by Kate Hubbard
Although it sounds as if Charles was designing a house for Gilbert and Mary – and they may well have led him to believe so – the fact that both letters ended up at Hatfield makes it more likely that Gilbert was procuring plans on Cecil’s behalf. In 1607, Cecil, who had become Lord Salisbury in 1605, exchanged Theobalds for the King’s Hatfield and was casting about for ideas for a new house. In 1608, he would request a plan of Chatsworth from Arbella and one of Hardwick from Gilbert.8 Writing to thank Gilbert for the ‘platt’ of Hardwick and ‘more for the hand that guided the pencil’, Cecil hoped to see him one day ‘at the house, which is as yet but in fancy and (for ought I know) shall be so far from beauty or greatness as it shall make amends for my precedent vanity’.9 Cecil’s Hatfield, completed in 1612, at a cost of a staggering £40,000, had plenty of beauty and greatness, though it owed little, in the end, to Charles’s platt.*10
The event of the summer of 1607 was the christening of Bess’s great-grandson, James Howard (Lord Maltravers), the first son of Alethea and Thomas Howard, Earl and Countess of Arundel, which brought about a rapprochement between Bess and the Shrewsburys. Bess was asked to be a godmother, though had to withdraw when the Queen proposed herself.11 However, she sent Mary Talbot a lavish present in honour of the event – a ‘fair and well wrought ermine’. Mary thanked her profusely: she would treasure the ermine ‘as a great jewel both in respect of your ladyship and of her from whom your ladyship had it, there can nothing be wrought in metal with more life’.* The christening, she continued, would take place that July at Whitehall, with Their Majesties in attendance, and she was glad to hear that Bess’s hip pain had improved.12 A few months later, Mary received an affectionate note from her mother: ‘my good sweet daughter. I am very desirous to hear how you do. I trust your Lord is well now of the gout, and I desire to hear how all ours do at London and the little sweet Lord Maltravers. I pray God ever to bless you dear heart and them all with his good blessings and so in haste I cease at Hardwick this last of November.’13 It was to be her last letter to Mary: Bess’s health was finally failing.
This brought the Shrewsburys together with Charles Cavendish to Hardwick in early December, the first time, as Gilbert told Cecil, that he’d visited in a decade. He ‘found a lady of great years, of great wealth and a great wit, which yet still remains’; moreover, there was no word ‘of any former suits or unkindness, neither was there any motion on either side, but only compliment, courtesy and kindness’.14 Admittedly they only stayed a day, and Gilbert probably wanted to present a united front to Cecil – at such a critical time it was important to be seen to be behaving well. He wrote more frankly to Henry Cavendish: Bess was hardly eating and couldn’t walk the length of her chamber, even when supported by two people.
As the new year dawned, with the country still in the grip of a great freeze (the Thames froze solid) and Arbella appearing at court in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Beauty (masques were a feature of court life and courtiers’ participation compulsory), Bess grew weaker.15 On New Year’s Eve, Mary Talbot had sent her mother a gift – a cushion on which to kneel for her daily prayers, though Bess must have been long past kneeling – and as Gilbert told Henry, ‘the messenger told us she looked pretty well and spoke heartily, but my Lady wrote that she was worse than when we last saw her and Mrs Digby sent a secret message that her Ladyship was so ill that she could not be from her day or night’.16 Gilbert had heard that the order had been given to ‘drive away all the sheep and cattle at Ewden instantly upon her ladyship’s death’ – Ewden, in Yorkshire, was land that formed part of Bess’s marriage settlement and would revert to Gilbert on her death, but William could at least prevent him from taking possession of the livestock that grazed there.* Gilbert had words of warning for Henry: he should look out for William, whose ‘principallest means is to keep us all so divided one from another’, and who, he suspected, had been hoping to see Henry’s ‘end’ before Bess’s. ‘They’ – i.e. William and his supporters – had been doing their best to persuade Bess that Henry intended to ‘enter the house and seize all’ on her death.17 Gilbert thought that Henry would receive an offer from William, an offer he should certainly refuse. He was right. Bearing in mind the delicate state of both Bess’s health and Henry’s finances, William calculated that Henry might be tempted to relinquish Chatsworth in return for ready cash and offered him £5,000 and £500 a year for Bess’s lifetime.18 Henry turned this down – he was holding out for £6,000 and £500 a year ‘for four years certain.’19
While her children hovered, Bess lay cocooned in her bed. This was splendid enough – its posts encased in ‘scarlet’ (woollen cloth) edged with silver lace, with a scarlet valance embroidered with gold studs and thistles, gold and silver lace and a gold fringe – but, during one of the coldest winters on record, primarily designed for warmth. It was hung with three curtains of scarlet and five curtains of purple ‘bays’ (also woollen cloth), and covered in three pairs of fustian blankets and six Spanish (finest-quality) blankets, and banked around with eight ‘fledges’ – wool mats. Curtains were rare in Tudor homes, but this was a corner room and, in the interests of excluding draughts, two red curtains and three coverlets hung over the windows, with another for the door.20
Bess was suffering from abdominal pain, and when this grew worse, the two ladies attending her, Mary Cartwright and Elizabeth Digby, ‘held her stomach’ to give her some relief. But she remained in full possession of her wits, perfectly aware of the manoeuvrings of her family, and perfectly attuned to falsehoods and insincerity. She ‘showed herself to be very offended with some, for that the well was poisoned and yet breath was made with that water.’21 The fire, burning steadily through the long January nights, cast shadows across the naked torsos of the ‘terms’ carved by Abraham Smith, supporting the mantel, and illuminated the cavorting couple and the red-tongued stag above. Perhaps Bess looked back to her younger, lusty, firm-fleshed self. To the days of her marriage to William Cavendish, when all was ahead of her.
