More glass than wall
It's over a week ago now, but on my way home from Yorkshire I decided to stop at a classier place than the service station. I had my National Trust card with me, so I turned left after about an hour.
This is one of the great treasure palaces of the NT's collection. It was built in the early seventeenth century for Bess of Hardwick, an astonishing, indomitable woman, who saw off four husbands, was as close a female friend as Elizabeth I ever had and became the second richest woman in the kingdom.
There are two halls at Hardwick, not far from the small manor where Bess was born. One is now ruinous - the Cavendish family unaccountably didn't feel the need to maintain two enormous palaces within yards of each other. The Old Hall (only older by a few years - they were actually being built at the same time) is interesting, but I didn't really have time for it in a glorified refreshment stop.
The Old Hall:
This is the New Hall, from the car park.
Glass was still expensive in the 1590s, when this place was planned; no house had ever been built with so many huge windows. Indeed, some of the windows are only for ostentation - some have walls behind them, or staircases. This was originally a servants' stair, for example:
The front of the house is in a walled garden, where they sell plants and random costumed people stroll around from time to time.
This is the frontage to which the jingle applies: "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall", though the other sides are similarly glazed.
You may note that at the top of the house a pair of initials are repeated frequently. The E is for Elizabeth, the S for "Shrewsbury". Her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsbury was a disaster in most ways, not helped by the fact that he was officially in charge of Mary, Queen of Scots for over a decade. But it gave Bess a title she'd worked for, so "ES" is displayed everywhere, such as on this piece of exquisite and pointless embroidery on velvet, possibly done by Bess herself.
Hardwick is well-known for its textiles. Bess was an expert and exacting needlewoman herself, and kept her household to a high standard. She is believed to have spent time with Mary Queen of Scots doing embroidery, and there are many impressive examples of the art in the house, as well as tapestries which still look good despite the passage of time and the fading of pigments. This is needlepoint, for example - the entire surface covered in regular, tiny stitches.
This is only part of a huge piece which covered a huge table once. The colours have faded more than a little - there would have been red where the brown is, flesh tones, rich blues and greens.
This one is appliqué on velvet, much of which has rubbed away.
This is the raised embroidery known as "stumpwork", at which Bess was particularly skilled.
Hardwick was built to impress. Bess's daughter had married the brother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots, = Darnley's brother - and thus her grand-daughter had a claim of sorts to the throne. Hardwick was designed at a suitable setting for "my jewel, Arbell", and also to overawe and impress all visitors. It had huge stone staircases, integrated into the building, and on a scale intended for sweeping up and down.
They are lined in rich tapestries and by the time you had made it to the top, you would know you were about to see Someone Very Important Indeed.
At the top was the Great High Chamber, not only tapestried but with astonishing plaster-work all round.
If you were truly honoured, or an intimate of My Lady, you might even be invited to join her in the Long Gallery, a sort of cross between an art gallery and a personal gym, where ladies could exercise in the dank weather only too common in the North Midlands.
Here's some of the Art:
That one's The Boss - the Queen who was such a close friend of Bess that she gave her the most valuable State Prisoner of the century to look after. Right.
Rather sweetly, the Long Gallery also has loads of things for children to do - a table with materials to create a self-portrait, for example, and Tudor-style clothes to dress up in.
I was only there for an hour, so I skipped some of the grand rooms. There were a lot of impressive curtained beds.
The house is in such good condition because Bess built so many of them, and her descendants (actually, most of the nobility of England have her somewhere in the family tree) preferred Chatsworth, which was modernised about three hundred years ago and again by the Victorians. Hardwick became the family's Dower House, where a widowed Duchess of Devonshire could live, not too far from the family, but far enough away not to interfere. The last Dowager Duchess to reside there did so in the 30s, and you can see her suite of rooms, much as she left it. This is her bath:
Families like this - the Cavendishes - never run out of space to store stuff, so old-fashioned things are just put out of the way rather than thrown out. There's a carrying chair, presumably used for a Dowager Duchess:
It was in a room full of old toys, furniture, oddments no-one could bear to throw out.
There's another set of grand stairs to go down - you can't use the same set for up and down now, can you?
This was a real lighting tour - I missed out several suites of rooms, because I wanted to get home before serious Friday evening traffic started. The Hall is within sight of the motorway, though, and does a much better plate of salad than the Services. I shall return.
This is the view from the front of the house, to finish on. It's on top of a big hill.
