Vulgar History - Real Estate Boss Bitch of the Tudor Era, Bess of Hardwick

00:00:00.000 Hello. Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast. 1.00

00:00:17.860 My name is Anne Foster and it's just you and me today. There's been lots of guests and lots of

00:00:22.320 things happening this season and some people have asked me a few times when it's going to

00:00:26.560 be the next just and only episode. I don't know if you can hear that, but Hepburn also here. So

00:00:32.860 technically I do have a guest and I'm petting her head. Anyway, I wanted to say, because sometimes

00:00:38.940 I forget like any episode could be someone's first episode of this podcast. So if you're new,

00:00:43.340 I mean, welcome. And just know that this show, we're all about vibes, historical vibes. I talk

00:00:51.220 very conversationally. In fact, that's one of the meanings of the word vulgar, the vulgar tongue.

00:00:55.580 it means like talking like the everyday people do. That's what this podcast is. I do a lot of

00:01:00.540 research and then I put it into words that I understand so that you can hopefully understand

00:01:06.080 the stories that I'm telling you because history, sometimes it can be overwhelming. It can be

00:01:10.620 intimidating to me. I'm just talking about me. I'm just like, who, what is happening? Who is this?

00:01:16.480 So even for me, like before I was doing this podcast, when I was reading stuff, I would just

00:01:19.720 like, honestly, like just break it down to myself to be like, who is this? Who is this? Making up

00:01:24.240 little names for people so you could tell them apart. And that's what we do on this podcast. So

00:01:28.780 I mean, just so you know what you're in for. That's the vibe. That's what's happening. And

00:01:33.140 if that's not for you, I mean, God bless and, you know, go read a textbook or whatever. Anyway,

00:01:40.180 my name is Anne Foster. Did I say that? That's my name. Hepburn is my cat. And we're here doing

00:01:45.780 an episode that's part of our extremely long, somewhat chaotic, but very fun, Mary Queen of

00:01:51.760 Scots season. There's something about Mary Queen of Scots. And so we're talking about Bess of

00:01:55.520 Hardwick today, who is a person who has come up a few times, most notably towards the end of Mary's

00:02:02.640 story, when Bess's husband, who we call Mr. Bess, became sort of like the jailer of Mary Queen of

00:02:08.100 Scots. But we said in that episode, like Bess of Hardwick, there's a lot to talk about. And I had

00:02:11.900 written an essay about her a while ago. And I was like, oh, this is fine. Easy peasy. Like I can

00:02:16.560 just like look at that essay and just record me reading it basically guess what no because there's

00:02:21.840 so much I didn't include it was a very short essay I wrote so I read very in-depth biography of best

00:02:27.420 of hard work and I'll tell you what the references are in a minute a couple other things so I wanted

00:02:34.100 to give you a recommendation which is a podcast that I just became aware of in my defense it just

00:02:40.500 started that I think is great. And it's called Dwarfism History. So it's a podcast hosted by

00:02:48.560 Aubrey Smalls, who you might know from TikTok and Instagram at Aubrey Smalls. So this is a

00:02:53.700 podcast about people with dwarfism throughout history, which is such an interesting and great

00:02:58.460 topic. And I'm excited that someone like Aubrey, by which I mean someone who is cool and can break

00:03:04.360 things down in a really understandable way, is doing this podcast because I think it's great.

00:03:08.460 I'm really excited to learn every week from Aubrey. Here's how the show is described.

00:03:12.020 Dwarfism can be traced back to the biblical days, yet stories of little people are rarely told.

00:03:16.600 So in this new podcast series, Aubrey Smalls is changing that. Join us weekly as we uncover new

00:03:21.940 and exciting stories of iconic people with dwarfism throughout history. So I'll put a link

00:03:26.540 to that in the show notes for this episode. But honestly, I've been listening and you should all

00:03:30.280 listen Dwarfism History with Aubrey Smalls. So good. Very needed. Really interesting. And also

00:03:35.560 just Aubrey. I've also just recently discovered him on Instagram. He does these hilarious videos.

00:03:40.680 Anyway, one of my new favorite people, Aubrey Smalls. And today, one of my favorite people

00:03:44.620 from history, Bess of Hardwick. And unlike everyone we've talked about in this season so

00:03:50.020 far, I think she's not a royal person. She is non-royal. So there's definitely things that

00:03:56.140 come up in her life that are similar to what we've seen other people go through, but it's

00:03:59.580 also different because there's not. And she's the queen at the same time. So we know her as

00:04:04.800 Bess of Hardwick. Technically, her name is Elizabeth Hardwick. She was one of five daughters

00:04:10.900 in a family of minor gentry. She was born in or around 1527. Because she wasn't royal,

00:04:18.260 we don't actually know when she was born exactly because there's a lot of kids being born in a lot

00:04:22.760 of places. And if you're not royal back then, you know, you just didn't record people's birthdays

00:04:26.260 that much. And so for perspective, 1527, the year or around when she was born. This was about six

00:04:32.860 years before Queen Elizabeth I was born. So the two of them, they have some dealings and they're

00:04:38.220 like similar age, right? In terms of how I think of Tudor history, sometimes it's like, which wife

00:04:44.380 was Henry VIII on at this point? And it's still Catherine of Aragon era. So pre Anne Boleyn.

00:04:50.560 In terms of other people we've talked about on this podcast. So this is about 10 years before

00:04:55.180 the birth of Lady Jane Grey, who Bess also knew, and about 15 years before the birth of Mary,

00:05:00.140 Queen of Scots. So just like right in the middle of what we think of as the Tudor era. So Bess and

00:05:05.880 her family. Trying to describe how wealthy or not she was is a challenge for me because I don't

00:05:11.100 super understand the different types of levels of people in Tudor England. Because there can be

00:05:17.160 people who they have this huge ancestral home and stuff, but they could actually themselves be very

00:05:22.140 poor. Or there could be people who are able to work themselves up and have more money, but because

00:05:27.440 they don't have a title, they're not considered upper class. So the trajectory of her life,

00:05:32.160 like she ends up, I mean, you know what? Spoiler in a good way. She lives a much longer life than 0.73

00:05:37.180 most people we talk about on this podcast, which is why this episode is going to maybe be kind of

00:05:41.180 long. But she ended up a whole lot better off than she was before. She really set her family 1.00

00:05:46.260 up for success. So she was born into what I'm going to consider for myself, even though this

00:05:50.800 wasn't exactly the term then, just sort of like a middle class family. Like they had some connections

00:05:56.380 to some royals, but kind of everyone did. And no one had any titles. And they were born in,

00:06:02.080 so their ancestor land, Hardwick is a place. They lived in a modest manor. So again, you're like

00:06:07.560 manor, you're like, so they were like rich and fancy. It's like, they're not really. And when

00:06:12.000 you have that many children, you have to have money to feed them all. And then if they're

00:06:15.760 daughters, she's one of five daughters, like you have to pay the money when they get married.

00:06:20.500 Anyway, so I don't want to be like, oh, they were poor and you know, whatever begging on the streets.

00:06:25.140 No, but they were like not super well off, right?

00:06:28.320 So their ancestor land, Hardwick, is in the county of Derbyshire, potentially pronounced

00:06:33.500 Derbyshire.

00:06:34.800 I mean, correct me, British members of the Titsad Brigade, which new listeners is what

00:06:40.420 we call listeners of this show.

00:06:42.040 So her father died when she was very young, leaving a very small dowry to be split between

00:06:46.980 Bess and her sisters.

00:06:48.440 Her brother was set to inherit the Hardwick lands.

00:06:51.280 so basically what they needed to do was to make themselves seem as appealing matches as possible

00:06:58.080 for prospective husbands and so with that in mind to try and just make connections with important 1.00

00:07:04.200 people and just make these girls seem like great great catches best was sent when she was around 12 0.99

00:07:09.400 years old to serve in the household of their distant relation lady zoosh which is a great

00:07:14.840 name, Z-O-U-C-H-E, or as Americans might say, Z-O-U-C-H-E. That felt very strange for me to say.

00:07:22.040 To new listeners, I am Canadian. Anyway, so Lady Zoush was at Codnor Castle, which was nearby.

00:07:30.580 And so this is a thing that happened a lot to people and kind of her status. Like this sort

00:07:35.820 of appointment, the purpose of it was, it's almost like an internship. It was to allow

00:07:39.340 young people from less notable families the opportunity to meet influential people

00:07:44.020 in order to improve their stations. And so if you have a relative, even if it's like a really

00:07:47.900 distant relative, you're like, can I send my daughter to your house just to like help out

00:07:52.500 there, please? And like, I don't know, read your books and whatever. So remember, Bess was born

00:07:57.920 pre Anne Boleyn, the wives of Henry VIII. It's like Catherine of Aragon for a long time, 0.55

00:08:02.340 Anne Boleyn for a short time, Jane Seymour for an even shorter time. Anyway, so at this point,

00:08:07.280 he was on his third wife, Queen Jane Seymour. Lady Zouche was currently in service. So she was

00:08:12.260 lady-in-waiting to Jane Seymour at the time that Bess came into service for her. So this probably

00:08:18.600 meant that Bess, as part of that household, would travel with Lady Zouche to and from the royal

00:08:23.200 court of Henry VIII, which would give her sort of like open her eyes. Like she grew up in this kind

00:08:27.140 of small community, just kind of seeing the wider world, but also just kind of how fucked up things 0.89

00:08:32.280 were. While in service to Lady Zouche, Bess met a teen aristocrat named Robert Barley. And these two 0.68

00:08:39.220 got married in 1543 when she was about 16 years old and Robert Barley died like a year later.

00:08:45.320 So just to contextualize this, there's a misconception that I myself fall victim to

00:08:52.500 sometimes I have to remind myself like, wait, that's not actually what happened. That people

00:08:56.240 in this era or in many past eras and countries would get married when they were young teenagers,

00:09:02.640 especially young girls. Not true. It was kind of weird when that happened and it was unexpected

00:09:08.520 And when that happened, the average age for women marrying in this time was, I think, something like 25 or something like that, like older than we assume, based on, I don't know, Romeo and Juliet or whatever.

00:09:18.600 I think about people in this era getting married when they're really young, because you hear about that with like the people who are most written about, which are like royals.

00:09:26.260 And those marriage negotiations happen when they're children, sometimes toddlers, because their parents, the kings and queens, really need to sort of cement these alliances.

00:09:35.700 this. And so people are married when they're really, really young. To normal people like

00:09:39.740 Beth, this would be weird that two 16-year-olds got married to each other. And so what this is

00:09:45.580 probably about is that Robert Barley's dad was ill and seemed to be dying. And Robert Barley

00:09:51.160 would inherit everything when the father, and this is going to come up later in the story,

00:09:55.140 so I'll try to explain it as best as I understand it at the moment, which is that when somebody,

00:09:58.820 when the father of a household in this place in time died and the heir, like their oldest son,

00:10:03.960 was not old enough to inherit, which I'm not sure if that means 18 or 21, then that child would

00:10:08.520 become a ward. There's like a wardship council and different families can almost like buy these

00:10:14.060 children and stuff. So just to sort of protect the family's interests, it was in their best

00:10:17.840 interest for the son, Robert Barley, to get married because that just changed the family

00:10:22.160 connections and it would change the wardship situation because it seemed like his dad was

00:10:25.320 going to die. So his dad did die. But then also Robert Barley died. And I just remembered,

00:10:29.900 but I forgot to say my sources. The biography that I read to make my notes was called Devices

00:10:35.480 and Desires, Best of Hardwick and the Building of Elizabeth England by Kate Hubbard. This book

00:10:40.940 has got all the detail, especially if you're interested in architecture, because we're going

00:10:45.000 to get into a lot of house building talk, some HGTV colon Tudor era talk. I also got information

00:10:51.260 from Hardwick Hall's website at thenationaltrust.org.uk, and also a news article from the BBC,

00:10:58.760 but I'll get to that at the end. But as we've had several times this season already,

00:11:02.760 could not be more late breaking news. Like I'm recording this in August, 2023, there was news

00:11:07.300 about Bess of Hardwick. So she's a teen, she was married, her husband died. She was a 16 year old

00:11:13.960 widow who had been married for a year. And so as the widow, and why was she chosen is an interesting

00:11:20.960 question. And no one really knows, but maybe like they wanted to marry this guy, Robert Barley,

00:11:25.920 because his father was going to die and for all these inheritance reasons. And maybe Beth just

00:11:29.560 kind of seemed, she was there. I don't know how much at this point she made, she was making

00:11:33.540 herself stand out or she did stand out, but for family reasons. And she should have been entitled

00:11:38.760 to a portion of his family's estate as the widow of this son, but the Barley family refused to 0.95

00:11:44.320 provide it to her. So guess what she did? And this is just setting up her whole personality for you

00:11:49.980 because we haven't really delved into that yet. So she's 17 years old and she took them to court.

00:11:55.700 She pursued the matter in a series of court battles and finally was awarded around 30

00:12:00.000 pounds a year.

00:12:01.340 So she had this marriage.

00:12:02.880 He died.

00:12:03.480 She's 17 years old.

00:12:04.480 And she's just like, they're like, oh, I'm sorry, teenager.

00:12:07.020 We're going to not give you the money. 1.00

00:12:08.160 And she's like, fuck that. 1.00

00:12:09.820 Give me my money. 1.00

00:12:11.160 Because she deserved it because she should have got it. 0.65

00:12:13.000 She wasn't going for money that she wasn't owed.

00:12:15.260 And she won. 0.86

00:12:16.320 And this is a theme we're going to see a lot in her life because she would not, she'd

00:12:21.540 not take things sitting down.

00:12:23.240 Is that the saying? 1.00

00:12:23.880 she if someone tried to take advantage of her she would take them to court and generally she would 1.00

00:12:29.040 win so she's still not wealthy but already like this 30 pounds a year she was much better off

00:12:35.100 than she had been as a child so with this money and with her experience now like with lady zeus

00:12:41.960 and you know the the books she read and the etiquette she was taught she decided like she 1.00

00:12:46.940 figured out like i'm gonna move up in this world bitches look out in 1545 she was placed in a 1.00

00:12:53.720 position in the household of Lady Frances Gray, the Marchioness of Dorset at Bradgate House. So 1.00

00:13:00.500 Lady Frances Gray is someone we have talked about before. I did a whole season about Lady Jane Gray,

00:13:05.860 and this is her mom. So Frances Gray was the daughter of Henry VIII's sister, Mary Tudor.

