Devices and Desires Read online

  For Bess, it was no small triumph; she might find herself grandmother to a future king, or queen. Since the direct line from Henry VIII ended with Elizabeth, if, as seemed increasingly likely, she died childless, the throne could then pass to the descendants of Henry’s elder sister, Margaret, or his younger, Mary. From Mary Tudor came the Grey sisters, of whom Jane and Katherine were dead, Mary the youngest was childless and Katherine’s two sons had been declared illegitimate by the Queen. From Margaret came Mary, Queen of Scots, her son James VI of Scotland – whose Scottish birth by rights nullified his claim – and Charles Stuart, who thus stood third in line to the throne. This of course was precisely why a match between Charles and Elizabeth Cavendish would not find favour with the Queen; indeed it would feel a threat. Not only would a child born to Charles and Elizabeth take its place in the succession, but he or she would also have the Queen of Scots as an aunt. Closer ties between the Shrewsburys and Mary were not to be encouraged. The benefits for the Lennoxes were less obvious – Elizabeth Cavendish was no great catch in terms of birth – but there were powerful financial incentives: a loan from Bess (over the next four years Margaret made annual repayments of £500) and Elizabeth’s £3,000 dowry, though in fact, with Shrewsbury arguing that he’d never consented to the marriage in the first place, this was only paid many years later, long after Elizabeth herself was dead.22

  For the Queen, the succession was, and would remain, a subject of acute sensitivity, and one with which she refused to engage. By 1574, she had been on the throne for fifteen years and, in defiance of all doubts and apprehensions about her sex, found herself greatly loved by a people who were enjoying stability, prosperity and peace – the religious wars that were convulsing France and the Netherlands left England untouched. Only her lack of husband or heir presented, at least for Burghley and his fellow councillors, a cloud of anxiety. The possibility of the Duke of Anjou (the future Henry III) as a husband had been mooted four years earlier, in 1570, when the Queen was thirty-seven – still within childbearing age – and when, in the wake of the Ridolfi Plot and the Queen’s excommunication, a French alliance, as a bulwark against Spanish and papal aggression, looked particularly appealing. But Anjou, an energetically bisexual yet fervently religious nineteen-year-old, was unenthusiastic about the match; when he refused to renounce his Catholicism, it foundered. At forty-one, the chances of Elizabeth producing an heir looked slim.

  When the Lennox marriage came to the Queen’s ears in November, it brought a storm. Margaret Lennox was ordered back to London, together with Charles and Elizabeth. Once there, all three were placed under house arrest in the Lennox house in Hackney, and following an inquiry, the Countess was sent to the Tower, this for the third time, and all, as she said plaintively, ‘for love matters’. Thomas Fowler, her secretary, was interrogated as to what he’d known and whether, when he’d been at his mistress’s house at Temple Newsam the previous summer, he’d been to see Bess.23 Nobody really believed that there was anything very spontaneous about the marriage – rather, it had every appearance of having been planned for some time.

  By now, Shrewsbury was in a spin of alarm, assuring the Queen that as far as he was concerned, the marriage had been ‘dealt in suddenly and without my knowledge’.24 In all likelihood, he hadn’t been consulted – he would never have condoned a marriage that he knew would anger the Queen, as Bess would have been well aware. Bess herself, almost certainly the chief architect of the match, surprisingly went unpunished. Over an acquaintance of more than twenty years, she had always been careful to cultivate the good opinion of the Queen, irreproachable in conduct, thoughtful with gifts. Her credit stood high enough for a single breach of loyalty to be overlooked. Besides, as the wife of Mary’s gaoler, she had made herself indispensable – the Queen needed her by Shrewsbury’s side, not in the Tower.

  By the following year, whatever ‘dealings’ had taken place over the Lennox marriage had been forgiven and the Earl was writing affectionately to his wife: ‘My dear heart, as you long to be with me so assuredly I am as desirous to have you.’ Bess was to be sure to tell Elizabeth Stuart to eat fruit, ‘which she loves well’.25 The Earl’s concern about Elizabeth’s diet had particular significance – she was pregnant.

