Devices and Desires Read online

  Work on the new Chatsworth probably began in the spring of 1552. Like Burghley, it was a courtyard house, originally two storeys high and one room deep. A needlework cushion of the ‘platt of Chatesworth house’, which Bess later kept in the long gallery at Hardwick, shows the west (main) front of the house, complete with the extra storey that she added in the 1570s, and four towers, one at each end and one either side of the gatehouse, through whose arch you can just glimpse a fountain in the courtyard.15 Architecturally there was nothing very original about the Cavendishes’ Chatsworth; indeed, it was a rather old-fashioned building, looking back to the quadrangular fortified mansions of the past. In its height, compactness and towers it belonged to the court Gothic tradition, recalling the likes of Richmond Palace, built by Henry VII.16 What was unusual, though not without precedent, was the placing of the state rooms (high great chamber, long gallery, withdrawing chamber, best bedchamber), with their lofty windows and ceilings, not on the first floor, as was conventional, but on the second. Here, in the Elizabethan Chatsworth, was ‘the first expression of a passion for high buildings’ that stayed with Bess throughout her life and would be recreated in both Hardwick Old and New Halls.17

  However, in the early 1550s, the complete three-storey Chatsworth was some way off and the Cavendishes were making do in the old house. Court business kept them in London for lengthy periods, so the management of their new estate and building frequently had to be conducted long-distance, with the inevitable frustrations and misunderstandings. In November 1552 comes Bess’s first surviving letter, a characteristic mix of instruction and admonition, written to the steward at Chatsworth, Francis Whitfield: she has spoken to Sir William and he’s happy that the carpenter should have whatever ‘cleats’ (boards) he needs, provided that ‘you take such as will do him no soreness about his building at Chatsworth’ – it’s most important that repairs to the old house don’t compromise the building of the new. Francis is ordered to ‘look well to all things at Chatsworth’ until Bess’s aunt Linnacre comes home, and to ‘let the brewer make beer for me forthwith for my own drinking and your master and see that I have good store of it, for if I lack either good beer or charcoal or wood I will blame nobody as much as I will do you. Cause the floor in my bed chamber to be made even either with plaster, clay or lime and all the windows where the glass is broken to be mended and all the chambers to be made as close and warm as you can.’ She is extremely put out to hear that her sister, Jane Leche, who had been left at Chatsworth, was not being properly treated – ‘if it be true you lack a great [sic] of honesty as well as discretion to deny her any thing that she has a mind to . . . I would be loathe to have any stranger so used in my house as then assure yourself I can not like it to have my sister so used. Like as I would not have any superfluity or waste of any thing so like wise would I have her to have that which is needful and necessary.’ With this last sentence we have Bess in essence: excess and waste were abhorred, yet things had to be done properly, with due care. ‘At my coming home I shall know more’, she finishes, ‘and then I will think as I shall have cause.’18 Francis Whitfield must have quailed.

  In February 1553, King Edward succumbed to a chill that he seemed unable to shake off, and by the spring it was clear that he was suffering from tuberculosis. Edward faced the problem that beset Tudor monarchs – the lack of an heir, and specifically a male heir. Possibly encouraged by the Duke of Northumberland, he decided to draw up ‘My Device for the Succession’, a startling document that overrode Henry VIII’s Third Act of Succession and passed over the claims of Mary and Elizabeth on the grounds of their illegitimacy, though Edward’s primary concern, reasonably enough, was that Mary would undo his Church reforms. Instead, the throne was left to the sons who might be born to Frances Grey, now thirty-five, and failing that the sons of Jane, Katherine or Mary Grey. Mary Tudor, however, remained by far the strongest claimant, and the Cavendishes, knowing this, took pains to cultivate her, paying visits to ‘my Lady Mary’s Grace’ and making small gifts – a ‘glass’ (mirror), 3s. and 4d ‘towards her purse’. At times of such uncertainty, when thrones, faith and heads all looked precarious, it was as well to hedge your bets.

