Prior to the Conquest Wollaton was known as Olaveston – medieval spelling and pronunciation resulted in the change of name. The manor was in the hands of Alfa the Saxon who paid Danegeld for about 180 acres of land. After 1066 the manor was granted to William Peverell and continued in his family until Henry II confiscated it and the land became Crown property. In 1174, Henry II gave it to his youngest son John. The land was held throughout by a tenant who paid a Knight’s fee in order to hold the manor.
During the thirteenth century a wool merchant named Ralph Bugge purchased lands in Willoughby-on-the-Wolds. Across the next hundred years the family, who changed their name to Willoughby, accrued more wealth, made judicious marriage alliances and ended up with the Wollaton estate on the outskirts of modern Nottingham. They also acquired Cossal and the following century added the estate of Middleton in Warwickshire to their portfolio. As they made good marriages and acquired land they became part of the gentry and served in various administrative capacities. In 1427, Hugh Willoughby served as one of Nottinghamshire’s MPs before becoming Sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. It helped that some of the Willoughbys’ land was sitting on coal seams. Sir Henry Willoughby, who lived at the end of the fifteenth century was regarded as a very wealthy man, who invested his income in land and through making judicious marriages for his children.
Sir Henry Willoughby looked to Lord Hastings as his patron and as a consequence fought for the Tudors at Bosworth in 1485. He was also on the field at Blackheath in 1497 and won favour from Henry VII. Not that Sir Henry was without blemish, in 1485 he abducted Jane Sacheverell who was both a widow and an heiress and forced her to marry his brother, Richard. The following year Jane was granted a divorce and married William Zouche, who she had been contracted to prior to her kidnap.
And now we come to Sir Francis Willoughby – who built Wollaton Hall. His father, (another Henry) married Anne Grey, the sister of the Duke of Suffolk. The Willoughbys were closely tied by marriage to the Greys several times over. When Francis was two, his father died. He and his brother became wards of their uncle. In 1554 Francis’ cousin Lady Jane Grey, was executed as was the duke. In 1559, Francis’ elder brother died and Francis became heir to his father’s estates.
Francis married Elizabeth Lyttleton when they were both in their teens. It was not a happy relationship. Eventually the Earl of Leicester adjudicated between the couple and they went their separate ways, although Francis was required to pay Elizabeth £200 per year.
Sir Francis initially tried to sell Bess of Hardwick land at Willoughby to try and raise funds to begin building Wollaton Hall. She told him his asking price was too mach and declined the offer. Instead, she leant him the money on the understanding that the land would be security for the debt. He began to build his hall with Ancaster stone from Lincolnshire, in 1580 and finished it in 1588. He died less than a decade after its completion and still in debt from the construction of the hall. It is thought that the building cost about £8,000. It did not help that he had six daughters who all required dowries.
In Derbyshire, Bess of Hardwick, watched the building take shape with keen interest, she even visited it when it was nearing completion on a journey home from London. In 1591 she signed Willoughby’s mason, John Roses, to complete the stonework on her own grand design at Hardwick which was designed, as was Wollaton, by Robert Smythson. Situated on a hill, with large windows covering the walls it has been described as a ‘lantern house’ which seems an appropriate description of both Wollaton and Hardwick.
Willoughby did not forget to emblazon his coat of arms above the front entrance but it was a nineteenth century extension designed by Jeffrey Wyatville, (real name Wyatt) who remodelled the interior of the hall, adding a large hall with a hammer-beam ceiling and rather gothic corbels and grotesques.
Francis had no sons so the estate passed to his eldest daughter and her husband – who also happened to be a cousin, named Sir Percival Willoughby.
There was a fire in 1641 which caused extensive damage, so the house was unoccupied for the better part of fifty years. When the Willoughbys returned, Cassandra Willoughby, Duchess of Chandos, ordered that the house should be changed on its exterior to reflect a more Italianate style with the addition of statues from Italy. Cassandra’s efforts to resurrect her family home included cataloguing the family papers.
In 1801 there was yet another fire which allowed Wyatville’s extensive remodelling.
Nottingham crept ever closer to the hall and its fourteenth century deer park. In 1881 the Willoughby family sold Wollaton to the Nottingham Corporation who turned it into a natural history museum.
Strauss, Sheila M., Wollaton and Wollaton Hall, A Short History (Nottingham: Nottingham City Council Leisure Department, 1989)
And it turns out that you can even buy a vintage travel poster for Wollaton Hall – just goes to show how popular visiting stately stacks and natural history museums can be!
Have you noticed the way that wives simply don’t count in the historical record unless they bring oodles of cash or have heirs and spares? Sometimes it really does look like “his story.” There certainly aren’t any pictures of Margaret or her daughters so this post will have to make do with William Cavendish. Margaret was William’s first wife.
Bess of Hardwick disowned her eldest son Henry but he had still inherited Chatsworth despite the fact that Bess entailed what she could to William and his heirs. Due to his debts Henry sold Chatsworth to his brother William.
In 1605 thanks to the auspices of his niece Arbella Stuart he became a baronet. In 1618 with the aid of £10,000 paid to James I he became an earl. In addition to his land holdings in Derbyshire he was also investing in foreign trade – the East India Company, the Muscovy Company, the Bermuda Company and also in the settlements in Virginia.
