Devices and Desires

by Kate Hubbard

  Three other sets of hangings were acquired, including five pieces of the ‘Story of Tobit’, for £38 17s., which were temporarily put up in Shrewsbury House but eventually hung in the Tobias Chamber of the New Hall. The story of Tobit, or Tobias, features elsewhere at Hardwick – in a table carpet, and an overmantel, brought from Chatsworth. It tells of Tobias setting out to recover money owed to his blind father Tobit, accompanied by his dog and, in disguise, the angel Raphael. On his journey, Tobias meets and marries Sarah, the daughter of a kinsman, undeterred by the fact that Sarah’s seven previous husbands have been killed by a demon. Thanks to the good offices of Raphael, Sarah’s demon is exorcised, Tobit’s sight is restored and Tobias and Sarah settle down to married life. As a tale of virtue rewarded, filial piety and the sanctity of marriage, it clearly appealed to Bess.

  In April, Bess and Arbella joined the court at Whitehall, and in May at Greenwich, for which three boats were hired, with Bess’s new litter taking up a boat of its own. The gardens at Greenwich must have particularly delighted her, since she gave several tips to the gardeners, and 20d to ‘one who brought strawberries’. A second visit to Greenwich took place in June, with Bess staying until 19 July, leaving Arbella behind. Arbella had been sitting for Hilliard, who was paid 40s. for his portrait, with a 20s. tip. Another 40s. went to ‘one Rowland’ (this was Rowland Lockey, an apprentice to Hilliard), probably for a copy of the miniature. Whether Rainutio liked what he saw was immaterial, since the Duke of Parma died in December and the son without the father was quite worthless.

  On 31 July, carried in relative comfort in her new litter, Bess left London for what would turn out to be the last time. She could count her visit a success – Gilbert defeated, Arbella still husbandless but reintroduced at court, a grand total of £6,360 spent on splendid furnishings for Hardwick, filling ten hired wagons, one with plate alone. Now she could look forward to seeing the progress of her new house, and she took the opportunity of her return journey to inspect the work of other builders, to gather ideas, to assess the competition. At Northampton, on what was possibly her first visit, she diverted to Holdenby, which sat vast, magnificent and empty. The housekeeper and gardener who showed her round had 20s. for their pains. From Holdenby she went on to stay with her daughter Frances Pierrepont at Holme Pierrepont, near Nottingham, a convenient base from which to visit Wollaton.

  Robert Smythson would still have been living at Wollaton (he remained there after Sir Francis Willoughby’s death in 1596, under the rather more harmonious regime of Sir Percival). Bess gave the Wollaton housekeeper 10s., but did Smythson act as her guide? Was Hardwick discussed? Perhaps, though Smythson might well have been occupied elsewhere, drawing up ‘platts’ for other East Midlands houses, as he did during the early 1590s. Documentary evidence is lacking, but there’s a strong case that such houses included Barlborough and Worksop Manor Lodge in Derbyshire, Pontefract in Yorkshire and Doddington in Lincolnshire.5 Some of these survive – remnants of a lost world clinging on amid Midlands sprawl. Barlborough has become a school. Doddington, elegant in mellow red brick, with a long gallery taking up the top floor and octagonal cupolas, sits within earshot of the roar and rush of cars and cyclists. Worksop Manor Lodge, recently gutted by fire, has been renovated as a private house, surrounded by a suburban garden, with the town of Worksop creeping ever closer to its walls.

  Manor Lodge, within a stone’s throw of Shrewsbury’s great house, was commissioned by Gilbert Talbot as a hunting lodge, and, like Worksop, it’s immensely tall – four storeys, with originally a fifth, containing a gallery. Both houses, built of pale grey magnesian limestone, would have risen over and gleamed through the trees of Sherwood Forest. Manor Lodge had a crossways hall and a great chamber, with vast windows, on the fourth floor, while the rest was given over to lodgings for the huntsmen. Function and design were aligned in a surprisingly modern way – this was a house in which to sleep before a long day’s hunting, but also to meet at the end of the day, for feasting and carousing in the great chamber. It’s handsome, yet plain, with something, in its rows of small windows lighting the huntsmen’s chambers, of the industrial buildings of the nineteenth century.*

  Having inspected Wollaton, and eager to discover how her own house was progressing, Bess and her cavalcade reached Hardwick on 5 August. The unusually hot summer of 1592 had fostered the plague that swept through London, but dry conditions aided building. In May, forty-one windows had been cut for the second storey of the New Hall, for which the scaffolding was erected and the cornice set in June. Bess must have been satisfied with what she found – both Rhodes and his men and Balechouse had 20s. cash rewards. She installed herself in the Old Hall, but here too work was still in progress. In October, escaping the dirt and dust and the relentless hammering of chisels and mallets, she and Arbella decamped to Chatsworth, which she was now free to use again.

