Bess of Hardwick Read online

  BESS OF HARDWICK

  ALSO BY MARY S. LOVELL

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  The Sound of Wings: The Biography of Amelia Earhart

  Cast No Shadow: The Spy Who Changed the Course of World War II

  A Scandalous Life: The Biography of Jane Digby

  The Splendid Outcast: The African Short Stories of Beryl Markham

  A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton

  The Mitford Girls: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family

  BESS OF HARDWICK

  Empire Builder

  MARY S. LOVELL

  ‘I assure you, there is no Lady in this land that I better love and like.’

  Queen Elizabeth I about Bess of Hardwick

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York London

  Copyright © 2005 by Mary S. Lovell

  Originally published in Great Britain under the title

  Bess of Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth, 1527–1608

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Production manager: Amanda Morrison

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lovell, Mary S.

  Bess of Hardwick: empire builder / Mary S. Lovell.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07579-3

  1. Shrewsbury, Elizabeth Hardwick Talbot, Countess of, 1527?–1608.

  2. Countesses—Great Britain—Biography. 3. Great Britain—History

  —Elizabeth, 1558–1603—Biography. 4. Women landowners—

  Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.

  DA358.S4L68 2006

  942.05'5092—dc22

  [B]

  2005030490

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

  This book is dedicated to Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire with my grateful thanks. Debo, as she prefers to be known, loves and cares for modern-day Chatsworth as Bess did for the original, and she has followed my research into Bess’s life with interest as well as much kind assistance.

  CONTENTS

  The Family Tree of Bess of Hardwick

  Introduction

  1 Merrie England 1520–40

  2 Child Bride, Child Widow 1540–7

  3 Lady Cavendish 1547

  4 Family Matters 1547–51

  5 Dangerous Times 1552–6

  6 ‘Your Poor Friend’ 1556–8

  7 Sir William St Loe 1518–58

  8 ‘My Own Sweet Bess’ 1559–61

  9 Lady St Loe in Trouble 1561–5

  10 A Very Eligible Widow 1565–9

  11 A Difficult Guest 1569–73

  12 A Dangerous Match 1574–5

  13 Raising Arbella 1576–8

  14 Enough to Alienate the Heart 1578–81

  15 Discord 1582–4

  16 No Winners 1585–6

  17 Death of a Queen 1586–90

  18 The Dowager Countess 1590–2

  19 More Window than Wall 1592–9

  20 ‘In Perfect Health and Good Memory’ 1600–02

  21 Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth 1602–03

  22 End of an Era 1603–08

  23 A Long Arm…1608 et seq.

  APPENDICES

  1: Discussion of Bess of Hardwick’s Date of Birth

  2: The Office of Wards

  3: Sir William Cavendish’s Statement to the Star Chamber, August 1557

  4: What happened to Bess’s Children and Grandchildren

  5: Extract from Tree Showing the Relationship between the Brandons and the Hardwicks

  6: The Stepchildren of Bess of Hardwick

  Family Tree: Selective Tree Showing the Heirs of Henry VII

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  The earliest known portrait of Bess c.1560, still at Hardwick Hall

  Hardwick Hall. Bess was born in the original house in 1527, but it is shown here after Bess had remodelled it half a century later

  Edward VI’s coronation procession in 1547, in which Sir William Cavendish took part. It shows the procession leaving the Tower, proceeding along East Cheap, passing Bow Church into Cheapside. Note the decorated spectator stands en route. It then passed St Paul’s (still with its original steeple), along the Strand past Charing Cross to Westminster. Sir William’s house in Newgate Street would be in the left foreground of this picture

  Sir William Cavendish, Bess’s second husband, c.1550

  The London Bess would have known well: Cheapside, with St Paul’s in the background (the original steeple collapsed in 1561). On the left, next to the bell tower of Bow Church, is a permanent gallery for watching processions. In the centre is the Standard water conduit, and in the distance Edward I’s cross

  King Edward VI. His patronage gave impetus to Sir William Cavendish’s ambitious plans

  A portrait thought to be of Lady Frances Brandon, Duchess of Suffolk, mother of Jane and Katherine Grey

  Portrait believed to be of Jane Grey. Her jacket is almost identical to that worn by Bess (see earliest portrait of Bess), except that it is ermine, a ‘royal’ fur

  London Bridge in Bess’s time – the only bridge across the Thames. The severed heads of wrongdoers were exhibited on poles (drawn out of scale here, for emphasis)

  Well-dressed passengers being ferried across the Thames, with London Bridge in the background