  William Cecil, who had become Edward’s Secretary of State, claimed that it was William’s Parr’s wife, Elizabeth Brooke, who suggested that fifteen-year-old Jane Grey marry Northumberland’s fourth son, Lord Guildford Dudley. At the same time, Katherine Grey was to marry Henry, Lord Herbert, son of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. These were strategic alliances, to shore up the Protestant regime. But in May, shortly after the double marriage had taken place, Edward’s health took a turn for the worse and he made a further change to his will: the throne was to go to Frances Grey’s male heirs, but if none such were born before Edward died, it was to go to Jane Grey and her male heirs. In effect, Jane was named as future Queen.

  The Cavendishes would have known that Edward was dying. They would also have been aware of the turmoil that his death might bring – the now very real risk of civil war. They could, of course, count on the goodwill and favour of Jane Grey, but her accession was far from a certainty. As, if not more, likely was the prospect of a Catholic queen, Mary, and Mary might not look kindly on Sir William, gifts or no gifts. It was only prudent for the Cavendishes to remove themselves to a safe distance from London. In June 1553, with Bess pregnant once again, they set out for Chatsworth.

  4.

  ‘Every man almost is a Builder’

  The Cavendishes were at Chatsworth when Edward VI died in July 1553. News would have filtered its way to them of the proclamation of Jane Grey as Queen, which was swiftly followed by Princess Mary’s own claim. The people of England had by no means embraced Protestantism and there was a great deal of popular enthusiasm for Mary – she was, after all, Henry’s daughter, and a Tudor, and the Tudor lineage exerted a powerful hold. Then too, Jane’s éminence grise John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, was a much-hated figure. Support for Jane melted away, just as, in the east of England, where Mary had estates, it swelled for the Princess. Once it was clear that Jane didn’t have the backing of the people, courtiers and councillors, beginning with William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, fell over themselves in their haste to declare allegiance to Mary. Jane Grey, sixteen years old, the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’, who had never sought the throne, found herself imprisoned in the Tower, together with her husband Guildford Dudley and her father Henry Grey. Northumberland, godfather to little Henry Cavendish, was executed in August; the following month saw the coronation of Mary, England’s first female monarch.

  The Cavendishes no doubt congratulated themselves on being out of the way, but these would still have been highly alarming events. The Protestant elite, to whom they’d bound themselves so closely, stood in disarray. They might well have been tainted by association, but those little attentions to Princess Mary seem to have paid off. Sir William found himself called back to court. Once again, probably against all expectation, and unlike most of Edward VI’s courtiers, he held on to his position as Treasurer.

  It was something of a coup, and incontrovertible proof that Queen Mary bore Sir William no ill will, that she agreed to stand as godmother to the Cavendishes’ third son, Charles, born in November 1553. Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and long-term supporter of Mary, was a godfather, together with, for the second time, Henry Grey. The latter seems an oddly tactless, indeed reckless, choice, given that Grey had worked directly to supplant Mary with his own daughter. At a time when alliances changed with the wind and self-preservation was all – the Pembroke family, for example, lost no time in distancing themselves from the Greys, by seeking an annulment of the marriage between Henry Herbert and Katherine – the Cavendishes remained steadfast. But Mary had always been close to her cousin Frances Grey, despite their religious differences, and initially she chose to see Northumberland as the villain of the piece. Henry, thanks to his wife’s pleas, had been pardoned and released from the Tower with a fine, presumably to the relie
f of the Cavendishes, allowing them to conciliate all parties, to demonstrate allegiance to the throne and loyalty to the Greys. The christening took place just two weeks after Jane Grey and her husband were tried and found guilty of high treason.

  Shortly before Bess was due to give birth once again, in March 1555, Sir William wrote to his friend Sir John Thynne. Thynne and Cavendish had a certain amount in common – both demonstrated a gift for riding the cross-currents of Tudor politics, and both were keenly interested in money and building. Even their portraits share something, not so much a matter of feature as of atmosphere: a high-coloured forcefulness, an air of tightly controlled energy. They had probably met at court and they certainly visited each other, at Longleat, Thynne’s Wiltshire house, and Chatsworth. Now Sir William hoped Thynne could help him out of a fix.

