Cavalier, p.32
Cavalier, page 32
London's response to William's death is quietly respectful rather than wildly grief-stricken. He has, in a sense, lived too long and become almost an embarrassment to the court of Charles II with his harping on about the king's father and his pre-war notions of courtesy and honour. William doubtless died still aggrieved that his loyalty throughout the Civil War was not - to his mind - sufficiently rewarded, but then his reputation never fully recovered from the blow he dealt it by running away after the battle of Marston Moor.
To his possible chagrin had he known it, William's role in the great affairs of the court and nation will come to be overshadowed by the memory of his achievements in other areas of life. His book on riding really was revolutionary, although at the time of his death this is not fully recognised. Still, even today, in 1676, William has already ensured his immortality, because his great houses will continue to impress and amaze visitors for centuries. Through them, and his poetry, he has provided the means for future generations to imagine the whole lost world of the courtly Cavaliers.
William and Margaret's monument, designed by Grinling Gibbons, in the north transept of Westminster Abbey
The year following William's death, the decease will be reported of 'Captain Mazine, the old great horseman', whose honorary place in the royal household is given to another of William's old servants, Mr Eagle (whose father had also served in the Cavendish household).13 William's secretary John Rolleston lives until the age of eighty-four in his manor house near Welbeck; after his death his wife decides that his tomb should say first and foremost that he had been 'well belov'd by ye High & mighty Wm late Duke of Newcastle & his noble family'.14 Mr Benoist continues to administer the affairs of William's son, Henry, his former pupil, and becomes tutor to Henry's own son, Harry. Mr Kitchen the builder rubs his hands at the thought of the lucrative contracts that Henry may be encouraged to place with him. Henry's daughters wonder if their father will let them marry the men of their choice and which of them will become his greatest heiress. The circling for position has begun once again and allegiances shift once more, for the household's life will continue under its new master.
Afterword: 'William Cavendish's legacy
William Cavendish's greatest legacy was his array of great seventeenth-century houses. His household was one of the very last of the extensive, medievally inspired organisations that were once the country's primary social units, yet within it many new and recognisable domestic practices began to take shape.
In William's lifetime, we find table forks, napkins laid on the lap, flushing toilets, glass wine bottles, underpants and even the umbrella making their first appearances in England. Meals were becoming recognisable, with the main course followed by the dessert. You could buy a recognisable printed book, though you had to visit the printer and bookbinder separately. Houses like the Little Castle were just beginning to have something in common with our own, with separate living and dining rooms, bedrooms and studies, while the Great Hall of medieval houses had begun its sorry descent down to the level of the meagre entrance passage that forms the 'hall' of the modern home. Men were starting to leave the formerly high-status household jobs such as gentleman usher or steward in order to go out to work in business or the professions, and women were beginning to take over the household roles of housekeeping and cooking that they would retain for at least three centuries. Yet, at the same time, other women were beginning to publish their written work, the handshake was replacing the doffing of the hat and the English were flirting with republicanism.
In order to see the rooms in which these momentous changes happened, it's possible to visit many of the houses mentioned in this book. Bolsover Castle is the most accessible, and the Little Castle in particular remains remarkably redolent of the seventeenth century. A large ingredient of its attraction is the emptiness of its rooms: no Victorian clutter or unsightly electric lights here mean the effect is austere but authentic. From the high Stone Walk you can see the Fountain Garden now planted with seventeenth-century varieties, but William's great Terrace Range lies roofless since its lead was plundered for improvements to Welbeck in the eighteenth century. The Little Castle was not regularly used after William's death until the nineteenth century, when it became the home of the snobbish Reverend Gray, vicar of Bolsover, and his wife. They found the Cavendishes' castle deliciously romantic, revelling in its 'most dismal desolation, wainscots torn down, windows rattling in every pane, doors off their hinges', while the pictures on the walls were 'shot through with arrows'.1 This odd couple refurnished it in a ludicrously baronial style that appealed to the writers of the many spurious Victorian historical romances that were set here; examples include The Romaunt of Bolsover Castle (1845) and Bolsover Castle: A Tale from Protestant History of the Sixteenth Century (1846). After the death of the Grays, the castle was opened to visitors by the Duke of Portland, until 1945, when he placed it in the care of the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works. This body's successor, English Heritage, still welcomes visitors to the site today.
In 1996,1 became English Heritage's Assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings, and it was my job to help research a great re-presentation project being undertaken there. During this project we made new red taffeta hangings for the Marble closet, repainted the Pillar Parlour in black, walnut and gold as indicated on Smithson's drawings, scripted an audio tour narrated by Andrew Clayton, made a film showing William and Margaret dancing together in a darkened closet and staged a wonderful event where riders demonstrated the manoeuvres of the manege amid the dust of the Riding House. In between times I was transcribing documents in the British Library, Nottingham University Library, Lambeth Palace Library, Sheffield City Archives, Lincoln Record Office, the Bodleian Library and a number of other places, tracking down William's letters in his crazy and increasingly familiar handwriting and visiting the other buildings connected to his life.
