Devices and Desires Read online

  The Shrewsburys set about enlisting the support of Burghley, Walsingham and Leicester – who, it was hoped, would persuade the Queen to look kindly on Elizabeth and Arbella – as well as petitioning the Queen herself. They had some success. Custody of Arbella was granted to her mother, rather than her wardship being sold outside of the family, and the Queen agreed to provide an annual pension of £400 for Elizabeth and £200 for Arbella. For Bess, however, this was not sufficient. She continued to badger Leicester, who that summer made another visit to Buxton, where Gilbert Talbot acted as his host. Leicester, as Gilbert told his parents, felt it was ‘better for him to defer her [Elizabeth Lennox’s] suits to her Majesty till his own coming to court’, when, he promised, he would be an ‘earnest solicitor’.1

  A portrait of two-year-old Arbella, commissioned by Bess, hangs at Hardwick. It shows a solemn, round-eyed child, stuffed into an elaborate dress, clutching a doll; around her neck is a triple gold chain, with a pendant shield bearing a countess’s coronet and the Lennox motto, ‘To achieve, I endure’, in French. Bess was making no bones about proclaiming her granddaughter’s rightful inheritance. In the autumn of 1578, she came to court, bringing Arbella with her, and took up lodging in two rooms, lent by Leicester, within his own apartments at Richmond Palace, where the court had decamped to avoid the plague. Bess was more than happy: ‘I had rather have albeit never so little a corner within the court than greater easement further off.’2 If she had hoped that the Queen would soften at the sight of little Arbella, such hopes were dashed, but she continued to petition for an increase to her granddaughter’s pension.

  By Christmas, Bess was back in Derbyshire, where she deposited Arbella at Chatsworth before joining the Earl at Sheffield on Christmas Eve. On 29 December, she told Walsingham that since her arrival, the Queen of Scots had kept to her bed, except for Christmas Day, and that she was ‘grown lean and sickly and sayth want of exercise brings her to that weak state. I see no danger in her of life and whatsoever she writes in excuse of herself I hope there will be advised considerations in believing her.’3 In fact, Mary’s complaints of ill health were real enough. She had recently sat for Nicholas Hilliard – a surprising bending of the rules on the part of the Queen – and his portrait shows her as still attractive, but with features beginning to blur and soften, and a lurking double chin. Mary was now thirty-six; age and nearly a decade of captivity were taking their toll.

  In February 1579, Gilbert Talbot wrote to Bess from London with news from court: ‘Her Majesty continues her very good liking of Monsieur Simier and all his company and he hath conference with her three or four times a week.’4 This was Jean de Simier, who had been sent to England by the Duke of Anjou to discuss a possible marriage between Anjou and the Queen. Anjou was the younger brother of Henry III, King of France, who had himself been proposed as a groom for Elizabeth some ten years earlier but had been unwilling to put aside his Catholicism. Anjou, who was puny, pockmarked and less than half the Queen’s forty-five years, had no such scruples and appeared enthusiastic about the match. Simier, Anjou’s ‘chief darling’, was a smooth-talking scoundrel (he had murdered his brother for having an affair with his wife, who had recently poisoned herself), but the Queen was enchanted with him, so much so that tongues at court were wagging about their frequent late-night ‘conferences’. Anjou would be the last serious candidate for the Queen’s hand, but the proposal, like those before it, came to nothing.

  Aside from court gossip, Gilbert reported on the works at the Earl’s Chelsea property, Shrewsbury House. This had been built, of brick, in 1519, around three sides of a quadrangle, backed by a large garden, on the river at Cheyne Walk. The Earl had been carrying out improvements, particularly in the Great Chamber, where coats of arms were being carved into the plasterwork ceiling and set into stained-glass windows (Shrewsbury loved heraldic glass, which was much used at Sheffield). The heraldic decoration at Shrewsbury House had been devised by William Jones, the ‘finisher’,* and Robert Cooke, the Clarenceux King of Arms. Jones, reported Gilbert, was to be given ‘good glass’ and a room in which to work and sleep; once he’d finished the glass, he was to oversee the rough-casting and panelling of such rooms as needed it. Gilbert thought that the ‘arms in glass that Clarentius the herald did bespeak’ would be ‘the fairest glasswork that is . . . anywhere in England to be found’.5 Richard Topcliffe, the Queen’s psychopathic rack-master, a Nottinghamshire man and friend of the Shrewsburys, came to inspect Cooke’s work and felt similarly about the plasterwork in the Great Chamber: it would ‘exceed in rareness of device and beauty’ any house in England.6

