by Kate Hubbard
Bess has been demonised, mostly by male historians, who seem to have taken their cue from the Earl of Shrewsbury. Horace Walpole was dismissive of Hardwick (‘Vast rooms, no taste’) and scathing about its builder: ‘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.’ For Joseph Hunter, in 1819, Bess was a harridan.8 For Edmund Lodge, in 1791, ‘a woman of masculine understanding and conduct, proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling. She was a builder, a buyer and seller of estates, a moneylender, a farmer and a merchant of lead, coals and timber. When disengaged from these employments she intrigued alternately with Elizabeth and Mary, always to the prejudice and terror of her husbands.’9 Lodge is absolutely right about Bess’s multi-stranded businesses. And she was tough, ambitious, scheming and furious. She made enemies. But she also inspired devotion – two of her husbands loved her wholeheartedly, as did her fourth and last, before love turned to hate.
This book is an attempt to examine Bess’s life as a builder within the context of the Elizabethan building world, dominated as it was by men – Sir John Thynne, Lord Burghley, Sir Christopher Hatton, the Earl of Leicester, Sir Thomas Tresham, some of them personal friends of Bess’s as well as rival builders. It’s about the building of Hardwick, but also of those houses that Bess knew, and visited, and coveted – Somerset House, Longleat, Kenilworth, Holdenby, Theobalds. Hardwick is not mentioned in any of Bess’s surviving letters – there are no references to its building, no record of how she felt about it on completion. Nevertheless, she can be found within the house – in the towering top-floor rooms, the glass-walled turrets, the profusion of ‘ES’s, the bold and gorgeous textiles. Hardwick was certainly intended for the glory of Bess’s heirs: it bristles with heraldry – Cavendish, Talbot and Hardwick arms – but it’s the Hardwick arms that dominate, not those of any husband. Bess’s identity is stamped, quite literally, all over her house, not only outside but in, where, like the doodling of a monstrous child, her initials are carved into overmantels and embroidered on hangings, tapestries and cushions. It’s impossible not to feel that Hardwick is a celebration of self. It would have brought a smile to Bess’s thin lips to know that she would become synonymous not with a husband, but with a house.
Prologue
Hardwick Hall, 1590
On the ground floor of Hardwick Hall is a small, vaulted room, cave-like, shadowy and lined from floor to ceiling with numbered oak drawers. This is the Evidence House (or Muniment Room), where for nearly four hundred years, in the drawers and in great iron chests on the floor, lay the ‘evidence’ of Bess of Hardwick’s progress through Elizabethan England. Here, until the Evidence House was finally emptied in 1989, its contents removed to nearby Chatsworth, the principal home of the Cavendish family, lay title deeds, charters, bills, household and building accounts, letters, inventories, records of rent-gathering, land-buying, money-lending and legal suits, of sales of iron, glass, coal, lead and livestock.
It’s at Chatsworth that we find the Hardwick building accounts today, in great leather-bound volumes, carefully itemised by a clerk in cramped and curling sixteenth-century script, and every two weeks totted up and signed with a large, emphatic ‘E Shrowesbury’. Occasionally the clerk’s arithmetic is corrected, or tart comments appear in the margin: ‘Because the walls rise and be not well nor all of one colour they must be whited at the plasterer’s charge.’ Thus Bess kept a beady eye on the building of Hardwick New Hall, the greatest, and only survivor, of her four houses.
The first actual mention of the New Hall comes on 5 December 1590, when Thomas Hollingworth, a waller, was paid to set two steps in a top-floor room of the Old Hall – adjacent to the New – ‘next to the leads towards the new foundations’.1 Those foundations, together with cellars, had been dug that autumn, in advance of winter frosts. In October, extra labour had been taken on, up to forty men at one point, and shovels and spades paid for.2 On 21 November, after four weeks of grinding work, the foundations were completed and the labourers dismissed. By the end of December, the ‘fleaks’ (hurdles), which formed a base for the scaffolding for the ground floor, were in place and masons began preparing stone for the walls. The great organisational engine required to construct a sixteenth-century house had been set in motion.
