A Woman of Passion

by Virginia Henley

  “Lady Cavendish, we pledge to do our utmost.”

  “That is all I ask, gentlemen.”

  The formal charges were laid against Sir William Cavendish on October 1. One week later he went before the queen's judges in the Star Chamber with his secretary, Robert Bestnay, and his lawyers to answer the charges. He put forth his own defense, and then his lawyers asked for leniency because of his past loyalty and service to the Crown. They hoped to get the debt reduced to one thousand pounds.

  The Queen's council owed their loyalty to Mary. Suffolk, Warwick, Somerset, and Seymour had all gone to the block, and the Earl of Shrewsbury was too old to be in London. It took fifteen long days before Cavendish was called to Court again. The waiting seemed endless, the pressure intolerable.

  Finally, on October 23 he was called back. Cavendish was told that his defense was unacceptable to the queen. A quick consultation with his lawyers did him little good. They told him it was pointless to deny the charges and that his only recourse was to beg for mercy. He argued with them, but in the end he was forced into the humiliation of pleading guilty and throwing himself on the mercy of the court. His lawyers pleaded his case, saying that if Sir William was forced to repay the full amount, he would be ruined financially and he and his children would end their days in penury.

  When he arrived home that night, William was in a rage. He cursed his lawyers for fools. He told Bess, “I was forced into a humiliating theatrical performance that got me absolutely nowhere.”

  Bess saved her curses for the queen, and William joined her, ranting and raving for hours. “After all the service I've given to the Crown, all the royal coffers I've filled, doing their dirty work for them, this is the thanks I get!”

  “William, I don't care about the debt; I care about you!” It was inevitable that the Crown would recover the debt, but they had not handed down their punishment yet. Bess feared that William would be sent to prison. He could even be sent to the block. Bess pushed the terrifying thought away.

  She did not fall asleep until the early hours of the morning.

  Bess awoke, terrified. The room was empty, stripped bare. She ran downstairs and found the bailiffs carrying off everything she possessed in the world. Bess begged and pleaded and cried, all to no avail. Outside, her beautiful possessions were being piled on a cart. They had been put out of their house and had nowhere to go. Fear washed over her in great waves. Panic choked her. When she turned around, the cart was gone, her family was gone, and even Chatsworth had vanished. Bess had lost everything she had in the world. The suffocating terror mounted until it engulfed her, the waves of fear almost drowning her.

  The hollow, empty feeling inside her belly was like a ravenous hunger, only worse: William was gone! She was overwhelmed with helplessness, hopelessness.

  Bess shot up in bed, knowing she had had the old nightmare. William was not beside her, and the panic of the dream was all too real. Then she saw him across the room and knew immediately that something was wrong. He was clutching his chest and trying to pour himself some wine.

  Bess sprang from the bed and ran to him. “William!” By the time she reached him, the pain had driven him to his knees. The goblet fell from his hand and the red wine spread across the carpet like blood. Bess cried out for James Cromp, who came running. “Help me get him to bed, James.”

  “It's easing,” William gasped as he lay back against the pillows. “I'll be fine.”

  Bess threw on her bedgown and went to summon Robert Bestnay. “Get William's doctor as fast as you can.”

  When Dr. Turner arrived and examined his patient, he determined that Sir William had suffered a heart seizure. He gave him an opiate for the pain and warned him severely that he must rest.

  Bess went downstairs with Turner. “Will he be all right?” she demanded frantically.

  “Lady Cavendish, he must be kept quiet. This has been brought about by work and worry. If he does not have complete bed rest, he could suffer another heart seizure. I'll come again tomorrow.”

  Bess was thoroughly alarmed, but she was also determined to follow the doctor's orders. She called the staff of the London house together and gave them their orders.

  William slept heavily through the entire day and into the night. He awoke about midnight and asked Bess to come into bed with him. She got up from the chair beside the bed and slipped beneath the covers. She put her arms about him and held him close. She did not want to transfer her panic to him.

