{"id":7736,"date":"2016-12-30T19:22:39","date_gmt":"2016-12-30T19:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=7736"},"modified":"2017-01-01T16:47:48","modified_gmt":"2017-01-01T16:47:48","slug":"bess-of-hardwick-the-complete-correspondence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=7736","title":{"rendered":"Bess of Hardwick: the complete correspondence"},"content":{"rendered":"

This productive year has seen publication in EMLO of thirty-one new correspondence catalogues, significant enhancements to an existing dozen (either with new letters, further detailed metadata, or transcriptions added), and the blossoming of a number of ground-breaking initiatives, including of course the pioneering and rapidly\u00a0taken up\u00a0Bodleian Student Editions<\/a>. Summer was heralded this year with the official launch in Oxford of Women\u2019s Early Modern Letters Online [WEMLO]<\/a>, the invaluable resource<\/a> and networking hub<\/a> for scholars of women\u2019s correspondence, and we were truly thrilled that this was followed by a spectacular autumn launch at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0correspondences of the wives of the seventeenth-century Dutch Stadtholders<\/a>, compiled by Dr Ineke Huysman<\/a>. And now, in these dwindling December days, EMLO sees out this year with the correspondence of one of the sixteenth-century\u2019s most remarkable figures, Bess of Hardwick<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Bessproject\"<\/p>\n

Bess was an indomitable woman. Widely known for four fortuitous marriages, each layering status and wealth onto the foundations of the previous, her life played out against a backdrop of England\u2019s religious troubles under a succession of Tudor monarchs (Henry VII, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth) until, by the time she died at the age of about 87, the first Stuart king James VI and I was well into his reign over\u00a0a combined Scotland and England. This longevity enabled Bess to plan and to build in a number of ways. She weathered her childbearing years to emerge as a matriarch and a builder of dynasties. With her second husband, the twice-widowed treasurer of the king\u2019s chamber Sir William Cavendish, she bore eight children, six of whom survived to adulthood. In addition, Bess presided over a dizzying number of step-children as well as her grand- and step-grandchildren (I\u2019m not going to attempt to count them but, rather, leave this figure open as a new year’s quiz; answers by email only, please!). Marriages were orchestrated carefully, even between her own children and her step-children, and from 1582 she was responsible for raising her granddaughter, Arbella Stuart<\/a> (1575\u20131615), a claimant \u2014 as the child of Bess\u2019s own daughter, Elizabeth Cavendish, and Charles Stuart \u2014 to both the English and the Scottish crowns in the years\u00a0when the aging Queen Elizabeth refused to name a\u00a0successor. It may have been a wise decision that, as a begetter of heirs, Bess kept herself largely to her home county of Derbyshire, despite being entreated by none less than the lord treasurer himself, William Cecil, Lord Burghley<\/a>, not to \u2018not live so solitary as it seems you do there in Chatsworth amongst hills and rocks of stones<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

But what stones, because, of course, Bess was also a builder in bricks and mortar (and glass!) as the creator of a succession of exceptionally impressive and architecturally striking houses. She was born into Derbyshire gentry, but on her father\u2019s death in 1528 his modest property around Hardwick was seized and administered by the office of wards until his son and heir, Bess\u2019s brother James, came of age. Bess\u2019s mother, Elizabeth Leeke, remarried Ralph Leche of Chatsworth, although the union brought little by way of money or land. It was Bess\u2019s second marriage to Sir William Cavendish, who just about weathered the complicated years of both Edward VI and Mary I, that enabled the purchase \u2014 in the couple\u2019s name jointly \u2014 of the Chatsworth lands from the Bess\u2019s step-family, the Leches, and thereafter the building of Chatsworth House, an\u00a0architectural project Bess focussed upon well into the 1560s even though her husband William died in 1557. (If you follow this link, you’ll find an exquisite\u00a0needlework image of the west front of the Chatsworth Bess built<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

It was some two decades later, however, in 1587, following an acrimonious legal battle over estates with her fourth husband, George Talbot (sixth earl of Shrewsbury, and keeper between 1568 and 1584 of Mary, Queen of Scots), that Bess embarked upon her most creative enterprises. In 1583, in the name of her son William, she had purchased the Hardwick lands following the death of her brother James, who had ended his days a bankrupt two years previously in Fleet Prison leaving just one \u2014 illegitimate \u2014 son. (The correspondence contains a letter\u00a0from James\u00a0to Bess asking for money<\/a>, as well as another\u00a0from their mother writing on his behalf with the same request<\/a>.)\u00a0Within just eight years, the house known today as \u2018Hardwick Old Hall<\/a>\u2019 was complete,\u00a0and by 1599 the monumental \u2018Hardwick New Hall<\/a>\u2019, one of the most architecturally ambitious and audacious undertakings of the age, was in place. This house, for which even the rigorous Pevsner rolls out the rhyme \u2018Hardwick Hall, more window than wall’, is topped with stone-carved crowns and\u00a0Bess’s own monogram ‘ES’ [Elizabeth Shrewsbury].<\/p>\n

Bess\u2019s correspondence charts these remarkable creations as well as her own extraordinary story and it affords us detailed glimpses into her world of building and family management\u00a0as she navigated the complexities of the times in which she lived, exchanging letters with royalty and figures of state, with family, friends, and servants alike. Her letters \u2014 currently 234 in total \u2014 have been edited and published together with full transcripts, commentaries, and images of many of the manuscripts by the AHRC-funded project Bess of Hardwick\u2019s Letters: The Complete Correspondence<\/a> (University of Glasgow), under the direction of Dr Alison Wiggins<\/a>, and each record in the EMLO catalogue links straight through to this project’s full entry.<\/p>\n

We hope you will take advantage of the midwinter break to explore Bess\u2019s correspondence, and to set it against those of her contemporaries in EMLO, both male and female. 2016 will long be remembered by us as the year in which WEMLO was launched, and with 12,285 letter records currently in the union catalogue from, to, or mentioning women, we look forward greatly to the quantity of women\u2019s correspondence increasing apace over the year ahead. To echo the words of our colleague Dr Kim McLean-Fiander<\/a>, co-director with Professor James Daybell<\/a> of WEMLO<\/a>, a gender search is something that should be built into all digital correspondence editions and library catalogues, for both women and men need to be searchable by gender as well as across the combined whole. Whatever your search and whichever correspondence you intend to consult, we hope you find this\u00a0gender-search functionality in W\/EMLO<\/a> useful, and we wish you a very happy New Year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This productive year has seen publication in EMLO of thirty-one new correspondence catalogues, significant enhancements to an existing dozen (either with new letters, further detailed metadata, or transcriptions added), and the blossoming of a number of ground-breaking initiatives, including of course the pioneering and rapidly\u00a0taken up\u00a0Bodleian Student Editions. Summer was heralded this year with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}