The start of work on the New Hall coincided with the death of Bess’s fourth husband, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. On 18 November, Shrewsbury, crippled and twisted by gout and bitterness, died in the arms of his mistress, Eleanor Britton, at Handsworth Lodge, Sheffield. He was not mourned by Bess. Whatever had existed of tenderness and affection in their marriage – and there had been plenty of both – had long been extinguished by rage and recrimination. But the building of the New Hall was not, as is sometimes said, contingent upon the Earl’s death. Bess was quite capable of funding her new house without Shrewsbury’s money; indeed, she had been making plans for some time prior to his death. Now, however, an immensely wealthy widow of nearly seventy, she was able to devote her still considerable energies to the passion that shaped and animated her life, to the building of a house to inspire admiration, envy and awe.
By 1590, Bess was a seasoned builder. There was Chatsworth, on which she had worked for thirty years. And there was the Old Hall at Hardwick, very large, very grand and still unfinished. She could have made do, more than comfortably, with her existing houses. She could have sat back and congratulated herself on being rid of a troublesome husband, on her great wealth, on her position and status as family matriarch and Dowager Countess. Many – most – would have done just that. But Bess was dissatisfied. She hadn’t done with building; she had one more house in her. This could be the house that brought the Queen to Derbyshire; it could be for Bess’s granddaughter Arbella, who herself had royal blood and for whom Bess nursed the highest hopes; or for William Cavendish, her second son, who needed a suitably impressive home. What it certainly would be was the house that Bess had always wanted, the house of her dreams.
The New Hall was carefully planned and considered. It was intended to dazzle; to display not only wealth and status, but wit and intelligence. Having acted as her own designer at the Old Hall, with decidedly mixed results, Bess now decided to engage the services of a man who could give shape to her vision, a man who had worked on some of the most romantic, dramatic and inventive houses to be found in sixteenth-century England, who came close to occupying the position of ‘architect’ at a time when such a term had no currency and little meaning: Robert Smythson.
‘Architector and Surveyor unto the most worthy house of Wollaton with divers others of great account’, reads the inscription on Smythson’s tombstone – probably the first time he was so described. An architect in the modern sense was unknown in Elizabethan England and would remain so until the advent of Inigo Jones, in the early seventeenth century. When the term was used at all, it was done so loosely, in the sense of a ‘supervisor’, or of a craftsman capable of drawing up designs, and it carried no social status. It is used just once by Shakespeare, in Titus Andronicus, and then metaphorically. There was only one English book on architecture in existence, The First and Chief Grounds of Architecture, published in 1563, by John Shute, who had been sent to Italy in 1550 by his patron, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, specifically to study the subject (it was Shute who introduced the concept of the classical orders to an English readership).
Bess may well have read Shute, and she certainly knew something about architecture, but she would not have thought of Smythson as her architect – she simply needed his help in drawing up a plan. In 1590, Smythson was working at Wollaton, the house that he had built for Sir Francis Willoughby, near Nottingham. Wollaton was complete, though Smythson remained on the payroll, as a kind of bailiff. He was now known as Mr Smythson; plain ‘Smythson the mason’ no more. But his obligations to Sir Francis did not prevent him from taking on building projects elsewhere in the Midlands, including Worksop, a Shrewsbury property near S
herwood Forest, in whose early stages Bess was very likely involved. Those features particular to Smythson houses – prominent hilltop locations, an eye for the silhouette, height (often provided by turrets), a sense of order and symmetry, expanses of glass – were all things Bess wanted for Hardwick.
In the spring or early summer of 1590, Smythson rode northwards from Wollaton to discuss plans with Bess. He would have known the Countess by reputation. He would have known that she was sharp-tongued, but fair-minded; that she drove a hard bargain, but paid her bills; that she expected the highest standards of workmanship; that she personally inspected and scrutinised every stage of the building. He would have known that she’d already built one house at Hardwick.
