As attractive as it is, Harvington also throws light on a less becoming feature of Elizabethan society. Elizabeth I has gained an anachronistic reputation as a religiously tolerant monarch who, famously, did not seek ‘to make windows into men’s souls’. It is true that in the first twenty years of her reign, the regime realised the limits of its power to enforce the Anglican faith and was, in comparison to governments on the Continent, relatively lenient towards members of the dissident faith, insisting only on outward conformity through attendance at church every Sunday and holy day (with fines to punish recusants). However, in 1570, the zealous new Pope Pius V issued a papal bull entitled Regnans in Excelsis, excommunicating ‘Elizabeth, pretended queen of England’; releasing English Catholics from their duty of allegiance; and encouraging them to overthrow their Queen. From 1574, a Catholic seminary in Douai in northern France started training English Catholics as priests and sending them home to reconvert England and provoke Catholics into open rebellion. After 1580, their numbers were bolstered by Jesuit missionaries, and the Elizabethan state had to react.
A series of draconian new laws from 1571 to 1593 clamped down on this potential fifth column. In 1585, it became treason for any Catholic priest, ordained by the Pope’s authority, to enter England, and for any person to give him aid or shelter. Yet, Catholicism remained strong in some quarters, especially among sections of the nobility and gentry who had the resources and wherewithal to hide priests from the eyes of the authorities. Humphrey Packington was one such man.
Like many others, Packington engaged the services of the master craftsman and Oxford carpenter Nicholas Owen to construct an elaborate series of concealed hiding places, or priest’s holes, to provide safe haven during raids by priest hunters, known as the Pursuivants. The first hide you’ll see at Harvington is to the left of the fireplace in the Withdrawing Room. It retains its original ladder (now in the alcove on the other side of the fireplace) and creates a hide above the bread oven in the kitchen. In the Great Chamber, there is a primitive hiding place above the ceiling to the north-west corner of the chamber, accessed from the Great Staircase. Two of the five stairs that lead down from the Nine Worthies Passage to the staircase can be raised (they’re very heavy!) to reveal the large inner hiding place, with a spyhole into the Great Chamber itself.
One of Owen’s most ingenious hides is in Dr Dodd’s library: so ingenious, it remained hidden for centuries and was only discovered in 1894. Five feet from the floor, once behind a book cupboard, it is hidden behind a beam that hangs on a pivot: once the lower end is pressed, the beam releases to swing up revealing a hole big enough — eight feet long, two feet wide and six feet high — to conceal several priests. The bottom of the beam could then be bolted from the inside and the books replaced, concealing the hiders in the very walls of the building.
In the chapel, used from 1590, you can pick up the floorboards to reveal a ‘secret corner’: not big enough for a man but sufficient to hide the ‘Massing stuff’ of the forbidden Catholic Mass, while in the Marble Room, the entire fireplace is fake — even to the point of smoke-blackened bricks — and designed as a bolt-hole up into a large hiding place in the roof.
We don’t know whether Owen’s handicraft was ever needed; there is no evidence of a raid at Harvington, but elsewhere the hides were lifesavers. Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire was searched in 1591 when priests John Gerard, Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet were concealed there. The Pursuivants left unsatisfied, and John Gerard, who later made a daring escape from the Tower of London, lived to tell the tale.
This was not, however, always the case. Edmund Campion and two other priests were at the home of the Yate family at Lyford Grange near Wantage when it was raided in July 1581. They hid but, by chance, one among the searchers ‘espied a chink in the wall of boards’ above the stairwell, and when it was found to be hollow, the Pursuivants broke in. Campion was escorted to the Tower, where he was repeatedly racked and had all his nails pulled out. In November 1581, he was hanged, drawn and quartered before the crowds at Tyburn.
Campion was not the only one to be caught, as carvings in the Tower of London make clear. In fact, 129 priests and 36 laymen were executed for treason between 1577 and 1603. Nicholas Owen himself would later be arrested and tortured to death in the Tower. In light of this, Elizabeth’s reputation for religious toleration must be considered an exaggeration.
‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’
It all began on 22 August 1485: the day the Tudor dynasty was founded (although for political reasons — so that those who fought against him could be declared traitors — Henry VII would later date the commencement of his reign to 21 August). But it was on 22 August that Richard III was killed in battle, and Henry Tudor became Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch.
