Devices and Desires Page 4

  This high-minded scholarliness does not seem to have rubbed off on Bess, but she recognised its value (she did not see the need to provide a humanist education for her own daughters, but Arbella, her granddaughter, with her brilliant prospects, was a different matter). And it may well have been at Bradgate that she acquired her italic hand – bold and right-leaning – the hand practised by the Grey sisters. Nor does she seem to have been touched by the reforming zeal of the Grey household. Both Frances and Henry were committed to Protestantism, as the new faith came to be known, in whose cause Jane Grey would become a martyr. Bess too fell into line, but she would always be a dutiful rather than fervent Protestant: Hardwick had its own chaplain and chapel, where the household gathered for daily prayers, but this was standard for any great house. However, for an unsophisticated, uncultured young woman, a whole new world opened up at Bradgate. A world of ideas and learning, talk and glamour. A world Bess wanted to be part of.

  It was at Bradgate that Bess probably first encountered William Cavendish. How else would a young widow from Derbyshire, with no fortune or prospects, have come to the attention of a rising man at court, a man based in London and Hertfordshire? The Greys had close court connections – Frances, after all, was the King’s niece. They would certainly have known Cavendish, who was Treasurer of the King’s Chamber, and to tempt him to Leicestershire, with the promise of fine hunting and hospitality, would have been easy enough. At any rate, the pair were married at Bradgate and launched themselves on an energetic programme of procreation and acquisition.

  If Bess loved any of her husbands, it was probably the cheerfully materialist Sir William, the father of her children. In 1570, thirteen years after Sir William’s death, she and Mary, Queen of Scots embroidered a hanging, now known as The Cavendish Hanging.* The central square shows tears falling onto smoking quicklime, with the motto ‘EXTINCTAM LACHRIMAE TESTANTUR VIVERE FLAMMAN’ (‘tears witness that the quenched flame lives’); in the surrounding border are Bess and William’s initials, the Cavendish arms and assorted emblems of love – a cracked mirror, three broken rings and a glove. The Earl of Shrewsbury, Bess’s husband of the moment, gets a heraldic acknowledgement, and Mary’s hand can clearly be seen in the use of the emblems and mottos that she loved, but the hanging reads like a love letter from Bess to William Cavendish, the husband of her heart.

  According to the Duchess of Newcastle, Sir William, ‘being somewhat advanced in years’, married Bess ‘chiefly for her beauty’. Bess was in fact no great beauty, but she was spirited, vital and determined. It’s a measure of her powers of attraction that Cavendish, a man on the make, chose a wife with little to recommend her in terms of social or material gain. But, at the age of thirty-nine, he found himself in the happy position of marrying a woman some thirteen years his junior, to whom he was temperamentally perfectly suited, and whose ambition, energy and pragmatism matched his own. He, like Bess, came from the landed gentry, by far the most vigorous and dynamic class in socially mobile sixteenth-century England. Members of the yeoman and merchant classes passed into the ranks of the gentry, and members of the gentry into those of the nobility. Such was the case with Cavendish, and along with him went his wife.

  Tudor England offered unique opportunities for advancement. ‘Never in the annals of the modern world has there existed so prolonged and so rich an opportunity for the businessman, the speculator and the profiteer’, wrote John Maynard Keynes.2 The Dissolution played a crucial part in this, changing forever the pattern of land ownership, freeing up property, redistributing wealth and boosting the rise of the gentry in the process. The prime beneficiary of the Dissolution was of course the King, whose coffers were swelled by the abbeys’ enormous revenues, and who acquired great tracts of monastic land and property. But about a third of this land was redistributed, sold on to both courtiers and local gentry. With increased social mobility came increased class-consciousness. Newly won titles were proclaimed in heraldry, carved in stone, etched in glass and embroidered in textiles all over sixteenth-century houses, as they would be at Hardwick. And newly acquired land was fiercely protected and fought for. Here perhaps lies an explanation for why the Tudors were so obsessively litigious, so quick to sue, so jealous of their rights.

