Devices and Desires Read online

  In May 1577, Bess wrote to Leicester thanking him for ‘an infinite number of goodnesses to me and mine’, and especially for his efforts to find a match for Elizabeth Lennox, whose ‘well bestowing’ was her mother’s ‘greatest care’. Having failed to secure the Lennox inheritance for her widowed daughter, Bess was anxious to find her a new husband, no doubt aware that as long as she remained unmarried, financial support would have to be provided by the Shrewsburys. Leicester had proposed various candidates, but Elizabeth was apparently no longer quite so obliging – ‘she says ever to me she can not determine herself to like of any for a husband whom she never saw nor knoweth not his liking of her’.16

  Bess repaid Leicester’s hospitality and kindness in whatever ways she could. When his sister, Lady Mary Sidney, mother of the poet Philip, was in need of a London house over the winter of 1576, Bess begged her husband for the loan of his at Coldharbour, near London Bridge. She assured Shrewsbury that Mary would only take the house on condition that if he wanted it himself, ‘you may have it upon two days warning to be made ready for you’, but she must have known that the Earl’s duties as the Queen of Scots’ gaoler made it virtually impossible for him to come to London.17

  In the early summer of 1577, Leicester proposed a visit to Chatsworth, following a sojourn at Buxton. Now in his mid forties, Leicester remained highly attractive to women, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the Queen. A few years earlier, Gilbert Talbot had reported to his father how two sisters at court, Lady Sheffield (with whom Leicester had an illegitimate son) and Frances Howard, were vying for Leicester’s affections ‘and the Queen thinketh not well of them and not the better of him’.18 He was currently, secretly, courting Lettice Knollys, widow of the Earl of Essex. But middle age and good living were taking their toll; Leicester, anxious lest he ‘grow high-coloured and red-faced’, had hopes of Buxton’s waters.

  Bess, in anticipation of Leicester’s visit, determined that Chatsworth should look its best, and cracked the whip. Major construction was at an end; it was now a question of finishing off – plastering, panelling, carving chimney-pieces, etc. Blackstone was acquired to make fireplaces; sawyers were paid to cut timber for doors and floors; ‘wiskets’ (baskets) were bought for carrying mortar, and ‘strickes of heare’ (bundles of hair) and a ‘heare sive’ (sieve) for making plaster.19 A new screen (screens, made of stone or wood, divided the great hall from the service areas) was carved for the hall, and the parlour and several bedrooms were panelled (Chatsworth, when it was finished, had thirty rooms panelled, six right up to the ceiling, some inlaid with alabaster and coloured stones, an extravagance that was not repeated when it came to the more restrained decoration of Hardwick). There was landscaping too – a new orchard was walled and stocked with fruit trees, ‘tarris’ (balustrading) was added to the bridge, and ponds were dug. Over the summer of 1577, Bess employed as many as eighty-two labourers, some of them working overtime; just before Leicester’s arrival, Thomas Accres (a stone and marble carver, who would contribute much to the interiors of Hardwick) and two others were paid extra for working on a Sunday and through one night.

  Leicester had nothing but praise for the hospitality of the Shrewsburys, at both Buxton and Chatsworth. He had certainly been well fed. At Buxton, which was after all a spa of sorts, excessive eating and exercising were frowned upon as undermining the benefits of the waters. Moderation was all. Whilst at Buxton, Leicester had written to Burghley claiming that he and his brother, who had accompanied him, were diligently drinking and bathing, restricting themselves to just one or two dishes at each meal, and taking only the gentlest exercise, unlike Burghley, who, so Leicester had heard, on his last visit to Buxton had dined lavishly and ridden up to twelve miles a day.20 The list of foodstuffs sent by Bess to Buxton during Leicester’s eight-day stay rather belies such claims. A hogshead of clear wine, two hogsheads of beer and two of ale had been laid down in advance, and supplies for his first day included ‘1 buck, 24 rabbits, 4 fat capons and 12 quails’, supplemented by bread, clotted and sweet cream, sweet butter, partridges and peascods (pea pods), venison pasties, artichokes, puddings and radishes.21 Such indulgence must have continued at Chatsworth and led to Leicester developing a painful boil on his calf and being carried home on a horse litter, for which he was much teased. Was Buxton supposed to send ‘sound men halting home’?22

