Devices and Desires Read online

  Bess, who was by now tiring of the Queen of Scots and her duties as gaoler’s wife, spent increasingly less time at Sheffield, preferring to base herself at Chatsworth, away from Mary and therefore apart from her husband. In November 1571, Thomas Kniveton, who was married to Bess’s half-sister Jane, and who also worked for Shrewsbury, wrote to tell her that the Earl, still not entirely recovered from his collapse in the summer, was ‘very quiet and reasonably well but cannot so continue . . . I think his lordship minds your honour shall abide at Chatsworth till near Christmas, but that I like not if I might be heard.’24 This sounds a note of warning – Kniveton, as family, felt able to offer Bess some brotherly advice. Remaining at Chatsworth for long periods of time was not necessarily for the good of the Shrewsbury marriage.

  If the fault lines were in place, they stayed largely hidden during the early 1570s. It suited Bess in many ways to have the Earl tied to Mary at Sheffield, leaving her free to pursue her own projects, and her plans for Chatsworth in particular. While at Chatsworth, she looked to her husband to supply her needs, be it money, iron, timber, plate, beer, oats, barley or venison pasties. He didn’t always oblige, or at least was dilatory. ‘You haste not to supply any want I have’, she wrote testily, ‘the two bottles of sack you sent hither will do small service here, the one is the smallest that ever I drink, like as though it were half water, the other much worse . . . it savours so of the vessel . . . Farewell unkind none.’25

  Shrewsbury’s letters to Bess, on the other hand, remain unfailingly uxorious, even clumsily flirtatious: ‘the true and faithful love you bear me is more comfortable to me than any thing I can think upon and I give God thanks daily for the benefice he has bestowed upon me and greatest cause I have to give him thanks [is] that he hath sent me you in my oldest years to comfort me . . . I thank you for the fat capon and it shall be baked and kept cold and untouched till my sweetheart comes. Guess who it is? I have sent you a pheasant cock . . . farewell my sweet true none and faithful wife.’26 He sent horses so that she could come to him the following day, ‘for that I think it long till you come’. He provided snippets of news – Sheffield was ‘greatly troubled with measles’, Mary ‘keeps much to her bed’ – and bulletins on his health: his colic was ‘grievous’, he had ‘been too bold with the herring’ and made himself sick.27

  Ailments aside, the Earl was feeling the pinch. The costs of keeping up multiple households, not to mention those of keeping Mary, were huge, and these on top of the large settlements that had to be made on the occasion of his children’s marriages, especially that of his eldest son Francis to the daughter of the Earl of Pembroke. Francis was also constantly in debt and applying to his father for handouts. Shrewsbury saw money leaking away in every direction, and it panicked him.

  Lack of ready cash led him to sign a deed of gift, on 22 April 1572, whereby he was let off from paying ‘great sums of money which he the said Earl standeth chargeable to pay as well to the younger children of the said Countess as also for the debts of the said Countess [what these were is unclear] and for diverse other weighty considerations’.28 Under the marriage settlement, the Earl was due to make large payments (about £20,000), which he could ill afford, to his stepsons, William and Charles, when they came of age (William was twenty-one in 1572, hence the urgency). In return for not doing so, all the estates that Bess had brought to her marriage (the western lands for example), which brought in a little over £1,000 a year in rents, were now settled on William and Charles, with Bess retaining a life interest. Later, the Earl would do his best to wriggle out of this deed – the source of the bitterest wrangling between the Shrewsburys – but in the short term it brought financial relief. For Bess, its benefits were immense: all that she had given up on her marriage was returned to her, and she now had financial independence and a profitable core of estates on which she could build and expand over the coming years.

  10.

  ‘Close dealing’

  In 1574, at Sheffield, Mary, Bess’s youngest daughter, married to Gilbert Talbot, gave birth to her first child, a son, named George after his paternal grandfather. The Queen, fearing that strangers might have been present, soon made her displeasure felt. Shrewsbury hastened to reassure her – none had attended the birth apart from the midwife, and he himself, with two of his children, had christened the child. The previous week the castle had been shaken by an earthquake, which had greatly alarmed the Queen of Scots – God ‘grant it may be a forewarning unto her’, wrote the Earl sententiously.1 By now he was heartily sick of his charge, confessing to Burghley, ‘I wish with all my heart I had never dealt withal.’ A ‘bruit’ reached his ears, relayed by Elizabeth Wingfield, Bess’s half-sister, ‘of this queen going from me’.2 It turned out to be false, but it would have been welcome enough.

