Devices and Desires
Page 39
Walsingham, Sir Francis 113, 128, 143, 145, 156, 170, 189–90, 194
Walsingham, Ursula St Barbe 229
Wardour Castle (Wiltshire) 161
Warwick, Earl of see Dudley, John, Duke of Northumberland
Warwick, Penelope Rich 229
Webb, John 102
Welbeck Abbey (Nottinghamshire) 85, 159, 249n, 261
Westmorland, Earls of see Neville, Charles and Henry
Whalley, Edward 226, 230, 257, 262, 281
Wharton, Philip, 3rd Baron 122
White, Nicholas 98
Whitehall Palace 6–7, 8, 21, 70, 227, 228, 232, 291
Whitfield, Francis 21, 36, 37
William of Orange 179
Willoughby, Bridget 161
Willoughby, Elizabeth Lyttelton 160–1, 185
Willoughby, Sir Francis
employs Smythson to work on Wollaton xxix–xxx, 161
builds Wollaton 3, 160, 161–3
character and description 160
refuses to marry Knollys’ daughter 160
unhappy marriage to Elizabeth Lyttelton 160–1
quarrels with everyone 161, 241
borrows litter from Bess for his sick wife 167n
ordered to pay estranged wife maintenance 185
involved in reconciliation commission between Bess and Shrewsbury 187
death of 232, 241
leases ironworks and wood from Bess 241
mortgaged property passes to Arbella in lieu of unpaid debts 241
receives loans from Bess 241, 242
Willoughby, Percival 161
Willoughby, Thomas 160
Winchester 70
Windsor Castle 9, 70, 130
Wingfield, Anthony 84, 127, 229
Wingfield, Elizabeth Hardwick 29, 84, 117, 127, 177, 186, 228, 229
Wingfield Manor see South Wingfield Manor (Derbyshire)
Wingfield, Mary Hardwick 29
Wollaton xxix–xxx, 3, 64n, 159–60, 161–3, 200, 206, 220 and note, 222–3, 232, 245, 285
Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas 6
Woodstock (Oxfordshire) 56
Woodward, Thomas 286
Worde (or Worthe), Roger 35, 62, 83
Worksop Manor xxx, 3, 85, 158–9 and note, 164–5, 169, 222, 223, 245, 269, 276
Worksop Manor Lodge (Derbyshire) 233 and note, 236
Wrest Park (Bedfordshire) 275
Wyatt, Thomas 41–2, 55
Wyatville, Jeffry 161
Yates, Peter 237, 245, 246
York Place (renamed Whitehall) 6
Zouch, Lady Catherine 10, 15, 148
Zouch, Sir John 138, 148
Photo Section
Bess, c. 1560, by a follower of Hans Eworth
Central square of The Cavendish Hanging, c. 1570, worked on by Bess and Mary, Queen of Scots
Sir William Cavendish, c. 1550, Bess’s second and best-loved husband
Penelope, a classical heroine from the Virtues hangings, with whom Bess liked to identify
Needlework cushion ‘of the platt of Chatesworth House’, in the long gallery at Hardwick in 1601
Elizabethan Chatsworth, before 1750, by Richard Wilson
George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, 1580, Bess’s fourth husband, before love turned to hate
Mary, Queen of Scots, c. 1578, by or after Rowland Lockey, probably painted during her captivity
Elizabeth I, c. 1599, commissioned by Bess for Hardwick
Embroidered panel, decorated with cloth-of-silver strapwork and gold and silver thread
Letter from Bess to her daughter, Mary Talbot, 1580s
The Evidence Room at Hardwick
Longleat, the south front, showing Robert Smythson’s rooftop banqueting houses
Smythson’s design for a two-storeyed bay window at Longleat, c. 1568
Smythson’s designs for tools, including a saw for blackstone and a sieve for sifting lime
Hardwick Old Hall, the north front, with the New Hall to the left, anonymous 17th-century drawing
The New Hall, the west front, 1959, by Edwin Smith, showing the house battered and blackened by coal dust
Allegorical figure of Architecture, from the Liberal Arts hangings, c. 1580
Smythson’s plan for the house, gardens and courts at Wollaton
Wollaton Hall
Smythson’s design for a hall screen at Worksop
A variant plan, by Smythson, for Hardwick’s ground floor, showing the ‘lesser’ stairs in their original position
Hardwick, north elevation, 1831 sketch, with the ruins of the Old Hall on the right
Long gallery at Hardwick, 1839, watercolour by David Cox
Detail of the plasterwork frieze of the court of Diana, in the High Great Chamber
William Cavendish, 1576, 1st Earl of Devonshire
Arbella Stuart, aged two, 1577, commissioned by Bess
Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury
Mary Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury
The saucy overmantel in Bess’s bedchamber
William Senior’s map of Hardwick, 1610, showing the Old and New Halls and gardens
Hanging showing Faith (looking rather like Elizabeth I) and Muhammad, made from 15th-century ecclesiastical vestments collected by William St Loe
Smythson’s drawing of Owlcotes, Bess’s final house
Bess’s silver livery and almshouse badge, with a countess’s coronet
