Devices and Desires

by Kate Hubbard

  In the summer of 1584, the Earl began a campaign of harassment aimed at Chatsworth and the Cavendishes. At Ashford, which had been returned to the Cavendishes by the deed of gift, the Earl’s men, led by Nicholas Booth, took rents and lead ore, and attacked Charles Cavendish, who was forced to take refuge in the church steeple. The walls around Charles’s pastures at Stoke were demolished and some of his servants wounded. One of Bess’s servants was attacked by Booth in Chatsworth park, while the house had windows broken and tenants had their livestock impounded, because they’d already paid rent to Bess and saw no reason to pay the Earl.

  Bess, feeling under siege, retreated to Hardwick, where furnishings, hangings and plate from Chatsworth had been carried off by William Cavendish, presumably acting on his mother’s orders, during two nocturnal raids.7 This must have been some feat. The finest furnishings would have been in the state apartments on Chatsworth’s top floor; plate was extremely heavy, as were hangings, such as the Virtues hangings. These would have had to be rolled up and carried down several flights of stairs, in the dark, before being loaded onto wagons and trundled the sixteen miles to Hardwick, which was hardly in a fit state to accommodate them. None of this could have been done without the cooperation of the Chatsworth servants, but many of them, like James Crompe, were long-serving and loyal to Bess. Furthermore, since it cost considerably more to furnish a house than to build it, the contents were immensely valuable, and their removal an indisputable act of aggression. Shrewsbury certainly took it as such and, accompanied by forty armed men, arrived at Chatsworth, where – if his own account is to be believed – he was refused ‘a night’s lodging’ by William Cavendish, who, armed ‘with halberd in hand and pistol under his girdle’, insulted him with ‘lewd language’.8 Naturally the Earl was quite incapable of overlooking such an affront to his honour, and immediately made an official complaint to the Privy Council; William was sent to the Fleet gaol for ‘insolent behaviour’.

  On 2 August, a ‘distressed’ and ‘sorrowful’ Bess wrote to Burghley from her new home at Hardwick, hoping that he and the Queen might use their influence with the Earl for her ‘better usage’. ‘Quietness is the thing I most desire in these my latter days’, she claimed, not entirely convincingly. Her husband was trying ‘to take away Chatsworth and those poor goods and living which were mine which himself assured to my two younger sons under his hand and seal about 11 years since’. Since she had not received her allowance for over a year, she was ‘driven to live on my children’. Those children, barring Henry, who had been ‘won’ by the Earl ‘to deal most unnaturally with me’, would ‘rather lose their life’ than be deprived of what was rightfully theirs, and Bess herself was ‘not without fear’ of her life.9 She was laying it on thick.

  She wrote the next day to Shrewsbury, apparently in similar vein. Her letter (since lost) displayed a ‘fair and unaccustomed show of dutifulness and humility of spirit’, but did not have a mollifying effect. Rather, the Earl suspected ‘it to be a siren’s song set for some other purpose than it pretends’, for Bess had shown herself his ‘bitter enemy, seeking by your ministers of false suggestions everywhere my infamy and overthrow, then the spoil of my goods and of mine and your own children by your unnatural means and malice and lastly the sack of Chatsworth house that devouring gulf of mine and other your husbands goods’. He had willingly funded Chatsworth for the sake of future heirs and he was now going ‘to proceed by due order of law with those my adversaries your sons . . . thinking it in conscience most dishonourable unto me to stand and look upon the ruin of that house with the utter undoing of your eldest and best deserving son’. Henry, by taking Shrewsbury’s part against his mother, had found favour with his stepfather. William Cavendish’s raids on Chatsworth, argued the Earl, deprived Henry of his inheritance.10

  In August, while lodging in Chancery Lane, where Bess had come on behalf of William Cavendish, who was languishing in the Fleet (after the case against him had been heard, he was released), she wrote: ‘My lord, the innocency of my own heart is such and my desire so infinite to procure your good conceit as I will leave no way unsought to attain your favour . . . my heart notwithstanding what I have suffered thirsts after your prosperity and desires nothing so much as to have your love . . . I know my Lord that hatred must grow of something and how I have deserved your indignation is invisible to me.’11

  Was she sincere? Bess, said a contemporary, was ‘humble in speech and stout in actions’.12 It was a policy that served her well. While more than capable of fighting her corner, viciously if necessary, she was also careful to present herself, especially to those that counted – the Queen, Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester – as the wronged but ever-dutiful wife. There lay her best chance of redress. And why should she seek the dissolution of a marriage that had, on the whole, suited her for many years, that had allowed her to operate within the umbrella of Shrewsbury’s wealth and position, to promote the interests of her children and to lead a largely independent life at Chatsworth? Bess had lost the ability to manage the Earl, largely because he had become unmanageable. There was, however, another factor in the mix, also beyond Bess’s control – the Queen of Scots.

