[20] Milles’s Catalogue of Honour, p. 667.
A supposed anachronism explained.
The reader will, it is hoped, excuse the minuteness of this inquiry. We have enough to teach us to take nothing upon trust that has been said concerning this work: and some doubts have been expressed as to the period at which it was written, grounded on a passage near the conclusion. Cavendish tells us that when the Cardinal left the hospitable mansion of the Earl of Shrewsbury at Sheffield, on the borders of Yorkshire, “he took his journey with Master Kingston and the guard. And as soon as they espied their old master in such a lamentable estate, they lamented him with weeping eyes. Whom my lord took by the hands, and divers times, by the way, as he rode, he would talk with them, sometime with one, and sometime with another; at night he was lodged at a house of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s, called Hardwick Hall, very evil at ease. The next day he rode to Nottingham, and there lodged that night, more sicker, and the next day we rode to Leicester Abbey; and by the way he waxed so sick, that he was divers times likely to have fallen from his mule.” p. 536. This is an affecting picture. Shakspeare had undoubtedly seen these words, his portrait of the sick and dying Cardinal so closely resembling this. But in these words is this chronological difficulty. How is it that Hardwick Hall is spoken of as a house of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s in the reign of Henry VIII. or at least in the days of Queen Mary, when it was well known that the house of this name between Sheffield and Nottingham, in which the Countess of Shrewsbury spent her widowhood, a house described in the Anecdotes of Painting, and seen and admired by every curious traveller in Derbyshire, did not accrue to the possessions of any part of the Shrewsbury family till the marriage of an earl, who was grandson to the Cardinal’s host, with Elizabeth Hardwick, the widow of Sir William Cavendish, in the time of Queen Elizabeth? If I recollect right, this difficulty perplexed that learned Derbyshire antiquary Dr. Samuel Pegge, who has written somewhat at length on the question, whether the Cardinal met his death in consequence of having taken poison. See Gent. Mag. vol. xxv. p. 27, and vol. liii. p. 751. The editor of the Topographer proposes to correct the text by reading Wingfield in place of Hardwick; vol. ii. p. 79. The truth, however, is, that though the story is told to every visitor of Hardwick Hall, that “the great child of honour, Cardinal Wolsey,” slept there a few nights before his death; as is also the story, equally unfounded, that Mary Queen of Scots was confined there; it was another Hardwick which received the weary traveller for a night in this his last melancholy pilgrimage. This was Hardwick upon Line in Nottinghamshire, a place about as far to the south of Mansfield, as the Hardwick in Derbyshire, so much better known, is to the north-west. It is now gone to much decay, and is consequently omitted in many maps of the county. It is found in Speed. Here the Earl of Shrewsbury had a house in the time of Wolsey. Leland expressly mentions it. “The Erle [of Shrewsbury] hath a park and maner place or lodge yn it caullid Hardewike upon Line, a four miles from Newstede Abbay.” Itin. vol. v. fol. 94. p. 108. Both the Hardwicks became afterwards the property of the Cavendishes. Thoroton tells us that Sir Charles Cavendish, youngest son of Sir William, and father of William Duke of Newcastle, “had begun to build a great house in this lordship, on a hill by the forest side, near Annesley Woodhouse, when he was assaulted and wounded by Sir John Stanhope and his men, as he was viewing the work, which was therefore thought fit to be left off, some bloud being spilt in the quarrel, then very hot between the two families.” Throsby’s edit. vol. ii. p. 294.
[22] The reference is to Dr. Wordsworth’s text; the passage will be found at p. [77] of the present edition. The same strain of querulous complaint occurs in his prologue to the Metrical Visions:
How some are by fortune exalted to riches,
And often such as most unworthy be, &c.
Afterwards he checks himself, and calls Dame Reason to his aid:
But after dewe serche and better advisement,
I knew by Reason that oonly God above