Devices and Desires Read online

  That the Shrewsbury marriage was in trouble was by now a matter of common knowledge, and their servants were taking sides. In April 1580, Nicholas Booth told Thomas Kniveton, Bess’s brother-in-law, that Shrewsbury had been full of ‘great speeches’ about Bess and had written to the Queen and the Privy Council ‘touching some hard and indirect dealing [regarding revenues] by my lady and Mr Harry Cavendish’. He did not see much hope of reconciliation.31 After his summer sojourn at Buxton, Leicester, at the Queen’s request, went to see Bess at Chatsworth, ‘to let her know how sorry’ Her Majesty was to hear of a ‘breech’ between the Shrewsburys. Leicester, as he reported to the Earl, found Bess ‘in very great grief’. When asked whether there was any truth in the rumours that she had been threatening the Earl, ‘as though she knew things by you that she could harm you if she listed’, she replied ‘calmly saying I think there is no man able to say it of me’. Rather, she claimed, she had been subjected to such treatment ‘as were enough to alienate the heart and duty of any wife’, including being ‘slighted’ in front of the Earl’s servants.32

  Behind Bess’s threats – most likely made – lay her suspicions about the Earl’s relations with the Queen of Scots. But the more immediate and obvious cause of conflict was money, for which, as the Earl complained to his steward Thomas Baldwin, he was being continually pressed by his wife – ‘the old song’.33 Bess was far from without means of her own: in addition to her £1,000 yearly allowance, she had, since 1572, the income from the St Loe lands. How she used that income is unclear (to buy more land, Shrewsbury would claim), but she certainly looked to the Earl to meet her expenses. In June, he told her that he was only able to provide £50 of the £150 she wanted, since he was waiting in vain for various creditors to pay up. ‘You have stopped my mouth for bringing of you any, your want being so great and therefore in that matter I cannot help you, so many breaking promises with me.’34 ‘Your want being so great’ – there was no end, it appeared, to Bess’s demands.

  The state of the Shrewsbury marriage worried the Queen, not out of any great personal concern, but because dissension between the Earl and Bess, like that amongst the Shrewsbury tenants, might be exploited by supporters of the Queen of Scots. In 1579, Gilbert Talbot, apropos of rumours at court of ‘no good agreement’ between the Shrewsburys, had warned that if Elizabeth came to believe ‘that there were jars between them, she would be in such a fear as it would sooner be the cause of the removing of my Lordship’s charge than any other thing’.35 However welcome Mary’s removal might be, it could not be seen to reflect badly on the Earl, as a stain on his conduct.

  In November 1581, Elizabeth dispatched Robert Beale, Clerk of the Council and Walsingham’s brother-in-law, to Sheffield. He was to assess the situation there, to discover, if possible, Mary’s intentions (she had been busily corresponding with the King of France about her restoration to the Scottish throne, where she would co-rule with her son James) and to remind her that ‘the usage she receives’ was ‘much better than she deserves’.36 For much of his three-week visit, Mary was bedridden, complaining bitterly of the old pain in her side. During one especially bizarre interview he found the Queen of Scots and her women, all of them weeping, in complete darkness, with Mary claiming, faintly, that she was dying. When Bess was sent to see her, her verdict was tart: ‘in her opinion she had known her far worse than she presently was’.37 Beale was nonplussed: ‘the parties are so wily with whom a man deals’. Who, if anyone, could be believed? All he could say for certain was that Mary was genuinely ill. He came away with her assurances that she would recognise Elizabeth as the lawful Queen of England, and would have no more dealings with foreign powers, but such assurances counted for little. And Mary won some concessions – permission to ride out in a coach and horses in Sheffield Park.

  Bess saw Mary infrequently, on her occasional visits to Sheffield, and the days of gossiping over embroidery were long gone. Her public stance on the Queen of Scots was one of sceptical impatience – there was nothing much wrong with her and whatever she said should be treated with caution – but privately she was quite prepared to use Mary to further her own ends. In July 1582, in a ‘secret letter’ to Bess, Charles Cavendish asked whether Mary could write a letter on his behalf saying she had known a certain individual ‘in the duke’s time’ – this would somehow hobble the man, rendering him harmless. The request was passed on and Mary replied: she was glad to hear of Bess and her ‘little niece’ (Arbella), but she didn’t have an ‘acquaintance with the old man’, and felt that if she wrote she would put both Charles and Bess ‘in hazard by my letters rather than to do him thereby any good at all’.38 This is an opaque exchange – the identity of the old man and what exactly Bess and Charles were after is a mystery, but it reveals Bess as neither so indifferent to, nor so distant from, the Queen of Scots as she professed.