Historians have argued over the exact location of the battlefield, which was somewhere in the vicinity of Ambion Hill, less than two miles south of Market Bosworth in Leicestershire. In 2009, the Heritage Lottery Fund funded a metal detection project to unearth the site. The results of this work suggested it was near Fenn Hill Farm on private land, about two miles away from the previously identified spot. Sadly, it is also therefore two miles away from the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre and not accessible to the public. Yet one field can look very much like another and this award-winning, child-friendly museum and heritage trail best commemorate the event, telling the story and, most importantly, displaying objects found on the battlefield from the day that Henry Tudor ended 331 years of Plantagenet rule.
Our impression of Bosworth, and the events leading up to it, has been significantly shaped by Shakespeare’s Richard III, a version of events written to please the victorious Tudor dynasty. In it, Richard III emerges as a ‘deformed’ villain, whose last, lamenting speech — ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ — is renowned. The truth is that Henry Tudor had only the feeblest of claims to the throne, and was certainly no more entitled to the throne than Richard himself.
Henry Tudor was born in Wales to Edmund Tudor, first Earl of Richmond (son of Owen Tudor and Catherine de Valois) and Margaret Beaufort. It is through his mother that Henry derived his claim to the Crown: she was the great-great-granddaughter of Edward III. The Beauforts had been legitimised by Act of Parliament under Richard II, but both this act and Henry VI’s declaration of 1407 made it clear that this legitimisation did not extend to inheriting the throne — a fact that Henry Tudor conveniently ignored when the time was right.
We know of Henry’s early life only in fragments. He never met his father, who died three months before his birth at Pembroke Castle on 28 January 1457. He spent the first four years of his life at Pembroke, before his mother married again, at which point Henry went to Raglan Castle, in Wales, as the ward of William, Lord Herbert. In 1470, Henry made one visit to England before his fight for its Crown, and had an audience with Henry VI. When Edward IV won back the throne in 1471 in the Wars of the Roses, Henry Tudor fled the country with his uncle, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke. They landed in the duchy of Brittany, where they remained for thirteen years, first as asylum seekers and later under virtual house arrest. So far, so inauspicious, for a future king of England.
Meanwhile, in April 1483, Edward IV died suddenly. His eldest son and heir — Edward V — was still a child, and his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, quickly acted to put the young King and his brother, Richard, Duke of York, in the Tower of London. (For years their fate was unknown, until the bones of young boys were found in the Tower in 1674.) Gloucester, in a transparent display of self-aggrandisement, declared that the boys were illegitimate and that therefore he was the rightful heir to the Crown. He was crowned on 6 July.
Richard’s actions provoked an outcry from various quarters, especially after the young boys mysteriously failed to be seen in public. In an atmosphere of near-open rebellion, Henry Tudor sensed his moment. Inspired by his resourceful mother (whose own claims to the Crown were overlooked), with support in Eng
land and with Francis, Duke of Brittany’s help, Henry declared that he would fight Richard for the throne. He also swore, in Rennes Cathedral on Christmas Day 1483, that as soon as he became king, he would marry Elizabeth, Edward IV’s eldest daughter, thereby uniting the Wars of the Roses’ two feuding families.
In April 1484, Richard III’s son and heir, Prince Edward, died at the age of seven. Knowing that this put him in greater danger, and capitalising on the illness of the Duke of Brittany, Richard reached an agreement with Peter Landois, the treasurer of Brittany, in which Landois would surrender Henry Tudor to him. But Henry caught wind of the plot and managed to escape, using the classic ploy of dressing as a servant. He assembled his English followers and on 1 August 1485, having raised an army of some 4,000 men, he set sail from the Seine, bound for Milford Haven. Once he had landed, he marched east, collecting rebel troops along the way. The King mustered an army of at least 10,000, and by Sunday 21 August both sides had set up camp near Ambion Hill, ready for the battle that would follow.
The story of the clash is told to dramatic effect at Bosworth today. King Richard, with his superior numbers and cannon, looked set to conquer the rebel forces under the leadership of the Earl of Oxford. But a combination of Henry’s superior strategic formation, and the reluctance of Richard’s men (namely the Earl of Northumberland and the Stanley family) to commit to his cause, thwarted Richard’s assured victory.