00:13:13.460 She was the mother of three daughters. So Lady Catherine Gray, Lady Mary Gray, and Lady Jane

00:13:17.440 Gray. Bess is 10 years older than Lady Jane Gray. So if Bess is like 20, Jane is like 10,

00:13:22.000 and Catherine and Mary Gray are quite a bit younger. But Bess of Hardwick is cool people

00:13:28.180 of all ages. She became friends with Jane Gray. She became friends also with Jane's mom, Lady

00:13:33.040 Frances Gray. So Bess was just kind of like a cool older sister to the Gray girls and maybe

00:13:38.320 like a cool younger sister to Lady Frances Gray. So they're all just pals, they're friends. And so

00:13:43.160 the reason that she wound up there is again, because the Gray family, if you look in the 0.85

00:13:48.480 family tree. Like they're vaguely related somehow to Bess of Hardwick. So she was sent there again,

00:13:53.220 just as sort of like a distant relative. And so she hung out there and she remained close to the

00:13:59.600 Gray family, like throughout the next tumultuous era. So they clearly hit it off in a genuine way.

00:14:04.380 So the Gray family was into what is described as quote, new learning, which is the Reformation

00:14:11.120 Protestant vibes, like AKA what we call in the show, the Renaissance Reformation,

00:14:16.900 girl squad, which is just cool people who are into being Protestant. This is what's happening

00:14:24.940 in the household. Bess of Hardwick, nothing I've read about her made me think that religion was

00:14:29.420 as important to her as it was to, for instance, Jane Grey or to Mary Queen of Scots. But she was

00:14:35.500 just like, I get it. That's what's happening. And I'm cool with it. Because she was there with the

00:14:39.420 Grey sisters, like the Grey sisters we know all got a really humanist, I think it's called,

00:14:44.480 education. And Bess was around that, but kind of none of this really rubbed off on her because

00:14:50.460 that's not her deal. She's not into, you know, reading the classics or whatever. We're going to

00:14:56.660 see what her deal is, but it's not that. But she did have very, very neat italic, it's called

00:15:01.860 handwriting Bess. And so she might have perfected that handwriting there with them because we know

00:15:06.640 that Lady Jean Grey also had similarly very neat handwriting. And it was while she was around this

00:15:11.640 household, because that's what she's about, is like finding a wealthy husband to move up in this

00:15:16.140 world. She first met William Cavendish, who would, spoiler, become husband number two. So Bess is a

00:15:22.920 young widow from Derbyshire and or Derbyshire. She had no fortune or prospects, as Jane Austen 0.97

00:15:30.540 might write. Even though she had this money from her first marriage, she was still just kind of

00:15:35.060 like, who is she? Like, I don't know her. And this guy, William Cavendish, who we're going to call

00:15:40.260 W.C., who was a rising man at court based out of London, and he was a real catch for her.

00:15:49.320 So he was treasurer of the King's Chamber, which was a highly influential role in Henry VIII's

00:15:54.500 court. He had been widowed twice before, which the number of people in the story who have had

00:15:58.920 numerous marriages, it's not weird to them to have been married numerous times and people die

00:16:04.780 all the time. And that's because there was a lot of plagues of smallpox, the sweating sickness,

00:16:12.540 people just, there's various reasons people died. But also if you're married when you're 16,

00:16:16.060 maybe you'll have numerous spouses. So anyway, he'd been widowed twice before, but I don't want

00:16:19.340 you to think like, oh, he's a weird guy or whatever. It's just like, that's kind of everyone

00:16:23.380 was. He had two daughters already who were about Bess's age, which is where I mentioned Bess is

00:16:29.620 like 20 and WC is about 42. So they were married at Bradgate, which is the house where she was

00:16:37.440 staying, Frances Gray's house. And because of his rank, Bess now became Lady Cavendish. And he was

00:16:43.480 so wealthy that she was now able to entirely change her lifestyle. It's interesting that this

00:16:50.020 is who he chose to marry, right? Like part of it is probably like, oh, she's young, like she's 20.

00:16:55.760 Like he has these older children, but like he knows he could have more children with her because

00:16:59.220 she's presumably just at the beginning of her fertile era of life, but also lots of people

00:17:06.040 he met would have been. So something about Bess made her stand out, even though she was, you know,

00:17:13.600 she had no fortune, she had no prospects. And last week, I believe the order that these episodes

00:17:19.200 come out, I had the interview with Yenta Huang about his book about anime Wong. And this,

00:17:26.260 it just reminds me in that sense of somebody who comes from non-impressive background, 0.97

00:17:32.160 like somebody who doesn't have connections or whatever, like the opposite of a Nepo baby, 0.91

00:17:37.620 who just is so charismatic and interesting and engaging that everyone around them just 0.82

00:17:43.560 notices and then they get opportunities or they make themselves opportunities. They find the

00:17:48.040 opportunities and then they have this sort of charisma to follow through on them. And this is,

00:17:51.900 we're going to see that in Bestest Life as well, because there are some portraits of her

00:17:55.720 that you can see if you just like do an image search for best of hard work portraits and we

00:18:00.820 see she looks i would say not fully comprehending the understanding of beauty in tudor england to

00:18:08.840 me she looks similar to queen elizabeth or to mary queen of scots or to anyone but she's never

00:18:17.840 written about as being like a beautiful gorgeous person and it's funny because mary queen of scots

00:18:23.360 for instance, was always written about as being this beautiful, captivating, engaging person.

00:18:27.140 And I'm sure she was, but also she was the queen. So you kind of had to say that,

00:18:32.100 but Bess of Hardwick, it's, I've read in a couple of different sources. I'm not sure. I don't want

00:18:36.520 to like put the author of this book on blast, but I think I might've been in this book. Like she was

00:18:40.420 not beautiful. When you look at her portraits, like that's not the expectation of what a beautiful

00:18:44.840 woman would have looked like back then. So it's like interesting that she snagged this guy when

00:18:50.760 she wasn't like the young hot person in the room. But I would say, first of all, a portrait is

00:18:55.260 subjective. Second of all, like, if you have a really interesting personality, sense of humor,

00:19:02.100 intelligent, smart, like that often can supersede what you look like in a still photograph, right?

00:19:10.060 And there's clearly something about Bess that made her so engaging and interesting that not just this

00:19:14.440 guy, not just WC, but like so many people around her were just fond of her and enjoyed her. And

00:19:19.700 And some of the writing about her is like, it was so interesting because she wasn't even beautiful.

00:19:24.040 And like, beautiful people are not necessarily interesting or charismatic.

00:19:29.560 She was interesting.

00:19:31.020 She was charismatic and that made her hot.

00:19:32.740 So she's married to W.C.

00:19:36.580 And so this, fortuitously for her, was 1547.

00:19:40.380 This is a few years after Henry VIII had dissolved the monasteries as part of the Protestant Reformation.

00:19:46.880 Not to get into that. 0.84

00:19:48.020 But so that Henry VIII could marry Anne Boleyn, he decided to make the country be not Catholic

00:19:53.700 anymore, but instead to start the Anglican religion, the Church of England, which was

00:19:58.120 Protestant. And as he did that, that was a way that he could also take all the Catholic monasteries

00:20:03.880 and just be like, sorry, no more Catholic monasteries. Now this is like a house and

00:20:08.400 I'm going to sell it to my friend or whatever. What this meant is that all of the highly

00:20:13.560 valuable land previously owned by religious orders can now be taken over by rich people

00:20:18.320 in search of land. And WC and Bess, because now they're married, they're a combo, they're a power

00:20:23.860 couple, they were powerful enough that they got first pick of which property they wanted. And so

00:20:30.600 of all the property that they could have taken, what they ended up taking was property in

00:20:34.940 Derbyshire slash Derbyshire, which is near where Bess grew up. So you have to presume that was

00:20:40.900 her suggestion she liked it there is maybe part of it she wanted to go back to a place she was

00:20:46.040 familiar with and or also she just wanted to go back there and like show off to everybody how

00:20:52.360 she had improved herself so much and so they started construction of a home that's still

00:20:57.880 around today that you can visit that's called chatsworth house and that was bess's favorite

00:21:03.540 she has numerous homes we're going to talk about during this whole story during her life

00:21:08.060 but that's where she would always return to when she's like in crisis or when it's just kind of

00:21:13.000 like, or when she's not in crisis, when everything's kind of like sorted out, she's like, I'm going to

00:21:16.840 go back here. Like this really was her home. That area where she was from is, was very close to her

00:21:21.360 and very important to her. And also she liked the house they built. So, you know, what their

00:21:25.700 relationship was like, they really liked each other. Later on, this is like, I'll tell you this

00:21:31.940 fact now, instead of what happens chronologically, because by then you might've forgotten who WC even

00:21:36.240 is. But years and years and years and years, decades later. So Bess was spending some time

00:21:41.060 hanging out with Mary Queen of Scots doing embroidery. And together they made a hanging

00:21:45.200 that is now known as the Cavendish Hanging. And so we know from the various episodes we've done

00:21:50.560 this season about embroidery and symbolism. So the Cavendish Hanging shows tears falling onto

00:21:56.300 smoking quicklime. And in Latin translated, it says, tears witness that the quenched flame lives

00:22:03.280 in the border around this hanging are the initials of Bess and W.C., the Cavendish Arms,

00:22:10.200 which is his last name, and assorted emblems of love, a cracked mirror, three broken rings,

00:22:14.640 and a glove. Bear in mind at the time she was making this, W.C. was dead. She was married to

00:22:20.100 someone else. So clearly the relationship stuck with her and was important to her.

00:22:25.160 This is a lot of the sources we have about her is there's a lot of letters that she wrote to

00:22:29.040 from various people. And the ones from WC to her are all like, oh, my love, you know, I adore you

00:22:34.600 so much. You're perfection itself. And hers are like, you need to negotiate a better price from

00:22:40.360 the guy doing the window finishings. And that's her love language. You know, what they had in

00:22:45.000 common, they were consumers. They really liked stuff. They really liked beautiful aesthetic

00:22:51.520 things, including architecture and house and like door trimmings and like window panes.

00:22:56.800 They also like getting new things and shopping and acquiring things.

00:23:00.360 And they both like gambling, like they were really rich and they were living their rich

00:23:05.260 life and they both enjoyed it, you know?

00:23:08.400 So WC went to London all the time because of his job for Henry VIII.

00:23:12.100 And so Bess was, again, she got to hang out more at royal court, but now from a higher

00:23:16.200 up position than when she was there before.

00:23:18.000 And this helped her shape her aesthetic tastes, like just being exposed to more fancy homes

00:23:23.000 and different furnishings and different things like that.

00:23:25.080 she got into studying classical texts. I said before, she didn't do that. But in fact,

00:23:31.500 she did do that. I guess what I was thinking, like she wasn't, she was scholarly, but in a

00:23:36.180 really sort of aesthetic way. Like she wasn't sitting around like the Gray family. I picture

00:23:41.660 they just sit around, or Jane Gray, just like reading the Bible, like really thinking heavily

00:23:45.800 about like spiritual things. And Bess was more like, I like well-rounded humanist education.

00:23:51.500 She also liked architectural books, seeing, you know, like what the buildings look like

00:23:55.240 in ancient Greece and whatever.

00:23:57.520 And so clearly she absorbed images from all the things she was reading and experiencing,

00:24:01.560 that later informed the design of her houses, both outside and the interiors.

00:24:06.100 And it was probably in this era that she might have first heard the stories of women from

00:24:09.980 antiquity, like Cleopatra, which is going to come up later, believe it or not.

00:24:15.300 So she and WC started having kids right away.

00:24:17.820 This is why I suspect one of the reasons, besides her just being like the coolest person

00:24:21.400 in the room always, was that she was young and he wanted to have more children. So their first child

00:24:27.080 was a daughter named Frances, I believe named after Frances Gray, who was also one of her

00:24:32.360 godparents. One of baby Frances's other godmothers was Catherine Willoughby, who we did an episode

00:24:38.540 about in the Jane Gray season. She's also a member of the Renaissance Reformation Girl Squad.

00:24:43.720 Bess just started basically having a baby every year for the next eight years. That is what she 1.00

00:24:48.000 was up to. But just the godparents that they chose for the various children were a very clear

00:24:53.320 statement. Naming a godparent wasn't just like, oh, these are my friends or whatever. It's just,

00:24:57.800 especially when you have this sort of role and this sort of status, it's like really showing

00:25:00.740 who your allies are at royal court. So this is really showing that W.C. and Bess were fully

00:25:06.160 aligned with the Grey family and therefore with Protestantism, which was the religion of England

00:25:12.100 at the time. Their second daughter was named Temperance, which is interesting because they

00:25:17.520 both like to gamble and live extravagantly. Jane Grey was one of Temperance's godmothers.

00:25:24.300 One of Temperance's godfathers was the Earl of Shrewsbury, who is the father of Mr. Bess,

00:25:31.900 who we will meet later on. Temperance sadly died within the year, but more babies just keep

00:25:36.760 coming. Next came their first son, Henry, who would grow up to be, Bess once described him

00:25:43.100 as my bad son, Henry. He sucked. His godmother was Princess Elizabeth, like later Queen Elizabeth 0.99

00:25:49.640 I. So like anyone could say like, oh, Queen Elizabeth is the godmother of my child. But

00:25:55.380 this is like, they actually knew her. So interestingly, like at around this time or

00:26:00.840 like after this is when, so King Henry VIII died and then his teenage son, Edward was king for like

00:26:06.820 a couple of years and then he died. And then Lady Jane Grey was the queen famously for nine days.

