by Kate Hubbard
Owlcotes, though a good deal smaller than Hardwick, took much the same time to build. In 1599, Bess gave William Cavendish £200 ‘for the full finishing’, and a year later it was, finally, finished.17 In October 1600, John Dodderidge was paid for installing bedsteads, furnishing rooms and matting the gallery.18 William, however, never made Owlcotes his home. After the death of his first wife in 1598, he preferred to remain at Hardwick. Owlcotes became a kind of satellite house, used occasionally by William and Bess herself, sometimes as a staging post en route to Chatsworth, sometimes to temporarily house a recalcitrant granddaughter (Arbella), sometimes as a refuge for William’s second wife Elizabeth, when she wished to escape her mother-in-law.19
Bess supported Charles Cavendish’s building projects too. Charles had a Derbyshire home, Stoke Manor, but in 1597 he started building a house at Kirkby-in-Ashfield, a few miles from Hardwick, towards which Bess contributed £400. It’s possible that Robert Smythson provided plans for Kirkby, as he did for several houses belonging to members of the Talbot and Cavendish families during the 1590s, not just Owlcotes, and Pontefract (for Edward Talbot), but, also for Charles, the never-built Slingsby, on a moated island in Yorkshire, and Welbeck Abbey, which Charles leased from Gilbert Talbot in 1597 and bought ten years later, of which only a small section of Smythson’s plan was realised. Plans for Slingsby and Welbeck and for a Pontefract-type house survive.*20 However, Charles’s house at Kirkby came to nothing: while inspecting progress in June 1599, he was attacked by twenty men on horseback, led by Sir John Stanhope, son of Thomas – a flare-up of the old feud. Charles was shot in the leg, and consequently abandoned his semi-built house, later using the stone to build Bolsover Castle.
The new century found the Queen debilitated and depressed. Now sixty-seven, she was suffering from insomnia and migraines; her thinning hair disguised by wigs; her teeth blackened stumps; her complexion destroyed by toxic face creams and whiteners. She was still smarting from the Earl of Essex’s insubordination. The previous year he’d persuaded her to send him to Ireland, with orders to subdue the Earl of Tyrone. Instead he had made a truce and returned to England, without the Queen’s permission, in September, an act of defiance for which he’d been punished by banishment from court.
Bess, on the contrary, though entering her eighth decade, was still in remarkably good health (presumably with the exception of her teeth) and showing little sign of slowing down, especially when it came to further acquisitions of land and property. ‘Parsonages and rectories in divers counties’ were acquired from the Queen in 1599 for £12,855.21 In 1600, Hercules Foljambe, a neighbour and recipient of loans, was paid £1,500 for land at Chesterfield, Moorhall and Whittington.22 Over just one year, between 1602 and 1603, William received £16,916 from Bess, to buy land.23 These were very substantial purchases. And given the notoriously and fiendishly complicated Elizabethan land laws, such purchases involved lawyers, a team of whom, including Edward Whalley and George Chaworth (a cousin of Bess’s), were more or less permanently engaged in pursuing lawsuits brought by or against Bess. The accounts record countless payments (£100 here, £200 there) to be ‘laid out’ on ‘law causes’, many of these to do with ‘concealments’ – the illegal withholding of land.
