Devices and Desires

by Kate Hubbard

  Margaret St Loe, William’s mother, had been staying with the St Loes at the time and her later letters to Bess provide the best account of what transpired in John Mann’s house. She had been visited by a cousin of Edward’s, who was seemingly in cahoots with him and anxious to discover what Margaret knew – ‘I told her I was sure you were poisoned when I was at London and if you had not had a present remedy you had died.’ She distrusted both the cousin and Edward: ‘I perceive their heads to be full of this matter, as they have little grace so god send them little power to do my son Sayntlo or you any hurt.’ And she was under no illusions as to the character of her younger son: ‘this was the goodwill he bore you when he came up to London to see you, as he said was none other cause his coming, which I know the contrary for he liked nothing your marriage. His good friendship to you and to me is all one. The living god defend us all from such friends. I pray you madam send me word how this devil’s devices began and how it came to light.’4 Edward himself countered all accusations by claiming they were simply Bess’s ‘devices and practices’.

  Whether or not Edward was the ‘devil’ his mother believed him to be, he was not charged with poisoning. Probably nothing could be proved, or perhaps William was unwilling to press charges. In March 1561, John Mann, who presumably felt to some degree responsible, accused a Bristol tavern keeper, Hugh Draper, a self-styled ‘astronomer’, of practising ‘necromancy’ against William and Bess. Draper was sent to the Tower, where he was joined by one Francis Cox and one Ralph Davis. All three were released within the year. On the wall of the Salt Tower, above a drawing of a sphere for casting horoscopes, is a piece of graffiti: ‘Hew Draper of Bristowe made thys spheer the 30 daye of Maye anno 1561’.5

  This is a knotted and murky story, impossible to fully unravel. Did Mann’s accusation relate to the poisoning? What was the link between Edward St Loe and Draper and his associates? Had they supplied, or dispensed, the poison? But it’s clear enough that Edward was motivated by greed, envy and dislike of Bess. John St Loe had left his Somerset and Gloucestershire lands to William; Edward, as the second son, was the next in line, so long as William had no male heirs. Edward had thwarted William’s marriage once, but he was unable to prevent his union with Bess, who, though in her late thirties, could very possibly give William a son. Edward saw the St Loe estates lost to him forever.

  William St Loe insisted that Bess ‘bore his said brother Edward very good will’ and claimed that she had in fact persuaded William, in the event of the St Loes having no children, to entail his lands on Edward. Only when he ‘perceived his brother to much unnaturalness and unseemly speeches of him and his wife’ did William change his mind and his will.6 In March 1563, he left ‘all . . . my leases, farms, plate, jewels, hangings, implements of household, debts, goods and chattels . . . to my most entirely beloved wife’ and her heirs thereafter. Edward was cut out completely.7 He continued to make trouble for the St Loes, bad-mouthing Bess and claiming that the manor of Chew Stoke had been left by Sir John St Loe to Edward’s wife Margaret, for her lifetime.

  Other dramas touched the St Loes during 1560. The previous year, Katherine Grey, the pretty second daughter of Frances and Henry Grey, had fallen in love with Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, son of the former Lord Protector. Seymour, described by a contemporary as a ‘little man and a great bladder’, was not a young man of great distinction, but Katherine was infatuated. However, according to an Act passed in 1536 by Henry VIII, those of royal blood required royal permission to marry and Katherine was a great-granddaughter of Henry VII. Elizabeth was not likely to look kindly on a marriage between Katherine and Hertford. Katherine won the support of her mother, Frances Grey, but Frances died in November 1559, aged forty-two. The Queen paid for her Westminster Abbey funeral, which, if she had been in London, and given their long association, was very likely attended by Bess.