00:26:12.380 and then she was pulled up the throne and then henry the eighth's daughter mary took over and

00:26:15.860 i did literally a season about lady jane gray not time to retell that all right now but all that

00:26:21.260 happened mary the first became queen she was like i'm gonna make england catholic again and this is

00:26:26.720 the time at which best had her third son charles and godmother to charles was in fact queen mary

00:26:32.940 and the godfather jane gray's dad this seems interesting because the how fraught it was

00:26:38.460 between Protestants and Catholics, but this is really just showing Bess being just so good at

00:26:44.400 playing both sides of things and always being the good bugs of whoever was in control. Queen Mary 1.00

00:26:50.000 had always been close to Frances Gray, who was her cousin. So they're probably just all part of

00:26:54.100 that girl squad. And just timing wise, Charles's christening was held two weeks after Jane Gray

00:27:00.500 was tried and found guilty of treason. And baby Charles's godfather was Jane Gray's dad. Like

00:27:05.640 unbelievable time going on here. So Bess, I remember she's 10 years older than Jane Grey,

00:27:12.420 but they had met each other when Jane was like eight and Bess was 18 and they hung out together

00:27:17.260 and they practiced handwriting together. Jane had been godmother to temperance. So they were

00:27:21.840 close to each other. And what I found really touching and interesting, because we don't know

00:27:25.060 a lot of Bess's inner life and you know, whose inner life does anyone know? But we do know that

00:27:29.980 Bess kept a portrait of Jane in her bedchamber at Chatsworth for the rest of her life, for the

00:27:35.440 rest of Bess's life. So clearly that affected her, what happened with Jane. So then she had a daughter

00:27:40.720 whose name was Elizabeth. And you might remember Bess of Hardwick's real name is Elizabeth. So this

00:27:45.920 is a naming daughter after self moment for those of you playing on the Vulgar History bingo card

00:27:51.040 at home. Godmother to Elizabeth was Catherine Gray, Jane Gray's younger sister. Even though by

00:27:56.960 now the Gray family was thoroughly disgraced because Jane's dad had joined this rebellion.

00:28:01.700 but so it's interesting like the loyalty the best shows to the gray family despite what their status

00:28:07.940 was she was a true friend to them she didn't abandon them when all this drama happened um 15

00:28:13.860 57 so she's 30 years old mother of six surviving children so wc fell ill and best rushed to be with

00:28:22.700 him in london he was there and she'd been one of the other properties probably like with their like

00:28:27.100 von Trapp brood of children. He died, so Bess was a widow again, but now she also was, guess what,

00:28:33.680 responsible for the considerable debt he had left because apparently they couldn't quite afford the

00:28:38.860 extravagant lifestyle that they had been enjoying. She could have settled these debts by selling off 0.75

00:28:43.820 some of their estates, but she did not want to do that. She knew she had to find a new husband. 0.56

00:28:50.120 So by now on the throne is Elizabeth, who is the godmother of one of her children. 0.94

00:28:54.660 Everything's Protestant again. 0.85

00:28:56.520 England is Protestant again. 0.98

00:28:58.280 Catholics still very much there.

00:28:59.760 Anyway, she knew she had to find a new husband, someone even richer than WC to help pay off 1.00

00:29:05.100 these debts and to help her ascent.

00:29:08.140 Like she had gotten used to this like rich life and she wanted to keep going.

00:29:12.300 So I don't, I don't know.

00:29:14.020 I imagine her looking on the court just being like, who's here?

00:29:16.460 Who do I choose?

00:29:17.860 Anyway, her best option, the person she chose and the person, and when she chooses a person

00:29:21.360 like that person chooses her back like because she's best of hard work and like you're not going

00:29:25.760 to do any better so it's a guy named sir william saint low he was serving in elizabeth's household

00:29:31.320 which is likely where best met him because she would have been hanging out there and next thing

00:29:35.080 you know these two got married so each of best's husbands and this is husband number three was

00:29:39.920 more politically powerful and wealthy than the previous one and william saint low was truly a

00:29:44.480 catch for her he was elizabeth the first captain of the guard and chief butler of england which

00:29:50.480 was apparently a very prestigious thing to be. Although it makes me think of the butler from

00:29:54.560 Downton Abbey. And well, that was very prestigious. Anyway, he's not a butler like that. Butler

00:30:00.180 clearly meant a different thing then. Anyway, so like WC, William St. Lowe owned lots of prestigious

00:30:05.720 estates and land and property. So Bess was able to continue her new real passion, which was

00:30:12.200 building homes, renovating homes, but not flipping them, like not selling them to other people,

00:30:18.280 but just having them for herself, like adding to her real estate portfolio. And then of course,

00:30:23.000 when they owned property and land, the people who lived on that land would pay them rent

00:30:27.300 because they were also landlords. So we see from William St. Lowe's letters to Bess,

00:30:33.060 he was also truly smitten with her. He adored her. He wrote things like my own more dearer to me than

00:30:38.860 I am to myself. And she wrote back to him being like, please negotiate a better price for the

00:30:44.260 window fixtures. And he loved her for that. Like, I love that she finds these guys who

00:30:48.400 get who she is and she doesn't have to compromise who she is. Like she's just being herself and

00:30:52.880 they're cool with it. The vibe is really like, she's Bess and he's just Ken with these marriages.

00:31:00.220 So normally in this context, where the husband was, the wife would go be with him also. But

00:31:07.180 William St. Lowe got that Bess needed to be at Chatsworth overseeing the renovations of his house

00:31:11.640 in Derbyshire. In one letter, he even referred to Bess as my honest, sweet Chatsworth. Like he

00:31:17.420 called her the name of the house because he knew how much it meant. So it's like, you know, Bess,

00:31:22.260 how much you love this house. I love you that much. You as a person. In a moment that I found,

00:31:27.180 again, it's like what was inside her heart? It's interesting. So one of Bess's letters was signed

00:31:31.440 Elizabeth Cavendish, which was her previous surname with WC. Then she crossed off Cavendish

00:31:36.300 and wrote St. Lo. Just kidding. That's my new last name. Like she was too busy wheeling and

00:31:41.420 dealing for like renovation materials, getting a good deal on limestone or whatever to remember

00:31:46.240 what her surname even was. Or she just was remembering how much she liked WC. And she was

00:31:50.840 hands-on with all of it. Like she was choosing the craftsmen. She was figuring out the design.

00:31:56.120 Like she was really invested in this and involved in this. But also some scandal was around the

00:32:02.640 corner. So William St. Lowe had a brother called Edward and Edward wanted to inherit all of the

00:32:08.000 St. Lowe estates and money. And so William St. Lowe had been married before and he had children

00:32:12.500 from a previous marriage, but they were all daughters. So Edward, his brother was like,

00:32:16.660 okay, like he knew that he would be the heir when William St. Lowe died. So he saw Bess as a threat

00:32:21.980 because she was 32, young enough that she might have a son. And if there was a new baby, St. Lowe,

00:32:27.220 Edward wouldn't inherit anything. And so he decided to murder her. Edward, I just want to say,

00:32:34.420 was, as we say on the show, a wrong on. He had experience with poisoning people to get what he

00:32:40.420 wanted. For instance, he'd married a woman named Bridget Scutt, described as a very lusty young

00:32:46.260 woman. So I like her already. She was pregnant when they got married, but the timing of it was

00:32:51.440 like, so Bridget Scutt had been married to a 90 year old husband who died from being poisoned.

00:32:58.080 Bridget Scutt was pregnant and then married Edward St. Lowe. And then after they got married within

00:33:04.400 two months, Bridget also died, probably also being poisoned. And Edward married another woman who he

00:33:11.040 had had dealings with, who was related to the 90 year old man. Anyway, so Edward is just like a

00:33:16.600 practiced poisoner, but no one could ever get enough proof of what he was doing. But he just

00:33:21.520 like, like when he's like, I'm going to kill Bess of Hardwick. It's like, he knows what he's doing. 0.67

00:33:25.640 And what happened was Edward and his new wife came to visit Bess and William St. Lowe. And

00:33:30.080 shortly after they left, she fell very sick with the symptoms of being poisoned. Everyone immediately

00:33:35.120 assumed Edward had poisoned her because that's just his deal. William St. Loeb believed it was

00:33:39.880 true. Their mother thought it was true, but Bess's condition improved because you know what? Even

00:33:44.360 poison was like, oh fuck, it's Bess of Hardwick. I poison. I'm going to not kill you because you 1.00

00:33:49.500 have so much more to do. She didn't die. There was an investigation. The investigation found

00:33:54.620 that Edward had been working with a necropancer, but he was not sent to jail because Bess hadn't

00:34:00.480 died. And also people fell sick for lots of reasons back then. They couldn't prove it was

00:34:05.620 poison. So everyone just disagreed to move on apparently, except for Edward, who is still

00:34:10.460 determined to cut Bess out of the will to make himself the only heir. So Edward brought William

00:34:16.020 St. Lowe to court. And the verdict was that Edward's wife, Margaret, could inherit one of

00:34:21.780 the manners as long as she lived. So I guess maybe they were just subtly trying to make Edward not

00:34:27.420 kill his latest wife. So what happened is that William St. Lowe had his will rewritten so that

00:34:32.420 Bess would inherit everything from him, leaving nothing for Edward. So whether or not Bess had a

00:34:36.500 new baby, Edward was cut off entirely. Fuck you, Edward. You get what you deserve. 1.00

00:34:42.800 During this time period, Bess of Hardwick was on good terms with the queen. She kind of always was,

00:34:47.660 but at this point, she received a royal gift for New Year's. And the royal gift was that Elizabeth

00:34:53.540 agreed to waive all of the debt that Bess still owed on behalf of WC. So between just being good

00:35:01.180 and charming and manipulative, but in a good way, like she gets what she wants. Like Bess, 0.95

00:35:06.560 there clearly was something about Bess of Hardwick where people just liked her. And that's very

00:35:11.600 powerful. So debt's paid off. She's married to a new rich husband. She wasn't poisoned. And she's

00:35:18.160 going to inherit everything from William St. Lowe whenever he dies. And she spent much of her time

00:35:21.920 overseeing construction at Chatsworth House. I just picture her going over blueprints, being like,

00:35:26.660 do we like this grout? I don't know. While William St. Lowe just was at royal court being the butler

00:35:31.840 and whatever. So 1560 is when Bess's friend, godmother of one of her children, Lady Catherine

00:35:39.460 Gray, who we did an episode about also in the Jane Gray season, there's a lot of overlap here,

00:35:44.180 had a super secret sexy marriage to Ned Seymour and got pregnant. This was a real scandal because 1.00

00:35:50.900 Catherine Gray was in the line of succession to maybe be the next monarch, but Ned Seymour kind

00:35:56.120 of also was or something like that. Anyway, Catherine Gray couldn't just marry whoever she 0.54

00:35:59.620 wanted, was the situation, and she's pregnant. She confided in somebody who was called Elizabeth 1.00

00:36:05.080 St. Lowe. Now, you tell me, listeners, because I did an episode about Catherine Gray, and some

00:36:12.440 sources mistakenly assume when it says she confided in someone called Elizabeth St. Lowe,

00:36:17.940 that that means best of Hardwick, because remember, her name is Elizabeth. She's married to Mr. St.

00:36:22.120 Lowe, like her name is Elizabeth St. Lowe. But the thing is, William St. Lowe had a sister

00:36:25.800 called Elizabeth St. Lowe, and that's who Catherine Gray confided in. So I'm not sure what I said in

00:36:30.560 that episode, but different sources say different things. But what we now know, and this is the

00:36:34.820 thing, history grows and changes and things I said in previous episodes might now have been

00:36:40.180 proven to be not true. Anyway, so Elizabeth St. Lowe, not Best of Hardwick. Best of Hardwick,

00:36:45.120 not involved in this mess. So Elizabeth St. Lowe, the sister of William St. Lowe,

00:36:50.240 was one of Queen Elizabeth's privy chamber women and she wasn't any help at all. When

00:36:54.820 Catherine Gray confided in her, apparently she fell into great weeping. And that's the sign that

00:36:58.940 this is not Best of Hardwick. Because first of all, I don't think Catherine would have told Best

00:37:03.280 of Hardwick because best of Hardwick doesn't seem like a friendly ear to cry on, but also best of

00:37:09.900 Hardwick, I don't think is someone who would fall into weeping when confronted with some sort of

00:37:14.520 tragedy. Anyway, Catherine Gray was sent to prison. Her husband was sent to prison. They got to share 0.94

00:37:20.880 a room. She got pregnant again. Eventually, Catherine Gray died. I did a whole episode about 0.99

00:37:25.700 that if you want to hear that. It's in the Jane Gray season. Elizabeth St. Lowe, the sister, was

00:37:30.220 dismissed from the privy chamber and spent six months in the tower. Best of Hardwick, meanwhile,

00:37:34.480 just building houses, doing fine. But then, 1564, she's called back to London because

00:37:39.300 her husband had become very ill. He had actually, he died before she even got there. And she was

00:37:44.960 fairly certain he'd been poisoned by his horrible brother, Edward. I assume the same. But the thing

00:37:50.960 is, whether Edward poisoned him or not, Edward didn't know about the will change and that he

00:37:55.560 was cut out of the inheritance altogether. But remember William St. Lowe had daughters. So they

00:38:00.120 also, cause everything went to Bess. So his daughters were unhappy that they didn't inherit

00:38:04.100 anything. So how it worked was the property went to Edward's wife and the money went to Bess.

00:38:10.860 So this whole thing made Bess kind of look a little bit like a gold digger slash black widow.

00:38:16.220 Edward took her to court to contest the terms of the will. I feel like the courtroom is just like,

00:38:20.900 oh, Bess of Hardwick, please come this way. You have an express lane you hear so often,

00:38:24.100 but nothing changed um margaret st lowe the wife of edward still got the house best still got the

00:38:29.280 money edward got the nothing good riddance honestly so glad to have that all behind her 1.00

00:38:35.420 we can assume best headed off to derbyshire to oversee construction projects because she was a 1.00

00:38:41.240 real estate slash house building maven she was rich wealthy and influential and could have chosen 1.00

00:38:46.080 to live out the rest of her life as a widow just based on her like widow's pension and the 1.00

00:38:50.160 inheritance she got from William St. Lowe, but that's not her style, man. She returned to royal 0.58

00:38:54.780 court in 1566. And everyone was like, oh my God, it's best of hard work, the coolest person.

