Bess of Hardwick, page 8
Bess’s household accounts show a good income from rents, but a fairly lavish housekeeping bill, too, with dozens of servants who were clearly necessary with two busy households to run. Bess’s half-sister Jane Leche, who could have been no older than fifteen in 1548, came as a well-paid lady-in-waiting to Bess at a wage of fifteen shillings each quarter-day. As well as Sir William’s secretaries and a major-domo in each establishment (James Crompe and Francis Whitfield), there were references such as ‘my butler, Tamis’, ‘my footman’ and ‘my porter’, a children’s nurse, numerous indoor maidservants such as Nan Todd, Cecily, Nell, Johanna, Barbara, ‘great Meg [Margaret Crane] and Little Meg’, a cook and kitchen staff. There were outside staff: ‘…the horse keeper…the stable boy’ and people ‘who wrought in the garden’ at Northaw, or ‘heaved coal’.
There were several general menservants who carried out regular commissions, and the names of two of them, Greves and Shawe, are familiar. Either they or their fathers were among the yeomen who testified on behalf of Mistress Hardwyck at the Inquisition Post Mortem of Bess’s father. This suggests that when Bess married Sir William she took with her a number of servants who were well known to her from Derbyshire, probably from her mother’s household. In addition to full-time employees, Bess engaged people from outside, such as a male embroiderer whose name was ‘Angell’ (possibly a European weaver), who often came in to help Bess with large household embroidery projects or delicate sewing tasks. There were regular, almost annual, payments to a midwife, and also frequent references to ‘my nurse’, who was more than likely a wet-nurse since Bess also made regular payments to ‘the woman who hath my nurse’s boy’.
Bess was an indulgent and even affectionate stepmother, and referred to William’s daughters as ‘my daughter Cateryn’ and ‘my daughter Anne’.* There is no mention of their sister, ten-year-old Mary, ever being at Northaw, although her name appears regularly in the accounts each month: ‘Given to the woman that hath Mary, ten shillings’ and ‘paid for Mary’s board, eleven shillings and threepence,’ and occasionally, ‘laid out for Mary – twenty five shillings.’10 These sums are significant amounts of money for the time and there must have been some good reason why Mary did not reside with her siblings among her father’s new family. Children who were physically or mentally abnormal were customarily given into outside care and it seems very likely that this is why Mary is boarded out. The child is not out of Bess’s thoughts, however, for there are other entries: ‘Given to Halle for Mary, the rest of the money that was promised him for her; fifty three shillings and four pence.’ And the following entry: ‘For a pretty coat for her; two shillings and sixpence.’ Mary missed out on the more lavish wardrobe of the children at Northaw, however:
Item: For my daughter Anne:
A nightingale
4/4d
An ell of cloth to make her sleeves
3/4d
Girdles; red, white and yellow
1/6d
An ounce of satin silk to work it all
2/–
Half an ell of cambric
2/6d
An ounce of lace for her kirtles and her laces
1/4d*
‘My daughter Cateryn’ and ‘my daughter Francys’ are similarly treated with purchases of silks and satins for their clothes, and there are other entries which hint at how the girls were dressed: ‘a neat waistcoat…a red mantle…two neat caps…’ and in the case of the baby Frances, ‘a coral for her teeth’.11 The children were the obvious recipients of the frequent purchases of ‘sugar candy’ and they were often given pocket money: five shillings at Christmas.
Sir William was a pampered husband by these accounts (although Tudor husbands had a high expectation of wifely duty). Bess purchased his shoes and hose, made his shirts (‘for 20 ells of cloth at two shillings the yard, to make shirts for my husband’), made, trimmed and embroidered his doublets, arranged for the skinner to line his jerkins with fur and make his ‘buskins’. These buskins were soft leather knee-high boots, necessary on long rides between assignments since everyday woollen hose provided little protection to the legs from the chafe of stirrup leathers. The contents of a drink she prepared for him on a number of occasions – ‘for ginger, sugar candy, aniseed and liquorice to make a [posset] for my husband’ – suggest that he suffered from stomach problems, perhaps a gastric ulcer diagnosed by ‘my Lord Chancellor’s physician’ to whom a fee of five shillings was paid for a consultation.
