Bess of Hardwick, mother of dynasties

All you need to know about Tudor England's richest woman

Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire is one of the great English country houses, that remarkable gift of our civilisation. Run by the National Trust, it stands as testimony to the tireless and remarkable Bess of Hardwick, the richest woman in Elizabethan England and grandmother to countless notable dynasties.

‘Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall’ as her contemporary William Cecil put it, this grand Tudor home is not Bess’s only physical legacy; there is also nearby Chatsworth, just 40 miles away, and Oldcotes, now demolished. But it is Hardwick which bears her imprint the most.

Inside this great house, surrounded by lush gardens and rolling hills, one is transported to the world of the Elizabethan aristocracy: large reception rooms with gigantic fireplaces, lined with dynastic portraits and giant embroideries, kitchens for the scullery maids and bedrooms with luxurious four-poster beds ready for important guests to stay. And the glass - there really is a lot of it. When the makers of the Harry Potter film series needed a location for Malfoy Manor, to signify good breeding and ancient privilege, this is naturally what they chose.

Bess was long-lived, so long as to become one of those rare people who span eras. Born in 1527, when England was Catholic and Henry VIII still married to Catherine of Aragon, although already in pursuit of Anne Boleyn, she died in 1608, surviving the tribulations of the Tudor instability and leaving an England that was entering the scientific revolution. Four husbands had already preceded her to the grave, or as the 18^th century writer Horace Walpole put it in a ditty:

‘Four times the nuptial bed she warmed,
And every time so well performed,
That when death spoiled each husband’s billing
He left the widow every shilling’.

Being widowed four times might seem like bad luck, but it was not suspiciously so for the period (although her third husband might have been poisoned by his brother). Indeed, Mary Lovell’s biography of Bess, probably the best known, recounts a life in which tragic, untimely deaths were all part of the great struggle for existence. Lovell’s Bess of Hardwick is a very enjoyable read, a sympathetic - but not overly so - portrayal of a woman in the thick of Tudor England’s bloodstained dynastic politics (spoiler alert: lots of people get beheaded). Bess came from good stock and rose up the ranks of the English class system, but in the 16th century it was dangerous to rise too far.

As well as marrying well for herself, Bess was one of the all-time great dynasts, and through her astute handling of alliances her sons and daughters would spawn a long line of Dukes of Devonshire, Portland and Newcastle, as well as the amusingly named Barons Waterpark.

What made this all the more impressive was that, as Lovell wrote, ‘Bess was not blessed with notable beauty’, her education was limited, and as the third daughter of five she was not especially well-placed to advance through society.

The Hardwicks had lived in this corner of the English midlands for at least two centuries, connected to a number of local Derbyshire gentry families through marriage ties – mostly Norman-descended clans like the Vernons, Babingtons or Leches, as well as the even more improbable-sounding ‘Foljambes of Barlborough’, the Frechevilles of Stavley, and the Knivetons of Mercaston, all of whom sound like features from a Billy Bryson travelogue.

Death was a feature of life. Bess’s father had exited when she was still an infant, and her mother Elizabeth then remarried, producing three more girls, including yet another Elizabeth (also the name of Bess’s grandmother, a daughter and a grandmother - people were not hugely imaginative in their naming choices).

At the age of 12, Bess was sent into service at Codnor castle, home of the Zouche family, minor aristocrats who were a rung or two up the ladder (they gave their name to Ashby-de-la-Zouche, one of the strangest named towns in England). It was at this point, and perhaps through her Zouche connections, that Bess met her first husband, Robert Barlow, who came from a neighbouring family linked enough to the Hardwicks that they called each other ‘cousin’. Bess was just 15, Robert 13, and sadly he was also soon dead, a death which resulted in a lawsuit over his lands, a continual theme in her story (Bess’s mother sued one of her later husbands, even though there seems to have been no great family falling out - it’s just what gentry did at the time).