Since my return I have mostly been helping R with sewing and packing. This weekend we helped both daughters move.
But that's another story, for another post...
This is one of the great treasure palaces of the NT's collection. It was built in the early seventeenth century for Bess of Hardwick, an astonishing, indomitable woman, who saw off four husbands, was as close a female friend as Elizabeth I ever had and became the second richest woman in the kingdom.
There are two halls at Hardwick, not far from the small manor where Bess was born. One is now ruinous - the Cavendish family unaccountably didn't feel the need to maintain two enormous palaces within yards of each other. The Old Hall (only older by a few years - they were actually being built at the same time) is interesting, but I didn't really have time for it in a glorified refreshment stop.
The Old Hall:
This is the New Hall, from the car park.
Glass was still expensive in the 1590s, when this place was planned; no house had ever been built with so many huge windows. Indeed, some of the windows are only for ostentation - some have walls behind them, or staircases. This was originally a servants' stair, for example:
The front of the house is in a walled garden, where they sell plants and random costumed people stroll around from time to time.
This is the frontage to which the jingle applies: "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall", though the other sides are similarly glazed.
You may note that at the top of the house a pair of initials are repeated frequently. The E is for Elizabeth, the S for "Shrewsbury". Her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsbury was a disaster in most ways, not helped by the fact that he was officially in charge of Mary, Queen of Scots for over a decade. But it gave Bess a title she'd worked for, so "ES" is displayed everywhere, such as on this piece of exquisite and pointless embroidery on velvet, possibly done by Bess herself.
Hardwick is well-known for its textiles. Bess was an expert and exacting needlewoman herself, and kept her household to a high standard. She is believed to have spent time with Mary Queen of Scots doing embroidery, and there are many impressive examples of the art in the house, as well as tapestries which still look good despite the passage of time and the fading of pigments. This is needlepoint, for example - the entire surface covered in regular, tiny stitches.
This is only part of a huge piece which covered a huge table once. The colours have faded more than a little - there would have been red where the brown is, flesh tones, rich blues and greens.
This one is appliqué on velvet, much of which has rubbed away.
This is the raised embroidery known as "stumpwork", at which Bess was particularly skilled.
Hardwick was built to impress. Bess's daughter had married the brother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots, = Darnley's brother - and thus her grand-daughter had a claim of sorts to the throne. Hardwick was designed at a suitable setting for "my jewel, Arbell", and also to overawe and impress all visitors. It had huge stone staircases, integrated into the building, and on a scale intended for sweeping up and down.
They are lined in rich tapestries and by the time you had made it to the top, you would know you were about to see Someone Very Important Indeed.
At the top was the Great High Chamber, not only tapestried but with astonishing plaster-work all round.
If you were truly honoured, or an intimate of My Lady, you might even be invited to join her in the Long Gallery, a sort of cross between an art gallery and a personal gym, where ladies could exercise in the dank weather only too common in the North Midlands.
Here's some of the Art:
That one's The Boss - the Queen who was such a close friend of Bess that she gave her the most valuable State Prisoner of the century to look after. Right.
Rather sweetly, the Long Gallery also has loads of things for children to do - a table with materials to create a self-portrait, for example, and Tudor-style clothes to dress up in.
I was only there for an hour, so I skipped some of the grand rooms. There were a lot of impressive curtained beds.
The house is in such good condition because Bess built so many of them, and her descendants (actually, most of the nobility of England have her somewhere in the family tree) preferred Chatsworth, which was modernised about three hundred years ago and again by the Victorians. Hardwick became the family's Dower House, where a widowed Duchess of Devonshire could live, not too far from the family, but far enough away not to interfere. The last Dowager Duchess to reside there did so in the 30s, and you can see her suite of rooms, much as she left it. This is her bath:
Families like this - the Cavendishes - never run out of space to store stuff, so old-fashioned things are just put out of the way rather than thrown out. There's a carrying chair, presumably used for a Dowager Duchess:
It was in a room full of old toys, furniture, oddments no-one could bear to throw out.
There's another set of grand stairs to go down - you can't use the same set for up and down now, can you?
This was a real lighting tour - I missed out several suites of rooms, because I wanted to get home before serious Friday evening traffic started. The Hall is within sight of the motorway, though, and does a much better plate of salad than the Services. I shall return.
This is the view from the front of the house, to finish on. It's on top of a big hill.
Since my return I have mostly been helping R with sewing and packing. This weekend we helped both daughters move.
But that's another story, for another post...