Devices and Desires Read online

  Charles Cavendish was also at ‘Tibaldes’, from where he wrote his mother a long letter, reporting on Arbella’s reception: ‘her majesty spoke to her twice, but not long and examined her nothing touching her book, she dined in the [royal] presence’. The dinner had taken place in Burghley’s great chamber, and if the Queen’s show of favour had hardly amounted to much, Burghley had made a point of praising Arbella, telling Sir Walter Ralegh, the dashing explorer, suppressor of Irish rebellions and new royal favourite, of her accomplishments in languages, music and dancing. If only, said Burghley, Arbella ‘were twenty years old’, whereupon he teasingly pulled Ralegh’s ear. ‘It would be a happy thing,’ replied Ralegh, entering into the tease. The dinner ended with a royal compliment for Burghley – the Queen ‘heartily prayed that god would lend her his life for 21 years for she desired not to live longer than she had him, which prayer was so kindly expressed that the good old lord could not return thanks nor other speech for tears’.

  Charles himself thought highly of his niece: ‘It is wonderful how she profits in her book, besides she will dance with an exceeding good grace and can behave herself with great proportion to every one in their degree.’ In fact, behaving ‘with great proportion’ was not Arbella’s strong suit. Just a year later, on visiting the court at Greenwich, she disgraced herself by insisting on taking precedence over ladies of higher rank as they walked to chapel. When asked to step back by the Master of Ceremonies, she replied haughtily that her chosen place was ‘the very lowest position that could be given her’.*11 She was promptly ordered back to Derbyshire; it would be three years before she returned to court.

  Charles continued his letter with news of the war in the Low Countries, snippets of court gossip and bulletins on family health: Mary Talbot still had a touch of jaundice, William Cavendish was in bed with a cricked neck; the King of Scotland was rumoured to be marrying a Spanish princess; at court, there was ‘none in that height as my Lord of Essex’. The tall, handsome Essex was Leicester’s twenty-one-year-old stepson Robert Devereux, a scholar-soldier, in whom Leicester took great pride – he ‘striketh’ Leicester ‘marvellously’, wrote Charles – and who was poised to succeed his stepfather in the Queen’s affections. As for Ralegh, Charles thought him in fine form, ‘yet labours to underprop himself by my Lord Treasurer and his friends’. Ralegh’s rise to fame and fortune, and the arrogance with which he flaunted both, had made him extremely unpopular amongst the old guard at court, as Charles well knew: ‘I see he is courteously used by my lord and his friends but I doubt the end considering how he hath handled himself in his former pride.’

  But much of Charles’s letter was taken up by describing the latest additions to Theobalds. The house was staggering in its scale, but it was the inventiveness of its interiors, the ways in which Burghley brought the outside in, that was a source of wonderment. Whimsy and frivolity are hardly qualities we associate with Burghley, yet his buildings had a playful quality: there is something of the fairy-tale castle about the ‘roof-scape’ of Burghley House, with its clusters of onion domes, turrets, chimneys and clock towers; and something of the enchanted forest about the interiors of Theobalds.

  Charles (correctly) judged Burghley’s ‘fair gallery’ to be 126 feet long, 21 feet wide and 16 feet high, with bay windows on one side. A painted frieze, running above the panelling, showed the cities of the world. The long gallery was distinct from the green gallery, which was decorated as a kind of heraldic arboretum, with fifty-two trees, each representing an English county, the branches and leaves painted with the coats of arms of local dukes, earls and knights. But it was Burghley’s great chamber that was particularly admired. This was on the second floor and looked out onto the ‘great garden’. It was, as Charles told Bess, 60 feet long, 22 feet wide and 21 feet high, and had, at one end, ‘a fair rock with ducks, pheasants, and divers other birds which serves for a cupboard’ (this was a kind of grotto, complete with fountain). The ceiling was decorated with a sundial and the signs of the zodiac, beneath which a mechanised sun and planets rotated; at night stars shone through ‘sky holes’ cut into the roof. The ‘old trees be there still’ – six along each side, made of plaster and covered with natural bark, leaves and birds’ nests, and so realistic, it was said, that birds flew in through the open windows, alighted on them and sang.12

  It sounds as though Bess had instructed Charles to provide a detailed description of Theobalds though it would be surprising, given her friendship with Burghley and her interest in his house, if she never visited herself. She was on the lookout for ideas for Hardwick. The decoration of the Forest Great Chamber in the Old Hall and the High Great Chamber in the New, with their naturalistic plasterwork, clearly derive from the great chamber at Theobalds.

