George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury

George, whose mother was Mary Dacre, spent much time in the borders. He was one of the men who invaded Scotland on the orders of Protector Somerset while Edward VI was king. He inherited his earldom in 1560.

In 1568 George married Bess of Hardwick – no doubt she was a very attractive bride not to mention a very wealthy one. His first wife had been Gertrude Manners who was the mother of all his legitimate children. So eager was George to ally himself to Bess and her Cavendish children that he married his eldest surviving son Gilbert to Bess’s daughter Mary Cavendish and his own daughter Grace Talbot to Bess’s eldest son Henry Cavendish even though she was only 8 at the time. It wasn’t a happy marriage and Henry didn’t get on with his mother either (a different post I think). Meanwhile George and Bess didn’t have long to enjoy wedded bliss because the following year Shrewsbury was handed the poisoned chalice of being Mary Queen of Scots’ custodian…er, host.

George moved the queen between Tutbury, Wingfield Manor and Sheffield Castle. In 1570 she went to Chatsworth which was a property belonging to Bess of Hardwick. And on occasion Mary took the waters in Buxton. In part Talbot was selected for the job because he owned extensive properties in the middle of the country where it would be hard to rescue Mary. He was also well off and that meant that Queen Elizabeth wouldn’t have to dip into the royal pockets for the care of Mary as often as they might otherwise have needed to do. The next fifteen years saw Shrewsbury becoming increasingly worn down, not to mention cash strapped, by the burden of his responsibilities.

His marriage with Bess became increasingly difficult. Even Elizabeth I turned her hand to marriage guidance between 1586 and 1589 in a bid to reconcile the couple. It was to no avail, the couple separated and George lived out the rest of his life in Sheffield with his mistress, Eleanor Britton.

The earl died on 18 November 1590. He was buried in the Shrewsbury Chapel of Sheffield Church – now Sheffield Cathedral. The chapel was built in 1520 by the 4th earl whose effigy can also be viewed there as can the effigies of his two wives. George was succeeded by his second son Gilbert, his eldest son having predeceased him. Bess outlived him dying in 1608. She chose to be buried in Derby rather than Sheffield.

The earl’s effigy rests with its feet on a Talbot dog – a white hunting hound and which was one of the Talbot families heraldic supporters.

And because I’m getting ever so slightly obsessed about these things – George’s great grandparents were Richard Neville Earl of Salisbury (executed at Pontefract 1461 after the Battle of Towton) and Alice Montagu or Montacute depending on your frame of mind, suo jure Countess of Salisbury – demonstrating once again that everyone was related one way or another!

Margaret Bostock Cavendish and daughters

250px-william_cavendish_c1547Have 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.

Anyway, Margaret Bostock was born in Whatcroft in Cheshire. Margaret’s father, Edmund, came from a family that claimed its descent from the Norman Conquest.  She married William in 1532 as Cavendish began his career in the employment of Thomas Cromwell.  She died on 9th June 1540, the day before Cromwell was arrested. It should have made for a grim year for Sir William, instead he was promoted and sent to Ireland to survey the king’s lands.

The couple had five children but only three survived to adulthood:

  • Catherine married Thomas Brooke, the son of Lord Cobham which sounds very grand but he was son number four or five. Lord Cobham, a soldier and courtier, fathered fourteen legitimate children.  He was an associate of the Seymours and would benefit from the dissolution of the monasteries. When she married Thomas, Catherine became the sister-in-law of William Parr who was married to Thomas’s sister Elizabeth.  William was Queen Katherine Parr’s brother.  It demonstrates that William Cavendish or rather Bess of Hardwick  was upwardly mobile, associated with the New Learning of the period and knew how to find a husband which would improve those all important social and career prospects.  Even more noticeable, on further inspection, is the chain of kinship connections that Bess of Hardwick wrought between her children and the Cobhams.

Thomas managed to get himself sentenced to death twice – once for treason and then for piracy and was charged with a murder in Blackfriars.  He got himself caught up in Wyatt’s Rebellion in 1554 (it was a family affair given that Cobham was Wyatt’s cousin) and on his release set off for a life of adventure on the high seas – by which I mean piracy which didn’t amuse the Spanish very much. eventually he was re-arrested and sent back to the Tower where he was sentenced to death.  On this occasion he didn’t have to rely on the clemency of the monarch – he pleaded benefit of the clergy.  All of which is very Elizabethan, he could even claim a degree of kinship with Sir Walter Raleigh but there’s no sign of Catherine in the tale.

 

  • Mary died in 1547
  • Anne married Sir Henry Baynton in 1561. The Bayntons were a Wiltshire family.  The marriage was arranged by Bess of Hardwick, Anne’s step-mother. Sir Henry was actually the brother-in-law of Bess’s new husband William St Loe. Like Lord Cobham, Baynton’s father was a courtier to Henry VIII and had been present at the baptism of Prince Edward.