Almost dominating the first account book are the number of entries for materials to make and decorate clothes. Clothes for her stepdaughters – ‘given for six yards and a half of satin, for a gown for “Cate”’ (Katheryne), who was fourteen and almost a woman (a further five yards of cotton was bought to line the satin gown) – clothes for her husband, but also for herself.
The lifestyle led by the Cavendishes required a rich wardrobe, and it is hardly surprising that Bess’s household books are full of the purchase of materials for gowns, ruffs and sleeves, and fashionable trimmings and accoutrements. She obviously delighted in the purchases of jewellery and fine things: ‘given to the woman who makes silk hosen…paid to Master Dupont for a pearl…for four ounces of silver [thread] to edge my sleeves and make my purse…Paid to Reynes the goldsmith for my buttons; seven pounds, seven shillings and six pence.’ She purchased the best linens, velvets, satins, silks and lace and to decorate her clothes she frequently spent money on ‘bone work’, bands of material encrusted with embroidery of black silk, or silver and gold wire or thread. In all the portraits we have of her she dresses with elegance and restraint but always luxuriously. One of her favourite gowns was ‘mole coloured satin’ it was important both to Bess and her husband that she looked and dressed as befitted her station.
In the earliest surviving image of Bess, painted in about 1560, she wears a fashionable loose-bodied black velvet gown with a high neck. It is a sumptuous garment indicating her rank and importance, and is clearly designed for winter wear. Trimmed with self-coloured bands of bone work, it has a collar of creamy mink. The short puffed sleeves are slashed to reveal that the gown is also lined with this costly fur, and the entire garment is decorated on the front, sleeves and sides with numerous pairs of intricately engraved gold aiglets,* which also act as decorative fastenings. In two portraits of Lady Jane Grey, the sitter wears an almost identical gown to the one worn by Bess in this portrait, except that the fur in the Jane Grey portrait is ermine, which only members of the Royal family and senior aristocracy (‘dukes, earls…and persons of distinction’), were permitted to wear.†
On her hands and arms Bess wears two gold and enamel bracelets of a popular contemporary design, and four gold dress rings. She wore pearls in all her portraits, and as they are mentioned on a number of occasions in her accounts, and in various inventories, it appears she was especially fond of them. In this portrait she wears them over the standing collar of her bodice as a choker, and two rows of black pearls decorate her small, elaborately wrought, wired ‘French hood’ headdress of dark red and gold. The fine red embroidery on the sleeves and small ruffed collar of the light-coloured bodice or kirtle is almost certainly her own work. Those long, slim, beringed fingers with their well-shaped and manicured nails were constantly employed at the fine needlework at which she excelled. In common with most chatelaines of her day this would have included helping to make her own household linen: ‘paid for cloth that I bought to make a pair of sheets at three shillings an ell, and in the whole 18 ells’.
In the late spring of 1549, twenty-one-year-old Bess was at Northaw awaiting the birth of her second child. Her half-sister Jane was with her, and the two sisters were subsequently joined by their aunt, Marcella Linnacre, who brought with her some luxuries purchased in London. Later, Bess’s elder sister Mary also came to stay, and Bess’s mother sent gifts of capons and brawn from Derbyshire by the hand of her manservant, Harry, to encourage Bess to build up her strength. In the days immediately before and after the birth, a midwife and a nurse were in attendance and the ladies passed their time embroidering new bedlinen for the use of Jane Dudley, ‘my Lady Warwick’,12 who had agreed to be a godmother and would stay at Northaw for the christening.13
On 10 June a second daughter was born to Bess at 2 in the morning.14 She was named Temperance, in honour of the Lady Elizabeth (Temperance being the nickname wryly bestowed upon his youngest half-sister by the young King). As well as the Countess of Warwick, Lady Jane Grey stood as a godmother, while the Earl of Shrewsbury15 was godfather. One can almost plot the fortunes of contemporary Tudor aristocracy by Sir William’s choice of godparents for his children. The godfather, Francis, Earl of Shrewsbury, a Privy Counsellor and Earl Marshal of England, continues an unexplained link between the powerful Shrewsbury family and Bess’s late father, for John Hardwick named the Earl in his will as one of two ‘supervisors’ of his estate.
