Mistress of Hardwick Read online

  Bess nursed WiUiam Cavendish with as much devotion as once she had nursed Robert Barlow. All sorts of delicacies were tried to tempt the appetite of the invalid, including necks of mutton, pigeons, oysters, whiting, capons and calves foot jelly. But it was no use. Two months later Bess opened the pocket book in which Sir William had carefully recorded the details of their marriage and the births and christenings of their children, and made a sad little entry of her own: *Sir Wilham Cavendish, knight, my most dear and well-beloved husband, departed this present life on Monday, being the

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  25th day of October, betwixt the hours of eight and nine of the same day at night, in the year of our Lord God, 1557. On whose soul I most humbly beseech the Lord to have mercy and to rid me and his poor children out of our great misery.'

  Bess and William Cavendish had been ideally suited and she mourned him sincerely. Nevertheless, her second widowhood was much shorter than her first - she had the future of her six small children to consider now. In 1559 she married Sir William St Loe, another widower much older than herself with children of his own. St Loe was scarcely a romantic figure but he, too, was a wealthy landowner and could certainly be regarded as a good match from the worldly point of view. As it turned out, Bess had once more chosen well. William St Loe proved the most generous and loving of husbands. He showed no jealousy over her absorption in her building activities -indeed he once began a letter to her as *my honest sweet Chatsworth'. At other times she was *my own sweet Bess . . . more dearer to me than I am to myself'.

  Her marriage to St Loe brought Bess to Court for the first time, and at a particularly exciting time. Sad Mary Tudor was dead and now a new Queen, the young redheaded, imperious Elizabeth was letting a gust of fresh air and optimism into a country heartily sick of weak, factious government, internal dissension and bad housekeeping. The St Loes were in a privileged position. Sir William had shown himself a good friend to Ehzabeth at a time when she had been in great danger, and she had rewarded him by making him Captain of the Guard and Butler to the Royal Household. Bess became one of the ladies of the Privy Chamber, but she was soon to discover that no one, however privileged, was immune from the dangers which lurked at Courts.

  Trouble for Lady St Loe took the shape of some highly unwelcome confidences from Lady Catherine Grey,

  younger sister of the unfortunate Jane and now, by the terms of Henry VIIPs Will, heiress presumptive to the throne. Throughout the summer of 1561 the matrons of the Court had been casting increasingly suspicious glances at Lady Catherine, and early in August she sought Bess out to confess that she had been secretly married the previous autumn to the Earl of Hertford and was now pregnant. Distraught and frightened, she begged Lady St Loe to help her break the news to the Queen, but although Catherine Grey's mother had been her friend and Catherine was godmother to one of her children, Bess could not or would not allow herself the luxury of kindness to the forlorn girl of twenty, now very near her time. The risks attached to becoming involved in the royal family's affairs were well-known and Bess, breaking into 'a passion of weeping', hastily dissociated herself from Lady Catherine's troubles. But Lady Catherine's condition could no longer be ignored and a few days after her appeal to Bess the storm broke.

  Anything which affected the succession, even indirectly, touched the Queen on her most sensitive spot. She had not forgotten - she was never to forget - her own experiences as a 'second person' during the reign of her sister Mary and of the intrigues which inevitably surrounded the heir to the Throne. In the activities of the present heir she had caught a sulphurous whiff of treason and Catherine Grey and her young husband were promptly arrested. Even in her twenties Ehzabeth Tudor was a formidable figure - as one ambassador remarked, *she gives her orders and has her way as absolutely as her father did' - and soon further orders reached Sir Edward Warner, Lieutenant of the Tower. *You shall send for St Loe', wrote the Queen, *and put her in awe of divers matters confessed by the Lady Catherine, and so also deal with her that she may confess to you all her knowledge in the same matter.'

  Elizabeth was convinced that there was more to Catherine Grey's secret marriage than met the eye - nor was her temper improved when Catherine presently gave birth to a healthy son. It is a little difficult to believe that Bess, with her close connections with the Grey family, had had no inkling of what had been going on, but no evidence of her complicity ever came to light. Even so, she spent seven months in the Tower - an unnerving experience and a sharp warning never to meddle in affairs of state.