00:38:59.740 Is she going to take a new husband and who's she going to choose? And so she was so rich at this

00:39:03.740 point, so different from the person with, you know, no fortune and no prospects. Like now it's

00:39:08.820 just like she could have whoever she wanted. I mean, she always could, but now she could because

00:39:12.600 of money. And so she decided that she was going to marry with royal permission. She went through

00:39:18.800 Elizabeth, no secret sexy weddings here. George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury and the son of

00:39:25.220 one of her children's godfathers. We called him in the previous episode, Mr. Bess. And I'm still

00:39:30.400 going to call him that because like she's everything. He's just Ken. So Mr. Bess was

00:39:37.280 the richest man in England, the richest man, like not just one of them. He was the richest man in

00:39:43.940 England. And marrying him meant that Bess now got the title of Countess of Shrewsbury. And so

00:39:49.280 being a countess put her up on a whole new league of just sort of like fanciness, the wealth and

00:39:55.000 status was also helpful for the interests of her children. Like she wanted her children to get good 0.98

00:39:59.340 marriages. Like she was always, she's not just like, I best want to be rich and whatever. She's

00:40:03.840 like, I want to look out for my family. I want to elevate them. And this is something I think I

00:40:08.060 wanted to talk about in this episode and we're getting into it. And so I will now. Just the

00:40:12.320 concept of money trauma. So there's a course called the trauma of money, which I've not taken,

00:40:19.300 but I've heard about, and I'm like strongly considering. I heard about it first. There's two

00:40:23.140 Canadian financial influencers I follow on Instagram. Bridget Casey is one, and she talks 0.97

00:40:29.660 about this a lot. And so I was just looking up in the name of the other. Anyway, there's a podcast

00:40:35.760 called Money Feels Podcast. I talk about this a lot. Bridget Casey, and then the other influencer

00:40:41.360 it's called mixed up money. Anyway, it's the issue of like, if you grow up without a lot of

00:40:48.940 money, then if you then become a person who has money or that like the trauma of growing up without

00:40:55.440 money could turn you into a person who's really single-mindedly focused on money. And that can

00:40:59.320 become problematic in some ways, like psychologically. And you could also become a

00:41:03.220 person who, even when you have money, you feel weird about it. Like you feel weird about spending

00:41:07.020 it or like you can't stop amassing it or you feel like you have to always be working. And so I

00:41:11.340 think part of that is what's playing out with Bess here it was just interesting to be consuming 1.00

00:41:15.400 their content while I was reading about Bess of Hardcore I'm like oh she's got money trauma like

00:41:19.740 she is so wealthy but she wasn't to begin with like she knew after her father died and we didn't

00:41:26.240 talk about that a lot but it does in the biography I read like they it was really challenging for

00:41:30.640 them for her mother for her and her siblings to survive so the fact that she like bought land in

00:41:35.420 Derbyshire, Derbyshire, and is building this house. And she just like needs to keep sort of

00:41:41.700 consuming and constructing. Is there something about like, she needs to build a home? I don't 0.58

00:41:46.080 know. But also at the same point, I don't want to be like, and that's why she married this guy.

00:41:50.420 It's like, she also, she's an ambitious person. She couldn't just be like, I'm going to be a

00:41:54.920 home builder at the end. It's like, the only way that she could elevate herself is by marrying a 0.92

00:41:58.880 man again. So she finds the best man to marry, like the richest man in England. And anyway,

00:42:06.360 this is how her ambition was able to manifest because she wasn't able to like get a job. And 0.69

00:42:11.220 she's not like other people we've talked about where it's like she's a queen or whatever.

00:42:14.440 So her new husband, Mr. Bess, was close-ish to her age. He was like six or seven years younger

00:42:20.200 than her. And he was also best friends, interestingly, with William Cecil, who we've

00:42:23.980 talked about a lot in the Mary Queen of Scots episode. So it's nice to see a softer side of

00:42:27.320 William Cecil, just being bros with this guy. Mr. Bess also has, even for like a person from

00:42:33.840 this time and era, incredibly hard to read handwriting, which might be because he had

00:42:39.140 rheumatism and arthritis in his hands. He wrote a lot of letters and, you know, I pity my empathy

00:42:45.180 goes out to the archivists and the writers who need to try and understand what words he says.

00:42:49.500 And also to his friends at the time, because apparently it's just like really

00:42:51.940 in decipherable handwriting. So he owned lots of land all over the place, I think partially through

00:42:57.400 the whole disillusion of the monasteries thing, including he owned some land in Derbyshire. He

00:43:02.300 also owned lots of property, including Tutbury Castle, which you'll remember from the Mary

00:43:06.540 Queen of Scots episodes, as the Swamp House. So he was already the father of seven children from

00:43:10.960 his previous marriage. And as part of their marriage settlement, and it sounds like Bess

00:43:15.980 probably worked out the marriage settlement herself because she's just apparently an amateur 0.65

00:43:19.700 lawyer by now. One of the things that was part of this was that they married four of their children

00:43:24.840 to each other. So Bess's daughter, Mary, was married to George's son, Gilbert. Bess's son,

00:43:30.800 Henry, her bad son, Henry, was married to George's daughter, Grace. So this is a thing that just

00:43:36.080 people did at that time. And it seems weird to us now. Everyone wasn't doing this then,

00:43:40.940 but this was like not super weird then. It was just a way to really cement the entwining of

00:43:45.700 the two households. There were caveats listed in this arrangement that any of these children died

00:43:50.100 before the marriages were consummated. Like, Bess's daughters were quite young, so the marriages

00:43:55.360 weren't going to happen for several years. The marriages would then be moved on to the next

00:43:58.700 younger sibling in each family. Anyway, with this new title came new lands and money, and Bess was 0.93

00:44:04.200 just like, you know what I'm going to do with these lands and money? Build goddamn houses. 1.00

00:44:07.240 this. So in this extremely rich family building their houses, Mary Queen of Scots suddenly came 1.00

00:44:16.500 by. So if you want to know her story, I've done like 20 hours of content on it. But just to

00:44:22.140 briefly remind you what part of the story this is, Mary Queen of Scots is in England and Elizabeth

00:44:28.160 doesn't want her to take over the throne. So she's kind of in house arrest, but they have to

00:44:32.160 have someone for her to live with. And it's really expensive for Mary Queen of Scots to be her house

00:44:36.020 guest because she had like 16 course meals three times a day or whatever. And so they're like,

00:44:40.880 who are we going to get to be sort of the jailer slash babysitter of Mary Queen of Scots? And the

00:44:45.800 person who they chose was Mr. Bess. And this is partially because he's very trustworthy,

00:44:51.000 partially because he was so rich. And Elizabeth, the queen looked at just the various properties

00:44:56.460 owned by these two. And they were like, you know, which seems like the best property to send Mary to

00:45:00.680 that it's going to be hardest for people to come and rescue her or for her to escape from is

00:45:05.440 tuppery, the house built on a swamp. Of this house, and this is a quote I hadn't seen before,

00:45:10.700 but it was in this biography of Bess, Mary Queen of Scots wrote about this house. It is so damp

00:45:15.540 that you cannot put any piece of furniture in that part without its being in three or four days

00:45:19.820 covered with mold. Privy's had no drain, which meant a continual stench. So this is like a

00:45:26.380 shitty house. Literally, Mary Queen of Scots didn't want to be there. Bess didn't want to be there. 0.99

00:45:30.620 It was more just kind of like they owned it, but they didn't kind of want to live in it.

00:45:34.200 But then one of the rules of being the babysitter of Mary Cream Scots is that none of their

00:45:39.160 children were allowed to be under the same roof as Mary.

00:45:41.480 So this meant that Bess and Mr. Bess had to figure out which of their other houses all

00:45:46.020 of their various children should live in, which I guess is helpfully four of the children

00:45:50.460 are married to each other.

00:45:51.320 So that's just one house instead of two.

00:45:53.220 And Mr. Bess was required to be in permanent attendance to Mary.

00:45:56.120 So wherever she was, he had to be.

00:45:57.900 And I mean, we've already seen Bess didn't feel the need to acquiesce to the societal

00:46:02.060 convention that a wife should be where the husband is but like she didn't want to be in the swamp 0.70

00:46:06.180 house but you know this is a royal guest so it's sort of a privilege to be her jailer and now we're 0.77

00:46:12.600 just going to take a break for a word from our sponsors the war is over and both sides lost

00:46:20.460 kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies scattered like bones in the dust now the survivors

00:46:27.260 claw to what's left of a broken world,

00:46:30.300 praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight.

00:46:33.580 But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins.

00:46:37.860 This is old school adventuring at its most cruel.

00:46:41.340 Your torch ticks down in real time.

00:46:43.660 And when that flame dies,

00:46:45.160 something else rises to finish the job.

00:46:47.260 This is a brutal rules light nightmare

00:46:49.460 with a story that emerges organically

00:46:52.160 based on the decisions that the characters make.

00:46:54.760 This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s

00:46:57.200 And man, it is so good to be back.

00:46:59.680 Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the shadow dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on youtube.com slash the glass cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day.

00:47:10.280 See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark.

00:47:17.600 Welcome to the realms of peril and glory.

00:47:22.800 Explore the mechanically magical vistas of Vale.

00:47:27.200 The paranormal mysteries of liminal London.

00:47:30.120 And the cyberpunk chaos of Cyborg.

00:47:36.180 Be awed by our incredible guests from familiar shows like Oxventure and No Rolls Barred.

00:47:43.780 Search realms of peril and glory to find out more.

00:47:49.580 Hi, I'm Whitney.

00:47:51.320 And I'm Katie.

00:47:52.320 And we're the hosts of True Crime Campfire.

00:47:54.960 We set out to make a true crime podcast we'd want to listen to.

00:47:58.440 We get right to the story.

00:47:59.960 We don't do a lot of extra talking, and when we do, 0.99

00:48:02.500 it's usually to roast the short hairs off of some loser, murderer, or scammer. 0.98

00:48:06.360 You'll laugh, but only at the people who deserve it. 0.98

00:48:09.000 Like, which serial killer would you most like to shove into a locker?

00:48:13.120 BTK and his awful poetry.

00:48:15.240 Dude got caught because he didn't understand what a floppy disk was.

00:48:18.720 We look for the stranger-than-fiction stories, like the case of Patty James,

00:48:22.740 a killer catfish before the internet was even a thing.

00:48:25.780 Or Howard Walmsley, a sentient wad of damp laundry

00:48:28.700 who convinced his town he'd won the lottery,

00:48:31.200 fleeced local businesses out of thousands,

00:48:33.400 and then became a romance scammer.

00:48:35.520 We've covered tons of cases you've never heard of. 0.97

00:48:38.200 Cults, scammers, killers.

00:48:40.060 So come find your next great binge. 0.90

00:48:42.200 Listen to True Crime Campfire on Apple Podcasts,

00:48:44.880 Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:48:47.200 New episodes every Friday.

00:48:49.380 Goodbye, Kyle!

00:48:50.320 Did the sound of those words call to you like Pavlov's dog?

00:48:53.800 Then you might enjoy our podcast, Turtle Time.

00:48:56.500 Every week, you can join me, Riley Hamilton, and my co-host, Amy Scarlotta,

00:49:00.860 as we cover the most pressing Bravo news and dig into the new episodes

00:49:04.660 to answer important questions like, who the hell is Adrienne Maloof in this world?

00:49:09.300 Listen to Turtle Time on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:49:14.480 New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

00:49:18.120 And we're back.

00:49:19.680 So at least at first, Bess was unseen.

00:49:22.200 So Mary was 26 years old when she arrived.

00:49:24.740 Bess was 42. 0.53

00:49:26.200 Not a huge age gap, all things considered, but just something to keep in mind. 1.00

00:49:31.060 It cost a lot of money to keep Mary there. 1.00

00:49:33.900 They had to pay her personal servants.

00:49:36.020 Every time they moved her from one house to another house,

00:49:38.800 had to transport all of her stuff.

00:49:40.820 Food for her personal chefs to prepare her meals.

00:49:44.200 So the costs were substantial.

00:49:45.720 And even though they were rich, they didn't want to be spending money on this, right?

00:49:49.700 So they're like, let's move out of the Swamp House and into Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.

00:49:53.900 So Mary spent a lot of time there in an apartment now known as the Queen of Scots room.

00:49:58.540 And she and Bess both did embroidery. 0.50

00:50:02.020 They're both really skilled at embroidery.

00:50:04.100 Bess, if you listen to the episode I did where I interviewed Claire Hunter about her amazing

00:50:08.820 book about Mary Queen of Scots and embroidery.

00:50:10.700 She talks about her Bess of Hardwick.

00:50:12.560 Like you can see her embroideries, a bunch of them are in various museums and homes in

00:50:16.080 England.

00:50:16.940 They're really good.

00:50:18.040 like best of hard work was really good at embroidery like perfect even stitches

00:50:22.000 Mary Queen of Scots had a lot her was her embroidery is more

00:50:25.260 passionate I think if I had an embroidery it'd be more like Mary Queen of Scots where it's just

00:50:30.640 like you're really into it for a minute and then you daydream and then you get back into it

00:50:34.300 but best of hard work was really good at it and so the two of them like we talk about this in

00:50:38.700 the conversation with Claire Hunter and in her book she does as well like sitting and stitching

00:50:42.820 is a really social thing to do like you really get to know other people while you're doing this

00:50:46.880 sort of task. And it's not just the two of them together. There's like other servants. There's a

00:50:50.360 person, Mary brought her personal embroiderer there. So there's like a whole group of people

00:50:53.940 just having like a nice stitch and bitch session, really. So if you go to visit most museums in 1.00

00:51:00.040 England, okay, there's a lot of museums in England. If you go to like, it's like the National Gallery,

00:51:04.980 the National Archives, the V&A, if you go to Hardwick Hall, which we haven't talked about yet,

00:51:10.640 they did a lot of stitching. And you can tell who stitched what, because Mary's have her initials

00:51:14.720 on them and Bess's have her initials on them. Her initials at this time being E.S. because her name

00:51:19.420 was Elizabeth Shrewsbury technically. I didn't mention this before but one of Bess's hobbies

00:51:25.540 was sort of like Emma from the book Emma by Jane Austen. She just loved matchmaking other people 0.99

00:51:31.880 usually with the queen's permission but she really liked pairing people off. So we're going to get

00:51:36.960 into the scheming grannies portion of this saga because we're skipping past 15 years because 0.92

00:51:43.500 that is how much time Mary Queen of Scots was there. So this was getting kind of in the way

00:51:49.960 of Bess's marriage to Mr. Bess, Mary's presence, but also the matchmaking is happening. So Bess

00:51:57.540 had one unmarried child left. So while she's having to, like Mr. Bess is with Mary, Bess is 0.77

00:52:04.640 building houses, but also matchmaking. And she wanted to matchmake for her youngest daughter,

00:52:09.640 Elizabeth. So we're going to call, there's a lot of Elizabeths in this story. We're going to call

00:52:14.120 the daughter Lizzie. So Bess had been trying to figure out the perfect husband for Lizzie. One 1.00

00:52:17.860 option was Peregrine Bertie, the son of Catherine Willoughby, who we talked about in an episode

00:52:23.960 years ago. Mr. Bess, like she ran this plan past him and he was like, yeah, no, that sounds good.