Looking to the future, beyond her death, to her acquisitive, quarrelsome, litigious children and stepchildren, there were real grounds for apprehension. Bess could only put her trust in William: ‘she lay awake much of the night thinking of matters that might concern him much and which perhaps he never thought of and that it stood upon him to look about him’. William didn’t need telling. He was jealously guarding access to his mother, anxious lest Mary Talbot in particular, still a favourite daughter, should have ‘any private conference’ with Bess; Elizabeth Digby was instructed to use whatever means she could to keep Mary away.
On the last day of January, Bess dragged herself from her bed, seated herself in her chair of ‘russet satin striped with silver’ and sent for William. She declared that ‘she found herself extreme sick at heart’ and had ‘no hope of life’. The following day, she instructed Timothy Pusey to make some revisions to her will: she wished Mary Talbot to have the Pearl Bed (the marriage bed she had shared with William Cavendish), ‘but she would give no hangings’ (a bed with no hangings, like Chatsworth without its contents, was practically worthless); Elizabeth Digby was to have £100 and Bess’s other ladies £20 apiece; £100 was to go to the Derby almshouses; and 4,000 marks to Charles Cavendish to buy land for his two sons.22 Last-minute amendments were just what William had dreaded, but though Charles and Mary had received some recognition, there was nothing here to give much cause for alarm.
On 2 February, Dr Hunton, the Cavendish family doctor, was summoned from Newark and moved into Hardwick. He applied a plaster to Bess’s back and a few days later dosed her with treacle. But she was beyond plasters and treacle. Bess died on 13 February, as darkness fell, with her ‘sense and memory even to the end’.23 Dr Hunton was paid 40 marks (£13 6s.) for his pains and sent away. Because the time involved in organising a countess’s funeral usually meant a delay of several weeks between death and burial, embalming, by an apothecary, was essential. Bess’s body was drained of blood, disembowelled and embalmed, then sealed
in wax.24 On the 17th, it was transported in a litter to Derby and placed in a lead coffin in the Cavendish vault that Bess had had constructed in 1601.25 She had chosen to lie with future generations of Cavendishes, not Talbots.
William quickly took charge. Gilbert Talbot told Cecil that both he and Arbella had been ‘made strangers to all my Lord Cavendish’s proceedings’; he knew nothing of either the will or the funeral.26 The will variously brought disappointment, relief and satisfaction. Gilbert and Henry had nothing. Charles had 4,000 marks for his sons, and Arbella, who came to Hardwick in March, had her £1,000. John Bentley, despite his many services to Bess, including travelling all the way from London to witness the codicil made in 1603, went empty-handed. ‘Yesterday’s experience breeds this day’s wisdom’, he commented ruefully, and promptly set about offering his services to Gilbert Talbot.27 Of Bess’s children, only Mary Talbot, with her pointedly compromised bequest, took her mother’s death very ‘sorely’ and gave herself up to ‘extreme grief’.28 Gilbert expressed surprise at his wife’s distress – she was still ‘melancholy’ in August – and hoped to ‘set some workmen’ on a building project soon to distract her.29 Gilbert himself was busy reclaiming his Talbot properties. Just five days after Bess’s death, he ordered all except those servants authorised by himself to be expelled from Wingfield.30
In April, before Bess’s funeral, William Cavendish’s eighteen-year-old son, ‘Wylkyn’, was married to Christian Bruce, the twelve-year-old sister of Lord Kinloss, a match of which Bess would certainly have approved, and which she may have helped engineer, though Arbella took the credit. Christian was a ‘pretty, red-haired wench’, but Wylkyn was a reluctant groom, in large part because he’d succumbed to the attractions of one of his stepmother’s ladies, Margaret Chatterton.31 Margaret, who came from an apparently respectable family of Staffordshire gentry and was seven years Wylkyn’s senior, had seduced him back in 1605, and then claimed that a marriage had taken place. It soon emerged that she had been enjoying drunken orgies in the Old Hall with William Cavendish’s male servants and his wife’s laundry maid.32 A twelve-year-old virgin bride held little appeal for Wylkyn, though he would have reason to be grateful to Christian, who did much to rescue the family fortunes from his own extravagances.