 

The Cavendish Connection part two – the earls of Devonshire.

bessofhardwickBess 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.

William was not what might be called dynamic.  He was still living at home  in Hardwick with his mum when he was a middle aged man with a family.  Nor was he interested in a London based career as a courtier.  Instead he concentrated on the role of administration traditionally allotted to the gentry.  He was for example the Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire.

William_Cavendish,_1st_Earl_of_DevonshireIn 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.

The first earl was Anne Keithley of Yorkshire with whom he had three children.  Two of them died young.  His daughter Frances married the first baron Maynard.  His second wife was also from Yorkshire and this marriage produced one son, John, who was knighted in 1618 when Prince Charles became Prince of Wales.  He died soon afterwards.

William’s eldest son was another William, called Wylkyn within the family.  It was intended that he should marry Christian Bruce of Kinross when he was eighteen.  She was only twelve but the matter had been arranged to King James’ approval.  The dowry was a very lucrative £10,000.  The problem was that young William didn’t want a wealthy bride of the kind that his father and grandmother Bess might have approved nor was he unduly concerned about the first earl’s political aspirations.  No, what William wanted was his mistress Margaret Chatterton who had been one of Bess’s ladies.  It didn’t help that Christian was still a child to William’s eighteen years. Despite Wylkyn’s dislike of the marriage he was wed to Christian Bruce.  The Devonshires would not be known for their love matches.

Lord-Cavendish-Later-Second-Earl-of-Devonshire-and-His-Son-G_58_4_1-827x1024By 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.

Perhaps in a bid to curtail his son’s rather un-Cavendish habits William senior appointed him a new tutor in the form of Thomas Hobbes.  The reason for this was that married men could not attend university and William senior saw that his son required a layer of culture to add to his fashionable persona.  The pair were sent on a tour of Europe.  These days we tend to think of the Grand Tour as an eighteenth century phenomenon but despite the on-going religious wars the English were keen to visit foreign climes – especially when Prince Charles (to be Charles I) made it a fashionable thing to do.

In addition to all the gallivanting he found time to become the MP for Derbyshire and on account of the Cavendish investments was also Governor of the Bermuda Company.  However he had managed to get himself into a huge amount of debt and ultimately an act of parliament would have to be sought to break Bess’s entail on part of the estate so that land could be sold to save the rest of the estate.

The second earl died in 1628 in London of “excessive indulgence.”  His heir, another William, was a minor so for a while at least the Cavendish lands were in the hands of Christian Bruce who was by now thirty-two-years old and a canny woman managing to secure full wardship for her son.  An economy drive was instituted and Thomas Hobbes was given the boot, only returning when finances recovered and there was further need for a tutor.  William was knighted at Charles I’s coronation in 1625.  His royalist credentials are evidenced by the fact that he spoke against the attainder on the Earl of Strafford in 1641. The network of family ties was strengthened with a marriage to Elizabeth Cecil, daughter of the Earl of Salisbury in 1639.

William_Cavendish,_3rd_Earl_of_Devonshire.jpgWhich 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.

The third earl laid the foundations for Chatsworth’s library, was a fellow of the Royal Society and a friend of the diarist John Evelyn.  He does not seem much like his father, or indeed his son.

 

(c) National Trust, Hardwick Hall; Supplied by The Public Catalogue FoundationBorn 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.

In 1661 the fourth earl entered Parliament and the following year married Lady Mary Butler the daughter of the Duke of Ormonde.  Ormonde had been at the forefront of the Irish campaign against Oliver Cromwell and had been with Charles II in exile. Upon the Restoration he became a key political figure.  In this instance the Cavendish alliance was for political advancement.

Somehow or other the brawling, womanising, verse-writing earl became a serious politician.  By the 1670s he was using his position to wage war on behalf of Parliament against James III.  This particular Cavendish was not a die-hard royalist like his father or uncles).  The Fourth earl was a Whig – he was anti-court and anti-Catholic and, of course alongside that, he was first and foremost a Cavendish.

 

Part of the reason for his being involved in the Glorious Revolution, to depose James III in favour of his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, was because of a dispute over land.  Colonel Culpepper, a supporter of James III, had made a claim to some Devonshire lands stating that they should have come to him as part of his wife’s dowry.  The pair had a brawl when Culpepper called Cavendish’s loyalty to the Crown into question and Cavendish called Culpepper a liar.Culpepper ended up in the Marshalsea Prison was released and the pair met again.  Culpepper having been imprisoned  for fighting refused a further confrontation so the earl grabbed him by the nose and dragged him from the room before beating him about the head with his cane. It was the earl’s turn to be imprisoned unless he paid a £30,000 fine.  The earl had no intention of paying so he simply walked out of the prison gates and headed for Derbyshire. A warrant for his arrest was issued but in the short term everything was smoothed out with a letter of apology and an I.O.U. – which the earl clearly had no intention of paying.

