Hardwick Hall

Hardwick Hall: Square, Imposing and crystalline.

Hardwick hall was the home of the Elizabethan heiress, Elizabeth Shrewsbury. “Bess”, as she was known, was born c1527 into a relatively unimportant gentry family*. In those days women could only make social progress via marriage and/or inheritance and in Bess’s case she was blessed with four advantageous marriages  outliving each successive husband, and each time she got a little richer – quite a bit richer, in fact, until she was the second richest woman in England after Queen Elizabeth. Some credit can, I suppose, be given to Elizabethan England in as much as it was not impossible for a woman to become so rich and influential. Bess was in her early sixties when her last husband died in 1590 and shortly after that she started building Hardwick hall as a powerful statement of her position in society. Later generations of her family, however, moved their principle seat to the fashionable baroque pile of Chatsworth, and Hardwick became a little neglected; this may partly explain why even today it has the touch and feel of a time capsule sent from the Elizabethan world.

I recently visited Hardwick hall and I don’t think I have been to a prodigy house that feels so atmospheric and original. This is probably down to a combination of the subdued lighting (always necessary from a conservation point of view), the ancient tapestries filling the walls, and above all the rush carpeting whose smell permeates the place (this is an original Elizabethan touch created by the National Trust who now own the house**); was this how the house smelt in Bess’s day? The famous staircase at Hardwick fulfilled all my expectations of an impressive and idiosyncratic formal processional way to Bess’s great chamber on the second floor. The great chambers of prodigy houses are normally found on the first floor, but as second richest women in the land perhaps Bess was signaling her extra special status by placing her state rooms one floor above the usual level. The great chambers of this time were a far cry from the days when the medieval lord dinned on his dias in the communal entrance hall. The withdrawal of the Lord’s and Lady’s presence from the hall to the great chamber in the upper regions of their houses was a sign of a richer stratified society, as the population was now dispersed over a wider spectrum of wealth.

The National Trust guide book bills the hall as “Hardwick hall, more glass that wall” and this is a reference to its collection of huge closely spaced windows, no doubt a secular application of all that had been learnt from the perpendicular period of ecclesiastical architecture. Like everything else about the house these expensive windows were another conscious display of wealth and ostentation.

Bess was the kind of person who, if it came to a choice between art and impressiveness would likely opt for the latter; for, to my eye the house is more imposing than it is beautiful. The rectangular, unfussy and heavy lines of the hall and the expanse of glass are reminiscent of the 60s modernist tendency to build square glass buildings. Large areas of glass signal optimism, extraversion and self-belief. Moreover, glass as the quasi-invisible crystal wall has that slight otherworldly feel about it, a reaching to heavenly realms perhaps. It probably says a lot about Bess and how she thought of herself.

The renaissance period to which Hardwick belongs was a time when ostentatious displays of individual wealth were less inhibited by a feudal religious milieu; feudalism with its straight jacket on aspiring social mobility was departing. Renaissance humanism promoted the exercise of human gifts, and gloried in the genius of human creativity. It is in the heat of this creative humanist context that an authentic spirituality becomes aware of the potential dangers of an enslaving pride and self indulgence. A studied detachment from the glory of one’s own works and/or wealth is always in order. And yet spiritual detachment can itself go horribly wrong: Having moved amongst some very pious people I have seen how meekness is so easily misinterpreted as the subjection of one’s humanity, and this subjection, Screwtape wise, can itself become a point of pride that manifests itself in affected displays of self-abasement that suppress creativity energy. Accordingly, the pious so easily imprison themselves in an inauthentic humility and become pray to sectarian religion. I have have come to despise what the religious sects stand for – the oppression of humanity and its self expression in favour of the submission to a bland group think based on the lie that salvation is achieved through the imprisonment of the soul. A memorial stone epitaph in a Norwich church warns us about a pious masquerade: “A scholar without pride, a Christian without bigotry, and devout without ostentation”. Ostentation, pride and bigotry are the temptations of the religious ascetic as well as the rich.

When I visit a building like Hardwick I find it a very difficult leap of the imagination to try and recreate in my mind its halcyon days when such buildings would have been considered state of the art. Today it is difficult to see past the dust, the staining, the warping and the general damage these structures have accumulated in their passage through time. In particular, the now faded tapestries of Hardwick would have been far more vibrant than we see today; they are shades of what they once looked like. The ambiance of modernity that would have pervaded Hardwick hall 400 years ago is impossible to duplicate today; although the National Trust do all they can to assist the imagination of the visitor. In its day Hardwick was where it was at and its lady was a towering dignitary whose subjects looked up to. Important though it once was, Hardwick has suffered that inevitable diminishment in significance with time: At one time it was a mountain dominating the social landscape. But as we look back through the distance of time it is seen to be little more than a largish foothill in the cosmic perspective of history.

Footnotes

* It is possible Bess’s family had come up through ranks from the ex-peasant yeomanry; in which case it says a lot for social mobility post-black death.
** I have since learnt that the rush carpeting concept pre-dates the NT, but the NT gets the credit for maintaining and replacing the carpeting as it wears out.