Logo Aethereal Stories
Chatsworth House

Chatsworth House — seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, in the Derwent valley

Location Profile
Type Country house and estate
Civil Parish Edensor
County Derbyshire, England
Region Peak District National Park
River River Derwent
Built 1687–c. 1707 (Baroque rebuild); on Elizabethan foundations of 1552
Architect William Talman (south front, 1687); Thomas Archer (north front)
Listed Status Grade I (house, gardens, multiple ancillary structures)
Owner Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement (Cavendish family)
Estate Area c. 35,000 acres (14,000 ha) including outlying holdings
Nearest Town Bakewell, c. 4 miles north
First Appearance Cambion, Chapter Two: Inarticulate

Chatsworth

Seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, in the valley of the River Derwent.

Overview

Chatsworth House is a Grade I listed country house and estate in Derbyshire, England, the seat of the Dukes of Devonshire and home to the Cavendish family since 1549. It stands in the valley of the River Derwent, four miles south of Bakewell and roughly nine miles north of Matlock, in the eastern part of the Peak District National Park. The present house, built in successive phases between 1687 and the early eighteenth century in the Baroque style, replaced an Elizabethan mansion begun in 1552 by Bess of Hardwick and her second husband Sir William Cavendish.

The Chatsworth estate extends, with outlying holdings, to some thirty-five thousand acres, including the surrounding villages of Edensor, Beeley, Pilsley and Calton Lees, and supporting tenanted farms, moorland, woodland and over four hundred residential properties. The house contains the Devonshire Collection, one of the largest and most significant private art collections in Britain, comprising paintings, sculpture, drawings, books, furniture and decorative art accumulated by the Cavendish family across more than four centuries. The house, gardens and farmyard are open to the public for the greater part of the year.

Geography & Atmosphere

The house occupies a broad shelf in the Derwent valley, set back from the river behind sweeping lawns and approached by a long drive that opens, deliberately and theatrically, on a curve that puts the south front of the building into view all at once. The land rises behind the house to wooded hills and, beyond them, the moorland of Stand Wood and Beeley Moor; the western view across the river is over carefully composed parkland to the rebuilt estate village of Edensor, the church spire of St Peter's rising above the trees. Sheep and cattle graze the parkland; a herd of red and fallow deer can usually be seen from the public paths.

The 105-acre formal garden behind the house is among the finest in England: water features descend the slope above (the seventeenth-century Cascade, the Emperor Fountain, the Sea Horse Fountain, the Wellington Rock, the Ring Pond) interspersed with parterres, sculpture, the modern maze on the site of Joseph Paxton's vanished Great Conservatory, and the wooded Pinetum. The atmosphere is at once palatial and convivial: this is one of the most-visited country houses in England, with school parties, coach tours, family days out and walking parties moving through it on most days the public are admitted, and the experience is well-organised, well-staffed, and managed with the affable register of any well-run English heritage attraction.

✦

History

The first house at Chatsworth was begun in 1552 by Sir William Cavendish (d. 1557) and his second wife Bess of Hardwick, the formidable Tudor heiress who, by the end of her life, would be among the wealthiest and most influential women in Elizabethan England. Bess's first house, an Elizabethan courtyard mansion, took several decades to complete and outlived its first owner by more than half a century. Bess subsequently married, as her fourth husband, George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, who, in his official capacity as guardian to the captive Mary, Queen of Scots, brought her to Chatsworth at intervals between 1569 and 1584. The east-end suite in which Mary was lodged is still known as the Queen of Scots Apartments, and is open to the public on payment of a separate admission charge. By 1608, when Bess died, her son William had inherited the estate; in 1618, his son was created first Earl of Devonshire by James I.

The Elizabethan house was rebuilt — piecemeal, then comprehensively — by William Cavendish, fourth Earl and (from 1694) first Duke of Devonshire, whose Whig politics had made him a co-author of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The first Duke commissioned William Talman to begin the south front of the present house in 1687 in the new Baroque manner, retained the Elizabethan courtyard plan but replaced the structure on every other side over the following twenty years, and laid out a formal garden anchored by the Cascade — a man-made waterfall of twenty-four steps designed by the French engineer Grillet and completed in 1703. The State Apartments on the south range were built in expectation of a state visit from William III and Mary II that, in the event, never took place.