  To the consternation of her councillors, Elizabeth had announced on her accession that she had no desire to marry. John Aylmer, the scholar and bishop, had sought to allay fears about a female monarch – an aberration in the eyes of many – by insisting that as a queen was subject to law and Parliament, there was no great cause for alarm: ‘A woman may rule as a magistrate and yet obey as a wife.’ But crucially, Elizabeth was not a wife, nor did she wish to become one. Why that was so is a matter of speculation. The fates of her father’s wives, especially that of her mother, were hardly an advertisement for marriage. Mary’s disastrous union with Philip of Spain (who had already proposed himself as a groom for Elizabeth) was enough to put her off a foreign consort, while marriage to a subject would only create factions and tensions. Perhaps having been subject to the will and whims of her father, brother and sister, she was now simply enjoying her freedom too much to relinquish it. But at the same time, she showed no inclination to name an heir; to do so, she claimed, would be ‘to bury herself alive’. It was a position from which she never wavered.

  The lack of an heir was an open invitation to those with a claim, however tenuous. Potential claimants, all descended from Henry VII, included the Grey sisters, Katherine and Mary, who according to the term’s of Henry VIII’s will legally had the best claim, and Mary Stuart, who stood closest in blood. Mary, the daughter of James V of Scotland and a granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s elder sister, was currently married to the new young King of France, Francis II, and the French were already proclaiming her, provocatively, as Queen of France, Scotland and England. There was also, more distantly, Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, Margaret Tudor’s daughter, who, amongst a dearth of male heirs, did at least have two healthy sons. None of these were ever recognised by the Queen; all were known, or would be known, to Bess, who, like many, would seek to exploit the question of the unresolved succession.

  In late 1560, Katherine and Hertford married in secret, and by the following March, Katherine knew she was pregnant. In July, with Hertford in France and knowing she could no longer conceal her pregnancy, a desperate Katherine confided in Elizabeth St Loe, William’s sister, one of the Queen’s privy chamber women, who was no help at all and simply ‘fell into great weeping saying she was very sorry she had done so without the consent or knowledge of the Queen’s Majesty or any other of her friends’. Katherine then appealed to Robert Dudley, the Queen’s Master of the Horse, who went straight to his mistress. Predictably, Elizabeth was furious and Katherine and Hertford were sent to the Tower, where, in September, Katherine gave birth to a son, Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp. The Queen had the Seymour marriage declared invalid, thereby making little Edward Seymour illegitimate, and negating his claim to the throne. Katherine and Edward, though held separately in the Tower, clearly had sympathetic gaolers, since Katherine gave birth to a second son the following year.

  Her end was wretched – released from the Tower, she was kept under close house arrest, barred from all contact with Hertford and her elder son. She sank into a deep depression and died in 1568, possibly from anorexia. For failing to inform the Queen of the Grey/ Hertford marriage, Elizabeth St Loe was dismissed from the privy chamber and spent six months in the Tower. Several biographers have mistaken Elizabeth St Loe for Bess. Aside from the fact that Bess was never a gentlewoman of the privy chamber, she would not have fallen ‘into great weeping’ on hearing Katherine’s confession. Hysterical tears were not Bess’s style; she would merely have been exasperated by Katherine’s foolishness. But given her relationship with the Greys, she must have followed the story closely. She had probably heard the rumours about Katherine and Hertford long before the Queen.

  In September 1560, William St Loe, who had been called back to court, wrote to his wife from Windsor, where he visited his stepsons Henry and William Cavendish at Eton and paid their fees (nineteen shillings a term).8 He reassured Bess that according to the Eton almoner, ‘no gentlemen’s children in England shall be better welcome nor better looked unto than our boys’. St Loe, however, was much ‘troubled’ at being parted from his wife and suffered �
�continual nightly dreams’. Alsope, the carrier, had not been able to satisfy him ‘in what estate thou nor thine is, whom I tender more than I do William St Loe, therefore I pray thee as thou dost love me, let me shortly hear from thee for the quieting of my unquiet mind how thy own sweet self with all thine doeth’. He hoped ‘shortly to be amongst you all’.9 The Queen, however, came first. Wherever she went – Winchester, Hampton Court, Windsor, Whitehall – St Loe followed. When she took a fancy to his horse, he obligingly handed over the animal, an act for which he received ‘many goodly words’.

