Devices and Desires Read online

  The Old and New Halls at Hardwick, wrote William Camden, ‘by reason of their lofty situation show themselves afar off to be seen and yield a very goodly prospect’.22 The importance of siting a house, both within a landscape and within gardens, was beginning to be recognised by the late sixteenth century. Burghley’s house on the Strand, built in the early 1560s, had big gardens, divided into compartments, something that was recreated at Theobalds on a grander scale – the Great Garden and Privy Garden boasted a grotto, classical arcades, fountains, ponds and a ‘great sea’. Hatton had huge gardens made around Holdenby. Tresham devoted a great deal of thought to the ways in which his grounds offset and enhanced his houses. The gardens at Chatsworth featured, like Worksop, elaborate waterworks.

  Setting was clearly important to Smythson – he designed houses that commanded views from within and attention from without, and drew up plans both for and of gardens. So he positioned Wollaton on a hilltop, and, as can be seen in a surviving drawing, planned to encase the house within eight courts, containing gardens, outbuildings and courtyards, the whole forming a giant square (some, if not all, of this scheme was realised). He did something similar, albeit scaled down, at Hardwick, which is also set high and where symmetry extends from house to surroundings, with two walled orchards to the north and south and two walled courts to the east and west, an almost symmetrical scheme apart from one wall of the north orchard, which had to be set at an angle to accommodate the lie of the land.23

  The architectural historian Mark Girouard, who has written so eloquently and elegantly about Hardwick, describes it as ‘Worksop perfected and simplified, with the polish though not the exuberance of Wollaton . . . It falls happily between the over-abundance of Wollaton and the severity of Worksop.’24 For Hardwick, Smythson took the best of both houses – symmetry and setting from Wollaton, height, vast windows, recesses and bays from Worksop. Unlike Wollaton, exterior decoration is restrained, but the classical detail in the shape of the colonnades running along two sides, the entablatures between the storeys and the balustrade, and the Flemish ornament in the obelisks and strapwork along the courtyard wall, on the gatehouse and cresting the turrets is enough to soften what might otherwise be an uncompromisingly rectangular building.

  By May 1591, the walls of the New Hall were high enough for William Carpenter to begin laying ‘the new foundation floors’, and fourteen sawpits were dug at Crich Chase, nine miles away.25 Up to twenty-five wallers worked into the autumn. Work on the Old Hall continued alongside that on the New, with labourers and craftsmen shuttling back and forth between the two. Between April and August 1591, chimneys and moulding for windows in the Old Hall and steps and doors for the stable were hewn, the embroiderer’s chamber and Bess’s withdrawing chamber were panelled, all the windows were glassed, ‘a great mashinge fatt’ – a vat for mashing barley to make beer – was made for the brewhouse, and top soil was cleared to enlarge the quarry.

  In November, a ‘bargain’ was drawn up between Bess and the mason John Rhodes for most of the stonework for the New Hall – walls, cornice, architrave, windows, door cases, stairs. He was paid by measure, according to the difficulty of the job: ashlar at 71/2d per foot, windows at 4d, architrave at 71/2d, and cornice at 6d, an enormous £890 in total. John Rhodes worked with his brother Christopher (Christopher left Hardwick in 1593, with 10s. from Bess), and they came to Hardwick from Wollaton, having previously worked on Shrewsbury’s Turret House at Sheffield. Mason families were common – Thomas Tresham’s Triangular Lodge was built by a father and three sons, Owlcotes by the four Plumtree brothers.

  A house was found for John Rhodes and, in December 1591, enlarged by the addition of two bays, at Bess’s expense. The New Hall was a huge job, and Rhodes, though he was illiterate and signed receipts with an ‘X’, must have been an extremely competent organiser and manager. In order to pay his men fairly, he needed to know who was responsible for what, and here masons’ marks were key: the ashlar (cut stone) blocks bore two sets of marks – these can still be seen today – one made by the mason who cut the stone, the other by he who laid it. With the New Hall, there was no question of economies, and rather than being rendered, the house was entirely and expensively faced with ashlar, levelled on lime mortar beds with slivers of oyster shell, which acted as a setting agent (oysters appeared regularly on Bess’s table). Lime, for the mortar, was burned in kilns in the north orchard that needed feeding and tending twenty-four hours a day.