  Chatsworth House built by Bess and Sir William Cavendish in 1552. This painting by Richard Wilson is after a contemporary original by Siberechts

  A needlework cushion depicting Chatsworth House. It is mentioned in Bess’s inventory of 1601 and is almost certainly her own work

  Queen Mary I. She had little patience with errors in Sir William Cavendish’s accounts

  Elizabeth I: The coronation portrait, 1559. Bess first met the Queen when Elizabeth was twenty years old and she stood as godmother to Bess’s eldest son Henry. Their friendship was lifelong

  The 10th Lord Cobham and his wife Frances (standing), with their children. Frances and Bess were best friends for many years

  Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, c.1564. The love of Queen Elizabeth’s life, and a great supporter of Bess

  Sir Francis Walsingham. Initially he was Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, but from 1573 he was Principal Secretary and ran England’s first secret service

  Sir Thomas Wyatt: leader of a rebellion to oust Queen Mary and place the Protestant Princess Elizabeth on the throne

  William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s devoted chief minister. He was swept up in the perennial quarrels of the Shrewsburys

  Sir William St Loe in his tilt armour, 1560

  Sir William St Loe. A detail from a drawing of the coronation process by an unknown herald

  Sir William St Loe, Captain of the Queen’s personal Yeoman Guard, leads his men from the Tower at the coronation procession in 1559

  Lady Katherine, Jane Grey’s sister, with her son Edward, Lord Beauchamp. Bess’s friendship with the Grey sisters would get her into trouble

  A needlework cushion of the sacrifice of Isaac, with the figures wearing Elizabethan court dress. The women (right) were thought to be Bess and her ladies

  A portrait of Bess, aged forty, painted shortly after her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsbury


  George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, Earl Marshal of England and Bess’s fourth husband, c.1567

  Detail of tapestry at Hardwick with the head of Zenobia, the warrior queen of ancient Syria, looking remarkably like Bess

  Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. Granddaughter of King Henry VII, and mother of Henry, Lord Darnley, the murdered husband of Mary, Queen of Scots

  Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, with her family. The effigy on the bier is that of Lord Darnley; the small boy in the foreground is King James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley. Behind the Countess is Charles Stuart, Bess’s son-in-law and the father of Arbella

  Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was Queen of France, the most beautiful princess in Christendom

  A page of ciphers used by Mary, Queen of Scots for secret correspondence, while she was imprisoned by the Shrewsburys. Both the Shrewsburys appear on the list

  Contemporary drawing of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Bess’s husband (shown seated in right-hand chair at top of page) wept openly at the death of his former prisoner

  Tutbury Castle, one of the Shrewsburys’ massive homes, where Mary, Queen of Scots was imprisoned for various periods from 1569

  Elizabeth, Countess of Hardwick, c.1585. [inset] George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, 1582. A martyr to ‘gout’, he became a pernickety and bitter old man. Compare his appearance here with his earlier portrait

  The 7th Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury: Gilbert Talbot and his wife Mary Cavendish, Bess’s youngest daughter

  The Lady Arbella Stuart. Bess called her ‘my jewell’, but the rebellious orphan became the bane of Bess’s old age

  Sir William Cavendish, Bess’s second (and favourite) son who inherited her estates and became the 1st Earl of Devonshire

  Robert Cecil, later Lord Salisbury. He took over from his father, Lord Burghley, and was a staunch friend and supporter of Bess and her family

  The Long Gallery at Hardwick

  Detail from Bess’s tomb

  Bess of Hardwick’s magnificent tomb in Derby Cathedral

  THE FAMILY TREE OF BESS OF HARDWICK (1527-1608)

  INTRODUCTION

  TO MOST PEOPLE WHO HAVE HEARD OF THE WOMAN WHO was born Elizabeth Hardwick in 1527, she is known simply as ‘Bess of Hardwick’ and forever coupled to the jingle, ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’. This misquotation of a phrase said to have been coined by Robert Cecil referred to the innovative architecture of the new house Bess built for herself on her family property in Derbyshire. Anyone who has ever driven up the M1, north of the city of Nottingham, cannot fail to have seen the gaunt dark ruins of the old Hall at Hardwick dominating the skyline. Behind this structure lies another Hardwick Hall, a jewel of a building, and, amazingly, it remains intact, almost as Bess left it when she died in 1608.

  Bess of Hardwick is remembered as a builder of great houses – Chatsworth, Hardwick, Oldcotes – and also as a dynast, for through her children she founded the Dukedoms of Devonshire, Portland and Newcastle, and the Barons Waterpark, and there is probably no aristocratic family in England, including the present monarchy, which does not contain her DNA. But there was far more to Bess than this.