  If Elizabeth was resistant to marriage, she was certainly not indifferent to flirtation and the attentions of a handsome man. That September court was gripped by scandal, after the death of Amy Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley, whose relationship with the Queen had recently been the subject of much speculation and the source of acute anxiety for William Cecil, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, who longed for nothing more than to see the Queen safely married. Amy had been found at the foot of a flight of stairs, her neck broken. It was said that she had been suffering from depression, and possibly from breast cancer, and the official verdict was one of death by misadventure. Gossip, however, had it otherwise. Wasn’t her death all too convenient, clearing the way for Dudley to marry the Queen? Dudley appeared deeply shocked, and was soon restored to royal favour, but whatever hopes he’d entertained of the Queen receded. Of this drama St Loe said not a word in his (surviving) letters to Bess. Instead he complained about the cost of ‘hired court stuff’, and asked her to send hand towels, linen and shirts.10

  St Loe owned a London house, in Tuthill Street, though he apparently preferred to stay at Somerset House (now the property of the Queen), or to lodge with John Mann, whose wife acted as a housekeeper – useful when leading a bachelor life in London. He made good use of the river, hiring boats to carry himself and his horses from Somerset House to Blackfriars, Westminster or Hampton Court, or to transport ‘stuff’ for the Cavendish boys at Eton. He dined out with Lord Cobham, whose wife Frances was a lifelong friend to Bess, or Lady Throckmorton, whose husband was ambassador to France. But he missed Bess badly and consoled himself by buying presents, which were parcelled up in boxes and baskets and carried to Chatsworth. Three French grammars, a copy of Cosmografie de Levant, and psalms in French went to the children. Spanish gloves, Spanish leather shoes, velvet shoes and ‘a bone grace of the new fashion’ were bought for Bess, and goods and delicacies not available in Derbyshire: a barrel of sturgeon, a firkin of olives, a basket of plums, artichokes, ‘cowcombres’ (cucumbers), Spanish silks, red frisado (a silk fabric), wire for stringing a virginal, lemons, oranges, hops, frankincense, ten pomegranates at 8d each. Probably on Bess’s orders, St Loe spent 12s. on ‘a grate and knocker for the great gate at Chatsworth’.11

  It wasn’t only his duties to the Queen that kept St Loe in London ‘against my will’. He was also trying to settle the question of Bess’s £5,000 debt, ‘our chequer matter’, as he called it, which was dragging on and delaying his return. ‘My reward as yet is nothing more than fair words with the like promises’, he told Bess on 12 October, having bought paper the same day ‘to write home’, for 2d. But he did at least have leave to come to Chatsworth, along with his brother Clement, the following week.12

  After Chatsworth, St Loe visited his mother in Somerset, bearing presents – ‘half a yard of red and white stool-work’, to make sleeves, and gold and silver thread.13 On returning to court, he found Elizabeth displeased: ‘The Queen hath found great fault with my long absence’, he told Bess, ‘saying she would talk with me further and that she would well chide me thereunto, I answered that when her highness understood the truth and the cause she would not be offended whereunto she said very well very well howbeit hand of hers did I not kiss.’ He had been suffering from ‘extreme pain in my teeth since Sunday dinner, thus with aching teeth I end, praying the living to preserve thee and all thine’. His heart ached too – ‘Your loving husband with aching heart until we meet.’14 Bess joined him in November, remaining over Christmas.

  It’s hard to fault William St Loe as a husband, a model of generosity and forbearance, happy to bend before the greater will of his wife, prepared to base himself in Bess’s home county rather than his own. In Derbyshire, he became both a justice of the peace and a member of Parliament. He didn’t add to Bess’s Derbyshire estates, but he funded the building work at Chatsworth. In 1563, he finally succeeded in settling the matter of Bess’s debt – paying a fine of £1,000 on behalf of Bess and Henry Cavendish, in return for a royal pardon. And he took responsibility for her children and stepchildren, providing a dowry (William Cavendish did not apparently make provision for dowries for his daughters) of 1,000 marks (£666) for Anne Cavendish, Bess’s stepdaughter, who married Sir Henry Baynton, the younger brother of St Loe’s first wife, in 1562.

