Devices and Desires Read online

  Bess would have been perfectly aware that Willoughby was neither young nor healthy, nor in any position to repay his debts; she lent the £3,000, with annual interest of £300, and put the mortgage in her granddaughter Arbella’s name. When Willoughby died in 1596 (possibly poisoned), the loan unpaid, the five manors, worth £15,000, became Arbella’s. Bess’s £3,000 initial outlay had brought a very substantial return. The accounts record a steady stream of loans: £200 to Mr Wright, £700 to Mr Perindle, £300 to Mr Sacheverell, £100 each to the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, Henry Leake, Mr Gilbert and Mr Hacker, £200 to William Kniveton, £200 to George Needham. She lent to family too, though they it seems were let off interest: £200 to Charles Cavendish to buy land, £200 to Henry Cavendish, £100 to Edward Talbot, £1,000 to William Cavendish, to be repaid ‘upon my demand’, £200 and £350 to Arbella, ‘to be repaid when my lady shall command it’.11

  That Bess should have become so successful and canny a business-woman, let alone as a woman in her seventies, is remarkable. She did not of course come to it entirely new. During her marriage to Shrewsbury, she had been buying land, in William Cavendish’s name, as well as lending money. But widowhood brought independence and freedom to operate on her own terms. Her managing skills were applied to her businesses and estates. She had the good fortune, or good sense, to employ reliable and trustworthy servants, men like Pusey and Harrison who could offer sound advice. And she had William, with his thriftiness and legal training, at her side. Then too, over the years, she had had plenty of opportunity to observe and learn from others, husbands in particular. William Cavendish had made a fortune, and nearly lost it. William St Loe had demonstrated good husbandry. In Shrewsbury, who had struggled to manage his empire and racked up debts in the process, Bess had had an example of how not to manage one’s affairs. And there were plenty of others – Gilbert Talbot, James Hardwick, Francis Willoughby, Christopher Hatton. Men from whose reckless borrowing, careless spending and grandiose speculating Bess profited.

  With Bess at Chatsworth, Hardwick was left in the very capable hands of John Balechouse, who rode over every two weeks, taking the building accounts with him, and receiving a 10s. tip. Balechouse had an annual wage of £2, which seems surprisingly low for someone with his responsibilities, but this was substantially boosted by regular handouts from Bess: extra pay for working on ‘holydays’; 10s. or 20s. tips for good service; £10 in 1599 simply ‘of my goodwill’.12 His wife too had regular gifts of 10s., and his son James worked with him. Balechouse also had a farm, within walking distance of Hardwick, at Ault Hucknall, and his own room in the Old Hall, which he probably used as a kind of office. Around 1598, he built the New Inn – the Hardwick Inn today – at the entrance to the park, which was taken over by his son after his death. He was a highly skilled painter, but perhaps more importantly he acted as a foreman and overseer of the building work, and he was trusted to make important decisions in Bess’s absence.

  In February 1594, twenty turret windows were hewn, at which point Balechouse, taking a long, hard look at the turrets, Hardwick’s crowning glory, decided that they needed some extra height and reported as much to Bess. On 20 April, John Rhodes was paid ‘for the heightening of eight windows for two of the turrets upon the leads, viz for every window 25 foot at 4 and half d the foot’. By September, all the turrets had been raised by an extra pane of glass, adding just over six feet. Aesthetically this was doubtless the right decision, but the ratio of glass to wall brought structural problems for future generations, requiring much pinning and propping. Large windows tend to undermine walls, an eventuality that Smythson had tried to address by using the turrets as buttresses. However, the turrets themselves were weakened by their expanses of glass, and five of the six have no interior supporting walls; instead they are supported by concealed relieving arches to allow for the window bays on the top floor.