  In March 1584, Frances Battell, one of Bess’s gentlewomen, had written to Lady Paulet (the wife of the Marquess of Winchester) from Chatsworth, where Bess was still living. She claimed she was being victimised by Shrewsbury, who ‘gives out hard speeches of her to her great discredit’ and was agitating for her dismissal and all because the Scottish Queen disliked her. How could Mary ‘abide her when she is with all hatred bent against her mistress [Bess]?’ Frances recalled an incident when one of Mary’s gentlemen said that Mary should be Queen of England, whereupon Bess replied ‘that it were better that the Scottish Queen were hanged before that time should come to pass’. The Earl had taken great offence at such disrespect and ‘since that time . . . deals hardly with’ Bess. Frances did not want to leave Bess’s service, but felt she would have no choice if the Earl continued his campaign against her.13 This letter was given to Burghley by Bess’s half-sister Elizabeth Wingfield, possibly as evidence of Bess’s loyalty to the Queen, or of the Earl’s unreasonable behaviour. It makes it abundantly clear that Bess had made an enemy of Mary, that the Earl was taking his prisoner’s part against his wife and that the Shrewsbury household had become polarised in consequence.

  Any goodwill between Bess and Mary had long vanished. Where both women had once hoped each might be of use to the other, both had been disappointed. Bess had ceased to be a source of court gossip or information about the Queen, and her ambitions for Arbella had infuriated Mary. By 1584, rumours of an affair between the Scots Queen and Shrewsbury, and indeed of a child or two, were rife.14 Both Mary and the Earl firmly pointed the finger at Bess and her sons as the source of such rumours. Mary was certainly out to make trouble for Bess. In January 1584, she told the French ambassador, de Mauvissière, that she sought ‘to implicate indirectly the Countess of Shrewsbury’.15 This was followed by claims that Bess had offered to help her escape should her life ever be in danger, that Charles Cavendish had offered to act as a spy for her in London (Charles certainly had asked favours of Mary and probably offered them in return), and that Bess’s servants and Bess herself had delivered ciphers to her.16

  Whether or not Bess believed the rumours, it suited her to appear to do so, and she may well have authorised her sons to see to their spreading, as part of a campaign to undermine the Earl, to besmirch his reputation. On the other hand, if she really hoped for reconciliation, why would she have gone out of her way to further enrage Shrewsbury? That the Earl had conducted an affair with Mary seems highly improbable – he was far too neurotic, as well as deeply loyal to his Queen, to take such a risk. That Bess was jealous, very possible. At the very least, she would have resented what she perceived as a partiality on her husband’s part, a sympathy between him and his prisoner. According to the Earl, Bess believed that ‘the Scottish Queen could rule me in all things against her’.17<
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  For Mary, time was running out and with that came a growing sense of desperation, as any hopes of liberty, let alone of restoration to the Scottish throne, fell away. Her son James, having declared in 1583, aged seventeen, that his minority was at an end, was now King James VI of Scotland. And he had made it perfectly clear that he had no interest in co-ruling with his mother. In fifteen years of captivity, Mary had not so much as had an audience with Elizabeth. All the intriguing, all the plots and attempts to spring her free had come to nothing. Since Walsingham had by now become adept at intercepting Mary’s correspondence, virtually no communication passed undetected. In November 1583, the Throckmorton Plot, by which an invasion of England and Scotland, backed by Spain, the Pope and the Duke of Guise, would place Mary on the throne, had been uncovered. Mary was clearly implicated, but once again the Queen baulked at putting her on trial, though she agreed to the execution of Francis Throckmorton. Then in July 1584, Protestants throughout Europe were deeply shaken by the assassination, by a Catholic, of William of Orange, who had led the Dutch Protestants against the Spanish. Fears for Elizabeth’s safety grew. Anti-Catholic feeling had never run higher. And the noose tightened around Mary.