  Chatsworth provided some of the (finest) furnishings for the New Hall – hangings, tables, overmantels, beds and stools – but more were needed, tapestries and plate in particular. In the autumn of 1591, Bess decided to decamp to London for an eight-month shopping spree. Shopping aside, there was the question of her jointure to be settled – Gilbert was still prevaricating over payment and claiming that Bess was appropriating land that wasn’t hers. There was to be a court case, and Bess was bent on ensuring that it was held in Derbyshire, where she could be confident of the outcome. She had good reason to remember the case brought against one of her Somerset tenants, Henry Beresford, in 1586, by Shrewsbury. This had been heard in York, with a jury entirely made up of Shrewsbury supporters, who naturally found against Beresford and proved that ‘in this part great men may do what they list’.26 Now Bess intended to do some jury-fixing of her own, and London lawyers needed to be courted and cajoled.

  And then there was Arbella, now sixteen. Bess had not given up hope of persuading the Queen to increase her granddaughter’s £200 allowance, nor of her making a great marriage. The possibility of Rainutio Farnese was under discussion once again. It was a match that both Bess and the Queen had reason to favour – Bess could provide Arbella with a well-connected husband (Farnese, like a great many European royals, could claim descent from John of Gaunt), who would take her granddaughter off her hands, while the Queen, who had no desire to keep supporting the French in what was proving a lengthy and costly war in the Netherlands, could expect peace. The promoters of the Rainutio match had recently requested a Hilliard miniature of Arbella – they wanted to size her up.

  Towards the end of November, as Bess prepared to leave for London, the building works at Hardwick were scaled down: day labourers were greatly reduced and John Rhodes and his men were left with instructions to quarry and cut ashlar in preparation for the next storey of the New Hall. Other masons were diverted to the Old Hall, to plaster internal walls and finish off the Hill Great Chamber. While Bess was away, Sir Henry Jenkinson, the family priest, who had taken over the building accounts from David Flood, was to pay the workforce, apart from the carpenters, who were to be paid by John Balechouse. Balechouse was emerging as a key figure at the New Hall; he must surely have sent Bess reports of the progress of the building during her eight-month absence, but none such survive.

  18.

  London, 1591

  Bess set out for London with an entourage of around forty: her personal servants, including her ladies, Timothy Pusey, her steward, and Edward Whalley, a lawyer; William and Charles Cavendish and their wives and servants; Arbella and her lady-in-waiting, Mrs Abrahall. Most were on horseback, though Bess and her ladies – Jane Kniveton (her half-sister) and Elizabeth Digby – travelled with Arbella in Bess’s coach (recently introduced into England and, despite being unsprung and hideously uncomfortable, a coveted accessory), pulled by six horses. The journey must have been something of an ordeal for Elizabeth Digby, who was six months pregnant. Elizabeth was the most senior and trusted of Bess’s four ladies, and also the highest paid, at £30 a year.*

  Bess’s coach rocked and rumbled its way towards London, via Nottingham, Leicester, Dunstable and Barnet, and as each came into view, the clerk comptroller rode on ahead to alert the townspeople to Bess’s arrival so that church bells could be rung. This was a spectacle with all the hallmarks of a royal progress: ‘the ringers’ were given cash rewards; ‘the poor’ received 20s. (Bess was a generous tipper and this was her standard handout); Bess’s servants in their
light blue Cavendish livery and velvet caps bearing her silver badge – an ‘ES’ topped with a coronet – swarmed about; the silver buckles on the horses’ harnesses, also cut into ‘ES’s, flashed; food and drink was ordered; saddles stuffed, horses shod and coach wheels mended. On 25 November, after a week on the road, the party arrived at Shrewsbury House in Chelsea.1

  Shrewsbury House had been little used, or maintained, since Shrewsbury’s building works back in 1579, and stood in need of some refurbishment in order to comfortably accommodate Bess and her retinue. In advance of their arrival, a bricklayer, a carpenter and a smith had been engaged, loads of brick and sand had been delivered, the gallery had been boarded over, a stable turned into a dormitory – presumably for servants – and quantities of wood, for fuel, brought by barge. In addition, ‘two fat oxen and forty sheep’, a walking larder, had been driven from Bess’s Leicestershire estate and pastured in fields around the house. Chelsea, in the 1590s, was little more than a village, but the river provided easy access to the royal palaces at Whitehall, Greenwich and Richmond, as well as to the City.