  The move to Chatsworth may have been for reasons of security too. In September, Bess had received a letter from Burghley warning her of the discovery of a Catholic plot to abduct Arbella. It was Arbella’s curse to be the focus of Catholic plots to depose Elizabeth, and later James I. While no Catholic herself – although her grandmother, the Countess of Lennox, had been staunchly so, and her aunt was a convert – Arbella could always be furnished with a Catholic husband, who could then be placed on the English throne. Bess replied to Burghley, using her son William as a scribe since she was unable to write ‘for fear of bringing pain to my head’: she was doing all she could to thwart ‘wicked and mischievous practices’ and to protect her granddaughter. ‘I will not have any unknown or suspected person to come to my house . . . I have little resort to me, my house is furnished with sufficient company, Arbell walks not late, at such time as she shall take the air, it shall be near the house and well attended on. She goeth not to any body’s house at all, I see her almost every hour in the day, she lyeth in my bed chamber.’

  Bess had got wind of a Catholic priest who had been staying with his brother near Hardwick, and since Catholic priests were ‘the likeliest instruments to put a bad matter in execution’, it was as well to be vigilant. She had dismissed a certain Morley, who had acted as a tutor to Arbella for the last three years but had showed himself, ever since Bess’s ‘return into the country . . . to be much discontented’. There was some reason to suspect Morley’s religious leanings, though Bess admitted that she couldn’t ‘charge him with papistry’.6 She assured Burghley that Arbella was ‘loving and dutiful’, but for how long would a strong-willed, intelligent seventeen-year-old be content to live under her grandmother’s watchful eye, confined to her house, sharing her bedchamber?

  Bess returned to Hardwick for Christmas. Living with her in the Old Hall, occupying the west wing, were William Cavendish, his wife Anne and their children (four of whom died young). Life in the Old Hall must have been noisy, crowded and, under the rule of Bess, not without its strains. William was making himself indispensable as Bess’s second-in-command, but Anne may have felt rather differently about living with her mother-in-law. At any rate, the Cavendishes needed a home of their own. In January 1593, as part of her programme of land-buying around Hardwick, Bess bought the manors of Stainsby, Rowthorn, Heath and Oldcotes from Sir John Savage for £3,416 13s. Oldcotes – or Owlcotes – is three miles northwest from Hardwick, across the valley, just out of sight.7 It became the site of a new house, Bess’s last, built for William, and designed by Smythson.

  All ‘bargains’ for the building of Hardwick Old and New Halls have vanished, but one survives for Owlcotes, and it gives a good idea of how such documents read and how the house looked. On 8 March, a bargain was drawn up between Bess and William Cavendish and six wallers, all of whom had been working at Hardwick – the four Plumtree brothers and two others. The wallers were to build a house ‘from the bottom of the cellar, to the top of the roof and two turrets above the roof according to a plat already drawn’. The house was to be two rooms deep, with a twenty-foot-high hall. No ashlar was to be u
sed, presumably for reasons of economy; instead, the walls were simply to be scappled (roughly finished) to match those of the old manor. The thickness and height of the walls, the details of the chimneys, the width of the ovens, all were specified. Bess and William were to supply the stone (sandstone), sand and water; the wallers were to make mortar and erect scaffolding at their own expense, the hurdles and poles (usually ash or elder) being provided. The wallers agreed ‘to do what they can well and workmanlike, to work, scappel and finish all the said walls before All Hallows time next’, i.e. in eight months’ time. They were to be paid ‘by measure’ – 3s. 4d per rood of wall ‘till they come to the height of 20 feet above the ground’, 5s. for every rood above that, with extra for the two turrets, and 20s. for the two ovens. They would be lent six beds, which could be put up in the old house, and three cows, and provided with rye and oatmeal.8

  William would never actually live in Owlcotes – it was not perhaps either large or grand enough for his liking – but he met most of its costs. Bess contributed too, with regular payments ‘towards the building of Oulde Coats’, a total of £300 in 1593. And she kept a close eye on progress, with inspections and site visits, on one such handing out £3 in tips.9 When Owlcotes was finally finished, in 1600, it was Bess who provided the all-important furnishings.