It was a short step from that event to conspiracy in Whittington and a letter inviting William of Orange to come to England – William Cavendish was able to stand up for Protestantism and get one over on Colonel Culpepper. It also made him one of the so-called “Immortal Seven” having signed the letter inviting William to come and take the crown. The new king was very grateful to the fourth earl who would shortly become the First Duke of Devonshire.  The two times great grandson of Bess of Hardwick had moved the family further up the social hierarchy.

 

Hattersley, Roy. (2014) The Devonshires: The Story of a Family and a Nation. London:Vintage Books

Pearson, John. (1984) The Serpent and the Stag. New York: Holt Reinhart

 

 

 

The Cavendish Connection

john of gauntPrior 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.

It was only in the sixteenth century that Derbyshire acquired its own homegrown power base rather than the Crown or the Earls of Shrewsbury who owned land to the north including Sheffield Castle. I’m taking the opportunity provided by snow drifts and gales to cement my understanding of that power base’s affinity of kinship.

bessofhardwickIn 1547, at Bradgate in Leicestershire, Bess of Hardwick as she would become known married Sir William Cavendish.  Cavendish was the younger son of a Suffolk family but had gained a foothold in the household of Cardinal Wolsey thanks to the support of his older brother George who remained a loyal servant of the cardinal’s throughout Wolsey’s life. In 1529 when Wolsey had fallen from favour Thomas had gone into Thomas Cromwell’s service putting him nicely in place as an auditor for the Court of Augmentations to profit from the dissolution of the monasteries.

250px-william_cavendish_c1547Like Bess, who was his third wife, Thomas had an eye for a bargain.  The pair soon started to build up a property portfolio.  Bess’s mother wrote to her telling her of bargains to be had in Derbyshire. Bess would marry twice more after her husband’s death in 1557 first to Sir William St Loe and then to George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury but she would have no more children.  She ensured all her children made good marriages – a dynasty had been founded.

Frances Cavendish (1548- 1632) – Frances married Sir Henry Pierrepoint from Nottinghamshire.  He was did what gentry did in those days.  He was a justice of the peace and a member of parliament.  He and his wife had three children.  Their eldest son would marry into the Talbot family and Frances’ grandson would become Marquis of  Dorchester.  The family would go on to spawn the Dukes of Kingston-Upon-Hull.  Frances’ youngest daughter, Grace, would marry Sir George Manners – making her the mother of the 8th Earl of Rutland.

henrycavendish1549.jpgHenry 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.

William_Cavendish,_1st_Earl_of_Devonshire.jpgWilliam Cavendish (1552 – 1626) started off having the kind of career that readers of this blog might expect of a scion of the gentry.  He was an MP and a justice.  He was also the Sheriff of Derbyshire.  He became a baron in 1605 thanks to his niece Arbella Stuart who presents this case to her cousin King James I. After his mother’s death he became very wealthy and together with his court connections was able to gain the title Earl of Devonshire.  It is reported that he paid James I £10,000 for the privilege.  I shall be coming back to William tomorrow. I find that I need an understanding of who is who in the Devonshire fold – as someone said to me recently – it’s impossible to escape the Devonshires in Derbyshire and whilst on one hand the fact that quite a lot of them are called William means that I can get away with a lot its an aristocratic skein that I need to untangle.

Charles Cavendish (1553-1617) was the godson of Queen Mary and the father of William Cavendish who became the Duke of Newcastle – he went through the titles earl and marquis before gaining the dukedom in 1665 when he pointed out to Charles II that the Crown owed him rather a lot of back pay and that he was seriously out of pocket for having supported Charles I during the English Civil War.  If that succession of titles wasn’t confusing enough for the casual reader he was also created Viscount Mansfield in 1620.   From this branch of the family come the dukes of Newcastle and also Portland.

William had a younger brother also called Charles who worked loyally on his brother’s behalf.  Aubrey described him as a “little, weak, crooked man.” Aside from becoming an MP and going into exile with his brother the Marquis of Newcastle in July 1644 after the Battle of Marston Moor, Charles deserves more mention because of his advancement of the science of mathematics and correspondence with continental mathematicians .  There can’t be many men defined in the National Archives as a Knight Mathematician and it would have to be said that Aubrey notes that having been left estates and money he purchased books and “learned men.”  The books, which were all mathematical were sold upon his death, by his wife, for waste paper.

Elizabeth Cavendish (1555-1582) married Charles Stuart the younger brother of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley the unfortunate second husband of Mary Queen of Scots.  Margaret, Countess of Lennox and Bess, then Countess of Shrewsbury, met at Rufford Abbey along with their respective off-spring and the rest, as they say, is history.  The result of the marriage was Arbella Stuart and a possible contender for the Crown being descended from the eldest daughter of Henry VII.