  Visitors soon began to call, one of the first Mary Scudamore, a cousin of Bess’s, an old friend of Gilbert and Mary Talbot, and a lady of the privy chamber to the Queen. Bess was probably eager to hear court gossip, to discover the lie of the land and to seek advice about her New Year’s gift for Her Majesty – once again this was to be a ‘garment’, rather than cash. Her first important engagement was to attend court for the twelve days of Christmas, for which both she and Arbella (this would be Arbella’s first visit to court since her disgrace three years earlier) urgently needed new clothes and jewels. The December accounts record payments for fifty yards of damask, fifty yards of velvet, forty yards of satin, black taffeta, black Spanish lace (these must have been for Bess, who now only wore black), blue and white starches for lace collars and ruffs (starch-making techniques, using wheat, had been introduced into England by a Dutch woman in the 1560s), several plain gold chains, gold bracelets, and a pair of bracelets set with diamonds, pearls and rubies (costing £21). William Jones, the royal tailor, was paid £59 14s. for making a gown for the Queen, and £50 went to John Parr, the Queen’s embroiderer, for embroidering it.

  The court, that Christmas, was at Whitehall, the largest of the Tudor palaces, a sprawling conglomeration of two thousand rooms covering twenty-three acres and decorated in medieval style, with Holbein’s great portraits of Henry VII and Henry VIII and their queens looming from the walls of the privy chamber. Whitehall catered admirably for Elizabethan taste for colour and spectacle, with tennis courts, bowling alleys, a tiltyard, a cockpit, a pheasant yard, an orchard and gardens enlivened by thirty-four heraldic beasts mounted on brightly painted pillars, along with a sundial that told the time in thirty different ways and a multi-jetted fountain. Bess and Arbella enjoyed a round of feasts, masques, dancing, bear-baiting, plays and jesting. Ramsey, the court jester, must have pleased Bess, since she gave him 20s. at New Year. Other New Year’s gifts were dispensed: the Queen had her gown and Bess received a ‘great gilt bowl with a cover’ in return.2 Bess gave her usual cash gifts to family, servants and acquaintances: £100 to the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury; £26 to William Cavendish and his wife; £20 apiece to Charles and Henry and their wives; £10 to Lady Cobham, in a purse of crimson silk, embroidered in gold, and another £10 to her son George, Bess’s godson; £7 to Elizabeth Wingfield; £15 to Jane Kniveton; and 40s. to Mrs Digby.

  In the five years or so since Bess had last visited, court had become a very different place, as a new generation of courtiers replaced the old. Bess needed to navigate the new ways, to cultivate the new favourites, on behalf of Arbella, if not herself. Her former friends and allies – Leicester, Walsingham, Hatton – all were no more. Burghley, whose much-loved wife Mildred had died in 1589, and who was himself increasingly frail and crippled by gout, was gradually handing over the reins to his equally clever and unscrupulous son, Robert Cecil. Cecil, who joined the Privy Council in 1591, headed one faction at court, Ralegh and Essex, who loathed each other almost as much as they loathed Cecil, others. All three jostled for power and position. Essex, having temporarily enraged the Queen by secretly marrying Walsingham’s daughter (and Philip Sidney’s widow), Frances, had just returned to court from France, where he’d spectacularly failed to capture Rouen from the Spanish and thus to win the military glory that he longed for. Whereas Walsingham, Burghley, Leicester and Hatton had worked more or less harmoniously together, held in place by the Queen, now the atmosphere at court was tense and febrile. Elizabeth herself was nearing sixty, her brilliant facade and her hold a little less sure. Semper Eadem (Always the Same) may have been her motto, but nothing was the same. The Virgin Queen was ageing. She still commanded the homage and admiration of her courtiers, but what had, in the past, been genuine enough now concealed frustration and impatience. And amongst her people there was apprehension. Who would succeed her?