  The Shrewsburys were together at Sheffield for the Christmas of 1581. During the Twelfth Night celebrations, Elizabeth Lennox fell ill, and on 21 January, she died. In her will, made a few days before her death, she hopefully left the lands from which her £400 pension was paid to her daughter Arbella, and, presumably to reinforce that hope, her ‘best jewel set with great diamonds’ to the Queen. Leicester, Burghley, Walsingham and Sir Christopher Hatton were asked to continue their goodwill to the ‘smale orphant’. Elizabeth’s white sables went to Bess, and a gold salt cellar to Shrewsbury, as a token of thanks for being a good father to her.39

  Bess, always an odd mixture of the hard-headed and the sentimental, had been happy enough to use Elizabeth as a marriageable commodity, but was greatly distressed by her death. The Earl told Walsingham that ‘the poor mother takes her daugther’s death so grievously and so mourneth and lamenteth that she cannot think of ought but tears’.40 Grief, however, did not get in the way of practicalities – the question of six-year-old Arbella’s maintenance. On the 28th, Bess wrote to both Walsingham and Burghley, hoping that Arbella would get her mother’s ‘portion’ (Elizabeth’s £400 pension, in addition to Arbella’s £200), ‘for her better education and training up in all good virtue and learning and so the sooner may she be ready to attend on her Majesty’.41 This was the key point – Arbella’s proximity to the Queen. A ‘better education’ was simply her due.

  Her Majesty recognised no such requirement and did not oblige. In May, Bess tried again, with further letters to Burghley and Walsingham. She could not remember her daughter ‘but with a sorrowful, troubled mind’; now she was pleading the case of the ‘poor infant, my jewel Arbella, who is to depend wholly upon her majesty’s bounty and goodness’. She hoped that the Queen would ‘confirm that grant of the whole six hundred pounds yearly for the education of my dearest jewel’.42 This education, the ‘dearest jewel’ being of royal blood, not to mention keeping Arbella ‘with such as are fit to attend upon her and be in her company’, was, she pointed out, an expensive business, though Arbella was proving to be a gifted child, a child worthy of investment and ‘of very great towardness to learn anything’.43 The Queen remained unmoved, but Arbella now became the focus of Bess’s ambitions – watched over, cosseted and groomed, so she hoped, for a glorious future.

  13.

  ‘Send Me Accres’

  ‘I pray you send me Accres so soon as you can for I may spare him no longer’, wrote Shrewsbury peremptorily to Bess in October 1580.1 ‘Accres’ was Thomas Accres, the great stonemason, who had been working at Chatsworth and was now required by the Earl for his new building project at Worksop. He had decided to remodel a hunting lodge, built by his father, on the edge of Sherwood Forest.

  Nothing of Worksop remains – it burned to the ground in 1761 – but drawings show an extraordinary building, compact, immensely tall (incorporating the existing lodge necessitated a narrow site, so it was decided to build upwards; the parapet was some ninety feet above ground and the turrets higher still) and wrapped around by great bands of windows. It looks monumental and fortress-like, but softened and lightened by the expanses of
glass and the domed turrets. These, with their circular glass walls, would have made thrilling prospect rooms, from which to look down on the surrounding forest and watch the hunt.

  As at Chatsworth and Hardwick, Worksop’s second floor was taller than the first and almost entirely taken up by the long gallery – 212 feet long and 36 feet wide, with ranges of huge windows on three sides. It was much admired at the time, and set something of a gold standard for galleries. In 1590, Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, wrote to Gilbert Talbot: ‘It were a much more ease for a man’s coach or horses to visit you at Chelsea with a fair pair of oars from London than to come through your craggy stoney lanes where in seeking for the fairest gallery in England a man shall meet never a cup of good drink.’*2 Getting to Worksop took some doing, but it was worth the effort.

