Submitted in Fulfilment for the Degree of Doctor Of
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Submitted in fulfilment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, Brunel University, London February 2018. Title: Re-Reading Women’s Patronage: The Cavendish/Talbot/Ogle Circle Name: Collette Wheeler Primary Supervisor: Prof. James Knowles Secondary Supervisor: Prof. William Leahy Word Count: 108,263 1 | P a g e Re-Reading Women’s Patronage: The Cavendish/Talbot/Ogle Circle. 2 | P a g e Contents Acknowledgements 5 1. Introduction 7 2. Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury: The Beginning of the Hardwick/Cavendish Legacy 78 3. The Rise, The Fall, and The Rise Again: The Political Failures and Successes of the Next Generation of Cavendish Women 121 4. The Newcastle Cavendishes: The Role of William Cavendish and his first Wife Elizabeth Bassett on the Continuance of and Alteration to the Cavendish Family Legacy 172 3 | P a g e 5. Creating Their Own Writing Through Their Pen: The Importance of Writing in the Cavendish Family and its Uses for Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Bassett 232 6. Conclusion 298 Bibliography. 306 4 | P a g e Acknowledgements I suppose first and foremost I must pay homage to the women whose lives I have researched for this thesis and whom I have come to admire for their strength, self-awareness and attitude. To have led such lives that 400 years later are still worthy of attention is truly a feat of achievement. The Cavendish women have opened my eyes, all these years later, not only about what women during their own period were capable of, but what women today can be capable of as well. Secondly I must thank my ever patient, constantly encouraging supervisor, Professor James Knowles, who was always very quick to point out that my stubborn belief that my theories were right did not necessarily make them fact. James was always ready to listen to my crazy theories that generally had little more than my own imagination to help support them, and did not (always) entirely disregard them but gave me the push to pursue them further. Thanks to Brunel University as a whole, who have given me guidance and support throughout my degree. To all the librarians in the British Library who helped me with the vast amount of books that I got out nearly every day and who helped me find the correct volumes when I hit a brick wall with their catalogue. Their friendly smiles in the morning always helped to brighten what was likely to be a tiresome day spent in front of a large pile of books. Also to those at Nottingham University’s Manuscript and Special Collection Reading Room at King’s Meadows Campus and those at Nottingham County Council Archives who not only helped me with the materials but also gave me directions on how best to get back to my hotel. A massive thank you to Elena Williams at Hardwick Hall for her guided tour around a building that I had, for so long, only been able to examine and analyse through a series of books. Her words of wisdom about the great lady who lived there and her in depth 5 | P a g e knowledge of the building did nothing but make me more inspired by the story Hardwick Hall had to tell. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, to my friends and family who have been a constant support system to me throughout my degree and have always been there when I’ve had a low day and needed inspiration to keep going; never becoming annoyed when at the last minute I have had to cancel plans because of “chapter problems”. Special thanks goes to my mum, who now probably knows just as much as me about these women as she listened to every idea I had, read through every chapter I wrote and argued through every theory I presented her with. I’m not sure I would have got through these last four years without her. 6 | P a g e Chapter 1 7 | P a g e Introduction. In his book, Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642-1660, Dale B.J. Randall ponders the importance of the Cavendish family’s influence on literary output during the Civil War and post-Civil War era: “Why might the Cavendishes warrant a chapter of their own? Simply put, we rarely find so many members of a single family concerned with writing drama.”1 While certainly, this is true, when one looks closer into this family you realise there is more at work within the confines of their activities than simply their dramatic writing concerns. What this thesis will attempt to do is take Randall's statement further and look at the reasons why the Cavendish women not only partook in patronage but what they ultimately achieved through their activities. In Randall's work, he focuses on the influence of the Newcastle Cavendishes – William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, his second wife Margaret Lucas Cavendish, and two of his daughters, Elizabeth and Jane. While I am not contradicting Randall’s thesis that the concentration of literary endeavours within these two generations is indeed unusual, this thesis will look at further generations and expand upon Randall’s original thesis and try to ascertain how this rare familial interest came about. Randall’s focus on William Cavendish and his family suggests that it is only within these members of the Cavendish clan as a whole that we are able to find the extraordinary. What this thesis is arguing is that the Newcastle Cavendishes are in fact the end product of nearly a century’s worth of work, planning and scheming, and in fact the real intrigue of this family is not its dramatic production or even the patronage activity that the Cavendishes as a whole provided and thrived at, but the female empowerment and evolution of power that underlies all of it. I will argue how the traces of this family activity can be found all the way through to the actions of the Cavendish family matriarch, Elizabeth Hardwick Barley 1 Dale B. J. Randall, Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642-1660 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 313. 8 | P a g e Cavendish St Loe Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, better known as Bess of Hardwick. The impact and significance of the actions she took during her lifetime can be seen through the generations in the activities of her descendants, though most notably the female ones, perhaps becoming most clear in the literary writings of her great-granddaughters Jane and Elizabeth. I shall, therefore, be arguing that, while Randall's argument that the extraordinary interest of so many members of the Newcastle Cavendish family is worthy of exploration, the extraordinary does not end with their literary output. Ultimately, through the actions of this family as a whole, we are able to see the beginnings of a female, familial evolution of power developing through the patronage ties held by family members during this period. This thesis will try to understand how they achieved this by examining the importance that patronage had as a form of female empowerment and a means of progression, and how that affected the lives of these sixteenth and seventeenth-century women. It will, therefore, follow the lives of key women linked with the Cavendish family but will focus predominately on the women of what would become the Newcastle line of the family. It will also be continually assessing whether these women were unique in their activities or whether their actions could be read as a model that could be projected on a wider societal scale. The thesis will examine the relationship between female kin and what role those relationships had on the development of women pursuing positions in what was essentially a patriarchal sphere. It will demonstrate how, by looking to their familial past and mimicking and taking inspiration from their female ancestors, the women in this family were remarkably pulling themselves further into the future, using that past inspiration to push their empowerment journey further. Looking at their lives in this way is a break from the current scholarly approach to the examination of female relationships, which currently seems to only analyse the relationships that women had with their contemporaries, rather than with their past. Gemma Allen looks at the relationship of sisters in her study of the Cooke sisters, while Sara Mendelson and Patricia 9 | P a g e Crawford look at the relationships that women have with their female neighbours, their female friends, and their direct female relatives. Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben edited a collection of essays that examines the relationships that women had as ladies in waiting with their contemporary aristocratic friends (and enemies). Even people who have studied the Cavendish family haven’t been able to look past one generation’s effects on the other. In his biography of Bess, David Durant doesn’t look past the relationships, or indeed influence, that she had over her family apart from the ones she had with her children and Arbella, the people who came in direct contact with her. S. P. Cerasan, Marion Wynne-Davies, and Margaret J. M. Ezell, whom all looked at the writing of Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, suggest there are feministic undertones to their plays and poetry, yet fail to look past their father, whom they credit with their girls' free spirit, and the war, which gave them the freedom they would subsequently desire in marriage.2 Not one considers an influence from their mother to be worthy of exploration for their unconventional feminist beliefs, let alone any other female ancestors.