  Glass had been manufactured in England since the thirteenth century, though of an inferior quality to that made in France, but it was transformed after 1567, when Jean Carré obtained a patent to make window glass in the Weald and brought over glass-makers from Lorraine and Normandy. By the 1590s, glass-making techniques were greatly improved and, as long as there were sufficient supplies of fuel, relatively straightforward, though most builders bought their glass ready-made, from the Weald in the south-east, or from Staffordshire in the Midlands.13 For Hardwick, however, Bess, who had abundant timber, set up her own glassworks at South Wingfield, where she also had an ironworks, both under the management of Sylvester Smith. Sixteenth-century glass was not completely clear, being mottled and greenish in colour, and windows were heavily leaded, which is why at a house like Hardwick, views were more readily admired from the roof or the loggias. But Hardwick’s top-floor rooms would still have been flooded with light.

  The heightening of the turrets was not the only alteration to Smythson’s plan during the course of the building – changes were also made to the loggias and the stairs. Smythson had designed a loggia, or colonnade, to run right around the outside of the house. This was unusual – loggias, a classical feature, were more commonly found in interior courtyards, as at Burghley or Theobalds. At Hardwick they were clearly intended, despite the lack of balustrade, to be used as walks or viewing platforms accessed by doors on the first floor. In the summer of 1593, it was decided to abandon the side loggias (the rough stone where they were to be attached can still be seen), though it wasn’t until 1595 that the redundant doors were blocked – Rhodes was paid ‘for hewing 40 foots ashlar to make up two doors where the walks should have been’. In total, four doors leading onto the side loggias were blocked. The loggias may well have been abandoned to allow more light into the ground-floor rooms, but equally they may have simply not pleased Bess, who would hardly have used the ground floor herself.14 Hardwick, entirely encased within a loggia, would have looked a very different house.

  Two staircases – the ‘great stone stairs’ and the ‘lesser stone stairs’ – thread their way through the house, from the great hall to the top floor, emerging, in the case of the ‘great’ stairs, at the entrance to the High Great Chamber, and the ‘lesser’ at the north turret. According to Smythson’s plan, however, the ‘lesser’ stairs would have come out into, and thus broken up, the long gallery. To avoid this, their course was altered in November 1594. What would have been a landing now became a small paved dining room, which was used by Bess and her ladies. Was Smythson consulted about these changes to his original plan – the turrets, the loggias, the stairs? Possibly, but Bess would certainly have felt no obligation to do so – Smythson had none of the status of an architect today, he was simply a draughtsman – and Bess and Balechouse between them were quite capable of making their own design decisions.

  Bess returned to Hardwick in September 1594, in time to see the last of the twenty-four newly heightened turret windows set. By November 1594, the Yates brothers had completed their bargain for the roof, including the turrets, for £50. This meant that the scaffolding, which remained in place on sixteenth-century building sites for longer than you might expect because lime mortar was so slow to dry, could finally be removed and work could start on the loggias along the east and west fronts. In the spring of 1595, columns for the loggias were hewn, the plastering of the interiors began and John Mercer, a particularly skilled plasterer, put up the cornice in the gallery.

  That year also saw Thomas Accres start work at Hardwick. Accres had long been known to Bess – he was at Chatsworth in 1576 on 5d a day and may well have gone on to Worksop, if Bess had acceded to Shrewsbury’s request for him.15 Between 1584 and 1588, he was at Wollaton, and after that he disappears from the record, most likely to some other Midlands house. By May 1595, he was at Hardwick, working with an apprentice, Luke Dolphin, and cutting the coat of arms over the entrance, many times renewed since. Accres brought his wife and family with him, lived on a rent-free farm and received a half-yearly wage of £6 13s. 4d (wages were paid biannually, at midsummer and Christmas).
Apart from the coat of arms, the marble overmantel in the state bedchamber, and possibly those in the long gallery, we can’t be certain what he was responsible for at Hardwick, but much of the marble work must have been his, and he was clearly highly valued by Bess, with the use of a ground-floor ‘chamber’ in which to work, and the chilly luxury of a turret room in which to ‘lie’.

