The Devonshires, by Roy Hattersley – review

Recalling being taken as a teenager on repeated outings to see Chatsworth, Roy Hattersley disarmingly confesses that in those days ‘I was impressed by neither the pictures nor the furniture’. Over the past three years, while working in the Chatsworth archives on this history of its owners, the Cavendish Dukes of Devonshire, Hattersley would break off from research to roam the rooms and reacquaint himself with the house’s treasures. Yet if he is now more appreciative of its contents, he is not completely under the spell of Chatsworth’s past occupants.

The ‘founding mother’ of the Devonshire dynasty was the Tudor virago known as Bess of Hardwick. Aged 20 in 1549 she married her second husband, Sir William Cavendish, a widower in his forties who had made money from the dissolution of the monasteries. Having purchased an estate at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, they started building a house there in 1551. After Sir William’s death Bess remarried twice, both times to rich men, using her husbands’ considerable wealth  to complete work at Chatsworth and to build the magnificent Hardwick Hall nearby.