She then went into the service of the Greys, distant cousins of the Hardwicks but also of the Tudors, another small step up the English class system. Bess became a lady-in-waiting to Frances Grey, Duchess of Suffolk, daughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and Henry’s great jousting pal.

Bess grew to become good friends with Lady Frances’s three daughters, whom their mother treated with little affection, regularly ‘boxing’ the ears of their eldest, Jane, for minor transgression like lateness. Sadly, young Jane Grey’s life was going to become a lot more tragic thanks to her parents.

The National Trust’s photography: slightly better than mine

Bess’s rise in status continued with a highly prized second husband, in 1547, the year of Henry VIII’s death. William Cavendish was more than 20 years her senior, and he was notably unattractive and already ‘corpulent’. Yet there is no suggestion it was an arranged marriage and Bess went willingly into it; perhaps she looked for a father figure, Lovell suggests, but he was also immensely rich, which must have helped; Cavendish owned lands in a dozen counties from Northumberland to Cornwall (including the manor of Harringay in Middlesex, so perhaps the very spot where I write this). Originally from Suffolk, her husband moved to Bess’s native Derbyshire where he purchased the manor of Chatsworth from the Leche family. Bess began constructing a stately home here which would become the seat of their descendants, the Dukes of Devonshire.

Theirs was a happy marriage, although not especially brimming with passion. Only one letter survives from their correspondence, and it is business-like in tone - but when he died, she referred to him as ‘my most dear and well-beloved husband’.

Cavendish had recently been sworn onto the Privy Council and knighted by the King, and her status continued to rise; when in 1548 Bess gave birth to a daughter, Frances, the children’s godmothers included influential figures like Lady Frances Gray and Lady Frances’s stepmother Katherine Willoughby Brandon; bizarrely, Willoughby was two years younger than her stepdaughter, and was supposed to be her sister-in-law. She had been betrothed to Frances’s 10-year-old brother Henry only for their recently-widowed father Charles Brandon to marry her instead, causing a fair degree of scandal.

A second daughter soon followed, named Temperance in honour of Lady Elizabeth (Temperance had been Edward VI’s nickname for his sister), the future queen. The couple had many friends in high places, including the Seymours, one of the most powerful families in England, and also the most reckless.

Thomas Seymour, brother of Jane and therefore uncle of the new king, Edward VI, had married Henry VIII’s widow Catherine Parr but the marriage was mired in scandal due to his behaviour around her stepdaughter, the Lady Elizabeth. Their relationship probably went no further than flirting or maybe kissing, but it was unwise on his part and caused scandal.

Seymour ended up beheaded in 1549 for ‘disloyal practices’ after a bungled attempt to kidnap the King, which resulted in the death of Edward’s pet dog (always a guaranteed way to alienate public opinion in England). When told of Seymour’s execution, Elizabeth said ‘this day died a man of much wit, and very little judgement’. His brother Edward went to the block three years later for similarly conspiring against the crown.

Elizabeth had survived a potentially dangerous scandal although sadly her namesake Temperance died only a few months after her birth. For several months afterwards, all the household accounts are in William’s handwriting, suggesting that Bess was too distressed to write. This being an age of high mortality and high fertility, she was pregnant almost immediately and soon gave birth to a son, Henry, who also had very powerful godparents, including Lady Elizabeth, Henry Grey, Lady’s Frances husband, and John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland.

Life at the top in Tudor England was dangerous, and made more so by the fires of religion. In 1553 the sickly Protestant child king Edward died, ending the male line of the Tudor dynasty, and leading to yet more uncertainty. England had never had a queen regnant before – only one woman, Matilda, had attempted to claim her rightful crown way back in 1135 and this had led to a civil war. Yet the next nine in line to the throne were now all women, and to make matters worse, at the head of the list was a Catholic woman, Henry’s eldest child Mary.

