Bess of Hardwick, page 31
I have reported…as near as I can, what was the chief matter that passed between my Lady and me. So must I say in truth I found her most desirous and most willing to have your good favour, above any worldly thing…
Touching the mislike you have of my Lord Talbot for his going to Chatsworth, truly my Lord, all things duly considered, your Lordship doth hardly need to be offended for that matter, his wife being there, and with child…truly my Lord he is bent in all obedience and duty to serve you and obey you…and your Lordship I know, will not refuse willingly the fount of the blessing of God, which is the comfort of your own flesh and blood, your child, and him that must succeed you…Her Majesty has also conceived a very good opinion of him [Gilbert]; he is only now shadowed and darkened by the want of your Lordship’s father-like countenance and favour…
Good my Lord, think it sometimes what I was bold enough to say at Buxton touching this matter. I am sure there never was any who spoke with a more sincere mind towards you and your house…neither shall you ever find any kinsman or friend that has been more careful for both of you…than I have been. From Richmond, 26 June [1580].17
In his reply, Shrewsbury completely ignored what Leicester had to say regarding Bess’s explanations, and wrote that he rejoiced that Leicester had now heard his wife’s ‘lies’ from her own lips. He went on to explain why he had forbidden Gilbert to visit Chatsworth:
I have forbade him for coming to my wicked and malicious wife, who has set me at nought in his own hearing, that – contrary to my commandment – hath both gone and sent unto her daily by his wife’s persuasion. Yea, and hath both written and carried letters to no mean personages on my wife’s behalf…He hath been a costly child to me…[and now] he takes the way to spoil himself in London…’18
Shrewsbury then applied to move his prisoner to Chatsworth but this was refused. Queen Elizabeth was unwell with a strange pain in the head and a stitch over the stomach, he was told, and she ‘was resolutely bent against the going to Chatsworth’.19 Burghley wrote separately to explain that he had received intelligence ‘that it is earnestly intended within the realm and without, that very shortly the Queen there should either by slight or force, escape from you.’20 So, despite Leicester’s valiant attempt at mediation, the immediate dispute was never resolved, and it lay between the couple, festering, although they appear to have maintained a semblance of being together for another year or so.
Gilbert and Mary’s baby was born, a daughter whom they called Mary after her mother, and the Scottish Queen stood as godmother. Bess continued to make occasional dutiful visits to Sheffield, usually when Mary was moved, so that it could be cleaned and sweetened, repairs made to broken windows, and the rat catchers brought in.21
The threat of escape, about which Burghley warned, seems to have dispersed quickly, for at the end of July permission was given for a visit by Queen Mary to Buxton spa. Although Buxton would appear to be a less secure venue than Chatsworth, the Earl assured the Privy Council that surveillance at his Buxton house was strict, and that the only correspondence Mary would receive was from the French Ambassador. But she had a bad start to her journey to Buxton; almost as soon as she was seated on her horse it shied, and ‘she fell and hurt her back, which she still complains of’, the Earl reported, ‘notwithstanding she applies the baths once or twice a day.’22
Despite his seemingly endless streams of letters to the Queen, Burghley, Walsingham and anyone on the Privy Council he thought might help, the allowance for the Scottish Queen’s ‘diet’ was not increased. In fact, to Shrewsbury’s utter bewilderment, on 29 January 1581 the Queen reduced it, from over £50 a week to £32, and ordered him to cut Mary’s retinue by half.
It is impossible to explain why the Queen should have treated Shrewsbury in such a cavalier manner. The only explanation is that she genuinely thought that Shrewsbury had plenty of money, that despite his appeals these amounts were really not terribly important to him. In the event she continued to exploit his loyalty. Walsingham was startled enough to write to the Queen: ‘Pray God the abatement of the charges [allowed] that noble man that hath custody of the bosom serpent, have not lessened his care in keeping her.’23 If Shrewsbury could not afford to guard his prisoner adequately, he pointed out, she would escape. ‘How can my Lord maintain his people about him, and if she not be seen unto, she will escape. I beseech your Majesty, let not the pinching and sparing of a thousand pounds…work such extremities. And [even] if no such thing were to happen, I would not keep so dangerous a guest to gain as much money as my Lord…’24 But when Walsingham subsequently attempted to see the Queen to plead Shrewsbury’s case, he was refused an audience. And after being kept waiting for over two weeks, he realised that he was wasting his time.
