Introduction

Summary

Family

William Cavendish was born on 27 December 1551, the second son of Sir William Cavendish and his third wife, Elizabeth Barley (née Hardwick), generally known as Bess of Hardwick. Of Bess's children by William, her second husband, five survived into adulthood: an elder brother and sister, Henry and Frances; a younger brother, Charles; and two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Mary. Bess married as her fourth husband George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, late in 1567, and on 9 February following, her son and daughter Henry and Mary wed the earl's daughter Grace and his son and heir, Gilbert, respectively. Henry, who lived at Tutbury Abbey, had no legitimate children, although he fathered ‘a host of bastards’. Charles married Margaret, the daughter of Sir Thomas Kitson of Hengrave (Suffolk), in 1581, but the match hardly lasted a year because she died in childbirth in July 1582. He married as his second wife Catherine Ogle, daughter and co-heiress of Cuthbert, 7th Baron Ogle, in 1592. Until 1607 Charles lived at Stoke, four miles from Chatsworth, but in that year he bought Welbeck Abbey from his brother-in-law, Gilbert, and moved in. He acquired Bolsover from Gilbert a year later.4 His elder son, William, who eventually became Duke of Newcastle, was one of the foremost horsemen in Europe. Frances, Bess's eldest child, married Sir Henry Pierrepont of Holme Pierrepont (Nottinghamshire), while Elizabeth's union with Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, gave their daughter Arbella a claim to the throne. William married as his first wife Anne, daughter and co-heiress of Henry Keighley of Keighley (Yorkshire: West Riding), in March 1580, and of the couple's six children, two survived into adulthood. William, the 2nd earl, was born around 1590 and later married Christiana, the daughter of Edward Bruce, Lord Kinloss and Master of the Rolls, while Frances, born in 1593 or 1594, married William, the son of Sir Henry Maynard, Lord Burghley's secretary. Anne died in childbirth in February 1598, leaving William a widower until his marriage to Elizabeth Wortley (née Boughton), the widow of Sir Richard Wortley of Wortley Hall (Yorkshire: West Riding), on 2 July 1604. Their son John was born in spring 1607 but died in January 1618.