00:52:29.480 But those plans fell through, which led Bess to an even better plan, which was to marry Lizzie to

00:52:34.420 Charles Lennox. Who is Charles Lennox? So Charles Lennox is the younger brother of Darnley,

00:52:40.960 Mary Queen of Scots, second husband, who was a disaster who got blown up and strangled.

00:52:46.760 Charles's mother was Bess's friend, Margaret Douglas, who we've also done an episode about,

00:52:52.740 who, so Margaret Douglas was anxious to find a wife for Charles, what Margaret Douglas wanted.

00:52:58.060 Not the mothers, the grandmothers, or no, I guess Margaret's the grandmother, Bess is the mother, 1.00

00:53:04.220 But we're still going to call them scheming grannies because it's cute. 1.00

00:53:07.200 So Margaret Douglas wanted to find a wife for Charles who had a really good dowry 1.00

00:53:11.100 because Margaret Douglas needed some money. 1.00

00:53:13.920 And the person who had money was Bess of goddamn Hardwick. 0.96

00:53:17.700 So Charles was kind of an heir to the throne of England. 0.96

00:53:22.140 So if he had a child with Lizzie, that child can maybe be the next monarch,

00:53:26.780 which would make Bess and Margaret grandmother slash great-grandmothers to the next king or queen.

00:53:31.960 And so they're like, yes, how do we make this happen?

00:53:33.980 Mr. Best not consulted with this plan.

00:53:36.680 And I love this plan.

00:53:37.780 This is what happened.

00:53:38.600 So Margaret, the grandmother.

00:53:40.540 Oh, no, they're both mothers. 0.71

00:53:41.980 Why do we call them grannies?

00:53:43.080 Oh, because they're both grandmothers of the child who's born later. 0.93

00:53:46.980 Still, I'm not going to change it. 1.00

00:53:48.200 It's a scheming grannies. 1.00

00:53:50.220 Margaret and her son, Charles. 1.00

00:53:51.780 They're like, we're just going to go on a trip to the north of England.

00:53:54.340 Super casual.

00:53:55.720 No big deal.

00:53:56.360 And then while they're in that part of the country, they happen to get an invitation

00:53:59.360 from Bess of Hardwick being like, why don't you come visit me where I'm staying at Rufford Abbey,

00:54:03.460 which is one of the dissolved abbeys that Mr. Bess had acquired to turn into a house.

00:54:07.780 It's near where you are. And Bess happened to be staying there herself.

00:54:11.760 So once Margaret and Charles arrived, Margaret fell ill, quote unquote, and needed to lie in 0.99

00:54:17.100 bed for five days. During those five days, Charles and Lizzie fell in love and then got married right

00:54:23.380 there at Rufford Abbey. And they didn't get permission or anything. It's just everyone was

00:54:28.860 like, well, this wasn't a scheme. It's just a sick granny. Two young people happen to fall in love 1.00

00:54:34.000 and get immediately married. This is just a true love story. No schemes here. No. Mr. Bess, who

00:54:39.860 had been cut out of this planning, was just like, this is clearly a scheme. Like, what the fuck did 0.99

00:54:43.600 you do? Like, I'm an important person at royal court. Elizabeth is going to be so mad. So he had 0.99

00:54:47.720 to like, save face with Elizabeth being like, I was super not involved in this. I didn't know

00:54:51.500 anything about this. But Lizzie was pregnant and it was, they couldn't annul the marriage or 0.99

00:54:57.200 anything like this had happened. Margaret Douglas, Charles's mom, was sent to the Tower of London for

00:55:02.160 her role in this, but Bess was not punished. So previously, and from another source I read,

00:55:08.900 and this is the thing with history reading, it's like one source says this, one source says this.

00:55:13.040 I do not know which is true. Both of them agreed that Bess didn't really face any repercussions.

00:55:18.020 One of them said Elizabeth summoned Bess and Bess just didn't go and that was fine.

00:55:21.740 this one just says Bess wasn't punished at all. But so maybe Mr. Bess's pleading paid off with

00:55:27.960 Elizabeth, or maybe Elizabeth just liked Bess because Bess was cool. Whether or not Bess was

00:55:34.320 sent for, the reason she was not punished is because she was the wife of Mr. Bess. Mr. Bess

00:55:39.160 was the jailer of Mary Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth needed Bess with Mr. Bess, like for 0.97

00:55:44.060 jailer purposes. So Lizzie had a baby, the two women became grannies, and the baby was a daughter 0.92

00:55:50.540 whose name was Arbella Stewart, who I've also done an episode about, but don't worry, we're

00:55:54.480 going to recap her story coming right up. So Charles died of tuberculosis, a real theme

00:56:01.680 this season. So Lizzie was now a widow. There's sort of a question of like, well, what's going

00:56:06.500 to happen? Who's going to raise Arbella? Especially because three years later, Margaret died.

00:56:12.900 And so there's a thing about, well, now is Arbella the heir to the Lennox family inheritance? Like

00:56:17.520 who is going to watch after Arbella? And the answer to this is basically Bess of Hardwick because

00:56:23.440 that's what she wanted to have happen. And so that's what happened. But that's not what usually

00:56:26.960 happens because there's a whole thing with like wards and like people can buy the wardship of

00:56:31.420 people. But anyway, Bess was just like, fuck all this. Like I'm going to be the guardian of Arbella 0.99

00:56:37.200 or no, she is going to be eventually. First, Charles died. Lizzie is now a widow. The mother

00:56:43.520 is still there. We don't have to worry about who is going to take care of Arbella. But when Margaret

00:56:48.320 Lennox died, there's the thing about the inheritance. So Arbella should have legally

00:56:53.040 gotten the Lennox family inheritance, but Elizabeth I was like, or what about not?

00:56:59.260 So the title wound up with Ismay Stewart, who we talked about in a previous episode. I don't have

00:57:04.840 time to get into it. James, Mary Queen of Scots' son, took all the jewels that Arbella should have

00:57:09.700 inherited. Bess is just like, this is some bullshit. And so she got her allies together 1.00

00:57:13.740 to try and restore Arbella's inheritance. Who were the allies? Well, her husband's bestie,

00:57:19.260 Cecil, Frances Walsingham, and Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth's boyfriend, aka Bobby Dutz.

00:57:25.960 Bess also appealed to Elizabeth directly. The ultimate result was that Lizzie, the daughter,

00:57:33.160 was awarded custody of Arbella rather than the whole wardship being sold scenario.

00:57:37.620 Both Arbella and Lizzie were provided with pensions from the Lennox family fortune.

00:57:42.020 And so the other thing that Bess, she's just like, but I also want more things.

00:57:47.520 So she kind of hoped that if Elizabeth saw Arbella, who at this point was like three years old and

00:57:52.420 really cute, there's a portrait of her looking really cute, that Elizabeth, her heart would

00:57:55.720 soften and maybe she'd give them some more stuff, but not really. Meanwhile, Bess had her own

00:58:00.220 disaster son, Henry, who was a wrong on. He didn't have any legitimate children with his wife.

00:58:06.700 grace but he did have numerous illegitimate children with various women such that he was

00:58:12.680 known as quote the common bull of derbyshire and staffordshire he's just like like the rooster

00:58:20.500 of the chickens who were women in that area so anyway he and his wife grace had to live in the

00:58:28.300 tutbury swamp palace so maybe that's part of why he was mad all the time life is not great he was

00:58:32.580 often in debt and he appealed to his mother, Bess, to help out, but she did not. Bess and Mr. Bess.

00:58:38.900 So they own all these houses and also property. And the people who live in the land of this

00:58:44.180 property were their tenants, like they were landlords. And apparently they were not cool

00:58:49.840 landlords to the point that the tenants teamed up to protest their leases being revoked and rents

00:58:55.180 being raised and people being evicted. This kind of union of tenants went to court under the

00:59:01.220 leadership of the amazingly named Otwell Higginbotham. So they went to court and Mr.

00:59:07.240 Best was like, no, no, no. The people who I evicted were lewd persons and they deserve to

00:59:12.400 be evicted. But the court was like, you suck. We find a favor of the lewd persons. And so this was 1.00

00:59:18.500 sort of stressful for Elizabeth, the queen, because having unhappy tenants posed a security

00:59:22.860 risk to Mary Queen of Scots because constantly there are all these people who wanted to maybe

00:59:27.000 like free Mary Queen of Scots from this house and any sort of like tension was something that the

00:59:33.520 Catholic supporters could maybe use to their advantage. Mr. Bess, honestly, like at this

00:59:38.780 point, he just, he's just over it. He's over all of it. Like he's been watching Mary Queen of Scots

00:59:43.340 for whatever, like 15 years or something. He also, various things are happening to him mental health

00:59:48.980 wise. So he became paranoid, convinced that his son Gilbert and Gilbert's wife slash stepsister

00:59:55.780 slash Bess's daughter, Mary, were on cahoots with Bess against him. They kind of were because he was 0.54

01:00:01.780 not doing great. So their marriage just kind of fell apart to the point that everyone knew about

01:00:09.140 it. All the servants were taking sides and the presence of Mary Queen of Scots was just

01:00:13.640 exacerbating existing tensions about money. Mr. Bess felt that Bess was asking him for too much

01:00:19.600 money for her various building projects, which sucks because she had her own money, but she also 1.00

01:00:24.680 had to ask him for money because the whole thing was like women couldn't own money or like she had

01:00:29.080 her own money from the income from William St. Lowe. But like as a married couple, she should 0.98

01:00:33.920 have access to their like joint money, but she had to go through Mr. Best to do that. And he's

01:00:37.720 like, no, we're spending so much money on Mary Queen of Scots and her like 32 course meals and

01:00:41.280 whatever. But the tension in the marriage was also concerning to Elizabeth because again,

01:00:46.700 Mary Queen of Scots security threats because, you know, maybe the tension in the marriage could be

01:00:50.040 exploited by supporters of Mary Queen of Scots. At this point, every single servant in all of

01:00:53.940 their houses, Bess and Mr. Bess's houses, was on the payroll of either the Catholics or of Walsingham

01:01:00.360 or both. At this point, Bess was not seeing Mary Queen of Scots as much anymore. Like they no longer

01:01:06.440 are they having their little embroidery bitch sessions because Mary had to be like Mr. Bess 0.96

01:01:10.960 had to be with Mary and Bess was just like, I feel like avoiding Mr. Bess because he's like losing 1.00

01:01:15.380 his goddamn mind. Christmas, 1581, Bess's daughter Lizzie, Arbella's mom, died. So what had been 0.99

01:01:22.740 sorted before was that Arbella got a bit of a pension and Lizzie got a bit of a pension. And so

01:01:27.120 Bess was like, well, I feel like the amount of pension Lizzie had been getting should now go to

01:01:30.380 Arbella. So she wrote to Walsingham and Cecil asking, can Arbella get that money now too? And

01:01:35.040 Elizabeth said no. Mr. Bess, meanwhile, keeping busy on a building project of a house called

01:01:41.260 WorkSop. I don't know his age specifically at this point, but it feels like a midlife crisis

01:01:45.560 house. He's building kind of to spite Bess because she had been building on Chatsworth for so long

01:01:51.260 and he knew that she loved houses. So he's like, even though I have a lot of houses and unpaid

01:01:55.100 bills and is always whining about how he doesn't have enough money, he wanted to build a grand

01:02:00.300 house that would be better than Chatsworth to outdo Bess. So this just kind of shows he's a

01:02:04.960 piece of shit. They were warring, they were arguing, but they were still sometimes together 1.00

01:02:09.120 until, and this is like, I can't, I'll explain to you this as I read it. It doesn't make entire

01:02:13.880 sense to me. What does make sense is that Mr. Bess was having some real mental health type

01:02:18.800 things. He might have had some strokes that might have affected his brain because the level of

01:02:24.100 hatred that he was expressing for Bess, people around him were being like, dude, what are you

01:02:29.280 doing? Mr. Bess is just not doing well. So they were together at their house in Sheffield and

01:02:35.420 then Bess left that house. So later, Mr. Bess would claim that she left voluntarily, but Bess

01:02:40.440 would say that she had been sent away. Mr. Bess had assured her he would send for her again soon,

01:02:45.000 but he never sent for her again. And from the moment she left, Mr. Bess stopped paying her

01:02:50.400 £1,000 annual allowance and claimed that she had sold some land without his agreement so he would

01:02:56.020 make up the money from rents from her lands so her tenants should pay him rent. Those tenants

01:03:00.560 refused to do that because that's some bullshit. Mr. Bess sent a bailiff to demand that they pay 0.99

01:03:05.540 him and not Bess. He had effectively declared war on Bess of Hardwick, which like, it's just not

01:03:11.000 what you do. And he saw everyone around him as either team him or team Bess. He raged constantly

01:03:15.760 against her to anyone who he ever saw, even though everyone was always encouraging him to reconcile

01:03:21.000 with Bess, including Queen Elizabeth. But his behavior was erratic and illogical, and he refused.

01:03:27.740 Bobby Duds, of all people, was called in to mediate. No success. I'm not surprised. That's

01:03:33.220 not who I would call in to mediate. Anyway, so it was a marital civil war. This went on for years,

01:03:38.520 and it was largely to do with property and money. And they were just going through like line items

01:03:42.780 in their shared budget being like, you owe me $2 from this. You owe me $3 from this.