  By the spring of 1588, building at the Old Hall was gearing up once again. In March, sieves and baskets were bought for the plasterers and the lime kilns were drawn. Work now began on another four-storey wing, to the west of the hall, with the kitchens on the ground floor, and a great chamber, the Hill Great Chamber, on the fourth, and it proceeded at an amazing rate. Thomas Hollingworth, a rough-waller, and his men were paid to erect the walls by the ‘rood’ (a measure of area), the higher the walls, the more per rood, a grand total of £73 for 290 roods when, by mid December, in just six months, the walls had risen to the top of the fourth storey. The labour was immense: over the summer, between early June and the end of August, seventy-three cartloads of timber, to make floors and roofs, were dragged in carts by oxen from Pentrich, eight miles away.13 This was an operation fraught with difficulty and danger: wet weather made tracks, rudimentary at the best of times, virtually impassable, thus escalating costs; wheels could and often did break; harnesses wore out; the shoulders and necks of the oxen were rubbed raw by the wooden yokes and had to be eased with ‘black soap’, while their feet needed regular shoeing and their hooves treating with ‘vergrease’.

  Bess, at least in the early stages of the building of the Old Hall, seems to have tried to keep down costs, probably because she was still trying to extract money from Shrewsbury. Much of the Old Hall was walled – walls were built on a core of rubble and then rendered – by rough-wallers, who, at 4d a day, were cheaper than masons. However, her use of wallers may simply have been due to a lack of available masons. John and Christopher Rhodes and Thomas Accres, who would all be key to the building of the New Hall, were still employed at Wollaton in 1588.

  As the walls of the west wing rose, the Spanish Armada prepared to set sail. After the death of the Queen of Scots, Philip II, who could claim descent from John of Gaunt and who had not forgotten his brief occupation of the English throne, fashioned himself as the restorer of the Catholic faith to England. The Armada was to join the Duke of Parma’s army in the Netherlands, from where they would together invade England. At the end of May, 130 Spanish ships, carrying 19,000 soldiers and 7,000 sailors, left Lisbon. England braced itself, nervously, for invasion, without knowing exactly where or how that invasion would take place. In June, the Queen wrote to her lord lieutenants, including Shrewsbury – as Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire and Staffordshire, he was to assemble the gentlemen of the county and ensure that they provided men for the defence of the country.14

  On 18 July, the first sails were spotted off the Scilly Isles, and from there the Armada sailed purposefully up the English Channel, en route to meet Parma, an impressive and terrifying sight. However, the Spanish suffered setbacks from the off, thanks to bad weather and sickness, as Gilbert Talbot told his father in July, while assuring him that ‘all our preparations for defence still hold’. Smaller, faster English ships did their work too (Shrewsbury’s Talbot was used as a fire ship). That August, the Queen went to Tilbury to rally her troops. According to Leicester, her appearance ‘so inflamed the hearts of her good subjects, as I think the weakest person among them is able to match the proudest Spaniard that dares land in England’.15 In the event, not a single Spaniard landed – the great Armada scattered, destroyed by storms
and English guns.

  Whilst demonstrating all proper patriotic fervour, Shrewsbury was also keeping a close eye on his wife. In November 1588, Nicholas Kinnersley, one of Bess’s servants, wrote to her from Wingfield to report that one of the Earl’s men, Gilbert Dickenson, and a ‘boy in a green coat’ had come from Sheffield and nosed about, asking the Wingfield servants questions about Bess’s whereabouts. What these questions meant, ‘I know not except it be to bring my lord word of your absence here and so that he might come upon the sudden and find you away.’ He thought Bess should return to Wingfield. Apart from foiling the Earl, Arbella needed taking in hand. She was ‘merry’ and eating ‘her meat well’ but hadn’t been to school for the last six days.16 Arbella’s wilfulness, as displayed on her last visit to court, did not go unnoticed. Shrewsbury remarked that she ‘was wont to have the upper hand of my wife and her daughter Mary, but now it is otherwise . . . for that they have been advised by some of their friends at the court that it was misliked’.17 A few months later, Kinnersley wrote to Bess again: he was sending her some of her ‘principal jewels’ and she was not to worry: ‘take no thought but be merry for you shall find all things here I trust in good order as you left them for we neither will yield to commandment nor force except your honour’s hand’.18

