Bess of Hardwick Page 2
Apart from this wholly delightful and unexpected personal bonus, the research into Bess’s life has been a joy. The Tudor period has been an abiding interest of mine for as long as I can remember. But I can recall once, in the early days of my work, waking in the small hours, and wondering uneasily what I had taken on. After all, almost four hundred years had passed since Bess’s death and there had already been several biographies written.
So what were the chances that I would find anything new, especially as I imagined that not much in the way of original documentation would have survived the ensuing four centuries? Apart from the great public libraries mentioned previously, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire generously offered access to their extensive archives at Chatsworth, as did the Marquess of Bath at Longleat. And, to my surprise, far from a dearth of surviving documentation I found a positive glut. At first, whenever I found a relevant document – whether previously known or not known about – and wherever permitted, I photocopied the original to work on (to transcribe into modern English for ease of use while writing). When this was not possible I made a longhand or typed transcript. In the case of the great archive of printed matter contained in the Calendars of State Papers I photocopied the printed word. I then filed each of these documents in date order, in a series of lever-arch files. I was not too far into my researches before I had filled fourteen of these files dating from 1500 to 1610, and I realised that if I was not prepared to move to a larger house I had better be more circumspect in what I collected. It is no exaggeration to say that there are more surviving documents concerning Bess and her connections than there are about some modern-day subjects upon whom I have worked.
Every research project has its unique difficulties. In this case it was not the quantity of material available, but reading that material. The problems ranged from handwriting styles, inconsistent and archaic spelling, incomprehensible words, fading ink, crumbling parchments and, not least, the fact that some formal documents such as court hearings and inquisition post mortems were written in Latin. It was impractical, given the restrictions of publishing a commercial book and the cost of accommodation in cities such as London and Oxford, to sit in libraries and archives spending a day or more per document when there were hundreds to be read. So wherever possible I worked on photocopies at home. These were pored over with the aid of a very strong light and the largest magnifying glass I could lay hands on.
Because of the sheer number of documents, this involved a significant amount of eye strain, and even so some proved impossible fully to decipher. And when this occurred I decided to seek some professional assistance for at least the more difficult documents, and especially for those written in Latin, the contents of which, with dimly recollected shreds of school Latin, I could only guess at.
I asked the Public Record Office staff, at Kew, if they knew of an expert in the early modern period, based in Gloucestershire. They suggested a freelancer, Christine Leighton, who worked for them transcribing sixteenth-century documents. If I could pay her usual hourly fee, they thought she would be prepared to help. I wrote to Christine and she telephoned me. She said that she was interested in my proposition, but that she no longer lived at the address I had written to for she had just moved to live with her recently widowed father. ‘Where are you living now?’ I asked. ‘Across the road from you,’ she replied. Her father was my neighbour, and owned a cottage directly opposite my house. Indeed, I could see her front door from my study window. If this is not serendipity at work, it is difficult to know what else to call it.
There was another problem in research: the spelling of names was phonetic in Tudor documents, and hence erratic. For example the name St Loe was spelled in different documents (and sometimes even in the same document) as: St Lowe, St Loo, Sentlow, Sentloo, Seyntlowe, Sentloe, Santlo, Senteloo, Sayntlo, Sanctlo and St Cloo, with a number of other variations. For Hardwick I also had to check for: Hardwycke, Herdvyk, Herdwyke, Hardweeke etc., and the surname Frecheville was sometimes Fressheville, Fretteswell, Fretchvylle or Frytteville. This made searching through archive indexes a tedious business, since I had about thirty primary names on my search list.
Very few personalities in history, outside royal circles, have had blow-by-blow details of their marital problems preserved in the collection of State papers. But that is what happened to Bess and her fourth husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury. It was like the clash of two titans, involving the Court and many senior government ministers such as Lord Burghley, Francis Walsingham and the Earl of Leicester. Queen Elizabeth herself found it necessary to intervene on occasion, once ordering the protagonists to behave themselves for the sake of appearances at least. They rarely spoke directly to each other, so, fortunately for us, their differences survive in a series of explosive letters.