  In November 1575, the Countess of Lennox, now released from the Tower and back in her Hackney home, wrote to the Queen of Scots, who took a kindly interest in the young Lennoxes, to thank her for her ‘good remembrance and bounty to our little daughter – her who some day may serve your highness’, with Elizabeth Lennox adding her thanks in a postscript.26 Elizabeth had just given birth to a daughter, Arbella. The baby’s sex no doubt came as a relief to the Queen and a disappointment to Bess, who would nevertheless campaign for what she saw as Arbella’s rights.

  Conscious that with the Lennox marriage she had sailed very close to the wind, Bess took particular trouble over her 1576 New Year’s gift to the Queen. She was seeking advice from friends and family at court as early as October 1575. Her brother-in-law, Anthony Wingfield, told his wife Elizabeth that he had consulted the Countess of Sussex and Lady Cobham, Bess’s old friend, who had suggested a travelling outfit of a safeguard (an outer skirt) and cloak made of watchet (blue) or peach satin, ‘embroidered with some pretty flowers and lined with sundry colours’, made with gold spangles and silks. ‘Such fantastical things will be more accepted than cups or jewels’.27 He wrote again, in December, with further advice about colours and design – the Queen particularly favoured pansies.28

  Bess’s efforts paid off, as Elizabeth Wingfield reported in January: ‘Her Majesty never liked anything you gave her so well . . . the colour and strange trimming of the garments . . . and great cost bestowed upon it hath caused her to give out such good speeches of my Ld and yr La as I never heard of better.’ In her view, if Bess had given £100 – as she often did – ‘it would not have been so well taken’. After such gratifying comments, Elizabeth slipped in a request for ‘the rest of the money’ (presumably a loan from Bess) and, in a postscript, added that ‘all are well at Hackney and my La Arbella a good child’.29

  All was not well for long. In April 1576, Charles Lennox, who had probably been suffering from tuberculosis, died and Elizabeth was left a widow, with a small daughter, after just eighteen months of marriage. This immediately raised the question of the Lennox earldom and estates. The Scottish government argued that the title and the Scottish lands now reverted to the Crown, to be awarded as it saw fit. Bess claimed the Lennox inheritance for her daughter and Arbella. She had the support of old Margaret Lennox, and also the Queen of Scots, who drew up a draft will stating: ‘I give to my niece Arbella the earldom of Lennox, held by her late father; and enjoin my son, as my heir and successor, to obey my will in this particular.’30 But the will, unsigned, was worthless, and in this, as in so many things, Mary’s wishes were ignored.

  In June, Bess came to court, hoping to persuade the Queen and the Privy Council to back her claim and put pressure on the Scottish regent. She stayed at Leicester House, courtesy of the Earl, who wrote to Shrewsbury, ‘without flattery, I do assure your Lordship that I have not seen Her Majesty make more of anybody, than she has done of my Lady’.31 Her Majesty was sympathetic enough, as were the likes of Leicester and Walsingham, but it brought no result. Elizabeth Lennox and her little daughter may have had the support of two powerful grandmothers, not to mention the Scottish Queen, but such counted for little in the face of the indifference of the Scots.

  11.

  ‘Great turmoil doth two houses breed’

  In August 1573, Lord Burghley told Shrewsbury how much he wished he could be at Chatsworth, ‘where I think I should see a great alteration, to my good liking’.1 Bess had been building again, this time extending the house upwards, with a third storey. In addition, galleries were built around the inner courtyard, the great hall was enlarged, rooms were refitted and work began on the garden and outbuildings. This was not a matter of a few home improvements, but a major programme of const
ruction. The extra storey provided a complete second suite of state rooms. These may have been intended to accommodate the Queen of Scots, but the existing rooms served perfectly well, and besides, Mary was rarely kept at Chatsworth. Bess’s ambitions for her house were her own.