  Finally, he spoke to her in a calm voice. “Bess … my Bessie, I love and adore you. I am so very sorry to leave you in such a mess.”

  “William, you are not going to leave me, I won't let you!”

  He smiled. How very like Bess to think she could order things the way she wanted. He knew he had been blessed the day he found her. He had taught her everything he knew about business. She had always had courage, but now she had confidence in herself as well. She was only twenty-nine years old—she had her whole life before her.

  The next day Bess bathed him and fed him and forbade him to speak of their difficulties. By late afternoon she began to have a glimmer of hope that he would recover. In the evening he even teased her about being too bossy.

  She went down to the kitchen to prepare him some soup laced with cream and wine. When she came back upstairs, she was furious to find him out of bed. Suddenly, William grabbed his chest and lurched forward. Bess screamed and ran to him. She knelt on the floor beside him and enfolded him in her arms. She held him until his body turned cold.

  “No, William, no,” she whispered with trembling lips. She shivered over and over, then her whole body began to shake uncontrollably, as she was convulsed by racking dry sobs. Bess stared at him in disbelief. “Don't leave me, William … I cannot go on without you.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Bess was numb. She was as stunned as if a stone wall had collapsed on her. She could not feel, she could not think, she could not function in any way. This time, fate had dealt her a blow from which she would never recover.

  Robert Bestnay and James Cromp joined ranks and did what needed to be done. They dispatched messages to Lady Cavendish's family immediately and gently coaxed her to tell them what funeral arrangements she wanted made.

  Her mother, Marcella, and Jane arrived with all the children and their attendant nursemaids. They were alarmed when they saw Bess. She was silent and remote as if she were in a trance.

  Sir William Cavendish was buried on Allhallows, the last day of October, at St. Botolph's, Aldgate. Bess thought it would please him to be laid to rest beside his mother and father and all the Cavendishes who had gone before him. She stood at the grave, veiled in black, holding the hand of her daughter Francie, who was so much like her father. His other children stood in a row beside them as his coffin was lowered into the cold ground, and the noble mourners who had come to pay their respects could not remember such a sad sight.

  Sir John Thynne was the first to approach Bess. Though he was now past forty, his tight brown curls still gave him a youthful appearance. As he looked at her, his green eyes filled with compassion. “Lady Cavendish— Bess, please accept my heartfelt condolences. If there is anything I can do to help you in any way whatsoever, I beg that you send word to me.”

  Bess stared at him as if she hadn't heard a word.

  Frances Grey and Nan Dudley tried to comfort Bess. All three women were united in their hatred of Mary. Bess remained silent, rigid, and dry-eyed, and her friends were deeply concerned for her. As they gathered close about her, Bess stared at the two women and murmured, “I curse her.”

  During the next two weeks Bess did not speak, did not eat, and did not sleep. She had withdrawn to a place where no one could touch her, no one could hurt her again. Her heart had died with William, and she could not face the world without him. He was her bastion, her rock, her strength. William was more than her love, he was her very life. With him beside her she had conquered the world; without him she felt that she could not exist.
Whenever her mother or Jane spoke to her, she did not answer, so they left her in peace and did their best to keep the children quiet.

  Finally, Marcella went up to the master bedchamber to confront her. She found Bess lying on the great bed, carved with the Cavendish stags, staring up at the red silk canopy. “This nonsense cannot go on. You have abdicated your responsibilities, and it is time you came to grips with it all.”

  “You do not understand,” Bess whispered.

  “No, we do not. So you will have to get up off that bed, come downstairs, and talk to us.”

  Bess did not respond, but half an hour later she came quietly downstairs and joined the Hardwick women in the parlor. Wearily, she told them what William had gone through during the last months. Listlessly, she told them that the queen had ruined his career and that he owed the Crown over five thousand pounds. As she quietly told them of his insurmountable problems, her mother and Jane were shocked into silence by the amount of money owed.