  Accres and Abraham Smith were by far the most skilled and highly paid of the craftsmen working on the New Hall. Smith had been working on the Old Hall for several years, carving many of the great overmantels. By 1592, he, like Accres, was receiving a half-yearly wage of £6 13s. 4d, together with the income from his rent-free fifty-five-acre farm at Ashford, near Chatsworth and the blackstone quarries. Blackstone was used extensively in the New Hall, in fireplaces and overmantels, dragged to Hardwick by oxen – their driver received 2s. in 1594 for the oxen’s grass and his own supper. Bess was well supplied, so much so that she gave Lord Cobham blackstone for his buildings in 1596.16

  Smith carved some of the cartouches on the exterior of the New Hall, Bess’s coat of arms (now vanished) on the east front, the stone around the great hall fireplace, and the ‘terms’ (figures) supporting the overmantel in Bess’s bedchamber. It was also probably Smith, with assistants, who modelled at least some of the plasterwork frieze in the High Great Chamber. There were of course other masons at work: William Griffin hewed and laid the paving for the great hall and carved the hall screen (for £6), the balustrade on the chapel landing, the fireplace in Bess’s withdrawing chamber and, together with James Adams, the columns for the loggias; Henry Nayll and Richard Mallory were responsible for the eighteen chimney shafts and the balustrade around the roof. But which of them carved the outsize ‘ES’s, each taking six days? We don’t know.

  Bess was an exacting employer: unreliable workers got short shrift; poor workmanship had to be put right. When in 1595 she was dissatisfied with the whitewashing of the walls, the plasterer was told that they must be ‘whited’ at his own charge (once plastered, walls were whitewashed using special white lime that came ready-burnt from nearby Crich; impurities in the lime resulted in an uneven colour). In September 1594, Bess complained to Richard Bagot, a sheriff and justice of the peace, about a ‘lewd workman Tuft who hath dealt very badly and lewdly with me’. This was Richard Tuft, a slater, who had been working with the Yates brothers but had absconded before completing the job. He had, wrote Bess, ‘greatly disappointed me and hindered my works’.17

  William Bramley, a joiner, who was responsible for much of the panelling in the Old and New Halls, was also unsatisfactory. In October 1595, the panelling of the Hill Great Chamber in the Old Hall was pronounced as in ‘many things yet imperfect’, though Bramley had promised ‘to mould them perfect’. He was in trouble again in January 1599, when he had to put right shoddy work in the New Hall’s High Great Chamber: ‘Bramley is to take up the window sills and a piece of the selling [panelling] in the great chamber at his own charges, to mend it as fair as conveniently he may.’ But in the main, he must have been competent enough, since he worked continuously up until 1600, not just panelling, but making tables and benches and ‘two little chairs’ for Bess’s grandson, her ‘sweet James’.18

  Yet if Bess was a hard taskmaster, she also believed in the value of praise and rewards for good work: in 1595, she rewarded Accres ‘for the making of an engine for the sawing of blackstone’ with 10s. The ‘engine’ was a form of water wheel, for the sawmill, and a year later, either because it worked so well, or perhaps had been improved, Accres’ wife Grace was given 20s. ‘in respect of her husband’s device of sawing blackstone to buy her a gown withal’.19 Balechouse was given 20s. when he painted Bess’s arms onto the Gideon tapestries, and his wife the same when she sent Bess a basket of wardens.20 Marriages generally brought a gift: Abraham Smith had 40s. on his marriage; the daughter of Thomas Accres 20s. on hers; and Mrs Cooper, one of Bess’s ladies, was given £50 when she married Rowland Harrison.21

  Bess’s largesse went beyond her employees. The hot, dry summers of 1592 and 1593 gave way to a series of exceptionally wet and storm-ridden years – harvests failed, the price of wheat rocketed, and thousands starved. Bess, whose own revenues were down 25 per cent, did what she could.22 Most weeks, 20s. were distributed among ‘the poor about Hardwick’; sometimes they had money to buy winter coats. In the particularly cold winter of 1595, masons ‘and others about Hardwick’ were given ‘a dish of meat’ every day for the twelve days of Christmas. At Christmas 1600, the poor at Heath, Hucknall and Tibshelf had £3, as well as beef, bread, beer and pease.23 Those who appeared at the gates of Hardwick with an offering of some kind – ‘a poor woman’ who brought cakes, ‘a poor boy’ who brought a mallard – never left without a few pennies.

