Devices and Desires Page 7

  In winter, exterior building work largely came to a halt and many found themselves out of a job. Those working on country houses, beyond the umbrella of a trade guild, were entirely dependent on the whims of their employers. Thynne certainly had no compunction when it came to laying off men. ‘I will not keep one workman that shall work day work [those paid by the day, usually labourers] after Michelmas . . . but you shall not need to let the workmen themselves know it’, he wrote to Dodd in August 1547.7 That October, Dodd was ordered to make sure that the tower and porch were rough-cast (the rough plastering of external walls) before the frosts and that the window in the chapel was put in before ‘the men go’. However, work on the interiors of the house could proceed through the winter: the joiners were to carry on with the parlour and the chamber above it, while the masons were to prepare stone for the following spring.8

  ‘To my servant John Dod at Longleat haste haste haste’ is a familiar refrain. And ‘I may command what I will and you will do what you do list, but trust to it you shall pay hereafter’ pretty much sums up Thynne’s attitude towards his workforce.9 He’s a hard man to warm to and was clearly impossible to work for – demanding, impatient, suspicious, capricious and mean. However, such qualities were accompanied by a restless energy and perfectionism that served him well as a patron, driving him to build and rebuild until he had the house he wanted. Dodd assured his master that Longleat was shaping up to be ‘the first house and handsomest that is or shall be . . . within the compass of four shires . . . and so doth all the country report, some grieved and some pleased’.10 But Thynne was not easily mollified, preferring to believe himself cheated and taken advantage of at every turn. He was forever ‘marvelling’ at some instance of incompetence or neglect: ‘I marvel that I should now lack lead for if it be not stolen or bribed away I know I should have had sufficient . . . as I have always said I am served with words.’11 After 1549, the stream of letters dries up. And by 1553, when the next phase of building began, Thynne was on site to boss and bully in person.

  The Cavendishes were eager to inspect Longleat’s progress, but by 1556, Sir William’s health had deteriorated. In June, a few months after Bess had given birth to her seventh child, Mary (Lucretia, her last, born in 1557, would die young), he told Thynne that ‘god willing having my health which I thank God I have partly recovered’, he and Bess hoped to visit Longleat before Bartholomew’s Fair, held in mid August, or earlier if he could get away from court.*12 But a few weeks later, he wrote again: ‘I am fallen into my old disease and sickness and am so sick that I shall not be able to ride.’ The Longleat visit was postponed. He sent a present of larks by way of apology and signed off ‘from Chattysworth my pore house’.13 This was no more than a figure of speech – Chatsworth by now was anything but ‘poor’.

  The new house, though by no means finished, was already a very substantial two-storey building, for which the Cavendishes were steadily accumulating magnificent furnishings. Wealth and status in Elizabethan houses were displayed not in fine furniture, but in plate and textiles – tapestries, hangings, cushions and carpets. So a bed was judged by the splendour of its hangings, rather than by the bed itself. According to an inventory of William Cavendish’s goods (dated 1553, but in fact drawn up in 1559, after his death) Chatsworth had no fewer than forty-eight tapestries, two enormous ‘Turkey’ (Turkish) carpets (twenty-one and fifteen feet long respectively), nineteen smaller carpets (laid over tables and cupboards), quantities of napkins and tablecloths made of ‘fyne diaper’ and even greater quantities of gold and silver plate – basins, ewers, porringers (shallow bowls), spoons, snuffers, casting bottles, standing cups and goblets. The Cavendishes’ marriage bed had black velvet hangings embossed with cloth of gold and silver and embroidered with gold and pearls, five curtains of yellow and white damask, and a black velvet cover, worked with silver and embroidered with purle (a form of embroidery, using coiled metal thread) and pearls.*14 If there was nothing very remarkable, architecturally, about Chatsworth’s exterior, its interiors, swathed in richly coloured textiles, shimmering with plate, would have dazzled.

  While some of these furnishings – beds, for example – had come from Sir William’s Northaw manor, much must have been bought or made specifically for Chatsworth. The Cavendishes were living in considerable style. Then too, they had been steadily building up their landholdings around Chatsworth. How had all this been paid for? Not, it seems, exclusively from Sir William’s revenues.