Nor was the choice of godmothers accidental. Since the previous year, the Seymours had fallen from power. In January 1549 the recently widowed Lord Admiral had been arrested on the orders of his brother the Protector and imprisoned in the Tower. The charges were various but one of them was the Lord Admiral’s unseemly behaviour towards his quasi-stepdaughter,* the Lady Elizabeth. And following Queen Catherine’s death in childbirth, he had tried to persuade the Privy Council to agree to his marriage with the princess.
At the same time he had sent word to Henry Grey (through his gentleman usher, John Harington), that he could arrange a marriage between the Lady Jane Grey and the boy king. Upon this vague assurance, and in return for a deposit of cash against the eventual sum of £2000, Jane Grey became the Admiral’s ward and was sent to live at Sudeley, where the Admiral had retained his late wife’s attendants to wait upon Jane.16 These obvious machinations did not go unnoticed by his brother the Protector, or the Privy Council, and the Lord Admiral was arrested for ‘disloyal practices’ after he made a bungled attempt to kidnap the King which resulted in the death of the boy’s pet dog.
The Lord Admiral was a popular man, but the gossip surging around the city after his arrest (possibly ‘spin’, spread deliberately) was so widespread and damaging that Princess Elizabeth herself was in danger of arrest. She wrote to the Protector, demanding that the Privy Council repudiate the rumour that she was in the Tower and pregnant by the Lord Admiral. Had she been entirely innocent, as she claimed, it was a natural thing for her to have done. ‘This City of London,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘is a whirlpool and a sink of evil rumours where they be bred and from thence spread out into all parts of this realm.’17 However, Elizabeth’s servants Kat Ashley and Thomas Parry were arrested and confirmed, under intense questioning and threats of torture,* that there had been a few unladylike romps. Fortunately the inquisitors were unable to prove that matters had gone any further than some kisses, and slap and tickle, between the infatuated Princess and her so-called stepfather, and Mistress Ashley revealed that such incidents had been initially condoned by Queen Catherine, who regarded them as innocent fun until she discovered her husband and stepdaughter locked in a passionate embrace, when the Queen ‘fell out’ with them both and Elizabeth was asked to leave.18
Elizabeth only just managed to survive this scandal; the Lord Admiral, friend to the Cavendishes, did not. Found guilty of high treason he was beheaded on 20 March 1549. Elizabeth’s reaction was cool and does not reflect either the infatuation she appears to have felt for the man or the danger she knew herself to have been in. When news of Seymour’s execution was brought to her, Elizabeth told a friend, ‘this day died a man of much wit, and very little judgement.’19
The Lord Admiral’s death provoked a period of unrest and general dissatisfaction with the Protector, who grew more unpopular by the day, and a man in Sir William’s position needed to be in London keeping watch on current events. So it is not surprising that immediately after Bess had been churched, the couple removed to Newgate Street, leaving Marcella Linnacre and Jane Leche in charge of the babies at Northaw: ‘Delivered to my Aunt Linnacre,’ Sir William noted, ‘when my wife and I went to London after the christening; ten shillings.’
The execution of his brother would ultimately lead to the downfall of the Lord Protector. In October that year, after mishandling rebellions in Norfolk and the West Country, he was ousted from power and the Protectorate was abolished. After a spell in the Tower, Seymour (who now went by the title Duke of Somerset),* was released, and he again took his place as a Privy Counsellor. Immediately he attempted to regain his previous power, and this led to his rearrest. The man who would eventually replace Seymour as Lord Protector of the boy king was John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick. Initially, though, Dudley was content with the presidency of the Council. Henry Grey, who correctly read the signs, had already taken the precaution of attaching himself to Dudley a year earlier, and the two had been fast friends for some time before Dudley became the most powerful man in England. Moving in Henry Grey’s circle, Sir William Cavendish’s choice of ‘my lady Warwick’ as first godmother to Temperance, indicates that he, too, was reading the signs and thinking ahead.
