With him as my husband, and a good Protestant queen on the throne, I knew there would be no questioning the history of a pair of gold candlesticks that once stood on an altar and now my best table. No one would worry about some three hundred handsome silver forks, a couple of dozen golden ewers, some exquisite Venetian glass, and chests of gold coins which suddenly appeared in the accounts of my household goods. Surely, to the Protestant God whom we all worship and adore, no one would trouble a loyal widow who has done nothing but love things of beauty that have come her way? There would be no great anxiety about lands that had once belonged to the church and now belong to me. And nor should there be. “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads the corn,” my Cavendish used to say to me, and sometimes, only half in jest, “the Lord helps them who help themselves.”

But neither of us—I swear to Our Lady—neither of us, at our most acquisitive, would have taken Tutbury Castle even as a gift. It will cost more to put right than it would to pull down and start again. I can just imagine my Cavendish looking it over and saying to me, “Bess, beloved, a castle is a very fine thing, but where is the profit in it?” And the two of us would have ridden away to a better investment: something that we could buy cheap and make better.

When I remember Cavendish, I have to marvel at my new husband, the earl. His family have owned half of England for centuries, and leased this property of Tutbury forever, but they have let it get so rundown that it is no good for them, nor for any fool that might have taken it off their hands. Of course, my husband the earl has no mind for detail, he has never had to trouble himself with the vulgar questions of profit and loss. After all, he is a nobleman, not a merchant like my Cavendish. He is not on the rise as my Cavendish had to be, as I was then proud to be. My husband the earl has such great lands, he has so many people as servants and tenants and dependents, that he has no idea what profit he makes and what are his costs. Cavendish would have been sick to his heart to do business like this, but it is the noble way. I don’t do it myself, but I know enough to admire it.