“These being the reasons that move me thus to advise you, consider how like it is that when she is thought to be in danger your good brother will think it time to work with you to that effect, and—God forgive me if I judge amiss—I verily think that, till of late, he hath been in some hope to have seen your end before hers, by reason of your sickliness and discontentment of mind. To conclude, I wish and advise you to take no hold of any offer that shall be made unto you, etc.
Photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby
TOMB OF ELIZABETH COUNTESS OF SHREWSBURY
Page [346]
“You have not been forgot to my Lady, neither for yourself nor for Chatsworth, but we have forborne to write you thereof, knowing that one of your brother’s principallest means to keep us all so divided one from another, etc.”
“Your good brother” is certainly William Cavendish, of whom the whole family were wildly jealous, and who planned to seize certain cattle belonging to the Countess, in advance of his brothers, so soon as she had drawn her last breath.
Very few details are extant of the death of the great Bess. Grateful pensioners she had, and certainly some devoted servants. Her intimate friends were few, and nearly all her contemporaries predeceased her. We come across nothing more interesting as a bare record of her death than the following entry in Simpson’s National Records of Derby for 1607:—
“The old Countess of Shrewsbury died about Candlemas this year, whose funeral was about Holy Thursday. A great frost this year. The witches of Bakewell hanged.”
So into limbo this contemptuous entry dismisses a great lady. Pouf! Out with the candles! The frost is over; some women have been hung at Bakewell; an old lady is dead.
To the end she never ceased her doughty and defiant game with stone, wood, and mortar. While her “home for owls” was in erection there came that same “great frost” named in the old Derby chronicle. Naturally the mortar at “Owlcotes” froze. The masons could do nothing. Instantly she issued orders that it was to be thawed with boiling water. This was unavailing, and the order came to use ale also, in the hope that the thicker fluid might prevent crystallisation. About this there is the true Elizabethan touch. But even ale, poured out like water, failed, and my Lady went out—with the holy candles.
How Arabella—faithful, loyal, vital, intense—danced, toiled, and loved—to her doom; how energetic, ambitious Mary Shrewsbury, like her mother before her, enjoyed imprisonment in the Tower because of her match-making intrigues; how William Cavendish became not only an earl, but one of the first colonists in Virginia and Bermuda; how Henry Cavendish died of his “sickliness and discontentment of mind”; how Henry Talbot, also, passed away before he could share the splendour or the thriftlessness of his race; how Charles Cavendish made Bolsover Castle a fit guesthouse for the King, for whom his son prepared a famous masque and banquet; how Gilbert Shrewsbury, his presence-chamber crowded with spongers and creditors, pawned his plate and jewels, and how his younger brother and chief enemy, Edward Talbot, became eighth Earl in his stead, belong to an epoch which escapes the limit of this survey.