From a distance, the Old Hall looked imposing, high on its ridge, and Smythson could see the possibilities of the site. Riding on, up the driveway, through great oaks and clusters of deer, he passed a man herding sheep, another with a cart of fish, a woman with a basket of plums, others digging ponds and erecting fences. The park was pleasing, but close up, he was dismayed by the house itself – its facade so plain, its silhouette so uneven and haphazard, its position (facing north) so misjudged, the whole so lacking in harmony. Inside, in the great hall, he was told that her Lady would receive him in her withdrawing chamber. He climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and found himself in a room panelled, he was quick to note, from floor to ceiling, and hung with fine tapestries. A small, slight figure rose to greet him: keen-eyed, hair still decidedly red, wearing a gown of black taffeta and several long ropes of pearls. She held out a hand: ‘Good day, Mr Smythson.’
1.
Derbyshire Beginnings
There is no lack of information about Bess in later life, when she had become a great personage, the wife of one of England’s foremost earls, the friend of such as the Earl of Leicester and Lord Burghley, on (mostly) cordial terms with the Queen herself. But of her early years, the years of obscurity, we know little. As the daughter of a Derbyshire squire, who died young leaving his wife and six children in precarious circumstances, no one would have predicted great things for Bess. To marry into the local gentry, as did several of her sisters, was as much as she could have hoped for, and is indeed how she began her marital career. She would rise out of the ranks of the gentry, but it was precisely because she retained those traits particular to her class – energy, prudence and the kind of rigour she applied to her household accounts – just as she retained her flat Derbyshire vowels, that she prospered so spectacularly. That she defied her circumstances and from modest beginnings forged her way through the Elizabethan world, not merely by a judicious choice of husbands, but by shrewd exploitation of whatever assets those husbands brought her, is astonishing.
Bess’s birth date is uncertain. Her monument in Derby Cathedral suggests that she was ‘about 87’ when she died, in 1608, but recent biographers have settled on 1527 as the year of her birth.* In fact she was probably born in 1521, or early 1522, at Hardwick, when Henry VIII was still, more or less happily, married to Catherine of Aragon and still in hopes of having a son.1 Her parents, John and Elizabeth Hardwick, belonged to the minor gentry: respectable, not especially prosperous, part of a small network of gentry families – the Foljambes of Barlborough, the Frechevilles of Staveley, the Barleys of Barlow, the Leakes of Hasland, the Leches, the Babingtons, the Chaworths – interlinked by marriage, forever bargaining and bickering over land and money, all families Bess would come to do business with in the future. John Hardwick’s family had owned land at Hardwick* since the thirteenth century, when the estate had been granted to them by the Savages of neighbouring Stainsby (they paid an annual peppercorn rent of 12d, one pound of cumin, one pound of pepper and a gillyflower).2 By 1521, John Hardwick was farming over 400 acres, and enjoying rents from another 100 in Lincolnshire.3 During the 1520s, he turned the original medieval farmhouse at Hardwick into a half-timbered manor.
Sixteenth-century Derbyshire was a remote, inaccessible county, a good five days’ ride from London, varied and extreme in its landscape – craggy outcrops, rolling, thickly wooded hills and bleak expanses of moor, all criss-crossed by notoriously rough tracks and byways. Celia Fiennes, writing in 1698, a good hundred years after Bess’s time, commented on ‘the steepness and hazard of the Wayes – if you take a wrong Way there is no passing – you are forced to have Guides in all parts of Derbyshire’.4 To southerners, it appeared a wild, uncivilised place. However, along with neighbouring Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, it was also unusually rich in natural resources – lead, iron and coal. Upon such resources fortunes were founded and houses built. Sir Francis Willoughby’s Wollaton was funded by coal; the Earl of Shrewsbury’s Sheffield Manor and Worksop by lead and iron. It was no accident that the sixteenth century (and after) saw such a concentration of houses emerging in the north-east Midlands.
By 1507, when Bess’s grandfather, another John Hardwick, died, his son and heir, though only eleven years old, was already married, to Elizabeth Leake, the daughter of a neighbouring squire, Thomas Leake of Hasland. The marriage would not have been consummated until both parties had come of age, but they went on to produce six children: five daughters, Alice, Elizabeth, Mary, Jane and Dorothy, and a son, James. Elizabeth (Bess) was most probably the second daughter, with her brother born three or four years later. Dorothy died young.