  For the Earl, the constant alarms and the resulting criticism and suspicion that he felt directed at him presented an increasing strain. He had Mary’s complaints to contend with too. Lack of exercise was taking its toll on her health. She tried regular bathing with herbs, but when the ‘hardness in her side’ worsened, she began agitating to be taken to the baths at Buxton – ‘La Fontayne de Bogsby’ as she called them. In August 1573, royal permission was finally granted, on the condition that Mary be kept well away from any strangers.

  Taking the waters at Buxton, both bathing and drinking, became highly fashionable during the 1570s. At Buxton one could pursue good health and meet friends, activities that were not necessarily complementary. Leicester was a regular, as were Shrewsbury and Burghley, both in search of relief from their gout. So too was Sir Christopher Hatton. ‘Mr Hatton by reason of his great sickness is minded to go to the spa for the better recovery of his health’, Francis Talbot told his father in May 1573.3 Hatton was a gentleman’s son from Northamptonshire, who rose to become a member of the Privy Council, and, eventually, Lord Chancellor. According to a contemporary, he was ‘a mere vegetable of the Court that sprung at night and sank again at noon’, but, partly on account of his good looks and his dancing prowess, he was a great favourite with the Queen, who, reported Gilbert Talbot, visited him daily on his sickbed.4 Gilbert saw little hope for Hatton, but perhaps Buxton worked its magic, for he made a full recovery, going on to build his great houses Holdenby and Kirby Hall.

  According to William Harrison, the Buxton waters were said to be the finest in England, unsurpassed when it came to ‘strengthening the enfeebled members’ and ‘assisting the lively forces’.5 Some of the springs were hot, in theory, though the Earl of Sussex found the water so cold in 1582 that he could hardly bear to get in, and settled on drinking it instead – three pints, rising to eight, a day.6 Buxton was part of the Cavendish estate, and in the early 1570s Shrewsbury began building a hall over the baths, described by a Dr Jones, who wrote a treatise on the waters in 1572, as ‘a very goodly house, four square, four stories high, so well compact with houses of office beneath and above and round about, with a great chamber and other goodly lodgings to the number of thirty, that it is and will be a beauty to behold’.7 There were seats around the baths and fireplaces for the airing of clothes. Buxton was not entirely a spa for the rich: fees operated on a sliding scale, ranging from £5 for an archbishop to 20s. for an earl and 12d for a yeoman; one half of the fee went to the doctor in charge, the rest into a fund for the use of the poor, who were lodged in wooden sheds.8 By 1573, Shrewsbury’s hall was finished, ready to receive the Queen of Scots.

  Besides the hall at Buxton, the Earl was building at Sheffield on a grand scale. This presented yet another drain on his finances, but was at least one of his own making. Prior to his marriage to Bess, Shrewsbury had shown no particular interest in building; however, spurred on by, and possibly in competition with, his wife, he soon caught the bug. To what degree Bess, who was busy with her own building works at Chatsworth, was involved with those at Sheffield is hard to gauge, but she would surely have advised and she would certainly have had views. ‘Your plan has not come down according to your promise�
��, the Earl complained in 1574.9 This could have referred to Chatsworth, but equally to Sheffield, where an extensive remodelling of the manor, including the addition of a grand gatehouse with twin octagonal towers, had been going on for a couple of years. In 1573, the Earl told his bailiff, William Dickenson,* that the pain in his leg prevented him coming to Sheffield to inspect the works, but Dickenson was to make the workmen believe that he was coming – it was important to keep them up to the mark.10

  Sheffield Manor, from its hilltop site, once overlooked a great deer park, eight miles in circumference and bordered by two rivers. The park, where Mary longed to hunt, was known for its walnut avenues and giant oak trees, one so vast, it was said, that two hundred horsemen could take shelter beneath its branches.11 All traces of the park have long gone. Today the ruins of the manor – nothing of the castle survives – are hemmed in by post-war housing estates and, beyond, the sprawl of the city. However, a turret house, built in 1574 as a banqueting house or hunting tower, remains intact. In January 1574, William Dickenson drew up an agreement between the Earl and two masons for a year’s work.12 In addition to their wage, the masons were to get a coat each but were expected to provide their own tools.