  A few months later, William Jones informed the Earl that his Great Chamber would be ready by the time Shrewsbury came to London, but that he was in urgent need of payment – ‘I am like to be put in prison for your lordship’s debts.’ Several noblemen, including the Earl of Derby and the Earl of Surrey, had been to see the house, and two nights in a row the Queen’s barge had moored close by and ‘stayed there with musicians playing’.7 Shrewsbury House clearly did excel ‘in rareness of device and beauty’.

  Bess was there for a few months in 1580. She had been suffering from rheumatism, as she told her daughter Mary: ‘Swete harte . . . I have been continually greatly pained in my head, neck, shoulders and arms and think it much worse in the moist weather, this day I thank God I am somewhat better and ventured to go into the garden where I was not this 5 or 6 weeks . . . I thank God that your Lord, you and all our little ones are well . . . I heard not from the court since Monday nor know nothing worthy the advertising.’8 She had had a number of visitors – Lady Arundel, Lady Strange, Lady Marcus and the Master of the Rolls. ‘I pray you let me hear this night how you and your good Lord do else I shall not sleep quietly, my jewell Arbell is well.’9

  Bess’s letters to Mary, her youngest and best-loved daughter, with their titbits of gossip, bulletins on health and enquiries after the children, are the affectionate, mundane letters of a mother. The two would always be close, even after relations with Gilbert Talbot deteriorated. Of her other daughters, Frances was long established at Holme Pierrepont with her husband, and Elizabeth, despite the fact that Arbella, and so presumably her mother, spent much of her time with Bess, never quite comes into focus. Mary, darkly handsome, with sharp, defined features, was the daughter temperamentally most like Bess – spirited and combative – though she lacked her mother’s prudence and in later years made no secret of her Catholicism. Mary, like Bess, could be a formidable foe. Writing to Sir Thomas Stanhope, a Derbyshire neighbour with whom the Talbots, like the Zouches, had a long-running feud, she didn’t hold back – Stanhope was ‘more wretched, vile and miserable than any creature living and . . . more ugly in shape than the ugliest toad in the world’. She hoped that he would be ‘damned perpetually in hell fire’.10

  Shrewsbury believed that Bess’s children were entirely ‘ruled’ by her, and they were certainly kept on the shortest of reins. However, she was also capable of being a fond, even indulgent mother (and an even fonder grandmother), solicitous over health and generous with handouts. And, as Shrewsbury acknowledged and appreciated, she treated her stepsons kindly – supportive of Gilbert and giving Henry and Edward Talbot £10 each when they set off to study in France in 1581.11

  But possibly her stepchildren found her easier than her own: Bess inspired fear as much as love, and her children dreaded her disapproval and anger. Elizabeth Lennox wrote anxiously: she could not imagine that she would have ‘continued’ in Bess’s ‘displeasure so long a time’, unless Bess had heard some ‘false bruits’.12 When, during a mock duel, Charles Cavendish injured the eye of the servant of a friend with his rapier, he appealed to Shrewsbury to intercede with Bess: ‘I beseech you to appease my Lady’s mislike to me through this crooked misfortune, which was but ill luck.’ The man was recovering and in no danger, but ‘I desire not to have the least frown of her, much less to be in her disgrace.’13 Bess’s children, her sons in particular, could ill afford to incu
r her displeasure – she held the purse strings.

  Of all her children, Henry was the most troublesome, not merely evading Bess’s control but actively opposing her. Henry was no scholar as a boy, and did not, unlike William and Charles, go to Cambridge. Soon after his marriage to Grace Talbot, he was dispatched on a tour of Europe, travelling through France and Italy with Gilbert. Back home in 1572, he became an MP for Derbyshire, being returned for six consecutive elections, and in 1574, he went off to fight in the Dutch wars against the Spanish, with a letter of recommendation from Leicester and ‘500 tall men’, mostly drawn from his estates. Bess perhaps hoped that this would be the making of him – in 1576, she asked Leicester if he could send ‘earnest letters’ to William of Orange, on Henry’s behalf.14 Whether Henry had a distinguished military career, we don’t know, but in Bess’s eyes he remained a wastrel – overly fond of gambling, racking up debts (by 1584 he was in debt to the tune of £3,000) and womanising.15 His marriage to Grace was childless, though he fathered numerous illegitimate offspring* – not for nothing was he known as ‘the common bull of Derbyshire and Staffordshire’. Grace had to endure his faithlessness without the consolation of children of her own. By the 1580s, the pair were living, miserably, at Tutbury, which had been given to them by Shrewsbury.

