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In one or two former works relating to the seventeenth century, it has been the writer’s misfortune to lead his readers over rather muddy roads into somewhat shady places; but it will now be his privilege to offer himself as their guide along smooth paths paved with the strictest propriety into regions “of sweetness and delight,” where they may bask in the sunshine of unmitigated respectability. There will be nothing in these pages to give offence (and therefore pleasure) to Mrs. Grundy, or to raise that tender blush on the cheek of a maiden, which he has been assured still exists; although he has never yet had the good fortune to see it.

The two chief sources of information about the earlier part of the lives of the first Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, are The History of the Rebellion, by Lord Clarendon; and The Life of the Most Illustrious Prince, William Duke of Newcastle, by Margaret Duchess of Newcastle. The first-mentioned book needs no recommendation; as to the second and its fellow-works, such high authorities as the Master and other Dons of St. John’s College, Cambridge, wrote to its author: “Your Excellencies books ... will not only survive our University, but hold date even with time itself; ... and incontinently this age, by reading of your books, will lose its barbarity and rudeness, being made tame by the elegance of your style and matter”.

In case this testimony should not be considered sufficient, another contemporary criticism shall be produced, namely, that of a certain Mr. Pepys, who kept a diary, and wrote in it on the 18th of March, 1667 (the same year in which the Master and Dons of St. John’s wrote their letter quoted above)—“Staid at home reading the ridiculous History of my Lord Newcastle, wrote by his wife; which shows her to be a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman, and he an asse to suffer her to write what she writes to him and of him”. Probably an estimate of the Duchess’s book, about half-way between that of the Dons and that of the diarist, would not be very far from a just one.

A serious drawback to most biographies is that they begin with the dull subject of family history and end with the dreary one of death; and, of the two, the latter frequently affords less dreary reading than the former. Happily, in the present instance, pedigree can be almost dispensed with; for it would be an insult to the reader to suppose him ignorant of the history of so celebrated a family as that of Cavendish, which, as Burke observes, “laid the foundations of its greatness originally on the share of Abbey lands, obtained, at the dissolution of the monasteries, by Sir William Cavendish”. This Sir William Cavendish left two sons who had issue; the eldest of these, William, became first Earl of Devonshire, and the younger, Sir Charles of Welbeck Abbey, was the father of William Cavendish (the chief subject of these pages), who became first Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Those who profess to understand the mysteries of heredity say that children more frequently inherit the characteristics of their grandparents than those of their parents, and that a great man more often had a brilliant mother or grandmother than a brilliant father or grandfather. The William Cavendish in whom it is hoped that the reader may be interested had a very remarkable grandmother in Margaret, the third wife of Sir William Cavendish of the aforesaid Abbey Lands. She was a widow when Sir William married her, and she had inherited her late husband’s large estates under settlements. This estimable woman had no less than four rich husbands and succeeded in obtaining magnificent settlements from every one of them.

Collins[2] says that, on the death of Sir William Cavendish, she married Sir William St. Lowe, “possessor of divers fair lordships in Gloucester, which, in articles of marriage, she took care should be settled on her, and her own heirs, in default of issue by him, and accordingly, having no child by him, she lived to enjoy his whole estate, excluding his former daughters and brothers.” On his death she married George, Earl of Shrewsbury, “whom she brought to terms” in an excellent marriage settlement, and she made him marry his eldest son and heir to her own youngest daughter, and his youngest daughter to her own eldest son. Well, in her case, may Collins speak of “Conditions that, perhaps, never fell to any one woman ... to rise by every husband into greater wealth, and higher honours; to have an unanimous issue by one husband only, etc.”

[2] Historical Collections of the Noble Families of Cavendish, etc., p. 14 seq.

The “unanimous issue by one husband only” was the best part of the business, as it had the effect of concentrating the riches of four very wealthy husbands upon the offspring of one.

The grandmother of the first Duke of Newcastle, says Collins, “built three of the most elegant seats that were ever raised by one hand within the same county, beyond example, Chatsworth, Hardwick, and Oldcoates, all transmitted to the first Duke of Devonshire”.

