Gangadhara, a multilingual poet of the fifteenth century, having achieved renown in south India, decided to seek further glory in the faraway kingdoms of Gujarat. From the court of King Pratapadevaraya of Vijayanagara (r. 1426-1447), he set forth on a long and arduous journey of hundreds of miles. At the time, Gujarat roughly comprised much of the territory that is part of the state today, including the peninsulas of Saurashtra, also known as Kathiawad, and Kachchh. Gangadhara first went on a pilgrimage to the holy city of Dwarka. Next, he proceeded to the court of Sultan Muhammad Shah II (r. 1442-1451), at Ahmadabad. This was a flourishing city, a new capital of the Gujarat sultanate that had only recently been built by the Sultan's father, Ahmad Shah (r. 1411-1442). At the Ahmedabad court, to the great delight of Sultan Muhammad, Gangadhara vanquished the local poets with his excellent lyrical skills. Gangadhara then went on to two other courts in the region - Champaner, to the east of the capital, and Junagadh, to its far west - composing panegyrics for the Rajput chieftains of these fort kingdoms.

In the mid-fifteenth century Gujarat was becoming well known as a place where poets and scholars were sure to find supportive audiences. Sanskrit continued to be popular: Gangadhara's skills in this Indic High language were favoured not only by modest Rajput kings but also desired in the court of a Muslim sultan. At the same time, a multilingual milieu was also emerging. As political action shifted away from the subcontinent's traditional centre, Delhi, Gujarat, an ecologically and socially diverse region, saw a variety of groups vying for political power. Poets, writers, and scribes were crucial to the ways in which these new rulers of local and regional entities imagined their polities and asserted their rights to rule in this changing political context. Gangadhara's ability to make good in the different courts that constituted Gujarat evidence the region's political, cultural, and literary vibrancy. Yet the century during which Gangadhara made his journey is viewed in the conventional historiography of pre-modern South Asia as one of political and cultural decline. In most surveys of Indian history, the fifteenth century is given little attention, and is often designated the ‘period in waiting’ or the ‘twilight’ before the rise of the Mughals in the sixteenth century.

When, in the late sixteenth century, the Mughals in north India eventually overpowered the regional kingdom of Gujarat, the system of negotiated harmony that had developed between the Muzaffarid sultans and local chieftains was unseated. While the regional sultanate came to an end, the Rajput chieftaincies were subsumed into a new imperial administration. Decades before that, in 1511, Sultan Mahmud Begadahad succumbed to ill health and had been buried at the imperial necropolis of Sarkhej, on the outskins of Ahmadabad, close to the remains of the revered Sufi, Sheikh Ahmad Khattu. During his fiftytwo-year reign, Begada had overpowered the two great forts of Champaner-Pavagadh and Junagadh and integrated the numerous other local chieftains into the regional imperium, both through conquest and through the imposition of a tribute-paying system. By securing the support of spiritual leaders and other diverse communities, both professional and religious, the sultans, particularly Mahmud Begada, had managed to create a regional consensus. The prosperity of the region, ensured by its fertile lands, flourishing seaports, and the revenue system established by Sultan Ahmad and his successors, made these rulers reliable paymasters in the north Indian military marketplace. Over time, the sultans had emerged as important cultural patrons; cities like Ahmadabad and Chamapaner grew as significant centres of sultanate-style architecture and became home to a number of scholars and littérateurs.

Sultanate rule, and its network of relationships with local chieftains, persisted for sixty years after Begada's death. While the Mughal emperor Humayun had defeated the Gujarati sultan Bahadur Shah in c. 1535, it was his son Akbar's conquest of Gujarat in late sixteenth century that made the region an imperial province, or subah; it remained so until the late eighteenth century. And then, as the Marathas became well-ensconced in the region with Mughal decline, the different parts of Gujarat came to be controlled by the Gaekwad family, which had established itself in Baroda beginning in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The Gaekwads conducted repeated and violent revenue extraction incursions in different parts of the region, targeting the chieftaincies of the areas surrounding their kingdoms, such as Mahi Kantha and the Saurashtra/Kathiawad peninsula. These attacks were eventually put to an end when the British annexed Gujarat, along with Kathiawad to the Bombay Presidency in 1808.

Because of their intelligence, their relationship with Man and their iconic appeal, horses could not be treated in the same way as other domesticated animals.1 For a member of the landed elite who wished to establish or expand a stud the unique status of horses held out the prospect of a good return on his investment, that is, if he produced a well-proportioned horse; in a sought-after breed with an excellent pedigree; of the right size, pace and colour; and fit for purpose, whether for hunting, pulling a coach or merely enhancing the image of the rider mounted on his back. It was therefore a risky business, one that could not be undertaken lightly, because failure to produce exactly the right product for a highly discerning market courted disaster. As Sir John Reresby wrote of his grandfather Sir George, who owned the Thrybergh estate (Yorkshire: West Riding) in the early seventeenth century:

The absence of sales ledgers precludes any analysis of the profitability or otherwise of Cavendish's stud, but the disbursement books show that he was expanding his stud at the time, and he was not a man who was careless with his money.

