The Elizabethans (25 page)

So wrote a plaintive Scottish queen to Bertrand de la Mothe Fénelon, the French Ambassador. The garden was no more than a ‘potato patch . . . fitter to keep pigs in the house, having no drains to the privies, is subject to a continual stench’.
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Bess was forty-one when the Scottish queen moved to Tutbury, Mary was twenty-six. Initially, they spent much of each day together. When it was deemed safe to take exercise – and there was constant fear that Mary would be kidnapped by her Roman Catholic supporters – Bess and she could ride together. (The expenses of the Queen’s horses and those of her entourage were borne by the earl. The forty-five shillings a week sent by Queen Elizabeth to feed her cousin could not buy the foods demanded by Mary.)

An inventory of the Scottish queen’s belongings six months before her death included many items of unfinished embroidery: bed hangings and chair covers, and the like. Mary liked to incorporate her own heraldic devices and anagrams of her name into her exquisite stitching. Into her cloth of state, which Shrewsbury allowed to hang in her room as if she were still a reigning monarch, was embroidered the ominous motto: ‘In my end is my beginning’
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–
En ma fin git mon commencement
– the motto of her mother, Mary of Lorraine, embroidered around her impresa, a phoenix rising from the flames.
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Much of the day was spent sewing in Bess’s comfortable quarters; Bess was a good needlewoman, and the Scottish queen was an excellent one. Together with the ladies-in-waiting – Mary Seton and Agnes, Lady Livingstone – they would pore over pattern books, design gowns, discuss hairstyles. Inevitably, too, they gossiped, and this got Bess into trouble.

When gossip is repeated to third, fourth, fifth parties, it inevitably becomes difficult to establish who really said what to whom. Mary mischievously put it about that Bess Shrewsbury had been disloyal about Queen Elizabeth, that she had repeated tittle-tattle about the Queen’s indiscretions with Leicester; more dangerously, that she had offered to plant Charles Cavendish, her son, at court as a spy for Mary; that she smuggled Mary’s secret letters in cipher; even that she supported Mary in her political aims. How much Bess really said such things, and whether she said them because she meant them or because she wanted to please, who can know?

Mary was subject to frequent illnesses, to outbursts of hysterical weeping and to stomach pains. They moved her to another of Lord Shrewsbury’s residences, Wingfield Manor. They allowed her to take the waters at Buxton. But these were major security operations, requiring an ever-increasing entourage. All the earl’s entreaties to Queen Elizabeth for a corresponding increase in the forty-five-shilling weekly allowance were – highly characteristically – ignored. At some points there was a crowd of as many as eighty visiting Queen Mary, and all the extra bodyguards and security arrangements entailed by this had to be paid for out of the earl’s pocket.
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One biographer of Shrewsbury estimated that he was spending £30
a day
on looking after Queen Mary, and that he was therefore a staggering £10,000 per annum out of pocket. They were paying for such figures as Sir John Morton (whom everyone knew to be a Catholic priest, but to whom Shrewsbury turned a blind eye); John Beaton, Mary’s master of the house; her physician; her cup-bearer; pages; secretaries; a master cook: it was hardly solitary confinement.

Bess believed that her husband had fallen under Queen Mary’s spell, that his affections had been alienated. There is no evidence that she believed, or repeated, the rumour that Queen Mary had borne a child to Shrewsbury,
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but it would not be surprising if daily contact with this famously enchanting, much younger imprisoned royal beauty, had not in some way bewitched Shrewsbury. Nor, though the very idea was loyally denied by Lady Antonia Fraser in her biography of Mary, would it have been entirely surprising if the Scottish queen had not exploited such a situation for all it was worth. Mary wrote an indignant letter to Queen Elizabeth denying the rumours and taking the opportunity to land Bess in trouble by repeating the allegedly satirical, scandalous and disloyal things about Queen Elizabeth that she had supposedly said over the embroidery sessions. Bess lived down these scurrilous and embarrassing revelations, but Mary succeeded in causing discomfiture to ‘
la bonne Comptesse
’, as she maliciously termed her former friend.