  He was in need of a house, near London, an alternative to Newgate Street, ‘for the repose of myself, wife and children’, and having searched fruitlessly had remembered Thynne’s house at Brentford, which Thynne had built in 1549. Might he be able to lease it? Bess, apparently, was ‘not disposed, as women be’ – here Cavendish became jocular – ‘(if I durst say) fantastical, to lie in’ at the Newgate Street house, on the grounds that Sir William’s previous wife had died in childbirth there. This seems surprising: Bess does not come across as a woman inclined to the ‘fantastical’, but she apparently had a streak of superstition. Childbirth was always risky, and the birth of her last baby, Charles, may have been particularly difficult. ‘Beseeching you good Mr Thynne’, continued Sir William, ‘to take it in good part and to consider if you were not my friend I would not so boldly have asked you . . . And for your stuff within your house shall be so handled and used that if any thing be lacking . . . I will either buy new or supply the lack and default with money.’ He hoped to be able to keep the house until Bess had been delivered and churched, and ideally to stay for at least a year, since court business required that he ‘tarry’ in London for a while.1

  Thynne was agreeable, and Elizabeth Cavendish was born at Brentford on 31 March. This time the Cavendishes made Katherine Grey, Jane’s younger sister, godmother, despite the fact that by now, after the Wyatt rebellion the previous year, the Greys were thoroughly disgraced. Henry Grey had hardly been released from the Tower in July 1553 before he was plotting, with Sir Thomas Wyatt and others, to place Princess Elizabeth on the throne (Mary’s betrothal to the Catholic Philip of Spain was deeply unpopular with all, and the Protestant reformers in particular). The rebellion was planned as a series of revolts, led by local bigwigs – Sir Thomas Wyatt in Kent, Sir James Croft in the Welsh Marches, Sir Peter Carew in the south-west, and Henry Grey in Leicestershire – which would converge on London. But the plot was betrayed and Grey, along with the other conspirators, was arrested once again.

  Mary could hardly be expected to show mercy to the Greys now, and one can only wonder why Henry Grey imperilled himself and his daughter by involving himself in the Wyatt rebellion at all. He was executed in February 1554, eleven days after the executions of Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley. In March, his brother Thomas also lost his head, for carrying messages from the conspirators to members of Princess Elizabeth’s household. It was a dangerous time to be a Grey, or indeed to know one. Three weeks after her husband’s death, Frances married her Master of the Horse, Adrian Stokes, a loss of status that saved her skin – as plain Mrs Stokes, she forfeited any claim to the throne and no longer represented a threat to Mary.

  What did Bess make of Frances’s hasty marriage? An act of prudence, or folly? Given that the Cavendishes reasserted their friendship with the Greys by making Katherine a godmother, the latter seems more likely. What we can be sure of is that, for Bess, the death of Jane Grey, whom she’d first met as a precocious eight-year-old at Bradgate and whom she’d made godmother to her second daughter, Temperance, must have brought deep shock and sadness. Jane, just seventeen years old, met her death with courage and grace, but as she fumbled, blindfolded, for the block, crying, ‘What shall I do? Where is it?’ few could have been unmoved. Bess, though not a witness, would have heard the reports. She kept a portrait of Jane in her bedchamber at Chatsworth for the rest of her life.2

  In 1555, ensconced at Brentford, where Bess was recovering from the birth of Elizabeth, and Sir William found ‘ease and quietness’, another letter was dispatched to Thynne and his ‘good lady your bedfellow’. Cavendish had a further request: ‘I understand that you have a cunning plasterer at Longleat who hath in your hall and in other places of your house made diverse pendants and other pretty things. If your business be at an end or will be by the next summer after this that cometh in I would pray you that I might have him in Derbyshire for my hall is yet un-made.’3 Sir William’s duties at court curtailed time at Chatsworth, but work on the new house was continuing. Having seen, or heard of, the decorative plasterwork at Longleat, which Thynne had been building for several years, the Cavendishes wanted something of similar quality for their great hall. A good deal of exchange of and competition for craftsmen went on between patrons. Highly skilled men, especially plasterers and masons, were in short supply and much sought after.