The six short years of the zealous Protestant King Edward had accelerated the Reformation begun by his father, but England’s loyalties were very divided. Surviving court records of the time recount numerous people fined or jailed for loose words lamenting the old days when England was Catholic, and these feelings were widely felt. Bess’s son William later recalled ‘All the old holidays, with their mirth and rites… May games, Morris dances, the Lord of the May, the Lady of the May, the fool and the Hobby Horse, also the Whitsun Lord and Lady, carols and wassails at Christmas with good plum porridge and pies’. This world, a thousand-year culture of feasts and fasts, carnivals, richly-painted church walls, monks and Merrie England, was fast disappearing.

Many others welcomed the change, out of both genuine belief and self-interest; church lands had comprised 30 per cent of England’s territory before Thomas Cromwell’s dissolution of the monasteries, and much of this confiscated real estate had been sold cheaply to the country’s leading families. It is very hard to reverse reforms in which powerful people have a financial interest, and especially difficult when the most educated sections of society tend to be sympathetic to the new regime. Actual believing Protestants were most likely a minority, although probably a majority in London; most people just went with the wind. Perhaps a skilled and charismatic politician might have reversed England’s Protestant revolution, but Mary was not such a person.

Immediately the new queen faced rebellion, with a plot to place her cousin, 16-year-old Lady Jane Grey, on the throne, led by her father and father-in-law, Dudley. Dynastic interests coincided with religious passion; Henry Grey was a committed Protestant and was convinced that, given the signal, the public would join a revolt - yet when he went to gather support in the Midlands he found that few people outside his immediate circle were interested (the perils of living in an ideological bubble). The rebellion collapsed, and most of those involved were beheaded - including, tragically and unjustly, 16-year-old Jane, the Nine Days Queen.

(Less than a month after the execution of Henry Grey, his widow Lady Frances married her 21-year-old former equerry, Adrian Stokes, and she even commissioned proud portraits of the pair side by side, giving birth to a daughter eight months later. Lady Elizabeth was aghast, referring to Stokes as her cousin’s ‘horse-keeper’.)

This meant that Frances, Bess’s eldest child, was barely past her sixth birthday and three of her godparents had already been beheaded: Henry Grey, Jane Grey and John Dudley.

Mary’s reign would be unsuccessful by any measure, and infamous to later generations. She was a sad figure, suffering from phantom pregnancies and devoted to her Spanish husband King Philip in a way guaranteed to ensure her unpopularity. In order to raise money for his cause, she dispatched Privy Seals across the country asking for a loan of £100 from each member of the gentry - Cavendish refused. Understandably, the policy of rinsing the country’s most influential people in order to give money to England’s most hated foreigner was not popular.

William Cavendish died in 1557. Their youngest child, baby Lucres, must had passed away soon after, as he was not mentioned again. William’s death was not just a tragedy – it was a financial disaster for Bess, too, leaving her with huge debts. Parliament proposed confiscating the lands left by her husband, including her beloved Chatsworth, which she had spent years building up and renovating. She had to fight her case in London, a woman very much in a man’s world, but her appeal was successful.

This financial situation was also made easier in August 1559 when she married her third husband, William St Loe. This new William came from a long line of distinguished knights from Chew Magna in Somerset, the family having the hereditary honour of raising 100 men to appear at the monarch’s funeral. William had earned a knighthood for his services in Ireland, where the Elizabethan regime was engaged in a war of conquest, and made Captain of the Queen’s guard.

The family had also been implicated in the rebellion against Mary, and William had been interrogated. Yet, unlike other men who faced the enhanced interrogation techniques of the Tudor regimes, St Loe said nothing under duress which would have been used against the queen’s half-sister Elizabeth, then locked in the Tower and facing a precarious future.

In fact, Elizabeth’s execution had looked almost certain at one point. When Mary was ill, her Lord Chancellor Stephen Gardiner, on his own initiative, had sent a warrant with instructions for the princess’s immediate execution to the Lieutenant of the Tower - but he refused to proceed without the Queen’s signature. When Elizabeth saw Henry Bedingfeld and his 100-man escort arriving at the Tower she thought it was a prelude to her own execution, and her female companions began to cry.

