done so – Bess had still not received the money, cattle and lead that were her due and had heard that Gilbert intended ‘to break off the agreement’. She felt that ‘he will still seek to bring me in the end to nothing, but if this goes not forward I will be loath to talk the fourth time. What he will do yet rests uncertain.’12 There was nothing uncertain about Bess’s own course of action. Despite her claims to be looking forward to a quiet life, free of controversy, she was quite incapable of overlooking a wrong.

  A portrait of Bess, probably painted around 1590, by or after Rowland Lockey, an apprentice to Hilliard, shows her with her red hair only a little faded, wearing a widow’s cap and a black velvet gown, the splend
idly starched ruff and cuffs much the same colour as her skin. She fingers a long five-stranded rope of pearls, her sole ornament, and her gaze is steady and a touch sardonic. This is Bess at sixty-nine, the sober widow, and a vastly wealthy one. As well as her jointure, when it finally came through, there were the lands made over to William and Charles by the deed of gift and lands subsequently purchased in the names of her sons. And then, under her marriage settlement, she had the use, for her lifetime, of Wingfield Manor with its ironworks and glassworks, Bolsover Castle with its coal pits, Shrewsbury House in Chelsea, and Chatsworth. Altogether this amounted to a very large collection of estates, concentrated in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire, with the addition of the St Loe western lands in Gloucestershire and Somerset, to which Bess would go on adding. In 1590, her annual income stood at about £7,000; it continued to rise.13

  Bess now had ample funds with which to build her new house. But why, when she already had the Old Hall, which was habitable but by no means finished in 1590, did she start work on another house a mere hundred yards away? Simultaneous building projects were not, as we have seen, so unusual: Lord Burghley embarked on Theobalds whilst still building Burghley House; Sir Christopher Hatton worked on both Kirby Hall and Holdenby, just twenty-five miles apart. Bess, however, was erecting two houses alongside each other.

  She may have built the New Hall simply because she could; as a statement of proud confidence and independence. She could afford to be profligate. Dissatisfied with her existing house, she could put it to one side and start again. The Old Hall allowed her to experiment and try out ideas; it can be seen as a rehearsal for the New. Now she could reuse those features that pleased her and do away with those that did not. So she would keep the two-storey crossways hall, an arrangement that both allowed for greater symmetry and made it easier to have a compact building, two rooms deep, with no internal courtyard. So too would she once more have her state rooms on the second floor (as they also were at Chatsworth), rather than the first. And the plasterwork forest of the Forest Great Chamber would reappear, to even greater effect, in the New Hall’s great chamber. On the other hand, she would make sure that her bedroom in the New Hall was on the warmer south side of the house, while the kitchens, and kitchen smells, were to be placed at the furthest possible distance, at the north end.

  The New Hall was designed to correct the deficiencies of, but also to complement, the Old, which could now function as a very grand annexe, to accommodate guests and upper servants. With the Old Hall, and Chatsworth, Bess had built houses that were notable for their size and their richly decorated interiors, but not for any great architectural merit. The opposite is the case with the New Hall, which did not need to be particularly large – there are only six principal bedrooms – and whose interiors, on the whole, are relatively plain, rather as though Bess had begun to run out of energy when it came to interior decoration. Style, not size, was what counted now.

  As a young woman in London, newly married to William Cavendish and mixing in humanist circles, Bess had acquired some understanding of architecture. Later, she commissioned inlaid wooden panels showing architectural scenes, probably derived from contemporary engravings, for Chatsworth (they hang on the stairs at Hardwick today). The noble women in the Virtues hangings are placed within architectural settings. And to a set of small appliqué hangings of female allegorical figures (these, like the noble women, were originally made at Chatsworth in the 1570s, but brought to Hardwick), personifying the seven Liberal Arts, she added an eighth: Architecture, who is shown holding a set square and a pair of dividers.14

  The New Hall was to be an architecturally coherent house, and to that end, Bess needed design and draughtsmanship expertise. There is no absolute proof that Smythson designed Hardwick (the household accounts for 1590, which might have recorded payments to him, have vanished), but there is compelling evidence. Bess knew of him, from his work at Longleat and, more recently, at Worksop and Wollaton. She may have asked him to design the hunting tower at Chatsworth. Amongst the Smythson drawings that survive are three closely related to Hardwick, one an elongated version of the ground floor.15 It was probably Smythson who drew up a design for Bess’s splendid tomb, in Derby Cathedral, some years prior to her death. And his association with her continued afterwards, with his son John and grandson Huntingdon working for her children and grandchildren.

