It must have been in this old hall, and not in the present edifice, that Mary Stuart resided during her short stay at Hardwicke. I am sorry to disturb the fanciful or sentimental tourists and sight-seers; but so it is, or rather, so it must have been. Yet it is not surprising that the memory of Mary Stuart should now form the principal charm and interest of Hardwicke, and that she should be in a manner the tutelary genius of the place. Chatsworth has been burned and rebuilt. Tutbury, Sheffield castle, Wingfield, Fotheringay, and the old house of Hardwicke, in short, every place which Mary inhabited during her captivity, all lie in ruins, as if struck with a doleful curse. But Hardwicke Hall exists just as it stood in the reign of Elizabeth. The present Duke of Devonshire, with excellent taste and feeling, keeps up the old costume within and without. The bed and furniture which had been used by Mary, the cushions of her oratory, the tapestry wrought by her own hands, have been removed hither, and are carefully preserved. There can be no doubt of the authenticity of these relics, and there is enough surely to consecrate the whole to our imagination. Moreover, we have but to go to the window and see the very spot, the very walls which once enclosed her, the very casements from which she probably gazed with a sigh over the far hills; and indulge, without one intrusive doubt, in all the romantic and fascinating, and mysterious, and sorrowful associations, which hang round the memory of Mary Stuart.
With what different eyes may people view the same things! "We receive but what we give," says the poet; and all the light, and glory, and beauty, with which certain objects are in a manner suffused to the eye of fancy, must issue from our own souls, and be reflected back to us, else 'tis all in vain.
"We may not hope from outward forms to win,
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within!"
When Gray, the poet, visited Hardwicke, he fell at once into a very poet-like rapture, and did not stop to criticise pictures, and question authorities. He says in one of his letters to Dr. Wharton, "of all the places I have seen in my return from you, Hardwicke pleased me most. One would think that Mary queen of Scotts was but just walked down into the park with her guard for half an hour: her gallery, her room of audience, her ante-chamber, with the very canopies, chair of state, footstool, lit de repos, oratory, carpets, hangings, just as she left them, a little tattered indeed, but the more venerable," &c. &c.
Now let us hear Horace Walpole, antiquarian, virtuoso, dilettante, filosofastro—but, in truth, no poet. He is, however, in general so good-natured, so amusing, and so tasteful, that I cannot conceive what put him into such a Smelfungus humour when he visited Hardwicke, with a Cavendish too at his elbow as his cicerone!
He says, "the duke sent Lord John with me to Hardwicke, where I was again disappointed; but I will not take relations from others; they either don't see for themselves, or can't see for me. How I had been promised that I should be charmed with Hardwicke, and told that the Devonshires ought to have established themselves there! Never was I less charmed in my life. The house is not gothic, but of that betweenity that intervened when Gothic declined, and Palladian was creeping in; rather, this is totally naked of either. It has vast chambers—aye, vast, such as the nobility of that time delighted in, and did not know how to furnish. The great apartment is exactly what it was when the Queen of Scots was kept there.[ 53] Her council-chamber (the council-chamber of a poor woman who had only two secretaries, a gentleman usher, an apothecary, a confessor, and three maids) is so outrageously spacious that you would take it for King David's, who thought, contrary to all modern experience, that in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom. At the upper end is the State, with a long table, covered with a sumptuous cloth, embroidered and embossed with gold—at least what was gold; so are all the tables. Round the top of the chamber runs a monstrous frieze, ten or twelve feet deep, representing a stag-hunt in miserable plastered relief.[ 54]
"The next is her dressing-room, hung with patchwork on black velvet; then her state bed-chamber. The bed has been rich beyond description, and now hangs in costly golden tatters; the hangings, part of which they say her majesty worked, are composed of figures as large as life, sewed and embroidered on black velvet, white satin, &c., and represent the virtues that were necessary to her, or that she was found to have—as patience, temperance,[ 55] &c. The fire-screens are particular;—pieces of yellow velvet, fringed with gold, hung on a cross-bar of wood, which is fixed on the top of a single stick that rises from the foot.[ 56] The only furniture which has any appearance of taste are the table and cabinets, which are of oak, richly carved."
(I must observe en passant, that I wonder Horace did not go mad about the chairs, which are exactly in the Strawberry Hill taste, only infinitely finer, crimson velvet, with backs six feet high, and sumptuously carved.)