  Three years after her release, she became a widow for the third time. William St Loe had made a Will leaving her all his property, but Bess had to face a good deal of unpleasantness from the St Loe family, who were understandably aggrieved and some ugly accusations of poisoning and witchcraft were bandied about. Bess was now forty-four, self-confident, strong-willed and still very handsome with her slender, upright figure, reddish hair and fine complexion. An efficient businesswoman, she managed her large estates with 'masculine understanding' and kept an unforgiving eye on every detail, every subordinate. She was by this time a wealthy woman and a matrimonial prize in her own right, and there was a good deal of speculation as to who her next husband would be. The names of Sir John Thynne, the builder of Longleat, Lord Darcy and Lord Cobham were all mentioned. But Bess was in no hurry. It was not until 1568 that she made her last and most brilliant marriage, to George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury - yet another widower with children of his own, yet another extremely rich man with property all over the north of England. It seemed as if everything Bess touched turned to gold. Her enemies did not hesitate to accuse her of an insatiable lust for power and wealth, but much of her driving ambition was now centred on her children. Before she accepted Shrewsbury, she insisted that her eldest son, Henry Cavendish, and her youngest daughter, Mary, should be married to his eldest

  daughter and second son, Gilbert Talbot. To mark this auspicious occasion, Bess ordered a walnut table to be made, inlaid with chessmen, dice and musical instruments, with the Talbot arms impaled by those of the Cavendish family - a table which stands today in the High Presence Chamber at Hardwick Hall.

  Yet again it seemed as if Bess was to be lucky in love, for George Talbot had fallen completely under the spell of her powerful personality. Queen Elizabeth was graciously pleased to approve the marriage - the Catherine Grey episode had now been forgiven and forgotten - and Her Majesty was heard to remark: 'I have been glad to see my lady St Loe, but now more desirous to see my lady Shrewsbury. I hope my lady hath known my good opinion of her . . . There is no lady in this land that I better love and like.'

  Bess had come a long way since that day, more than a quarter of a century earlier, when she had set out for London with no assets beyond her youth and optimism, and a dowry of not quite twenty-seven pounds. The past had been astonishingly successful. The future looked comfortably assured. When Lady St Loe went to the altar with the Earl of Shrewsbury, there was nothing but her own restless spirit to warn her of the storms which lay ahead.

  2 Dangerous Alliance

  In one of the turrets of Hardwick Hall there is a small room dedicated to the memory of Mary Queen of Scots, with her arms blazoned over the door. Mary had gone to her death in the Great Hall of Fotheringay Castle four years before the new Hardwick began to rise from its foundations, and why this room was furnished with relics of the tragic Qiaeen, or who furnished it, remains a mystery. Bess did not refer to it as the 'Scots Room' in the inventory^ of Hardwick which she herself compiled in 1601, yet she had every reason to remember her long association with Mary Stuart - an association which had brought her and her posterity nothing but disappointment and heartbreak.

  At about the same time that Bess became Countess of Shrewsbury, the Queen of Scots, deposed and imprisoned by her ungrateful subjects, was making her spectacular escape from Lochleven Castle. Her hopes of regaining the Scottish throne by force of arms were quickly dashed and a few days later she crossed the Solway Firth
in a fishing boat to seek sanctuary in England - a fugitive with nothing in the world but the clothes she stood up in. Sir Francis Knollys, who was hastily despatched to Carlisle to take charge of this unusual refugee, found her surprisingly undaunted by her misfortunes. *This lady and princess is a notable woman', he wrote to his friend WilUam Cecil. *She seemeth to regard no ceremonious honour beside the acknowledging of her estate regal. She showeth a disposition to speak much, to be bold, to be pleasant, and to be very familiar. She showeth a great desire to be avenged of her enemies . . . The thing that most she thirsteth after is victory, and it seemeth to be indifferent to her to have her enemies diminished either by the sword of her friends,

  or by the liberal promises and rewards of her purse, or by division and quarrels raised among themselves; so that for victory's sake, pain and peril seemeth pleasant unto her, and in respect of victory, wealth and all things seem to her contemptible and vile. Now what is to be done with such a lady and princess?'