  An aerial view of England during the latter half of the sixteenth century would have revealed something of a frenzy of construction. ‘Prodigy houses’ may have been the most visible face of the building boom, but they were a minority phenomenon. Houses of every shape and size appeared all over the country: houses built in the shape of a letter, or employing elaborate geometry and symbolism, manor houses, banqueting houses, lodges, almshouses. Building mania took hold right across the social scale, from old and new nobility to gentry and yeomen. A stable government and a flourishing economy meant standards of living rose, and with them a growing interest in domestic comfort. At the same time, labour was cheap. And in the wake of the Dissolution, land came up for grabs and social structures loosened. This was the era of the self-made man: canny lawyers, civil servants, merchants, sheriffs and adventurers made fortunes, and what better way to display your fortune than to build a house?

  A new breed of builder and a new kind of house. The fortified courtyard homes of medieval England began to make way for more compact, outward-looking houses, houses that experimented with new ideas about design and decorative detail coming from Europe, houses that were more about comfort than security, but which also pleased and intrigued the eye. ‘Curious’ became a term of approbation. They were lived in differently too. An increasing desire for privacy meant that rooms became more specialised in their uses, whether for eating, or entertaining, or sleeping, and that servants and family were increasingly separate. The great hall, once the noisy heart of the house, was now relegated to the servants, while their employers moved upstairs. And the service buildings (bakehouse, brewhouse, washhouse, etc.), instead of cluttering the forecourt, were removed to a distance.

  William Cavendish, William Cecil and John Thynne, newly ennobled and newly rich, were all new builders. Thynne would have been regarded by the Cavendishes not just as a friend, but as something of an authority in the building game. He had been closely involved in the various architectural projects undertaken by the Duke of Somerset, whose steward he had become in 1536, probably contributing to the design of Somerset’s proposed Wiltshire house, The Brails, and possibly that of Somerset House. According to a satire written about Thynne by a neighbour in 1575, he was responsible for ‘infesting his Master’s head with plattes and forms and many a subtle thing’.4 After Somerset’s fall in 1549 (on his execution, in January 1552, Somerset House remained unfinished), Thynne found himself out of a job and spending ten months in the Tower. However, like Cavendish, he was a survivor, and despite having to stump up a hefty fine of £2,000, he managed to hold on to much of the fortune he’d accumulated while in Somerset’s employ, as well as his estates, most of them in the West Country. Released from the Tower, he retired to Wiltshire, to personally oversee the building of Longleat, a former Carthusian priory that he’d acquired in 1540, duri
ng the Dissolution.

  Thynne had plenty of money to pour into his project, his own fortune boosted by an advantageous marriage to Christian Gresham, daughter of the wealthy Sir Richard Gresham and sister of Sir Thomas, who built the Royal Exchange (after Christian’s death in 1566, Thynne married Dorothy Wroughton). But he hadn’t just profited financially from his years in Somerset’s household; he also understood the mechanics of building a great house, as well as the basic principles of Renaissance architecture, and he’d acquired some expertise in drawing up plans and designs. All of which made him unusually qualified among Tudor patrons.

  The first phase of building work at Longleat began in 1547 with a straightforward conversion of the existing monastic buildings into a house. For much of this period, Thynne was in London with Somerset, or, after Somerset’s fall, in the Tower, which meant long-distance supervision of the work. He was a micro-manager par excellence and he bombarded his steward at Longleat, John Dodd, with daily – sometimes twice-daily – letters, a barrage of instruction, exhortation and complaint: John Berryman, Thynne’s chief mason, was to come to London to receive his orders; the joiners must ‘make as much haste as they may’, so the wood had time to season; the plumber was to set Thynne’s arms on the pipes of the tower, as well as on the other pipes around the house; the whereabouts of the glazier must be discovered; the young apricot and cherry trees were to be watered.5 In June 1547, Thynne, keen to make progress, wanted extra rough-layers and masons taken on, which, he felt, shouldn’t present any difficulty, because the war with France, and hence the building of fortifications, was now over and craftsmen were no longer subject to impressment: ‘they shall be in no danger of the commissioners now it is peace’.6