Mary Cavendish (1556-1632) married Gilbert Talbot who became the 7th Earl of Shrewsbury upon his father’s death.  Mary’s home life was complicated by the 6th earls increasing hostility to Bess and to her family not to mention his family.  The pair had five children but their two sons died in infancy.  Their three daughters married as follows; the earls of Norfolk, Pembroke and Kent.

Essentially the descendants of a poor Derbyshire squire’s daughter had married into some of the most prestigious families in the land. The Dukeries area in Nottinghamshire is so-called because it was once home to the Dukes of Norfolk descended from Mary Cavendish;  Dukes of Portland  and Dukes of Newcastle descended from Charles Cavendish and the Dukes of Kingston descended from Frances. Bess’s descendants have impacted on  British politics since the seventeenth century and whilst she was unable to ensure that her grand-daughter Arbella Stuart wore the crown it should be noted that Elizabeth II is descended from her through the Bowes-Lyons and that Princes William and Henry are related to her not only through their paternal line but also through Princess Diana’s ancestry.

 

An inconvenient almost royal romance – Elizabeth Cavendish and Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox.

Arbella StuartElizabeth 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.

In the Autumn of 1574 Bess of Hardwick, wife of the earl of Shrewsbury, who was at that time entertaining Mary Queen of Scots as a long term “house guest” left Chatsworth where the Scottish queen was imprisoned and travelled to Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire.  Rufford had been acquired by Bess’s second husband, William Cavendish who had been rather heavily involved with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536.

bessofhardwick

Rufford Abbey was a very convenient place.  It was getting on for thirty miles away from Chatsworth and it was handily close to the Great North Road. Bess was on her way to meet an important guest.

The guest was Margaret Stuart, Countess of Lennox.  Her parents were Margaret Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VII, and Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus.  She was Elizabeth’s cousin and in line to the English throne – apart from the fact that Henry VIII had excluded her because of her Catholicism.  There was also the small matter of Margaret Tudor’s complicated marital arrangements which had cast doubt upon Margaret Douglas’s legitimacy.  In any event Margaret having realised that her own claim to the throne was nothing but a dream had concentrated her ambition into her two sons by her husband Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox.  The older boy, Henry Stuart (don’t ask me about why Stewart/Stuart is spelled the way it is) had married Mary Queen of Scots and got himself murdered.  Given the link between Mary and Margaret as well as their shared Catholicism the English Privy Council had stipulated that Margaret should not come within thirty miles of either Chatsworth or Sheffield if Mary Queen of Scots was in residence.  They suspected plots. However, Margaret had been given permission to travel between her home in Hackney to her home in Yorkshire, Temple Newsam.  Permission had been granted for her to travel on 3 October 1574.

Mid October 1574 – Margaret began her journey north.  She broke her journey with a stay at the home of Katherine Bertie, Baroness Willoughby de Eresby.  Readers of the History Jar might recognise Katherine Bertie as Katherine Willoughby, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon’s loyal lady-in-waiting, Maria de Salinas.  She became the duchess of Suffolk when she married the widowed Charles Brandon, was a friend of Katherine Parr and has been identified by some historians as a perspective wife number seven for Henry VIII.  Margaret and Katherine Bertie had known each other since they were young women.  They had a friend in common – Bess of Hardwick had entertained Katherine when Katherine went to Buxton to take the waters in 1575 and she stayed at Chatsworth.  There had been some talk of Bess’s daughter Elizabeth Cavendish marrying Katherine’s son Peregrine Bertie.

charles stuart earl of lennox.jpgBess 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.

Margaret became unwell whilst staying in Rufford.  Bess cared for her guest personally.  After all Margaret was a Tudor even if both host and guest were countesses.

Elizabeth who had accompanied her mother and young Charles were left to their own devices.  The pair fell in love and got themselves firmly engaged.  Neither mother raised any objections.  In fact it appears that Bess smoothed the way.  She leant Margaret a large some of money and the fact that Elizabeth Cavendish had a dowry of £3000 probably helped.

– The Earl of Shrewsbury, who must have been horrified when he discovered what had been going on, wrote to Lord Burghley to inform him of his step-daughter’s secret marriage to Charles Stuart, Earl of  Lennox  at Rufford Abbey in Nottinghamshire without royal permission.

– Lord Burghley replied that the marriage would be trouble. He was not wrong.

4 November – Shrewsbury replied to Burghley explaining how the young couple had fallen in love.  He stressed that the marriage was not a secret and that he was hiding nothing.  The reality was, of course, that royal permission had not been sought – Charles Stuart was a direct descendent of Henry VII and the son of an English subject so a possible claimant of the Crown.

Someone broke the news to Elizabeth I.  The queen was predictably and probably alarmingly annoyed.

2 December – Shrewsbury sent another letter to Burghley saying that he had heard that the news of the wedding hadn’t gone down particularly well and begged Burghley to intercede on his behalf.  He also wrote to the queen – making it clear that none of it had been his idea and that he and Bess were the queen’s very loyal servants  (You can almost hear the gulp).