Collins presently hints at a slight thorn which accompanied the roses of Lady Shrewsbury’s riches, at a certain period. He says: “It must not be forgotten, that this lady had the honour to be the Keeper of Mary, Queen of Scots, committed prisoner to George, Earl of Shrewsbury for seventeen years.” On the tomb of her husband, George, at Sheffield, is inscribed: “quod licet a malevolis propter suspectam cum captiva Regina familiaritatem saepius male audivit”.

THE CASTLE OF THE OGLES

Inherited by Newcastle from his mother. From his book on horsemanship

Possibly the excellent Lady Shrewsbury may have been more concerned about her husbands making first-rate settlements upon her before marriage, than about their morals after marriage. In the case of Mary, Queen of Scots, however, she gave Queen Elizabeth a gentle hint that there were “goings-on,” with the result that Lord Shrewsbury was immediately deprived of the smiles of his captive Queen.

The Sir William Cavendish with whom we have to deal was born during the reign of Queen Elizabeth in 1592. Of course his mother was an heiress. Undoubtedly his grandmother would not have allowed his father to marry any one who was not! She was, in fact, the younger of the two daughters and co-heiresses of the seventh Baron Ogle. The elder co-heiress was the wife of the Earl of Shrewsbury, and, as was very proper, she died without issue.

Collins[3] has a little to tell us about Cavendish’s boyhood.

[3] P. 25.

“After his school-learning, he was entered a scholar of St. John’s College, in Cambridge; but, delighting more in sports than in books, his father finding he had a ready wit, and a very good disposition, suffered him to follow his own genius, and had him instructed, by the best masters, in the arts of horsemanship and weapons, which he was most inclined to, and soon became master of them.”

As the Duchess of Newcastle is said to have consulted her husband about her writings, and as he is reported to have helped her considerably in writing them, it is highly probable that her account of the education of a boy of the period describes Newcastle’s own experiences. In her Nature’s Pictures by Fancy’s Pencil, she says: “His education, in the first place, was to learn the horn-book, from that his primer, and so the Bible, by his mother’s chambermaid or the like. But after he came to ten years old or thereabouts he went to a free school where the noise of each scholar’s reading aloud did drown the sense of what they read, burying the knowledge and understanding in the confusion of many words, and several languages; yet was whipt for not learning by their tutors, for their ill-teaching them, which broke and weakened their memories with the over-heavy burthens, striving to thrust in more learning than could be digested or kept in the brain.... After some time he was sent to the University, there continuing from the age of fourteen to the years of eighteen; at last considering with himself that he was buried to the world and the delights therein, conversing more with the dead than the living, in reading old authors, and that little company he had, was only at prayers, and meat; wherein the time of the one was taken up in devotion, the other in eating, or rather fasting; for their prayers were so long and their commons so short, that it seemed rather an humiliation and fasting, than an eating and thanksgiving. But their conversation was a greater penance than their spare diet; for their disputations, which are fed by contradictions, did more wrack the brain, than the other did gripe the belly, the one filling the head with vain opinions and false imaginations, for want of the light of truth, as the other with wind and rude humours, for want of a sufficient nourishment. Where upon these considerations he left the University.”

Could there be a greater contrast than that between Oxford or Cambridge life in the seventeenth century and in the twentieth?

Despite what Collins says about the young Cavendish delighting more in sports than in books, as well as a statement by his Duchess that “to school-learning he never showed a great inclination,” it is said in the Biographia Britannica[4] that his father, “discovering, even in his infancy, the strongest marks of an extraordinary genius, etc...., was extremely careful in the cultivation of them, and took all imaginable pains to have him instructed, as well in sciences as in languages; so that, at an age when most young gentlemen are but entering on knowledge, he might be truly said to have acquired a large stock of solid learning, which was adorned with an easy and polite behaviour, that, except on proper occasions, entirely concealed the scholar under the more taking appearance of the fine gentleman.”

[4] Edition 1748, vol. II, p. 1208.

Thomas Hobbes, the “Philosopher of Malmsbury,” was tutor to William’s first cousin, whose name was also William. Hobbes may or may not have acted as tutor to the subject of our story; but it was probably through Hobbes’s introduction in a tutorial capacity into the Cavendish family that he became an intimate friend of the William with whom we are concerned.

