April 1959
Miss Williams must first be congratulated upon her choice of subject. As she points out in her preface, Bess of Hardwick has been harshly dealt with by a number of historians (even I, who cannot claim to have thought very often of her, have never thought kindly) and this book, apart from its interest, certainly gives one a chance of admiring this formidable lady. For those who have never thought of her at all, here are some brief facts of her life.
She was born in 1520 at Hardwick Hall (then merely a substantial farmhouse) of a respectable, but poor, Derbyshire landowning family. When Bess was twelve she was given the opportunity of going to London and it was there that she met and married her first husband, young Robert Barlow, who loved her, and who settled all his estates upon her before he died, less than a year after the marriage.
She was married thrice more, to Sir William Cavendish, by whom she had nine children - six surviving - and with whom she was extremely happy until he died; to Sir William St. Loe, a fretful and delicate man much older than herself, who only lasted six years; and finally to George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury. She lived to be eighty-seven and survived five reigns (six, if Jane Grey be counted), and she built Hardwick Hall as it stands today and the original Chatsworth. With Shrewsbury she also endured fifteen and a half years of exhausting and expensive custodianship of Mary Queen of Scots - who must have been one of the most slippery and dangerous prisoners ever to be guarded in a succession of country houses.
Bess was a woman of boundless energy, unswerving loyalty, and fierce ambition for her children. Apart from founding Chatsworth for her Cavendish family, she married two of them to Shrewsbury’s children by a previous marriage and for the last third of her life made a serious and prolonged effort to get her grand-daughter, Arabella Stewart, named as successor to Queen Elizabeth; but here the temperaments of Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Elizabeth and Arabella all combined and fate was against her. In appearance she had much in common with her royal namesake, including red hair and beautiful hands; she also had the sharp tongue, the keen mind, and the intelligence and courage to foresee and sometimes to avert the recurrent catastrophe of royal displeasures - she was twice sent to the Tower.
As Miss Williams remarks, she must be judged against the background of her own times, and they were far simpler, richer, coarser and harder than any other in English history. They were also times when a woman - so far as it is known without an architect - could conceive and build a house like Hardwick. Miss Williams has produced much fascinating contemporary material, of Bess herself, her large family, of the Queens and others, all inveterate letter-writers in language which makes our own today seem watery and dull and not even worth the paper - so inferior to parchment - on which it is written. She has indulged in one or two longish shots of benign supposition, but surely in any biography it is preferable that the subject should be given the benefit of the doubt rather than our being given the doubtful benefit of the author’s malice.