  Why Shrewsbury was bothering to spy on Bess, or what he hoped to discover, is unclear. Perhaps he simply wished to make her feel uncomfortable at Wingfield, to maintain a vaguely threatening presence. In September 1589, he bought the Barley estate from Peter Barley, and with it Bess’s dower from her first husband Robert, now worth about £100 a year. This made some sense in that the estate adjoined Talbot lands, and came with the Barley lead mines, but the Earl paid a high price – £8,000, with the estate encumbered with £7,000 worth of debt.19 He hardly needed more debt; this sounds like a purchase made for reasons of control – over Bess’s dower – rather than commerce. ‘Queer what a dear purchase Barley is’, wrote Gilbert Talbot later.

  In March 1589, Thomas Hollingworth and his men were contracted to add a fourth floor to the east wing of the Old Hall, with a second great chamber – the Forest Great Chamber – a withdrawing chamber, bedchambers and a new staircase. Why Bess wanted another great chamber when she already had a very spectacular example in the west wing is curious, but the most likely explanation is that the west wing was to be made over to William Cavendish, while she herself would occupy the east wing, and she therefore needed her own suite of state rooms. In addition to the new storey, work began on the service buildings – brewhouse, bakehouse, stables, wash-house and dairy – on the west side of where the stable yard is today (a slaughterhouse, chandler house, still house and smithy came later).

  By now, with her lands and rents secured, Bess felt able to spend. The walls of the new east wing were faced with ashlar (cut stone) rather than rendered, and there were no economies when it came to the decoration of the interiors. For the Forest Great Chamber, she ordered an elaborate frieze of forest scenes in three-dimensional painted plaster, inspired by Theobalds, and Abraham Smith was set to work carving his great overmantels. Plasterwork overmantels were first cast onto wooden frames, which, once set, were fastened to the walls with ‘hicks’ (hooks). Designs were frequently taken from Flemish prints and engravings, as with Smith’s very splendid overmantel in the Hill Great Chamber (still intact today), which shows the giant muscular figures of Gog and Magog flanking the winged figure of Desire. It’s based on an engraving, The Triumph of Patience, by Maarten van Heemskerck, published in 1559, of Desire and Hope leading Patience on a chariot, with Fortune shackled behind.20 Both Patience and Fortune are missing from Smith’s overmantel, but visitors would have been expected to recognise the allusion to Bess’s situation – Patience triumphing over the ill fortune she has suffered at the hands of her husband, exactly the kind of device that would have appealed to Elizabethan tastes. Much of the decoration of both the Old and New Halls was inspired by Flemish prints, but whether these were supplied by one of Bess’s craftsmen, such as John Balechouse, or whether she had a collection of her own, we don’t know.

  The Old Hall, when it was finally finished, was actually decorated more elaborately than the New would be, with gilded leather wall hangings (pricey and mostly imported from the Low Countries) and floor-to-ceiling panelling. It was perhaps with the adornment of the Old Hall in mind that Henry Cavendish was dispatched to Constantinople in 1589, though he may have been sounding out trading possibilities too. This, as Grace Cavendish rightly said, was a ‘long and dangerous journey’, and thanks to a journal kept by Henry’s servant Fox, we have a record of it. Henry, together with a friend and three servants, sailed to north Germany at the end of March. From here, the party made their way south, by wagon, to Venice, took a boat to Dubrovnik and continued across Dalmatia, often on horseback, sleeping wherever they could – stables, hen coops – and eating bad food (a particular bugbear of Fox’s). They arrived in Constantinople in June. Fox has disappointingly little to say about the city itself, beyond the ‘evil build’ of the houses and the ‘rude and proud’ inhabitants, and considering they’d spent nearly three months on the road, their stay was a brief two weeks. They returned via Poland, reaching England by the end of September, perhaps bringing with them some of the thirty-two ‘turkie carpets’ mentioned in the Hardwick inventory.21