  Henry himself resented his mother’s disapproval. In 1585, he wrote refuting reports that he’d come to London ‘to play at dice, to seek ease and dalliance and for any other vain delight’; in fact, he was seeking ‘virtue and honour in arms’, and if others, with their ‘babbling tongues’, sought to make trouble with Bess, he was not to be blamed. ‘My study is to please your ladyship’, he claimed.16 This rings hollow. Henry, perhaps believing that having forfeited his mother’s good opinion he had nothing to lose, went out of his way to thwart her, siding with the Earl in his battles with her, and, later, with Arbella in hers. Grace tried to act as a mediator and conciliator. In 1585, she wrote, humbly, to Jane Kniveton, Bess’s half-sister, asking her to pass on a letter from Henry to Bess, ‘a suit he has to her honour which I trust she will not be offended with him for’. Perhaps hoping to soften her mother-in-law, she sent her ‘two fat capons which are not so good as I desire they were but I hope to have better shortly’, as well as a hundred wardens (cooking pears), ‘the best fruit our country will afford this year’.17

  Capons and wardens notwithstanding, Bess saw no need to bail out Henry. He was not, after all, without means – he had the Chatsworth lands settled on him by his father, and he would eventually inherit Chatsworth itself.18 Bess could do nothing to prevent this, but having written off Henry as a bad lot, she looked to William, her second son, as her de facto heir. At the age of fifteen, William had gone to Clare Hall, Cambridge, and from there to Gray’s Inn to study law – his legal skills would be put to good use when managing the Cavendish estates. He was knighted in 1580, and in 1582 he married Anne Keighley, the daughter of Henry Keighley, of Keighley, Yorkshire, who came with a gratifyingly large collection of estates in Lancashire. The pair lived with Bess, at Chatsworth and later at Hardwick, an arrangement that must have had its strains but meant that William had his mother’s ear.

  It’s hard to get much sense of William, or to greatly warm to him. We have a mere handful of letters between him and Bess, partly because for much of the time they shared a roof; such as there are are dull and businesslike. With a lawyer’s clear and tidy mind, William was the safe pair of hands who could be trusted to look after Bess’s interests and to manage and expand her estates, and he received large sums of money with which to do so (by 1584, he was enjoying £700 a year from lands bought in his name). He had his mother’s red hair, her caution and her head for business, but there’s little evidence of her spirit and singularity, and he had a reputation for meanness (something that, for all her aversion to waste and excess, was never said of Bess). His accounts, however, from the early 1600s, tell a rather different story: an interest in music and books; a taste for milk baths and fine underwear; a willingness to indulge his second wife’s love of clothes, jewels and fine furniture.19 And he had the imagination, or simply the good fortune, to employ the philosopher Thomas Hobbes as tutor to his son.*

  Of Bess’s three sons, Charles, the youngest, appears the most attractive – open-hearted, generous, loyal and brave. In 1575, Shrewsbury felt Charles was ‘easily led to folly’, having spent a night poaching with some servants, and that Bess should ‘advise him from those doings’.20 But this was no more than a young man’s escapade. He was a fine horseman and swordsman. He loved music, and was a patron of the madrigalist George Wilbye, who dedicated a book of airs to him. He also shared his mother’s passion for building and was something of an amateur architect. Although Charles had a home, Stoke Manor, just north of Chatsworth, bought by Bess in 1573, he started (but did not finish) building a house at Kirkby-in-Ashfield, just a few miles from Hardwick, and later the enchanting Little Castle at Bolsover, which was completed by his son. To Gilbert Talbot, his stepbrother, he was a steadfast friend, ‘always at his elbow, politic and having great sway with him’. Gilbert was not the easiest of friends: Charles found himself drawn into his feuds, and to help relieve his debts he took Bolsover and Welbeck Abbey off his hands.

