Devices and Desires Read online

  The first letter that we have written by Bess from the New Hall is to the Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury in February 1598. She had been ‘exceedingly troubled’ to hear of Mary’s ‘sickness’ and asked anxiously after her and the ‘three jewels’, her granddaughters. She herself had been ‘troubled with a cold’ at Christmas and then ‘much grieved’ for her ‘daughter Cavendish’ – Anne Cavendish, William’s wife, who had died after giving birth to a son, James – but she was now well and took ‘the air often abroad’. ‘I desire that I may some times hear from you’, she finished, ‘both how you do have your healths, and when you mean to come into the country, this air is better for you both than London, and especially for you sweetheart after your ague.’2 This is an affectionate letter, though it’s clear enough that there had been little in the way of communication between Bess and the Shrewsburys, a breakdown of relations that went back to Gilbert’s recalcitrance when it came to paying Bess’s jointure and his continued appropriation of lands that, as Bess maintained, rightfully belonged to her sons. Gilbert had long ceased writing his mother-in-law newsy letters from London; Bess, as in the letter above, tried to stay on some kind of terms with Mary (she gave her £100 in 1599 and £5 to each of the ‘three jewels’), but privately she seethed.

  When it came to championing her cause at court and seeking redress in matters such as the payment of her jointure, Bess had always turned to Burghley, who – this a credit to his gifts of diplomacy – had somehow managed to steer a course between the warring Shrewsburys. In August 1598, Burghley died, aged seventy-seven, a very great blow for the Queen, who visited him during his last days at his house on the Strand and spoon-fed him broth, but a loss for Bess too. Now she could only look to Burghley’s son and heir, Robert Cecil, who had all his father’s ruthlessness but no particular loyalty to his father’s old friend.

  While we don’t know how Bess felt about Hardwick, we do know something about how she lived there. The household accounts for the 1590s illuminate daily life – the comings and goings of servants and neighbours, the buying of foodstuffs, fabric and plate, the loans made and lands purchased, the sales of cattle and sheep, the ongoing work in the house and gardens. Blue cloth was bought to make livery cloaks and caps; new shoes came from Chesterfield; Gilbert Talbot, in a rare conciliatory moment, sent a ‘fat stag’; a neighbour sent three apricot trees; another artichokes and flowers for planting out; Bess’s Pierrepont son-in-law sent oysters; the carrier brought a portrait of the Queen, commissioned by Bess, from London; a woman brought plums; labourers started ‘grubbing’ around the fish ponds; a bull, oxen, steers and wethers were all delivered; ‘one that brought plovers’ was given 6d; an Anthony Glossop, who brought partridges, had 2d a bird; Sir Thomas Stanhope, who evidently didn’t include Bess in his feud with Gilbert, sent two salmons; a great many consignments of ‘red deer pies’ (venison pasties) went up to London; yet more plate was bought, and gold fringe, lawn, velvet, taffeta and lace to make furnishings and clothes.

  There would have been plenty of home-grown, -reared and -made food and drink at Hardwick, from the home farm, the gardens, the bakehouse and the brewery, but shopping needed to be done. William Jenkinson, the clerk of the kitchen, was sent to Hull to buy herrings, salt salmons, oysters, stockfish, sturgeon, salad oil, sprats, eels, hops, bay salt, ‘a topknot’ of figs, sack, ‘gasgone’ wine, hogsheads of claret, firkins of soap, cod and sprats, all of which were taken by boat, on the River Trent, to Stockwith, then up the River Idle to Bawtry, then on by wagon to Worksop before finally reaching Hardwick. From Stourbridge Fair – one of the largest fairs, held in September outside Cambridge – came ling, stockfish (this was dried and generally a poor man’s fish – useful for feeding servants perhaps), soap, corks and candlewicks. While in London, Timothy Pusey bought imported goods – pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar loaves, ginger and currants. Nearer home, Lenton Fair, outside Nottingham, held over eight days at the feast of St Martin in November, provided fine sewing silk and ‘Venice gold’ (gold metal thread).