Welbeck Abbey is far less readily accessible, but then very little survives that William Cavendish would have recognised. After his death, his name and at least part of his wealth travelled through three generations of the female line: through his granddaughter Margaret to the Holies family, and then through her only child Henrietta, who married Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford. The redoubtable Henrietta Cavendish-Holles-Harley also had a single child, another Margaret, who married William Bentinck, second Duke of Portland, with the result that her descendants took - and retain - the name of Cavendish-Bentinck. The abbey, remodelled in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is deeply intriguing to architectural historians, but as a military college and private residence access to the public is not possible.
In Northumberland, William's castles at Bothal and Ogle are also private residences, but William's brother Sir Charles's house, Slingsby Castle in Yorkshire, lies in ruins. Also ruinous are the houses in Lincolnshire rented by William's brother and son, Glentworth and Wellingore. Very few fragments remain of the Palace of Richmond, though the area yields rich pickings for archaeologists. The King's Manor in York still remains intact, and if you visit the battlefield of Marston Moor you can see the copse where the bodies of four thousand of William's Whitecoats remain buried in one of the country's largest mass graves. In Antwerp, Rubens's house, apparently so intact, was actually almost completely rebuilt during the Second World War.
Newcastle House in London ended up in the hands of William's granddaughter Elizabeth, Duchess of Albemarle, who became famous as the second supposedly 'mad' duchess to live there.2 During her widowhood after her first husband's death, she refused to marry anyone but the Emperor of China. Her second husband, the Earl of Montagu, won her hand by impersonating him. After her death in 1734, Newcastle House fell on hard times, becoming used as a cabinetmaker's workshop before being demolished by one James Carr for the sale of its materials.3 In the sale he retained one lot for his own use, and it is therefore speculated that Newcastle House was the source of the fine early-eighteenth-century panelling which still survives in Carr's own house at 12 Albemarle Street, Clerkenwell.4 By 1893, Newcastle House had been replaced by a row of houses still called 'Newcastle Row', and part of the cloister of the nunnery still exists in the corner of a dank London park.
In due course Nottingham Castle, the last great house of the Cavendishes, became something of a white elephant. William's grandson died only four years after William's own death in 1676, so the line of Dukes of Newcastle for whom William had built this 'new castle' petered out after only two generations. After the subsequent spat among a number of claimants to William's legacy, the castle ended up in the possession of Thomas Pelham, a relation by marriage of one of William's granddaughters. Pelham complained, 'seeing the Bare shell of ye House can be of little or no value, but rather an expence', but his architect, the playwright John Vanbrugh, with his eye for the dramatic, persuaded him to choose 'this Castle for [his] Northern Seat'.5 Improvements made the draughty house tolerably comfortable, but it was to be burnt down by rioters in 1831. Then the equestrian statue of William Cavendish was pulled down, and by some strange chance his carved foot ended up on the floor of a junk shop in Victorian London.6 Rebuilt by the local architect Thomas Chambers Hine, the castle is now the city's art gallery.
The lasting reputation of William's fellow Cavaliers rose again with the nineteenth-century Romantic movement. G. M. Trevelyan's rose-tinted description of Charles I's courtiers, using St John's College in Oxford as their Civil War headquarters, stands out as an evocation of their attraction: 'They strolled through the garden, as the hopeless evenings fell, listening, at the end of all, while the siege guns broke the silence with ominous iteration. Behind the cannon on those low hills to northward were ranked the inexorable men who came to lay their hands on all this beauty, hoping to change it to strength and sterner virtue.'7 The authors of the spoof history textbook 1066 and All That expressed the same idea in a different way:
Charles I was a Cavalier King and therefore had a small pointed beard, long flowing curls, a large, flat, flowing hat and gay attire. The Roundheads, on the other hand, were clean-shaven and wore tall, conical hats, white ties and sombre garments. Under these circumstances a Civil War was inevitable.8
William Cavendish has a well-deserved place among the 'wrong but romantic' Cavaliers, but his reputation has been fiercely contested. On the one hand, those like Horace Walpole condemn William and Margaret's social and literary pretension. 'What a picture of foolish nobility was this stately poetic couple,' he writes, 'retired to their own little domain, and intoxicating one another with circumstantial flattery on what was of consequence to no mortal but themselves!'9 Yet William's apologists, won over by Margaret's hagiographical biography, take him at his wife's estimation: brave, generous and loyal. Geoffrey Trease, better known as a children's writer, took this view in Portrait of a Cavalier in 1979, which lovingly portrayed all of William's blithe charm, spirit and optimism.