The future queen owed St Loe her life, and she was a woman who never forgot the people who helped her after she came to the throne in 1558, following Mary’s death. Years later Elizabeth granted a favour to John Harrington, imprisoned in Tower, because his father had stood by her in her darkest hour: ‘Boy Jack, I do this because thy father was ready to serve and love us in trouble and thrall.’

Old Hardwick Hall, which has seen better days

Bess’s marriage says something about her personal charm; Lovell suggests that Sir William could have had his pick of England’s noble women, but was obviously in love with his new wife, and the feeling was returned. With her previous husband, ‘Bess had clearly felt great affection… and her marriage and been happy, but dutiful.’

Yet it still obviously took some time to get used to, and in one surviving document Bess has started signing herself as Elizabeth Cavendish before crossing it out and writing ‘Seyntlo’ (many of the surnames have multiple, confusing spellings). Although both had children from previous marriages – his all seemed to have died – they had no more.

St Loe came from a distinguished line, but it was not without its bad apples, and his brother Edward went beyond ordinary villainy; he probably murdered a tenant, John Scutt, an unpleasant man known to abuse his wife, and who died suddenly, maybe of poisoning. Barely a month later Edward married the man’s widow, who soon fell pregnant, and then died suspiciously too. Edward then married Scutt’s daughter Margaret.

Edward had also accused Bess of using sorcery to persuade William to give her his estate, using ‘unnatural’ means. He may also have poisoned Bess, who fell sick after one visit. Despite Edward’s behaviour, William tried to be fair but eventually, in January 1561, St Loe and Bess ordered a writ against him, accusing Edward of forging their mother’s signature, turning her against William, menacing and threatening tenants, and stealing their lands. When William suddenly fell ill and died in 1565, Lovell at least finds it ‘very suspicious’ that Edward was at his bedside.

St Loe’s will was very brief, giving everything to Elizabeth, ‘in consideration of the natural affection, mutual love, and assured good will, which I have ever perceived and found in my most entirely beloved wife’.

Now 38, she was a very wealthy three-times widow, and secure in the reign of Elizabeth, which now appeared increasingly stable. Comparisons are often made between the two redheads, both shrewd movers in a world of men. They were just five years apart in age, and though they knew each other, they were not on particularly friendly terms; there seemed to be more of a cool respect, and even this was now strained as Bess entered her fourth marriage.

George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, owned huge amounts of land, one biographer describing him as ‘a prince, whose princedom was north of the Trent’, and this final marriage has the feel more of a business deal than a declaration of love. Indeed, two of Bess’s children were now also married to two of Shrewsbury’s children, and while we cannot know if this was a condition of their marriage, the Talbot-Cavendish triple alliance was dynastically brilliant, and would help spawn a number of great houses - but it made their complicated domestic situation even more stressful when they all fell out.

Their marriage would begin happily enough but then went dramatically sour. Shrewsbury may have suffered a stroke or had the early signs of dementia – he seemed to have undergone a personality change – but it was not helped by the arrival of one unwelcome guest.

Mary, Queen of Scots, was a figure who seemed to bring drama wherever she went. Inheriting the throne at just six days’ old, after her father James V had died of dysentery after presiding over yet another defeat by the English, she had grown up under a regent and at the age of six was sent to France to marry the dauphin Francis. Mary’s mother was also French, and these matches reflected the ‘Auld Alliance’ between France and Scotland, now being upended by the arrival of a Reformation far more radical than England’s.

Upon assuming personal rule, Mary’s reign was beset by opposition by the likes of John Knox, whose militant Calvinism veered almost into republicanism. Knox would make outrageous comments about the queen, in thundering sermons in which he warned that dogs would ‘eat the flesh of Jezebel’.