  Worksop was a great house, but one can’t but wonder why Shrewsbury built it at all. He was hardly short of houses, what with South Wingfield Manor, Sheffield Manor and Castle and the new lodge, Tutbury Castle, Rufford Abbey, Welbeck Abbey and his London homes. Improvements at Shrewsbury House were barely completed and building work at Sheffield was ongoing, with more work on the manor from 1583. This came at a cost. And all the while the Earl was complaining bitterly about the parlous state of his finances – so much so that he told Thomas Baldwin, his London steward, that he was contemplating selling off plate and his ship, the Talbot, just to raise cash.3 Why then did he embark on an enormous, expensive and superfluous house?

  It may have been to rival Chatsworth and outdo Bess. Having watched the expansion of Chatsworth, that ‘devouring gulf of mine and other your husbands goods’, Shrewsbury might simply have wanted to spend his money on his own house rather than see it swallowed up by his wife’s. He now saw an opportunity to build something bolder and more contemporary. However, besides an element of marital one-upmanship, there was also the spur of a new house under construction in Nottinghamshire, a house that would have been the talk of the Midlands in the 1580s – Wollaton.

  From its hilltop site, Wollaton now looms over the sprawl of Nottingham, but once this was farmland, whose inhabitants would have marvelled at the emergence of a great glittering edifice, topped by a kind of giant conservatory (the glass prospect room), ‘standing bleakly’, in the words of William Camden, ‘but offering a very goodly prospect to the beholders far and near’.4 Wollaton was built by Sir Francis Willoughby, a complicated, curious man – highly cultured, brilliant, uncomfortable and quarrelsome. Willoughby was a ‘projector’ (speculator), in coal (profits, as much as £1,000 a year, from the coal fields that surrounded Wollaton funded its building), iron, woad and property, but he managed his affairs badly, overextending himself with compulsive land-buying, disastrous investments and grandiose schemes.5 He was a much less successful businessman than Bess, to whom he would turn to for loans in the 1590s.

  The Willoughbys were originally Nottinghamshire gentry, prosaically named ‘Bugge’, who, thanks to some judicious marrying, accumulated large estates rich in coal and, to a lesser extent, iron. Having been orphaned at the age of two, Francis was shunted about between relatives, including several years with his uncle, Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, at Bradgate (Grey had bought the wardship of Francis’s older brother Thomas), though at a later date than Bess. Along the way, probably encouraged by Grey, he acquired an excellent classical education. When his brother died in 1559, Francis, at the age of thirteen, became heir, and his wardship was bought by Sir Francis Knollys, Treasurer of the Queen’s Chamber.

  The young Francis, already showing a certain contrariness, refused to marry Knollys’ daughter, and when the executors of his father’s will bought out the wardship, he became independent. In 1564, he married Elizabeth Lyttelton, with whom he had six daughters, and a son who died young. The lack of heir, Elizabeth’s chronic ill health and her habit of running up debts and running down to London made for incessant quarrels and a wretched marriage. Elizabeth was said to be wilful and fiery. During one of her many visits to Buxton, Sir Francis wrote hoping that ‘with the recovery of her health she may also put on a tractable mind and let her self-will give place to reason’.6 The quarrels went on, and, in much the same way as those of the Shrewsburys, were exploited by their servants. In 1582, Elizabeth petitioned the Queen for a separation (Sir Francis was ordered to pay her £200 a year maintenance), though she returned to Wollaton in 1588.

  Sir Francis fought not just with his wife, but with everyone around him – daughters, son-in-law (Percival Willoughby, a cousin, married Sir Francis’s eldest daughter Bridget, and became his heir), servants – all of whom also fought with each other. Wollaton was a house of turbulence and discord, riven by distrust and rivalries, something that seems reflected in its exterior (the interiors were almost entirely remodelled by Jeffry Wyatville in the nineteenth century). In many ways Wollaton is a monstrous building, heavy and hectic, overcrowded with ornament, overwhelmed with glass. The prospect room, known at the time as the ‘High Hall’, is astonishing but was utterly impractical – reached by the narrowest of stairs, with no fireplace or furniture, a space for Sir Francis and his guests to walk in and admire the view but not to sit, linger or relax.

  Wollaton is a restless house built for a restless patron. But a patron who wanted his house to be noticed. Willoughby, ‘out of ostentation to show his riches’ (Camden again), ‘built at vast charges a very stately house, both for the splendid appearance and curious workmanship of it’.7 For help in building something splendid and curious, he turned to Robert Smythson.