01:03:46.940 The main overarching thing is that Mr. Bess thought that Bess and her sons and his son

01:03:51.340 were trying to take all his money. And Bess was saying that she wanted to hold on to what was

01:03:55.100 rightfully hers and that he was trying to take that. He also had gout, which is a disease that

01:04:00.100 is painful. And maybe that was exacerbating or making worse his whatever's going on with him

01:04:06.900 mentally. But he was just like, he's not okay. The vibes I'm getting are like latter years,

01:04:11.560 Henry VIII vibes, who also had gout. But Bess remains still calm, resolute, like that picture

01:04:17.360 of Selena Gomez in the blanket. Bess is just like, you know what? Like, I know I'm in the right. So

01:04:23.600 let's just move on. So she decided to buy some more land, which she did. 1593, she bought the 0.98

01:04:31.940 Hardwick estate. So Hardwick was the place where she had been born and she wanted to build a house

01:04:37.500 that she could enjoy independently of any husband. Like, cause she was effectively single. Like they

01:04:42.720 were super estranged. Simultaneously, she's also plotting marriage for Arbella. So like we're 1.00

01:04:48.500 zipping through the years. If you're like, wasn't she just plotting marriage for Arbella? No,

01:04:51.560 she's plotting marriage for Lizzie. But now Arbella, she wanted to figure this out. So one plan

01:04:57.460 was to marry Arbella to Bobby Dudz's two-year-old son by his wife, Letizia Knowles, who he's also

01:05:04.320 done an episode about. Like if we drew a picture of this episode and how many crossovers, it's big

01:05:08.500 spider's web. Arbella has this claim to the throne, but Bobby Dudz has all these political

01:05:13.080 connections. And so this would be like a really powerful match. Therefore, Elizabeth, the queen,

01:05:18.560 was not told about it, but Mary Queen of Scots heard about it and she used her secret cipher

01:05:22.380 letters to inform Elizabeth about it. Anyway, this two-year-old son, he died as a young baby,

01:05:28.840 and so this marriage did not happen. But Bess is still thinking about this. And then Mr. Bess is

01:05:35.720 just chaos. He's just like, he hates her. He's got this real incel energy. And then rumors of an

01:05:41.860 affair between Mr. Bess and Mary Queen of Scots became widespread by 1584. Mary Queen of Scots

01:05:48.540 was writing, she's just like, no, I would never. Mr. Bess was like, no, I would never. And they

01:05:54.860 both were like, I'm pretty sure Bess of Hardwick and her sons had started these rumors, which is

01:05:59.560 like, I don't know if they started the rumors, but I don't think they shut down the rumors because

01:06:03.580 these rumors made Mr. Bess look bad and they wanted to make Mr. Bess look bad. But Mary was

01:06:09.520 like, she was firmly on team Mr. Bess at this point. So she claimed that Bess had offered to

01:06:14.580 help her escape. She really threw her under the bus. She was like, Bess's son offered to be my 1.00

01:06:18.460 spy. Bess's servants and Bess herself had delivered secret cipher letters to me. Bess may have helped

01:06:24.480 start these rumors or help spread the rumors. But anyway, by the end of that summer, Mr. Bess was

01:06:29.640 removed as Mary's custodian after 15 years. And like the level of importance that these two people

01:06:35.800 had to society is wild to me because there was a commission was held examining their marriage.

01:06:41.600 and the finding was a victory for Bess. Because the whole thing is that Mr. Bess was just like,

01:06:46.840 fuck you, Bess. Never come back here. I hate you. You're trying to take my money. 1.00

01:06:49.540 And Bess is like, calm down. And Mr. Bess is like, ah, don't talk about it. Calm down.

01:06:53.980 And Elizabeth and everyone was like, you just need to take her back. And Bess was like,

01:06:57.520 I would go back to him, but he won't let me. So the finding of this commission was that Mr.

01:07:01.480 Bess had to reconcile with Bess. He had to also return the money he'd seized in rents from her

01:07:06.200 tenants. And he had to drop all pending legal suits against Bess's sons and servants. He did

01:07:11.760 not do those things. They did not reconcile. And he kept making suits against like lawsuits against

01:07:16.740 Bess's servants and sons. So they returned to court the following year. Both of them appealed

01:07:21.200 to William Cecil as a friend. And you know, like when you have like two friends who were a couple

01:07:26.320 and then they split, you have to choose sides. So Cecil's really in the middle. One letter that

01:07:30.460 Bess wrote to William Cecil, she signed off at the end as your lordship's poor friend,

01:07:34.700 greatly oppressed. So even though she was so rich and so powerful, Mr. Best was still more powerful

01:07:40.380 and so she wasn't able to get everything she wanted. A second commission was held to try and

01:07:46.240 get them to reconcile. Mr. Best was again ordered to end all conflict with Best, but everyone knew

01:07:51.340 that wouldn't work because he just was too stubborn or whatever. One observer wrote it was

01:07:56.380 more likely that the wars in the low countries would come to an end than these civil discourse

01:08:00.640 between him and her. Then, 1586, Mary Queen of Scots executed. Mr. Bess attended the execution.

01:08:09.160 What this means for Bess is that her granddaughter Arbella is now second in line to the throne

01:08:13.760 wildly after Mary Queen of Scots's son, James, King of Scots. So Liz Elizabeth, in my notes,

01:08:20.640 I call her Liz, but I'm trying to be formal in talking on this podcast. Elizabeth I made one

01:08:26.180 final attempt to reconcile Bess and Mr. Bess. You know, God bless, but like that did not work.

01:08:31.560 Mr. Bess had by now taken up with a mistress who was his housekeeper, Eleanor Britton. And Bess

01:08:36.840 had found a new love as well, her building project, Hardwick Hall. So these days, Hardwick Hall is

01:08:43.100 open to visit. It's one of the most gorgeous buildings in England. But when we talk about

01:08:47.260 Hardwick Hall now, that's actually Hardwick Hall 2.0. It's Hardwick New Hall. The first thing that

01:08:53.400 Bess, the first project she did in this area is what's now called Old Hardwick Hall, which is next

01:08:58.560 to it and currently mostly in ruins because it was sort of abandoned. So she built two houses next to

01:09:03.360 each other. We're going to talk about this one first. Before any of those were there, there was

01:09:07.500 Hardwick House, which is where Bess had grown up and that had been originally built by her

01:09:11.380 grandfather, but it's too small for her needs and her current tastes. So she wanted to build her new

01:09:16.260 like I'm an independent woman home without any specific plan or any one overseer. So Old Hardwick

01:09:22.240 call is kind of chaotic, but she'd spent like 30 years overseeing renovations at Chatsworth.

01:09:28.640 So she knew like where to get good deals on materials and labor. She knew what she liked 0.97

01:09:31.920 and didn't like in terms of like ceiling height or whatever. While this was happening, Arbella

01:09:37.500 is now like 12 years old and she was sent to royal court to meet Elizabeth and try to make

01:09:41.320 a good enough impression that maybe she'd be named heir or get a really good marriage arranged for

01:09:45.240 her. But Arbella disgraced herself by insisting on taking precedence over ladies of higher rank 1.00

01:09:52.460 as they walked to chapel and she was sent home. She was sent back to Derbyshire. By 1590, Bess had

01:09:59.360 mostly completed building the old hall, but it was weird, incoherent, and oddly unbalanced, kind of

01:10:04.940 like the Tudor mansion version of Weird Barbie's House in the Barbie movie. And then, in fairly

01:10:11.700 quick order. Bobby Duds died. Walsingham also died. And these are two of Bess' allies. Her only

01:10:17.600 ally she really had left from the old guard was Cecil. It was like all new younger people there 1.00

01:10:21.400 now. Then Mr. Bess died, thank God, age 62. His mistress slash housekeeper, Eleanor Britton, 0.73

01:10:27.620 who I have to say sounds pretty great, just in like a dirtbag sort of way. So she promptly set 0.97

01:10:33.720 about removing money, jewels, furniture, and bedding from the home, along with he used to keep

01:10:38.340 a bunch of silver and gold in his room just for like to have money on hand, like Scrooge McDuck.

01:10:44.440 And Eleanor Britton allegedly took all of that as well. And this became a whole thing. So Mr.

01:10:50.800 Bess's heir was his son, Gilbert, who's married to Bess's daughter, Mary. And there's a whole

01:10:55.880 thing about like, so all this money was taken. No one could find Eleanor Britton. Like again,

01:11:00.020 good for her. Get your bag, whatever. But Mr. Bess had more than just these like gold and silver.

01:11:05.700 where he had like homes and properties and stuff. And there's a whole thing about who's going to be

01:11:08.840 the executor of the estate. Gilbert, his son, just appointed himself sole executor. He discovered

01:11:14.840 his father had died with debts. Gilbert had debts of his own. And so he declared war on Eleanor

01:11:20.680 Britton, as well as his own brothers and Bess, because he just wanted money and he felt like he

01:11:27.300 deserved it. I hate that he's called Gilbert because the name Gilbert to me, I think of Gilbert

01:11:32.280 from Anne of Green Gables. And that's like the Gilbert from Anne of Green Gables from the Megan

01:11:39.740 Follow series. It's just like one of my original childhood crushes. And I hate that this guy's

01:11:44.340 called Gilbert because it's just like, anyway, one of Gilbert's shenanigans was at one point,

01:11:49.580 he challenged his brother to a duel. The brother declined. And then Gilbert claimed that the

01:11:53.900 brother had tried to murder him with poison gloves. Like he's just like, he's a mess and

01:11:59.060 not in a fun way. So he used to be Bess's ally back when she was like helping loan him money

01:12:04.960 and stuff. But now he was like Mr. Bess 2.0, like Mr. Bess Jr. He was her nemesis, her enemy.

01:12:10.220 Part of why he was mad at her was because he had to provide her 3,000 pounds annually as her

01:12:15.560 widow's pension. But he was like, no, I need that money to pay off my debts. I'm a dirtbag,

01:12:19.420 whatever. So she was still busy working at Hard Recall 2.0. So Hard Recall 1.0 wasn't even

01:12:25.320 finished yet. And a few hundred yards away, she started Hardwick Hall 2.0 because she saw like

01:12:30.720 old Hardwick Hall. She's like, this is great. My house is cool, but also it's crazy. Let's build

01:12:36.200 a house that's more like symmetrical and looks nicer. So she wanted the new house. So the first

01:12:41.640 one's kind of dress rehearsal. The second one was going to be architecturally coherent. And she

01:12:45.920 hired Robert Smithson, who is apparently the first English architect. So this home was the first

01:12:52.500 time in England that an architect was commissioned to design a building, apparently. And if you go

01:12:58.980 there or if you look at pictures of it, Hardwick Hall, this is the building people now call Hardwick

01:13:03.020 Hall. The way that it looks now, like each floor has a higher ceiling than the floor below it.

01:13:08.940 There's these so many windows, huge windows everywhere. And this was an era where windows

01:13:12.880 were a sign of wealth, like houses couldn't afford windows in general. And this is just like

01:13:17.340 all windows. There's a saying, Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall, which is true if you see

01:13:22.480 a picture of it. There's turrets at the top of it. And what I love about this is like her initials,

01:13:28.020 ES, like Elizabeth Shrewsbury, are carved into the building itself, like out of stone. Like

01:13:33.940 if you see a picture of Hardwick Hall, it's like this beautiful symmetrical house. And at the top,

01:13:37.580 there's kind of like little sticking up bits. And if you zoom into those sticking up, it's her

01:13:41.060 initials with a little crown on top, like this bitch. I love it. I love it. She's just like, 1.00

01:13:46.880 this is my house and I am the coolest person. And it's true when she was. So to furnish her

01:13:53.080 tuning homes, she moved over some of the finest furnishings from Chatsworth, but she needed more,

01:13:57.520 especially tapestries because she was as a stylistic choice, or maybe it's like a cost

01:14:01.740 saving. She was only doing wood paneling on like half of the walls and the rest there would be

01:14:06.120 large tapestry. So in 1591 slash 1592, she went to London for an eight month shopping spree.

01:14:12.820 yeah. And while she was there, you know, cause she was always multitasking. She also was kind

01:14:17.820 of like hanging out at Royal Court, seeing who's who, how she could elevate Arbella's position,

01:14:21.940 maybe better. She also, because Gilbert was like taking her to court to like get money.

01:14:25.880 And she's like, okay, if we go to court in London, I don't know if I'll win or not,

01:14:29.300 but if we go to court in Derbyshire where everybody loves me slash are my tenants,

01:14:33.540 I'll probably win. So she's like, how can I get the court case to be in Derbyshire,

01:14:36.820 Derbyshire instead of London. And what she did is she hired every lawyer in London so Gilbert

01:14:43.760 couldn't get a lawyer. So they had to do the court case somewhere else, which is similar to,

01:14:48.720 if you listen on my Patreon to Vulgar Peace Theater, we did an episode on Tombstone,

01:14:52.880 the movie, the Western, where there's a whole thing where Kevin Costner wanted to do another

01:14:57.020 movie on the same topic. So the guy who was doing the costumes for Tombstone just rented every Wild

01:15:02.160 West costume in all of America so that the Kevin Costner movie couldn't get any costumes. This is

01:15:07.260 the same vibe to me. Anyway, she's in town doing this shopping spree. And so she got numerous 0.98

01:15:13.480 tapestries and she got a lot of them on sale because she just knows her shit. She knows what 1.00

01:15:18.820 to do. She knows how to get a good deal. She's rich, but also is into bargaining. So she got a 1.00

01:15:24.620 great deal from this estate sales. There's a guy called Sir William Hatton who was selling off

01:15:29.580 stuff to pay off his own debts. And so she got various tapestries and she got the price reduced

01:15:34.380 on one of them because the tapestry had his arms, like his like signal or whatever on it. And she's

01:15:40.840 like, I'm going to have to replace that with my own. So can you please take off five pounds from

01:15:44.500 the price? And he's like, okay. But then she got her own like logo put on, but just like,

01:15:49.420 instead of embroidered on, it was just sort of like ironed on or something. And it only cost

01:15:53.120 like 30 cents. So she made money on that anyway. Among these tapestries is a hanging featuring

01:15:58.220 historical and mythical female figures intended to show Bess's virtues. So the women are all

01:16:04.140 defined by their relationship to their husbands as wives or widows. And I just want to briefly 0.94

01:16:08.080 tell you who they are because it's a big vulgar history type vibe to just like get a huge,

01:16:12.940 and these are like life size. It's like people in these tapestries are the size of a person now,

01:16:17.700 but just having tapestries showing like great women of history is like, that's what I'm all

01:16:22.160 about. So one of the people on them is Lucretia, who was the loyal wife of a Roman general. She's

01:16:28.660 shown holding a knife to her breast. And her story, I looked up to see what her story was.