  When it came to what she perceived to be her children’s rights, Bess fought hard whether it was a question of a pension or a marriage settlement. In 1581, Charles married Margaret Kitson, the daughter of Sir Thomas Kitson of Hengrave Hall, Suffolk. Bess had been closely involved in the negotiations, carefully going through the marriage ‘articles’ and noting in the margin her ‘answer and mind to every such particular’. She felt the Kitsons’ demands were excessive, as she told Sir Thomas Cornwallis, Sir Thomas Kitson’s father-in-law, whose help she had enlisted. She said the same to William Cavendish and Gilbert Talbot, who had been petitioning for an increase to Charles’s £400 allowance.21 Bess was having none of this: ‘I say and am sure that four hundred pounds a year is as large a proportion as any Earl allows his eldest son.’ Sir Thomas Kitson could surely do something for the couple. Charles would have £2,000 from her, but as to a further £5,000, ‘this is so great a sum as I know not which way to turn me for discharge of so much’. She was willing to promise that on her death he would have £5,000 ‘either in money or land . . . and yearly as I live care shall be had therein’, but ‘to depart with so much presently, or in short time, that can I never do except I should utterly spoil myself’.22 But she was very keen that the marriage shouldn’t founder over the question of the £5,000, and in the end, when Shrewsbury refused to stump up the money, she paid it herself, or so at least she claimed.23 Reluctant though she was to provide more than Charles’s due, Bess was equally determined that the Kitsons should do the right thing by him, and when the settlement of lands on Charles and Margaret (part of her dowry) was obstructed by a member of the Kitson family, she promptly went into battle on their behalf.24

  In July 1582, after little more than a year of marriage, Margaret died. Bess’s immediate concern was that Charles should still receive what was owed to him under the marriage settlement. She asked Cornwallis if he could use his influence with Sir Thomas Kitson to ensure that Charles was treated ‘as much to his commodity as that by her life might have come to him’. Sir Thomas was now left with just one daughter ‘and none else near to him’; surely he would treat Charles ‘as his own child and even so deal with him’? ‘I have always had so good liking of him as I hold him no less dear than one of my own’, she added unconvincingly.25 Whether Sir Thomas fell into line we don’t know, but Charles’s second wife, Catherine Ogle, the daughter of Baron Ogle, brought with her substantial lands and property – he was well provided for.

  In 1578, Nicholas Booth, a Shrewsbury bailiff, told his master that servants of Bess and William Cavendish were trying to stir up the Glossopdale tenants, in Derbyshire’s Peak District, against him.26 They succeeded. The following year, John Kniveton, one of Bess’s servants, said that he’d heard ‘very evil speeches’ of th
e Earl, who ‘had put out a number of tenants lately to their utter decay’.27 The Glossopdale tenants were up in arms, soon to be joined by those at Ashford, which belonged to Bess, under the leadership of the splendidly named Otwell Higgenbotham (later a slater at Hardwick). In protest at leases being revoked and rents being raised, they brought a petition to court, where they were examined before the Privy Council. The Earl was indignant: those few tenants who had been evicted had been causing trouble; it was a matter of a few ‘lewd persons’ inciting the rest and they deserved to be punished.28 The Council, however, found in favour of the ‘lewd persons’. Discontent amongst the Shrewsbury tenants posed a risk to the security of the Queen of Scots – a risk they could not afford. For the Earl, it was another slight.

  ‘I consider myself very hardly dealt withal’, he wrote to Burghley in 1580. And this after eleven years of faithful service as Mary’s custodian. He was still out of pocket, regularly shelling out £1,000 ‘over the shoulder’, but costs aside, there was ‘the loss of liberty, dangering of my life, and many other discomforts which no money could have hired me to’. Still, he added, ever loyal, ‘the desire I have to serve my Sovereign makes peril and pain a pleasure to me’.29 The Queen had granted permission for the Earl to take Mary to Buxton in the summer of 1580, but she would not allow him to take her to Chatsworth, where Mary Talbot was awaiting the birth of her second child.

  ‘Commend me to the great belly’, the Earl wrote to Bess. He felt that she was wrong in not allowing Elizabeth Lennox to be with her sister for the birth – ‘it were not amiss she should be with her now and Grace also’ – but in fact he had been making difficulties about Gilbert visiting his own wife at Chatsworth.30 This came out of the Earl’s growing paranoia, his sense of being maligned and exploited by those around him, and in particular his conviction that Gilbert and Mary were in cahoots with Bess against him.