  The ‘scandal letter’, from the Queen of Scots to Elizabeth, undated but most probably written in early 1584, lobbed a series of small grenades – pieces of gossip supposedly relayed to Mary by Bess – in the Queen’s direction. Elizabeth, according to Bess, was an insatiable nymphomaniac, whose lovers had included Leicester, Hatton and Jean de Simier; she was ‘not as other women’ – suggesting some kind of sexual deformity; she took so much ‘pleasure in exaggerated flattery, such as that none dared’ look her ‘full in the face because it shone like the sun’; when Bess and her daughter Elizabeth had been at court, they had been unable to ‘look at each other when addressing’ the Queen ‘for fear of bursting out laughing’; the Queen had broken the finger of Mary Scudamore, one of her ladies and Bess’s cousin, in a fit of rage and then blamed it on a falling chandelier; Bess had tried to marry her daughter Elizabeth to Sir Christopher Hatton, but he had held back for fear of the Queen’s wrath (Elizabeth did not look kindly on her favourites marrying, and Hatton, who would have been a great match for Elizabeth, remained a bachelor); the Queen had stepped in to stop Charles Cavendish marrying Lord Paget’s niece because she had another groom in mind.18 And so it went on, a document steeped in venom, much of it pure invention. But Bess certainly had gossiped to Mary and some of this has the ring of truth: the Queen’s vanity and susceptibility to flattery; Bess’s irritation at being thwarted in her matchmaking plans for her children. The letter was most probably never sent, only finding its way into Burghley’s hands after Mary’s death (any earlier and he would have used it against her). But it says a great deal about Mary’s desperation and frustration, her desire to besmirch Bess, her desire to have an effect.

  By the summer of 1584, the decision had been taken to relieve Shrewsbury, after fifteen years, of Mary’s care.19 His health was poor, his temper worse and his marriage in ruins, all of which inclined the Queen to doubt both his judgement and Mary’s safety. Sir Ralph Sadler was appointed to take over (Sadler’s custodianship would be short-lived – he was seen as too soft and replaced by the hard-line Puritan Sir Amyas Paulet in 1585). Sadler found Mary ‘much altered’ since he had last seen her in 1572 – stout, stooped, her grey hair hidden beneath a wig, her legs so inflamed and swollen that she could hardly walk. She was only forty-two. In September, on the Queen’s orders, Shrewsbury and Sadler escorted Mary to South Wingfield (subsequently she would be moved back to the hated Tutbury), where the Earl made his farewells, a moment that must have brought very mixed feelings, of sadness and relief.

  Shrewsbury was finally free to come to court, for the first time in twelve years. He arrived at Oatlands in September and was so overcome on seeing the Queen, and kissing her hand, that he burst into tears.20 He showed himself to be as proud and prickly as ever, refusing to take a seat at his first Privy Council meeting until ‘he knew if any of them would charge him with any lack of duty to her Majesty’. Only having been ‘declared by them all to be both honourable and loyal’ did he sit.21

  Bess too had come to court, and in November, she and William and Charles Cavendish appeared before the Privy Council to answer the charge that the allegations about Mary and Shrewsbury had originated with them. Naturally they denied everything. They were not ‘the authors, inventors or reporters’ of the rumours about the Queen of Scots having had a child, or several, by the Earl. Such were ‘very false, scandalous lies’.22 Of course they remained guilty in Shrewsbury’s eyes.

  In December 1584, a commission of inquiry into the Shrewsbury marriage was conducted by the Lord Chancellor and two chief justices. At the centre of the Shrewsburys’ disputes stood the 1572 deed of gift, which the Earl initially claimed to be a forgery, and then said he thought had been made for the benefit of Bess alone, not for William and Charles Cavendish. According to the Earl, Bess’s sons had spent more than £25,000 on buying land in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire over the twelve years since the deed of gift, with Hardwick being the largest single purchase. Bess, he said, was enjoying an annual income of £5,000, five times the amount that had been agreed as her marital allowance, while William Cavendish had £700 a year from estates bought since 1572.23 And all this at his expense. Bess countered by claiming that William and Charles had been buying land with their own money, that they were now in debt as a result, and that besides, the total sum was much less than that alleged by the Earl.