That winter the Cavendishes bought a house and some land in Derbyshire. Although they could not have known it at the time, the purchase was to be a life-changing event, and the property concerned would be inextricably linked with the Cavendish name down through the centuries to the present day. The property was at Chatsworth and Bess would have been familiar with it: after all she had grown up within a few hours’ ride of it, and the family of her stepfather, Ralph Leche, lived there. It would be remarkable if she had not visited the nearby home of such close relatives. Bess’s younger sister Alice Hardwick had also married into the same family, Francis Leche, a nephew of Ralph, and here it is necessary to backtrack somewhat.
Two years earlier, in 1547, Francis Leche had discovered that his wife Alice had been unfaithful to him. It caused a local scandal and he was not a man to wear lightly the horns of a cuckold. In the heat of the discovery he offered the old family property to Thomas Agarde, a friend of the Lord Admiral’s, for £700, ‘rather than let bastards be his heirs’.20 The Leche family, including Ralph Leche, who owned some property at Beeley which marched with the Chatsworth land, were aghast when they discovered what Francis had done and clamoured for the bargain to be rescinded. With his temper cooling, Francis realised that he had acted rashly and told Agarde that he had changed his mind, but Agarde refused to back down: a bargain was a bargain, and the law was on his side. Knowing that Agarde had the protection of the Lord Admiral, Francis Leche presented his case to a higher force, the Lord Protector, begging him to intervene so that the property might not be removed from his family.
Having expressed polite distaste at the ‘lewd’ behaviour of Mistress Alice Leche, and ‘without searching the private life of those before us’, the Lord Protector ruled in favour of the Leche family. ‘Agarde,’ he wrote to his brother who had pleaded Agarde’s case, ‘has abused you by not declaring his case truly, and if he does not immediately accomplish our order he shall know the price. We find that the bargain made by Leche should not disinherit the succession to that land, so as all parties should attain their own.’21 This statement, ‘he shall know the price’, was not a threat to be ignored coming from such a source, and the unfortunate Agarde now had on his hands a ‘damaged’ freehold. Having paid for the property, he undoubtedly owned it, but this apparently would not protect him from future claims by members of the Leche family. In the middle of this matter he died, and it is small wonder that his son and heir, Francis Agarde, decided to sell Chatsworth back to a member of the Leche family for whatever he could get.
There are a number of demonstrable occasions in Bess’s life when her mother wrote to tell her of a property for sale at a bargain price,22 and perhaps this is how Bess got to hear about Chatsworth. Or perhaps their good friend the late Lord Admiral had mentioned it to them when he realised that some of the protagonists in the squabble were relatives of Lady Cavendish. In whatever way they heard of it, on 31 December 1550, ‘Sir William and Dame Elizabeth* Cavendish’ purchased the property from Francis Agarde at the knockdown price of £600.23 The estate included ‘the manors of Chatsworth and Cromford, and houses and land there, and in Calton, Edensor, Pilsley, Birchills, Bakewell, Baslow, Totley, Tideswell, Litton, Dore, Wheston, Abney, Chesterfield, Beeley, Matlock, Bonsall and Repton’.24
The purchase may have been simply a chance one: Sir William taking advantage of an obvious bargain. But it would have been absolutely characteristic of Sir William Cavendish to move his assets and his family further away from London during what promised to be troubled times should anything happen to the delicate young king. First in line to the throne was Princess Mary, Roman Catholic and in close touch with the Pope, who – if she succeeded to the throne – was expected to attempt to return ownership of former Church properties. This was always going to be difficult to achieve, since the buyers of the great tranches of Church lands, comprising almost 30 per cent of all the land in England, had included most of the great families. But it appears Sir William was unwilling to take this chance: almost immediately he began to dispose of the former Church properties he had acquired during the Dissolution, and to buy others. That some of the new acquisitions were also former Church properties did not seem to matter. Probably he wanted to establish a chain of secular buying and selling, in which there could be no doubt of his legal ownership.
There was another consideration: Mary’s succession might not go unchallenged. A fervent Protestant faction, headed by John Dudley and Henry Grey, planned to install a Protestant monarch. Given his close connections with Grey, these ambitions may have been known to Sir William, or at the very least he probably suspected what might happen. In the event of the death of Edward VI there was a possibility of civil war with its epicentre in London, only a few hours’ ride from Northaw.