  Through the 1590s, Bess’s household stood at between sixty and seventy, including those craftsmen kept permanently on the payroll like Accres, Smith and Snidall. Most servants apart from Bess’s ladies, and the laundry and nursery maids, were male and the fact that many remained in her service for years bears testament to their good treatment. Bess’s insistence on justice, as regarded her own affairs, extended to those dependent on her – she was quite prepared to defend the interests and fight the causes of her employees. Back in 1576, for instance, she had written to Lord Thomas Paget, who was presiding over the trial of one of her servants, Robinson. Robinson was accused of murder, but, insisted Bess, he was innocent of all charges.3 When John Clarkson, a labourer at Hardwick, was ‘robbed’, he was given 10s., and John Balechouse’s wife had 20s. when she suffered similarly.4

  Bess looked after her own, be they servants or family, so long, that is, as they showed themselves deserving. John Dodderidge (Good), a gentleman servant, with the lease of a farm, and ‘Hatfield of Alton’, a bailiff, had 40s. and £5 a year respectively, to pay for their sons’ schooling. John Hardwick, the illegitimate son of Bess’s brother James, was always treated kindly: he had a £40 annuity, £5 to buy sheep in 1594, and a year later a loan of £8, apparently without security. Bess’s younger half-sister Margaret was regularly given 20s. Anne Baynton, Bess’s step-daughter by William Cavendish, who had married Sir Henry Baynton, had £20 a year. And who was Mary Norton, who enjoyed a substantial £100 annuity? We can’t be sure.* But Bess made a clear distinction between rewards for good service and charitable handouts: a servant called Gurney was given 40s. ‘at her going away, not for good service but for charity’. George Kniveton, Bess’s nephew, whom she had taken into her household, proved unsatisfactory and had to be dismissed. However, he left with an extremely generous £600, ‘not in respect of his services but for his mother’s sake over above his wages at his go—’ and here Bess corrected herself: ‘my putting him away’.5

  The impact and drama of Hardwick’s interior lies in the use of space and proportion – the turns and sweeps of the wide, shallow steps of the stone stairs, passing through light and shadow, leading you upwards towards the astonishing, profligate and entirely impractical expanses of the High Great Chamber and the long gallery. Decoratively, the interior is fairly restrained – the exception being the monumental marble and blackstone overmantels.* There is no inlaid panelling, no plasterwork ceilings (that in the long gallery was probably put in later, by William Cavendish), no heraldic glass. Such restraint may have been due to Bess’s dislike of excess, more ingrained now with age, but equally it may simply have been a lack of suitable craftsmen.

  Where Bess did not hold back was in her deployment of textiles and soft furnishings – hangings, tapestries, carpets, cushions, upholstered chairs and stools. Some of these had been brought, or removed by William Cavendish, from Chatsworth (the Virtues and Liberal Arts hangings), some acquired in London (the Gideon, Abraham and Tobias tapestries), some from further afield – ‘a quilt of India stuff’, Turkish carpets, silk damask from China for backing cushions (a pair survive, of ‘crimson satin embroidered with strawberries and worms with blue silk fringe and tassels and lined with blue damask’).6 There’s no evidence that Bess herself was directly engaged in trade with the Far East, but she had had access to its spoils via Shrewsbury, she had sent Henry Cavendish to Constantinople, and William Cavendish was involved in the founding of the East India Company in 1600, subscribing £200 to its inaugural voyage and receiving a ton and a half of pepper in return.7

  Hardwick’s interiors are remarkably unchanged, though little of the original Elizabethan furniture survives and Bess’s huge collection of plate has entirely vanished. Also, and crucially, lost are colour and light. Today, Hardwick’s windows are shrouded, in the interests of conservation, and paintwork, tapestries and hangings have faded.* Traces of brightly coloured plasterwork remain, but the overall effect is muted and sombre. How
ever, we have only to look to the inventory of the contents of Chatsworth and Hardwick Old and New Halls, made in 1601 as an adjunct to Bess’s will, to get a sense of the brilliancy of Elizabethan Hardwick. The ‘houshold stuff’ in each and every room is carefully listed – the inlaid tables, the Turkey carpets, the hangings, the gold and silver plate, the beds and chairs and stools and long cushions gorgeously upholstered in cloth of gold and silver, in mulberry, orange, purple and green velvets, in watchet (pale blue) satin, in crimson damask, all fringed and tasselled and spangled, and laid about with gold twist and silver lace.8 A house of shimmering light and colour.

