Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, England 2003
"Higher yet in the very East frontier of this country, upon a rough and craggie soile standeth Hardwic, which gave name to a family in which possessed the same: out of which descended Lady Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, who beganne to build there two goodly houses joining in a manner one to the other, which by reason of their lofty situation shew themselves, a farre off to be seene, and yeeld a very goodly prospect." William Camden, Britannia, 1610
Bess of Hardwick's nickname ties her securley to the house she built. So do her initials, with which she decorated its skyline. There is probably no other house in England which is so closely connected in popular imagination with one person. And she was a person to be reckoned with.
Elizabeth Hardwick was born at Hardwick in 1527, one of a family of four girls and a boy. The Hardwicks were minor gentry who had been established at Hardwick for at least six-generations. They owned a few hundred acres and lived in a small manor house on the site of Old Hardwick Hall. Bess's father died in 1528 leaving each of his daughters 26 pounds 13 schillings. By the 1540s she had gone into service in the household of a neighboring great Derbyshire family, that of Sir John and Lady Zouche of Codnor Castle.
To be a gentlewoman or upper servant in a big household was an accepted course for the children of the Tudor gentry. It was a form of practical education and a sueful step towards marriage. In about 1543, Bess married her cousin Robert Barlow, heir of a Derbyshire gentry family slightly more prosperous than the Hardwicks. He died a few months after their marriage and as a childless widow, she probably continued to serve in great households, and may have become one of the gentlewomen of the Marchioness of Dorset, the mother of Lady Jane Grey. This would explain why her second marriage, to Sir William Cavendish, tookplace in the Grey family chapel at Bradgate Manor in Leicestershire.
Set high on a hill in north-east Derbyshire, Hardwick is famous for the New Hall, one of the greatest Elizabethan houses, which survives almost unchanged today. Completed over 400 years ago and known to have 'more glass than wall', the Hall contains one of Europe's best collections of embroideries and tapestries.
To many visitors to Hardwick, it is a matter of amazement to find two such large houses existing side by side, especially when they learn that both houses were more or less fully furnished and in use at the same time; Hardwick Old Hall only became ruinous in the eighteenth century. When Bess started to remodel the Old Hall in about 1585 her husband was still alive and she did not have the means to embark on anything as magnificent as the New Hall. As she and her husband were of the same relative age, there was not much likelihood that she would survive him.
Shrewsbury's death in 1590 improved Bess's financial situation and encouraged her to build the New Hall. But she continued to live in the Old Hall until the New Hall was ready for occupation in 1597; in fact the Old Hall was still being furnished while the new one was being built. Thereafter it was used to provide a useful supply of extra accommodation for both servants and guests.
Both houses were built of the same stone, quarried just down the hill, and in many cases the same craftsmen worked on both of them, but the results were very different. The Old Hall looks as if it had been designed as it went along; the New Hall is splendidly all of a piece. The plan for the New Hall was provided by Robert Smythson (c.1535-1614), one of the most original of Elizabethan architects.
The term architect is somewhat misleading, for the concept of an architect was only in its embryonic stages in Elizabethan England. Robert Symthson was trained as a stonemason. By the 1560s he had become a master-mason, travelling round England with a gang of masons working under him. As such he was brought from London to Wiltshire in 1568 to assist in the rebuilding of Sir John Thynne's house at Longleat. He later moved on to Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire where he was a surveyor rather than a master-mason, both designing the house and superintending its erection; by now he had stopped working as a mason. Symthson was also involved in the design of Worksop Manor and eventually Hardwick.
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Hardwick Garden
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