Diary of Henry Cavendish's journey to Constantinople (Hardwick MS 45A)

This diary contains a written financial account of Mr Harrie [Henry] Cavendish's journey to and from Constantinople in 1589, by his secretary Fox. The first folio gives a summarised itinerary of where they were for each day between 28 March 1589 and 13 September 1590. Following this Fox writes a detailed financial account of their travels based on the itinerary.

This account has been published in: 'Mr. Harrie Cavendish his Journey To and From Constantinople 1589 Fox, His Servant', Royal Historical Society Camden Third Series , Volume 64 , December 1940 , pp. 1 - 29, available online via Cambridge University Press: https://doi.org/10.1017/S2042171000005070.This volume is mentioned in the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Third Report (1872) p.43.

Henry Cavendish's letters from continent, are held at Lambeth Palace Archives, London (MS 697).

Henry Cavendish (1550-1616), soldier and traveller, was the eldest son of Sir William Cavendish (1508-1557) of Chatsworth, Derbyshire, administrator, and his third wife, Elizabeth [see Talbot, Elizabeth, countess of Shrewsbury (1527-1608)], noblewoman, known as Bess of Hardwick, daughter of John Hardwick of Hardwick, Derbyshire, and his wife, Elizabeth. He was born on 17 December 1550.

Henry Cavendish's godparents were Princess Elizabeth and John Dudley, earl of Warwick. Little is known of his life until, on 9 February 1568, he married Grace, daughter of George Talbot, sixth earl of Shrewsbury, and Gertrude, daughter of Thomas Manners, earl of Rutland. His sister, Mary, married Shrewsbury's heir, Gilbert Talbot, at the same time. The matches resulted from Bess of Hardwick's dynastic ambitions, but Cavendish's marriage proved unsuccessful; Bess herself had already married Shrewsbury. Soon after his wedding, Cavendish, who attended Eton College in 1560, received private tuition, and was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1567, was sent on the grand tour of the continent. It is tempting to see this as an early symptom of marital breakdown, but in fact Grace was only eight. Henry and his brother-in-law Talbot met in Germany, before going on to Padua and Venice. They did not return until early 1572, when Cavendish immediately took up the duties expected of him by his family: he was elected MP for Derbyshire, aged only twenty-two, and was soon serving on local panels such as commissions post mortem. He was again elected as MP in 1584, 1586, 1589, and 1593, and was sheriff of Derbyshire in 1582-3 and 1608-9.

A. C. Wood suggested Cavendish was 'fiery, turbulent and adventurous' (Wood, iv). He evidently found it hard to keep his attention focused on one thing for any length of time and had a violent temper, easily aroused when his will was thwarted. The first evidence of this was in 1574, when he was involved in an affray in Staffordshire. A man was killed and Cavendish came to the attention of the privy council-not for the last time. Cavendish did not become captain, then colonel, of a company in the Netherlands in 1574, as some historians have stated. In fact, it was in 1578 that he raised a regiment of some five or six hundred men from his own estates and joined the army of William of Orange. Since rumours indicated that he may originally have been looking for action in 'Scotch affairs & to help Morton and his friends' (CSP Spain, 1509-25, 575), Cavendish may just have wanted to experience war rather than to aid the Dutch. In any event, he had a chance of action; but by March 1579 he had lost the stomach for the gruelling nature of the Dutch wars and came home, abandoning his regiment.

Later in 1579, Cavendish made a trip to Portugal. In March 1589, aged nearly forty, he left on a trip to Turkey, a journey planned well in advance and presumably made to satisfy his own taste for adventure. He went with Richard Mallory, a merchant with interests in Turkey, but Cavendish himself had no commercial interests in the Levant. Mallory replaced Cavendish's intended companion, the scholar Anthony Wingfield, at the last minute. Cavendish avoided the Netherlands and instead went via Germany and eastern Europe. One of his servants, Fox, left a memoir of the trip. Cavendish was back home by late 1591, when he became caught up in another violent feud, this time with William Agard. Both men used armed followers against each other, and Gilbert Talbot, now seventh earl of Shrewsbury, felt obliged to step in, asking the privy council on 30 May 1592 that the two men be obliged to agree that 'all matters of quarrell and pyke betwyxt them and theyrs' should be adjudicated by Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, and him (Talbot MS 2, fol. 102). The privy council did as he requested and the two earls duly resolved the dispute.