  At Hardwick, a mini court revolved around Bess, its rituals shaped, indeed enforced, by the house’s stratified interior. On the ground floor, the great hall was a place of noise and bustle, where lower and outdoors servants, and whichever of Bess’s craftsmen were working, milled about, ate at long tables and benches and warmed themselves by the fire. Also here were rooms for Jane Kniveton, Bess’s half-sister, and William Cavendish, and a nursery for William’s children. But in the main, the ground floor, and basement, housed the service rooms: kitchen, ‘surveying place’ (serving area), between the kitchen and hall, where food was set out, pantry, buttery, dry larder, pastry, scullery, wine cellars and boiling house (here, the hard graft of cooking took place, using ten spits, a grid-iron, brass pans, chopping and mincing knives and a cleaver). The Old Hall’s brewhouse, bakehouse, washhouse, dairy, slaughterhouse and chandler’s house also serviced the New. Lower servants weren’t provided with bedchambers and simply bedded down wherever they could, all over Hardwick, within calling distance (this before the invention of the bell). Throughout the house were bedsteads ‘to turn up like chests’ and mattresses, feather beds, bolsters and blankets, tucked into corners or stored in pallets. The night darkness would have been thick with the rustling and shifting, the sighing and snoring of sleeping servants.

  Upper servants slept in the Old Hall, but ate in the New Hall’s Low Great Chamber on the first floor, which also functioned as a kind of common room, a place for sitting about, gossiping and card-playing, while Bess, her ladies – Mrs Digby, Mrs Cooper, Mrs Skipwith and Mary Steward – and Arbella used the ‘little dining chamber’ created from a landing when the course of the stairs was altered. At the southern end of the first floor were Bess’s rooms: a withdrawing chamber and bedchamber, with an adjoining maid’s room and, beyond that, a room for a gentlewoman.

  For everyday purposes Bess kept to her first-floor rooms, emerging for a walk along the colonnades perhaps, a coach drive in the park, a visit to neighbours or an inspection of a new property. Days began and finished early: breakfast, a simple meal of manchet and beer, was followed by lunch at 11 a.m., and supper at 5 or 6 p.m. Bess received family, visitors and employees in her withdrawing chamber: William Cavendish come to discuss further acquisitions of land and property; Charles with news of his building projects; grandchildren, for whom there were ‘two little chairs’; Timothy Pusey reporting on Bess’s various business affairs; William Reason bringing rent money and news of troublesome tenants; John Balechouse seeking approval for work in the house; Edward Whalley reporting on ongoing legal suits; Rowland Harrison bringing the household accounts; William Jenkinson come to collect the money to pay the weekly household bill (generally between 17s. and 22s.); neighbours begging for favours or loans or help in brokering a marriage.9

  Today, Bess’s bedchamber seems surprisingly small, especially given the quantity of furniture with which it was crowded, but originally it was probably larger. Equally surprising is the overmantel, supported by two naked figures – the ‘terms’ carved by Abraham Smith. There is more nudity above the mantel in the shape of chubby putti, Adam and Eve cavorting astride a rope, and the head of a Hardwick stag with a long, red, lascivious tongue. It’s playful, sensual and oddly anarchic, and unlike all the other Hardwick overmantels, there are no arms – not entirely what you might expect for a woman in her late seventies with a reputation for severity.

  Besides two beds, one for Bess and one for Arbella, there was an upholstered chair, several stools and long ‘quitions’ (cushions), a looking glass, an hourglass, fire irons, an iron chest and five trunks for storing valuables. ‘Two pieces of tapestry hangings with personages and forest work’ hung on the walls, and ‘two foot carpets of turkie worke’ (a knotted pile fabric, made in England, as opposed to imported ‘Turkey carpets’) lay on the floor.10 However, Bess’s bedchamber doubled as an office and counting-house. She had one large and two small leather-covered desks and ‘a little desk to write on’, and, for storing gold and silver coins, ‘two trussing coffers bound with iron’, with three further ‘little coffers’ and three ‘flat coffers’, which may have been used for jewels as well as money (in the maid’s room were four more iron coffers, brass weights and scales). The New Hall had close-stools – luxury chamber pots, with box-like seats and hinged lids – rather than garderobes; Bess had hers in a tiny room off her bedchamber, tastefully covered in blue and white cloth, with a red and black silk fringe, and equipped with three pewter basins.

  When not in use, the second floor could be easily shut off, but on formal occasions, and for important guests, it came into its own. The great suite of state rooms – High Great Chamber, long gallery, withdrawing chamber and best bedchamber – was for show, expressly designed to astonish and awe. We don’t know how much entertaining went on at Hardwick – there’s a sense of retreat on Bess’s part by the late 1590s, of her choosing to lead a retired life at Hardwick, removed from London and court, of concentrating her energies on local affairs, on consolidating her empire and planning for its future. Which is not to say that she wouldn’t have relished showing off her house. Approach and anticipation were all – Hardwick reveals itself slowly. Guests, having passed through the gatehouse and the court, would have come into the great hall, a modest enough entrance, giving little hint of what was to come. From the hall they would have climbed the stairs, winding upwards, emerging at the door of the High Great Chamber, a cathedral of a room, a room to make you catch your breath.