  What indeed. This was a question which Queen Elizabeth and her Council were to ask themselves repeatedly during the next eighteen years. As the grand-daughter of Henry VIII's elder sister, Mary Stuart had an undeniable right to be recognised as Elizabeth's heir. Catholics, both native and European, thought she had every right to be recognised as Queen of England without further delay. The Enghsh government, therefore, faced a virtually insoluble problem. Mary had powerful friends abroad, and to let her go free would have been to invite disaster. They could not in decency hand her back to the Scots, who would have made short work of her. On the other hand, as the historian William Camden sagely observed: Tf she were detained in England, they reasoned lest she (who was as it were the very pith and marrow of sweet eloquence) might draw many daily to her part which favoured her title to the Crown of England, who would kindle the coals of her ambition, and leave nothing unassayed whereby they might set the crown upon her head.'

  These fears turned out to be only too well founded, but as long as Mary was kept a prisoner in England her movements could at least be controlled and her activities watched. Given the circumstances, the choice of custodian was obviously of paramount importance. He must be incorruptible; conscientious enough to be willing to accept such a thankless task; rich enough to be able to bear the expense such an 'honour' would be bound to entail, and preferably in a position to provide suitable accommodation for his charge. In December, 1568 Queen Elizabeth began to drop hints to the Earl of Shrewsbury, 'declaring that

  ere it were long I should well perceive she did so trust me as she did few'. *She would not tell me wherein', wrote the Earl to his new wife, *but doubt it was about the custody of the Scots Queen.' A little later Bess heard from one of her nephews in London: 'The news is here that my lord your husband is sworn of the Privy Council and that the Scottish Queen is on her journey to Tutbury, something against her will, and will be under my lord's custody there.'

  Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire was Crown property leased by the Shrewsburys, who used it as a hunting box. As a prison it had the advantage of being easily defensible. As a country residence in the depth of winter it had little to recommend it - being damp, bitterly cold and half ruined. The task of making Tutbury habitable at virtually a moment's notice was a challenge to her housekeeping abilities and Bess rose to the occasion with her usual efficiency. *The house being unready in many respects for the receiving of the Scottish Queen coming at such a sudden', she wrote, T have caused workmen to make forthwith in readiness all things as are most needful to be done before her coming, and, God willing, I shall cause three or four lodgings to be furnished with hangings and other necessaries.' Rather than she should not 'with true and faithful heart answer the trust reposed by the Queen's Majesty' declared Bess, she would go without 'furniture of lodging' for herself.

  Shrewsbury had wanted to take the Queen of Scots to his own house, Sheffield Castle, where there would have been more room for the large retinue of servants she had now acquired. But by the time the Council in London agreed to this, all the best tapestries and Turkey carpets had been moved to Tutbury and it was too late to change the plan. Conditions were certainly crowded and uncomfortable for the two households, but Mary had a suite of three rooms - a great chamber, an outer chamber and

  an inner chamber - and apart from the cold and damp, which was the same for everybody, the worst she had to suffer was the boredom and frustration of captivity. The weather made any form of outdoor exercise impossible, and Nicholas White, a visitor at Tutbury, asked her how she passed her time. 'She said that all the day she wrought with her needle, and that the diversity of the colours made the work seem less tedious, and continued so long at it till very pain made her to give over, and with that laid her hand upon her left side, and complained of an old grief newly increased there.'

  Mary, who had driven her first guardian, Francis Knollys, to desperation by her tantrums, never made any secret of the fact that she hated Tutbury, but all the same, the first few months she spent in the Earl of Shrewsbury's care passed comparatively peacefully. This was partly due to the friendship she had struck up with Bess. *This Queen continueth daily resort unto my wife's chamber', reported the Earl, Vhere with the Lady Leviston and Mrs Seaton, she sits working with the needle, in which she much delights, and devising of further works.' Shrewsbury was able to reassure the Council that 'her talk is altogether of indifferent and trifling matters, without any sign of secret dealing or practice'.