  “Queen Mary murdered him as surely as if she had plunged a dagger into his heart,” Bess said softly.

  Marcella demanded, “Aren't you going to get angry?”

  My emotions are dead, Bess thought.

  “So the queen wins! You are not even going to fight her!”

  “You don't understand! William lost.”

  “Bess, you are the one who doesn't understand. William is dead. These problems are now your problems. Lying on your bed will not solve them. The five-thousand-pound debt is your debt. You must sell the land, you must pay off the debt. The legacy William left you is not Chatsworth, it is your Cavendish children.”

  Bess stood up all of a sudden. “I curse the bitch!” She ran to the front door, flung it open, and cried into the November wind, “I curse the bitch!”

  The women exchanged relieved glances. Bess would be all right now that she had gotten angry.

  The London house was on the Thames, the Cavendish barge moored at the water stairs. Bess went aboard and spoke to the bargeman. “Take me upriver, past Whitehall—I need the air.”

  She paced the deck without so much as a shawl. The fury erupting inside her kept her warm. Silently, Bess reviled the queen, heaping curses upon her head. Bess knew she was not alone in her hatred. Mary and the Spaniard she married had revived the practice of burning heretics at the stake, and her subjects condemned such evil and loathed her.

  By the time Whitehall came into view, Bess had worked herself up to full pitch. Aloud she cried, “Bloody Mary! I'm going to fight you! Not one acre of Cavendish land will I part with! Not one acre! I will see you in your grave, you bitch!”

  That night, in the privacy of her bedchamber, Bess cried for the first time. Her anger had opened the flood-gates, and her other dammed-up emotions of anguish and sorrow came pouring forth.

  Later, when the storm abated somewhat, she lay in the big bed with her hand upon William's pillow. “My love, when I had the fever and thought I might die, I made you swear that you would make great marriages for our children. Now I give the same pledge to you. I can do no less, William. You will always be with me in them. Help me to be strong.”

  Bess appointed Francis Whitfield as bailiff of Chatsworth; her sister Jane's husband would assist him. She put Timothy Pusey in charge of the lead and coal mines. She asked Robert Bestnay to become her secretary, and James Cromp, whom she trusted with her life, became her personal assistant.

  Bess sent Cromp off with a letter to her old friend Sir John Thynne, who had attended the funeral and offered to do anything he could for her. Then, accompanied by Robert Bestnay, she paid a visit to the lawyers.

  Bess made her position abundantly clear. “Gentlemen, you probably believe the simplest way out of my difficulties is for me to sell Chatsworth and my northern landholdings to pay what I owe the Crown. But I have no such intent! I am going to fight, and gentlemen, when I fight it is with no holds barred. I will use every means within my power. If it is humanly possible, I will not sell one acre to pay my debt to the Crown.”

  Bess had their full attention as she continued. “A bill to recover the five thousand will have to go through Parliament. I have dealt with the courts before and know how slow the process can be. It will be your job to see that the bill is delayed and delayed again. I don't care what it costs, and I don't care who you have to bribe. Cavendish taught me the effectiveness of the golden spur. I intend to put the London house up for sale today.”

  Bess knew that the only way to save her sanity was to keep busy. Within three months of her husband's death, Bess had sold the London house and packed up everything. From Sir John Thynne, Bess leased his house at Brentford and moved the children there the moment the London house was sold. It was on the Thames close by her friend Nan Dudley's Syon House. The quiet village near Chelsea would give her privacy from the Court but still allow her to be close enough to London to learn everything that was happening.

  Bess's income from her tenant farmers and mines was three hundred pounds a year. Her London expenses equaled her income, so the building at Chatsworth came to a halt. Not one pound could be expended on workmen 's wages or building materials. On top of this was the money she owed to Westmorland and to William Parr for the thousands of acres she and William had purchased from them.

