WHEN THEY EMBARKED UPON THE AMBITIOUS PROGRAMME of building a great house at Chatsworth, Sir William and Bess probably did not envisage that it would take thirty years to complete. Fortunately, although it no longer exists, there are a number of surviving records which enable us to visualise their new house, including a contemporary oil painting,1 and a small tapestry picture of it, which is likely to have been worked by Bess.2
Set above and parallel to the flood plain of the River Derwent, the new house occupied exactly the same site as that of the main block of the present building. It was already a dated design when it was built, its turrets and battlements giving it the distinct air of a medieval fortress. In counties nearer London new manor houses were beginning to move away from designs that made them look like strongholds in favour of more elegant European renaissance designs.3 Nevertheless, Bess’s Chatsworth had reasonable claims to being the first real ‘country house’ built in the north of England. Originally two storeys high (Bess would later add another floor consisting of State rooms and a long gallery), and one room thick, it was built of stone from local quarries around a central courtyard. It had diamond-paned leaded windows and decorative round ‘spandells’ over the main entrance depicting the arms of the Hardwick and Cavendish families, as well as carved lion masks. The newness of the building was softened by its perfect setting in a hunting park in a sheltered valley through which the fast-flowing river Derwent rushed, to which Bess gradually added pleasure gardens, orchards and terraces, fish pools and fountains, gazebos and an entrance lodge. The steep hillside behind the house, today clothed in woodlands, was then bare.
At Greenwich, on 20 June 1552, Sir William Cavendish achieved what he had evidently been planning for a year or more, and probably working out in greater detail during his trips to Chatsworth. He gave all his properties and lands, except those in Derbyshire, to the King. In exchange he received a massive tranche of lands, houses and cottages (including ‘villains and natives’), mines and quarries, the bulk of which were situated in Derbyshire. But also included in what was effectively a ‘swap’ were properties and lands in other counties: Surrey, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Lincolnshire, Kent, Essex, Dorset, Cornwall, Herefordshire and Northumberland.
The document covering this transfer details the lands he owned before the exchange:
…the capital mansion of the Lordship, manor and rectory of Northawe…and lands in Northawe and Cuffley Herts, the manor of Birhehold, Herts and lands in Chesthunt, Herts. The site of the late priory, cell or rectory of Cardigan, and lands in Tallyngton, Fulbecke, Beckington, Northeraunceby and Calthorpe Lincs, and in Barnaby next Newarke Notts, the manor of Fernefeldes and Harringay and the rectory of Sowermyms, Middlesex, and other lands.4
To facilitate a favourable outcome, Sir William sent the Crown surveyors a handsome food hamper while they were at Northaw making their valuation. And those acting on behalf of the King in this transaction must have regarded Sir William’s properties highly, for a close-typeset transcript of the list of lands which he received in exchange runs to five A4 pages, and seems today to be an unequal bargain very much in Sir William’s favour. Noting that all the properties mentioned were given to ‘the said William Cavendish, his heirs and assigns’, the document ends that the exchange is ‘without fine or fee’.5 It was a phenomenal bargain and surely a tribute to Sir William’s acumen and negotiating skills.
The Cavendishes wasted no time in moving their family and chattels north. Bess spent a good deal of the year 1552 in London, but by that autumn her entire household had been transferred from Northaw to Chatsworth. Aunt Marcella Linnacre and Bess’s half-sister Jane (formerly Jane Leche and now Mrs Thomas Kniveton) were living there with the Cavendish children in November, when, following a visit to London by Aunt Linnacre, Bess had cause to reprimand her steward, Francis Whitfield. Having first warned him not to hinder or inconvenience the newly appointed carpenter, Master Neusante, while he was working, she goes on to say:
I pray you, look well to all things at Chatsworth till my Aunt’s coming home, which I hope will be shortly. And in the meantime…let the brewer make beer forthwith, for my own drinking and your master.* And see that I have a good store of it, for if I lack either good beer or charcoal or wood, I will blame nobody so much as I will do you.
