Читать книгу Bess of Hardwick and Her Circle онлайн

30 страница из 82

George, the sixth earl, the great gentleman now dealt with, inherited all the administrative qualities of his ancestors, though he was less intimately associated with war than his father Francis. It was well also that his duties should have been to a greater extent civil and defensive than military and aggressive. For he had stepped into a great inheritance, and his burdens, as householder and county magnate, were stupendous. The manors and castles of Worksop, Welbeck, Bolsover, Sheffield, Tutbury, Wingfield, and Rufford were all his. He came into his own in 1560. The greatest gift he received in that year was the Garter which the Queen bestowed on him. Five years later he was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of the counties of York, Nottingham, and Derby. Subsequently the post of High Steward in the place of the unhappy fifth Duke of Norfolk was added to his honours. In the third year of his lieutenancy the affair with Bess Hardwick was in full swing.

From both sides it was a reasonable and profitable alliance. He was a widower with sons and daughters who needed mothering. Her children needed a father. There was wealth enough to provide for all. Yet possibly family dissensions might arise amongst the young folk. But against this risk my lady had devised a splendid scheme of protection—the intermarriage of some of the children. They were but children, the two couples—Gilbert Talbot, the fifteen-year-old second son of the Lord-Lieutenant and Mary Cavendish, and the bride’s son Henry Cavendish, to whom Grace Talbot, the Earl’s daughter, was given as wife.