  The rains would have made building difficult too. Just as lime mortar was slow to dry, so too were the lime ash floors – lime ash was mixed with water and laid on hay, over rushes nailed to the lathes and joints – on Hardwick’s upper storeys. Once dry, the floors could be polished – much like concrete – but how that was ever achieved over a succession of wet summers and cold winters, with no source of heat but a fire, is hard to imagine. This is probably one reason why, while the basic construction of a sixteenth-century house was relatively quick, the finishing of its interior could be very lengthy indeed.

  By 1595, work was going on outside the house as well as in: the building of walls around the orchards and courts; paving and fencing; a partridge house; ‘corner turrets’ in the entrance court; a turret originally intended as a banqueting house but turned into a still house in the north orchard; a gatehouse with gates and six great locks, made from Bess’s iron; and a ‘great gate’ leading out of the gardens, hewn by ‘Cutbeard the mason’.24 We don’t know what Hardwick’s gardens looked like, but they were neither so large nor so elaborate as those at Chatsworth.

  The end, however, was in sight. March 1596 brought the last payment of John Rhodes’s bargain; in May, Bess’s withdrawing chamber, on the first floor, was panelled; by October, the plastering was done. In the household accounts for the week ending 27 March 1597 comes the following entry: ‘Given to Mr Smythson the surveyor 20s. and to his son 10s.’25 It’s possible that this was payment for some kind of actual surveying work undertaken by Smythson, but more likely that ‘surveyor’ was used loosely, in the sense of designer. Twenty shillings was Bess’s standard tip; it sounds as though, with the New Hall nearing completion, Smythson had ridden north from Wollaton, bringing his son John* with him, to view the realisation of his ‘platt’, and had been rewarded by a delighted Bess.

  For all her identification with Penelope, Bess did not find patience easy. After seven years of building, she must have longed to get into her house. At the very least, she was determined to have her own rooms – her withdrawing chamber and bedchamber – ready. The summer of 1597 saw a surge of activity: the completion of the glazing, the entrance court wall, the outside privies and the hall paving, the panelling of the great hall, and the window alcoves and door of Bess’s bedchamber.

  Work would continue on the New Hall for another few years, but it was habitable. And Bess had waited long enough. On 4 October, she was triumphantly played into her house by four musical members of her household – John Dodderidge (also known as John Good), James Starkey, the household chaplain – both of whom would become embroiled in Arbella’s schemes – Francis Parker, a gentleman servant, and Richard Abrahall, whose mother had been one of Arbella’s ladies.* They received 20s., with another £3 distributed to those whom Bess felt to be deserving.

  20.

  ‘Houshold stuff’

  Few letters, to or from Bess, survive from the late 1590s, reflecting, perhaps, a period of relative calm as she settled into her new house. The ‘quiet’ she had longed for. A time for taking stock. She had built a house to glory in, a house to be wondered at, a house, above all, that proclaimed just how far she had come, from Derbyshire squire’s daughter to Dowager Countess. In the p
lace of her father’s ramshackle, unremarkable manor stood not one but two very large, very grand and, in the case of the New Hall, architecturally thrilling houses, financed and built by Bess herself.

  She no longer needed her day labourers, who were dismissed, but, as with all building projects, work dragged on – rooms that needed finishing, work that needed to be redone, repairs that needed to be made. Key craftsmen were retained: John Balechouse, Thomas Accres, Abraham Smith, Richard Snidall, William Bramley and John Mercer. Over the next few years, the Low Great Chamber, the long gallery, the state withdrawing chamber and the High Great Chamber were panelled; Balechouse stained the cloth hangings for the chapel, painted the frieze in the long gallery, the plasterwork in the High Great Chamber and Bess’s arms on felted wool, covering over those of Christopher Hatton on the Gideon tapestries, which were hung in July 1598. Yards of sweet-smelling rush matting for the gallery floor came from Shropshire and Leicestershire, at 4d per yard, stitched together with ‘pack thread’ (rush matting still covers Hardwick’s floors). Bramley made a table of marble and blackstone, and sluices for the fish ponds that Bess had dug below the house, Mercer mended windows and stairs, paling (fencing) was put up around the orchard and park, Snidall replaced glass in the turrets and cellars.1