  Bess was partial to matchmaking – a pursuit involving intrigue and speculation – amongst her acquaintances as well as family. In 1561, it was the turn of her eldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Frances, for whom Bess selected a husband in the shape of Henry Pierrepont, aged fifteen. The Pierreponts were a local family, with a large estate, Holme Pierrepont, near Nottingham. Henry’s father, Sir George Pierrepont, was extremely rich and in poor health. It had the makings of an excellent match. In the autumn of 1561, the St Loes rode over to Holme Pierrepont, where they were able to make themselves useful to Sir George by offering support and advice in a suit he was bringing against a certain Master Whalley, as well as discussing the proposed marriage. The matter of a dowry must have been raised, and presumably William St Loe obliged. In November, Sir George wrote to Bess in London, thanking her for ‘your great pains taken with me at Holme’ and assuring her that ‘if your ladyship and the gentlewoman your daughter like our boy upon sight as well as I and my wife like the young gentlewoman, I will not shrink one word from what I said or promised’.15 It was important that the young couple ‘liked’ (each other); as a way of finding out Frances joined the Pierrepont household as a gentlewoman.

  By May 1562, all was settled. Sir George wrote to Bess, thanking her for the ‘bounteous goodness and cost’ bestowed on his son Henry in London and lamenting that he was unable to accept her invitation to Chatsworth to ‘make merrie’, as the ‘pain of my disease’ (arthritis, perhaps, or gout) made it impossible to ride.16 The marriage took place soon after.

  The dramas and anxieties of the early 1560s – Edward St Loe’s skulduggery, the Katherine Grey affair and the disgrace of Elizabeth St Loe, the question of Bess’s debt – had kept Bess in London more than she would have liked. But as life became more settled, she was able to spend longer periods at Chatsworth. By October 1564, the house was nearing completion and a St Loe cousin wrote to congratulate her: ‘I am glad you are in health and I trust the sight of your near finished building will continue it.’ William St Loe ‘must now tarry by it, to render his credit of negligent waiting. It will stand you in hand to forbear him more than you have’ – a hint that St Loe’s friends felt he received less than his due from his wife.17

  By now, Chatsworth was looking very splendid both inside and out. Thirteen bedchambers boasted magnificent beds, with en suite furnishings – this very rare at the time – chairs, stools and cushions upholstered in matching fabric (cloth of silver and gold, black and white velvet, white and tawny damask, gold and purple taffeta). Bess’s own room, on the first floor, was a profusion of reds, blues and greens. She slept in ‘a bed of red cloth, trimmed with silver lace’, hung with five curtains of red mockado (a woollen velvet). There was a great chair of green checked silk, a small chair of blue velvet, long cushions made of black velvet, red velvet and blue taffeta, and six blue hangings. Green satin curtains hung at the windows, and portraits of Sir William Cavendish, Sir William St Loe, Lady Jane Grey and Bess herself on the walls.18

  Bess’s London friends also regretted her preoccupation with Chatsworth. In October 1564, Frances, Lady Cobham, wrote wishing she saw more of B
ess in London: ‘would you had as good cause to come to lie in these parts as I could wish and then you should be as great a stranger in Derbyshire as now you are in London’. Lady Cobham, the wife of William Brooke, Baron Cobham, and a gentlewoman of the privy chamber (and soon-to-be Mistress of the Robes), was writing from the Cobham family home in Kent, where she was awaiting the birth of her second child. She and Bess were working together on a dress, to present to the Queen as a New Year’s gift. Present-giving, for the Elizabethans, took place at New Year rather than Christmas, and as far as the Queen was concerned, money or plate were perfectly acceptable, but imaginative effort was appreciated (such was not expected of Her Majesty, who invariably gave plate). ‘I have basted the sleeves’, Lady Cobham told Bess, ‘of that wideness that will best content the queen . . . they are fine and strange. I have here sent you enclosed the braid, and length of caulle [netting] for the queen of the same work for to suit with the sleeves, you may send it up unmade for that the fashion is much altered since you were here. Ten yards is enough for the ruffs of the neck and hands.’19 Gifts of clothing went down especially well with the Queen, the finer and stranger the better, and, crucially, made in accordance with the very latest fashions, with which Lady Cobham felt, quite reasonably, Bess might not be entirely au fait, marooned as she was in Derbyshire.