  In the spring of 1557, Sir William received a bombshell: a commission of privy councillors, headed by the Lord Treasurer, William Paulet, had been appointed to look into his accounts, as Treasurer of the Chamber, and had found a discrepancy to the tune of a very substantial £5,237 5s. Sir William was called to account, although why is not altogether clear. He had bought his office; his salary (£100) was modest; boosting it with the sale of favours, or some discreet siphoning-off of revenues, was no more than standard practice at the Tudor court. Perhaps he had simply overstepped what was considered acceptable. Perhaps Queen Mary was in need of money to finance the war against France into which she had been, reluctantly, dragged, as Spain’s ally, by her husband Philip, who had by now more or less deserted her. Perhaps someone at court had their own reasons for wanting to get rid of Cavendish.

  There was no denying the accusation, and Sir William grovelled. He offered various excuses and explanations: a servant, Thomas Knot, whom he’d inherited from the previous Treasurer, had absconded during ‘the time of my sickness’, taking £1,231; there had been several instances, under Henry VIII and Edward VI, when he’d incurred expenses for which he’d never been repaid; he even cited £700 that he’d supposedly spent on raising a force against Northumberland, in defence of Mary in 1553.15 He offered lands, fees and goods in payment of the debt, though claiming these were of no value. And he begged for mercy. If he was forced to repay the whole sum he, his ‘poor wife’ and ‘innocent Children’ would be ‘utterly undone, like to end our latter days in no small penury’.16 Sir William was due to appear before the Privy Council, to answer charges, in October. He was facing a crisis, his health was failing and he wanted Bess by his side. On 20 August, she set out from Chatsworth to join him.

  Bess travelled fast – three days, on horseback, with stops at Northampton, St Albans and Barnet. Her accounts record the expenses of the journey: new shoes for the horses, and, at Northampton, famous for its shoemakers, new shoes for two footmen and for Bess’s daughter Elizabeth; canvas to provide padding under a saddle; drink for the men; a fire for Bess’s chamber at an inn (it must have been a chilly August).17 Once in London, she set about stocking up the larder and cellars, buying beef, veal, rabbits, chickens, butter, salt, pepper, nutmeg, mace, mutton, damsons, pears, a pie for ‘Master Harry’s’ breakfast, pigeons, sparrows, calves’ feet, oysters, shrimps, cherries, strawberries, rushes, coal, candles, and a great many gallons of ale, and pints of wine and sack for ‘my master’.18

  Cavendish had seemingly lost none of his appetite, but he was not well enough to appear before the Council in person in October, appointing two clerks, William Cade and Robert Bestnay, to appear in his stead. On 12 October, Bestnay handed over a book containing an account of his master’s debts and his pleas for mercy. The following day, Bess’s household accounts come to a halt. Perhaps Sir William had taken a turn for the worse. He died on 25 October (an outbreak of influenza killed thousands over the autumn and winter of 1557–8, but Cavendish probably died from whatever ‘sickness’ he’d been suffering from over the previous couple of years). He was buried at St Botolph’s church, Aldgate, joining his mother and first wife.

  For Bess, this was a devastating loss. Cavendish was only forty-nine, and, despite recent poor health, a man with the kind of vigour that seemed to defy mortality. Theirs had been a life of common purpose, a joint enterprise – the amassing of a great estate in Derbyshire, the building of a great house, the production of children. And now that life, a decade of happy marriage, was over
, leaving Bess a widow at thirty-six, with seven young children – Lucretia, the baby, just a few months old* – and one unmarried stepdaughter (Catherine Cavendish had married Thomas Brooke), without the protection and the direction of Sir William. No letters from Bess to Cavendish survive and we have no record of her feelings, but if love can be inscribed by the embroiderer’s needle, then The Cavendish Hanging tells its story. As does Bess’s entry in the notebook in which Sir William had noted the hour of their marriage: ‘Memorandum. That Sir William Cavendish Knight my most dear and well beloved Husband departed this present Life of Monday being the 25th day of October between the Hours of 8 and 9 of the same day at Night in the year of our Lord God 1557. The dominical Letter then C. On whose Soul I most humbly beseech the Lord to have Mercy and Rid me and his poor Children out of our great Misery.’19

  5.

