House-building and husbandry

Bess of Hardwick has usually been viewed as a hard-hearted schemer, an unscrupulous woman who triumphed in male-dominated Tudor England by never allowing emotion to impede her ambition. Allegedly driven by acquisitiveness and a lust for power, she married four times, always moving on to a husband richer than the last. Having gained a sizeable fortune, she sought immortality by founding a dynasty and building great houses, and this, too, has been seen as evidence of her predatory nature and instinct for self-aggrandisement. While no one can deny the beauty of her most famous creation, Hardwick Hall, few have doubted that the woman who erected it was deeply unpleasant. Now, however, in this impressive biography, Mary S. Lovell portrays Bess in a more sympathetic light.

The daughter of a gentleman farmer from Derbyshire, Bess was first widowed at the age of 17. Her second husband was Sir William Cavendish, a canny bureaucrat 20 years her senior, who had made substantial sums from the dissolution of the monasteries. During the tense last years of Henry VIII and the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, the couple contrived the difficult feat of remaining members of England’s political elite without being destroyed by the upheavals that claimed the lives of many of their associates.

Cavendish died in 1557, leaving Bess with six young children. Three years later she married again, this time to Sir William St Loe, Captain of Queen Elizabeth’s royal bodyguard. St Loe clearly adored Bess, and proved an indulgent husband. He paid for work to be continued on Chatsworth, the house in Derbyshire that Bess had begun building while married to Cavendish. When St Loe died unexpectedly in 1565, he left Bess his entire fortune, prompting claims that other members of his family had been ‘cruelly robbed’.