The Georgian Chatsworth was the work principally of the fourth Duke (1720–1764), who reversed the approach to the house from east to west, employed Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to remodel the surrounding park in the naturalistic English landscape style, and engaged James Paine to build a new bridge over the river (1762), a water mill, and an impressive ornate stable block on the slope above the house. As part of the same scheme, the houses of the village of Edensor visible from the new west front were demolished. (The full rebuilding of Edensor in its present picturesque form was a separate, later project of the sixth Duke.)

The Victorian period at Chatsworth is dominated by the sixth Duke, William Cavendish (1790–1858), known as the ‘Bachelor Duke’, and the man who in 1826 appointed as his head gardener at the age of twenty-three an able young plantsman named Joseph Paxton. The thirty-year partnership that followed transformed the gardens of Chatsworth and, in the process, helped transform Victorian horticulture more broadly. Paxton built the Rockery on the model of Alpine scenery; the colossal Great Conservatory of 1837 (since demolished, but the prototype for his subsequent Crystal Palace at the 1851 Great Exhibition); the Emperor Fountain (1843–44); and, between 1838 and the early 1840s, the new estate village of Edensor, in a deliberate variety of architectural styles, on the far side of the road through the park. He also engaged Sir Jeffry Wyatville to add the long North Wing to the house (1820s–1830s).

The twentieth century brought near-disaster. The tenth Duke died in 1950 with death duties at eighty per cent of the value of the entire estate; Hardwick Hall, a long list of rare books, and a great deal of art were surrendered to the Treasury in lieu. The eleventh Duke and his wife Deborah (one of the Mitford sisters) negotiated the survival of Chatsworth in trust through the second half of the century, restoring the house and gardens, opening them progressively to the public, and establishing the Chatsworth House Trust in 1981 to safeguard the building and the collection in perpetuity. The estate today is held by the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, a family trust established in 1946.

The House & The Collection

The present house is on a substantial scale: a four-square Baroque palace built around an Elizabethan courtyard, with twenty-five rooms open to the public, including the Painted Hall (decorated by Louis Laguerre and Antonio Verrio in the 1690s), the Great Stairs, the Long Gallery (now the Library), the State Apartments, the Sculpture Gallery and the Chapel. The interiors are at once ducal and lived-in: the family still occupies the private apartments, and the public route circles around them rather than through them.

The Devonshire Collection is among the largest and oldest privately-held art collections in Britain. It includes paintings by Rembrandt, Veronese, Reynolds, Sargent and Lucian Freud; significant holdings of Old Master drawings; Renaissance and Neo-classical sculpture; an important library of incunabula and bound manuscripts; mineralogical and natural-history collections; furniture; tapestries; and a remarkable archive of family papers. Only a portion is on display at any given time. The collection's catalogue runs to many volumes.

Garden, Park & Estate

Capability Brown's landscape, laid out in the 1750s and 1760s for the fourth Duke, replaced the formal Baroque garden of the first Duke with sweeping lawns, careful tree plantations, the Salisbury Lawn, and a managed naturalism that has remained the underlying logic of the Chatsworth park ever since. The course of the River Derwent was straightened in the same period; bridges and a stable block were built to designs by James Paine; the parts of Edensor village visible from the new west front were taken down. The work is one of Brown's most complete surviving commissions.

The Emperor Fountain, in the Canal Pond on the south lawn, was Paxton's response to the announcement, in 1843, that Tsar Nicholas I of Russia intended to visit Chatsworth the following summer. The sixth Duke resolved that Chatsworth should fire a fountain to a height the Tsar had never seen, and Paxton drove the work through in six months — including the digging of an eight-acre reservoir on the moors three hundred and fifty feet above the house, to provide the gravity-fed pressure on which the jet depended. The reservoir was completed; the fountain rose, on record, to two hundred and ninety-six feet (about ninety metres), the tallest fountain in the world. The Tsar did not visit. He died in 1855 without ever seeing it. The fountain has been firing into the Derwent valley, generally on partial pressure, ever since. The same gravity-fed water system was used to generate Chatsworth's electricity from 1893 to 1936; a modern turbine, installed in 1988, now supplies about a third of the electricity the house consumes.