  News of Leicester’s fine dining reached the Queen’s ears. In skittish mood, she composed a letter thanking the Shrewsburys for entertaining her favourite (she was as yet unaware of Leicester’s affair with Lettice Knollys) and acknowledging her indebtedness to them both. She continued with some playful allusions to both Leicester’s diet and Shrewsbury’s pleas for diet money for the Queen of Scots: unless Leicester’s consumption was reduced, she would be bankrupt and unable to discharge her debts to Shrewsbury, so in future she recommended Leicester’s diet be limited to ‘two ounces of flesh’ a day, though for dinner on festival days he might be allowed ‘the shoulder of a wren and for his supper a leg of the same’.23 However, she clearly thought better of writing so facetiously – the ever-sensitive Earl was not likely to appreciate jokey references to diets and debts – and the letter was never sent. Instead, she wrote another, in more sober vein: ‘In this acknowledgement of new debts we may not forget our old debt, the same being as great as a Sovereign can owe to a subject, when through your loyal and most careful looking to the charge committed to you both we and our realm enjoy a peaceful government.’24 Whatever her reluctance to reach into her pocket, the Queen knew full well the value of the service the Earl was performing.

  Over the summer of 1577, Shrewsbury hoped to move Mary to Chatsworth for a few weeks, while Sheffield was cleaned, and he invited Burghley to break his journey from Burghley to Buxton with a stay there in August. He wanted Burghley’s advice too on a ‘lodge’ he was building (Handsworth Lodge, on the edge of the park at Sheffield Manor), for which he’d sent a ‘platt’.25 The exchange of advice and materials between patrons was reciprocal: Burghley cast his eye over Shrewsbury’s ‘platt’, and the Earl supplied him with large quantities of lead for Theobalds (lead, a particularly valuable and expensive commodity, was used for roofing, pipes and windows). ‘I think some unkindness in you being a builder and hath need of lead and will not send to me to be your purveyor’, wrote the Earl in 1578, adding Bess’s pleas: ‘my wife desires your lordship should end that house as you have begun’. A dozen fothers of lead were sent from Hull to Theobalds, a further ten fothers a few months later.26 In the 1580s, the Earl would supply Lord Ogle and Sir Christopher Hatton with lead for their building works.

  Bess’s own needs were not of course to be forgotten. As chatelaine of Chatsworth, overseeing the completion of the house and the entertainment of guests, she looked, as always, to the Earl to supply her with building materials and provisions. Her tone, in 1577, was distinctly high-handed: ‘If you cannot get my timber carried I must be without it though I greatly want it . . . I pray you let me know if I shall have the ton of iron, if you cannot spare it I must make haste to get it elsewhere. You promised to send me money before this time to buy oxen, but I see out of sight out of mind with your unkind none . . . I will send you the bill of my wood stuff . . . here is neither malt nor hops, the malt come last is so very ill and stinking as Hanks [her brewer] thinks none of my workmen will drink it.’

  It was not entirely a letter of complaint and demand; she also mentioned Gilbert’s health – he had been ‘ill in his head’ ever since he’d come from Sheffield – and alluded to the ongoing dispute between her Derbyshire neighbours, Sir John Zouch and Sir Thomas Stanhope, in which Shrewsbury, siding with Stanhope, was embroiled. She thought the Queen would grant permission for the Earl to bring Mary to Chatsworth, but since the Earl had failed to provide the necessary provisions, she assumed ‘you mind not to come’. And then came a postscript: ‘I have sent you lettuce for that you love them, and every second day some is sent to your charge and you. I have nothing else to send. Le
t me know how you, your charge and love do and commend me I pray you. It were well you sent four or five pieces of the great hangings that they might be put up and some carpets.’27 What did she mean by ‘your charge and love’? This must be an allusion to Mary. But was it merely a light-hearted tease? Or more barbed – real, not feigned, jealousy? Shrewsbury saw rather more of his ‘charge’ than he did of his wife. Bess had now reached an age – fifty-six – when her physical and sexual confidence was a little less sure, when a woman twenty years younger than herself, a woman known for her powers of attraction, might well feel a threat. Relations between the Shrewsburys were souring over the summer of 1577.