According to the censorious Lucy Hutchinson, William never found a comfortable place for himself in London and should have remained in the Midlands: it was 'a foolish ambition of glorious slavery' that 'carried him to Court, where he ran himselfe much in to debt'.10 In 2003, I, too, felt the lure of London and became Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity that looks after the unoccupied royal palaces of the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the state apartments at Kensington Palace, the Banqueting House at Whitehall and Kew Palace in Kew Gardens.
Here in London, the palaces are magnificent, the documentary sources are rich and the royal dramatis personae melodramatic. Yet I left behind me in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire my fondest memories of William, the eccentric, erratic, maddening and ridiculous - yet 'LoyalP and lovable - Duke of Newcastle.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the people who helped me along the way with this book and the D.Phil, thesis upon which it is based. First and foremost are Maurice Howard, a super supervisor, and Mark Girouard, who, through his book Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House, first introduced me to Bolsover Castle. The following people all helped with either encouragement or information or both: Malcolm Airs, Charles Avery, Catherine Barne, Susan Bracken, Steven Brindle, Karen Britland, Anne Brookes, Clare Browne, John Burditt, James Campbell, Rosa Schiano di Cola, Marie-Louise Coolahan, Rosalys Coope, Nicholas Cooper, Tarnya Cooper, Ben Cowell, Gillian Darley, Carl Depauw, David Durant, Trevor Foulds, Alan Gardner, Robert Harding, Paula Henderson, Adrian Henstock, Robert Howard, David Howarth, Liz James, Nigel Llewellyn, Arthur McGregor, David Mitchell, Sir Oliver Millar, Richard Morris, Christopher Norton, Lawrence Stewart Owens, Michael Partington, Timothy Raylor, the late Annabel Ricketts, Christopher Ridgeway, Martin Ripley, Harry Rowland, Barney Sloane, John Thorneycroft, Rutger Tijs, Malcolm Underwood, Anthony Wells-Cole, Adam White, Amanda White, David Withey, Adrian Woodhouse, Rosemary and the late Patrick Wormald, and Sir Marcus Worsley.
I'm particularly grateful to my former colleagues from English Heritage's Bolsover Castle project: Tom Addyman, Mark Askey, Glyn Coppack, Judith Dobie, Tony Fleming, Nick Hill, Helen Hughes, Richard Lea, Stephen Paine, Richard Sheppard and Mike Sutherill. For access to Cavendish buildings, I'm indebted to Derek Adlam and Keith Crosland at Welbeck Abbey, and especially Derek for all sorts of help; to Dawn Beer and Charles Sample at Bothal Castle; Mr and Mrs Boanas at Ogle Castle; Tony and Joy Shaw Browne at Cavendish Lodge, Clipstone, and of course, my most sincere thanks go to John Coulson, Christine Paulson, Sarah Chapman and all the girls both now and formerly at Bolsover Castle.
s To my friends the curators of the exhibition 'Royalist Refugees' in To my friends the curators of the exhibition 'Royalist Refugees' in Antwerp in 2006 I give special thanks: Ben van Beneden, Ursula Harting, Karen Hearn, Lynn Hulse, James Knowles, Simon Stock and Nora de Poorter.
Peter Furtado has kindly allowed me to reproduce material from my article 'Reining Cavaliers' in History Today, Vol. 54 (9), September, 2004, pp. 9-15. Dorothy Johnson gave me kind permission to quote from the Portland collection in the Department of Special Collections and Manuscripts at the University of Nottingham, where I've felt very welcome. Thanks, too, to the Society of Antiquaries and the British Academy for their financial support of earlier parts of this research, especially those leading to my article on William's architectural patronage in the Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society's 2006 volume.
For advice and encouragement about book-writing, I am grateful to the late Giles Worsley, Michael Jones, Simon Jenkins and Zoe Pagnamenta. Felicity Bryan is electricity in human form. Julian Loose is an evil genius as an editor, always cruel, always right and always funny. The very kind people who read and improved various drafts for me were: David Adshead, Mark Askey, Ian Bahrami, Ben van Beneden, Gillian Blake, John Cloake, John Coulson, Heather Ewing, Esther Godfrey, Karen Hearn, Paula Henderson, Nick Hill, Katherine Ibbett, Ann Plackett, Lindsay Sagnette, Julie Sanders, David Swinscoe, Elaine Walker, Jenni Waugh and Henry Volans. Of course, the mistakes are mine, not theirs, and like Margaret Cavendish in her preface to her biography of William Cavendish, I hope that whatsoever 'shall be found amiss, will be favourably pardoned by the candid readers, to whom I wish all manner of happiness'.