  By 1590, Bess had an impressive and very substantial house, yet an oddly incoherent and unbalanced one, with an irregular gabled central block flanked by two towering flat-roofed wings, the eastern set at an odd angle, possibly because it incorporated an existing building. Because of its position on the edge of an escarpment, the Old Hall faced north, rather than, more naturally, looking west across the valley, and the north front was left quite flat and unadorned. In its height and plainness it must have been reminiscent of Worksop, but it was also rather grim and forbidding. Inside, things were equally disorganised. Placing the kitchen in the west wing meant that the prevailing southwest wind would have carried cooking smells right through the house, as well as noise into the bedchambers above. Bess’s bedchamber, on the third floor of the east wing, was on the cold north side of the house, while her withdrawing chamber was inconveniently on the floor above. Similarly, the long gallery was on the third floor and the Forest Great Chamber on the fourth. The Old Hall may have sufficed in terms of size and grandeur, but architecturally and practically it was far from perfect. It was a house built in extremis and it suffered as a result. Bess, however, would have another chance to rectify her mistakes.

  While Bess shuttled between Wingfield and Hardwick, her children kept her abreast of events at court, and abroad. In July 1589, Gilbert Talbot told her how the Earl of Essex had been angling to get his hands on Tutbury, which was leased to Shrewsbury by the Queen, because it was very near his ‘chief house’, and had applied to the Queen, who had said that she wouldn’t give it to anyone else. However, according to Gilbert, Essex had so much respect for his ‘house’ and such ‘great good affection’ for Gilbert himself that he was willing to ‘surcease his suit’. He went on to provide a graphic account of the murder of Henry III, King of France, by a Dominican friar, or a man masquerading as a friar, in revenge for the killing of the Duke of Guise and his brother. The ‘friar’ had pulled ‘a long, sharp pointed knife’ out of his sleeve and stabbed the King, who had ‘himself wrested the knife out of the villain’s hand (some say he pulled it out of his own body)’ and ‘stabbed the varlet two or three times into the face and head therewith’. On the news of the King’s death, Sir Christopher Hatton had been summoned to court from Holdenby, where he was celebrating the marriage of his nephew. In a postscript, Mary Talbot reported that the Queen had asked ‘carefully’ after Arbella, which could have meant something or nothing at all and would not have greatly satisfied Bess.22

  Gilbert knew that Essex, as the new man at court, was not to be alienated. And so did Bess, though when, in 1590, he wrote to her recommending one of his former servants as a gentleman usher in he
r own household, she seems to have ignored the request.23 The old guard were vanishing fast. Leicester had died in September 1588, on his way to Kenilworth, bloated and florid at fifty-five. Walsingham followed him in 1590, and Hatton a year later, owing £42,000 to the Crown, bankrupted by Holdenby, a house he had barely used. Their deaths meant the loss of Bess’s friends and supporters at court, though she still had an ally in Burghley. Shrewsbury’s health was failing too. He told Burghley, in January 1589, that he was unable to ‘stir abroad’, or take any exercise at all, and only warmth helped, something that was in short supply during a Yorkshire winter.24

  The Queen wrote in December 1589 enquiring after the Earl’s health, ‘especially at this time of the fall of the leaf’, and asking that Bess be allowed to see him occasionally, ‘which she hath now of a long time wanted’. The chances of that were slim – Shrewsbury showed no sign of softening towards his wife, though, unexpectedly, he did towards Mary Talbot. In April 1590, he wrote to Mary with real affection: he was sorry to hear that she was unwell, which he felt could only have been caused by ‘your extraordinary pains taken in visiting and comforting others . . . good daughter let me hear from you more often’. He prayed God to bless her with good health; he himself could barely write his name and had to resort to the services of a clerk.25 ‘My father’s kind letter to my wife’, wrote Gilbert on the envelope, in surprise. This is one of the Earl’s last surviving letters. On 18 November, aged sixty-two, he died at Handsworth Manor, Sheffield.