With divine confidence, Richard decided to take matters into his own hands, and bravely charged across the battlefield to engage directly with Henry’s own vanguard. He cut down and killed Henry’s standard-bearer, to come within feet of Henry himself. Henry’s saviour came in the form of Sir William Stanley, who at that moment traitorously threw in his lot with the rebels and raced into the battlefield with his men to engage Richard’s troops. In doing so, he rescued Henry from sure defeat and disaster.
Fighting boldly to the last, Richard was cornered, unhorsed and swiftly demolished. Henry was proclaimed king: legend has it that Reginald Bray, finding Richard’s gold circlet in a nearby thorn bush, crowned Henry on the battlefield. In a little less than two hours, the fight was over; the Tudor had won. To this day, Richard remains the last English king to have died in battle, and the only one to do so on English soil since Harold was (or was not) shot through the eye by William the Conqueror’s archers at Hastings.
At Bosworth’s Heritage Centre, they have a collection of objects found at the battlefield, which together evocatively conjure up that eventful day: from shot to belt buckles, coins to horse harness pendants. The crucial object, however, is a silver gilt badge depicting a boar: Richard III’s badge, lost for years under the soil where he met his unhappy end.
This was the decisive day. Henry Tudor had become King Henry VII. When, towards the end of his life, he built his chapel at Westminster Abbey, Henry envisaged that the moment would be forever commemorated atop the shrine of Edward the Confessor by a gold-plated statue of him kneeling in full armour and holding aloft the crown he had received that day. The statue was never made, but the dynasty that Henry established that Monday in August 1485 has never been forgotten.
‘There is no Lady in this land that I better love and like.’
Sitting atop a hill, stunning in its symmetry and glinting in the sun, Hardwick Hall is one of the most spectacular buildings of the Elizabethan age. It was built by the most remarkable non-royal woman of the long Tudor century: Bess of Hardwick.
Bess was born in a manor farmhouse at the Old Hall at Hardwick in 1527, her humble origins as the daughter of minor gentry not betraying the fact that she would one day become the richest and most powerful woman in England after the Queen. Her father died before she was seven months old and, aged twelve, Bess was sent to learn noble ways from the Zouche family of Codnor Castle in Derbyshire. Here, before she turned sixteen, she had met and married Robert Barlow, the first of her four husbands. However, before the couple had ‘bedded together’, Barlow died and the young Bess began the first of many fights for her rights — in this case, her widow’s dower of £30 a year.
Next, Bess became a waiting woman in the house of Lord and Lady Dorset, the Grey family. Her attachment to the Grey girls was considerable: she kept a picture of Lady Jane Grey on her bedside table for the rest of her life. In 1547, Bess married Sir William Cavendish. He was more than twice her age (forty to her nineteen), and had made his fortune as a commissioner during the dissolution of the monasteries. Bess bore him eight children in ten years, six of whom survived infancy.
When Cavendish died in October 1557, he left everything to Bess — an unusual thing to do at the time — with their house and land at Chatsworth entailed on their eldest son only after Bess’s death. He also left her a debt to the tune of £5,000 (equivalent to £850,000 today). A less feisty woman would have sold off the properties to pay the debt, but Bess instead contested it and it was eventually reduced, in 1563, to an amount of only £1,000 (today equivalent to £170,000). The earliest portrait that we have of Bess dates from about this time and hangs at Hardwick. She is red-haired, blue-eyed and desirably pale, but not excessively beautiful.
Following Elizabeth I’s accession, Bess became one of the Queen’s Ladies of the Bedchamber. This was the start of a long friendship between the women: Elizabeth would later say of Bess, ‘There is no Lady in this land that I better love and like.’
Elizabeth’s Master of the Horse at that time, and the captain of her personal guard, was Sir William St Loe. In August 1559, he and Bess married. A recent biography suggests this relationship was the passionate love of Bess’s life, but it did not last long. In February 1565, St Loe died suddenly: foul play by his brother Edward was suspected. Edward didn’t know that St Loe had changed his will to leave everything to Bess and ‘to her heirs forever’. This extraordinary act — even Cavendish had entailed the estate on his son after Bess’s death — tarnished her reputation in some quarters, as detractors held Bess responsible for the impoverishment of the St Loes.