Smythson’s design for Bess’s tomb, All Saints’ Church, Derby
Bess fingering her pearls, 1590s, attributed to Rowland Lockey
About the Author
KATE HUBBARD worked variously as a researcher, teacher, book reviewer, publisher’s reader, and freelance editor. An Oxford University graduate, she currently works for the Royal Literary Fund. She is the author of the acclaimed historical biography Serving Victoria and lives in London and Dorset, England.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Kate Hubbard
NON-FICTION
Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Household
FOR CHILDREN
Charlotte Brontë: The Girl who Turned her Life into a Book
Queen Victoria: The Woman who Ruled the World
Rubies in the Snow: Diary of Russia’s Last Grand Duchess 1911–1918
Copyright
DEVICES AND DESIRES. Copyright © 2019 by Kate Hubbard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover photographs © National Trust Images/John Hammond (embroidery); © sbayram/iStock/Getty Images (red background)
Map © 2018 by Emma Lopes
Originally published as Devices & Desires in Great Britain in 2018 by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hubbard, Kate, 1963- author.
Title: Devices and desires : Bess of Hardwick and the building of Elizabethan England / Kate Hubbard.
Other titles: Bess of Hardwick and the building of Elizabethan England
Description: New York : HarperCollins Publishers, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043843 (print) | LCCN 2018049723 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062303011 (E-book) | ISBN 9780062302991 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Shrewsbury, Elizabeth Hardwick Talbot, Countess of, 1527?-1608. | Countesses--England--Biography. | Nobility--Great Britain--Biography. | Women landowners--Great Britain--Biography. | Great Britain--History--Elizabeth, 1558-1603--B
iography.
Classification: LCC DA358.S4 (ebook) | LCC DA358.S4 H83 2019 (print) | DDC 942.05/5092 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043843
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-230301-1
Version 01102019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-230299-1
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* The architects Caruso St John cited Hardwick as an inspiration for their design for the New Art Gallery, Walsall, 2000. Here, as at Hardwick, the highest ceilings are found on the top floor.
* From ‘Hardwick Hall? More window than wall’, coined by Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, an admirer of Hardwick and a builder in his own right.
* Gilbert Talbot, writing to Robert Cecil in 1604, refers to his ‘unkind mother-in-law’ as being 84 (HMC Salisbury, Vol. XVI, p.360).
* From ‘de Herdewyk’, meaning ‘sheep farm’.
* Including works by Montaigne and Chaucer, William Camden’s Britannia and Sir Anthony Shirley’s Travels into Persia, all bought from a London bookseller (Riden, Household Accounts). It was Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, who came to Hardwick in 1608 as tutor to William’s son, who created a library, on the top floor of the Old Hall.
* A ‘mark’ being two thirds of a pound.
* By 1589, her Barley jointure was worth £100 a year (Durant, Bess of Hardwick, p.11).
* Mary, Queen of Scots married Bothwell at 4 a.m., but in her case there were grounds for secrecy.
* Today The Cavendish Hanging is on display at Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk.
* In 1538, Cavendish and Leigh were accused of accepting plate from the Abbot of Merivale ‘to be good masters unto him and his brethren’, but not prosecuted (L&P Henry VIII, Vol. 13.2B, p.514).
* A room known as ‘Crump’s Chamber’ appears in the 1601 Chatsworth inventory, though Crompe himself was long dead.
* William Cavendish owned a copy of Vitruvius, inscribed with his name in 1557.
* Highly contagious and fatal, this swept through England in a series of epidemics during the first half of the 16th century.
* Daniel Defoe, looking over the moors above Chatsworth in the 1720s, saw ‘a waste and howling wilderness’ (Hey, p.12).
* Bartholomew’s Fair was one of the largest and most popular fairs, held in the fields beyond Smithfield, outside London.
* The bed was later removed, by Bess, to Hardwick, where it gave its name to the Pearl Bedchamber.
* Lucretia was still alive in June 1558, when Bess had velvet shoes made for her, but then disappears from the record (Devonshire MSS, Chatsworth, HM/3, f.20).
* A measure of length: one ell being equivalent to six hand breadths, or 45 inches.