  They made a strange pair: the exquisitely feminine Queen of Scots, already at twenty-seven a figure of romantic legend, and shrewd successful Bess of Hardwick the yeoman's daughter, nearly fifty now, who had doggedly fought and married her way up the social ladder. And yet they had a surprising amount in common. Both were skilful, enthusiastic needlewomen. Both had a discerning eye for beautiful surroundings and a developed taste in luxury. Both possessed devious and scheming brains. No doubt much of the time they spent together was occupied in discussing designs for their next set of cushions, bed curtains or wall hangings: Mary employed

  a professional embroiderer who was able to draw patterns for the ladies and fill in the boring bits of background for them. The Queen of Scots would also have been in a position to advise Bess, who was still busy building Ghats-worth, on the latest styles in interior decoration. This was women's chatter, which the careful Shrewsbury could safely dismiss as trifling, but there must have been occasions when their talk turned to other, more dangerous, topics.

  The reason publicly advanced by Queen Elizabeth for keeping Mary under restraint and refusing to receive her at Court was that the Queen of Scots still lay under grave suspicion of having been an accessory before the fact of the murder of her second husband, Henry Stuart Lord Darnley. It would surely be strange if, during those long intimate sessions over the embroidery frames, Bess did not hear - more than once - Mary's side of the story. Mary had flatly refused to testify, even by proxy, at the special tribunal which Elizabeth had set up to enquire into the dispute between the Queen of Scots and her subjects. It was not for her, a sovereign princess, to justify herself before her own rebels. It was the Scottish lords, Mary maintained, who had secretly slain her husband and destroyed the house at Kirk o'Field *so that scarce one stone was left standing upon another'. The assassination of Darnley had really been an attempt on her own life, she declared, and when it had failed, her enemies had accused her of being guilty of the crime. They had dishonoured her, forced her to abdicate and made her good subjects hate her. They held her infant son a prisoner, had threatened to put her to death and had even stolen her rings and jewels. Mary would have been only too pleased to answer their wicked slanders before Elizabeth, *as one friend, one princess, to another'. She would never answer to anyone else. Nor would she speak while she remained in prison. She could not understand why the Queen of

  England, 'her good sister', apparently preferred to believe the word of rebels and traitors rather than that of her own kinswoman and cousin.

  While Bess sat liste
ning with half an ear to the Queen of Scots expatiating on her grievances, it seems as if an idea gradually began to take shape in her mind. She spent more and more of her time in Mary's company. Was she perhaps brooding quietly on the ramifications of the Tudor and Stuart families ? Lord Darnley, who had died violently in the house at Kirk o'Field, had been Mary's first cousin as well as her husband. Darnley was dead, but he had a younger brother, Charles, now in his early teens. After Mary Queen of Scots and her little son James, Charles Stuart could lay legitimate claim to the thrones of England and Scotland. Mary was a prisoner, constantly complaining how ill she felt. James was a mere baby in the hands of the Scottish war-lords - his future looked uncertain to put it mildly. But Charles Stuart was in England, still in the care of his widowed mother, the Countess of Lennox. And Bess had a daughter still unmarried. The seed of a plan more ambitious, more far-reaching in its implications than anything she had yet attempted, germinated slowly. There was no hurry. Bess was content to wait and watch.

  In the autumn of 1574, the Countess of Lennox left London to visit her estates in Yorkshire, taking her son Charles with her. On their way north they made an overnight stop at Huntingdon to stay with an old friend, the Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, now married to Mr Bertie. By a strange coincidence the Countess of Shrewsbury happened to be at RufFord, one of the many Shrewsbury houses in the neighbourhood. By an even more curious coincidence she had chosen to ride over to see her old friend, Mrs Bertie. It would be fascinating to know what these three formidable matrons found to talk about that evening. It was clearly a satisfactory encounter, for Bess

  issued a pressing in'itation to the Lennoxes to spend a few days at Rufford before continuing their journey. Unfortunately, though, no sooner had mother and son arrived at Rufford than Lady Lennox fell ill. As a good hostess and notable sick nurse, Bess naturally devoted herself to the invahd. Her daughter, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Cavendish, was left to entertain Charles Stuart and for a brief, halcyon period romance blossomed and burgeoned in the gardens of the old Cistercian Abbey of Rufford.