  Owlcotes was demolished in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century and in its place today is a bleak-looking farmhouse, surrounded by rusting vehicles and sheds, occupied by men in boiler suits conducting mysterious business on mobile phones. The only trace of the old house is a scalloped alcove in a garden wall, but a drawing, thought to be Smythson’s design for Owlcotes, survives. It shows an elegant Hardwick-in-miniature – a house with two towers, two storeys* and a flight of steps (Worksop Manor Lodge and Barlborough were also approached by steps) leading to a prettily colonnaded porch. It must have been one of Smythson’s most enchanting buildings.

  19.

  ‘More glass than wall’

  Alongside Owlcotes, work on the New Hall pushed ahead in 1593, helped by another long, dry summer. Plastering began in April and scaffolding for the third storey went up in June, whilst windows were hewn in July and set in October.1 With the walls nearing completion and the shell of the house in place, a bargain was made with the slaters William and Peter Yates for the roof, and a further bargain with the plumber for leading the roof and making pipes. The Old Hall had been roofed with stone tiles, but the flat expanses of the New were to be leaded. This was expensive, but Bess had access to the lead works at Winster, Aldwark and Bonsall that she had made over to William Cavendish. The roof also required huge quantities of timber, including sixteen great oak trusses, each thirty-four feet, on which it would be supported. Tree-felling began in earnest at Teversal, at 3d a tree. The oaks for the trusses* – known as ‘somers’ – came from Chatsworth (3s. 4d for the ‘felling and squaring’ of each) and were dragged by oxen the sixteen miles or so to Hardwick, where they were hoisted into place using ropes and pulleys, and possibly some kind of wooden crane.

  Remarkably few accidents seem to have occurred during the building of Hardwick, considering the hazards of manually lifting and manoeuvring lengths of timber and blocks of stone – just one payment is recorded in the accounts, ‘to Hollingworth, when he was hurt’. However, at Owlcotes in 1597, a beam fell, taking two others with it, as Elizabeth Wingfield reported to Mary Talbot: ‘there was a great beam fell at Oldcotes which broke two others and much shook the walls, but no men, but some a little bruised’.2

  In May 1593, Bess moved to Chatsworth once again, where she remained for just over a year. Chatsworth would have been a great deal more peaceful and comfortable than Hardwick, and it was important that Bess exercise her rights of occupancy (she spent a month there in the summers of 1595 and 1596). Besides, it was a house to which she had devoted much time and attention, and of which she was rightly proud, and she made sure it wasn’t neglected. In her absence, Ellen Steward, the Chatsworth housekeeper, was deputed to pay ‘work folks’ wages and for general repairs and improvements, such as fencing.

  Burghley wrote in August, offering his congratulations on the marriage between Bess’s granddaughter Grace Pierrepont and George Manners: ‘I do persuade myself that your Ladyship shall take much comfort of their match, so as betwixt his father and your Ladyship the two young folks may be provided for to live without want.’3 This sounds like a match of Bess’s making – George’s father was Sir John Manners, son of Thomas, 1st Earl of Rutland, and once brother-in-law of the Earl of Shrewsbury, whose first wife, Gertrude, had been Sir John’s sister. It was a good marriage for Grace (from it would come the Dukes of Rutland), and as George would inherit Haddon Hall, near Chatsworth, it consolidated the family holdings in Derbyshire. Bess provided a dowry of £700 and gave George £100 to buy plate, with another £50 the following year for ‘setting up’ house.4 Congratulations aside, Burghley added that he wished Bess would ‘take more comfort by stirring abroad to visit your friends and childen and not to live so solitary as it seems you do there in Chatsworth, amongst hills and rocks of stones’.

  From London, Derbyshire seemed remote indeed. London, however, and court, no longer held much allure for Bess, who, now in her early seventies, was more interested in the short view, the view from Hardwick. Only Burghley survived of her allies of old, and he had more or less withdrawn from public life, making way for his son, Robert Cecil. In 1595, Bess wrote to Cecil congratulating him on his appointment as the Queen’s ‘principal secretary’: ‘the honourable remembrance, the whole realm retaineth, of your most noble father, placed in that room you are now in, will make every one expect no less good of you, carrying that name and being son to so worthy a counsellor’.5 This was flattering, but carried with it the weight of expectation – Cecil had much to live up to and should be sure not to disappoint. Bess would have cause to appeal to him in the future, in regard to both her uncooperative son-in-law and her troublesome granddaughter.