Sending for Gilbert, who was in ‘lodgings in Westminster at the sign of the half moon, in a grocer’s house’, Walsingham told him it was obvious that the Queen would not be moved in the matter. He advised him to tell his father it was useless to keep badgering her about the allowances still outstanding. She had not the resources to pay him, chiefly because of a £20,000 sum she had to pay to Scotland and other ‘infinite daily sums’ to which she was committed.
He suggested that instead Shrewsbury should write to the Queen, Lord Leicester, Lord Burghley and several other members of the Privy Council, telling them that he requested that the Scottish Queen be removed from his keeping forthwith, and that in respect of the sums outstanding he would take instead some grants in lands and farms. He should remind the Queen of his utmost loyalty for over eleven years, Walsingham counselled, and point out that his service had gone completely without reward, where many who had provided lesser services had been handsomely recompensed.25
Shrewsbury could not believe that it was the Queen’s real intention to treat him so poorly, and so did not accept this sensible advice from Walsingham. Instead, he wrote again, begging to be allowed to come to Court to explain matters. Meanwhile he made an attempt to remove some of Mary’s servants, and cut down on costs by drastically reducing the number of dishes served. Mary smuggled out messages to her supporters, and soon Elizabeth had an uncomfortable interview with the French Ambassador in which she was virtually accused of trying to starve Mary to death. Hitherto, Mary was used to choosing from umpteen dishes – up to sixteen – at mealtimes. Now Lord Leicester wrote hastily to the Shrewsburys to warn them of Mary’s claim that on Easter Day ‘she had but two dishes, and in both the meat was bad’. He urged Shrewsbury to respond immediately; ‘your Lordship should answer that you were cut off your allowance and therefore could yield no better’.26
In despair, the Earl wrote asking Walsingham for the going price of silver in London because he feared he must sell some of his plate to meet the demands of his creditors.27 Now instead of constantly bombarding the Queen for the monies owed him, his requests are piteous pleas to be allowed to come to Court and see her. Privately, though, he instructed his London agent to continue to press Burghley regarding the outstanding amounts still owing to him. With all these financial pressures, the monthly allowance that he made to Bess under their marriage agreement, in respect of lands of hers that came under his control, was one of the first things to suffer. As far as he was concerned she always appeared to have enough money to spend on buying land for her sons, and was unlikely to starve.
Inevitably this became yet a further cause for rancour between husband and wife, and Bess now began writing to the same set of people complaining of the Earl’s treatment. There is a rebuttal dated 12 October 1581, written in the Earl’s illegible hand, declaring that all the accusations made by his wife against him concerning money are untrue. He claims grandly that he had paid off her debts, and lists them, but they total only £24.28 He also lists lands and tenements, which he had allowed the Countess ‘to own and enjoy’. These were Chatsworth and ‘all the lands which she had from her husband Sir William Cavendish. All the lands which she had by conveyance of Sir William Seyntloe. All her stocks of sheep and cattle and many other things…all of which she doth enjoy by the Earl’s permission.’29
One can imagine Bess’s reaction to this. Her husband had reneged on contracted promises regarding her annual allowance. He was keeping for himself the rents of many of the properties she had brought into their marriage, while pointing out how generous he was in allowing her to occupy her own property. Meanwhile, he was maligning her to their influential friends. It comes as no surprise to learn, a month later, in a letter from Shrewsbury to his London agent, that Bess is pressing him hard for money: ‘the old song,’ he comments sourly.30 Bess’s periodic visits to her husband had become very joyless affairs by this time. And she was grieving, too, because her only brother James Hardwick* had recently died aged fifty-five, a bankrupt in the Fleet prison. Hardwick was duly seized by the Lord Chancellor’s department, although thanks to her foresight in securing loans with mortgages Bess was a major creditor.31 Indeed, at this point, the main reason she was pressing the Earl for the money he owed her was to buy Hardwick back from the Crown, and she complained to Burghley that the Earl would not repay her.32
As the winter set in, the Scottish Queen’s health worsened, and she became ill enough to cause concern to her own and Shrewsbury’s doctors. As a result, the clerk of the Privy Council, Robert Beale (Walsingham’s brother-in-law), was sent in late November to judge for himself how serious matters were. Bess had been summoned to Sheffield and was waiting with Shrewsbury to meet Beale; together they warned him against Mary’s ‘deviousness’. There was a delay of some days before Mary finally summoned Beale to her chamber in the early evening. As he crossed the threshold, all the candles were mysteriously doused, leaving the room in total darkness apart from the glow from a fire. In a feeble, wispy voice, Mary listed her complaints, whispering that she was so ill she could hardly eat and drink, and she expected not to live much longer. And all the while Beale could hear her ladies, sobbing softly somewhere in the gloom.
