Country Images Magazine North Edition November 2017 | Page 20

The Lost Houses of Derbyshire by Maxwell Craven Edward Saunders’s measured reconstruction of the street elevation of Pickford’s Devonshire Hospital of 1777. [M.Craven] Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, as depicted on her monument in All Saints’, Derby (Derby Cathedral) designed by her architect Robert Smythson. [M. Craven] Th e layout of the Hospital as depicted in the 1852 Board of Health Map. [M. Craven] Th e story goes back to Bess of Hardwick (which Derbyshire stories oft en do). Th is much married woman rose from minor gentry to Countess in a progression of four glittering marriages, and she ended up allied to royalty, fabulously wealthy and a formidable operator all round. She was a patron of the arts amongst other things and a keen builder, commemorating her projects on her epitaph in Derby Cathedral. Her buildings - mainly paid for by her second husband, Sir William Cavendish and her fourth, George Talbot, 5 th Earl of Shrewsbury – included Chatsworth, Worksop Manor, Oldcotes, Hardwick Old and New Halls, just to name the most prominent projects. Most were built under the guidance of the Tudor builder/ architect Robert Smythson, and thereby gained immortality if only through his ability to build 20 | CountryImagesMagazine.co.uk spectacularly and innovatively. On 5 th October 1599 Bess, by then Countess of Shrewsbury, decided to found a charity in Derby, the Shrewsbury Hospital, to house eight poor men and four poor women, to be endowed with a rent-charge of £100 per annum (pretty generous in 1599) raised out of the tenants’ receipt from Little Longstone, in the Peak. Th e lucky dozen were to be chosen from the parishes of All Saints’, St. Michael and St. Peter, and had to be ‘the most aged poor or needy persons within the said town of Derby, being of good and honest conversation, and not infected with any contagious disorder.’ Detail from Samuel and Nathaniel Bucks’ 1728 East Prospect of Derby showing the river front of the original hospital. [M.Craven