Motorways can be very boring roads. You drive at speed but have little opportunity to take in anything of real interest, either near at hand or on the horizon. There are exceptions. The M6, as its carriageways separate and it snakes through the fringes of the Lake District is perhaps the most notable. But one of my favourite bits of motorway is what I call the Hardwick Stretch of the M1. Driving north, through Derbyshire, and some fairly nondescript countryside, you suddenly see on the right, through a bank of trees, a picturesque ruin and, close by, a house with what seems like a thousand windows. In a flash they have gone but you have seen Hardwick Old Hall and Hardwick Hall. And you have to be pretty dull not to want to learn more, and to see more.
Behind these two houses is one of the most remarkable stories in English history, and in the history of English architecture. Its heroine is Bess of Hardwick. Bess was born around 1520, the daughter of a minor squire, John Hardwick, who owned the manor house of Hardwick, in those days a small and not particularly distinguished English country house. At around twenty Bess married her cousin Robert Barley, a man of modest means. Had he lived Bess would have become yet another minor lady of the manor hardly causing a stir in local, let alone national, history. But within a couple of years or so Robert Barley had died.
Bess, still only in her early twenties, must have been a comely girl for she caught the attention of Sir William Cavendish, Treasurer of the Chamber to the King. He was not a Derbyshire man but he was a rich one and he had properties in five counties. Bess persuaded him to sell those he owned in Suffolk and in 1549 he bought the Chatsworth estate – still in the possession of a Cavendish descendent – and settled in Derbyshire. It was as William Cavendish’s wife that Bess began to indulge her passion for building and the new Chatsworth House was begun in 1552. Sir William died just five years later leaving his wealth, which was very considerable, to Bess. She was clearly an attractive catch, even if her physical charms had begun to decline, and she soon found a third husband in Sir William St Loe. St Loe was a West Country landowner, already twice married and with daughters, but from an older, more established family than the Cavendish’s. Sir William was Captain of the Guard and Butler of the Royal Household – a favourite courtier of the new Queen Elizabeth. But in 1565 Sir William died leaving most of his property, to the indignation of the rest of his family, to Bess.
She was herself now a fairly formidable prize in the marriage market of Tudor England but no one expected her to land one of the greatest catches in that strange social sea. In 1567 she married George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, a widower with six children and, to cement the alliance, she married off, at the same time, her eldest son, and her daughter, to two of Lord Shrewsbury’s children.
It was a tempestuous marriage but both the Earl and the new Countess were fanatical builders. He was guardian of Mary Queen of Scots, and kept her under house arrest after she fled across the English border in 1568, the year of his marriage to Bess. He moved the tragic Queen between his many houses – Tutbury, Sheffield Castle, Sheffield Manor, Wingfield Manor, Buxton, Chatsworth and Worksop.
Mary Queen of Scots never lodged in Hardwick but Bess used her husband’s guardianship as basis for false accusation and rumour about illicit liaisons. She even intrigued to bring about, without her husband’s knowledge, a marriage between her daughter Elizabeth and Charles Stewart, the brother of Mary Queen of Scots ex-husband, Lord Darnley. She saw herself as helping found a dynasty with a claim to the English throne.
It was this marriage, as much as anything else, that caused the Earl and Countess to separate in 1583. Bess then began converting the old manor house she had inherited into a large mansion. This is Hardwick Old Hall – now in ruins but lived in and admired until the eighteenth century. Then, when the Earl died, in 1590 a free, and even wealthier, Bess was able to indulge all her building ambitions. She began to build a new hall at Hardwick, hard by the old, but a house of its time. She almost certainly enlisted the services of Robert Smythson, the greatest of Elizabethan architects. Apparently Bess was told by some fortune-teller that so long as she carried on building she would never die. Whatever the truth of that she spent some thirteen years of frenetic activity building and furnishing Hardwick. She halted during the severe winter of 1608 when the fortune-tellers prophecy seemed to come true for she died, aged about eighty-eight, on the 13th February. She was given a lavish funeral, the mourning cloth alone cost the equivalent of three hundred thousand pounds in modern money and she was buried in great state in what is now Derby Cathedral, her own epitaph recording her as the builder of Chatsworth and Hardwick and Oldcotes – a smaller but still grand house which she built for her son William and which was demolished long ago.
Any visitor to Hardwick must take in the Old Hall ruins, the Hardwick Inn, the stable yard buildings and the wonderful gardens but I will concentrate, as any visitor must, on Hardwick Hall itself, undoubtedly one of the finest and most romantic of English houses, the greatest monument, in many ways, to the Elizabethan age and well worth a detour from the M1, or from very much further afield.
I first saw Hardwick over half a century ago and I have been back many times since. My father taught me the old rhyme “Hardwick Hall more glass than wall,” and I fell under its spell even on that first visit, as a young school boy. Hardwick is basically an H in plan with six great towers “Four Square and massive” as Pevsner says. From the tower balustrades, four times along each of the long fronts, and three times along the shorter ones, Bess’s initials ES stand out boldly.
But it is its windows that mark Hardwick out from other great late Elizabethan houses. They grow in size as the house saws upwards and its great rooms are on the top floor. On a sunny day the windows along the west front shimmer and gleam and sparkle in the sunshine. And when the sky is grey and overcast, as it is all too often in Derbyshire, they can look forbidding.
You need to spend time in Hardwick: to linger in the remarkable Entrance Hall and marvel at the wonderfully carved screen and the huge fireplace. The two staircases were much altered by the sixth Duke of Devonshire in the second quarter of the nineteenth century but they feel authentic. The main stairs lead up to the drawing room and the suite of first floor rooms including dining room and chapel. But the great State Rooms are on the second floor – the Long Gallery and the High Great Chamber, the Gallery running all along the east front of the house, 166 feet of it. The chamber is reckoned to be one of the most impressive of its date anywhere in England and its plaster work and alabaster fireplace and the tapestries which have hung here since 1601, and were probably bought by Bess thirty years before then, having been made in Brussels, are remarkable.
For many people the Gallery is the glory of Hardwick – again adorned by fine tapestries and with some extraordinarily good furniture. But for all its grandeur the Gallery is not the authentic Elizabethan creation that the great chamber is. Like the staircases it received the attentions of the sixth Duke. But, with its extensive collection of pictures, it is a room to linger in and to savour. The portraits are themselves an evocation of the history of Elizabethan England.
But all the rooms at Hardwick – The Withdrawing Chamber, The Green Velvet Drawing Room, the Mary Queen of Scots room (dedicated to her in spite of the fact that she could never have stayed here as she was executed three years before the real building of Hardwick began), the Blue Room and the Dining Room have their treasures and hold endless fascination, as do the great kitchens.
Hardwick passed into the hands of the Cavendish descendants after Bess’s death and was one of the homes of the Dukes of Devonshire until some fifty years ago when it was surrendered in lieu of death duties and became the property of the National Trust. Recently the Trust has undertaken a major restoration. The repairs have included work to the structure of the Hall and to the stable yards and surrounding park land. A new stone centre, in the old pump house, has been opened and this tells the story of Hardwick’s stonemasons and the work they have done through the ages. There will shortly be five new museum rooms opened which will contain Hardwick’s famous Tobit table carpet and new displays of textiles and miniature furniture – and a display telling the story of Bess and her extraordinary achievements and influence.
The Trust’s work will not be completed until 2006 but the House, of course, remains open and there is much to see and to admire. Hardwick, perhaps more than almost any other house I know (and in spite of the “improvements” and embellishments of the nineteenth century) embodies the spirit of the Elizabethan age – and of a woman who, in her way, was almost as remarkable as the Queen herself.