Henry Cavendish, reporting on the wedding, told Gilbert that the young couple ‘were bedded together to his [Wylkyn’s] great punishment some 2 hours’. William Cavendish was bringing a bill against Henry – ‘something touching my entail’ – and Henry, being ‘so unfit and so unapt for these law matters’, knew all too well that he was no match for his ‘wily politic’ and ‘too skilfully experimented’ brother.33 Since Henry had no legitimate heir, Chatsworth would revert to William on Henry’s death, but William was unwilling to wait and banked on Henry’s need for money. Sure enough, in 1610, Chatsworth became his, for £8,000.
When Bess first made her will in 1601, she expressed a wish, with her usual dislike of waste and excess, that her funeral ‘be not over sumptuous or otherwise performed with too much vain and idle charges’. However, this was somewhat at odds with the very substantial £5,102 that was put into bags, in a coffer, to cover cash legacies and funeral expenses.34 She must have known that as a dowager countess, a heraldic funeral, with all attendant ceremony and display, was inevitable. And indeed her due.
It took place on 4 May at All Saints church, Derby, which was extravagantly swathed in black cloth for the occasion.*35 We have no contemporary accounts, but the procession into the church would have been headed by a mourning knight, carrying a banner painted with Bess’s arms, followed by heralds from the College of Arms, then the coffin, and behind that two hooded gentleman ushers carrying white rods, Mary Talbot, as lady chief mourner, supported by two hooded barons, and Bess’s family and servants, with the twelve residents of the almshouses and fifty-eight ‘poor women’ bringing up the rear.
Inside All Saints, the coffin would probably have been laid on a huge thirty-foot-tall hearse, like a four-poster bed, made of timber, with a canopy, all covered in black velvet. Bess’s funeral sermon was preached by Tobie Matthew, the Archbishop of York and a committed Protestant. Matthew, who was famed for his sermons, took his text from the Book of Proverbs, 31:25: ‘Strength and honour is her clothing, and in the latter day she shall rejoice.’ Aside from black cloth, the greatest expense was the funeral feast. Glasses and plates had been bought in London, as well as delicacies such as two pounds of green lemons, three barrels of pickled oysters, two firkins of sturgeon, twenty-five gallons of ‘reinish’ wine, eighteen dried tongues, a firkin of quinces, six gammons of Westphalia bacon, three pounds of Polonia sausage, three pounds of dates, four pounds of ginger, four pounds of figs, pickled cucumbers, pickled lemons and anchovies. The total cost of the occasion came to £3,257, a sum that Bess would certainly have regarded as excessive.36
‘The old Countess of Shrewsbury died about Candlemas this year, whose funeral was about Holy Thursday. A great frost this year. A hot fortnight about James’s tide. The witches of Bakewell hanged.’ So read the 1608 entry in the National Records of Derby.37 Bess’s death is a detail of no greater significance than the fate of the Bakewell witches or the vagaries of the weather. Yet her legacy has been far-reaching and long-lasting. She is remarkable not just by the standards of her age, but by those of any age. Remarkable for her eighty-seven years and for outliving four husbands and most, if not all, of her friends and contemporaries – Sir John Thynne, Frances Grey, the Earl of Leicester, Lord Burghley, Margaret Lennox, Lady Cobham, Queen Elizabeth herself. Remarkable for being able to remember the Dissolution, yet living to see the first Stuart monarch ascend the throne. Remarkable for amassing a fortune that no woman in sixteenth-century England, bar Elizabeth I, came even close to. Nor many men for that matter.