Unable to see how ill the prisoner really was, unnerved by the entire episode, and recalling the warnings of her deviousness, he did not know whether to be concerned because Mary was dying, or worried that he had been tricked. He returned and told the Shrewsburys what had happened and asked Bess if she would go and check on the Queen. She did so, returning shortly afterwards to say that she had found Mary fast asleep. Later, at Beale’s request, Bess went to see her again. ‘She found her complaining as before,’ Beale reported. ‘Howbeit, seeing her face, she says is not much altered…in her opinion she has known the Scottish Queen far worse than she presently was.’33 Eventually Beale did get to see Queen Mary in daylight; he recorded that he found her pale and wan, crippled with rheumatism and overweight from lack of exercise.
At least Beale’s visit had the effect of relaxing the close confinement, which was a relief to everyone including Shrewsbury. Not wanting to be accused of killing Mary by neglect, Elizabeth agreed to several of Mary’s demands:34 that she might be allowed to go two or three miles outside of the park; that she might be allowed a coach and six horses in which to take exercise; that the household regimen might be more relaxed so that entertainments, such as a play or a masque, could be held occasionally, to break the tedium for all concerned; and that she might change a few of her older servants who had become tired in her service. Elizabeth agreed to all these, but she did not accede to Mary’s final request, that Shrewsbury’s long overdue expenses in connection with her captivity be repaid.
Mary’s health improved.
CHAPTER 15
DISCORD
1582–4
THE FOLLOWING YEAR SAW SOME MAJOR REVERSES IN THE houses of both Cavendish and Shrewsbury. Hardly had 1582 begun before the Earl of Shrewsbury was writing to Lords Burghley and Leicester to advise that, ‘It has pleased God to call to his mercy out of this transitory world my daughter [Elizabeth] Lennox, this present Sunday being 21 January…about 3 o’clock in the morning.’ She was twenty-six years of age and had been taken ill during a Twelfth Night party at Sheffield. Shrewsbury explained that her dying wish was that the Queen would take pity on her little daughter, Arbella, and in her will* she specifically asked Lords Burghley and Leicester to present this last wish as a petition to the Queen. He added, ‘my wife taketh my daughter Lennox’s death so grievously that she neither doth, nor can think of, anything but lamenting and weeping’.1
Later, when Bess wrote to Burghley, she was still very distressed ‘by the death of my daughter…whom it pleased God…to take out of this world in her best time…I doubt not in mercy, for her good, but to my no small grief…whom I cannot yet remember but with a sorrowful, troubled mind’.2 Her purpose in writing, however, was to plead on her orphan granddaughter’s behalf who, formerly, ‘had been where her mother was during her life,’ but now Bess could not bear to be parted from the child ‘nor in any place where I may not see her and daily hear of her…of whom I have special care, not only as a natural mother has of her best beloved child, but much more greater in respect of how she is in blood to her Majesty, albeit one of the poorest…’ wherefore, it was necessary for her to establish a nursery and staff ‘fit for her calling’. She reminded him of the allowance made by the Queen to her late daughter of £400 annually, in lieu of the confiscated Lennox estates, and the £200 the Queen similarly made little Arbella. ‘I hope her Majesty, upon my humble suit will let that portion which her Majesty bestowed upon my daughter Lennox, and my jewel Arbella, remain wholly to the child, for her better education. For the servants that are to look after her, and her masters that are to train her up in all good learning and virtue, will require no small charges.’3
Shrewsbury had been pressing the Queen to allow him to come to Court, and for a while it seemed that the Queen had agreed and was merely seeking a mutually convenient date. Then, to his disappointment he was advised that his visit was postponed until later in the year. He therefore requested permission to take Queen Mary to Chatsworth, ‘for that my daughter Talbot will be near her lying-in time’ and also to allow the time ‘to sweeten my house that my children may come to me’.4