  Bess ruled over a court of her own making, among the hills and rocks and stones of Derbyshire. Here she was a great personage – rich, powerful and respected. She would seek to fight for and to further the interests – marital, territorial, financial – of her children and grandchildren, but she had no need of royal favour for her own sake. Which is not to say that she didn’t hold out hopes of entertaining the Queen at Hardwick – the appearance of Diana, the huntress and virgin goddess, in the plasterwork of the High Great Chamber was intended as a tribute to Elizabeth, whose arms were also carved into the overmantel. Arbella, it was true, remained unmarried, and her prospects uncertain, but by now Bess was coming to accept that those prospects did not encompass the throne. The Queen was never going to recognise Arbella as her successor; those who counted at court increasingly looked to James VI as much the strongest claimant. Hardwick was surely not built for the glory of Arbella, who hardly features at all in the decoration of the house, other than her coat of arms in the room she called her ‘quondam study’.

  Financing the building of the New Hall was easy enough, given that during the 1590s, Bess’s annual income averaged £8,300, rising to £10,000 by 1600.6 Her business interests and estates were growing steadily, as she accumulated more land and property, most of it within twenty miles of Hardwick, some further afield. Three manors in Derbyshire were bought from a Mr Shackerly for £2,450 in 1596; other manors and rectories were bought in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Leicestershire.7 All were settled on William Cavendish. Several streams of revenue funded these acquisitions: rents and leases, sales of livestock, coal, wool, iron and glass, and interest on loans. Rents were collected by seventeen bailiffs, passed on, in canvas ‘money bags’, to Bess’s receiver, William Reason, who in turn gave them to Timothy Pusey, her steward and right-hand man, before they ended up in Bess’s coffers. Pusey was paid £10 a year, with, eventually, the lease of a farm and a mill, and was absolutely central to the running of Bess’s affairs, his legal background being especially u
seful. Under him came Rowland Harrison, a gentleman servant and clerk comptroller, who acted as both a money collector and a keeper of the fortnightly household accounts. These were totalled by Pusey and finally signed off by Bess herself.

  Key to Bess’s business portfolio was moneylending, something she had practised successfully since the early 1580s. In the absence of banks, cash was both badly needed and in short supply in Tudor England. Bess offered the respectable face of usury. Like Shrewsbury, with his coffers at Sheffield allegedly emptied by Eleanor Britton, Bess kept eight coffers in her bedchamber, together with a pair of scales. She collected interest on her loans (the 1571 Act Against Usury fixed interest at 10 per cent), and as she frequently lent money on the security of land – mortgaging land being by far the easiest way of raising money – she collected land and property too. In 1581, for example, the Earl of Cumberland had mortgaged his land at Edensor to her for £500 (a sum that she managed to extract from Shrewsbury); when the Earl defaulted on his loan, Edensor reverted to Bess, and is still owned by the Cavendishes today.8

  In 1591, Sir Francis Willoughby, finding himself ever deeper in debt and hoping to generate some much-needed funds, had leased the ironworks at Oakmoor and the nearby woods at Alton, in Staffordshire, from Bess (both were Talbot properties and part of her marriage settlement).9 Willoughby’s ironmaster, Loggin, wanted to set up two new blast furnaces at Oakmoor, which would be fuelled by timber from the Alton woods, and it was he who initially approached Bess for a £400 loan, secured on Willoughby land. With this ‘bargain’ concluded, Bess received £172 a year in rent and from the sale of timber, and £40 interest on the loan. When Sir Francis, predictably, fell out with Loggin, Bess’s own ironmaster, Sylvester Smith, stepped in to keep the operation running. Three years later, Sir Francis was applying for a loan once again, this time for £3,000 on the security of five manors. Bess, who didn’t lend lightly, considered this expensive: ‘for so great a sum I think it not a convenient portion. I know where for less than half this money you assured far more land’, and she was only willing to enter into a deal ‘for the security of them that are to disburse this money. Your land I do not desire. If I could be assured of your life, there should not need any mortgage at all to be made, but the youngest and healthfulest are subject to change.’10