17 November- Margaret Lennox was ordered to return to London.    Charles Stuart was to return to London with his bride (Elizabeth Cavendish).  The journey took the rest of the month and into the beginning of December.  Perhaps it was bad roads and lame beasts or perhaps Margaret wanted time for her cousin to calm down.

3 December – Countess of Lennox in Huntington.  She wrote to the earl of Leicester and Lord Burghley asking for help.  She sent a second letter to Burghley on the 10th December.

12 December Margaret Lennox arrived in King’s Place, Hackney.

13 December Margaret Lennox appeared before the Privy Council.  Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon in charge of investigation.  No plot to involve Mary Queen of Scots was uncovered and there was no evidence that the marriage was anything other than a young couple falling in inconvenient love.

27 December.  Margaret was placed under arrest and carted off to The Tower. The version of events that the earl of Shrewsbury had recorded in his letters did not quite tally with the story that Margaret had told on her return to London.  Charles and Elizabeth were placed under house arrest.  It was the third time that Margaret had been incarcerated (the first was when she fell in love with Sir Thomas Howard in the reign of Henry VIII; the second when her eldest son married Mary Queen of Scots and now because Charles had married without permission to the daughter of the woman who was effectively Mary Queen of Scots’ gaoler.)

On the same day the Earl of Shrewsbury wrote yet another letter saying that no ill will had been intended.  Bess of Hardwick was now ordered to London as well.

1575

January – some historians say that Bess of Hardwick was given the opportunity to contemplate the error of her ways in the Tower at this time but others disagree.

Bess was allowed to return home where the presence of Mary Queen of Scots continued to cause difficulties and where the marriage of Gilbert Talbot and Mary Cavendish now resulted in the birth of an heir – George and increased family friction.  The worry of his high status prisoner and the fact that he wasn’t being paid for maintaining her were having unfortunate effects on the earl of Shrewsbury’s personality.

Ultimately Margaret was released back to Hackney as there was no evidence of a master plot to free Mary or to kidnap James from London.

10 Nov (ish) – Birth of Arbella Stuart probably at King’s Place, Hackney. There is a letter from Mary Queen of Scots to her new niece and a reply from both Margaret and Elizabeth.

Christmas – Bess of Hardwick gave the queen a cloak of blue satin trimmed with velvet as a New Year’s gift.

1576

April – Charles Stuart died.  Arbella was barely six months old.  Lovell suggests that Charles had always been delicate and perhaps this was another reason that Margaret had encouraged the match with Elizabeth Cavendish.  Arbella should now have become the Countess of Lennox in Scotland it was argued that it was King James VI of Scotland who should have title and rights to the estates because he was Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley’s son.  Mary Queen of Scots wrote in her will asking hr son James to grant her niece, his cousin, Arbella the earldom.  James never did.

 

Elizabeth Cavendish would die six years later in January 1582.  She was just twenty-six years old.  Arbella would be given into the wardship of Lord Cecil and her day to day care into the hands of her grandmother Bess of Hardwick.

 

Armitage, Jill. (2017) Arbella Stuart: The Uncrowned Queen.  Stroud: Amberley

Gristwood, Sarah. (2003) Arbella: England’s Lost Queen London: Bantam Press.

Lovell, Mary S. ( 2012)  Bess of Hardwick: First Lady of Chatsworth. London: Little Brown

Tudor dolls

Arbella Stuart

Up until the fourteenth century the great hall doubled as a place to sleep for all but the wealthiest. As the decades progressed vernacular building styles changed and more people could afford their own private chambers. For instance chimneys replaced open hearths.   This meant that the hall could now be a ground floor space with a first floor above it rather than being open to the roof. Ultimately the wealthy dined in private rooms and the servants were relegated to the servant’s hall. Once food was removed from the hall it changed into a grand entrance way. As times became more peaceful the hall could be extended into part of a winged building. The great hall disappeared altogether where builders began from scratch.

Hardwick-Hall-plan-1024x621

 

So – Renaissance halls were much less functionally important than their medieval predecessors but still an important statement of wealth and ostentation. Four times married Bess of Hardwick poured her wealth into her building projects from her home at Chatsworth, via Buxton Old Hall and alms houses in Derby to Hardwick. Hardwick Hall is famously “more glass than wall” and it has a great hall style space which lays at its very heart  as shown in the plan above– but no staircase in that particular location! England’s first official architect Robert Smythson who was also responsible for Longleat built it.

 

However, there’s plenty of information about Hardwick available on-line so my third advent for 2017 is this image of Arbella Stuart. Bess of Hardwick forged strong marriage alliances for her off-spring but over-stepped herself when she arranged a marriage between her daughter Elizabeth Cavendish and Lord Darnley’s younger brother Charles Stuart. Lord Darnley was, of course, Henry Stuart the murdered spouse of Bess’s” house guest” Mary Queen of Scots. It happened that Bess was friends with Margaret, Countess of Lennox – the mother of the Stuart boys. And, of course Margaret’s mother was Henry VII’s eldest daughter Margaret Tudor. Bess of Hardwick became grandmother to a contender for the throne. No wonder she described Arbella as “my jewel.”