  Back in Chelsea, Bess entertained old friends (Anthony Wingfield, the husband of her half-sister Elizabeth, Roger Manners, a Shrewsbury cousin and Derbyshire neighbour, Lady Cobham), and courted new ones, such as Lord Buckhurst, the Lord Treasurer, Sir Fulke Greville, the statesman and poet, and Lord Howard, Admiral of the Fleet. A man like Howard, who was married to Kate Carey, one of the Queen’s favourite ladies of the privy chamber, was very much worth cultivating (the Howards had a Chelsea estate, not far from Shrewsbury House). Fellow widows such as Lady Sheffield (Leicester’s old love), Lady Walsingham, Lady Warwick, Lady Cheke and Lady Bacon (mother of Francis) came to gossip and, in the case of Ladies Bacon and Cheke, to borrow £50. The talk that spring would have been of the latest court scandal: Bess Throckmorton, one of the Queen’s ladies, was discovered to have become pregnant by and to have subsequently married Ralegh; the baby was born in March and the pair were sent to the Tower, before being forgiven.

  Bess also set about outmanoeuvring Gilbert Talbot. To win her case, she needed powerful allies: Sir William Cordell, the Master of the Rolls, who had already been warmed up with gifts (‘a great standing cup’ and venison pasties), was invited to dinner. Regular payments were made to Edward Whalley, for ‘law matters’. Whalley and Timothy Pusey were hard at work securing Bess’s titles to her lands, to avoid any dispute on her death, and thwarting Gilbert by engaging as many legal officers as they could in London, thereby preventing Gilbert from finding lawyers to represent him. Their efforts, and £430 in legal charges, paid off – the case was heard in Derbyshire and it found in Bess’s favour.3

  But much of Bess’s time in London was devoted to shopping – for herself, for Arbella and for Hardwick. She spent £300 on clothes: Spanish leather shoes, a pair of pantables (overshoes), velvet shoes, looking glasses, perfumed gloves, a dress trimmed with red braid and a powdered ermine gown (these presumably for Arbella), yards of velvet, satin, damask, fustian, lawn and holland (for shifts), silver buttons and gold fringe. ‘Five little jewels’ were bought at 14s. ‘a piece’, and ‘another little one of a bee’ for 6s. 8d (again these sound too frivolous for Bess and were probably for Arbella), along with a ruby, ‘a fair opal’ and a pearl, ‘a little jewel with 3 pearls and a whitestone in it’, ‘an agate with a man’s face with a bunch of grapes hanging to it’ and twelve rings.

  Bess had a sumptuous new horse litter made (£11), upholstered in twenty-two yards of tawny velvet (£19 16s.), with a tawny silk fringe, windows of tawny and gold parchment and a felt-covered footstool. Shrewsbury House needed a few essentials: bellows and fire tongs and shovels, bedsteads and stools, close stools and pewter stool pots. But more importantly, huge quantities of plate and hangings were bought for the New Hall: silver-gilt bowls with covers (silver gilt being finer than plain silver), standing cups, casting bottles, chafing dishes (for keeping food warm), basins and ewers (for hand-washing before and after eating), a great porringer, gilt salts with covers, gilt candlesticks, gilt spoons, platters and flagons. Some silver plate came from Sir William Hatton, Christoph
er Hatton’s nephew and heir, who, having inherited a pile of mortar and a pile of debt, was selling off the contents of Holdenby, offering bargains for Bess.

  Since the rooms in the New Hall were only going to be panelled halfway, Bess needed a large acreage of tapestry to cover the remainder of her walls, and if she could acquire this inexpensively and second hand, then all the better. For £321 6s. she bought the thirteen-piece Gideon tapestry from Sir William Hatton, originally woven in 1578 for Holdenby. This was destined for the long gallery, and Bess insisted that £5 be knocked off the total to cover the cost of replacing Hatton’s arms (these were eventually covered with her own, painted on felt, for just 30s. 4d). From Sir William too came the four Abraham tapestries for the state withdrawing chamber (now in the Green Velvet Room), bought piecemeal, some via the dealer Mulmaster, one piece for as little as £24 10s., and the set with ‘personages with my ladies Armes’ for Bess’s own withdrawing chamber. All of these tapestries had been woven in Flanders, and their price, per Flemish ell, varied according to the complexity of the design (figures being more expensive than foliage) and the materials used (wool was cheaper than gold and silver thread). So the one piece of the Abraham tapestries that was woven with gold metal thread cost 20s. per ell, as opposed to 14s. for the rest.4