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Photo by Richard Keene, Ltd., Derby HARDWICK OLD HALL Page ssss1

There is almost a touch of Becky Sharp in the way that this young girl, dowerless save for the forty marks of dot allotted by John Hardwick to each of his daughters, settled down in that household. There came to London one of her Derbyshire neighbours—a youth of the Barley or Barlow family, named Robert. Under Lady Zouche’s roof he fell sick and the little niece helped to tend him. Whether he also fell in love, whether Mistress Hardwick the mother was minded to “settle” one at least of her girls early, or whether Lady Zouche was of a strong match-making tendency does not appear. But a marriage between the niece and the guest was arranged and quickly carried through. A strange pitiful affair it must have been—that London wedding between the red-haired child and the sickly young man—a ceremony trailing after it a sorry hope of happiness in the midst of physicking and nostrums, weakness and watching, until the death of the bridegroom before the bride had reached her fourteenth year. His death left no apparent gap in my Lady Zouche’s household and no mark upon history. But it bestowed on the child-wife the dignity of widowhood, and such importance, plus her forty marks, as attached to any property that Robert Barlow left her. The Barlows were not wealthy. Some of them in after years were in sore straits for a living. The State Papers show the existence of piteous letters from a certain Jane Barlow who writes in January, 1583, to her father, Alexander Barlow, “from a foreign land.” She is in extreme want, forced to borrow money to carry on her “business,” and assures him that the meanest servant he has “liveth in far better condition than she.” There is nothing to show that the Barlows applied to their relation “Bess” in after years for help. Such property as there was passed to her, and she travelled out of their ken into richer circles.