 

The story goes that Margaret was travelling with her son Charles from London to their lands in Yorkshire. They stopped off at Rufford Abbey – one of Bess’s residences purchased by husband number two, William Cavendish, at the dissolution of the monasteries. Bess arrived with her daughter Elizabeth in tow. Margaret promptly became unwell and what was Bess to do but nurse her poor friend, leaving their children to get to know one another better. It all sounds very romantic but the two women had been plotting for the better part of a year to arrange the match. Bess’s husband the earl of Shrewsbury was not amused when he heard the news. The marriage into the Tudor family line and the arrival of little Arbella were nails in the coffin of Bess’s final marriage.

 

Arbella was born in 1575 – probably at Lennox House in Hackney. Charles died the following year and the title that should have been Arbella’s went back to Scotland. It is significant that the portrait identifies Arbella as the countess of Lennox. It would be a claimed that she pursued intermittently for the rest of her life.

 

bartholomews babyThis 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.

Dolls were sometimes called Bartholomew babies according to information I once read at Knebworth House because they were often purchased at St Bartholomew’s Fair in London. These dolls were carved from wood. They had a head and a torso but no arms or legs. The wooden shape could then be painted and dressed. The British Museum has another kind of doll in its Complete-pewter-doll-bluecollection 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.

By 1582 there was a tax on foreign made dolls though they weren’t known as dolls until the eighteenth century.

 

Croxden Abbey- Dissolution, William Cavendish and King John…

croxden-abbey-hero.jpgThe 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.

The Valor Ecclesiasticus reveals that money was paid out to seven laymen who fulfilled essential roles including stewards and bailiffs including the steward of Croxden, Ashbourne, and Caldon, the bailiff of Ashbourne and Caldon. The document for its suppression identifies its full estates of which several were in Derbyshire. Not that the division of land was always simple. Take Trusley, near Derby, for instance. Some of the land around the village belonged to the monks of Croxden whilst other parts belonged to some of Derby’s community of nuns.

By rights Croxden should have been suppressed in 1536 along with the rest of the smaller monasteries but the abbot paid a £100 and received a licence to continue. Two years later on the 17 September 1538 Dr Legh – an infamous abbey visitor and William Cavendish, equally well known at the time but less mentioned in this blog until now, received the surrender of the abbey. Along with the abbot, Thomas Chawner, who received a pension of £26 per annum there were twelve other monks. As with the other abbeys the building was stripped of everything valuable whilst the abbey’s water-mill, its lands and the rectory at Croxden were rented to Francis Bassett who just happened to work for the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. The archbishop wrote to Cromwell on December 14 1538 asking him to “accomplish his suit.”

250px-William_Cavendish_c1547.jpgWilliam Cavendish had been a servant of Cardinal Wolsey.  He also seems to have been very efficient at taking the surrenders of abbeys.  According to Bess of Hardwick’s biographer, Mary Lovell, there was a point in 1538 where he was overseeing ten surrenders a week. He’d begun by auditing the abbey at St Albans and gone on to gain a job with the Court of Augmentations when it was set up in 1536 by Cromwell specifically to oversee the transfer of Church land to the Crown. He earned twenty pounds a year in addition to the ‘profits of office.’ As Lovell observes, the Cavendishs were not alone in making their fortunes from the reformation but Cavendish seems to have been rather good at it. As for William, these days he is more famous for his third wife – Bess of Hardwick, the foundation of Chatsworth House and his role as Mary Queen of Scot’s jailer.

 

The monks received their pensions and were required to sign for them. There is a receipt dated May 28 1541 for one Robert Clarke. Another of the monks, a man called John Stanley, became Vicar of Alton in 1546 until his death in 1569. We know this because along with three other men we have the records of his pensions in 1557-58.

A swift search on the Internet revealed the interesting fact that King John’s heart is rumoured to be buried in the grounds of Croxden Abbey whilst the rest of him was buried in Worcester (http://www.farmonthehill.co.uk/local-history.html accessed 4 November 2016 19:45). This information completely sidetracked me from monks being kicked out of their home by Henry VIII, Cromwell and Cavendish.  It sent me off down the side alley of Croxden’s relationship with King John.