And many such ‘causes’ involved Gilbert Talbot. In June 1600, Bess appealed to Robert Cecil: ‘I am wronged by those who in reason should seek my comfort. The Earl of Shrewsbury under pretence of a grant of concealed lands, goeth about to overthrow the estate of some lands formerly conveyed to my children and dearly obtained by me and upon great considerations, the matter I have caused to be briefly set down, which my son William Cavendish will present to you.’24 Cecil seemingly took little action, since four months later, Bess was writing again: Gilbert, she complained, was ‘most unconscionably and unnaturally’ appropriating lands that belonged not to him, but to Henry Cavendish.25 In November, William, who was in London, acting as Bess’s representative and attending the Star Chamber, where ‘concealment’ cases were heard, reported on progress, or rather lack of it, since Bess’s cases had been postponed. He thanked her ‘for the hands of the three little honest folks [his children] subscribed in your Ladyship’s letter. I know by James writing where he learned his skill.’26
As far as Gilbert was concerned, Bess was wilfully trying to thwart his perfectly legitimate acquisitions of land, and in his own appeals to Cecil, he made no attempt to hide his feelings: ‘I perceive my dear good mother-in-law (dear I may justly term her) means quite to overthrow me in the late purchase I made, wherein I am resolved to stand so far as I may justify in honour, conscience and law, the particulars shall be hereafter at large opened unto you and in the meantime I beseech you suspend your judgement notwithstanding all the fair shows that are made on the contrary side.’27
The building of the almshouses in Derby was no mere act of charity – by 1601, Bess was thinking of, and preparing for, her own death. There was no question of her taking her place in the Shrewsbury vault at Sheffield, or indeed of joining any husband. She wished to orchestrate her own burial. She commissioned Smythson to design a very splendid tomb, of blackstone and marble, for All Saints church, Derby (now Derby Cathedral). Payments were made to labourers for preparing the site, to stone-getters, and for teams of horses to drag forty loads of stone to Derby; by April 1601, it was ‘finished and wanting nothing but the setting up’. Three years later, a vault was added.28
In the same year, Bess drew up a will – eleven large, densely written vellum pages. Chatsworth was entailed on Henry Cavendish, while she had ensured that William and Charles were amply provided with land and property; however, her goods and chattels could be distributed as she wished. To William Cavendish went the contents of the Old and New Halls and Owlcotes, and to Henry those of Chatsworth; William’s children, Frances, James and William, had £1,000 each; Henry’s wife Grace was left 100 angels* to buy a mourning ring, and the Pierrepont grandchildren also had money with which to buy rings; to Arbella, ‘my very loving grandchild’, went Bess’s ‘crystal glass trimmed with silver and gilt’ and set with lapis lazuli and agates, her sables – one with a gold enamelled head – her pearls and jewels and £1,000; to Bess’s daughter Frances went the book, set with stones, given to her by William Cavendish, ‘with her father’s picture and mine drawn in it’; £1,000 was to be distributed between the servants, who were to have ‘meat, drink and lodging’ at Hardwick for one month after the funeral; the almshouse residents were to get mourning gowns and 20s. apiece; Anne Baynton, Bess’s stepdaughter, was to go on receiving an annual legacy of £5; and to the Queen, who was asked to be good to Arbella, ‘the poor orphan’, went £200 in gold to buy a cup. Due to the ‘unkindness offered me by my son-in-law the Earl of Shrewsbury and my daughter his wife, and likewise my son Charles Cavendish’, Mary and Charles received nothing more than Bess’s blessing.29 Subsequently, as beneficiaries rose and fell in favour, the will would be revised.
21.
‘A scribbling melancholy’
Though Bess had not been to court since 1592, she still had her court informants. One such, Lady Dorothy Stafford, a friend of old, and now the longest serving of the Queen’s ladies of the privy chamber, wrote in January 1601 to report on the reception of Bess and Arbella’s New Year’s gifts to the Queen. Bess had simply given £100, but Arbella had gone to more trouble – ‘a scarf or head-veil of lawn cutwork, flourished with silver and silks of various colours’, quite possibly worked by Arbella herself, to which the Queen had ‘taken an especial liking’, although apparently that did not signify any ‘especial liking’ towards Arbella herself. Bess had not given up hope of a good match for Arbella, and had continued to write to the Queen to that effect, urging ‘that she might be carefully bestowed’. However, the Queen, true to form, had refused to commit herself beyond assuring Lady Stafford, vaguely, that ‘she would be careful of her’. Her New Year’s ‘token’ for Arbella (a piece of plate) was not, felt Lady Stafford, ‘so good as I could wish it, nor so good
as her La. deserveth in respect of the rareness of that which she sent unto her Majesty’. It was a case of gift disparity. But Lady Stafford, nervous that she had said too much, begged Bess to keep this to herself.1
The Queen, at nearly seventy, was increasingly reliant on artifice – cosmetics, jewels, ever more fantastic frocks – to disguise the ravages of age, and still refusing to nominate a successor. Arbella’s claim was no longer taken seriously. Nor was that of Lord Beauchamp – the son of Katherine Grey and the Earl of Hertford – by reason of his illegitimacy and the fact that he’d married a commoner. Philip III of Spain was pushing his half-sister, the Infanta Isabella, but the strongest candidate remained James VI of Scotland. James was the closest blood heir; he was a Protestant; he had not one but two healthy sons; and he was a man – after nearly fifty years of female rule, there was appetite for a king. Robert Cecil, who was secretly corresponding with James, claimed that he was simply acting in Elizabeth’s best interests whether she knew it or not: ‘If her Majesty had known all I did . . . her age and orbity, joined to the jealousy of her sex, might have moved her to think ill of that which helped to preserve her.’2
After several peaceful years, as Bess settled into and perfected her new house, drama erupted at Hardwick, charted in an avalanche of letters. By 1602, relations between Bess and Arbella had broken down. The ‘dearest jewel’ and ‘loving grandchild’ was, at twenty-seven, somewhat tarnished and distinctly less loving. Shortly before his death, the Earl of Shrewsbury had predicted that Arbella ‘would bring much trouble to his house by his wife’s and her daughter’s devices’.3 He was right, though trouble came thanks to Arbella’s own devices.