  The Turret House is three storeys high, with two small rooms on each floor, and a corner stair rising to the turret. On the top floor is the banqueting room, where the Shrewsburys and their guests would have decamped, after dinner in the manor, to eat comfits and chat and admire the view. This is a jewel of a room: a grand fireplace with an overmantel of great muscular Talbot hounds (known as Talbots); an elaborate plasterwork ceiling with more hounds, coronets, lion heads, Etruscan masks, vines and sprays of lilies and roses; windows of glowing red and yellow heraldic glass. It’s finer than anything at Hardwick (where there is no heraldic glass) and gives some measure of the former glories of the manor.* Did Mary have a hand in the decoration? Was the plasterwork drawn from images in her pattern books? What of the lilies of France? Or the crowned ‘M’s in the window glass? It’s hard to believe that the Scottish Queen wasn’t consulted, or that she didn’t occasionally enjoy the banqueting room herself, or stand on the leads, looking out across the expanse of the park towards the hills of ‘Hallamshire’ (Yorkshire).

  For the Queen of Scots, intrigue was life, the only means she had of exercising some degree of free will and autonomy. Intrigue, practised judiciously, appealed to Bess too, and matchmaking was just one form. Back in 1571, she had been intriguing with a John Lenton about a match for ‘Master Pierrepont’ presumably a relation, perhaps brother, of the Henry Pierrepont to whom her daughter Frances was married. They must proceed carefully, thought Lenton: ‘therefore he must handle the matter wisely and silently, that must put his hand without harm between the bark and the tree . . . I beseech you good madam, use the young gentleman as gently as you can, that we may win him.’ Bess had apparently had plans for Anne Pierrepont too, but Anne was in love with ‘one Teyvle’, so Lenton thought Bess’s hopes of ‘Master Chaworth’ (the Chaworths were cousins of Bess’s) would be dashed. ‘By close dealing a man will come to a kingdom’, he added in a postscript, a piece of gnomic wisdom with which Bess would have concurred.13

  ‘Close dealing’ was the order of the day in 1574. Some of this involved the Queen of Scots, of whose intrigues Bess was at the very least aware.* In 1574, she wrote to Mary, thanking her for remembering her ‘little poor creature’, who ‘showed more gladness than was to be looked for in one double her years’. This most probably refers to Bessie Pierrepont, Bess’s granddaughter, who had been taken into Mary’s household in 1571, aged four, and who was a great favourite with the Queen of Scots – she called her ‘Mignonne’ and made her pretty dresses. Then Bess, who must have known of the danger of Mary’s correspondence being intercepted by agents of Walsingham or Burghley, becomes cryptic: she has sent four letters, which she hopes can be ‘showed’; if Mary feels that she can write ‘as required’ – and Bess assures her ‘no harm’ will come of it – she begs her to send her letter with ‘this bearer’, and, for safety’s sake, to address it to Bess’s son.14 In an accompanying note, she asks Gilbert Curle, Mary’s secretary, to deliver the letter and ‘procure answer with that speed you may’.

  As to the nature of the four letters sent by Bess, or the letter she hoped that Mary would write, we are in the dark. But it’s clear enough that she was attempting to enlist Mary’s help, perhaps in connection with her principal project of 1574 – the marriage of her daughter Elizabeth. Of Bess’s daughters, only nineteen-year-old Elizabeth remained unmarried. We know little of Elizabeth Cavendish – just two creatively spelt letters survive, one thanking her mother for the loan of a horse litter, the other anxious that ‘false bruits’ about her have incurred Bess’s ‘displeasure’.15 But she seems to have been of a mild, amenable disposition – certainly in comparison to her sister Mary – happy to fall in with her mother’s plans.

  Bess had been casting about for a husband for Elizabeth. According to Shrewsbury, there had been ‘few noblemen’s sons in England that she hath not prayed me to deal for at one time or other’.16 The Earl had been digging his heels in when it came to stumping up a dowry, and although eventually Bess ‘by brawling did get three thousand pounds’, various candidates – Lord Rutland, Lord Sussex, Lord Wharton – fell by the wayside.17 One, however, looked promising – Peregrine Bertie, the son of Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, by her second marriage to Richard Bertie. The Duchess, previously married to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and reluctant to relinquish her title for plain Mrs Bertie, was known to Bess of old – she was godmother to Frances Cavendish. She and Bess had been discussing the match for the past year and the Earl was in favour – young Bertie would do well enough.