Apparently John awarded the monks of Croxden an annuity of £5.00 each year from the Irish Exchequer in 1200. An English Heritage research report shed that much light on the assertion of John’s heart but what about something more academic than a legend? The Gentleman’s Magazine (volume 38) asserts that the descendants of Bertram de Verdun were buried there – so far so good, he was the founder after all and the same sentence references King John’s ticker. In fact Victorian tomes trip over themselves in their desire to identify Croxden as the last resting place of at least one bit of King John. The Antiquarian and Architectural Year Book for Staffordshire explains that John’s physician was also the abbot of Croxden – which would account for the grisly souvenir.  Another text dating from 1829 identifies the abbot as Ralph de Lincoln but misidentifies Croxden as being in Leicestershire. A book dating from 1844 references a British Museum text from the Cotton collection which looks at the Chronicle of William de Shepesheved who details the fact that John’s bowels were buried at Croxden. The whole thing is starting to sound decidedly offal.

 

Have I been there? No, not yet – but trust me when I say that I shall shortly be finding a reason for being in the vicinity and I shall be studying English Heritage’s interpretation boards with great interest.

 

Graham Brown, Barry Jones Croxden Abbey and Its Environs London: English Heritage

Lovell, Mary S. (2006) Bess of Hardwick:First Lady of Chatsw0rth. 

G C Baugh, W L Cowie, J C Dickinson, Duggan A P, A K B Evans, R H Evans, Una C Hannam, P Heath, D A Johnston, Hilda Johnstone, Ann J Kettle, J L Kirby, R Mansfield and A Saltman, ‘Houses of Cistercian monks: The abbey of Croxden’, in A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 3, ed. M W Greenslade and R B Pugh (London, 1970), pp. 226-230. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/staffs/vol3/pp226-230 [accessed 13 October 2016].

 

‘Henry VIII: December 1538 11-15’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 13 Part 2, August-December 1538, ed. James Gairdner (London, 1893), pp. 438-455. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/letters-papers-hen8/vol13/no2/pp438-455 [accessed 23 October 2016].

 

‘Henry VIII: May 1541, 26-31’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 16, 1540-1541, ed. James Gairdner and R H Brodie (London, 1898), pp. 409-429. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/letters-papers-hen8/vol16/pp409-429 [accessed 18 October 2016].

George Cavendish – eyewitness account of Anne Boleyn’s romance and wrath

00cavenish.jpgGeorge 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.

 

I’m looking at George today because he wrote about Anne Boleyn’s relationship with Henry Percy. Both he, William and Percy were part of Cardinal Wolsey’s household, so you could say that Cavendish had a ringside seat as events unfolded. Cavendish stayed with Wolsey until his death, in disgrace, in 1530. It was he who served Wolsey his last meal of baked pears in Leicester. He then had an uncomfortable conversation with Henry VIII about Wolsey’s last words – uncomfortable in more ways than one as Harry kept Cavendish on his knees for more than an hour.

 

George retired to Suffolk following Wolsey’s death despite being offered a job as one of Henry’s ushers. He went home to his wife and family from whom even Wolsey conceded he’d been separated for too long on account of loyal service.  He took the opportunity to write a biography of the Cardinal having made notes of events and anecdotes down the years of his service to Henry’s right hand man so it is not surprising that the ‘gorgeous young lady’ who turned Wolsey’s power on its head should feature between the pages. Cavendish claims that Anne was motivated by hatred for Wolsey and a desire for revenge when the prelate scuppered her plans to marry Henry Percy in 1522 on the orders of Henry VIII.

 

Cavendish writes of the romance;

Lord Percy would then resort for his pastime into the Queen’s maidens, being at the last more conversant with Mistress Anne Boleyn than with any other; so that there grew such a secret love between them that at length they were insured together, intending to marry.

 

Cavendish went on to describe the couple being separated and clearly believed that Henry had his eye on Anne from an early time but more modern writers think that Wolsey didn’t think that Anne Boleyn was a suitable match for the earl of Northumberland. Percy’s marriage needed to be about land, power and money not love. It can’t have helped that Anne was packed off home in disgrace and that Percy rarely came to court after that nor was his marriage to the Earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter a very happy one. Cavendish also reports that Wolsey believed that it was Anne who turned Henry against him. He called her a ‘night crow.’

 

Clearly it would have not been wise to make any criticisms of Henry VIII during the monarch’s life time so Cavendish only made his writing available during the reign of Queen Mary. The text wasn’t published until 1641 but it is thought that Shakespeare had access to the manuscript.

Cavendish’s biography of Wolsey is still in print and is also available on the Internet at https://archive.org/stream/TheLifeAndDeathOfCardinalWosley/cavendish_george_1500_1561_life_and_death_of_cardinal_wolsey#page/n3/mode/2up.  Click on the link to open up a new page to find out about the ‘honest poor man’s son’ who became a cardinal, the day that Thomas Cromwell shed tears, the duke of Norfolk threatening to rend Wolsey with his teeth and the prophecy of the dun cow.

george cavendish.jpg

An illustration from Cavendish’s manuscript showing part of the cardinal;’s procession.

 

 

Gunpowder, treason and plot

 Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

king-james1Actually there’s every reason why the plot might have been forgotten!  There were at least four plots against James I during the early years of his reign. Yet it is Guy Fawkes, a York boy, who is remembered.  This post is about two earlier plots and the wonderfully named Sir Griffin Markham.