Very early in my research it became obvious that many previous biographers (mostly male) portrayed Bess as a hard and scheming woman who managed to get her hands on the fortunes of four weak or gullible, but always rich husbands with the sole aim of creating a mega-rich dynasty of her own. This is only partly correct. Bess was ambitious, certainly, and she was hugely successful. We know how, in our own times, people who make such fortunes enrich themselves and their families and those close to them, but they also make enemies of others who are not swept along on the tide of that fortune. Inevitably, Bess made some powerful adversaries, and the emotional opinions of these enemies have coloured her reputation down the centuries.
My research, however, reveals her as a highly energetic woman who used her abilities and native intelligence to rise above a relatively indifferent start in life and to overcome vicissitudes that would have daunted a lesser personality. Through a natural charm, rather than beauty, she attracted four personable husbands: three of whom were strong and powerful men, each one richer than his predecessor. Two of them, at least, were romantically in love with her when they married, and Bess returned their affection in full. Towards the end of her long life, widowed and in control of her own fortune, Bess had become – second only to the Queen – the richest and therefore the most powerful woman in the country. But she was also liked and respected, and as a widow in the last two decades of her life she was able to significantly increase her fortune, when, clearly, there was no masculine influence at work. In fact it would be fair to say that she succeeded even more spectacularly without the restraining hand of a man.
The best-known portrait of Bess is one painted when she was about sixty, and is a powerful image of a shrewd, intelligent woman. The original of this is lost. There is a copy at Hardwick Hall, her home until her death, which is thought to be taken from the original by Rowland Lockey. And there is another copy, owned by the National Portrait Gallery,*which has far more detail, and more expression. In this version there is a slight upward twitch in the corners of the mouth, making the subject look wryly amused and a little less forbidding. At her left temple there is an enlarged vein, and her ropes of magnificent pearls are graduated in colour, whereas in the Hardwick version the pearls are all cream.
In both examples, however, this portrait has had the effect of making people think of Bess in terms of the powerful woman she became in later life. There is no hint here of a laughing, dancing young Bess who captivated four highly eligible men, three of whom moved in Court circles, close to the monarchy, and the last of whom bore the resounding title of Earl Marshal of England.
I hope that in this book I have been successful in illuminating the experiences of this younger Bess. What I can say for certain is that we know more about Bess of Hardwick than we know about any other non-royal woman of the Tudor age. Hers is a truly remarkable story.
CHAPTER 1
MERRIE ENGLAND
(1520–40)
LITTLE BESS HARDWICK NEVER KNEW HER FATHER. HE DIED at the age of thirty-three, when Bess was still a babe in arms.1
Bess was a fighter from the start, for whether born into a palace or a cottage, life for any sixteenth-century child was uncertain. Almost half of all bab
ies died within twelve months of birth,2 and for those who survived that critical first year – tightly bound and swaddled for the first six months to ensure straight limbs – plagues and occasional epidemics were a constant danger as they grew. Childhood was rarely entirely carefree. Girls in particular, dressed in restrictive clothing that was a miniature replica of their mothers’, were taught never to be idle, and such education as there was for a girl, non-existent among the poorer classes, had but one aim: preparing her to be a good wife, homemaker and mother. This was the ordained lot of the daughter born to John and Elizabeth Hardwick sometime between June and November in the year 1527, at the small manor farmhouse in Hardwick, Derbyshire.3
At the time of Bess’s birth, thirty-six-year-old King Henry VIII and his wife Queen Catherine of Aragon were on the throne. The royal couple had been married for eighteen years, and between 1510 and 1520 the Queen had given birth to six babies, four of them boys. Two further pregnancies had ended before full term. But from this incessant round of conception and birth only one infant had survived: the Princess Mary, born in 1516. Everyone knew how much the king longed for – needed – a son, but the only son who lived beyond a month was the one he fathered by one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Blount, in 1525.* The Queen was now past her child-bearing years and in that summer and autumn of 1527, although the people of England were not yet aware of it, the King had begun seeking ways to have his marriage legally annulled. He was infatuated with yet another lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn, who was young enough to give him sons. Such things were outside the lives of the Hardwick family, and yet they would be swept up, as was everyone, high-born or low, in the changes that would come about as a result of the King’s secret passion.
