I nine-score beadsmen maintain there,
With hats and gowns and house-rent free,
And every man five marks a year.”
During the civil wars the old hall of Chatsworth was taken possession of, and garrisoned, in 1643, for the Parliament by Sir John Gell, being then placed under the command of Captain Stafford, from whose company at Chatsworth in the latter part of the year, forty musqueteers were ordered to be drafted off, and joined to the army of Fairfax for his proposed march to Chesterfield and the North. At the end of the same year the Earl of Newcastle’s forces having taken Wingfield Manor, and other places in the county, made themselves masters of Chatsworth (which had been evacuated on his approach to Chesterfield), and garrisoned it for the king under Colonel Eyre, who the following spring received reinforcements from Tissington and Bakewell. In September, 1645, “the governor of Welbecke having gotten good strength by the kinges coming that way, came to Derbyshire with 300 horse and dragoones, to sett upp a garrison at Chatsworth, and one Colonel Shallcross, for governor there. Colonel Gell having intelligence thereof, sent presently Major Molanus with 400 foott to repossess the house; and having layn theire 14 days, and hearing of the demolishinge of Welbecke, Bolsover, and Tickhill castles, was commanded by Colonel Gell to return to Derby.”
A little before these troublous times, in 1636, Thomas Hobbes, best known as “Leviathan Hobbes” or “Hobbes of Malmesbury,” who, before he was twenty years of age, became tutor to the sons of Sir William Cavendish (then recently created Baron Cavendish of Hardwick), and who lived and died in the family, thus wrote of the beauty of Chatsworth, and of the nobleness of soul of its owner, his patron and friend:—
“On th’ English Alps, where Darbie’s Peak doth rise
High up in Hills that emulate the skies,
And largely waters all the Vales below
With Rivers that still plentifully flow,
Doth Chatsworth by swift Derwin’s Channel stand,
Fam’d for its pile, and Lord, for both are grand.
Slowly the River by its Gates doth pass,
Here silent, as in wonder of the place,
But does from rocky precipices move
In rapid streams below it; and above
A lofty Mountain guards the house behind
From the assaults of the rough eastern wind;
Which does from far its rugged Cliffs display,
And sleep prolongs by shutting out the day.
Behind, a pleasant Garden does appear:
Where the rich earth breathes odours everywhere;
Where, in the midst of Woods, the fruitful tree
Bears without prune-hook, seeming now as free;
Where, by the thick-leav’d roof, the walls are made—
Spite of the Sun where all his beams display’d—
More cool than the fam’d Virgil’s beechen shade;
Where Art (itself dissembling), rough-hewn stone
And craggy flints worn out by dropping on
(Together joyning by the workman’s tool),
Makes horrid rocks and watry caverns cool.”
Of Hobbes we give an interesting and curious memoir in the present volume, under the head of “Hardwick Hall.” Of the old house as it existed in 1680-1, we have, fortunately, a very graphic word-picture, preserved to us in Charles Cotton’s “Wonders of the Peak;” and an admirable pictorial representation in one of Knyff’s careful drawings, engraved by Kipp, of the same house, when the south front and other parts had been rebuilt, but the west front with its towers was remaining entire. Cotton’s—friend and companion of Izaak Walton—description of the place is so clever and so graphic that it cannot fail to interest our readers. We can, however, find room for but a few passages:—
“This Palace, with wild prospects girded round,
Stands in the middle of a falling ground,
At a black mountain’s foot, whose craggy brow,
Secures from eastern tempests all below,
Under whose shelter trees and flowers grow,
With early blossom, maugre native snow;
Which elsewhere round a tyranny maintains,
And binds crampt nature long in crystal chains.
The fabrick’s noble front faces the west,
Turning her fair broad shoulders to the east;
On the south side the stately gardens lye,
Where the scorn’d Peak rivals proud Italy.
And on the north several inferior plots
For servile use do scatter’d lye in spots.
****
Environ’d round with Nature’s shames and ills,
Black heaths, wild rocks, bleak craggs and naked hills
And the whole prospect so informe and rude,
Who is it, but must presently conclude
That this is Paradise, which seated stands
In midst of desarts, and of barren sands?”