  This, however, was disingenuous – William and Charles were funded by Bess. Her accounts, in the early 1580s, record a steady stream of payments: £100, £200, £400, £345 ‘out of my jewel coffer at Chatsworth’, all ‘to Wyll’, sometimes delivered by James Crompe, sometimes given to ‘my daughter Cavendish’ to pass on to her husband.24 Charles received a quarterly allowance of £100, as well as the revenues from the Somerset portion of the western lands, which were made over to him in 1586, with Bess keeping the Gloucestershire share (this too went to Charles after her death).*25 Were such sums paid entirely from Bess’s income? Or was she dipping into the Talbot coffers? Wherever the money came from, it was used by William and Charles to buy land, on their mother’s behalf, consolidating and expanding the Cavendish estates in Derbyshire and beyond.

  The commission resulted in an ‘order’ from the Queen and a victory for Bess: Shrewsbury was to take her back; William and Charles were to keep the lands bought over the last twelve years, as well as those settled on them in 1572; the Earl was to return the £2,000 he’d seized in rents; he was to drop all the legal suits currently pending against William and Charles and Bess’s servants. As a sop, he was to receive £500 a year from Bess for lands that she occupied, according to the marriage settlement, but which belonged to him.

  Shrewsbury complained to Leicester, in April 1585, about the Queen’s ‘hard sentence against me, to my perpetual infamy and dishonour, to be ruled and overrun by my wife, so bad and wicked a woman’.26 To be ruled by Bess ‘and her servants’, to be made ‘the wife and her the husband’ – this was key to Shrewsbury’s resentment, to his sense of being humiliated. William Cavendish and William St Loe had, it seemed, willingly submitted to Bess’s rule, but possibly she had been careful to rule by stealth, to operate within the bounds, or maintain the appearance, of wifely duty. With Shrewsbury she had overstepped the mark and lost control. He felt unmanned. Nevertheless, he assured Leicester that he would abide by the Queen’s order, ‘though no curse or plague on earth could be more grievous to me’.

  15.

  Mocking and Mowing

  ‘My riches they talk of are in other men’s purses’, wrote Shrewsbury to Thomas Baldwin plaintively.1 The Earl’s expenses were huge, as were his debts, but so was his income from rents and sales, estimated at £10,000 a year in the 1580s. Like many rich men, he believed himself to be less rich than he actually was, and there was nothing he liked less than p
arting with money. Shrewsbury was mean and Bess and his children suffered for it. Gilbert Talbot in particular was constantly in debt and constantly applying to his father for relief. In 1585, the Earl gave him £1,000, which all, including the Queen, saw as a cause for celebration. Sir Christopher Hatton, with no sons of his own, felt that Gilbert could be ‘a comfortable staff in your old years’ and deserved some help.2 Burghley, who did have a ‘son or two’, agreed and repeatedly urged Shrewsbury to deal generously with Gilbert.

  Burghley and Shrewsbury were friends of old and united by their ‘joint enemy’, gout. They exchanged reports and commiserations, suggested remedies, sent soothing ointments, and in Burghley’s case, offered the use of Burghley House, which was on ‘drier soil’ than Sheffield.* Both were sometimes unable to write at all, so crippled were their hands, but as Burghley put it touchingly, ‘I pray you make more account of my heart than my hands.’3 ‘I am as lonely as an owl’, claimed Burghley. This was no doubt true enough of Burghley the public figure, but privately he was a devoted husband and a humane and kindly father: ‘we fathers must take comfort in our children, to see and provide for them to live agreeable to our comforts’. Debt, he told the Earl, was ‘a cancer growing’, and without relief, Gilbert’s estate would simply be ‘eaten with burden of interest’. ‘No deed’, he thought, was ‘more charitable than to help a man out of a deep pit of debt, wherein the longer he shall be the deeper the pit will be’. And it would only take ‘a small portion’ of Shrewsbury’s ‘favour and purse’ to relieve his son. He knew that the Earl saw Gilbert as in league with Bess, but he, Burghley, believed that in actuality Gilbert had ‘worked for reconciliation’, and besides, he could hardly be blamed for seeing Bess, given that she was his wife’s mother.4