Bess and her husband, of necessity, spent longer and longer periods apart. Bess was at court. Lord Shrewsbury was guarding – and not merely guarding, but becoming infatuated with – Queen Mary. If Mary did not actually cause the break-up of Bess’s marriage, the situation did nothing to alleviate it.

Bess, as well as her life as a courtier, was a triumphantly successful manager of money and estates, and an inspired builder. At one point, in the early 1570s, her brother James got into money difficulties and it looked as if he would have to sell her childhood home, Hardwick Hall. By now Bess was settled at Chatsworth, which was entailed to her son Henry after her death. She had no obvious need of Hardwick, owning as she did so much former St Loe property in the West Country, and being, as Countess of Shrewsbury, the chatelaine, at least in name and title, of her husband’s many houses. But she had always loved Hardwick and, either because she saw it as a house for her old age or for her two younger sons, she bailed James out of his difficulties. She settled a mortgage on the house and leased his coal and ore mines, which she proceeded to make profitable. This was the era when the coal industry in England – a key factor in its prodigious wealth and global domination before the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century – began. There were more than 100 collieries in Derbyshire between 1550 and 1615, most of them newly started. The Trent was an easily navigable river and that was of great advantage to such landowners as Sir Francis Willoughby, who was a pioneer of the Nottinghamshire coal industry at Wollaton and Strelley. (He also, like Bess, made money from iron-making.) In Northumberland and Durham the richest coal fields were found. In one manor alone, Whickham, leased from the Bishop of Durham, 100,000 tons of coal per annum were being produced in the seventeenth century.
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Bess was enabled, from her large rents and her judicious investments in industry, to be rich enough, when the time came, to build a new house at Hardwick, which became a byword for all that was splendid, all that was beautiful, all that was ethereal and strange about that age of architectural glory.

Never before, and never since, has there been an era in England of such stupendous domestic architecture. Just as there was no professional army, but there were many military heroes; a navy built by privateers; no civil service – just Lord Burghley and a spider’s web of administrators; so there was no concept at that time of the professional architect in England. Robert Smythson (
c.
1535–1614) was one of the most inspired of all English architects. He trained as a stonemason, rising in the 1560s to become a master mason, travelling the country with a gang of highly skilled masons working under him. In 1568 he was summoned by Sir John Thynne to assist with the rebuilding of Longleat House in Wiltshire, the first of the great houses in England to bear no trace of fortification. Smythson worked at Longleat for eighteen years, in the interval designing or beautifying such great houses as Caversham House, near Reading (for Sir Francis Knollys), Wardour Castle in Wiltshire (for Sir Matthew Arundell), Wollaton Hall (for Sir Francis Willoughby), Worksop Manor and Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, and Burton Agnes in Yorkshire. Partly because more of Smythson’s drawings and designs survive than of other Elizabethan master masons and builders, and partly because of the sheer magnitude of his achievement, Smythson stands out as the most innovative, the most prodigious of them all. His drawings show an instinctually intelligent consciousness of the English Gothic tradition, but he matched this to a classical sense of symmetry and proportion, and a use of light that was entirely innovatory and distinctly of its age. Symmetry applied to domestic architecture what was ‘essentially a Tudor innovation’.
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It is seen at its most luminous, most palatial, most inspired at Hardwick.