  William Cavendish was born in 1508, the second son of a Suffolk squire, Thomas Cavendish, who had court connections as Clerk of the Pipe, a position in the Exchequer, under Henry VII. When Thomas died in 1524, he left William some land in Suffolk, but essentially he had to make his own way, though his older brother, George, was a gentleman usher to Cardinal Wolsey, to whom he was devoted and whose (anonymous) biographer he became, and was thus excellently placed to lend a helping hand. William probably became a gentleman servant in Wolsey’s household, where he would have come across Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey’s right-hand man. After Wolsey’s fall, he swiftly hitched himself to Cromwell’s coat-tails; by the early 1530s, he was working for Cromwell, as one of his agents in the appropriation of religious houses, and busily lining his own pockets in the process.

  In 1536, when the Dissolution of the Monasteries got under way in earnest, William Cavendish was appointed one of ten auditors to the Court of Augmentations, which was set up to deal with the distribution of monastic land and property. He toured the country, mostly the Home Counties, sometimes with a Dr Thomas Leigh, another commissioner appointed to oversee the Dissolution. Typically, in June 1536, he wrote to Cromwell: ‘we have been at the priory of Little Marlowe and have dissolved it. My lady takes her discharge like a wise woman and has made delivery of everything of which we send an inventory. She trusts entirely to you for a reasonable pension.’3 Cavendish’s salary was a modest £20, but the perks, the ‘profits’ of the office, were considerable, both in the shape of bribes* and in opportunities to hoover up parcels of land and property on favourable terms.4 Cavendish assessed and audited the property of the immensely rich and well-endowed Abbey of St Albans in Hertfordshire (the King kept the Abbot’s house at St Albans for his own use), which ultimately led to the grant of the freehold of the manor at Northaw, together with land and other properties in Hertfordshire. In similar fashion he acquired land and property in Lincolnshire, Shropshire, Norfolk, Staffordshire and South Wales.

  In the early 1530s, he married Margaret Bostock, with whom he had three daughters. They made their home at Northaw, in prime hunting country but conveniently close to London, where Cavendish leased another house. Margaret died in 1540, the same year that Thomas Cromwell lost his head. This might have spelled trouble for Cavendish; however, he weathered the storm and was appointed one of three commissioners to survey Crown lands and oversee the surrender of religious houses in Ireland. Here he remained for over a year and prospered. In May 1542, Sir Anthony St Leger, Lord Deputy of Ireland, wrote to the King: ‘Mr Cavendish took great pains in your said service, as well as with continual pains about the said accounts and surveys, as in taking very painful journeys about the same . . . to Limerick and those parts, where I think none of your Highness’s English commissioners came these many years, and in such weather of snow and frost that I never rode in my life. And I note him to be such a man as little feareth the displeasure of any man in your Highness’s service, wherefore I account him to be the meter man for this land.’5 Back in England, in 1542, Cavendish married again, this time a widow, Elizabeth Parris, with whom he had three more children, all of whom died, as did Elizabeth herself, in 1546, while giving birth to her third child. In the same year he was appointed Treasurer of the King’s Chamber (a position for which he paid £1,000), became a Privy Councillor and received a knighthood.

  A prerequisite for survival, let alone advancement, at the Tudor court was a willingness to bow before the prevailing wind. Sir William showed himself more than willing. He’d survived the falls of Wolsey and Cromwell; now, after Henry’s death in January 1547, he smoothly established himself in the new regime, making himself useful to the boy King, Edward VI, and retaining his position as Treasurer (Edward left him £20
0 in his will, suggesting that he valued Cavendish). It was in August, eight months after Henry’s death, that Sir William and Bess married.

  What kind of a man was William Cavendish? What kind of husband? Only one letter from him to ‘good Besse’ survives, a brief, businesslike note, written in 1550, asking his wife to pay eight pounds for some oats, and there are none of hers to him.6 Judging from his career, we can assume that he was an efficient servant to Cromwell and Henry VIII; that he was ambitious, acquisitive and interested in money; that he was unscrupulous and opportunistic – not excessively so by the standards of the time, but a man not overly concerned with niceties or troubled by conscience. Judging from his portrait, hanging in the long gallery at Hardwick, he was florid and fleshy, with small, shrewd eyes, and luxuriant moustaches and beard merging into the extravagant expanse of his fur collar. He looks worldly, convivial, a man of hearty appetites. That he liked to live well is borne out by his household accounts and inventories: his table was well supplied, his cellar well stocked (he got through an impressive daily four pints of wine) and his homes lavishly furnished. Bess had married an unabashed consumer.