That her household was installed in the old manor of the Leche family, rather than the new building, is obvious from the instructions she gives Francis for reparations: ‘Cause the floor in my bedchamber to be made even, either with plaster, clay or lime, and all the windows where the glass is broken to be mended. And all the chambers to be made as close and warm as you can.’ It sounds as though Aunt Linnacre may have unburdened herself of a few complaints during her visit to London:
…I hear that my sister Jane6 cannot have things that are needful for her to have amongst you. If it be true, you lack a great deal of honesty, as well as discretion, to deny her anything she hath a mind to, being in case as she has been. I would be loathe to have a stranger so used in my house. And then assure yourself that I cannot like it, to have my sister so used. Like as I would not have an superfluity or waste of anything, so likewise would I have her to have that which is needful and necessary. At my coming home I shall know more, and then I will think as I shall have cause.
She goes on to authorise him to make payments to her nurse and her midwife, as gifts from herself and her boy ‘Willie’ (now aged eleven months).
…In total you give them twenty-three shillings and four pence. Make my sister Jane privy of it, and then pay it to them forthwith…tell my sister Jane that I will give my daughter something on coming home. And praying you not to fail to see all things done accordingly, I bid you farewell from London on the 14th November. Your mistress, Elizabeth Cavendish.
The payments to the midwife, the same reward given at the births of Bess’s children, suggest that perhaps Jane had given birth during this period, probably to her daughter Mary. Why else would a midwife be on hand when baby William was eleven months old, for Bess herself had no child in 1552? This would explain Bess’s annoyance that her sister had been denied something she needed, ‘being in the case as she has been’.
Despite her threat, Bess did not return to Chatsworth for some months, and their housekeeping bill in London that winter and spring was especially high, for they entertained a good deal. Bess’s mother came to stay with them, as did her brother James, together with a Derbyshire friend and neighbour, Sir James Folijambe. Her elder sister Jane, and Jane’s husband Godfrey Bosville (who had benignly held the wardship of Robert Barlow) came from Yorkshire to stay on a number of occasions. Meanwhile there was constant intercourse between the Cavendishes and the Grey family who now lived at their London mansion in Suffolk Place, and the Parrs – Lord and Lady Northampton – the latter being baby William’s godmother.
In February 1553 the King became unwell, and as the weeks went on it must have been acutely obvious to Sir William as he went about his daily tasks at Whitehall that the boy had not long to live. He was in fact suffering from acute pulmonary tuberculosis, for which there was no cure in the sixteenth century. Firmly in the camp of Henry Grey (Duke of Suffolk) and John Dudley (Duke of Northumberland), it is more than possible that Sir William knew of, and was even part of, in some way, the plans of these two powerful men to avert the course of Henry VIII’s Act of Succession, under which the throne would pass to Princess Mary. Capitalising on the boy king’s obsession that the Reformation must progress, Dudley used his position as Protector, and the affection that the King had for the whole Dudley family, to encourage Edward to draw up a new ‘Device’ for the succession to the throne. This document overturned his father’s instructions and bypassed both Mary and Elizabeth in favour of his cousin, Jane Grey, ‘and her heirs male’. It was unconstitutional, but Dudley believed that with sufficient force he could make it work.
With this plan already under way, on Whit Sunday, 21 May 1553, Guildford Dudley, the fourth son of John, Duke of Northumberland, became the reluctant husband of the equally reluctant fifteen-year-old Lady Jane Grey who had been bullied by her parents into the marriage.7
It was a triple wedding, a major social event, celebrated at the Dudleys’ riverside mansion in London, which was ringed by a large crowd of townsfolk anxious to watch the comings and goings of the great and the good. As well as the marriage of their son Guildford, the Dudleys’ youngest daughter Catherine was betrothed to Lord Hastings (heir of the Duke of Huntingdon), and Katherine Grey was betrothed to Lord Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke. Almost all the parents of the bridal couples were godparents to one or other of the Cavendish children, and Sir William and Bess would unquestionably have been guests at this great dynastic ceremony.
In June, the dying King’s Device for the Succession was presented to Privy Counsellors and leading judges, and was reluctantly passed, although not by unanimous decision. There was covert sympathy for Mary and her superior claim to the throne, even though she was a Catholic. But there was no overwhelming support for any of the women concerned, either in the Act of Succession or in the King’s Device, for it was considered impossible for a woman to reign successfully. Unfortunately, apart from Edward VI, not only were all Henry VIII’s surviving legitimate offspring female, but so were the surviving children of his two sisters.8
On 9 July, three days after the death of the King, Dudley (Duke of Northumberland) boldly proclaimed his daughter-in-law as queen, citing Edward VI’s last wishes. Jane Grey no more wanted to take the throne than she had wanted to marry Guildford Dudley, but she had been conditioned throughout her life to submit to her bullying parents’ wishes. In one thing only did she stand up to them and her father-in-law. Having been declared Queen, she steadfastly refused to proclaim her husband King.