Since Smythson had reworked Worksop Manor in Nottinghamshire for the earl of Shrewsbury, it is possible, after the Earl and Bess had in effect split up, that Smythson held back from working for the countess until his lordship died. Once Shrewsbury was dead, he was able, in all likelihood,
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to provide designs for Bess’s new house at Hardwick, that air-filled, tall Derbyshire palace. ‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.’ Glass, being very costly, was a status symbol. ‘You shall have sometimes fair houses so full of glass, that one cannot tell where to become to be out of the sun or cold.’ It must have been perishingly cold, as Mark Girouard, best of scholars in the field of Elizabethan architecture, who grew up there, attests.
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The impracticality of life there was also, on one level, an absurdity. There were no servants’ quarters in the house itself, as in a Victorian country house. Servants, who had to be at the beck and call of the occupants, slept all over the place – on landings, or at the end of masters’ or mistresses’ beds. The huge distances between the kitchens and the High Great Chamber, where ceremonial meals were served, guaranteed that food would always arrive at the table tepid or cold. Lighting was entirely by candles. Water was pumped from a well. Sanitation, of course, was non-existent, in modern terms. ‘Bess,’ wrote Mark Girouard, ‘had her personal close stool in a little room off her bedchamber; it was “covered with blewe cloth stitch with white, with red and black silk fringe”, but there were no backstairs and no amount of silk fringe can have offset the squalor of carrying the contents of the emptied close stools down the two great staircases.’
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Stinking as they must sometimes have been, the Elizabethan great houses, of which Hardwick Hall was one of the most splendid, were the settings of human magnificence, little theatres where aristocrats could hold what amounted to small versions of a royal court. (And many of the great houses were designed in part to provide hospitality for the Queen herself and her entourage during a progress.) And one of the things that give the Elizabethan great houses their distinction is that none of them were entirely designed by one person. They reflected the personalities of their owners and of those who worked there. The huge glass façades of Hardwick Hall could well have been designed by Smythson, but to Bess Shrewsbury’s specifications. The ‘style’ of Hardwick is what we should immediately label ‘Elizabethan’, but this itself is an eclectic blend of Perpendicular Gothic, with its huge grids of glass, like the windows of some great cathedral or college, set into Mannerist styles based on contemporary Antwerp or Delft. A distinctively ‘Flemish’ feature of Hardwick is its abundance of obelisks and strapwork, modelled in stone, plaster or alabaster, as overmantels inside; crowning its outline on towers, walls and lodges outside. Then again, one of the most remarkable features of Hardwick is its embroideries – used as wall hangings, bed hangings, door curtains – the largest such collection of any private house in Europe.
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Every detail of these phenomenal productions gives delight, whether in such huge symbolic images as Arthemesia flanked by Constans and Pietan, and those that depict Astrology or Perspective or Logic, or in the much smaller works, panels that bear the heraldic devices of Bess and the various men she married. The Talbot heraldic dog, for example, built up on a piece of crimson velvet with a linen base and teased-out wool, and then sewn over with twists of silver purl and gold filé. Cushions depict the Elements, interwoven with the Cavendish snake. Here are silken white roses picked out on green velvet, or crimson velvet cushions bordered with mistletoe. Needlework is a strong, vividly flavoured and intensely personal art-form. Looking at the Hardwick embroideries, we do not merely revere the craftsmanship, we feel the presence of the many prodigious seamstresses who worked them. We have almost certainly arrived at Hardwick in an ugly car and we stand before the embroideries in our mass-produced clothes. Light streams from those tall windows onto our sweatshirts and sneakers, challenging us to imagine a world where there was no ugliness, where no factory manufactured clothes or furniture, where life was a ceremony of beautiful clothes, beautiful objects and considered shapes and shades.

The infinite variety of Elizabethan architecture refreshes our eyes, delights and amuses us with its playfulness and complexity, as much as a polyphonic part song by Byrd or an intricate rhyme by Philip Sidney. Look up at the chimneystacks of brick and terracotta and stone on their palaces and country houses. All are recognisable as Elizabethan, yet how varied they are, whether we are looking at the zigzags of the chimneys at Penshurst Place in Kent, or the hexagonal brick stacks, crowned like a classical pillar, at Horham Hall in Essex, or the twisted terracotta barley-sugar of Hengrave Hall in Sussex. In all the details of Elizabethan buildings we find variety and ingenuity: in the chimneypieces, in the plastered ceilings, in lanterned columns at Montacute House in Somerset, in the pilasters and entablatures at Longleat, in porches and gateways, in gables and gatehouses. Their architecture was eclectic, and native, while absorbing the principles and classical inspirations of the European Renaissance. Their houses and colleges look like the dwellings of men and women who had revived the ability to read Greek, who could speak Italian, who ordered their expensive clothes from Paris, who wrote everything from prayers to shopping lists in Latin and who were yet deeply, and self-consciously, rooted in their native English soil, loving the English landscape, the English country sports, hunting, fishing and riding.