  Sir Francis would have known of Smythson through his sister Margaret, who was married to Sir Matthew Arundell, for whom Smythson had worked at Wardour Castle during his years at Longleat. In 1580, after the death of Sir John Thynne, Smythson came north, to Wollaton. He was employed as a ‘Surveyor’, drawing up plans for Sir Francis’s new house (a plan for the ground floor and gardens, and drawings of a turret and the hall screen, survive), and he remained at Wollaton, living in the village and acting as a kind of bailiff – collecting rents and drawing up inventories of bedding – until his death in 1614. Along the way he became a gentleman, meriting a ‘Mr’ in the building accounts. His name first appears in those accounts in 1584, paying wages to the masons at the quarry at Ancaster. He also ordered and paid for materials. Aside from the design, he oversaw and managed the whole project.

  Smythson was a highly skilled and versatile draughtsman, as can be seen from his surviving drawings, exquisite things in their own right. Besides plans and elevations for houses, he turned his hand to the design of windows, chimney-pieces, hall screens, beds, tools, tombs, summer houses and gardens. He learned from the buildings he worked on, the craftsmen he worked with and the architectural manuals that came his way. Since the 1560s, pattern books and engravings showing architectural ornament had been coming off the printing presses in Antwerp, while the persecution of Flemish Protestant craftsmen meant that many made their way to England. This led to strapwork (stone carved into interlaced ribbons or straps), for example, inspired by Hans Vredeman de Vries, becoming increasingly common. Strapwork was used extensively at Wollaton, and later at Hardwick (amongst the Smythson drawings are copies of details from Vredeman de Vries’s Varia architecturae formae). Smythson would also have had access to Sir Francis’s extensive library, which contained a great many architectural books and prints by such as Sebastiano Serlio, Vitruvius, Palladio, Jacques Androuet du Cerceau and John Shute. In Serlio (published in separate books from 1537 and in a single edition in 1575), Smythson would have discovered illustrations, derived from Roman builders, of classical features such as order, proportion and symmetry, as well as plans for villas with towers containing prospect rooms. In du Cerceau’s handbooks, he would have come across the kind of geometrical devices that he would employ in houses like Hardwick.

  Having worked at Longleat, alongside his fellow mason the Frenchman Alan Maynard, Smythson had plenty of experience of classical ornament. However, the excesses of Wollaton – the proliferation
of ornament – probably shows the hand of Sir Francis, a patron with wide-ranging intellectual interests. Wollaton, in all its strangeness, stands as a synthesis of ideas, influences and styles, filtered through Willoughby, Smythson and the craftsmen.

  Craftsmen, and masons in particular, moved about the country in groups, from site to site, wherever the work took them. Thus Smythson brought some of his Longleat team with him – Christopher Lovell (son of Humphrey) and John Hills, both masons, and Richard Crispin, a carpenter. They were joined by men who had been employed elsewhere in the Midlands – the mason brothers John and Christopher Rhodes, who had been working on Sheffield Manor and William Dickenson’s (Shrewsbury’s bailiff) house, and Thomas Accres, who was at Wollaton in 1584, presumably ‘spared’ by either Shrewsbury or Bess. The Rhodes brothers, Accres and Hills would all go on to Hardwick.

  By the time it was finished in 1588, Wollaton had cost around £8,000, though this did not include some boon work (free labour extracted from Willoughby tenants) and the fact that stone was traded for coal – carriers bringing the Ancaster stone with which the house was faced (on a brick core) from Lincolnshire, forty miles away, had their panniers reloaded with coal.8 Wollaton was the first house that Smythson designed from scratch, and his least harmonious, though that was probably due in large measure to the influence and interference of his patron. But it was a new kind of house – an outward-looking house, rather than an inward-looking courtyard house – which got him talked about and brought him to the attention of the Shrewsburys.

  Wollaton didn’t stop Smythson from taking on other projects.* Bess would have known of Smythson through her old friend Sir John Thynne, and once he was established at Wollaton, it would have been easy enough to seek him out. The Stand at Chatsworth, above the house, at a fine vantage point for hunt-viewing, may have been designed by Smythson. Built in the early 1580s, it’s a square tower, with four domed turrets that recall the banqueting houses at Longleat and prefigure those at Worksop, and exquisite plasterwork ceilings.