My final thanks go with love to Peter, Enid and Tom Worsley. This book is dedicated to Mark Hines, with thanks for our ten happy years together.
PICTURE CREDITS
Plate Sections
i: © The Palace of Westminster. 2, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 20, 29: © English Heritage. 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 25, 30: Private Collection. 5: Paula Henderson. 10: Lucy Worsley. 11, 16: Chris Puddephatt. 12, 18, 21, 22: The Royal Collection © 2007 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 23, 26: Stad Antwerpen © Foto: Collectiebeleid. 24: Museo del Prado, Madrid. 27: Stad Antwerpen © Foto: Stefan Dewickere. 28: National Portrait Gallery, London
Illustrations in the Text
1, 9, 13-15, 19, 20, 26, 33, 35, 42: Mark Hines. 2: From an engraving in Francis Sandford, 'The Solemn interment of George Duke of Albemarle' (1670), plate 3, His Grace's Watermen 12. British Library shelfmark Tab.1315.b- 3: Royal Institute of British Architects Library, Drawings Collection, The Smythson Collection, III / I(I). 4: From Randle Holme, An Academie or Store of Armory & Blazon (Book III, Chapter 9, plate 3), apparently published in 1688. British Library shelfmark CUP25.C.8. 5, 22: The Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement. 6: From V. Scamozzi, Les Cinq Ordres d'architecture de Vincent Scamozzi (Paris, 1685), facing: Historic Royal Palaces. 8: RIBA Drawings Collection. The second is from The Smythson Collection, III/13. 10: Engraving by Lucas Vorstermans after Abraham van Diepenbeeck, in William Cavendish, Methode Nouvelle et Invention Extraordinaire de dresser les Chevaux (Antwerp, 1657-8) Plate 8. 11: RIBA Drawings Collection, The Smythson Collection, III/i(3). 12: Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge. 16: By courtesy of Sir Reresby Sitwell. 17: RIBA Drawings Collection, The Smythson Collection, III/I (II). 18: An engraving, by Thod. van Kesel after Abraham van Diepenbeeck, in William Cavendish (1657-8), Plate 35. 21: Georg Phillip Harsdorffer, Vollstandiges und von newem vermehrtes Trincir-Buch (Nuremberg, 1665), British Library shelfmark BL 1037C18. 23: 'The Sucklington Faction or Roaring Boyes' (1641), British Library shelfmark 669f4(26). 24: The Duke of Northumber-land/Syon House. 25, 36: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 27: Illustration from Sir John Harrington, The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), British Library shelfmark C21A5. 28: © The British Museum, Wenceslaus Hollar's print of Richmond (1638), no. 1058 in Pennington's index of Hollar's works. 29: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. 30: Illustrated in John Cruso, Militarie Instructions for the CAVALL'RIE (1632), British Library shelfmark 717.rn.18. 31: © The British Museum, no. 547 in Pennington's index of Hollar's works. 32: From The Bloody Prince, or a Declaration of the most cruel practices of Prince Rupert and the rest of the Cavaliers (1643), British Library Thomason Tracts E99.14. 34: 'A DOGS ELEGY OR RUPERT'S TEARS', (London, 27th July, 1644), British Library shelfmark £.3(17). 37: Prints by J. Harrewijn, courtesy of the Rubenshuis museum. 38: Erasmus de Bie, View of the Meir (Gezicht op de Meir). Collection: Musee d'Lxelles, Brussels. Photography: Mixed Media, Brussels. 39: From Margaret Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters (London, 1664), frontispiece. 40: Nottingham University Hallward Library, Department of Special Collections and Manuscripts, Pw V/25, f.14or. 41: A print by Marcus Willemsz Doornick (1666), The Guildhall Library, Corporation of London. 43: From the 'Crowle Pennant', the collector's edition of Thomas Pennant's Some Account of London, Westminster and Southwark (London, 1790), Vol. 7, Plate 291 © The British Museum. 44: From Francis Hawkins (trans.), Youths Behaviour (London, 1654), British Library shelfmark 8405aaaio. 45: Frontispiece from Margaret Cavendish, The World's Olio (London, 1671). 46: From Avray H. Tipping, English Homes, Vol. 3, No. 1, Late Tudor (1922). 47: Image by John Clee, reproduced in Charles Deering, Nottinghamia vetus et nova, or an Historical Account of the Ancient and Present State of the town of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1751), facing, British Library shelfmark 984.C7. 48: The Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey. Chapter openers: British Library, shelfmark CUP25.C.8. British Library illustrations all © the British Library Board. All rights reserved.