The estate village of Edensor, separated from the house by the road through the park, is one of the most striking small villages in England: thirty-three dwellings rebuilt by Paxton between 1838 and the early 1840s in a deliberate medley of styles, from Tudor through Italianate to alpine, around a triangular green near the medieval parish church of St Peter's. Most of the present houses are occupied by Chatsworth staff, retired estate workers and pensioners. St Peter's itself, rebuilt by Sir George Gilbert Scott in the 1860s on the site of an earlier Saxon church, contains a notable monument to the elder sons of Bess of Hardwick and is the burial place of the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh Dukes, in simple individual headstones in the family plot overlooking the churchyard.

Role in the Saga — Cambion spoilers Contains plot reveals from Book One.

Chatsworth's sole appearance in Cambion is in Chapter Two: Inarticulate, on the notice board outside the headteacher's office at Stepping Stones Primary. The detail occupies a single line.

Daniel and Robert are sitting in the waiting area outside Mrs Davison's office in the immediate aftermath of the bike-shed incident in which Robert has knocked out Michael Lawson's tooth. Michael's mother has just left, dragging her son out of reception, demanding suspension on her way through the doors. The murals on the wall — trees bent into a clearing where a unicorn leaps mid-air toward the double doors — are watching them. Daniel sits beside Robert, watches the empty doorway, and in the way of a child waiting for a consequence he cannot prevent, lets his eyes drift to the school notice board for somewhere neutral to look. Pinned among the laminated sheets — swimming lessons, head-lice notice, parents' evening — is an upcoming school trip to Chatsworth.

The trip itself is forthcoming and is not followed up in the text. It is on the board, advertising the ordinary into the present moment; the present moment is something the ordinary has no language for. The juxtaposition is the point. Outside Mrs Davison's door, two boys are waiting to account for a manifestation event that will mark the beginning of every operational concern Beowulf, Orion and the Knight household will spend the rest of the saga managing. Among the laminated sheets, Chatsworth sits where it always sits: in its valley, in its parkland, four miles from Bakewell, indifferent to whatever turns out to have happened at a primary school in Hope's End.

That is the whole of Chatsworth's textual presence in Cambion. It is, by some distance, the smallest role the largest house in Derbyshire could be given.

Trivia

  • Chatsworth is widely held to be the model for Pemberley in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), an identification supported by the geography of Austen's Derbyshire and reinforced by the 2005 film adaptation, which used Chatsworth as Pemberley's exterior. Austen's readers had certainly visited Chatsworth themselves: the gardens and house had been open to summer visitors, on application to the housekeeper, since the late eighteenth century.
  • The ‘Dwarf Cavendish’ banana, introduced from Mauritius to Chatsworth in 1829 by Joseph Paxton, was first cultivated commercially in the Chatsworth glasshouses. It is the genetic ancestor of more than ninety per cent of the bananas eaten in the world today.
  • The Cascade, a stepped water-staircase descending some sixty metres (about two hundred feet) down twenty-four risers, was built for the first Duke between 1696 and 1703 by the French Huguenot engineer Grillet, a hydraulics specialist trained at Louis XIV's waterworks at Marly. Its temple at the head of the drop was designed by Thomas Archer. Each riser is of slightly different size, profile and texture, so that the water makes a different sound on every step of the descent. It is, in this respect at least, an instrument as well as a fountain.
  • The State Apartments on the south side of the house were built in the 1690s for a state visit by William III and Mary II that never happened. They were designed for ceremonial display rather than residence; the doors of each room are aligned with one another, with a mirror set in a mock doorway at the end of the Great Chamber to double the apparent length of the enfilade.
  • During the Second World War, the tenth Duke arranged for the house to be occupied by Penrhos College, a girls' boarding school evacuated from North Wales, rather than by the military — a decision which preserved the building and its collection through six years of wartime use that might otherwise have damaged it considerably.
  • The Derbyshire dukedom is the same Cavendish family responsible, more than a century earlier, for the spa town of Buxton, which was largely the creation of the fifth Duke at the end of the eighteenth century. The two estates — Buxton on the western edge of the Peak, Chatsworth on the eastern — are roughly equidistant from Bakewell, and are connected by a long history of common patronage.

Appearances

Title Role Notes
Cambion
Book One · Book of Thoth Saga		 Referenced; Background Cultural Texture A single mention, in Chapter Two: Inarticulate, as an upcoming school trip on the notice board outside Mrs Davison's office at Stepping Stones Primary. The trip is not followed up in the text and its eventual outcome is not stated. Chatsworth never appears as a directly-set scene.