  Bess’s request for ‘four or five pieces of the great hangings’ probably included at least one set of the Virtues hangings, made in the 1570s for Chatsworth, and later removed to Hardwick (today they are to be found in the Great Hall and on the chapel landing and are some of the rarest and most valuable textiles in the house). The larger set of five hangings (of which four survive) features women of the Ancient World, flanked by personifications of their virtues: Penelope stands between Patience and Perseverance, Lucretia between Chastity and Liberality, Cleopatra between Fortitude and Justice, Zenobia between Magnanimity and Prudence, and Artemisia between Constancy and Piety. The second set, of three, which was probably only completed after Bess left Chatsworth for Hardwick in 1584, depicts the theological virtues of Faith and Hope and the cardinal virtue of Temperance (suggesting Bess valued temperance over charity), together with their opposite vices.*

  Together the two sets celebrate powerful women, several of them female rulers, but also women who were devoted wives, as well as virtues – patience, constancy, fortitude, wisdom, generosity, temperance – that Bess prized, if did not always practise (it should be remembered that her two daughters who died young were named Temperance and Lucretia). She clearly identified in particular with the patient Penelope, who featured in the decoration of both the Old and New Halls at Hardwick, and the virtuous Lucretia, but Shrewsbury, by the 1570s, would have held a rather different view. Patience was not a quality that he would have recognised in his wife. The Virtues hangings say a great deal about their creator – her eye for design and dramatic effect, her learning, her moral code – but more importantly, they say something about Bess’s idea of herself and how she wished to be seen.

  The hangings are very fine, large-scale examples of appliqué work. Bess may have seen, and been inspired by, a set of such hangings at Nonsuch, Henry VIII’s Surrey palace, made of red Turkey silk, embroidered with horsemen and figures, each of them fourteen feet square. Appliqué work was the province of professional, male embroiderers; according to Bess, hers were in the main made by her ‘grooms, women and some boys she kept’, together with Thomas Lane, an in-house embroiderer. A patchwork effect was created using pieces of velvet, cloth of gold and patterned silk, cut from late-fifteenth-century ecclesiastical vestments (orphreys and cope hoods) acquired by William St Loe, and possibly William Cavendish, during the Dissolution, and brought to Chatsworth.*

  The hangings would be fought over during the unravelling of the Shrewsbury marriage; in July 1577, their makers provoked the couple’s first major public row. This is relayed, in some detail, by Gilbert Talbot, who had his father’s penchant for prolix letters and his own gift for recalling dialogue. He told Bess of a conversation between himself and the Earl while the two men were riding the fifteen miles or so from Bolsover, a Shrewsbury property close to Hardwick, back to Sheffield. Bess and Gilbert were at this point on excellent terms. Bess had taken the Talbots’ part in their efforts to secure a home of their own. Gilbert positioned himself as a go-between in his parents’ battles – he was essentially sympathetic to his stepmother, but, perpetually short of cash, he could not afford to alienate his father. His letter, he says, is written ‘plainly and truly’, though ‘bluntly and tediously’.

  The latest quarrel had taken place at Sheffield, where Bess’s embroiderers had been locked out of the lodge overnight by John Dickenson, Keeper of the Earl’s Wardrobe. The Earl, when questioned the next morning by Bess, flatly denied any involvement and flew into a rage, using many ‘hard speeches’. These, however, as he told Gilbert, were as nothing compared to the ‘cruel speeches’ he’d had from Bess, who ‘scolded like one that came from the bank’ (the mouth of a coal pit). His wife, he said, was surrounded by ‘varlets’ who did nothing but tell tales, and he singled out Owen, one of her grooms, and the embroiderers in particular. He was expecting to find Bess back at Sheffield, and when Gilbert broke the news that she’d left the day before for Chatsworth, he ‘seemed to marvel greatly and said is her malice such she would not tarry one night for my coming . . . After he had seen all his grounds about Bolsover and was coming into the way homewards, he began with me again, saying that all the house might discern your Ladyship’s stomach against him by your departure before his coming.’

