Derbyshire

It is possible to establish a connexion between a number of Derbyshire Members and the lady known to posterity as Bess of Hardwick, who was building up her dynasties there during this period. Thomas Kniveton (1559) was the husband of her half-sister and confidential woman of business; Sir William St. Loe (1563) was her third husband; Gilbert Talbot, later 7th Earl of Shrewsbury (1572) and Henry Talbot (1584, 1586), her stepsons, Henry Cavendish (1572, 1584, 1586, 1589, 1593) her son, and George Manners (1593) married her granddaughter. But there is no evidence that Bess of Hardwick took any active part in manipulating county elections, and all the Members excepting Sir William St. Loe were local country gentlemen and/or related to her fourth husband, the 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, lord lieutenant of Derbyshire. St. Loe indeed may have owed his election to his wife. It was the first opportunity after their marriage for the county to pay a compliment to a highly placed married couple, one of whom had strong local ties, and at a time when neither the Cavendishes nor the Talbots had an heir of suitable age. But one swallow does not make a summer and more than close family ties must be demonstrated before Bess of Hardwick can be accepted as a power in county elections. Henry Cavendish, five times knight of the shire for Derbyshire, was at odds with his mother almost all his adult life. She referred to him as ‘my bad son Henry’, strong language for the time, and she finally cut him out of her will. So she did Gilbert Talbot, who had supported her during her estrangement from his father. However, Henry Cavendish and Gilbert were themselves friends in 1572, having married into each other’s families and having recently returned from a Continental tour together. Although a little young—Talbot was 19 and Cavendish 21—they were natural choices. Talbot, because of his superior social status, took the senior seat. He did not sit in the Commons again, and finally fell out with Bess over his father’s will in the 1590s. Henry Cavendish sat in each Parliament until 1593, but the absence of his name from the journals and his own private life indicate that it was other interests that attracted him to London. The Cavendish-Talbot hold on the Derbyshire seats was complete from 1572 until 1588, the only sign of any dissension being a note—dated 15 Nov. 2584 and obviously written in response to a previous instruction of Shrewsbury’s—from one of the 6th Earl’s servants at Wingfield to his master at Chelsea saying that he had written to various officers of the Earl ‘to prevent the election of Sir Charles Cavendish as a knight of the shire’.HMC Shrewsbury and Talbot, ii. 130. Two days later John Harpur, who was himself to be elected for the county in 1597, wrote to Shrewsbury to say that he and Sir John Zouche, father of the 1589 man, were worried about the election, and had arranged for some of Shrewsbury’s friends to meet them at Derby to ensure the election of Henry Talbot and Henry Cavendish. As this was during the estrangement between Earl and Countess, the indications are that an attempt was being made to replace Henry Cavendish, who was on bad terms with his mother, by his brother, who was her favourite. In any case nothing more is heard of this—if anyone was able to exercise a power of veto over Derbyshire election candidates it was the Earl of Shrewsbury. The 1597 Members, Thomas Gresley of Drakelowe and John Harpur of Swarkeston, were both followers of the earls of Shrewsbury, Harpur being devoted to the 7th Earl ‘body and soul’. The Curzons of Kedleston, later to be so prominent in Derbyshire, were represented as knights of the shire in this period by Francis Curzon (1571). Peter Fretchvile (1601) was elected just before he was made sheriff of the county. Having tried unsuccessfully to evade the shrievalty he obtained leave of absence from the House in December to attend to his duties in the county.

Some of the Derbyshire MPs were Catholics or had Catholic connexions, among them Nicholas Longford (2559) and Sir George Hastings (1566). Also a Catholic was Gilbert Talbot’s wife Mary Cavendish, although her father, mother and husband were of the contrary persuasion.