  Burghley, keen builder that he was, was naturally eager to see the new Chatsworth. During the previous decade he’d been occupied not only with building a London house on the Strand,* but with the hugely ambitious project of Theobalds, a Hertfordshire manor acquired in 1563, work on which had put a temporary halt to Burghley House. Theobalds, just ten miles north of London, was convenient for royal visits, and begun, wrote Burghley, ‘with a mean measure but encreast by occasion of her Majesty’s often coming’ (she came, expensively, thirteen times).2 And increase it did, with the new house eventually spreading over four courtyards, with an open two-storey gallery or loggia (this was imported from Flanders, through Sir Thomas Gresham’s mason, Henryk), a great chamber with a famously fantastical interior, turrets covered in blue slates topped by lions bearing weather vanes, and huge gardens.3 The costs escalated too, peaking at £2,700 during 1571–2. In 1573, with Theobalds still unfinished, Burghley restarted work on Burghley House, building, now on a grander scale, the west front with its turreted gatehouse, the north front and a third storey.

  Burghley followed the progress of his building projects closely – scrutinising and annotating plans, making decisions, directing operations. For design expertise he looked to the Royal Works. So Henry Hawthorne, the Queen’s Surveyor at Windsor, provided plans for parts of Theobalds, and William Spicer, when Surveyor of the Royal Works, did the same for the remodelling of Burghley’s great Chelsea house, in the 1590s, but Burghley also contributed basic designs of his own. He had already amassed a large collection of architectural drawings – houses, lodges, harbours, fortifications. In 1575, he received a new addition: a plan of Longleat, sent by Thynne.4

  By the early 1570s, the exterior of the third Longleat was finished, though the interiors still had to be fitted up. However, Thynne, being Thynne, was not satisfied. In 1572, the fourth and final phase of building began, under a team of masons headed by Smythson and Maynard. They set to work wrapping the existing house round with a new classical facade. Thynne remained a ruthless employer, and relations with his chief masons were fraught. In 1574, Smythson was away from Longleat – probably working on another job at Wardour Castle – and in his absence, even though Maynard was still on site, the carving of one of the new bay windows was given to three lesser masons, who were paid at a lower rate. Smythson and Maynard had been undercut; they saw their work being taken over by inferiors (who botched the job and were never actually paid) and their income slashed. They wrote a desperate, pleading letter (Smythson’s only known letter) to Thynne: they were very sorry for his ‘displeasure’; they were no longer able to pay their debts; they considered themselves better able to do the work than their replacements ‘for the ordinance [design] thereof came from’ them. ‘We have been instruments to serve other men’s terms for a great while and our own always unserved’ – the rights of the craftsman were non-existent. Such, however, was their desperation that they caved in and offered to do the work at a lower rate than anyone else.5 Thynne had his way.

  Thynne would always extract his pound of flesh, but when it came to craftsmen and materials, he made sure he got the best. No longer was local stone good enough. Now he wanted Bath stone – a quarry was acquired, near Box, from where stone was dragged by oxen, on wheel-less drags, for twenty-five miles, at great expense. Glass, nails and panelling came from London. In 1573, the house was roofed with 13,000 Cornish slates, partly transported by sea.6 It was a plan – probably a collaboration between Maynard, Smythson and Thynne himself – of this final Longleat (still unfinished on Thynne’s death in 1580) that was sent to Burghley.

  Bess was a no less firm but much fairer employer than Thynne. The Chatsworth building accounts for the early 1570s have vanished, so the precise chronology of the building is impossible to determine. What we do know is that Bess spent as much time there as she could, overseeing the work, and that this provoked a great deal of marital friction. Whereas William St Loe had been indulgent of her attachment to her house, as well as willing to fund its building, Shrewsbury greatly resented Chatsworth, not just for its expense, but for taking up Bess’s time and attention.