Sir Griffin, the eldest son and heir of Thomas Markham, of Ollerton in Nottinghamshire, served as a soldier under the Earl of Essex in an expedition sent by Queen Elizabeth to the assistance of Henry IV of France. He was knighted during the siege of Rouen in 1591. He afterwards served in Ireland but there was a problem for this soldier that got worse with the passage of time. Sir Griffin was a Catholic at a time when being Catholic was a cause for suspicion and an impediment to power.

In the Parish Register of Mansfield it is stated that Griffin Markham was at the Market Cross in Mansfield and other gentlemen of the region for the proclamation of the accession of James I (pictured at the start of this post). Catholics had every reason to hope that persecution, which they faced during Elizabeth’s reign, might ease – after all, James’ mother and wife were Catholic. Yet, it appears that within a very short time of James’ accession Sir Griffin wasn’t a happy man. Four months later he was arrested on a treason charge – he’d become involved in a plot that history knows as the Bye Plot or the Treason of the Priests. (Ironically, Jesuits who were concerned that the Bye Plot was a harebrained scheme that would result in major difficulties for English Catholics revealed the conspiracy to Cecil.)

During the course of investigations into the Bye Plot a second plot, which became known as the Main Plot, was uncovered. The two were separate but involved many of the same people!

Sir Griffin Markham, Lord Grey (a radical puritan), Lord Cobham and George Brooke found themselves incarcerated in the Tower along with a couple of catholic priests- William Watson and William Clarke. They were charged with a plot to kidnap James and his Privy Council and then force them to make concessions to the Catholics including the repeal of anti-Catholic legeslation…like that was going to happen and with only three hundred men – not that there is any evidence of Sir Griffin being able to round up a posse that size. This was the Bye Plot.

arbella_stuart_15881At the same time Sir Walter Raleigh found himself under arrest on account of a slightly different plot called the ‘Main Plot’ to depose James (‘the kyngge and his cubbes’) and replace him with Arbella (Arabella) Stuart, the grand-daughter of Bess of Hardwick through her daughter Elizabeth Cavendish and Charles Stuart Earl of Lennox – who was the son of Margaret Douglas who in turn was the daughter of Margaret Tudor, eldest daughter of King Henry VII of England.

It is probable that Raleigh was caught in the net of the Main Plot because of his friendship with Lord Cobham who’d been travelling around Europe have shady chats with Spanish types looking at bankrolling the venture. The problem for Raleigh was that Cobham travelled home via Jersey where Raleigh was governor and clearly stopped off for a chat with his old friend. Cecil put two together, or so it would appear, and found an opportunity to rid himself of a political adversary. There’s another theory that says that Raleigh played his old friend along playing the role of agent provocateur and then managed to get caught in Cecil’s net – whichever way you look at the Main Plot it seems hard to believe that Raleigh would plot with the Spanish. There’s a third view that Raleigh himself spoke of at his trial which was that he thought that he was being offered a pension – not treasonable and something that Cecil was in receipt of himself!

The common denominators between the Main Plot and the Bye Plot were George Brooke and Lord Cobham who were, incidentally, brothers.

The Bye Plot conspirators including Lord Cobham were tried in Winchester and found guilty. A scaffold was built especially for the occasion in Winchester Castle. The warrant was signed on the 7th December and Sir Griffin went to his fate on the 9th complaining bitterly that his confession had been given on the promise of leniency. It was only as he was just about to lay his head on the block that a member of the King’s household arrived with another warrant from James I giving him an extra two hours of life. The same grisly process awaited Lord Grey who prayed for half an hour before the sheriff issued the stay of execution and then Lord Cobham. All three mounted the scaffold, thought their last moments had come only to be given a short reprieve at the last moment – sounding suspiciously like someone somewhere had a very nasty sense of humour or someone in authority wanted to entrap Raleigh through a pre-execution confession from his fellow conspirators.

Each of the three men also believed that the other two men had been executed until they were all bought back to the scaffold for a piece of Jacobean theatre contrived by the king for the news that they were to be spared death but banished from the kingdom. Brooke was the only one to be executed in Winchester, even though he might have reasonably expected leniency being married to Lord Cecil’s sister (talk about a family embarrassment).

Raleigh spent the next thirteen years in The Tower and Parliament passed an act called the ‘Statute Against Catholics’ banishing Catholic priests from England was passed into law as a result of the Bye Plot. Sir Griffin ended his life in continental poverty. According to some stories it is said that he often donned disguise and returned home, and that he assisted in the attempted escape of Arabella Stuart.

Fraser, Lady Antonia. (2003). The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605. London: (Phoenix) Orion Books

Orange, James. (1840) History and Antiquities of Nottingham Vol II. London: Hamilton, Adams and Co. pp733-745