Chatsworth
Although there was a house and park at Chatsworth in the 15th century, the famous house of today owes its true origin to Bess. Bess, then just Lady Cavendish, and her husband purchased Chatsworth in 1549, and she spent the next 30 years building a grand dwelling befitting a woman of her station. Bess’s house, of which little survives in the current iteration, was medieval in appearance, with battlements, turrets, and three floors. Although this sort of design was dated even when building began in 1553, Bess’s Chatsworth was the first country house built in the North of England.
The hunting tower Bess built in the 1580s still stands above the current house. But perhaps her most visible legacy at Chatsworth today is the outside. To the existing hunting park that adjoined the house, Bess added pleasure gardens, orchards, terraces, fish ponds, and gazebos. The wooded hillside behind the current house is covered with trees Bess had planted on the bare hill. Sadly, the house the Cavendishes built at Chatsworth was intended to be the seat of their new dynasty, but Sir William’s death but a stop to the plan. Bess, however, happily lived to see the project completed.
Bess was as determined in her building projects as she was in other areas of her life. Surviving correspondence from the construction of Chatsworth dating to 1561 reveals her uncompromising approach to workmen: ‘if he do tell you he is any penny behind for work done… he doth lie like a false knave… and as for that other mason, that Sir Thomas Folijambe told you of, if he will not apply his work, you know he is no mete [suitable] man for me’. It was a brave, or rather foolish, man who tried to cross Bess of Hardwick.
