The Devonshires, by Roy Hattersley – review

Recalling being taken as a teenager on repeated outings to see Chatsworth, Roy Hattersley disarmingly confesses that in those days ‘I was impressed by neither the pictures nor the furniture’. Over the past three years, while working in the Chatsworth archives on this history of its owners, the Cavendish Dukes of Devonshire, Hattersley would break off from research to roam the rooms and reacquaint himself with the house’s treasures. Yet if he is now more appreciative of its contents, he is not completely under the spell of Chatsworth’s past occupants.

The ‘founding mother’ of the Devonshire dynasty was the Tudor virago known as Bess of Hardwick. Aged 20 in 1549 she married her second husband, Sir William Cavendish, a widower in his forties who had made money from the dissolution of the monasteries. Having purchased an estate at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, they started building a house there in 1551. After Sir William’s death Bess remarried twice, both times to rich men, using her husbands’ considerable wealth  to complete work at Chatsworth and to build the magnificent Hardwick Hall nearby. Tough, single-minded and ruthlessly acquisitive, Bess became the richest woman in England after Queen Elizabeth, laying the foundations of a fortune that not even the extravagance and financial incompetence of many of her descendants could destroy.

Thanks to Bess, and remunerative marriages contracted by subsequent generations, the Cavendishes were established as great territorial magnates whom successive sovereigns automatically appointed Lord Lieutenants of Derbyshire. But it was Bess’s great-great-grandson, William Cavendish fourth Earl of Devonshire, who became the first member of the family to have a major political impact. In 1686 this arrogant, quarrelsome libertine retired to Derbyshire to avoid paying a fine of £30,000 imposed by James II for brawling in the royal presence. He busied himself remodelling Chatsworth and reading progressive political theory, and two years later was one of the ‘immortal seven’ who invited William of Orange to come to England.