Bess of Hardwick and Her Circle

by Maud Stepney Rawson

From a photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby, after the picture by P. Oudry
at Hardwick Hall, by permission of his Grace the Duke of Devonshire
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS
Page [356]

The end wall is given up to the portraits of the three English Queens. In the centre is Elizabeth, magnificent and monstrous, the clothes hiding the woman, the whole art of portraiture merged in the painter’s dogged intent to reproduce every detail of her jewels, her lace, and the birds, beasts, and reptiles with which her enormous, billowing dress is embroidered. On her right stands Queen Anne, very dull, complacent, and richly attired; on her left Queen Mary, solemn, handsomely robed, dignified. An opposite wall bears the other often-painted Mary, the Arch-Enigma, she whose personality, to my thinking, is so much more subtle and dominant than that of her magnificent English sisters. This is the famous Mary of Oudry’s brush, graceful, simple, subtle, the face diaphanous and elusive. There is an odd likeness between the motto she chose for her dais and that which the baby Arabella bears on the jewel pendent from her necklace: “Pour parvenir j’endure” is the legend. And both women bear witness to that determination in their faces, in their tragic fates. That and the old “En ma fin est mon commencement” ring in your ears as you turn from the gallery and from the beautiful presence-chamber with its wonderful coloured plaster frieze to the little bedroom dedicated to the relics of the Scots Mary. The curtains she embroidered, the coverings for the chairs, the tapestry, the very bed in which she slept and tossed and wept, are all proudly cherished. Mary never stayed at Hardwick, pace Horace Walpole, nor possibly ever saw it. Nor was she ever housed at the old Hardwick, which stands now like a ghostly, ruined parent of the newer building, at right angles to it. The old house served “Building Bess” not only as model for her new hall, but furnished her, it is said, with actual material. It was, for those days, a good model that she took, and its high and countless windows made it hygienically a great improvement upon the gloom of Tutbury and Sheffield. No trace of superstition or pettiness has gone to the building, begun soon after she acquired the house—either by purchase or by legacy from her brother James Hardwick—some years before the death of her fourth husband, and completed seven years or so after it—that is in 1597. At first, says tradition, she seems to have intended to make her home at the older house and reserve the new one for ceremonial and entertainment, “as if she had a mind to preserve her Cradle and set it by her Bed of State.” The stones of that “Cradle” she eventually took for the “Bed,” and into that bed she literally wove all that was best of herself. Of mere personal feminine vanity she expresses little, of personal importance much. She was fond of her crest, and the modelled stags of her own family are devised to flatter her duly in an inscription (in the great drawing-room) to the intent that noble as is the stag, in all its animal perfection, its nobility is enhanced by bearing the arms of the Countess. She doted also on her initials. They are worked into the stone scrolling which adorns her four towers, into the main gateway, and into the low wall which flanks the square garden where you enter. They are repeated in the flower-beds. She must have loved signing her name also, for scarcely a scrap, it seems, of the household accounts concerning her buildings exists but bears evidence of her minute scrutiny. Here is her signature as it appears often repeated under such items as “thre ponde hyght pence,” or at the close of a letter thus:—

The Hardwick wages-book between New Year, 1576, and the close of December, 1580, with the list of her men—stone-breakers, gardeners, moss-gatherers, thatchers, wall-builders, ditchers—was made up by her once a fortnight and signed. Inside the house too are her initials, with the arms of her father, the stags and the roses of the Hardwicks, and into a famous inlaid table (brought, it is said, by her son Henry from the East) is woven the cryptic poetical motto of her father’s family:—

Photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS BED, NOW AT HARDWICK HALL
Page [358]

“The redolent smell of aeglantyne

We stagges exault to the deveyne.”

This legend is to be faintly traced in the interior of the ruined old hall. With the exception of the Shrewsbury coronet and the initials, you find very little suggestion of the Talbots. Everywhere the arms of Hardwick predominate in panel, fireplace, and lock. They strike the eye the instant you enter the house by the great entrance-hall. Large and magnificent, they are set forth on the right wall: in heraldic language, “a saltire engrailed azure; on a chief of the second three cinquefoils of the field,” set in a lozenge-shaped shield and bearing the aforesaid coronet. The supporters are two “stags proper, each gorged with a chaplet of roses, argent, between two bars azure.” To these supporters the lady had no right because her family had none. But she assumed them, turning to account the stag of her family crest. Her son William adopted a variation of this, and in the Devonshire arms of to-day we again find the wreathed stags proper, while the shield bears three harts’ heads. In the Mary Queen of Scots bedroom you will find in plaster work again the Hardwick arms, but also those of Cavendish and of the Countess’s mother, Elizabeth Leake. Needless to say, the house is built in the grand manner. The great entrance-hall runs to the height of two stories, and besides its panelling and old furniture has screens of tapestry. Just off the stairway on the left is the curious little chapel shut off from the landing by an open-work oak screen. Close by is a state bedroom, and adjoining it is a fine dining-room, whence a minstrels’ gallery leads to the wainscoted and tapestried drawing-room. The splendid presence-chamber, sixty-five feet long, thirty-three wide, and twenty-six high, is another remarkable feature, and besides its pictures and tapestry has the famous ancient frieze, already mentioned, in coloured plaster relief representing the Court of Diana. The choice of theme was, no doubt, out of compliment to the Queen, for her initials and arms are in this room substituted for those of the Countess, who, in spite of her dreams, never had the delight of receiving Elizabeth here.