It did not, however, prevent George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury’s interest in Bess. Shrewsbury was one of the richest men in the country, a virtual ‘Prince of the North’. The couple married in February 1568, and sealed their union by simultaneously marrying Bess’s seventeen-year-old son, Henry, to Shrewsbury’s eight-year-old daughter, Grace, and Shrewsbury’s fifteen-year-old son, Gilbert, to Bess’s twelve-year-old daughter Mary! The eglantine table of inlaid marquetry in the High Great Chamber at Hardwick, decorated with the sixteenth-century pursuits of cards, backgammon and music, was probably commissioned to mark this triple marriage.
The marriage made Bess one of the most prominent and important women at court. It started happily enough, with Shrewsbury writing to Bess as ‘My None’ (a contraction of ‘mine own’) and ‘my sweetheart’. But in December 1568, Shrewsbury was put in charge of the imprisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots [see TUTBURY CASTLE], and, over the next fifteen years, the draining costs of this guardianship, the wiles of the beautiful Scottish queen (remember, nearly every red-blooded male who met this extraordinarily enthralling Queen ended up falling for her) and Bess’s absences from Shrewsbury’s own place of virtual imprisonment took their toll. By 1580, the marriage was falling apart. Shrewsbury wanted to be rid of Bess, but to hold on to the lands she had brought into their union. He sent men to terrorise Bess’s sons and dependants, and at one point broke into their house at Chatsworth with a force of forty armed men. The situation became so inflamed that the Queen herself ordered a six-month investigation into their marital breakdown, and wrote to Shrewsbury, helpfully, ‘We do not suffer in our realm to persons of your degree and quality to live in such a kind of discord.’
Throughout this difficult period, Bess played her hand expertly. When Shrewsbury died in 1590, he left Bess a very wealthy woman: wealthy enough to build, from scratch, a house to be envied.
In previous years, Bess had invested in Chatsworth and doubled the size of the Old Hall at Hardwick. Now, in her old age, s
he wanted to build at Hardwick a state-of-the-art house in which she could entertain the Queen.
She turned to premier master mason Robert Smythson for the design. Smythson had designed a lookout tower in Chatsworth’s park wall — still standing and now known as the Hunting Tower — as well as Bess’s fourth husband’s house at Worksop. Famously, he also designed the great houses of Longleat and Wollaton. But, despite Smythson’s input, Hardwick Hall was very much Bess’s own: the building accounts show her watchful eye on every expense and design decision. The exterior of the house remains exactly as Bess intended it.
The watchword of the design was ‘symmetry’, which was the height of innovative architectural fashion. The house spoke not only of taste, but of wealth and status: glass was still very expensive, and Smythson’s design called for lavish acres of glass, even creating false windows in order to maintain the house’s extravagant symmetry. Robert Cecil quipped that Hardwick Hall was ‘more window than wall’ (which is now remembered in the ditty, ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’).
What really distinguishes Hardwick, though, are the six towers. These ingenious turrets give a romantic and endlessly varied silhouette, and made Hardwick unusually and impressively high by Tudor standards. Each is surmounted by the giant stone initials, ‘ES’, for Elizabeth Shrouesbury (as Bess signed herself), under her countess’s coronet, thereby proclaiming her name, in a piece of shameless self-aggrandisement, to onlookers for miles around.
Inside, there are forty-six rooms, three of particular note. Firstly, there is the extraordinarily long stone staircase now hung with tapestries galore (with all these stairs, it’s strange to think that Bess probably moved here to celebrate her seventieth birthday). This stately approach leads to the show floor, and the second astonishing room: the High Great Chamber. This enormous room was designed to be bigger than the Great Chamber at Theobalds (belonging to Lord Burghley and at that time the grandest house in England) and is a riot of colourful decoration, with the large and crudely cut plasterwork frieze of Diana above the ubiquitous tapestries and canopy of estate (a rich fabric canopy mounted above a throne). This is a room intended for royalty. Not only did Bess anticipate that Elizabeth I would visit, but she hoped that her granddaughter, Arbella, daughter of Charles Stuart and Bess’s daughter Elizabeth, would one day succeed to the English throne. Arbella, because of her English birth, was thought by some to be Elizabeth’s obvious successor, instead of the Scottish-born James VI; Elizabeth herself once told the French ambassador’s wife, ‘Look to her well. She will one day be even as I am.’
Journey Through Tudor England Page 17
