In regard to the sheer details of furniture and tapestries the guide-books have sufficiently noted such items, and this is not the place for an inventory. But in the household lists, carefully catalogued and cherished, are noted “silver cloath of tissue and cloath of gold, velvet of sundry colours, needlework twelve feet deep, one piece of the picture of Faith and her contrary Mahomet, another piece with Temperance and her contrary Sardynapales.” And there are others “wrought with Flowers and slipps of Needlework,” while a “white Spanish rugg,” great chairs and little chairs, French stools, “a little desk of mother o’ pearl, a purple sarcanet quilt,” are duly noted, in addition to carpets and hangings galore storied with myth and legend. Good rich things over which to fight when it was a case of family quarrels! Many of these and the other famous tapestries with which the lovely house is crammed are being wisely guarded, and, where possible, delicately repaired, while taste and gracious sympathy with every object are turning the Hall into a place which is a perfect museum with the added grace of a house. The very ring—attached to the foot of the Countess’s writing-table—through which she slipped the leash of her dog, is still preserved.
Photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby
THE PRESENCE-CHAMBER, HARDWICK HALL
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Set high upon a fine hill in the centre of a park, encircled with rolling country, and facing east and west, the great, old windows of Hardwick look out above colonnades upon a new world. At no great distance are mines like those which have spoiled Bolsover and Worksop. The masons still labour at the stonework of Hardwick, for storms have worn the elaborate scrolling of those four proud towers, and the flagged pathway from gate to house-door is pitted and hollowed by frost and rain and the feet of generations. And still it stands, a monument and a living record of one who knew in her strange, active life much grief and much joy, who loved flattery and self-assertion and the struggle for individual development, and yet could write in letters of stone over the door of her presence-chamber: “The conclusion of all thinges is to feare God and keepe His commaundements.”
She had the great secret of living almost to the last in the “high noone” of her desires. When the western sun bathes her façade she lives again, walks again upon her terrace and under her colonnades. And with her goes that great procession, pathetic and vital, of her “workes”—her children, her friends, her buildings, her household gods, her intrigues, her dazzling dreams, her bargains—and all of them seem to have a part in the music of that duet of notions ever running in her head—“of bricks and mortar to yield grandeur, of human beings to yield wealth.”
She has been turned into ridicule by Horace Walpole, whose flippant vulgarity nevertheless acknowledged her magnificence. She was called shrew by a pompous bishop, but she had too much brain for a shrew. She could certainly scold—“like one from the banke”—but so could her royal mistress. In these two Elizabeths there is, after one allows for the difference in their actual circumstances, a strange likeness. Both were violent natures; both, in spite of their extraordinary sense of dignity, had a strong dash of the hoyden. Both had immense vitality, relished life intensely, loved to play with schemes. Both were obstinate, affectionate, vindictive, pugnacious, essentially women of their era, a type to which Elizabeth herself set the measure and called the tune. While the sum of all sorrow is the same, their sorrows differed in detail. Elizabeth of England, called to the immense sacrifice of her womanhood for England, fell back in private on petty vanities, and had her reward in the love of the larger public of her day and in the enlightened homage of posterity to her sacrifice and her statesmanship. Elizabeth Shrewsbury justly refused to sacrifice herself to the official burdens put upon her earl, unjustly refused to go shares with him in their common responsibilities, and so in her the “combat for the individual” ran to exaggeration, with its harvest of sheer bitterness and errors. In body and soul she represented that spirit of individualism set in an epoch of intrigue, sensation, change, uncertainty, wide and violent contrast, in days of large treasons and international piracy, of high feeding and large ideas, of scented gloves, masks, doublets, and ill-managed kitchen heaps, of plot and counter-plot, of Court splendour and national drama.
Photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby
HARDWICK HALL FROM THE WEST GARDEN
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Tobie Matthew, Archbishop of York, preached a fine funeral sermon upon this “costly Countess,” in which she was likened to the ideal virtuous woman of Solomon, while Hunter, on the other hand, ironically suggests that Massinger based his character of Sir Giles Overreach upon her. Lodge has termed her violent, treacherous, tyrannical. Such in many ways was the nature of England’s Elizabeth. Yet both women were makers and builders, often blind, always resourceful, achieving immense results in their several capacities. And since the royal symbol of the one is the stately Tudor rose, so also shall the lovely “redolent aeglantyne” of the motto of the other entwine and weave through the ages the memory of all that was finest in the amazing Lady of Hardwick. With that sweet savour—regarding it as the final evaporation of her complex, rampant, thorny, vital nature—let all harsher thoughts of her now be chased away.