This permission was apparently not granted, and Mary Talbot’s lying-in duly commenced at Sheffield Lodge, with Bess in attendance. Within a few days of her arrival at Sheffield, there was some sort of domestic crisis, for Shrewsbury ordered his wife back to Chatsworth, and he returned to Sheffield Castle. On the following day Mary Talbot went into labour and produced a healthy girl, whom she called Elizabeth, a name already over-used in the family. Shrewsbury reported grumpily: ‘I am removed to the castle, and am most quiet when I have the fewest women here.’ There is a hint of what may have caused this latest quarrel when he adds that his wife had pressed him to hire some of the men who had formerly served Elizabeth Lennox, but he had refused, snapping nastily, ‘I have too many spies in my house already.’5
Shrewsbury was undoubtedly suffering from a persecution complex but there was some truth in this statement concerning spies; even though the one we know about had nothing to do with Bess. That same month Walsingham’s agents in Paris had been watching Shrewsbury’s former secretary Thomas Morgan, who resigned his post at Sheffield at his own request. Walsingham ordered his agents to shadow the man suspecting that he had been ‘turned’ to the cause of the Scottish Queen, and it was no great surprise when he learned that Morgan had sailed for France. Suspicions hardened when Morgan covertly despatched ‘a Welsh boy, about the age of 17 years with letters for England via Calais’. Walsingham was warned to look out for the youth at Dover: ‘he is full-faced, apparelled in a black cloak, black hose and sky-colour nether hose.’6 Intercepted messages confirmed Morgan’s role as Mary’s agent in France, a position he held for the remainder of her life.
A very brief and unexplained softening in Shrewsbury’s attitude towards Bess is revealed in a letter written on 15 May 1582 to Thomas Baldwin, his London agent, advising that his wife needed a new horse litter. He instructed Baldwin to tell Gilbert to ensure that this vehicle should be ‘a very handsome one’, and was to be acquired with all possible speed, ‘…immediately after Whitsun, if not before’.7 He confirmed that he was going to Buxton on 18 May with the Scottish Queen, and that he had once again requested permission to come to Court. He was so confident of obtaining a favourable reply to this request that he instructed Baldwin to prepare Cold Harbour House for his arrival. But there is no further mention of his anticipated visit a month later, when he told Baldwin he could not buy some suggested land because his children were ‘so costly’. Nor could he pay off the debts of his heir, Lord Francis, about which Baldwin had advised him. Work had almost stopped at Worksop, and it was perhaps indiscreet for Bess at this time to embark on a new building at Chatsworth, albeit a small one. She commissioned Robert Smythson to design and build a lookout tower on the hill in the north-eastern corner of her park wall. The Stand Tower (now known as the Hunting Tower) is one of the few features to survive at Chatsworth from Bess’s time.8
In July 1582 there was another family tragedy when Margaret,* the wife of Bess’s third son, Charles Cavendish, died. The young couple had been married little more than a year when Margaret died after giving birth to a son they named William.† Charles, who was knighted that year, lived at Stoke Manor, a few miles from Chatsworth. In her moving letter of condolence to Margaret’s parents, Bess begged them to continue to regard Charles as their own son.9 Shrewsbury mentioned all these family matters in his reports to Burghley, but he was never sympathetic about Bess’s family bereavements; his usual reaction was one of irritation because she cried a great deal, which he appears to have considered self-indulgent. He does not comment on Bess’s reaction when, at the end of August, his own son and heir, Lord Francis, contracted plague and died shortly after arriving at Belvoir Castle, where he had gone to visit his uncle.