When Robert Cecil said that Elizabeth ‘had been more than a man and, in troth, sometimes less than a woman’, he could just as well have been referring to Bess. The Earl of Shrewsbury certainly felt that he suffered from his wife’s unwomanly behaviour. And he was eaten away by the belief that the Cavendishes were enriching themselves at his expense, a reversal of fortunes that would continue: while Gilbert Talbot sank deeper into debt, a survey of the estates of William and Charles Cavendish, begun in 1608 and finished in 1627, reckoned each at 100,000 acres.38 The Talbot fortunes have declined further (though the Shrewsbury title survives); those of the Cavendishes, founded on land and property originally accumulated by Bess, have, largely, flourished. There is hardly an English duke who doesn’t have Bess’s blood running in his veins: descended from her, directly and indirectly, are the Dukes of Devonshire (Bess’s great-great-grandson, William Cavendish, 4th Earl of Devonshire, became 1st Duke in 1694), Newcastle, Portland, Kingston and Norfolk. This is her achievement. But so too is her visible memorial, her greatest and only surviving house, Hardwick.
It would be unusual, indeed eccentric, for an elderly widow today to build a complicated, ambitious house, right alongside a more than adequate existing house, and then to display her initials all over it, writ large, in stone. ‘Builder of Chatsworth, Hardwick and Oldcotes, highly distinguished by their magnificence’ – so Bess is described in the inscription on her tomb. According to local legend, she would live so long as she continued to build: the exceptionally cold winter of 1608 meant that the mortar at Owlcotes froze, whereupon Bess ordered her masons to use boiling water; when that proved ineffectual, ale was substituted; when this too failed, she drew her last breath. In point of fact, Owlcotes was long finished by 1608, and masons would not have been making mortar in February, but the sentiment rings true – Bess had been engaged in building of one sort or another for nearly fifty years; it was her lifeblood. Energy, creativity, ambition, pride, vast wealth and resources, all found expression in and were lavished on her houses, and none more so than Hardwick, which not only stands as a monument to a brilliantly managed marital and business career, but proclaims one woman’s triumphant survival and her desire for immortality.
Afterword
Hardwick Post Bess
Many of the great Tudor houses built by Bess’s contemporaries – Kenilworth, Theobalds, Holdenby, Worksop – have vanished: burnt down, pulled down, abandoned. But Hardwick has survived: architecturally intact, its interiors largely unchanged, its collection of sixteenth-century textiles unsurpassed. Though today under the management of the National Trust, it is still very much Bess’s house. This would not be the case if Henry Cavendish had been rather more like his brother William; it was because Henry sold Chatsworth to William in 1610 that Hardwick became a secondary house for the Cavendishes and so, unlike Chatsworth, escaped rebuilding according to more fashionable tastes.
William Cavendish, who became 1st Earl of Devonshire in 1618, was keen, like most heirs, to make his mark and spent a substantial £1,163 on building works (supervised by John Balechouse) at Hardwick. What exactly these works consisted of is unclear, but they probably included the moulded plaster ceiling in the long gallery. In 1611, Hardwick had its first royal visit (something that would have gratified Bess) – Prince Charles (the future King), who came whilst his father was touring and hunting in the Midlands. When William died in 1626, his son, ‘Wylkyn’, became the 2nd Earl, inheriting Hardwick and Chatsworth. Young William was as profligate as his father had been parsimonious, leaving debts of £38,000 on his death in 1628, aged just thirty-eight.
During the 1600s, Hardwick was used as an alternative to Chatsworth, but towards the end of the century Chatsworth was demolished and completely rebuilt, to designs by William Talman; thereafter it became the principal home of the Cavendishes. Through the eighteenth century, Hardwick was regarded as a romantic curiosity, visited occasionally, but frequently empty. It was the 1st Duke of Devonshire who took the decision to abandon the Old Hall, for reasons of economy, and parts were demolished in 1756, with the west wing surviving, but steadily decaying, into the nineteenth century (the young Princess Victoria, visiting Hardwick in 1833, had to be dissuaded, on the grounds of safety, from climbing the stairs to the Hill Great Chamber). The 5th Duke, and his wife Georgiana, stayed regularly at Hardwick in the 1780s, and authorised various works, including the lowering of the ceiling of the state withdrawing chamber, thus diminishing one of Hardwick’s great spaces. A few months before the 5th Duke’s death, in 1811, a legendary party took place at Hardwick, to celebrate the coming-of-age of his son and heir, Lord Hartington.