Hardwick Hall is an architecturally significant Elizabethan-era country house in Derbyshire, England

Описание: Hardwick Hall is an architecturally significant Elizabethan-era country house in Derbyshire, England. A leading example of the Elizabethan prodigy house, the Renaissance style home was built between 1590 and 1597 for Bess of Hardwick to a design of the architect Robert Smythson. Hardwick Hall is one of the earliest examples of the English interpretation of this style, which came into fashion having slowly spread from Florence. Its arrival in Britain coincided with the period when it was no longer necessary or legal to fortify a domestic dwelling.
Designed by Robert Smythson in the late 16th century, Hardwick Hall is sited on a hilltop between Chesterfield and Mansfield overlooking the Derbyshire countryside. It was ordered by Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury and ancestress of the Dukes of Devonshire, and owned by her descendants until the mid-twentieth century.
Bess was born in her father's manor house, Hardwick Old Hall, today a ruin beside the newer hall. Each of her four marriages had brought her greater wealth, and Hardwick Hall was but one of her many homes.
BESS OF HARDWICK
Bess of Hardwick is almost as famous for her four marriages as she is for her building activities. Born in 1527 into a minor gentry family, she was married at 15, but her young husband, Robert Barlow, died a year later.
In 1547 she met and married Sir William Cavendish, a 40-year-old widower and father of three. Together they bought the Derbyshire estate of Chatsworth, built a new house there, and made it their main country seat. After Sir William’s sudden death in 1557 she married her third husband, Sir William St Loe, one of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers, and herself soon became an intimate friend of the queen.
When St Loe died suddenly in 1565 he left everything to Bess. After her next marriage, to George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury – one of the richest men in the country – she arranged marriages between her son Henry and Grace Talbot, and her daughter Mary and Shrewsbury’s heir, Gilbert, intertwining the two families. After the violent collapse of her fourth marriage, Bess fled from Chatsworth in 1584 to her family estate at Hardwick.