  Marriage to Cavendish propelled Bess out of Derbyshire and into the worlds of London and court, where she had her first real taste of high life brought by wealth and royal favour. The Cavendishes set themselves up in two properties: the manor at Northaw in Hertfordshire, and a rented London house in Newgate Street, in the shadow of the great spire (which would be destroyed by lightning in 1561) of the medieval St Paul’s. Newgate Street led into Cheapside, the busy heart of the city, crammed with goldsmiths, shops, lodgings and workshops, where the Cavendish servants, clad in their distinctive blue livery, would have been a familiar sight, scurrying about carrying out commissions for Bess. The Cavendishes kept at least fifteen servants, including a gentlewoman called Cecily, a nurse, a midwife – when Bess was giving birth – a cook, an embroiderer, a housekeeper, a footman, a couple of stewards, various maids, a stable boy and a porter. Some of these servants, such as Francis Whitfield and James Crompe,* stewards in London and Chatsworth respectively, would stay with Bess for many years.

  While most of Cheapside was paved, the compacted earth of Newgate Street would have been frequently turned to dust or mud. The Cavendishes negotiated the streets on horseback – the city was just a few miles square – and Bess also had a horse litter, lined in green satin. But they made good use of the river too, hiring a barge and a bargeman to take them to King Edward’s court at Whitehall, or to visit Frances and Henry Grey in their London mansion, Suffolk House, in Southwark.7

  In London, Sir William and Bess were very much part of the Protestant elite, a small band of individuals bound by ties – of blood, marriage and faith – at once close and, when circumstances demanded, easily dissolved. Henry VIII had not wanted a protector, or regent, for his son, and to avoid power residing in any one individual had made a will appointing a regency council of sixteen to rule collectively until Edward’s majority. But he died before his will was signed, which allowed for some reinterpretation, if not outright defiance. Three days after his death, the regency council named Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and the young King’s uncle, as Lord Protector and head of the council. Seymour now became Duke of Somerset; his ally, John Dudley, became Earl of Warwick, and his younger brother, Thomas Seymour, Lord Admiral and Baron Sudeley (Sudeley was also appointed to the council). In May 1547, just five months after Henry’s death, the attractive and ambitious Thomas Seymour married the Dowager Queen, Catherine Parr, who had been in love with him before she married Henry.

  The Seymour faction held the reins of power and, as committed humanist reformers, like King Edward himself, set out to promote the cause of Protestantism. They were also, together with the Greys (whose eldest daughter, Jane, had been placed in the household of Thomas Seymour in 1547, in much the same way that Bess had been in that of the Greys themselves), the Warwicks and William, Marquess of Northampton (brother of Catherine Parr), and his wife, the men and women whom the Cavendishes visited, entertained, gambled with (3s. 4d was ‘lost at play with my Lady and my Lord Admiral’ – the Sudeleys), and made godparents to their children.

  It was during these early years of marriage to Cavendish, when Bess was spending much of her time in London, and at Edward’s court, that her cultural tastes were formed, crucially through exposure to humanism, in which many of her friends, including Frances Grey, Elizabeth Brooke (daughter of Lord Cobham and married to William Parr) and the Coke sisters (Mildred, married to William Cecil, Anne, married to Nicholas Bacon, and Elizabeth, married to Sir Thomas Hoby), were passionately interested. The study of ancient, in particular classical, texts lay at the heart of sixteenth-century humanism, and key to their dissemination was the printing press, which made available English translations of the Bible, classical and medieval texts and new European works, architectural books, prints, engravings and illustrations for herbals, all of which Bess would have come across in the homes of her learned friends and at court.8 From such she absorbed images and references that would inform the design of her houses, both outside and in.

  Designs for overmantels and textiles at Hardwick draw on Flemish pattern books, Continental prints and classical and biblical texts. So it was perhaps from Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women (his complete works were first printed in 1532 and the Northaw inventory lists a copy) that Bess first heard the stories of Cleopatra and Lucretia, who would feature in the Virtues hangings of noble women – great appliqué textiles made at Chatsworth and now at Hardwick. Here she would be able to display her familiarity with both classical texts and classical architecture – the noble women stand beneath arches, supported by fluted columns topped by Ionic capitals, with an entablature running above.