While the Privy Council were dismayed about Dudley’s rough-shod methods and his overturning of the Act of Succession, they found him a difficult man to oppose since he had control of the Tower and its guard. He also had control of the Navy, and in the countryside he appeared to have the support of many landowners who were responsible in times of crisis for mustering small armies, and who, it was assumed, preferred a Protestant heir. Had Dudley captured Princess Mary at the outset, and imprisoned her so that she was not a rallying point, his plan might well have succeeded. He was almost there, but he made that one mistake. Warned by friends, the Princess slipped away to the comparative safety of Norfolk, despite a frantic attempt by Dudley’s twenty-year-old son, Robert,* to intercept her, in order to convey her ‘to a place of safety’.
As soon as her half-brother’s death was declared, Mary proclaimed herself Queen, and the honest men of East Anglia, a stronghold of the old religion, rallied to her banner; not because she was especially popular but because she was seen as the rightful heir, as Sir Nicholas Throckmorton later wrote:
And though I liked not the religion
Which all her life Queen Mary had professed
Yet in my mind that wicked notion,
Right heirs for to displace, I did detest.9
For nine days England had two Queens: a Protestant one and a Catholic one. Although Sir William Cavendish had carefully maintained a foot in each camp, there can be no question about which of these two queens he and Bess supported. Like the others in their circle, they stood to gain far more under Queen Jane, but it comes as no great surprise to find that they were not in London when Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen. On 24 June, twelve days after the dying King presented his will to the Privy Counsellors, and fifteen days before the boy’s death, Bess’s household account book came to an abrupt end although sufficient pages remained for further entries. The Cavendishes packed up and left London, removing their entire household to Chatsworth. Bess was five months pregnant. This and the hot summer month ahead gave them sufficient excuse for their departure. But no one knew better than Sir William Cavendish that the next weeks were likely to prove difficult and dangerous.
They watched from afar as the tragic events unfolded. Although he failed in his attempt to persuade Queen Jane (for such she was called for those few days) to declare her husband King, John Dudley nevertheless forced the girl to write letters demanding support from the gentry and known dissenters, reminding them that under ‘ordinances as the late King did establish in his life time, for the security and wealth of this realm, we are entered into our rightful possession of this Kingdom, as by the last Will of our said dearest cousin…’.10 He then led an army against Mary, who was already marching south from Norfolk with her growing band of supporters, to take possession of her throne.
A few days after he left London with his army, the Privy Council – emboldened by his absence – declared against Jane Grey and for Mary, and on 21 July Dudley was defeated and arrested near Cambridge. Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley were also arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. On 3 August Mary, by now accompanied by the Princess Elizabeth, was welcomed into London amid huge celebrations and proclaimed Queen, and on 22 August, a month after his arrest, John Dudley, the great Duke of Northumberland, was executed for high treason. Henry Grey was also arrested at his house at East Sheen and taken to the Tower.
Did Sir William Cavendish fear for his future as members of the Grey and Dudley factions were rounded up? We do not know. What we do know from the household accounts is that while he was very much a member of the Protestant faction prior to June 1553, he had also made regular visits to, and sent small gifts to Princess Mary over a period of some years. And he would later claim that he had mustered a fighting force of his own at Chatsworth to go to Mary’s aid against John Dudley’s army, at a personal cost of a thousand marks (£660).11 This is highly improbable given that Dudley and Grey were among Sir William’s closest friends. But he was a wily man, Sir William Cavendish; uncertain that the plan to crown Jane Grey would succeed, he ensured that he and his family were well out of harm’s way when the worst happened.
Bess’s fifth child was born in November. It was another boy, Charles. And it is surely a measure of the man that within a month of her coronation, Sir William had persuaded the new queen to be godmother to his latest child. All those visits and little gifts made while Mary was living in seclusion now paid off. The two godfathers were a curious mixture. Sir William had almost certainly known Bishop Stephen Gardiner from his days as a young usher in the service of Cardinal Wolsey. Gardiner had always been a great supporter of Mary (and her mother Catherine of Aragon), and he had spent years in prison during Edward’s reign because he would not accept all the tenets of the reformed religion. As a result Mary trusted and respected Gardiner utterly, and one can see how Sir William’s mind was working here. But the other godfather was none other than Henry Grey, so recently engaged in trying to supplant the Queen with his own daughter, and only just released from the Tower.