Mary’s predicament was not helped by her fantastically bad taste in men, especially violent and drunk men. After being imprisoned and losing in battle to her domestic enemies, Mary had fled across the border to the realm of her cousin Elizabeth, who didn’t know what to do with her.

Shrewsbury was chosen to look after Mary because Chatsworth and Sheffield castle, his seat, were located in the very middle of England, making escape harder. Shrewsbury was also seen as a staunch Protestant who was happily married, an important factor considering that men who came into contact with Mary tended to fall for her, or at least lose the ability to reason. She was beautiful, charming and vulnerable in a manipulative way. (She also had a French accent, irresistible to most Englishmen.) On the queen’s orders, Mary was placed under house arrest at the couple’s home – but no one expected it to last 15 years.

Although Shrewsbury had been granted expenses by the crown, it was nowhere near adequate to cover the costs, especially as more and more of her followers arrived. Shrewsbury wrote to William Cecil complaining that ‘the daily repair of Scots to her so increases that, though lodged in the town, the company going and coming being 80 persons… my expenses greatly exceed’ the allowance.

Mary’s ‘court’ included ‘a Master of Household, an Usher of the Chamber, a Master of Horse, two pages, four maids, a dozen “ladies and gentlemen” and their personal servants, a secretary, two doctors, a priest, an embroiderer and seamstress, a tailor, two wardrobe keepers and six varlets, fourteen sundry servitors, three cooks, a baker and a pastry cook, two pantry men, a farrier and grooms, three lackeys and four stableboys.’

Mary also sounded like she was hard work, with regular fits of weeping. Shrewsbury recalled that, when she heard news of how she was regarded in Scotland, ‘she wept and lamented exceedingly till she went to bed… Her lips and whole face was greatly swollen – she would eat nothing at supper, but sat weeping, notwithstanding all the persuasion that my wife and I used that she should trust Her Majesty’s goodness… She heard all we said very quietly but we could not appease her weeping’. Shrewsbury, an Englishman allergic to displays of emotion, found this unbearable.

Bess and Mary sometimes spent days doing needlework together, a skill in which the Scots queen excelled, although Bess was clearly talented and many of her embroideries can still be seen at Hardwick.

These conversations with Mary could be dangerous. She spread stories that Bess had promised to rescue her if her life was ever in danger, and that her host had indulged in pejorative gossip about the Queen. She even claimed that Bess smuggled out letters for her. We don’t know if this is true, but certainly Bess was in a very difficult position; Mary might be her prisoner, but if the Queen were to die, then Mary would likely succeed her, so it was necessary not to alienate the prisoner. The one upside to the arrangement was that Bess was now very much in demand within London society, as people were keen to hear stories about her famous guest.

Despite all their efforts, the Shrewsburys received little reward, and ended up castigated by the Queen, who felt them too sympathetic to Mary; she appointed the Earl of Huntingdon to ‘assist’ them, who openly said the Earl and Countess had treated Mary with ‘too much affection’. It is true that Mary had managed to turn some of their male servants, and as the years went on suspicions about Shrewsbury started to emerge.

There were further tears in 1572 when Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, was beheaded for his part in a plot against Elizabeth with the aim of replacing her with Mary. The plot was a Tudor conspiracy theorist’s dream, organised by a shadowy Italian banker called Roberto Ridolfi and featuring various scheming foreigners. As Elizabeth’s reign went on, the papacy became more overtly hostile and even called on English Catholics to overthrow her – with disastrous consequences for the country’s dwindling number of papists.

Shrewsbury had to serve as Lord High Steward at Norfolk’s treason trial, and even he was moved to tears as he pronounced the death sentence. Back in the Midlands, Mary naturally wept uncontrollably upon hearing the news.

Considering how dangerous it was to get close to the line of succession, it seems almost reckless that in 1574 Bess agreed to the marriage of her daughter Elizabeth to Charles Stuart, younger brother of Mary’s awful second husband Earl Darnley. This made the younger Elizabeth sister-in-law to Mary and, worse still, it meant their daughter Arbella, born in 1575, had a strong claim on the throne.

