by Kate Hubbard
* King Lear was first performed at James I’s court in December 1606.
* Bess hadn’t entirely turned her back on James – in 1582, she paid off £100 of his debts.
* Bess didn’t forget her daughters – Frances and Mary both had regular cash gifts (Devonshire MSS, Chatsworth, HM/5).
* Gilbert Talbot, with the help of his upholsterer, ‘devised’ a gout-friendly upholstered chair with a leg-rest, giving one to his father and offering another to Burghley (CP 165/17).
* Bess regularly gave ‘parcels of plate’ as gifts: a ‘gilt basin and ewer, the ewer like a ship’ to Leicester, a ‘gilt basin and ewer’ to Walter Mildmay, a ‘crystal cup trimmed with gold’ to Gilbert Talbot, etc. (Devonshire MSS, Chatsworth, H/143.8, 143.6).
* Bossy estimated the number of English Catholics as 40,000 in 1603, less than 1 per cent of the population (J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community: 1570-1850, 1975).
* Only the Earl of Essex, according to Arbella, came to her defence. The pair were not dissimilar, both clever, self-dramatising and reckless.
* By the 18th century, this arrangement would be reversed, with high-ceilinged reception rooms on the ground floor and servants and children tucked away in the attics.
* A reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple was first published in 1481. It has also been suggested that Bess, trying to outdo Wollaton with the New Hall, may have been inspired by a woodcut of Solomon’s Palace, byJost Amman. The Palace features in one of the inlaid wood panels showing architectural scenes, commissioned by Bess for Chatsworth (Mark Girouard, ‘Solomon’s Temple in Nottinghamshire’, Town and Country, 1992, pp.187–97).
* The Lodge was ostensibly built for Tresham’s warrener, who was given the ground- floor room and the unsettlingly dungeon-like basement (for the storage of rabbit skins, perhaps), while Tresham kept the first floor as a place for meditation.
* Elizabeth was given a generous £60 when she married John Digby, a gentleman servant, and £4 on the christening of her baby in April 1592 (Devonshire MSS, Chatsworth, HM/7, f.14).
* A recent owner of Manor Lodge filled the great chamber with knitting machines, while the house has also had an incarnation as a hotel and pub, nods perhaps to its hybrid character.
* From the evidence of a 17th-century survey, Owlcotes, once built, had three storeys (Durant, Smythson Circle, p.163).
* Some of the oak at Hardwick was put in green – unseasoned – subsequently warping and shrinking, suggesting impatience on Bess’s part.
* John Smythson trained, like his father, as a mason before graduating to architectural work. It’s often difficult to distinguish between the work of father and son. Both Smythsons may, for example, have produced designs for Charles Cavendish’s unfinished house at Kirkby-in-Ashfield, and Shireoaks in Derbyshire. John was responsible for parts of Welbeck Abbey. His greatest achievement is Bolsover Castle.
* Starkey, Dodderidge and Parker were versatile musicians – in 1601, they received 20s. for their singing (Devonshire MSS, Chatsworth, HM/8, f.150).
* Margaret St Loe, Sir William St Loe’s daughter by his first marriage, married a Thomas Norton. Could Mary have been her daughter? Was Bess trying to make amends for depriving her stepdaughters of their inheritance?
* The 6th Duke of Devonshire described the Green Velvet Room as a ‘wilderness of a bedroom, with a quarry of marble in one corner’.
* The Virtues hangings are in the process of being restored – reds, greens and golds once more vivid and glowing against a black and white velvet background.
* The hunting scenes are taken from engravings by Philips Galle, after designs by Johannes Stradanus, first published in 1578 (Wells-Cole, p.270).
* The Abraham tapestries were used as a substitute set.
* Other identifiable houses amongst the Smythson drawings are Blackwell-in-the-Peak, Derbyshire, and Burton Agnes Hall, Yorkshire.
* An angel was a gold coin, worth 10s.
* In November 1602, William Cavendish drew up an agreement promising his 12-year-old son a rapier, a dagger, an embroidered girdle and a pair of spurs if he spoke Latin until the following Lent Assizes with his cousin Arbella (Devonshire MSS, Chatsworth, H/143.12).
* Mark Girouard has suggested that the chimney-pieces were designed by Smythson, his only contribution to Hardwick’s interiors (Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture, p.388).
* Arbella’s fate was not a happy one. In 1610, in an act of wilful self-sabotage, she secretly, without seeking royal permission, married William Seymour, younger brother of Edward, for which both parties were imprisoned. They escaped the following year and attempted to flee to France. Arbella was recaptured and sent back to the Tower, as was Mary Talbot, who had tried to help her. In 1615, still a prisoner, she died, apparently of starvation.
* Once married to Elizabeth, presumably at her urging, William became an extravagant shopper, buying, for example, in 1605, a fine suite of upholstered walnut furniture and expensive furnishing fabrics – 46 yards of crimson damask for £31 – from Sir Baptist Hicks and Thomas Henshaw (Riden (ed.), Household Accounts, Part 3, pp. 324 and 402).
* Sir Francis lived at Sutton Scarsdale – today the site of an 18th-century ruin – near Owlcotes, and was on friendly terms with William Cavendish, though William and Bess engaged in numerous lawsuits with members of the Leake family, who were related to Bess through her mother.
* In 1612, he started work on Bolsover Castle, just along the ridge from Hardwick.
* The principal architect behind Hatfield was Robert Lemynge, with contributions from Simon Basil, the Surveyor of the Royal Works, and Inigo Jones.
* It may have been a gift from Queen Elizabeth.
* This was common practice in the event of death: in 1602, Bess had stepped in to prevent goods from being removed and cattle and sheep being ‘stolen out of the pastures’ of a Master Beresford. Those sent to guard Beresford’s belongings found ‘a good portion of wool that was hid in a rock’, by his heirs presumably (BHL, ID 241 and 44).
* Biographers of Bess have suggested that the hall, chapel and High Great Chamber at Hardwick were also draped in black cloth. This, disappointingly, has no factual basis.