  In February 1574, Hugh Fitzwilliam wrote to tell Bess that he was trying to engineer a ‘meeting of the parties’. The Duchess wanted to set this up at Huntingdon, her Northamptonshire house, but Fitzwilliam thought this too public ‘considering both sides require secrecy’ (why this should have been so is a mystery). Bertie had now come to Gray’s Inn, where William Cavendish was studying law, and if he and his father were to meet William, and all were agreeable, it ‘may further the matter much’.18 However, it seemed that the feelings of the young couple had not been taken into account – young Bertie loved another and the match came to nothing.

  Bess had to think again. The details are murky, but over the summer of 1574, in cahoots with the Duchess of Suffolk, who perhaps felt badly that Elizabeth had been ‘disappointed of young Bertie’, and Margaret, Countess of Lennox, she cooked up a plan. Margaret Lennox was a woman much battered but unbowed by misfortune and loss. Six of her eight children by the Earl of Lennox had died young, and Darnley, married so disastrously to the Queen of Scots, had been killed at Kirk o’ Field. Only nineteen-year-old Charles Stuart remained, by all accounts an unsatisfactory and sickly youth, described by even his mother as ‘my greatest dolour’. The passion and recklessness of Margaret’s youth had been tempered by age – she was now a widow of fifty-nine – but for wiliness and force of will she was certainly Bess’s equal. Margaret was anxious to find a wife for young Charles, ideally one with a substantial dowry to boost the dwindling Lennox fortunes.

  While Bess schemed at Chatsworth, Shrewsbury, at Sheffield with Mary, was not consulted. By August, a note of impatience creeps into his letters – Bess’s long absences and her endless demands were beginning to grate. His ‘only joy’ and ‘sweet true none’ is now addressed merely as ‘Wife’, and her various ‘wants’ wearily listed: a book, a dozen pigeons, items of plate, a billament costing £23, pheasant pullets, ‘pastes of a stage’ (venison pasties), beer and ale, boxes of comfits, lemons and oranges. In a postscript he adds darkly, ‘great turmoil doth two houses breed’.19 The logistics and expense of maintaining two separate, and very large, households, at Sheffield and Chatsworth, was taking its toll on the Earl. He longed for a little tendresse from his wife; he longed for her company; he longed to be regarded as somet
hing more than a purse and provider.

  During the summer of 1574, Margaret Lennox asked for the Queen’s permission to visit her Yorkshire estate, Temple Newsam. This was granted on the condition that she didn’t visit the Queen of Scots either at Sheffield or Chatsworth, or indeed go within thirty miles of her. Margaret affected indignation, insisting that she had no intention of doing any such thing, ‘for I was made of flesh and blood and could never forget the murder of my child’ – though in point of fact she no longer believed Mary guilty of Darnley’s murder and was on friendly enough terms with her former daughter-in-law.20 Rumours swirled about court as to her real motives in visiting Yorkshire – some said she intended to bring her little grandson James back from Scotland.

  In September, the Countess, together with her son Charles, set out for the north. She broke her journey with a stay at Huntingdon, and the Duchess of Suffolk then accompanied the Lennoxes as far as Grantham before returning home. At Newark, Margaret received a message from Bess, inviting her to Rufford Abbey, once a Cistercian abbey, acquired by the 4th Earl of Shrewsbury during the Dissolution and subsequently converted into a house. Bess, who had conveniently positioned herself at Rufford, which, on the edge of Sherwood Forest, was but a short distance from Newark, rode out to meet the Lennoxes. Once at Rufford, the Countess fell ill and promptly took to her bed for five days, during which time Charles Stuart and Elizabeth Cavendish, responding either to the romance of their surroundings* or to the wishes of their mothers, obligingly fell in love and were promptly married in Rufford chapel.

  This was possibly very fortuitous, but more likely very carefully stage-managed. It was presented, however, as a coup de foudre, with all parties insisting loudly that there hadn’t been any underhand ‘dealing’, that love had simply carried the day. Shrewsbury, giving Burghley a full account ‘of these ladies and their dealings at my houses’, claimed that the young man was so in love that ‘he is sick without her’.21 Personally, he was relieved to have Elizabeth off his hands.