  She was born into a family of respectable gentry. They were landowners who lived in comparative comfort, but there was little money. Their land lay on the borders of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, remote from London by a journey of a week, and though good for raising sheep it was not especially valuable. In common with most girls of her class, her education was limited and Bess was not blessed with notable beauty. As the third daughter of five surviving children, her marriage settlement when she was married at the age of fifteen was respectable, but not significant. How, then, did this woman rise to become the Countess of Shrewsbury, and the most powerful woman in the land next to Queen Elizabeth I?

  The simple answer would be that in her long life – she was over eighty when she died, which was considered an astonishing age in those days when few of her contemporaries reached three score and ten – she had four husbands, through whom she acquired her wealth. This received portrait of Bess was amusingly, though incorrectly, immortalised by Horace Walpole long after her death:

  Four times the nuptial bed she warmed,

  And every time so well performed,

  That when death spoiled each husband’s billing

  He left the widow every shilling.

  In an age when life was more precarious than it is now, Bess was far from being alone in having multiple spouses, yet no other non-royal woman of her times achieved a tenth as much as Bess did. And no other non-royal woman of her times comes down to us through history as a serious achiever. For that was what Bess was: an achiever. And she operated in an age when non-royal women had little education, virtually no legal rights, and were almost considered chattels of their husbands. How did she do it? I wanted to know.

  In 1996 my literary agent and dear friend, the late Robert Ducas, suggested Bess of Hardwick as a subject for a biography. At that time I was deeply involved in other projects and I did no more than file the suggestion away with other ‘possibles’. Five years later, Deborah, now the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and widow of one of Bess’s direct descendants, independently suggested to me that Bess was a very underrated personality.

  Some basic exploratory research revealed that much of what had already been written about Bess concerned her life from middle age onwards, after she had married her fourth husband. I decided, when I first undertook to write this biography, to concentrate as far as possible on the early, unknown and unexplored parts of her life to discover how she developed into a formidably successful and frighteningly practical grand dame.

  I first drew up a bibliography and followed this with a schedule of accepted academic research routes. One thing led to another, and after a while the known-about facts in published works began to give way to original material. At this stage satisfying chunks of new information began to appear. Major ‘finds’ are rare in historical research, and the work mostly consists of looking for pieces, as in a jigsaw, which will fit together with material already well known about, and explain some fact or facts in a new and more enlightened way. Serendipity often plays a major role, too. Browsing through a second-hand bookshop on a rare day off one might come across a book one did not know existed and an item in the index that points the way to a reference missed by previous researchers. Or someone met at a dinner party might steer one in a new direction. Both of these things happened to me while researching this book. But the most important piece of serendipity concerned my own family – or, to be strictly accurate, the family of my late husband.

  Less was known about Bess’s enigmatic third husband, Sir William St Loe, and their time together than almost any other period of her adult life. The surname St Loe is not a common one, yet when I read his name it was not unfamiliar to me. I could not think why this should be, but the name of his family home provided a clue: Sutton Court, in the village of Chew Magna, in the county of Somerset. My husband’s maternal family has one of those old Tudor tombs in the ancient church of St Andrew at Chew Magna. The colourfully painted effigy of Francis Baber is set on a marble bier next to and slightly higher than that of his wife, Anne. There they have lain in quiet harmony through the centuries, clad in their Sunday-best robes, immaculately ruffed at neck and wrists, hands permanently joined in prayer, surrounded by family crests, pious words and symbolic carvings. Every decade or so our family holds a world reunion, and invariably this is held at Chew Magna with a service in the family chapel. I vaguely recalled that the name St Loe was somehow associated with this church, so, having already attacked the libraries and archives of the Bodleian in Oxford, the British Library in London, the Public Record Office at Kew, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, I lowered my sights and looked in my own library at home, at the research my husband and a cousin had once made into his family history.

  Immediately the name St Loe cropped up, because the
two families – the Babers and the St Loes – were neighbouring landowners at Chew, and had intermarried on several occasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My husband’s family acquired Sutton Court from the St Loe family by marriage, lost it while supporting the wrong side in the Civil War, purchased it back from the Crown after the Restoration, and then lost it again through marriage into the Strachey family, who still own it. And, somewhat to my astonishment, without moving from my own home, I found among these books and papers more information on Sir William St Loe than had ever been previously published about him. I subsequently followed up this cache of information by researching the St Loe family in local and county archives in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset to confirm what I had found. It is always immensely comforting when a new piece of information is verified by an unrelated source.