01:16:32.900 And it was basically, she was assaulted and then she killed herself because of that. The Roman 0.76

01:16:38.240 monarchy ended and the Roman Republic began, but she killed herself because she was married to

01:16:43.140 somebody. She was assaulted by somebody else. And she's like, my husband is too important to me.

01:16:46.600 I'm going to kill myself. There's also a tapestry. This is all one big tapestry showing 0.69

01:16:51.820 Zenobia, who was a queen who lived in the third century in Pilmyra, Syria. She was married to the

01:16:57.460 king. And after he was assassinated, she ruled the kingdom as regent for her son and continued

01:17:01.720 on his work. So her noble actions are that she carried on her husband's campaign and work after

01:17:05.760 his death. One of the other people represented is Artemisia of Caria, not the one I did the

01:17:10.460 episode about. This is Artemisia II of Caria. And her thing is that she and her husband created one

01:17:17.020 of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the mausoleum at Halakarnassus. When her husband died,

01:17:22.440 she was so overwhelmed with grief, she put her husband's ashes into a goblet of wine and drank

01:17:26.440 it so she could be her husband's living tomb. And then there's also Penelope, the wife of Odysseus

01:17:33.340 in the Odyssey by Homer. And her whole thing was her husband went away and he was gone for so long

01:17:38.660 that people thought he was probably dead. And so suitors came every day asking to marry her,

01:17:42.800 but she wanted to stay loyal to him. So she's like, well, I can't accept anyone's hand until

01:17:46.080 I finished my weaving. But every night she would undo her weaving. So her weaving never ended.

01:17:50.880 Another person who's on the tapestry. So if you go there, you can see those ones.

01:17:54.240 There was another one, but it's no longer there. I guess that part fell apart or whatever,

01:17:57.860 but there's also Cleopatra. So it's interesting that the people there are just like really loyal,

01:18:02.600 like wives who were powerful because of who their husbands were, but who are so loyal to

01:18:06.520 their husbands. And like, this is a thing Bess bought from somebody else. Bess didn't commission

01:18:10.740 this, but it's interesting because she's married to this guy who she's like actively at war with,

01:18:15.000 but maybe she's thinking more WC and how she's loyal to him. Anyway, this and many of these

01:18:20.680 hangings are some of the largest and most splendid embroideries surviving from the Elizabethan age.

01:18:24.940 Asterix, more on that at the end of the episode with breaking news. So Bess also started a new

01:18:30.020 business venture. Like in her seventies, she decided to start doing money lending, which is

01:18:35.060 really interesting. So in the absence of banks, cash was badly needed and in a short supply in

01:18:41.240 Tudor England. So people needed literal money. And we talked about this last year in the Dona

01:18:46.140 Gracia Nasi episode where we're talking about just historically the jobs that Jewish people

01:18:52.240 have had in Western European countries. And a lot of times because money lending, I think

01:18:57.540 in the Christian Bible says like you shouldn't do it. So like quote, good Christians shouldn't

01:19:02.560 do money lending, which is why it was a job that was available. And then that's why Jewish people 1.00

01:19:06.500 got into it. So it's interesting to hear the best was just like, but that's the thing. Like 0.98

01:19:09.840 she was never super religious, right? She was just like, this is a business I can do and make money

01:19:14.200 at. Great. This is similar to how Mr. Bess had had like the gold and the silver in his bedroom.

01:19:20.280 She kept cash in her bedroom, but that was just like for the bank. Oh, Bess. Along with a pair 0.60

01:19:24.220 of scales, she collected interest at 10%. So legally that was the highest amount of interest

01:19:29.920 you could charge. She frequently lent money on the security of land. She collected land and

01:19:35.600 property as well, like mortgages. In one instance where a guy needed money, she got him to mortgage

01:19:40.760 his property in Arbella's name. So eventually he died. And then the five manners became Arbella's.

01:19:47.380 So Bess was just like amassing property because there's a bunch of people, including her son-in-law 0.63

01:19:53.000 slash stepson Gilbert, who just were in her son, bad son Henry. Like she just knew that these people

01:19:59.020 were shitty with money and she could make money off of it. And she did. And again, I just feel 0.99

01:20:03.120 like, Beth, get your back. In her 70s, she's like, you know what I'm going to do? Start a new career.

01:20:07.760 So anyway, but also now that Mr. Best was dead, she had freedom as a widow. She did not get married

01:20:13.760 again. But because she had watched her various husbands and how they ran their household and

01:20:19.220 how they ran their businesses, like she had various skills from Mr. Best. She learned how

01:20:22.880 not to manage your affairs. And so she's just like running her various households, building 0.99

01:20:27.800 thing. So Hardwick Hall 2.0 is coming along amazingly. So about the windows. So glass had

01:20:33.840 been manufactured in England since the 13th century, but it was like not as good as the

01:20:38.560 glass manufactured in France until this one guy in the 16th century came over, like he brought over

01:20:44.400 skilled glass makers from Lorraine and Normandy. So it was easier to get fancier glass by the time

01:20:49.220 she was doing Hardwick Hall, but Bess was like, not good enough for me, bitches. She set up her 1.00

01:20:53.160 own glassworks operation to like make her own glass. Like this is how rich she is. And this 0.99

01:20:58.420 is also how specific she is with her vision and what she wanted the house to look like.

01:21:02.400 So 1597, Hard Recall 2.0, mostly, but not entirely done. But she, unlike Penelope on her tapestry,

01:21:09.220 was not patient and she was just wanted to move in. So that year, October 4th, 1597,

01:21:14.440 she had her, some of her more musically inclined members of her household play a triumphant march.

01:21:19.920 and she walked into the house and she was just like, yeah, this is my house. Those are my

01:21:23.900 initials. Fuck you, Mr. Best. This is what's happening. And we don't know what she did for 1.00

01:21:28.100 a few years. Like she was just vibing out, I guess, just like having a nice time, but also

01:21:32.860 just like still commissioning projects. She started building alms houses. So like poor houses,

01:21:39.120 like places for like houseless people to go, which is interesting and good of her. I'm not 0.93

01:21:45.120 criticizing that at all. This coincides with her getting older and maybe wanting to like do more

01:21:49.420 good works in the world because as much religion as she may or may not have she probably was just 1.00

01:21:54.620 like let's just do some good deeds in case heaven and hell are like a real thing so i can go to the

01:21:59.100 direction i want to go she also was preparing for her death so she's in like her early 80s i think

01:22:06.560 she commissioned smithson the same guy who designed hard work hall to design her tomb which she wanted

01:22:11.600 to be a black stone and marble and she also drew up her will which she would amend several times

01:22:15.980 based on the events I'm about to tell you about. So 1602, all hell breaks loose with her and

01:22:21.140 Arbella. Arbella is by now 27 years old, has not been married. She's had to share a room with Bess

01:22:26.860 this whole time. Like if you go to visit Hardwick Hall, there's like two beds in the room. Like one

01:22:30.580 of them is Arbella's. Like she's just like, get me out of here. I did a whole episode about Arbella,

01:22:35.620 but basically Arbella figured out the only way she could escape the clutches of her grandmother 0.97

01:22:40.640 was by marriage. And the marriage that she wanted to have was to 16 year old descendant 0.74

01:22:45.740 of Catherine Gray's prison baby. And the thing with this is that Arbella really idolized Catherine 0.98

01:22:51.940 Gray and her sort of romantic story of like super secret, sexy marriage. But then the thing Arbella

01:22:56.840 has this claim to the throne and then Catherine Gray's son has this claim to the throne. So the

01:23:00.820 two of them married, like Elizabeth would never, and it would be like a super dangerous combination

01:23:04.300 of people. I do love like Arbella was a chaotic person. Her plans were not good, but one part of

01:23:10.880 her plan that was good was she had part of it was like I need to trick Bess to leave the house what 1.00

01:23:15.980 will I do she'll get her boyfriend to pretend to be a guy with some land and property to sell 1.00

01:23:20.460 because she's like I know Bess would go do that because she there's one thing she knows what Bess

01:23:23.920 is that she likes to buy property anyway the plan was discovered Bess freaked out Arbella was put

01:23:29.000 under sort of armed guard and then it was like war of two people in a house 2.0 um servants again

01:23:35.560 took sides, some were on Arbella's side, some were on Bess's side. I truly don't know between

01:23:41.740 those two why you would take Arbella's side, but whatever. Anyway, Arbella wrote letters to some of

01:23:46.220 her aunts and uncles to see if they would help. Everyone said no, including Gilbert, but one

01:23:50.640 person said, okay, I'll help you. And that's Uncle Henry, Bess's bad son, off in the swamp house.

01:23:55.540 He's just like, I'll do anything. So he helped arrange for Arbella to escape, but she was caught.

01:24:00.960 You can hear all of this in the Arbella Stewart episode. At this point, Bess changed her will

01:24:05.300 to remove Arbella and Henry. Then Queen Elizabeth died and the new king was named and it's Mary

01:24:10.660 Queen of Scots' son, James. So the whole thing about like, is Arbella going to be the new queen

01:24:17.140 is like, probably not, but she's pretty chaotic anyway. So then bad son Henry was implicated in,

01:24:24.440 here's the thing, there's so many plots in the Mary Queen of Scots episodes, but people didn't

01:24:28.300 stop plotting just because she died. So there's a plot called the bi plot, which was a thing where

01:24:33.200 Catholics were working together with Puritans, power duo, on a plan to kidnap James and force 0.81

01:24:39.380 him to allow freedom of religion. Good luck with that. Did not happen or work, obviously. 1.00

01:24:44.900 So Henry was implicated in that. But then there was another plot he was not involved in that

01:24:49.140 happened at the same time, which is sort of like, what if the bi-plot is step one? So this is called

01:24:53.220 the main plot. And this plot was to kidnap and murder James and his sons and then have Arbella

01:24:58.920 placed as queen. They were making this plan and then somebody told Arbella, hey, just FYI,

01:25:03.600 we're doing this plan. They sent her a letter and she sent the letter to James being like,

01:25:07.260 FYI, this is happening. So like, she was not on board this plan. Even Arbella, a chaos person,

01:25:12.480 was not involved in this plan. So bad son Henry was brought to court as a co-conspirator because

01:25:18.040 he had been involved in the bi plot, but not in the main plot. He was found not guilty.

01:25:22.320 Arbella, meanwhile, she did manage to escape Bess's house. She was allowed to come live at 0.83

01:25:27.300 royal court, but she got there and she's just like, oh, this is fucked up. I don't like this 0.99

01:25:30.700 because the king is James. Like, it's just like people having fun and partying all the time. And

01:25:35.780 that's not Arbella's vibe either. Although she was named godmother of James's daughter,

01:25:40.420 Princess Mary. So interestingly, Mary Queen of Scots was staying with Bess and Mr. Bess for 15

01:25:45.700 years. And now we are now 15 more years later after the death of Mr. Bess. And Bess and Gilbert

01:25:52.560 are still feuding. They've been feuding for 15 years. Then at the same 15 year point,

01:25:58.200 the gunpowder plot happened, which I'm not going to explain to you right now, but this is briefly,

01:26:02.760 it's the Guy Fawkes thing. So where Catholics wanted to blow up the parliament building with 0.92

01:26:07.900 James and his older son inside, and then place James's young daughter, Elizabeth on the throne 0.67

01:26:12.580 as their puppet monarch, but they were discovered. I'm mentioning this not just because Bess was like

01:26:17.760 living for the drama of it all. She loved hearing all the details, but because she wasn't living in

01:26:22.120 London. Like she was living in Hardwick, but she wanted to know what was going on. The connection

01:26:27.180 here is that Gilbert was implicated by association with the gunpowder plot because his wife, Mary,

01:26:32.700 Bess's daughter was a Catholic and she was friends with some of the like friend of a friend with some

01:26:38.200 of the gunpowder people, but neither of them were arrested for this though. So by now, Bess,

01:26:44.200 she's now in her like mid to late eighties and is doing poorly. She had arthritis that affected

01:26:49.380 her ability to walk without assistance. She's just in a lot of pain. And soon enough, she like,

01:26:55.600 I don't know, just the symptoms became too much. They were sort of like various things are happening

01:26:59.460 and she's just like, okay, clearly I'm dying. So let's figure this out. Like she still had her

01:27:02.880 wits about her. Like she was still able to think very clearly. So she redid her will, I think one

01:27:08.880 last time. And then she eventually she did die. So on February 13th, age 87, her body was transported

01:27:16.080 to the tomb she had commissioned, where she was to be buried with the Cavendish family, WC's family,

01:27:22.500 not with the Mr. Bess family, because it's like that was the family of her heart, the Cavendish's.