Initially, the Hardwick baby, christened Elizabeth after her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, but always known as Bess, would have been a disappointment to her parents. The Hardwicks already had four daughters,† but had only one son, James, born in April 1526, so they needed a second boy to secure the future of the family estate. However, we know from her later history and correspondence that Elizabeth Hardwick was a good, sensible mother, who loved and cared for all her children. She soon recovered from having another girl, and she was still young; there was time enough to have boys.‡
The Hardwicks lived on the property from which John Hardwick’s forebears had taken their name. Of no particular importance in the world, their half-timbered home, typical of its time, with barnyards, stables and a dovecot yard,4 stood foursquare on a rocky hilltop, giving it some prominence on the local skyline at least. The Hardwick family had lived on this land for at least two centuries by 1527,5 by which time they farmed 450 acres in Derbyshire, and received rents on a further 100 acres in Lincolnshire,6 The Hall and some lands were held ‘in fealty’ to Sir John Savage for an annual peppercorn rent of ‘twelve pence, one pound of cumin, one pound of pepper and one clove a year’.7 Further lands were leased from the Savages.
John Hardwick’s lineage can be traced back to King Edward I of England and his Queen, Eleanor of Castile,* but by 1527 the Hardwick family had no pretensions to greatness, they were simply gentlemen farmers, respectable and locally respected, and with a few useful, if distant, good family connections. In the parlance of a later century they were country squires, or minor gentry, and in 1520 things must have been going well for the newly married twenty-five-year-old John Hardwick. He began to build, converting the original medieval farmhouse into a manor house.8
There are only a few surviving documents relating to Bess Hardwick’s childhood, but it is possible to speculate about the world she lived in, and what were, inevitably, her childhood experiences. Following custom, Bess would have been baptised on the very first Sunday or Holy Day following her birth, having been carried to the local church of St John the Baptist at nearby Ault Hucknall by her godparents: two women and one man for a girl child. After being ‘crossed’ with sacred oil on the shoulders and chest, and the sign of the cross made in her right hand, she would have been dipped three times in holy water and then, having been named and received into the Church, the baby was considered safe from the devil and all his works.
Elizabeth Hardwick did not attend this ceremony because custom decreed that a new mother must have a month’s lying-in. It was two weeks before she was even allowed to sit up after giving birth. And when the month was up she could not resume conjugal relations, or go visiting, until after she was ‘churched’. So while baby Bess was being baptised, Elizabeth waited in bed at home, dressed for receiving, the house decorated with fresh strewing herbs and, since it was summer or early autumn, fresh flowers. A christening feast was prepared for those who had attended the service. Even in the poorest homes money was somehow found for this celebration, and in the home of a gentleman, as John Hardwick was, such a public occasion would normally call for food and drink to be liberally dispensed: ‘all things fine against the christening day’, contemporary fashion decreed. ‘Sugar, biscuits, comfits and caraways, marmalade and marchpane, must fill the pockets of dainty dames’.9
On arrival at the parents’ house the principal guests and godparents went first to the lying-in chamber to congratulate and honour the mother, gifts and blessings were bestowed upon the child, and then all the women – family, friends and neighbours – would crowd into the lying-in chamber to gossip and enjoy the occasion. This custom was called ‘a Gossiping’, and in a popular catchphrase of the day a person was said to be ‘as drunk as women at a gossiping’.