  By 1575, Shrewsbury was feeling harried from every side, by the Queen, Mary, Bess, his children and his tenants. The Queen proposed that Mary’s household should be reduced, and in consequence the Earl’s diet money cut, from £52 to £30 a week. The Earl took this hard. ‘When I received her into my charge at your Majesty’s hands, I understood very well it was a most dangerous service, and thought over-hard for any man to perform, without some great mischief to himself at least; and as it seemed most hard and fearful to others, and every man shrunk from it, so much the gladder was I to take it upon me . . .’7 Having undertaken so thankless a task, he was not even adequately, let alone generously, rewarded. The original sum had been little enough; now he was to receive even less. And this when he had just spent over £300 on a voyage to Rouen, to stock up on fine French goods for Mary, including twelve tons of wine, red and white wine vinegar, thirty ells of damask for table napkins, twenty-two ells of diaper ‘of Rouen making’, forty-two pounds of comfits and forty-eight dozen quails with cages to keep them in.8

  In addition, some of the Earl’s tenants from Derbyshire’s Peak District were protesting about the enclosure of pasture and rights of way in the forest, for which they blamed Bess.9 Gilbert Talbot told his stepmother that ‘those lewd fellows of the Peak’ had come to court with a petition.* Gilbert had a petition of his own, for a house for himself, Mary and their baby son George, who was greatly adored by his grandparents. Although the Earl had agreed to provide a house, and had indeed sought Bess’s advice, he then stalled. In October, Gilbert reported to Bess, whose support he counted on, that his father was ‘very often in exceeding choler of slight occasion, a great grief to them that love him to see him hurt himself so much’. Gilbert, living at Sheffield with his family, was growing restive – ‘in all my life I never longed for any thing so much as to be from hence, truly madam I rather wish myself a ploughman than here to continue’.10

  When the Earl did finally offer the Talbots the dilapidated Goodrich Castle in Herefordshire, he made difficulties about furnishing it. Bess provided some furniture, from Chatsworth, including beds and pieces of tapestry. ‘That which your Ladyship has given us’, wrote Gilbert, was worth more than anything that had come from Sheffield. Indeed, the Earl had been deliberately obstructive, forbidding the delivery of ‘the bed of cloth of gold and tawny velvet’, refusing to pay for cloth to make sheets because he considered it too ‘dear’ and denying the Talbots the plate that had been set aside for them by Bess.11 Shrewsbury’s conviction that he was being taken advantage of, especially when it came to his own family, was coupled with inherent meanness, and this kind of behaviour – penny-pinching over trifles like sheets – would become familiar.

  Further aggravation came from the fact that the Earl’s building works at Sheffield were being held up because Bess was monopolising workmen at Chatsworth. ‘Assure yourself’, he told her, ‘I cannot like to have you undo your self and hinder me and my works to bestow my men in work there and you to keep so many men as you do considering my building.’ He would now be unable to provide her with corn and beef until his works were finished. In the meantime, there were Mary’s requirements to be met – he needed Bess to order plate, sheets and damask and diaper napkins for Sheffield. But he ended affectionately enough – ‘farewell my only love’.12

  Joining the workforce at Chatsworth was a plasterer borrowed from Leicester’s Kenilworth Castle. By 1575, Kenilworth was complete, in time to receive the Queen on her summer progress. Leicester laid on an extraordinarily lavish ten-day extravaganza, including an enormous artificial lake complete with its own Lady of the Lake and a papi
er-mâché swimming dolphin concealing an orchestra in its belly, rosemary bushes whose individual needles had been specially gilded, spectacular fireworks and masques. A guest at the festivities described ‘the rare beauty of building that his Honour had advanced; all of the hard quarry-stone; every room so spacious, so well belighted, and so high roofed within; so seemly to sight by due proportion without; at day time on every side so glittering by glass; at nights, by continual brightness of candle, fire and torch-light, transparent through the lightsome windows’.13 Bess very likely attended herself and, prompted by the ‘rare beauty’ of the castle, begged Leicester for the loan of his plasterer.

  She would certainly have followed the building of Kenilworth with interest. Leicester was some ten years the younger, but, as the son of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, he and Bess had known each other from the days of Bess’s marriage to William Cavendish. Besides their building projects, both shared a love of hangings and textiles, of which Leicester had an impressive collection, including many very costly gilt leather hangings and over eighty Turkish or Persian carpets.14 Leicester proved a loyal friend to both Shrewsburys, offering the use of his rooms at court and his London house on several occasions, insisting: ‘command and dispose of house and all that is in it even as you would of your very own and I pray you think that next her Majesty there is no two in England better welcome than your lord and your self is’.15 And he did what he could to further not just their own interests, but those of their children too.