  Bess would have witnessed classicism first hand in Somerset House, then known as Somerset Place, on the Strand. Now Lord Protector, Somerset was de facto ruler of England, and as such he required a suitably splendid London mansion. Work began in 1547, using materials from former monasteries. Built around two courtyards, with a triumphal arch and a classical facade, Somerset House is often cited as the first Renaissance building in England, although there is evidence that classical features were used earlier, from about 1515, in such houses as Southwark Place, Charles Brandon’s house.9 Nevertheless, Somerset House, as it emerged in the late 1540s, would have been a novel sight and certainly a talking point amongst the Cavendishes and their friends. By the time of Somerset’s death in 1551, he had spent over £10,000, a huge sum, on his house.10

  Somerset was a man of many parts: soldier, statesman, builder. His involvement in Henry VIII’s military campaigns in Scotland and France and the building of fortifications meant he acquired an understanding of engineering, which fed quite naturally into the building of houses. He was a considerable private patron: in addition to Somerset House, he commissioned Syon House (a former Bridgettine abbey), outside London, and The Brails, a never-completed house at Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire. As a committed reformer, he was open to new ways of thinking, but equally to new developments in architecture and design coming from the Continent. And, sophisticated and well travelled, he knew how to get his hands on the finest French craftsmen.

  Somerset gathered around him a group of men who shared his love of building and would go on to become architectural patrons in their own right: Sir William Cecil, Sir Thomas Smith and Sir John Thynne. All were familiar with classicism, either because they had travelled in France and Italy, or because they had come across architectural books by such as Sebastiano Serlio (Serlio’s six-part L’Architettura was the architectural manual of the Renaissance) and Vitruvius.* Cecil was Somerset’s private secretary, later Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State and Lord Treasurer, and the builder of Burghley House and Theobalds. Smith, Greek scholar, Cambridge don, ambassador to France and Secretary of State, knew as much as anyone in England about Renaissance architecture, owning no fewer than five editions of Vitruvius, supplying Cecil with French arch
itectural books and building Hill Hall in Essex, complete with classical orders and entablatures. Thynne, Somerset’s steward and a great friend of the Cavendishes, devoted over thirty years of his life to the building and rebuilding of Longleat. Each was something of an amateur architect: Cecil produced basic plans for Burghley and Theobalds; Smith made drawings for Hill Hall in collaboration with his carpenter-surveyor; Thynne was closely involved in the design of Longleat.

  It’s unlikely that any one individual was responsible for the design of Somerset House – like most Tudor houses it was a collaborative effort, to which Somerset, Thynne, Smith and the French masons all contributed. It played a key role in the Tudor building world, allowing would-be patrons to cut their teeth and see new ideas put into practice – classical features embellishing traditional design – and enabling craftsmen to hone their skills. It clearly influenced later houses, such as Longleat (the bay windows) and Burghley (the balustrading of the courtyard pavilions). Several craftsmen at Somerset House moved on to the Royal Works: John Revell, a master carpenter, became Surveyor of the Royal Works in 1560, and Humphrey Lovell became the Queen’s master mason. Somerset House may also have provided a young mason, Robert Smythson, an apprentice to Lovell, with his first job.

  3.

  Acquisition

  In marrying William Cavendish, Bess acquired three stepdaughters. Catherine and Anne, aged twelve and eight in 1547, lived with the Cavendishes and were treated generously by Bess. She bought them sugar candy and clothes: ‘for my daughter Cateryn’, ells of holland (fine linen) to make partlets (a kind of collar, or bib, covering the neck); ‘for my daughter Ane’, cloth to make sleeves, cambric and lace for kirtles, and white, red and yellow girdles.1 However, Sir William’s third daughter, Mary, lived elsewhere – regular payments were made ‘to the woman that hath Mary’ – most likely because she had some kind of disability (by 1556 she was dead). Bess kept close links to her own family: her younger half-sister, Jane Leche, was employed as one of her gentlewomen, as she would be throughout her life, and generously paid, at fifteen shillings a quarter; her aunt, Marcella Linnacre, was also a semi-permanent member of the household and helped with the children.