Bess had certainly treated Arbella liberally – cash, land, jewels, all came her way. In January 1594, she had had £2,000 from Bess and £1,360 from William Cavendish (this was Elizabeth Lennox’s £3,000 dowry, finally paid to Arbella with interest).4 There were the five manors acquired from Francis Willoughby; £500 in 1599 towards buying a ‘piece of land’ in Lincolnshire and £640 to buy a property at Skegby; £10 for a set of viols; £100 to buy a pearl ‘to enlarge her chain’; ‘a bone grace with thirty pearls for a coronet’, taken out of Bess’s ‘jewel coffer’.5 But such gifts carried obligations and only served to bind Arbella more closely.
It was Arbella’s misfortune to be educated for sovereignty, but overeducated for her lot. Thanks to Bess, she had had the benefit of a fine humanist education: she could read, write and speak in French and Latin,* she was familiar with Italian, Spanish, Greek and Hebrew, she was almost as skilled a needlewoman as her aunt the Queen of Scots; she was an accomplished viol and lute player; her letters, scattered with biblical and classical allusions, are testament to her scholarship. However, raised with the highest expectations – ‘in exile with expectation’ as she put it – possibly of a throne, certainly of a great match, Arbella was disappointed of both. At an age when most young women would have been long married, she was leading the life of an unmarried dependant, immured in Derbyshire under the rule of her grandmother. Although she had a room of her own at Hardwick – her ‘study’ – this could only be accessed via Bess’s rooms. She still slept in Bess’s bedchamber.
An already combustible situation was made more so by the fact that apart from sharing a very powerful will, grandmother and granddaughter were otherwise two very different, and incompatible, personalities. Where Bess was pragmatic, controlled and prudent, Arbella was romantic, impulsive and reckless. As with Shrewsbury, Bess misjudged a character whose passions were quite alien to her own. Arbella wanted to be able to select her own servants, to see whom she wished, to have ‘the company of some young lady or gentlewoman for my recreation and scholars, music, hunting, hawking’. ‘Many infants’ were able to choose ‘their own guardian’; at twenty-seven, she simply wanted the liberty to choose her ‘place of abode’.6 Here was a clever, articulate young woman, desperate for autonomy, longing to ‘be my own woman’ and to ‘shape my own coat according to my cloth’.7 One way, indeed the only way, to liberate herself from Hardwick, and Bess, was marriage.
Arbella’s choice of groom was curious: sixteen-year-old Edward Seymour, a youth she had never set eyes on. Seymour was the son of Lord Beauchamp and grandson of the Earl of Hertford. For marrying in secret, Hertford and Katherine Grey had been sent to the Tower, where Lord Beauchamp had been born. Arbella was a romantic, and this tale of doomed love, far from warning her off, seemed to exert an irresistible lure. She later claimed that the marriage had initially been proposed by Hertford, who, she understood, had ‘desired and well liked’ the idea; he had approached Bess through one of her servants, David Owen Tudor, whose son Richard was Arbella’s page, but the plan had been rejected by Bess as not having the approval of the Queen. If this was the case, nobody, least of all Hertford or Bess, ever admitted to it. Since a marriage between Seymour and Arbella would unite two, admittedly tentative, claims to the throne, it would indeed be highly unlikely to win the approval, let alone the consent, of the Queen.
