On a Derbyshire hill, Hardwick Hall raises its towers crowned with immense windows, so vast that contemporaries summed up the house in a phrase that has stayed famous: 'Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.' It is the masterpiece of the architect Robert Smythson — and the monument of an extraordinary woman, Bess of Hardwick.
Bess of Hardwick, the builder
Born into a modest Derbyshire family, Elizabeth Talbot, known as Bess of Hardwick (1527-1608), rose through four successive marriages to become, after Elizabeth I, the richest woman in England. Her husbands — Robert Barlow, Sir William Cavendish, Sir William St Loe, then George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury — each left her fortune and lands. It was with her last husband that the couple had the keeping of Mary Queen of Scots, captive in England, whom they guarded for nearly fifteen years. Widowed for the fourth time and estranged from Shrewsbury, Bess returned to her native lands and, at over sixty, set out to build the house that would carry her name and her glory. Between 1590 and 1597 she had Hardwick raised by the finest architect of the age, Robert Smythson, while finishing beside it the 'Old Hall' whose neighbouring ruins survive. The house is the assertion of a female power without equal: on top of every tower, her initials 'ES' (Elizabeth Shrewsbury), carved in openwork stone and crowned, proclaim to all the winds whose palace this is.
The triumph of glass
Hardwick carries Elizabethan architecture to its height. Its perfectly symmetrical façade rises in a cliff of windows growing ever taller the higher one climbs: on the top floor, the state rooms bathe in a light then unheard of, for glass, still costly, was an ostentatious luxury. Smythson's daring was to reverse the usual logic: here the highest and most luminous rooms are the noblest, against the grain of medieval houses. Inside, a great stone staircase climbs slowly, almost processional, up to the 'High Great Chamber', adorned with a sumptuous painted plaster frieze depicting a forest scene and the court of Diana, and up to the long gallery, one of the vastest in England, hung with the so-called Gideon tapestries and peopled with portraits.
What to see
- The symmetrical glass façade, 'more glass than wall'.
- The crowned initials 'ES' on top of the six towers.
- The High Great Chamber and its plaster frieze of the court of Diana.
- The long gallery, its Gideon tapestries and portraits; the embroideries and original furniture.
Seeing it differently
Lift your eye up the façade: the windows grow floor by floor, as if to warn that the most precious things happen high up. Seek, in silhouette against the sky, the six towers and their crowned 'ES' — a signature in stone by a woman who had nothing to prove but to herself. Inside, follow the path Bess intended: one climbs the stair, crosses rooms ever more luminous, up to the summit where light, plaster and wool compose a theatre of prestige. Hardwick is not so much visited as ascended; and each step was, for an Elizabethan guest, a lesson in hierarchy.
Did you know?
Glass, in the sixteenth century, was expensive: to crown one's towers with immense windows was, for Bess of Hardwick, a way of displaying her fortune as surely as covering her walls with gold. The phrase 'Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall' was not only a description: it was the observation, admiring or envious, that a woman who had started with nothing was affording herself the most insolent of luxuries — light.
Notes
Hardwick Hall lies near Chesterfield, in Derbyshire; the house is in the care of the National Trust, and the neighbouring ruined 'Old Hall' in that of English Heritage.
Quiz
- Which famous phrase sums up the architecture of Hardwick Hall?
- 'More glass than wall'
- 'The brick palace'
- 'The house without windows'
- Which woman had Hardwick Hall built?
- Bess of Hardwick
- Elizabeth I
- Mary Queen of Scots
- What is seen, carved, on top of the towers?
- The builder's initials 'ES'
- The king's arms
- A clock