It was strongly believed that sexual intercourse was damaging to breast-milk and therefore to the suckling child, so a breastfeeding mother would normally abstain from sex for some months at least. James Hardwick was born in June 1526, Bess twelve to fifteen months later in the summer or autumn of 1527, and their mother was already pregnant again in January 1528.10 From this childbearing history it is reasonably safe to assume that Elizabeth employed wet nurses to suckle her babies. So many women were constantly pregnant and infant mortality so high it was not difficult, for those who could afford it, to find a woman glad of the additional income she could earn by wet-nursing. Usually a wet nurse would have been the wife of a tenant or some other local person that the mother could trust.
These are extrapolations of what we can safely assume would have happened to little Bess. What we know for sure about that first year of her life is that her father died before she was seven months old. He was ill for about three weeks in January 1528, and whatever ailed him was serious enough for him to make provisions for his family and direct his own funeral arrangements. At his own request he was buried ‘in the Arch betwixt the chancel and the new aisle’ in the church of Ault Hucknall,11 No gravestone survives, but some fragments remain of what was once a painted-glass memorial window, commissioned by Elizabeth to commemorate John Hardwick’s life and honourable stature in the community.12 These were later incorporated into a nineteenth-century window, but the Hardwick coat of arms, and the words ‘bono’ and ‘Joh…is’ are all that is left of the original inscription, ‘Orate pro bono statu Johannis Hardwyk generosi et uxoris ejus’.* To the parson, John Hardwick left ‘my best beast’ to pay for his ‘mortuary’, and for funeral expenses such as candles, bread and ale ‘on the day’. To Sir John Savage, effectively his liege lord, he bequeathed ‘my young white gelding, unbroken’. Apart from these and a few small offerings to the mother church, all John Hardwick’s thoughts were for his wife and children.13
Elizabeth Hardwick was twenty-eight years old when her husband died. She was a gentlewoman, the daughter of Thomas Leake of Hasland, which was only a few hours’ ride away from Hardwick Hall.†14 Furthermore, John Hardwick’s younger brother Roger lived at Hardwick and seems to have acted as some sort of farm manager,15 so, saving Elizabeth’s natural grief at the loss of her husband, with family from both sides living close at hand, being left with so many small dependants should not, in itself, have been an insurmountable problem. With high prevailing mortality rates few men or women
took for granted that they would live out the biblical span of three score years and ten.16 Widowhood was a constant possibility for both sexes, as was subsequent remarriage. The Hardwick farm was a well-established one, and had clearly been successful enough to allow John Hardwick to consider a fairly ambitious new building programme seven years earlier. What was against Elizabeth Hardwick’s survival was the law of the land, which could make her under-age son a ward and appropriate her husband’s lands and income for the Crown exchequer.
Soon after the New Year in 1528, when John Hardwick realised he was likely to die, his son and heir James was only eighteen months old. John had been in a similar situation himself, for his father had died in 1507 when John was only twelve. He and his brother had escaped being made wards of court because prior to his death his father had cleverly set up a form of Trust. That is, he made over his lands and property to friendly trustees or ‘feoffees’, including Sir John Savage, who obligingly returned the lands to John when he reached his majority. On 6 January 1528, John Hardwick attempted to do the same thing by ‘giving’ the estate to his brother Roger and seven feoffees for a term of twenty years.17 When he made his will on 9 January, three weeks before he died,18 John referred to this gift, but no deed had been drawn up so it was probably an ad hoc arrangement, cobbled together by a very sick man with his anxious friends and relatives,* gathered round his bedside all wanting to help.
All landowners were subject to an Inquisition Post Mortem, that is, an investigation, held some months following a death, concerning any properties the deceased person owned or had owned by courtesy of the Crown during their lifetime. An escheator was assigned to ascertain how the lands and properties had been acquired by the deceased, whether any others had an interest in them (widows’ dower rights and jointures were respected), and sundry information such as the name and age of the heir. It was a method of keeping track of all landholdings and properties.