To put her plan into action, Arbella needed help. She first appealed to James Starkey, the chaplain at Hardwick and former tutor to William Cavendish’s children. Starkey was disgruntled – he had been promised a living by William, which had then been withheld. Arbella offered to help Starkey get his living, and he to deliver letters for her. According to Starkey, Arbella would often burst into tears while ‘at her book’ and felt that ‘she was hardly used . . . in despiteful words, being bobbed and her nose played withal’.8 In the summer of 1602, Starkey left Hardwick and Arbella sent money and jewels to Yorkshire for safe keeping, after Bess had threatened to take them away. Arbella then approached John Dodderidge (Good), an old and trusted servant at Hardwick – he had witnessed Bess’s will and Bess had paid for his son’s education. Would Dodderidge, asked Arbella, ‘go a little way for her’? In fact she wanted him to go a rather long way – as far as London, to deliver a message to the Earl of Hertford. Dodderidge was to say that he was representing Henry and William Cavendish and to request that Edward Seymour come to Hardwick, in disguise, accompanied by some ‘grave, ancient man’, on the pretext of selling land (this being bait, Arbella calculated, that Bess would be unable to resist). They were to bring with them some form of identification such as ‘some picture or handwriting of the Lady Jane Grey, whose hand I know’.9
Surprisingly, Dodderidge agreed to this fanciful plan and on Christmas Day 1602 set off for London on a horse provided by Henry Cavendish. He arrived on 30 December, only to be received ‘contrary to all expectation’. An alarmed Hertford immediately alerted Cecil, and Dodderidge was marched off to the Gatehouse gaol at Westminster. It was clear enough that all was not well at Hardwick, and this at a moment when the Queen, as her godson John Harington wrote, was in a ‘most pitiable state’, sunk in ‘melancholy’, her memory failing, refusing food, unable to sleep, spending her days hunched on cushions on the floor. There was still great uncertainty as to what would happen in the event of Elizabeth’s death. Cecil may have been paving the way for James’s accession, but James was not recognised by the Queen, nor was he necessarily the popular choice. The support of the Privy Council was no guarantee in itself without the backing of the people, as had been proved by the ill-fated attempt to put Jane Grey on the throne. There was talk of France and Spain favouring Arbella as less objectionable than James. And Arbella’s proposal to Edward Seymour alarmed the Queen – she’d become a loose cannon. Sir Henry Brounker, a Queen’s commissioner with a reputation for tact and experience, was dispatched to Hardwick.
On the morning of 7 January, Brounker arrived at Hardwick, unannounced. He was taken up to the long gallery, where he found Bess, Arbella and William Cavendish walking. Bess’s gallery, at 167 feet, stretching the length of the top floor, was one of the longest in England, only surpassed by Montacute in Somerset and probably by Worksop. Like the withdrawing chamber, it was sparsely furnished (a couple of inlaid tables covered with Turkish carpets, a few chairs and stools, long cushions
for the window seats), a room for strolling and admiring the portraits – fewer than there are today – the two great chimney-pieces, with their alabaster figures of Justice and Mercy, carved by Thomas Accres,* and the great thirteen-piece Gideon tapestry. On a January morning the gallery would have been flooded with clear, thin winter light from its wall of east-facing windows, inadequately warmed by two fires, and smelling faintly of grass from the rush matting covering the floor (Bess was fussy about her matting – Arbella commented, sourly, that she and her cousin Mary walked in the adjoining great chamber ‘for fear of wearing the mats in the gallery’, which was ‘reserved’ for important guests).10 Brounker might well have been struck by the gallery, but he had not travelled at speed from London to admire Hardwick’s interiors.
For Bess, and Arbella, the sudden appearance of an officer from court must have caused consternation. Brounker began by drawing Bess to one end of the gallery – a long gallery being conducive to confidences – and giving her a letter from the Queen, which, without revealing the whole story, was quite alarming enough to provoke an instant ‘change of countenance’ and make Bess attempt to fall to her knees (no easy matter for an eighty-two-year-old). Brounker then took Arbella to the other end of the gallery and confronted her. When she denied all, he produced Dodderidge’s confession. The following day, Arbella wrote a statement, a nonsensical document – ‘confused, obscure and in truth ridiculous’, thought Brounker, who asked for another draft. He considered ‘her wits were throughout disordered, either through fear of her grandmother or conceit of her own folly’.