* Sawpits, a 16th-century innovation, allowed timber to be sawn on the spot – tree trunks were marked with chalk, then fastened with wedges over a pit and cut with a two-handed saw, one man above, the other below.
* Today limestone is no longer burned, but simply ground to a powder.
* Bess rarely employed women, and only for light work – polishing stone, collecting rubbish, weeding – at 1d a day (Durant and Riden (eds), Building of Hardwick Hall: Part II, p.xlix). Some builders made more use of women – at Wollaton they carried limestone, and Sir Thomas Tresham had them tending the lime kilns.
* Sir Thomas Smith, who had known Thynne from the Somerset House days, wrote to commiserate on his ‘mischance’. Smith, who had just returned from his ambassadorship in Paris, was about to embark on the building of Hill Hall in Essex, transforming the existing timber-framed courtyard structure into a classical house (Longleat Building Records, Vol. II, f.261).
* The Earl started doing business with Osborne, a member of the Clothworkers’ Company, in the 1560s. In a letter from September 1585, accompanying a delivery of nutmeg, Osborne, now governor of the Turkey Company and Lord Mayor of London, wrote of the arrival of a ship from Turkey carrying carpets – did the Earl want any? (Shrewsbury MSS, LPL, 695, f.27). The following month the Earl asked Osborne for a loan and was refused (Shrewsbury MSS, LPL, 698, f.83).
* ‘Nine pairs of beams’ for the embroiderers were listed in the Hardwick inventory of 1601.
* Most of those worked by Mary are now at Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk, while those at Hardwick, all but two initialled by Bess, have been mounted on screens.
* Moray was killed in January 1570 and replaced by the Earl of Lennox, who suffered the same fate a year later.
* In 1572 Burghley became Lord Treasurer.
* Dickenson was building his own house in Sheffield, timber-framed, with panels of wattle and daub.
* Sheffield was lavishly furnished. A 1582 inventory mentions a great six-piece tapestry of the story of Hercules and eight ‘long Turkey carpets’ (Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 1874, Vol. XXX).
* A few years later, c.1577, Gilbert Talbot would alert Bess to a couple of Scots, one the brother of Mary’s secretary Gilbert Curle, who were heading for Sheffield, posing as cloth-sellers and bearing letters for Mary (BHL, ID 84).
* D. H. Lawrence based Wragby Hall in Lady Chatterley’s Lover on Rufford.
* Sir Nicolas Bacon, writing to Cecil about the London house in 1560, felt that the privy had been put ‘too near the lodging, too near an oven and too near a little larder’, and that it would have ‘been better to offend your eye outward than your nose inward’ (quoted in Airs, p.5).
* The tenants of the Peak Forest were still petitioning about ‘common pasture’ in 1604, their claims dismissed by Bess as ‘altogether untrue’ (BHL, ID 100).
* These were based on Flemish prints published by Hans Collaert in 1576, after designs by Crispin van der Broeck (Levey, Embroideries at Hardwick Hall, p.109).
* Pieces showing biblical scenes, which were not appropriate for classical heroines, were carefully cut away and stored. They are now on display at Hardwick.
* A ‘finisher’, sometimes called a ‘furnisher’, was a new profession, combining literal ‘finishing’ (present-day ‘snagging’) with interior decorating.
* From one of whom, another Henry, descended the Lords Waterpark.
* Since Hobbes was only two years older than young William, master and pupil had a companionable relationship and did much travelling together. After William’s death, in 1628, Hobbes remained employed by the Cavendishes, dying at Hardwick at the age of 91.
* Ben Jonson, visiting Worksop in 1618, during his great walk from London to Edinburgh, remarked on ‘the bigness and beauty’ of the gallery, which ‘exceedeth most that I have seen’, and on the eight vast windows set, as at Shrewsbury House, with heraldic glass (Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland, ed.James Loxley, Anna Groundwater and Julie Sanders, 2015, p.55).
* During the 1580s, he drew up plans for Barlborough Hall, De
rbyshire, now a school, and possibly for Heath Old Hall, Yorkshire (Girouard, Robert Smythson, p.120).
* It may well have been this litter that Francis Willoughby asked for the loan of in 1589, to bring his wife back from Buxton, as she was too weak to ride or travel by coach, ‘wherefore I am humbly to desire your Ladyship to lend her your horse litter and furniture’ (Folger X.d.428 [126]).
* The pastry in the pasties was used to preserve the venison in transit and was probably not eaten.
* In a letter written in September 1583, Gilbert refers to a ‘swellinge’ in ‘my Lord’s boddy’ (BHL, ID 86).