By the time he was in his twenties young William was a polished courtier (pictured left). He also had a reputation of brawling, drinking and womanising. He also spent money as though it was water. This Cavendish was behaving as though he was a member of the aristocracy.
Which brings us to the English Civil War. Christian Bruce was a friend of Henrietta Maria. The Cavendishs were Royalists. In 1642 the 3rd Earl presented himself in York with his younger brother Charles who joined with Prince Rupert and his cavalry, took part in the Battle of Edgehill and ultimately became the Royalist commander for Derbyshire and Lincolnshire prior to his death at the Battle of Gainsborough. Meanwhile the earl, no doubt on his mother’s advice, took himself off to Europe until 1645 when he compounded for his Royalist sympathies – paid a fine of £5000 and returned to live in England at Leicester Abbey where his mother had her residence (it had been purchased by the first earl in 1613) and from there he went to Latimer Place in Buckinghamshire until the Restoration when he returned to Chatsworth.
Born in 1641, yet another William became the fourth earl upon his father’s death in 1684. There had been an older brother but he died in his infancy. The third earl had preserved the Cavendish estates largely by keeping his head down and letting his cousin (William Earl, Marquis and the Duke of Newcastle) of and younger brother get on with Royalist soldiering. The fourth earl was described by Bishop Burnet as being of “nice honour in everything except the paying of his tradesmen.” Like his father he had been sent on the Grand Tour and like his Uncle William (Newcastle) he fancied himself as a bit of a poet. It is easy to see how this particular Cavendish fitted into the court of King Charles II who was also known for his late payments. Like his monarch Cavendish also had a reputation for womanising. He had several children by a mistress called Mrs Heneage. Apparently Charles II had told Nell Gwynn not to have anything to do with him – re-arrange the words pot, kettle and black into a sentence of your choice. It could be that Charles took against William Cavendish because he publicly snubbed the Duke of York (James) at Newmarket on account of his catholicism. Aside from seduction the fourth earl also seems to have spent a lot of time picking fights and duelling.
Prior to the sixteenth century Derbyshire did not have an extremely powerful local magnate to dominate affairs. The position was occupied in latter half of the fourteenth century by John of Gaunt who acquired manors, castles and rights through his marriage to Blanche of Lancaster. On his death the land and power base, along with the loyalty of the local affinity when largely to his son Henry of Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby who returned from exile to reclaim his father’s title and estate when Richard II confiscated them. As a consequence of this Bolingbroke turned into Henry IV and duchy land turned into Crown estates.
Henry Cavendish (1550 – 1616) was married off to Grace Talbot as part of Bess and the Earl of Shrewsbury’s marriage agreement. As the eldest son he should have inherited Chatsworth but he managed to get into Bess’s bad-books and got himself disinherited. He didn’t have any legitimate off spring. It should be noted that he actually did inherit Chatsworth but sold it to his brother. One of his illegitimate sons, also called Henry, founded the Cavendish of Doveridge line.
Elizabeth I is a monarch of notoriously dodgy temperament. She was also prone to locking people up who got married without asking her permission first – Sir Walter Raleigh and Bess Throckmorton being a notable example as indeed were Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey when they married without their cousin’s approval. It is perhaps not surprising then that when another scion of the Tudor family tree married on the quiet that there was repercussions. Aside from Liz’s dodgy temper there was the fact that under the 1536 Act of Attainder it was necessary for people in line to the throne to acquire Royal Assent before marrying. The fact that permission wasn’t usually given was, under the law, neither here nor there.
Bess invited the Countess to stay at Rufford during her journey north. Travelling with Margaret was her other son Charles Stuart. He was nineteen at that time and already earl of Lennox – though not necessarily terribly wealthy. For once this does not seem to have bothered Bess.
This portrait was painted by an unknown artist in about 1577 and one of the things I love about it is the doll. Dolls as toys have been around for a very long time. There’s a Roman ragdoll in the British Museum for instance. There are other sixteenth century portraits of children with dolls but this one is done up to the nines – so its more of a fashion doll for an adult rather than a child’s toy. It suggests that the infant Arbella was much cossetted.
collection dating from Tudor times and also thought to be sold at fairs like St Bartholomew’s. It was found in the Thames and is a rare survival made from lead alloy.
The Cistercian abbey of Croxden, in the care of English Heritage, is in Staffordshire, one of approximately thirty religious houses across the county. Its story is similar to many other monasteries. It built its wealth on sheep in the twelfth century and then ran into debt as the political landscape of the countryside changed. By the late thirteenth century it was considerably poorer as a consequence of Edward I’s wars with Scotland and the loans it was forced to make to the warrior monarch. Murrain, plague and poor harvests didn’t help. It never recovered. It’s income in 1535 was given as £103 6s. 7d. which was substantially less than its early income and provided Cromwell with evidence, if he needed it, of the decline of the monasteries.
George Cavendish was born in Suffolk in about 1497 and yes, he was related to the Cavendish family who became the Dukes of Devonshire and Newcastle. His brother, William, was the Cavendish who married Bess of Hardwick. And if you want further proof that everyone was related to everyone else in Tudor times then bear in mind that George’s wife was Sir Thomas More’s niece.