  Alone in her bed at night, she lay worrying about what would become of them all. She had shown a defiant face to the world, ordering the lawyers to use delaying tactics, but deep down inside she was realist enough to know the day of reckoning was inevitable. She feared that in the end Chatsworth and everything else she owned would have to be sacrificed. But at least her name had been on every legal document as co-owner. Bess had William to thank for the fact that she owned everything outright in her own name.

  By keeping busy and expending all her energy, Bess got through the days. She played with the children, and she had learned to laugh again when she was with others, but the nights were something else entirely. She was so lonely she thought she would die of it. Her heart—and her body too—ached for him. She grew thin, and the emptiness inside her expanded instead of lessening, as day followed night and night followed day.

  In late January Bess received a note from Frances Grey that read: I have a surprise for you and Nan Dudley. Meet me tomorrow at Syon House.

  Both Bess and Nan were gowned in black silk when their friend Frances swept in wearing scarlet.

  “Good God, you look like two old crows, sitting there in your widows' weeds. 'Tis time you threw off your mourning and took lovers!”

  “Which is apparently what you have done,” Bess said dryly.

  “Ah, that is where you are completely wrong, darling. I took lovers long before I became a widow.”

  Nan Dudley was shocked. “You took a lover while your husband was alive?”

  Frances's eyebrows arched. “And you didn't?”

  “Duke Dudley gave me thirteen children; what the hell would I want with a lover?”

  “Bess, surely you took lovers,” Frances demanded.

  “No, I never did, Frances. It was all I could do to keep Rogue Cavendish happy. He was a man of considerable appetite.”

  “Well, fortunately for me, I now have a husband of considerable appetite!” Frances waved her new wedding ring under their noses.

  “You're married?” Nan asked in disbelief.

  “To whom?” Bess questioned.

  “To Adrian Stokes, darling, my master of horse.”

  Nan Dudley was speechless.

  Bess said, “How old is he?”

  “Twenty-one, darling. He has bright red hair, and you know what they say about redheads! I'm replete as a cat filled with cream.”

  “Aren't you afraid of Bloody Mary?” Bess demanded.

  “She has forbidden me the Court, thank God; the place is like a tomb these days.” Frances leaned forward and lowered her voice confidentially. “My daughter Catherine tells me the queen is ill. Her belly is swollen, but it isn't a child as she would have everyone believe. Her husband, Philip,
has gone back to Spain. He's had enough of her false pregnancies!” Catherine had been made a lady-in-waiting to the queen as compensation for sending her sister, Lady Jane, to the block.

  “I hope Mary rots!” Bess said with venom.

  The three friends indulged in highly treasonous conversation for the rest of the afternoon. Before Frances left, however, their talk turned back to marriage. Both Bess and Nan kissed their friend and wished her every happiness.

  “In a way I have to admire Frances. She doesn't give a fart what the world thinks of her. I'll always love her no matter what outrageous thing she does.”

  “Do you think there's any chance that the queen might be fatally ill?” Nan asked hopefully.

  “Well, I certainly put a curse on her,” Bess hissed.

  “So did my sons.” Nan sighed heavily. “The minute they were released, they went off to fight the war in France. The wretched queen declared war on France only at her husband's urging, to help Spain. It seems I never stop worrying over them.”

  “They were in the Tower so long, Nan. Who managed to get them released?”

  “I think Elizabeth asked Cecil to help. He worked for my husband years ago. In fact, it was Duke Dudley who got young King Edward to appoint Cecil as principal secretary. Queen Mary didn't keep him on in that position, but he still has influence.”

  Bess sighed, remembering the caustic young man who had been a friend to her and William. Elizabeth had always trusted Cecil. Suddenly Bess wanted Elizabeth to know the rumor about the queen. It would give her a glimmer of hope. No one in the realm had more reason to hate Bloody Mary than Elizabeth did!

  Bess told no one she was going to Hatfield, except the coach driver. When she was taken to Princess Elizabeth's private wing by attendants she had never seen before, Bess realized just how long it had been since she had visited. When the red-haired young women at last came face to face, Bess swept into a curtsy, then arose so they could study each other.