  The glory of the High Great Chamber is the three-dimensional plaster frieze depicting the court of Diana and woodland hunting scenes. As at Theobalds and in the Forest Great Chamber in the Old Hall, real tree trunks and branches were nailed to the wall, then plastered over. It’s fantastic and fantastical: boar and deer mingle with more exotic creatures – unicorns, camels, elephants, lions. The frieze is probably the work of Abraham Smith and his men, who would of course have never seen such animals and looked to Flemish prints and woodcuts.* Once finished and dried, the plasterwork was painted, in 1599, by Balechouse, in vivid reds and greens and yellows.11

  Here meals were served in great splendour and according to strictly prescribed ceremony. Food, following a similar progression to guests, was carried (rapidly cooling) from the ‘surveying place’ by the kitchen, through the hall, where all stood to attention and the gentleman usher, carrying a rod, called for silence, then up the stairs to the High Great Chamber. Having dined, guests would adjourn to the withdrawing chamber, or the long gallery, so the High Great Chamber could be cleared, for music perhaps, or a play. The Queen’s players came at least twice to Hardwick, in 1593 and 1600, performing, in all likelihood, Shakespeare (they might also have used the great hall, with Bess watching from the gallery above). On other occasions the players of Admiral Lord Thomas Howard, Lord Ogle, the Earl of Huntingdon and the Earl of Pembroke all performed. And there was plenty of music. William Cavendish was a music-lover, regularly buying song books, by such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, books of madrigals and sheet music in London.12 Bess had competent musicians amongst her own household, but those belonging to the Earls of Rutland and Essex played, as did the waits (singers) of Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby and Newark.

  The ceiling of the withdrawing chamber was lowered in the eighteenth century to create rooms for servants, but in Bess’s day it was as high as that of the other state rooms, and from i
ts walls loomed almost life-sized heroines from the Ancient World – Penelope, Cleopatra, Lucretia, Zenobia and Artemisia – the five Virtues hangings.* The withdrawing chamber, intended to function as a very grand waiting room, had little in the way of furniture, apart from a splendid carved walnut table, brought from Chatsworth, along with some stools and long cushions. In the adjoining best bedchamber hung the second set of appliqué hangings, showing a virtue and its opposite vice. Here there was a magnificent bed with a valance of cloth of gold and silver and ‘six curtains of blue and red satin striped with gold and silver and laid with gold lace about the edges and a gold twist down the seams and fringed about with gold fringe’.

  The roof at Hardwick, as at Longleat or Burghley or Wollaton, functioned as a kind of extra storey, a place for eating dessert (in the south turret’s banqueting room), for strolling, viewing, even sleeping. The four middle turrets, all with fireplaces, were evidently intended as bedchambers, though only one was furnished as such, and this very grandly, with white damask and mulberry velvet embroidered hangings and a bed with a black velvet valance embroidered with Hardwick stags and Talbot hounds. It would have been a romantic but fantastically cold room to sleep in, despite four curtains of ‘tufted sacking’ for the windows and a great many blankets and quilts. The remaining turrets were simply used for storage, piled with feather beds, mattresses, pewter-ware and kitchen utensils.

  Bess’s building days were not quite over. Besides ongoing work on the New Hall and Owlcotes, and repairs to the Old, she began building almshouses in Derby in 1597. A bargain was drawn up with Hall, a carpenter, ‘for the setting, squaring, framing, rearing and perfect finishing of all the timber work for the almshouse at Derby’, as well as bargains with a mason and a slater.13 By 1599, the almshouses, now nearing completion, were kitted out with blankets, sheets, shovels, tongs, iron candlesticks, brass pots, pewter dishes, skillets, cups and spoons.14 The first twelve residents (eight men and four women) moved in a year later; each was given a livery of Cavendish blue, and every year thereafter three yards of blue cloth with which to make new livery, a silver ‘ES’ badge, and 2s. 6d per week.15 In May 1601, some kind of building work restarted at Chatsworth too – John Mercer, the Plumtree brothers, carpenters and stone-getters were all employed for several months.16