Cavendish was taken early to the Court of James I who made him a Knight of the Bath when he was about 17 or 18, and he was sent from thence to Savoy, with the Ambassador Extraordinary, Sir Henry Wotton. It was thus Cavendish’s fortune to be thrown early in life into the company of a man of considerable culture and no little experience of foreign Courts. Wotton had had an opportunity of earning the deep gratitude of James I in a rather romantic episode; but when that King sent him as his Ambassador to Venice, he was asked (at Augsburg) to contribute to a lady’s album, and he was so imprudent as to write: “An Ambassador is an honest man, sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.” King James was told of this and was so offended that, for five years after Wotton’s return from Venice, he gave him no further employment. Then he relented, and, at the time with which we are now dealing, James sent him as his representative to the Duke of Savoy, who, after having been allied with Spain against France, was now making an alliance with France against Spain.

In Wotton, who eventually became Provost of Eton, Cavendish had as a companion a man of letters. Of his poetry only two fragments shall be quoted.

Untrue she was: yet I believed her eyes

(Instructed spies)

Till I was taught that love was but a school

To breed a fool.

—love, lodged in a woman’s breast,

Is but a guest.

Wotton’s literary tastes may have had the effect of implanting a love of literature in Cavendish, or at least of inducing him to dabble in literature. The very fact of his father’s never pressing the boy to give much attention to books or scholars in early youth, may have disposed him to cultivate both at maturity.

It was an advantage for Cavendish to learn something of foreign countries and customs at the Court of the Duke of Savoy; and in courtiery,[5] as in other professions, it is well for a man to make the inevitable mistakes of early practice away from home. At that Court he was treated with great kindness. The Duchess of Newcastle writes:—

“He went to travel with Sir Henry Wotton who was sent as Ambassador Extraordinary to the then Duke of Savoy; which Duke made very much of My Lord, and when he would be free in Feasting, placed Him next to himself. Before My Lord did return with the Ambassador into England, the said Duke profer’d my Lord, that if he would stay with him, he would not onely confer upon him the best Titles of Honour he could, but also give him an honourable Command in War, although My Lord was but young, for the Duke had then some designs of War. But the Ambassador, who had taken the care of My Lord, would not leave Him behind without His Parents consent.”

[5] A word used by Ben Jonson.

“At last, when My Lord took his leave of the Duke, the Duke being a very generous person, presented him with a Spanish Horse, a saddle very richly embroidered, and with a rich Jewel of Diamonds.”

About a year after William Cavendish’s return from Savoy, his father died; but the dates of the events recently recorded in this chapter vary so much according to different authorities, that it is difficult to arrive at anything like accuracy respecting them. Sir Charles Cavendish left his son great wealth and, as a very rich man was a valuable asset even to a King in those early times, Cavendish’s position at Court became more than doubly assured. On the other hand, he is said not to have been a favourite of that almighty potentate, Buckingham, although their correspondence shows that they professed to be on terms of friendship.

Some five years after his father’s death, Cavendish married. His second wife thus describes the marriage with his first:—

“His mother, being then a Widow, was desirous that My Lord should marry; in obedience to whose commands, he chose a Wife both to his own good liking, and his Mothers approving; who was Daughter and Heir to William Basset of Blore[6] Esq., a very honourable and ancient family in Staffordshire, by whom was added a great part to His Estate, as hereafter shall be mentioned”.

[6] This was the Blore near Ashbourne, and not the Blore near Blore Heath (also in Staffordshire), where the battle of that name was fought.

Elsewhere the Duchess is condescending enough to say that “his first wife was a very kind, loving and Virtuous Lady,” which, in most cases, might be taken to mean about the worst that one lady could politely say of another.

Collins states that Cavendish’s first wife, who, by the way, was the widow of the first Earl of Suffolk, “brought him a yearly inheritance of £2400, besides a jointure for life of £800 per ann. and between six and seven thousand pounds in money”. Something over £3000 a year in those days would be the equivalent of more than £10,000 in ours, and Cavendish seems to have inherited some of his celebrated grandmother’s talent for falling in love upon a sound financial basis. His Duchess writes:—

“After My Lord was married, he lived, for the most part, in the country, and pleased Himself and his neighbours with Hospitality, and such delights as the Country afforded; onely now and then he would go up to London for some short time to wait on the King”.

Possibly the frowns of Buckingham may have perceptibly increased Cavendish’s appreciation of “such delights as the Country afforded”.