This christening raises several points. Since the Queen acted as godmother and Bishop Gardiner as godfather, the service was certain to have been a Catholic one. Sir William pragmatically adopted the attitude of the Vicar of Bray. Neither Sir William nor Bess were intellectuals; there was no agonising for them over the principles of their religious beliefs. The safety of their family and the position Sir William had made for himself were far more important to them than the shade of the Church in which they worshipped. After all, it was only twenty years earlier that they had all worshipped together under the old religion in the very same churches. Given a free choice they would prefer to be Protestants, but Sir William Cavendish and Bess were not made of the stuff of martyrs. The choice of Henry Grey as the second godfather, at that time, is less characteristic.
The christening occurred only two weeks after Lady Jane Grey and her husband Guildford Dudley had been tried and found guilty of high treason. After their trial these two hapless young people were returned to the Tower to await the Queen’s pleasure, but, for the sake of her cousin Lady Frances, whom she had always liked, the Queen forgave Henry Grey his traitorous behaviour after Lady Frances pleaded on her knees for her husband’s life. Lord Grey was released on payment of a huge fine and allowed to live quietly at one of his houses, at East Sheen near Richmond. Lady Frances, however, continued to live at Mary’s Court where she was treated ‘with much distinction’, to the detriment, and immense irritation of Princess Elizabeth. The two younger Grey daughters, Katherine (her betrothal to the Earl of Pembroke’s son was quickly annulled by Pembroke to distance himself from any connection with Henry Grey) and Mary, were maids of honour to the Queen. Curiously, there is no record of Lady Frances ever attempting to plead for clemency for her daughter Jane.12
Sir William Cavendish made a clear statement in choosing the out-of-favour Henry Grey as a godparent. It told the Greys that he had not gone over to ‘the other side’ or deserted them in a time of trouble. It was either the act of a loyal friend, or else Sir William was covering himself in case Henry Grey should ever recover his lost power-base. It gave Grey an opportunity to make a statement, too, by participating in a Catholic service.
This christening ceremony, with its distinguished guests (Sir William does not mention any proxies in his account), implies that Bess was confined in London. There are no surviving household books for this period to prove Bess’s whereabouts, and no mention of Sir William in the Calendar of State Papers for that month either. We know from history that there was something akin to panic among parts of the populace when, at roughly the same time as the christening of baby Charles Cavendish took place, it became known that Mary was planning to marry Philip of Spain. Mary’s honeymoon period with the people of London had been a brief one. There was great resentment at her immediate attempts to overturn the structure of the Reformed Church (even though this had been predicted), and in August, only weeks after being welcomed to London by jubilant throngs, Mary was surrounded by an extremely hostile mob after her chaplain preached a Catholic service at St Paul’s Cross. When news spread of the proposed Spanish marriage, people went in real fear that a Spanish King would also mean the Spanish Inquisition, and there was an exodus of committed Protestants to Germany and the Low Countries.
During that winter of 1553–4 a senior courtier, Sir Thomas Wyatt, son of the famous poet who had been implicated in the trial of Anne Boleyn, hatched a plot to place Elizabeth on the throne and marry her to Edward Courtenay, a descendant of King Edward IV. Contemporary writers confirm the reaction to the threat of a Spaniard on the throne of England: ‘At this time many bare such hatred against the Pope’s power and the thought of a foreign yoke that Sir Thomas Wyatt and some Kentish men, within ten days of the marriage contracted betwixt Queen Mary and Philip of Spain brake forward into open rebellion.’13
Thomas Wyatt and his Kentish army were by no means the full extent of the scheme. In the West Country powerful Protestant landowners such as Sir Peter Carew in Devon and Cornwall, and Sir John St Loe in Somerset and Gloucestershire were secretly mustering private armies with the same intention. And Henry Grey returned to the Midlands to raise an army there.