Cavendish avoided the privy council's attention again until December 1602, when he became caught up in (or even initiated) a plot to liberate his niece, Arabella Stuart, a potential heir to the throne, from the custody of her grandmother, Bess of Hardwick, in Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. Cavendish and one Stapleton, a Yorkshire Catholic, gathered forty men to carry Arabella off, but when his mother refused his demand that she be given into his custody, he and the other conspirators simply faded away. Bess of Hardwick vigorously condemned her son's actions to the privy council, but fortunately for Cavendish his conduct seems to have got lost in the tumult of Elizabeth I's death and James VI and I's peaceful accession.

As the episode shows, however, Cavendish was not much of a leader. Part of his problem was an inability to handle money. Having raised his regiment for the Netherlands, he made insufficient provision for it to be paid and supplied, and the English ambassador, William Davison, had to use his own credit on Cavendish's behalf. Davison bitterly wrote home asking the secretaries of state 'to divert such gentlemen of our nation as are bending hitherwardes, for unless they come provided as Mr Candishe hath not & they will find a cold wellcome' (TNA: PRO, SP 83/28, fols. 113r, 116r). When English colonels negotiated with the states general over unpaid wages, Cavendish was always accompanied by his lieutenant-colonel, Richard Bingham, as though not trusted by his officers to handle matters alone. However, part of his problem, as this hints, was a simple lack of leadership qualities. His regiment played a crucial role in the great victory over the Spanish at Rijmenam in August 1578, but it was commanded, 'in his absence', by Bingham (Churchyard, sig. Si); no contemporary source even attempts to explain where the colonel was.

The expedition to the Netherlands was a major factor in Cavendish's debts, which by 1584 totalled £3000, but he had started borrowing considerable sums at least as early as 1575. Yet his resources were great. His stepfather-in-law bestowed on him lands around Hardwick in Ashby in Nottinghamshire when he married, and on his twenty-first birthday, lands worth some £550 per annum, previously enjoyed by his mother, were settled on him. These did not include the splendid estate of Chatsworth, which was entailed on Henry, but which had been left to his mother in her lifetime. Bess was unimpressed by Henry's inability to produce an heir and thus help perpetuate her empire. What made it worse from her perspective was that Henry had at least four illegitimate sons and another four daughters. He was known among fellow MPs as 'the common bull of Derbyshire and Staffordshire' (HoP, Commons, 1558-1603, 1.556). Cavendish hated his wife, whom he referred to openly as a 'harlot' (Stone, 194). Despite this, he sided with his Talbot in-laws in their quarrels with his formidable mother. His attempt to liberate Arabella was the last straw for Bess of Hardwick, who notoriously added a codicil to her will, revoking all bequests to her eldest son. There was no reconciliation before her death in 1608.

Cavendish was now able to move into Chatsworth, having lived up to this point at Tutbury in Staffordshire. His debts, however, still troubled him and in 1610 he was obliged to sell the reversion of Chatsworth and most of his lands to his younger brother William Cavendish, later first earl of Devonshire. Henry Cavendish lived in Chatsworth until his death on 12 October 1616. At some point, he settled the estate of Doveridge in Derbyshire on his eldest bastard, Henry Cavendish, for he died intestate and administration of his estate was granted to Lord Cavendish, who was said to 'inherit £4,000 p.a. from the death of his brother' (CSP dom., 1611-18, 426). Lord Cavendish, the second son, was their mother's favourite and his descendants still live in Chatsworth. Bess of Hardwick, in a sense, got the better of Henry Cavendish in death, as in life. However, if his choleric and feckless personality made him a disappointment to her, it doubtless owed much to his having been brought up by such a mother. He was buried at Edensor in Derbyshire.

[Source: Trim, D. J. B, Cavendish, Henry (1550-1616), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4935. By permission of Oxford University Press.]