Hardwick Hall

Bess of Hardwick made her own luck, rising to become one of the most powerful figures of Tudor times. We explore her magnificent family home

- Lawrence Alexander

From the second Hardwick Hall heaves into view there’s no doubting whose show it is. High on the parapets the initials E.S. appear fourteen times, each crowned with a ducal coronet. Elizabeth Countess of Shrewsbury knew how to make a statement. Confidence, however, is not the same as unpleasantness and for 400 years Bess of Hardwick has endured a hard rap.

“She was a Tudor woman who had power but has been judged through history for having it,” says Dr Suzannah Lipscomb, co-curator of We Are Bess, an exhibition currently showing in Hardwick Hall’s Long Gallery. “She was a formidable woman in the sense of being strong and capable and inspiring,” continues Lipscomb, “but also kind and generous and thoughtful. That second half of her character has been forgotten by generations of male historians who only stressed Bess’s daunting nature. She was very good at corresponding with the important men of her time but she surrounded herself with women.”

One thing is certain. Without Bess, the two great halls at Hardwick would not exist. She was born, in the mid-1520s, in the Old Hall; not today’s glamorous ruin, opened to the public by English Heritage, but a very modest manor house. Her family was modest too and Bess learned self-reliance at an early age. Almost from the start hers was a life of loss: her father, before she was a year old, four husbands and two children. She may have become the second wealthiest woman in England but grief remains the same down the centuries and Bess knew hard times.