The plot was betrayed by Edward Courtenay himself. He was a young man who had already spent fifteen years of his life in prison, most of it in solitary confinement, simply because his father had displeased Henry VIII, and he buckled as soon as he was put under pressure. Among the first to suffer the consequences was Henry Grey. Despite his recent appearance as godfather at the Catholic christening service of Charles Cavendish, Grey was as committed to the Protestant cause as it was possible to be, and he wanted no Spaniard on the throne of England. He was preparing to leave Bradgate with his men to ride to Wyatt’s support, when a message arrived from Queen Mary offering him command of her forces marching against the rebels. He told the messenger that he would hasten to the Queen’s side. ‘Ye may see that I am booted and spurred ready to ride, and I will but break my fast and go,’ he said. But he intended to throw in his lot with the rebels, banking on the men of Leicestershire rising to the anti-Spanish cause. As he marched south through the Midlands, however, he found no proof of the sympathy which had made itself so evident in the West Country and in Kent, and which he had assumed existed throughout the country. And when they saw how little the cause was supported, even Grey’s existing followers began to desert him.
Grey arrived at Coventry on 30 January 1554 and found the gates of the fortified town closed against him. He knew then that the game was up. He paid off his men and sent them home before going into hiding ‘in secret places’ at Astley Park, one of his manors about five miles from Coventry. By now he was ill with a fever, and he could do little to help himself when he was betrayed by his own gamekeeper, who reported him to Lord Huntingdon. He was arrested, taken to London on 10 February, and a week later was arraigned on a charge of high treason. This time even his wife’s eloquence and royal favour could not save him. It was said by some that his judge, the Earl of Arundel (who was brother to Grey’s repudiated first wife), was unnecessarily savage, driven by a desire to avenge his sister. But this was the second major mistake made by Grey, and he could not have expected another reprieve.
Lady Jane Grey and her husband Guildford Dudley had played no part in this plan of her father’s, but they were regarded by Mary’s advisers as rallying points for further uprisings. A scaffold was hastily erected on Tower Hill and they were summarily executed on 12 February 1554. Eleven days later Henry Grey suffered the same fate.
How can Bess have felt on hearing how this manipulated girl – whom Bess had first known as a bullied nine-year-old child – had groped blindfolded for the block, anxiously crying out to her executioner, ‘What must I do? Where is it?’ It is not difficult to imagine the frisson of horror she would have experienced, and perhaps her emotions went much deeper since for the remainder of her life Bess kept a portrait of Jane Grey on a table beside her bed. The death of Henry Grey, the bluff, larger-than-life, hunting-mad, gambling friend of Sir William Cavendish would also have affected her and Sir William, as it would affect anyone to lose a close friend in such a horrific manner. And what of the danger to her husband? Sir William had long been known as a member of the Dudley–Grey faction, and he might have been swept up under the Misprision of Treason law, which made it a crime to know that treason is being plotted and not report it, or to have an indirect hand in a treasonable crime. All the couple could hope for was that their long, quiet sojourn in the countryside would count in their favour.
There was still a real chance of civil war as the Wyatt army advanced on London, but with the plot blown and gallows already dangling with the corpses of those convicted of complicity, support from other parts of the country failed to materialise. Wyatt’s force was encamped on the south bank of the Thames, but when they attacked, they found London Bridge so well defended that they were forced to travel miles upriver to the next bridge, at Kingston, and approach London from the west. By this time the Queen’s men, under the command of the Earl of Pembroke, were ready for them, and Wyatt was defeated. Life in London slowly returned to normal for those not implicated in the rebellion.
For some ten months or so following these dramatic events, it seems that Bess lived quietly at Chatsworth, overseeing the ongoing building work, with Sir William joining her whenever his work at Court allowed. When one examines the fates of some of their closest friends, this was a sensible plan. Their eldest child, Frances, was hardly six years old, yet three of their friends who had acted as godparents since Frances’s birth had already been beheaded: Henry Grey, Jane Grey and John Dudley. Prior to that their friend the Lord Admiral and his brother the Protector had been executed. By any standards this is a high percentage of one’s acquaintances.
