Bess of Hardwick and Her Circle

by Maud Stepney Rawson

AND HER CIRCLE

CHAPTER I
THE RED-HAIRED GIRL

Among the hills and dales of Derbyshire, that great county of august estates, there came into the world in the year 1520 a certain baby girl. Her father, John Hardwick of Hardwick House, and her mother Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Leake of Hasland, in the same county, christened the child Elizabeth, naturally enough after her mother. Like the great Queen of England to whom she was senior, and with whom in after years she had so much traffic of a highly dramatic kind, this Elizabeth has come down to posterity under the shorter name of Bess.

Derbyshire, always a great county, was specially important in her day. Far from London and Court it seemed like a little England within England. Its great families wove its life step by step, its varied landscape, its heights and dales rendered it an important strategical centre in the event of rebellion, and the roughness and slough of pack-road and cart-road made even local expeditions affairs of moment. The little red-haired baby girl inherited from her native soil, from her race, and from the neighbours about her all that sense of county importance, that desire to found, establish and endow a great family with great estates which her life developed to so remarkable a degree. That consciousness of county importance was inevitable in those days when families gave their names not only to their mansions, but to the hamlets or village which clustered round them. Bess of Hardwick was brought up amongst them all—the Hardwicks of Hardwick, the Barleys of Barley (or Barlow), the Pinchbecks of Pinchbeck, the Blackwalls of Blackwall, the Leakes, and the Leches. Not all of them were so very opulent. The Hardwicks, though not rich, were of honourable standing as county gentry, and the Barleys and Leakes were of the same social rank. John Hardwick could not afford to give his daughters large dowries, and consequently when my Lady Zouche, her aunt, took Bess into her household in London the parents were probably glad enough to embrace such a social chance for her. Up to this time she led naturally the life of the ordinary young gentlewoman of tender years, said her prayers, learnt to sew and embroider, and had seen something of the ordering of a household and the disposal of country produce, while she heard and treasured up such scraps of news as filtered through to her family and neighbours by letters and travellers who came to the houses about her, or such rumours as were bruited in the county town. She was but twelve years old when she made her entry at once into my Lady Zouche’s house and into history. We are told that she had reddish hair and small eyes, but no picture of her remains to give any idea of her appearance at this moment when she left her childhood behind her. Physique she must always have had, and with it tenacity and tact in furthering her own prospects. She was of the type in which the art of “getting on” is innate. London and my Lady Zouche’s excellent social position gave her her first chance.

Photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby
HARDWICK OLD HALL
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There is almost a touch of Becky Sharp in the way that this young girl, dowerless save for the forty marks of dot allotted by John Hardwick to each of his daughters, settled down in that household. There came to London one of her Derbyshire neighbours—a youth of the Barley or Barlow family, named Robert. Under Lady Zouche’s roof he fell sick and the little niece helped to tend him. Whether he also fell in love, whether Mistress Hardwick the mother was minded to “settle” one at least of her girls early, or whether Lady Zouche was of a strong match-making tendency does not appear. But a marriage between the niece and the guest was arranged and quickly carried through. A strange pitiful affair it must have been—that London wedding between the red-haired child and the sickly young man—a ceremony trailing after it a sorry hope of happiness in the midst of physicking and nostrums, weakness and watching, until the death of the bridegroom before the bride had reached her fourteenth year. His death left no apparent gap in my Lady Zouche’s household and no mark upon history. But it bestowed on the child-wife the dignity of widowhood, and such importance, plus her forty marks, as attached to any property that Robert Barlow left her. The Barlows were not wealthy. Some of them in after years were in sore straits for a living. The State Papers show the existence of piteous letters from a certain Jane Barlow who writes in January, 1583, to her father, Alexander Barlow, “from a foreign land.” She is in extreme want, forced to borrow money to carry on her “business,” and assures him that the meanest servant he has “liveth in far better condition than she.” There is nothing to show that the Barlows applied to their relation “Bess” in after years for help. Such property as there was passed to her, and she travelled out of their ken into richer circles.

In 1547, at the age of twenty-seven, a woman in the height of her powers and the perfection of her womanhood, with considerable knowledge of the world and a tremendous store of physical and mental vitality, she secured a second husband and a man of considerable means—Sir William Cavendish. He was the second son of Thomas Cavendish, and his family, like that of Bess, took its name from its hamlet or manor. Says the pompous Bishop Kennet of those days: “The Cavendishes, like other great Families of greatest Antiquity derived a Name from their Place of Habitation. A younger branch of the Germons, famous in Norfolk and Essex, settled at Cavendish in Suffolk, and from that Seat and Estate were soon distinguished by that Sirname.” Thomas Cavendish, like the father of Bess, was “a well-to-do but undistinguished Squire,” but his sons made names for themselves.

From a photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby, after the painting at Hardwick Hall
By permission of his Grace the Duke of Devonshire
SIR WILLIAM CAVENDISH
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