There are plenty of examples of highly educated Tudor women – Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, the four brilliant daughters of Sir Anthony Coke, including Mildred, a Greek scholar, who became Lady Burghley, and Anne, who married Sir Nicholas Bacon, and of course the Queen herself. Bess was not one of them. Much has been made of the fact that only six books, kept in her bedchamber, are listed in the inventory made at Hardwick in 1601, including Calvin upon Jobbe (an edition of John Calvin’s sermons on the Book of Job), the resolution (possibly by the recusant Robert Persons, though used by Catholics and Protestants alike), Salomans proverbes (one of the Books of Solomon), and a booke of meditations.5 This doesn’t mean that there were no other books at Hardwick (there certainly were – the inventory is incomplete and does not include clothes or jewels, and Bess’s son William Cavendish bought a great many books*), or that Bess was unusually pious (she wasn’t).6 But, without being uncultured, she was no bluestocking. As a gentry daughter, her education probably went little beyond reading, writing, needlework, the basics of accounting and herbal medicine. She most likely acquired her italic hand later – italic script, mercifully legible, unlike the secretary script practised by men, was generally the preserve of educated, aristocratic women and was not, for example, used by Bess’s mother.
In 1528, John Hardwick died, aged thirty-three. Tudor landowners who died young, as so many did, leaving underage heirs, faced the great menace of wardship, whereby an estate became Crown property, administered by the Office of Wards, until the heir came of age at twenty-one. In the meantime, the heir became a ward, with a guardian who bought the wardship and could then arrange the ward’s marriage – often to one of his own children, thereby securing the estate – as he saw fit. This iniquitous system carried over from medieval times, when the Crown awarded lands and property in return for knight service; since a child heir could not perform knight service, it was regarded as perfectly legitimate for the Crown to appropriate the heir’s lands and revenues in lieu, until he reached majority.
By the sixteenth century, there was no call for mounted knights in creaking armour, but Henry VII and Henry VIII seized on wardship as a useful source of revenue and exploited it to the full. Bess’s grandfather successfully foiled the Office of Wards by leaving his estate not to his eleven-year-old son John, but to sympathetic trustees, including Sir John Savage, who returned the lands to John when he turned twenty-one. In 1528, with little James Hardwick just three, John Hardwick tried the same ruse. In early January, presumably with intimations of mortality, he drew up, or so he claimed, a deed making over his estates to seven feoffees, or trustees. Ten days before he died, he made a will, referr
ing to the deed (in point of fact, wills were solely for the leaving of goods and chattels, not land, which theoretically belonged to the Crown), stating that he wished those trustees to hold his land for the benefit of his wife and children until James came of age, and asking to be buried in Ault Hucknall church, close by Hardwick. He also left a dowry of forty marks* (about £33) to each of his five daughters.7
Initially John’s ploy seemed to have worked. In October, an inquisition post mortem – a standard procedure to examine the terms of wills and the leaving of land – found nothing to object to regarding the will. However, in August of the following year, a further enquiry was called for, and this time John Hardwick’s deed was dismissed and his estate passed into the hands of the Office of Wards. John Bugby, a court official (officer of the pantry), bought James’s wardship together with a quarter of the interest in the land.8 For £20, he got land worth £5 a year and the right to sell the marriage of his ward. Bugby had no connection with the Hardwicks and no interest in their welfare; he simply saw an opportunity and took it.
For Elizabeth Hardwick, this was a calamity. She had her widow’s jointure – the income from one third of her husband’s estates for her lifetime – but this did not provide sufficient means to buy back the wardship, which she had the right to do. Bugby did not own the entire estate. Just over half of it, including Hardwick Hall, remained in the hands of the Crown and was rented back to Elizabeth, and she may well have also rented back the lands held by Bugby. She probably continued to live at Hardwick with her children, but her income, with rents to pay, was drastically reduced. Sometime after 1529, she took the only practical course of action open to her – remarriage.