When the Queen found out about this act of borderline treason, she flew into a characteristic Tudor rage and ordered Bess to London. Bess survived, but it soured their relationship and some of Shrewsbury’s servants were tortured, where they admitted passing on messages from Mary.

The marriage sharply deteriorated in 1575, and ‘Shrewsbury, by nature a pessimist and a worrier, was now a bitter, disillusioned and angry man, sliding gradually into paranoia’. As well as possible dementia, he also suffered constant pain due to gout and arthritis, and became obsessed with money. He accused Bess of extravagance and, worse still, turning his children against him, yet his own behaviour was enough to ensure this.

While the Earl remained in his Sheffield Lodge home, he ordered his wife back to Chatsworth and said grumpily ‘I am removed to the castle, and am most quiet when I have the fewest women here.’ Even his daughter fled from Sheffield to Chatsworth because of his ferocious temper.

Bess continued to work on expanding Chatsworth and in 1583 bought Hardwick Old Hall, her birthplace, when her only brother James died, ending the Hardwick male line. She would extensively rebuild this house, but in the 18th century her descendants had it partially dismantled and it was left as an empty shell.

Life was punctuated by a series of personal tragedies, with members of Bess’s extended family seeming to die on every other page; to make matters worse, her displays of grief only seemed to irritate Shrewsbury. In July 1582 Bess’s third son Charles became a widower when his wife Margaret died shortly after giving birth to a son William, who also soon expired. Not long after, Shrewsbury’s eldest son Francis died from the plague, an added grief as his second son Gilbert was a great disappointment and was now estranged from his father, having taken Bess’s side.

In August 1584 this marital conflict erupted into violence when Shrewsbury arrived at Chatsworth with forty armed men, causing Bess to flee to Hardwick Old Hall. One of Shrewsbury’s bailiffs then conducted a campaign of terror against Bess’s sons, servants and tenants.

There was also increasing suspicions about Shrewsbury’s closeness to Mary; there were undeclared visits outside of the house, which had been picked up by Elizabeth’s famous spymaster Francis Walsingham. Shrewsbury even took legal action against an Islington innkeeper who had been telling his guests that Mary was carrying his child.

Mary did not exactly try to suppress these rumours, while also spreading gossip about Bess’s supposed lovers, almost certainly untrue. She wrote a poisonous letter to Elizabeth accusing Bess of spreading rumours about the Queen, and Lovell wrote that ‘Mary’s pen seems to have been dipped in venom as she relates that Bess had told her that Elizabeth was, “so vain and had such a good opinion of your beauty, as if you were some goddess” that Elizabeth encouraged and believed in the most flagrant flattery, such as that she was “as glorious as the sun”, and that while Elizabeth basked in such words her courtiers sniggered at her behind their hands.’ None of this was true, but it was bound to cast doubts in anyone’s mind.

Bess was now too scared to return to Chatsworth because of her husband, and she wrote to Walsingham lamenting that all she wanted now was ‘to find some friends for meat and drink, and so to end my life’.

The earl even brought a legal suit full of wild accusations against his wife, but the judges ruled in her favour, aware of his state of mind. The Privy Council also took her side, and when Shrewsbury learned of this he raged that his wife had bribed them: ‘now she has so apparently manifest her devilish disposition to the utter ruin and destruction of my house and name’.

In 1587 the ordeal of hosting Mary at least ended when Walsingham was finally able to trap her communications with supporters. Mary had been foolish in putting things in writing, a mistake her wily cousin had not; Lovell speculates that Elizabeth might have faced the same fate twenty years earlier had she made a written reply to rebellion leader Thomas Wyatt instead of entrusting a verbal message to William St Loe.