01:27:27.740 What's happened since then is the subsequent generations of the Mr. Bess family, whose last

01:27:31.700 name is Talbot, they didn't thrive as well as the Cavendish's did, the WC family, because the

01:27:38.160 Cavendish family, their fortune is built on the estates and properties Bess had accumulated and

01:27:42.580 or built. From that line, the Cavendishists, the Dukes of Devonshire, or Devonshire, come from that

01:27:49.400 line. One of whom married Georgiana Cavendish, who is a person I'll talk about in another podcast in

01:27:54.800 the future, I'm sure. And that all leads to Princess Diana in some way. Anyway, here's the

01:27:59.800 thing. When we're talking about people on the show and are thinking about what is their legacy,

01:28:04.260 and it's like, what did their descendants do or whatever? Her descendants did amazing because

01:28:08.440 she set them up to succeed. And that's what is a generational wealth. You know, she overcame her

01:28:13.000 money trauma to provide generational wealth to her descendants. And that was part of what she,

01:28:17.840 she like enjoyed spending money and having nice things, but she also wanted to set up her family 0.65

01:28:21.600 for success. So they wouldn't live and struggle like she did as a younger person. And she did, 0.72

01:28:26.280 she succeeded because she's best, but equally important, potentially more important is the 0.91

01:28:31.800 homes that she built. Like she was involved in home building for 50 years. Most of the homes, 0.98

01:28:37.400 like many of the other homes built at the same time fell into disrepair, but her descendants,

01:28:41.360 especially in Hardwick Hall, like they maintained it. So Hardwick Hall 2.0 is now overseen by the

01:28:47.820 National Trust. It is architecturally unchanged and its interiors are still much the same as when

01:28:52.620 she lived there. And then, so the Duke of Devonshire, like that dukedom, those are her

01:28:58.180 descendants. So under the ninth Duke of Devonshire, which is like the early 20th century, he really

01:29:02.920 cared about the house. Extensive repairs were done to the structure and stonework. And after he died

01:29:07.120 in 1938, his widow, Evelyn, devoted herself to the repair and restoration of Bess' tapestries

01:29:12.340 and hangings, which are still there as well. Which brings us to late breaking news, August

01:29:16.380 2023. So headline from The Guardian. A unique set of 16th century tapestries have gone on display

01:29:22.240 after a 24-year, 1.7 million pound restoration project. So the 13 tapestries, which portray the

01:29:29.600 Old Testament story of Gideon, were bought for Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire in 1592 by its owner,

01:29:35.260 Bess of Hardwick during her shopping spree era. So centuries of damage and dirt have been tackled

01:29:41.400 by a team of experts working on one six meter wall hanging at a time. So like this took 24

01:29:47.420 years to restore this thing and it just, it just was put in like this month. So each tapestry was

01:29:54.380 taken to the National Trust's conservation studio in Norfolk. Process began with sending each

01:29:59.100 tapestry to Belgium for specialist cleaning. Once back at the studio, the team completed

01:30:03.340 painstaking work to repair tears and replace stitches where possible all by hand like they

01:30:08.520 were to get the thread and stuff they're using natural dyes to match it perfectly and stuff like

01:30:13.940 so it would be just like how it was at the time the national trust senior national curator emma

01:30:18.100 slocum said quote these astonishing tapestries have been in the long gallery since it was first

01:30:22.940 decorated at the end of the 16th century extraordinarily that's where they remain

01:30:27.240 end quote. So in total, the conservation stitching, lining, and reconstruction took 5,470 hours to

01:30:33.960 complete or 24 years. Denise Edwards, former Hardwick estate general manager, oversaw the

01:30:39.860 project for 20 years, retiring shortly before it was completed. So that's one thing. Like I was

01:30:45.040 working on this. Um, and then I saw a bit ago, I follow the national trust on Instagram and they

01:30:50.120 were like, Ooh, we have big news coming to Hardwick hall. And it showed people carrying

01:30:53.360 some long rolled up thing. And I'm just like, what's happening? And then they revealed this

01:30:56.840 is what it was these tapestries were just restored and are hanging there now and then also this same

01:31:01.820 month august 2023 it was announced by the national trust and english heritage that a new partnership

01:31:06.960 agreement will see hardwick old hall hardwick hall 1.0 fully open to visitors for the first time in

01:31:12.980 five years after extensive conservation work so it's still like not a house with walls and a roof

01:31:19.740 but there's still a lot of the work is still there like the carvings and things have all been

01:31:23.780 restored. So that was just announced. So things are happening. Good work, national trust. So

01:31:29.760 in terms of best of hard work, she has not been in many, there's not been movies made about her.

01:31:35.580 It's a cool story to talk about. I would love to see a TV show or a movie about her, but I get

01:31:41.200 that watching the story of a woman thriving and building houses and going to court repeatedly

01:31:46.600 is not as exciting as maybe some other historical things might be. She was in the 2018 Saoirse

01:31:52.880 Ronan Mary Queen of Scott's movie. She's played there by Gemma Chan, which is interesting. Firstly,

01:31:57.380 because the movie was doing sort of colorblind casting and whatever, but also because Gemma Chan

01:32:01.180 has recently-ish said that she's working on an Anna Mae Wong biopic, where she'll be playing

01:32:06.400 Anna Mae Wong. So that connects last week's episode with this week's episode. Hepburn's back.

01:32:10.580 She's got thoughts. And we need to do some scoring. So Best of Hardwick. The first thing is

01:32:17.740 scandalousness so this is how scandalous was she at the time and the thing is like elizabeth

01:32:24.460 always forgave her which doesn't necessarily mean she wasn't scandalous the most scandalous thing 0.69

01:32:28.620 she did was scheming grannies like getting the two of those people married without elizabeth's 1.00

01:32:34.320 permission but that's not really scandalous like she went to court all the time but that wasn't

01:32:39.080 like the dissolution of her marriage was maybe seen as scandalous i don't know i'm gonna honestly

01:32:43.900 I'm going to give her a five. And that's mainly just for scheming grannies because the audacity, 1.00

01:32:48.540 you know, I'm giving her not any more points to respect the fact that she found ways to thrive 1.00

01:32:52.780 without having to, without being scandalous. Scheminess is a straight up 10 because that's 1.00

01:32:58.020 just not just scheming grannies vibes, but also arranging all the marriages, like all the court 1.00

01:33:02.660 stuff, the thing where she hired every lawyer in London, like she, like just the building plans, 0.97

01:33:08.360 like the schemes to build houses, to hire an architect, like she thought things out.

01:33:12.860 like what a manager, you know, I would read a book. Well, I wouldn't read this book,

01:33:16.600 but someone could write this book. That's like leadership lessons from Bess of Hardwick.

01:33:20.100 I don't personally have an interest in learning leadership lessons because I don't want to be a

01:33:24.340 leader, but I think that would be good business advice for people. The next is significance.

01:33:29.380 And this is like her descendants would say she's very significant. Hardwick hall itself is like

01:33:34.280 a very famous, notable building and she made it. And it's, you know, it's routinely in the list of,

01:33:40.920 you know, like top buildings in England, just like the design of it, the importance of it being the

01:33:45.780 first building that had an architect, all the houses she built. Like, I feel like financially

01:33:50.140 she was significant. I don't see her as like breaking down barriers for like women home 1.00

01:33:55.200 builders or whatever, but being the person who built Hardwick Hall, very significant. Like her

01:34:00.660 in her lifetime was very significant. I'm going to say like a seven for significance, almost

01:34:05.880 entirely because of Hardwick Hall. And then I've been thinking about this, honestly, because sexism

01:34:10.700 is the last thing. It's like, how much did sexism get in her way? And I'm going to say like, 1.00

01:34:14.800 it tried to, the patriarchy tried to stop her, but she kind of like Elizabeth the first where

01:34:20.400 it's kind of like, she figured like, okay, this is how I can play this game. I'm going to play

01:34:24.080 this game. Like she wasn't like the way that she could achieve her ambitions was to marry a series 1.00

01:34:29.280 of increasingly wealthy husbands. And she did like, she built these houses, like sexism did not 0.98

01:34:34.340 super get in her way. Like she had all these children, but she, you know, she survived child 1.00

01:34:38.280 birth and everything out of her long life that was just eight years was having babies i don't know

01:34:43.420 like if she had been a man maybe there wouldn't have been some of the inheritance issues but like

01:34:47.440 she still got all the inheritances i don't know man i'm gonna say i'm gonna say four i'm gonna say

01:34:53.760 four for six and just because not because it wasn't there but just because she was able to

01:34:58.080 work around it and it didn't get in her way and that's what that's for so that's 17 so that is a

01:35:02.760 27 is her score. You can see all of the scores. If you go to the website at vulgarhistory.com,

01:35:08.900 there's like a thing to click on that says scores. But I will say 27 is a very standard score.

01:35:14.220 Nothing wrong with that. That's just like a person who scores high in some things and not high in

01:35:17.760 some other things tends to get a 27. So like, for instance, Lady Jane Grey has a 29.5. Catherine

01:35:24.680 Grey has a 29. And that's because both of them had real scandal. Who else is around here who she 0.75

01:35:30.620 new. Latice Knowles, Bobby Dud's wife, 28. Cleopatra, 28. Margaret Douglas, the other 1.00

01:35:35.820 scheming granny, has a 28. Arbella Stewart, 28. And then we get to the 27s. Frances Gray has a 27. 0.99

01:35:42.240 Catherine Parr has a 27. Like she fits right in with the people who were of her time and era and

01:35:48.260 whatever. So what I did want to tell you as well, just in our little wrap up here, is that next week

01:35:54.800 I've got a really exciting author interview that I think you're going to enjoy. We're talking about

01:35:59.060 linguistics, which even if you're like, Oh, I'm not interested in linguistics. It's like,

01:36:03.320 what about the history of feminist words? Anyway. And then the week after that, it's going to be

01:36:08.640 the end of the Mary Queen of Scots episodes with a look at the four Marys. And then the show is

01:36:13.640 going to continue on after that. You know, in past years, when I finished the season,

01:36:16.480 I've taken a hiatus, but I've figured out ways to keep episodes coming every week. So

01:36:21.560 don't worry. The show's not going anywhere. And if you want to keep up with this show,

01:36:26.700 so we are on instagram at vulgar history pod also on the threads at vulgar history pod honestly

01:36:32.620 there's this weird diaspora of social media happening right now i'm also in blue sky but

01:36:37.280 like is anyone blue sky i don't really know i made like a facebook page like truly i'm just

01:36:41.620 like taking vulgar history and putting on very social media and just kind of seeing just sort

01:36:46.440 of wherever you are you know you can tag me i'm also on tiktok at vulgar history the main place 0.88

01:36:51.840 where I'm posting shit is Instagram at vulgarhistorypod. If you want to get in touch

01:36:56.440 with me, you can use a form at vulgarhistory.com or you can email me at vulgarhistorypod at gmail.com.

01:37:02.400 We also have merch available at vulgarhistory.com slash store. That takes you to the Tee Public

01:37:07.960 store. If you're living outside the US, the shipping is better if you use the Redbubble

01:37:12.660 store, which is vulgarhistory.redbubble.com. We also have a Patreon. So if you support this

01:37:18.380 podcast with a monthly donation at patreon.com slash ann foster writer, you get various cool

01:37:23.760 things. So if you pledge at least a dollar a month, you get early ad free access to all episodes,

01:37:28.740 including past episodes. If you pledge at least $5 a month, $5 or more a month, you get to hear

01:37:34.400 bonus episodes. So that's so this asshole episodes where I talk about gross men from history, 0.92

01:37:39.220 vulgar peace theater, where I talk about costume dramas, like movie recap podcasts. 0.98

01:37:43.960 and then also at that tier the five dollars a month or more tiers you get access to a new thing

01:37:49.140 which is also where i've been chatting with people which is we have a discord server the vulgar

01:37:53.740 history salon so you need to join the patreon at the five dollars a month or more level to get

01:37:58.120 access to the discord server and chatting but it's been interesting i really like it's so just

01:38:02.640 a low-key place to just kind of like tits a brigade can like talk to each other and also to

01:38:06.340 me recently because as i'm recording this the elizabeth of valois episode is what's just come

01:38:11.500 out and so we had a really nice and interesting conversation about you know childbirth and the

01:38:16.060 dangers of it back before doctors knew they had to wash their hands they couldn't just like touch

01:38:20.580 a dead body and then like put your hand up inside a woman and deliver a baby because if you did that

01:38:24.940 you would give her horrible infections and that's why so many women died in childbirth so the fact

01:38:28.920 that best of hardwick had like she delivered eight children and did not die is remarkable and thank

01:38:35.840 goodness because look at how much she did in her 87 years of life anyway thank you all for listening

01:38:41.140 to this podcast. There will be more episodes, more Mary Queen of Scott stuff in two weeks,

01:38:45.500 and a super special bonus episode next week. And until next time, keep your pants on and your tits 1.00

01:38:50.840 out. Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Anne Foster and edited by Christina 1.00

01:39:00.040 Lumagi.

01:39:00.700 Legendary stories, awe-inspiring sound, and endless adventure.

01:39:11.920 Welcome to the Realms of Peril and Glory.

01:39:18.120 Explore the mechanically magical vistas of Vale,

01:39:22.800 the paranormal mysteries of Liminal London,

01:39:26.880 and the cyberpunk chaos of Cyborg.

01:39:35.060 Fall in love with our core cast

01:39:37.840 or be awed by our incredible guests

01:39:40.840 from familiar shows like Oxventure,

01:39:44.160 Three Black Halflings,

01:39:45.840 and No Rolls Barred. 1.00

01:39:49.200 Ignite your imagination

01:39:50.500 and discover the realms of peril and glory today.

01:39:54.440 Go to RealmsPod.com

01:39:56.440 or search Realms of Peril and Glory wherever you listen to podcasts.

01:40:04.680 For eight years, we've been asking the same question over and over again.

01:40:09.840 How did this happen?

01:40:11.320 My name's Mandy.

01:40:12.320 And I'm Melissa.

01:40:13.160 And we're the hosts of Moms and Mysteries,

01:40:15.200 the true crime podcast with over 55 million downloads.

01:40:18.640 We're two Florida moms who are obsessed with mysteries.

01:40:21.640 Each week, we do deep dives into fascinating true crime stories.

01:40:24.580 We cover everything from infamous cases like Casey Anthony to the bizarre and complex crimes right here in our home state, like the shocking murder of FSU professor Dan Markell.

01:40:34.980 We bring you the facts, but with warmth and width, you'd only get from two friends who have been hooked on mysteries since childhood.

01:40:40.880 Join us for new episodes of Moms and Mysteries every Tuesday and Thursday.

01:40:44.520 Listen to Moms and Mysteries on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

01:40:50.160 Hi, listeners. We want to tell you about a podcast we love.

01:40:53.920 It's called Rebel Girls, formerly known as Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.

01:40:58.820 It's about real-life women who are changing the world with their courage, creativity, and big, bold ideas.

01:41:06.100 Want to know how Taylor Swift became a superstar?

01:41:09.440 Or hear how Simone Biles became the greatest athlete of all time?

01:41:13.620 From immersive stories to heartfelt interviews to super smart advice,

01:41:18.760 Rebel Girls brings you stories that will get you fired up to become your best self.

01:41:23.120 There are over 400 episodes for you to explore, with new episodes every week.

01:41:27.760 So, check it out.

01:41:29.260 Listen to Rebel Girls wherever you get your podcasts. 0.99

01:41:32.100 And find us on youtube.com slash rebelgirls.

01:41:35.480 And whatever you do, stay rebel.

Vulgar History - August 30, 2023

Real Estate Boss Bitch of the Tudor Era, Bess of Hardwick

Episode Stats

Transcript