  ‘My honest swete Chatesworth’

  Everything that Bess and Sir William had built together suddenly looked under threat. Bess did not have to fear the Court of Wards, since Cavendish’s portfolio of land and property had been bought in their joint names, and as a result Chatsworth and its estates, though entailed on Bess’s eldest son Henry, were hers for her lifetime, to be presided over and improved upon. And she had a reasonable income from rents, calculated in 1558 as around £300, while her outgoings stood at about £200, though 1558 was a particularly expensive year as much of it was spent in London.1 However, there were large amounts owing, too: money had been borrowed to extend the Chatsworth estate, not to mention Sir William’s £5,000 debt, which was now hanging over Bess’s head. It looked as though she might be ‘utterly undone’, as Cavendish had feared.

  In January 1558, a bill came before Parliament, which, if it became law, would allow lands to be confiscated for the recovery of debts such as those left by William Cavendish. This would directly affect Bess and threaten her Derbyshire estates. She could, of course, have raised money to settle her debts by selling off some of those estates. But this she was not prepared to do. Instead she tried to marshal support from powerful friends such as Sir John Thynne.

  ‘I am now driven to crave your help’, she wrote to Thynne in February. ‘There is a bill in the parliament house against me . . . it doth touch many and if it pass it will not only undo me and my poor children but a great number of others.’ The bill had been read twice in the ‘Lords’ House’, and was to be read in the ‘Lower House’ (the Commons) in the next few days. It was short notice, but could Thynne get to London to vote against it? ‘If you be here of Friday you shall stand me in good stead’, she added in a postscript, and in the margin, in a rare moment of whimsy, she doodled a ewer, holding a flower.2 We don’t know if Thynne made it to London, but the bill was opposed, as Bess explained in a letter written on the 25th: ‘hitherto I have taken no hurt by the parliament, yet do I still stand in great fear and shall do until such time as the parliament ends which I wish daily, for the bill has as yet been but once read and is so evil liked of the house that I trust through the help of such as you and other true . . . friends it shall take small effect’.3 She was right – the bill, on the Queen’s orders, was abandoned.

  In March, Bess felt able to return to Chatsworth, after a six-month absence. The journey, on horseback, after winter rains, along mudbound tracks, was, as she told Thynne, long and ‘foul’, with her horse struggling to ‘pass through the tough mire’. She had been ill, too – ‘I have escaped one of my fits since my coming home and doubt not in short time to recover my health’ (this is the only reference to Bess suffering from ‘fits’). Things had not been well looked after at Chatsworth, which was in a state of disarray, but for all that she could not but delight in the house itself – ‘for the good order and kindliness of it I dare compare it to any within this realm’.4

  During her marriage to Cavendish, Bess had learned to run several households, but estate business had been Sir William’s province. Newly widowed and not yet confident as a woman of property, she felt in need of advice and turned to Thynne, who arranged for one of his servants, a Mr Hyde, probably a steward or lawyer, to visit Chatsworth. ‘Master Hyde’ proved most helpful, as Bess reported: ‘he has taken much pain to bring my disordered things in to some good order. I shall by his means be able so to use my tenants as I trust they shall not much deceive me’. She did her best to induce Thynne to come to Chatsworth: ‘I would I could persuade you that your nearest way to London were to come to Chatsworth or else that you would choose this time to go see your land in Yorkshire. If any occasion might bring you hither so that it were not ill to you I would be very glad of it . . . I will cease troubling you with my scribbling, from my poor house at Chatsworth.’5

  Having set Chatsworth to rights, Bess returned to London, with the children joining her in June.6 Once again, she rented Thynne’s Brentford house. That summer, the talk in London would all have been of Queen Mary’s deteriorating health – another false pregnancy in the spring had left her suffering from headaches, depression, insomnia and poor vision. She could expect no comfort from Philip, who was in Spain, as he had been ever since his last visit to England the previous year. By the autumn, it was clear that Mary was dying, and she named Elizabeth, her half-sister, though still a bastard in Mary’s eyes, as her successor. Elizabeth was living at Hatfield, Hertfordshire, a few miles north-east of St Albans. When Bess left London for Chatsworth at the end of September, it would have been but a short detour off the Great North Road to visit Hatfield. She may well have taken the chance to pay her respects to Elizabeth; with Mary dying, it was important to position herself to advantage with the incoming Queen.