Although it was far from completed, it appears that the Cavendishes were now living in part of the new building, which Sir William modestly described in letters to friends as ‘my poor house’.14 It was far from poor. Chatsworth was already furnished with little expense spared, in what one writer has described as ‘splendid magnificence, which must have been unequalled in Derbyshire and neighbouring counties’:15 from the thirteen bedchambers filled with great carved beds and rich hangings embroidered with gold, silver and pearls, to items of household furniture, objects of gold and silver plate, and the tapestries that Bess loved to make and collect (there were fifty-eight tapestries in an inventory taken in 1553). Her own bed was described as ‘a bedstead, a tester valance and posts, covered all of black wrought velvet with gold lace and gold fringe [with] curtains of black damask all trimmed with gold lace.’16 There was also a well-stocked cellar. The fields were filled with sheep and Sir William had forty oxen for drawing his wagons, which had no doubt been employed full time transporting everything to deepest Derbyshire from his other properties.
From contemporary deeds and correspondence we know that between 1553 and 1556 Sir William continued to improve and increase his Derbyshire estate, buying up pieces of land and fighting disputes with neighbours such as Thomas Babington:
…on the 28th of this present month…[some of your men] came into my ground and…going to the mountain house found my shepherd’s wife with her children in the said house, which hereto they violently and forcibly entered into…and cast out my said shepherd’s wife and her children contrary to the…Queen’s statute whereof you are not ignorant…Wherefore if it shall please you to see me tomorrow…I shall think myself more bounden unto you…’17
Nor did he neglect the decoration of his new house, writing to ask his friend Sir John Thynne of Longleat about a plasterer, ‘which hath in your hall and in other places of your house made diverse pendants and other pretty things. If your business be at an end, or will be by next summer…I would pray you that I might have him into Derbyshire for my hall is yet unmade. And therefore, now might he devise with my carpenter how he should frame the same…’18
Sir William had not renewed the lease on the house at Newgate Street, which they left at the time of the Jane Grey affair.19 Although there are letters from him at Chatsworth, we know he also spent periods working at the Court because he is often mentioned in the Acts of the Privy Council, and because some of his surviving correspondence to friends was written from London. But Bess disliked being parted from her husband for long periods, and staying in lodgings was inconvenient. In March 1555,* Bess was more than eight months pregnant when Sir William wrote to Sir John Thynne with an urgent request that he might lease his house at Brentford for a year, or at least ‘until my wife shall be delivered…and to confide that if you was not my friend, I would not so boldly have asked you.’ He continued:
Of late I was of a mind to take a house near London…[for the] repose of myself, my wife and my children, but after a long search by myself and my friends could find none. This put me in remembrance of your house at Brentford…I make so bold as to ask you…as I do [account you] a very dear friend of mine…20
Sir John readily agreed to the request and it was at Brentford, three weeks later, on 31 March 1555, that Bess gave birth to her daughter Elizabeth. The Marchioness of Northampton and Lady Katherine Grey were the godmothers, revealing that, despite everything, the Cavendishes remained closely connected with the same friends, including the Parrs, and what remained of the Grey family.
Sir William and Bess were to use the Brentford house on and off for some years, whenever they were not at Chatsworth. It was near enough to London to be convenient for Sir William’s work, and far enough out of town to be away from any immediate dangers, including infections. Sir William was there in November that year when he wrote thanking Sir John Thynne ‘for the friendship I have found in you…I am now in your house at Brentford where I find ease and quietness…[but with] a month’s warning or less I will be ready to depart…’
To everyone’s amazement (though Bess was probably close enough to have known about it), less than a month after the execution of Henry Grey, at the age of thirty-seven, Lady Frances hurriedly married her twenty-one-year-old former equerry, Adrian Stokes, recently promoted to the post of ‘Master of Horse’. So proud was she of her young bridegroom that she commissioned several portraits of them painted side by side. There was a good reason for the hasty wedding: barely eight months later Lady Frances gave birth to a daughter, but the child died, as did two further children, both sons. What Queen Mary thought of the liaison is not known, but the Princess Elizabeth was aghast, referring to Stokes as her cousin’s ‘horse-keeper’, and she never forgave Lady Frances this act of lèse-majesté.
Bess became pregnant again almost immediately after baby Elizabeth’s birth, and only ten months later her seventh child, Mary, was born in January 1556 at Chatsworth. There was no grand christening celebration for Mary; her godparents were local friends and neighbours, Bess’s mother, Miss Elizabeth Frecheville (daughter of Bess’s old opponent), and Sir George Vernon of nearby Haddon Hall. It was probably a very similar event to Bess’s own christening, yet Mary would become – as would Bess herself – one of England’s leading peeresses.