Bess of Hardwick

Countess of Shrewsbury

• Born: c. 1527
• Birthplace: Derbyshire, England
• Died: February 13, 1608
• Place of death: Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, England

Born into relative obscurity, Bess of Hardwick is remembered principally for building the mansions Hardwick Hall, Chatsworth, and Oldcotes. She rose through four increasingly grand marriages to become countess of Shrewsbury, wife of the guardian of Mary, Queen of Scots, and grandmother of a potential claimant to both the Scottish and English thrones.

Early Life

Bess of Hardwick was born Elizabeth Hardwick, a member of an obscure Derbyshire gentry family of one boy and four girls, of whom Bess was the third. Her father, John Hardwick, died probably when Bess was about one year old. At the age of twelve, she is believed to have entered the service of her distant relatives, Lord and Lady Zouche, after the remarriage of her mother.

It was at the Zouche residence that she seems to have met her first husband, Robert Barlow. They married when both were in their early teens (the precise date is not known), but Barlow, never strong, soon died, leaving Bess the first of the three jointures, or widow’s portions, from which she was ultimately to make her fortune. Her great leap in status came with her second marriage, to the much older, wealthier, and already twice-widowed Sir William Cavendish, whom she married in 1547 and who died in 1557. This was the only one of her four marriages to be fruitful, producing eight children. Three sons and three daughters survived to maturity.

Her marriage to Cavendish also brought her contacts with the court and with circles of influence, since Cavendish had been one of Henry VIII’s commissioners for the dissolution of the monasteries (it was through this connection that he was able to acquire the land on which Chatsworth was later built).

Life’s Work

Bess of Hardwick’s principal efforts were directed toward two interrelated areas: the advancement of her children and the building of houses that would not only serve as homes for them but also give visible expression to the grandeur and status she hoped to achieve for them. For all her children, Bess sought to engineer suitably splendid marriages.

She pulled off a brilliant coup when, three years after the death of her third husband Sir William Saint Loe, whom she had married in 1559 and who died in 1564 she arranged for the marriages of her daughter Mary and her son Henry to the son and daughter of George Talbot, sixth earl of Shrewsbury, at the same time that she herself married their father.

This last and most splendid of her marriages brought her enormous wealth and also great responsibility, for two years after it took place Shrewsbury was appointed guardian of Mary, Queen of Scots , who had fled to England hoping that Elizabeth IIII16IIII would help restore her to the Scottish throne but instead found herself imprisoned until her execution nineteen years later.

Talbot was chosen because he was considered trustworthy and because he had a considerable number of properties relatively close to each other, and the queen and her servants needed to be moved frequently for cleaning and security purposes. At first Bess and the queen got along well; they sewed together, and they also plotted together, as was evident in 1574 when Bess and her daughter Elizabeth Cavendish entertained Margaret, countess of Lennox, and her son Charles, at Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire. Margaret Lennox was the niece of Henry VIII and the mother of the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, Lord Darnley; Charles, her only surviving child, thus had a potential claim to the thrones of both England and Scotland.

Between them, and with the encouragement of Mary, Queen of Scots, Bess and the equally formidable Margaret encouraged a romance and ultimately a wedding between their children, which delighted them but enraged Elizabeth I, who imprisoned the countess of Lennox and made her displeasure with Bess very clear. The next year the marriage produced a child, Lady Arbella Stuart, but both Elizabeth Cavendish and her husband died shortly after, leaving Bess as the guardian of the child she called “my jewel Arbella.” From that point on, Arbella was the center of her plans, particularly as jealousy of Mary, Queen of Scots, led to an increasingly bitter estrangement from her husband.

Bess also began to pour her energies into architecture. She had already done so much work on the original Elizabethan Chatsworth that Sir William Cavendish actually referred to her as “my sweet Chatsworth”; she bought Hardwick Old Hall from her heavily indebted brother in 1583 and began the new hall in 1585, pressing on apace after the death of Shrewsbury in 1590.

Nominally, the grandeur of the decorative scheme was ascribed to Bess’s hope of a visit by the queen, but Elizabeth I, who had never ventured so far north even in her youth, was hardly likely to do so in old age, and it seems clear that Bess’s real hope was that her granddaughter Arbella would be the queen’s successor, a hope that received a tremendous boost when the queen sent for the young girl to attend to her at court and reportedly told the assembled courtiers that one day Arbella “will be even as I am.” Arbella, however, was mentally unstable she, like her aunt Mary, Queen of Scots, may well have suffered from porphyria, the disease that caused the madness of King George III and her behavior became increasingly erratic, alienating the queen and ultimately Bess as well, who virtually imprisoned her at Hardwick.

Not until after Bess’s death did Arbella ultimately succeed in arranging the marriage which, because of her royal blood, had always been denied her, but her attempt to escape to the Continent with her new husband failed, and she died insane in the Tower of London. Bess also suffered other family problems in her old age, principally from “my bad son Henry”; she died lonely in 1608, the richest woman in England.

Significance

Three great ducal families, the dukes of Devonshire, the dukes of Portland, and the dukes of Kingston, claimed descent from Bess of Hardwick, and though the Chatsworth that Bess built has now disappeared entirely beneath the later alterations to the house and Oldcotes mansion is forgotten almost entirely, her great house, Hardwick Hall, still stands much as she left it, towering above England’s major highway, with the initials “E. S.” for “Elizabeth Shrewsbury,” clearly visible. Farther along the ridge, the splendid Renaissance palace of Bolsover Castle, built by her son and grandson, also testifies to her influence.

Much of her embroidery also survives, as well as her splendid tomb in Derby Cathedral, and the decorative scheme she designed for Hardwick, with its rich program of allegorical meanings, can still be seen and understood in its entirety, giving a unique insight into the life and mind of an extraordinary woman, who was a longstanding and formative presence in the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, and who, but for the accidents of history, might also have been responsible for the crowning of another queen.

Bibliography

Durant, David. Bess of Hardwick: Portrait of an Elizabethan Dynast. Newark, England: Cromwell Press, 1988. The standard scholarly biography, clearly and accessibly written.

Girouard, Mark. Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. This evocative and scholarly book offers the fullest and clearest account of the original significance of Bess’s vision for Hardwick Hall.

Gristwood, Sarah. Arbella: England’s Lost Queen. London: Bantam Press, 2003. Although focused primarily on Arbella, this work nevertheless offers considerable insight into Bess’s life and her hopes for her granddaughter.

Kettle, Pamela. Oldcotes: The Last Mansion Built by Bess of Hardwick. Cardiff, Wales: Merton Priory Press, 2000. An account of the least-known of Bess’s houses.

Levey, Santina, and Peter K. Thornton, eds. Of Household Stuff: The 1601 Inventories of Bess of Hardwick. London: National Trust, 2001. Provides a glimpse into the full scale of Bess’s wealth and into daily life at Hardwick Hall.

Steen, Sara Jayne, ed. The Letters of Arbella Stuart. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. This carefully edited volume reprints Arbella’s numerous surviving letters and traces the course of her mental instability.