  Gilbert tried to defend Bess, citing business she had at Chatsworth, but the Earl ‘allowed not of any reason or cause’. Gilbert went on to explain how ‘grieved and vexed in mind’ Bess was, how she felt that Shrewsbury’s ‘heart was withdrawn from her’. At this, his father ‘melted and although I cannot say his very words were that he had injured and wronged you, yet both by his countenance and words it plainly showed the same . . . I know, quoth he, her love hath been great to me and mine hath been and is as great to her, for what can a man do more for his wife than I have done, and daily do for her.’ Nevertheless, replied Gilbert, Bess believed ‘that you love them that love not her and believe those about you which hate her’, and that Shrewsbury was ‘gladder of’ Bess’s ‘absence’ than her ‘presence’. ‘You know the contrary,’ protested the Earl, ‘and how often I have cursed the building at Chatsworth for want of her company.’ That night, back at Sheffield, Gilbert felt convinced that his father’s ‘heart desired reconciliation, if he knew which way to bring it to pass’.28

  Here is marital breakdown vividly dramatised – two irreconcilable versions of a single event. On the one side is Bess: all innocence and distress and forbearance, the personification of Patience, Fortitude and Temperance. And on the other, Shrewsbury: all resentment and rage and irrationality. The Earl, always acutely sensitive about matters of honour and his reputation in the eyes of the world, is mortified by Bess’s leaving Sheffield without waiting for his return – he will be diminished before his household. And she treats him so insultingly when he’s done so much for her. As always, it’s Chatsworth that comes first, that comes between them. But he loves her still.

  Bess’s feelings are more opaque. She presents herself, to Gilbert, as the injured party – bewildered that her husband’s ‘wonted love and affection is clean turned to the contrary’, ignorant of the crime she’s supposed to have committed, professing herself willing to take on his ‘grieves’ if it would give him some relief. ‘When she told me’, wrote Gilbert, ‘of her dear love towards you and now how your Lordship had requited her, she was in such perplexity as I never saw woman.’ Yet this is the same woman who ‘scolded like one that came from the bank’. Gilbert’s letter is revealing in other ways – the incident with the embroiderers is merely the latest of many quarrels, which have now extended beyond the protagonists to their households, fuelled by the gossip and backbiting of servants.

  On 1 August, after visiting Bess at Chatsworth, Gilbert wrote to her again. The Earl had questioned him less closely, but was keen to know when Bess was coming to Sheffield. Gilbert had told him that she was willing to dismiss Owen, her groom, as the Earl was ‘so offended with him’, but she still ‘knew not what offence he had committed’. To which the Earl had replied curtly, ‘it was his will for diverse causes’. In a postscript, Gilbert gave news of little George, Bess’s grandson, who ‘drinketh every day to his Lady grandmother, rides to her often but yet within the court and if he has any spice I tell him Lady grandmother is come and will see him, which he then will either quickly hide or quickly eat and then asks where Lady
Danmode is’.29

  Just over a week later, on 10 August, two-year-old George Talbot, having apparently been in perfect health, died quite suddenly. On the 12th, the Earl wrote to Burghley, preferring that his friend should hear the news from him personally rather ‘than by common report . . . though it nips me near’. He made no attempt to hide his own grief, but sounded impatient with that of his wife: ‘I doubt not my wife will show more folly than need requires, I pray your lordship write your letter to her which I hope will greatly relieve her.’30 He told Walsingham that Bess was ‘not so well able to rule her passions, and has driven herself into such a case by her continual weeping as is like to breed in her further inconvenience’. And he asked permission to go to her at Chatsworth, taking Mary with him.31 This was granted. For the moment, the Shrewsburys came together in their grief.

  12.

  ‘The old song’

  The Shrewsburys were still presenting a united front in March 1578, when Margaret Lennox died. Arbella, her granddaughter, should have now inherited the Lennox estates in England and Scotland, and the Lennox title. But the Queen, who, in an uncharacteristic act of generosity, had paid for Margaret’s state funeral in Westminster Abbey, promptly recouped the costs by appropriating most of the Lennox lands in England, while those in Scotland remained with the Crown. Furthermore, in May, the Scottish regent awarded the Lennox title to the elderly and childless Bishop of Caithness, brother of the 4th Earl of Lennox and uncle to Charles Stuart (on the Bishop’s death, it passed to Esmé Stuart, James VI’s cousin). Even the Lennox jewels, which the Countess had left to Arbella, to be held by Thomas Fowler, her secretary and executor, until Arbella was fourteen, were lost. Fowler took off to Scotland and the jewels found their way into the greedy hands of James VI. Clearly Arbella could not expect any kind of restitution from the Scots. She had been roundly cheated of her entire inheritance; it was left to Bess to fight for her rights.