Ladies Who Did More Than Just Lunch – Bess Of Hardwick

Although not quite fitting my previous criteria that I wanted to focus on women who had come from humble beginnings to defy the conventions of their respective times and became successful in a male dominated environment, Bess of Hardwick fits the bill all but the humble beginnings bit.

When born in 1527, hers was a relatively monied background, being an estate of some 5,000 acres, and Elizabeth as she was known was left a small dowry when her father died when she was still young.

Throughout her life she was married four times, the first being when both she and her husband Robert Barlow were only fourteen. Such was the speed of her life that she was only forty at the time of her fourth marriage.

Each marriage seems to have been to a man more distinguished and richer than his predecessor, and you are beginning to pick up a thread that Bess was quite a girl, not a recognised historical term maybe, but sufficient to tell you that this lady knew her way around Elizabethan society.

With a succession of titles which included Lady Cavendish, Lady St. Loe and ultimately the Countess of Shrewsbury, it is hard to keep up with her. You can find her legacy in a number of places around the Peak District which was her home.

Firstly there is Hardwick Hall at Doe Lea by Chesterfield, divided into the old hall and the new hall, these being relative terms as Bess herself was responsible the “new” hall in the latter part of the 1500's. Bess was known as an accomplished seamstress and at Hardwick Hall there is now the largest collection of tapestries, canvaswork and embroidery still in private hands.

When her husband of the time, the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury was the keeper of Mary Queen of Scots, the two ladies worked on what became known as the Oxburgh Hangings, beautiful tapestries that hang at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk, the home at the time of the Catholic Bedingfield family.

Bess and Mary worked on these at Chatsworth, another beautiful and famous Derbyshire house for which Bess can claim responsibility. This came about as a result of her marriage into the Cavendish family, the name of the Dukes of Devonshire, who still own Chatsworth today.

During her life she was involved in manouevrings and machinations to work her family into the Royal Family by marrying her daughter to Charles Stuart, one of the Lennox family who had a claim to the throne.

There was a bit of a hullabaloo about all of this, as the marriage was considered a treasonable offence as no royal assent had been obtained. Bess was summoned to London, but ignored the summons and lay low at home until the row passed, so typical of her.

Bess passed away in 1608, aged 87, having lived a life sufficient to occupy two or three people. She had, at times received an annual income of the region of £13 million, and had enjoyed the company and patronage of some of the most famous and powerful people of her age, people that had treated her as an equal. In view of the efforts that she made to worm her way into the Royal Family, it is perhaps a point of great interest that our current monarch, Queen Elizabeth the Second is a distant relative of Bess.

Not quite what Bess had in mind, but success of a sort.