Читать книгу Bess of Hardwick and Her Circle - Maud Stepney Rawson - Страница 4

Photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby HARDWICK OLD HALL Page 2

There is almost a touch of Becky Sharp in the way that this young girl, dowerless save for the forty marks of dot allotted by John Hardwick to each of his daughters, settled down in that household. There came to London one of her Derbyshire neighbours—a youth of the Barley or Barlow family, named Robert. Under Lady Zouche’s roof he fell sick and the little niece helped to tend him. Whether he also fell in love, whether Mistress Hardwick the mother was minded to “settle” one at least of her girls early, or whether Lady Zouche was of a strong match-making tendency does not appear. But a marriage between the niece and the guest was arranged and quickly carried through. A strange pitiful affair it must have been—that London wedding between the red-haired child and the sickly young man—a ceremony trailing after it a sorry hope of happiness in the midst of physicking and nostrums, weakness and watching, until the death of the bridegroom before the bride had reached her fourteenth year. His death left no apparent gap in my Lady Zouche’s household and no mark upon history. But it bestowed on the child-wife the dignity of widowhood, and such importance, plus her forty marks, as attached to any property that Robert Barlow left her. The Barlows were not wealthy. Some of them in after years were in sore straits for a living. The State Papers show the existence of piteous letters from a certain Jane Barlow who writes in January, 1583, to her father, Alexander Barlow, “from a foreign land.” She is in extreme want, forced to borrow money to carry on her “business,” and assures him that the meanest servant he has “liveth in far better condition than she.” There is nothing to show that the Barlows applied to their relation “Bess” in after years for help. Such property as there was passed to her, and she travelled out of their ken into richer circles.

In 1547, at the age of twenty-seven, a woman in the height of her powers and the perfection of her womanhood, with considerable knowledge of the world and a tremendous store of physical and mental vitality, she secured a second husband and a man of considerable means—Sir William Cavendish. He was the second son of Thomas Cavendish, and his family, like that of Bess, took its name from its hamlet or manor. Says the pompous Bishop Kennet of those days: “The Cavendishes, like other great Families of greatest Antiquity derived a Name from their Place of Habitation. A younger branch of the Germons, famous in Norfolk and Essex, settled at Cavendish in Suffolk, and from that Seat and Estate were soon distinguished by that Sirname.” Thomas Cavendish, like the father of Bess, was “a well-to-do but undistinguished Squire,” but his sons made names for themselves.