  Bess would have first come across Elizabeth as a teenager, on her visits to Edward’s court with Sir William, and they were on friendly enough terms for the Cavendishes to make the young princess godmother to their firstborn son, Henry. Now twenty-five, Elizabeth was a little over ten years younger than Bess. Both were strong-willed, fearless redheads. Both would have recognised something formidable in the other, a glint of steel. Both were prepared to take on a man’s world on their own terms. If Bess needed an example of what a woman could achieve, then she needed to look no further than Elizabeth – a female monarch who chose not to be answerable to either a husband or her councillors. However, where the Queen’s unique position was largely defined by her unmarried state – marriage was a trap to be avoided, a curtailment to independence – Bess’s ascent was only made possible through marriage. And where Bess, though by no means averse to scheming, was decisive and forthright, Elizabeth was the mistress of vacillation and equivocation, supremely artful and subtle in her dealings with others. But there is nothing to suggest that in the early years relations between the two were anything but cordial, founded on mutual, perhaps wary, respect.

  On 17 November 1558, Mary died, aged forty-two. Four days earlier, Bess, anxious to be at the centre of events, had arrived in London and reopened the Brentford house. She opened a new account book too – ‘the charges for my house begun the 26 of November’ – engaged a boy to look after her sheep (Brentford was no more than a village) and went shopping. All the children and Bess herself needed new clothes, which meant the purchase of ells* of buckram, ells of holland, yards of black fustian and of gold and black sarcenet (a fine, soft cloth, often used for linings), mockado (deep-piled velvet), lace and black and white feathers. ‘Harry’ (Henry) had a pair of shoes to dance in and ‘Wyll’ (William) had gloves and hose.7

  On 14 January, under heavy grey skies, huddled against flurries of snow, Bess’s daughters, Frances and Elizabeth, stood in new clothes, their hair freshly dressed, to watch Elizabeth I process in a horse litter from the Tower to Westminster.8 Bess does not seem to have been with them, probably because she had been invited to the abbey to witness the coronation the following morning, along with her sons Henry and William, whose hair had been especially ‘polled’ by a barber in honour of the occasion. Also in the abbey would have been one of the new Queen’s most loyal servants – Sir William St Loe.
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  William St Loe, born in 1518, was the eldest son of Sir John St Loe, of Sutton Court, Chew Magna.9 The St Loes were an old Somerset family, with a history of service, both royal and military. William had three younger brothers, Edward, John and Clement, and a sister, Elizabeth. As a boy he was tutored by the distinguished scholar John Palsgrave, who had also taught Henry VIII’s sister Mary, and Henry’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, and who thought highly of William’s intelligence. William made his first appearance on the public stage in 1536, when he became a gentleman usher in the household of Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, but two years later Courtenay was convicted of high treason – for plotting against the King – and executed. William, now married to Jane Baynton, the daughter of a family friend, followed his father into the army; by 1545, he was serving in Ireland, as a grand captain, along with his father and his uncle William, and received a knighthood for good service. In 1549, his wife died, leaving two daughters, Mary and Margaret.

  In the spring of 1553, William returned to England and was put in charge of Princess Elizabeth’s security by Edward VI. On Edward’s death, the St Loes, Sir John and his sons, firm Protestants all, were involved in the attempt to put Jane Grey on the throne, raising a force in her support. More damagingly, months later, William took part in the Wyatt rebellion, several of whose leaders, though not Henry Grey, were personal friends – both Sir Peter Carew and Edward Courtenay were West Country men. Wyatt’s confession implicated St Loe, who was sent to the Tower, where he ‘came in with a wonderful stout courage, nothing at all abashed’.10 He continued to be ‘stout’ under interrogation, divulging nothing.