  Smythson provided order and harmony for the New Hall – those very things that the Old lacked. Order – divine and social – so prized by the Elizabethans, was manifested in both the regularity of its exterior and the hierarchical arrangement of its interior, with the ground floor given over to the servants, the first to Bess and her family, and the second to the entertaining of guests – even, so Bess hoped, the Queen herself. Ceilings and windows rose correspondingly, culminating in the towering expanses of the High Great Chamber and the long gallery.* Changes were made to Smythson’s design during the actual building – changes instigated or approved by Bess – but the result is a rigorously symmetrical building: the east front exactly matches the west, and the north the south. In the interests of symmetry, Smythson employed the crossways hall, already favoured by Bess; chimney flues carried up through internal walls, leaving the exterior free for glass; false windows, and windows that actually lit two floors rather than one.

  Architectural devices, so coveted by Elizabethan builders, took many forms – houses built on geometric principles (like Hardwick), or inspired by biblical or religious symbolism. The seven pilasters on the porch of Kirby Hall were probably an allusion to the seven pillars of wisdom in the Book of Proverbs; the design of Wollaton may well have derived from King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.*16 Sir Thomas Tresham took religious symbolism to new heights on his Northamptonshire estate at Rushton.

  Tresham was a wealthy Catholic landowner, with a large architectural library, a particular interest in intellectual, richly symbolic buildings, and some design expertise. As a recusant, he suffered regular imprisonment and paid almost £8,000 in fines. However, such handicaps did not in any way deter him from a busy building programme, at times, during the 1580s and 90s, directed from his prison cell. Commitment to building equalled that to faith – the one informed the other. In 1593, after twelve years either in the Fleet prison, or under house arrest in his Hoxton house, Tresham returned to Rushton, where his Catholicism took concrete form: the Triangular Lodge, built in honour of the Trinity, using recurring multiples of three – three rooms on three floors, each of the three sides measuring thirty-three feet, with groups of three windows, under three gables, topped by a triangular chimney. The lodge walls are carved with emblems, numbers and letters, many of them highly obscure (some allude, obliquely since it was illegal, to the Mass), devised by Tresham, though he may have had help from a Cambridge mathematician and astrologer, John Fletcher.*17

  Tresham’s lodge speaks of defiance, but also of ego. He may have dismissed his building projects as ‘daubing, botching and bungling’, but this was entirely false modesty. There is something self-regarding and precious about the man (he made much of the links between his name and the Trinity – he and his wife called each other ‘Tres’ and ‘Tresse’) and his buildings, for all their exquisite workmanship. And something of Sir John Thynne too – both were ruthless, demanding employers, obsessive micro-managers, slow to praise and quick to fault. Both got results.

  Besides the Lodge, Tresham was making improvements to Rushton Hall, and in 1595, he began work on another house – the cross-shaped Lyveden New Bield, this time celebrating the Crucifixion. From prison in Ely, he sent detailed instructions about Lyveden and its gardens: measurements and stone were specified; walks, arbours and a bowling green were to be made, with due regard for boggy ground; particular varieties of roses, apple and pear trees planted.18 When Tresham died, in 1605, Lyveden was still unfinished, so his friends never wound their way, as he intended, from his main house, a mile or so away, through meadows and orchards and moated gardens,
complete with a labyrinth – its circular beds planted with roses – and grassy prospect mounds, until they came upon Lyveden, where they would have been entertained and refreshed and perhaps encouraged to contemplate the state of their souls. Lyveden sits today looking much as it would have done on Tresham’s death – a roofless shell, starkly beautiful, a place of calm and quiet.

  Tresham was able to supply most of his materials himself – he had ‘redstone’ and ‘whitestone’ quarries and timber – which is why his total building costs came to less than £2,000. However, Sir Christopher Hatton provided him with stone from his quarry at Weldon for another of Tresham’s buildings, the Market House in Rothwell. In his letter of thanks in 1583, Tresham remarked that the Market House stood ‘as a witness of the bounty of happy Holdenby to ruinous Rushton’.19 In point of fact it was Hatton’s finances that were ‘ruinous’, thanks to Holdenby.

  There is no evidence that Bess ever visited Rushton, or had any dealings with Tresham, yet interestingly, and curiously, Tresham paid her (possibly Catholic) daughter Frances Pierrepont a twice-yearly annuity of £25.20 Bess lacked Tresham’s intellectualism, but she had quite as much ego, and she wanted the effects of an intellectual building. Here she looked to Smythson, who came up with a ‘platt’ that employed the simplest and yet most ingenious of devices – a rectangle encompassed by six rectangular turrets, two on each long and one on each short side, creating a kind of optical illusion, endlessly intriguing and surprising the eye. Sacheverell Sitwell, one of the house’s many admirers, described how Hardwick’s turrets mysteriously regroup themselves according to the position from which they’re viewed – ‘as though the building is shaped like a diamond on a playing card, more still, like the ace of clubs, so that the fourth tower is hidden, almost, behind the other three’.21