Mary’s conspirators all died a horrible death, hanged until they were half-dead and then cut down so that they were still alive to watch as ‘their privies were cut off’. Shrewsbury had to tell the Scottish queen that her own beheading would be at 8am the following day. She remained calm, for once.

Bess’s life spanned what later became seen as a golden age. Lovell notes how in 1592, William Shakespeare’s Henry VI was performed for the first time in the Rose Theatre in London, with as many as 30,000 spectators in attendance. Four years earlier, one of the great epic tales of English history had taken place when England faced invasion by Spain.

Shrewsbury, as the Earl Marshal, was expected to play a apart, although the Privy Council, aware of his state, largely entrusted the role to his deputy. Yet as Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire and Staffordshire, he was also ordered to furnish as many men for the imminent defence of ‘country, liberty, wife, children, lands… and for the profession of the true and sincere religion of Christ’. Luckily, as it turned out, the English weather managed to take care of it.

Shrewsbury died in 1590, his estranged son Gilbert inheriting the estate, although the old man’s servant and mistress Eleanor Britton had already stolen all the portable goods, including £18,000 in silver and gold. Bess was now the richest woman in England, although the family drama didn’t end; Gilbert had now turned against her, too, a feud which ended with Bess making a formal complaint to the Privy Council. Indeed, he complained about her in his correspondence in a similar manner to his father.

Gilbert also fell out with his two brothers and challenged one, Edward, to a duel with rapier and dagger, which Edward refused. Gilbert had accused Edward of hiring an apothecary to supply a poison; Edward took them to court and the apothecary was punished for his libel by having his ear cut off and three letters branded on his forehead. Gilbert had become so paranoid that he would not dine away from home in London for fear that his enemies would poison him.

Bess had other family troubles. Her relationship with granddaughter Arbella turned sour, the young girl coming to see her as a jailor. Her eldest son Henry was a disappointment, and she called him ‘my bad son Henry’. He reminded Bess of her brother James, ‘having nothing of the dynast about him, and no thoughts for furthering the future of his family; the goal to which she and her father had aspired.’

For Bess, furthering the future of the family was everything; she had spent her entire life in pursuit of this mission. Even as she lay dying in 1608, the lady of Hardwick was involved in the marriage arrangements of her grandson, William, negotiations she conducted on her literal deathbed - one contemporary suggested that the dowry was worth £100,000 to the Cavendish family. When Bess finally passed away, the funeral cost an astonishing £3,257, larger even than that of Privy Council members Leicester or Burghley, a fitting end for the richest woman in England.

Bess’s life still fascinates, telling of a woman who skilfully navigated the treacherous court and family politics of Tudor England. Lovell writes that while the terms ‘termagant’ and ‘harridan’ have been applied to Bess, ‘there is far more evidence that she was an affectionate and caring woman, rather than the reverse, and that she was shrewd rather than shrewish.’

In fact, ‘thousands of documents… reveal Bess as an intelligent, affectionate, diligent and loyal woman, who was also smart enough to look out for herself and her children. In a man’s world this was not necessarily viewed sympathetically’.

Bess’s dynastic legacy was immense, and so many of her descendants became noblemen that the area around Nottingham became known as the ‘Dukeries’. Yet her greatest legacy to the nation was in bricks and mortar, not to mention glass - in particular the 97-room Chatsworth and 46-room Hardwick.

At her Daughters of Time substack historian and novelist Lucretia Grindle Lutyens describes this ‘extraordinary’ house. ‘Right next to Hardwick Old Hall where she lived as a girl, the two houses are a testament to how far Bess came in her life. Combined they are her story in stone, the record that she constructed. Hardwick Old Hall is her past. Hardwick Hall is all she achieved - a monument to her power, and to her sense of herself as a survivor, a creator, a force in the world to be reckoned with. Great rows of windows look out across her beloved Derbyshire. Towers crown each wing. At their top, her initials E S are intertwined, just in case anyone ever forgets she was there.’

No one can forget that she was there, not while this jewel in the heart of England still stands.