Mares and Stallions

The Cavendish brothers, Henry, William and Charles, kept fine horses, an interest that they had inherited from their father. In 1597, for instance, Henry offered Sir Robert Cecil, the queen's chief minister, 100 French crowns or the choice of a horse of equal value for a six- or seven-year-old colt then in his own stable. In August of that year, William paid a modus of 10d. to the vicar of Pentrich for ten foals produced in the stud over the previous five years, a mean of two per annum. In 1611 the mares delivered eleven foals, while in March 1623 Martin Hole had to buy fourteen halters to lead the young foals. To achieve this growth, Cavendish acquired additional brood mares, mainly in a flurry of activity between 1597 and 1603.

Family

William Cavendish was born on 27 December 1551, the second son of Sir William Cavendish and his third wife, Elizabeth Barley (née Hardwick), generally known as Bess of Hardwick. Of Bess's children by William, her second husband, five survived into adulthood: an elder brother and sister, Henry and Frances; a younger brother, Charles; and two younger sisters, Elizabeth and Mary. Bess married as her fourth husband George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, late in 1567, and on 9 February following, her son and daughter Henry and Mary wed the earl's daughter Grace and his son and heir, Gilbert, respectively. Henry, who lived at Tutbury Abbey, had no legitimate children, although he fathered ‘a host of bastards’. Charles married Margaret, the daughter of Sir Thomas Kitson of Hengrave (Suffolk), in 1581, but the match hardly lasted a year because she died in childbirth in July 1582. He married as his second wife Catherine Ogle, daughter and co-heiress of Cuthbert, 7th Baron Ogle, in 1592. Until 1607 Charles lived at Stoke, four miles from Chatsworth, but in that year he bought Welbeck Abbey from his brother-in-law, Gilbert, and moved in. He acquired Bolsover from Gilbert a year later.4 His elder son, William, who eventually became Duke of Newcastle, was one of the foremost horsemen in Europe. Frances, Bess's eldest child, married Sir Henry Pierrepont of Holme Pierrepont (Nottinghamshire), while Elizabeth's union with Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, gave their daughter Arbella a claim to the throne. William married as his first wife Anne, daughter and co-heiress of Henry Keighley of Keighley (Yorkshire: West Riding), in March 1580, and of the couple's six children, two survived into adulthood. William, the 2nd earl, was born around 1590 and later married Christiana, the daughter of Edward Bruce, Lord Kinloss and Master of the Rolls, while Frances, born in 1593 or 1594, married William, the son of Sir Henry Maynard, Lord Burghley's secretary. Anne died in childbirth in February 1598, leaving William a widower until his marriage to Elizabeth Wortley (née Boughton), the widow of Sir Richard Wortley of Wortley Hall (Yorkshire: West Riding), on 2 July 1604. Their son John was born in spring 1607 but died in January 1618.

To manage their large, unwieldy estates peers employed numerous officials organised in a hierarchical fashion, as exemplified in the estate accounts of the Earls of Northumberland or those of Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland. Bailiffs supervised economic activity in the primary unit of administration and accounted to receivers who were responsible for discrete blocks of territory, perhaps in a county. The latter, in turn, reported to a receiver-general who had financial oversight of the entire estate. Not uncommonly, officers maintained separate accounts for the estate and the household, respectively under the control of receivers and the steward of the household. The Master of the Horse or his equivalent often drew up distinct stable accounts, either in specific documents or filed en bloc in more general accounts. The structure was therefore capable of adaptation. For instance, within this broad framework, Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, operated a flexible system, in which ‘responsibility was personal to the officer accounting rather than attached to the office or offices which he held’.

In spite of the incentive to improve their knowledge of their financial situation, landowners were slow to modernise their accounting procedure. On the estates of the Earls of Northumberland, the medieval charge/discharge system persisted and only really gave way to double-entry book-keeping after the Restoration. Stone argues that landlords were reluctant to change because they prioritised the prevention of fraud over a more accurate calculation of profit and loss. William Cavendish and his mother usually kept separate receipt and disbursement books, many of the former having been lost over time. As Riden and Fowkes indicate, Bess and her son adopted slightly different systems from the one just discussed. Bess did appoint a receiver-general but he, rather than intermediate receivers, obtained the accounts and surpluses of the bailiffs of individual manors. In the 1590s her receiver, Mr William Reason, gave the balance to Mr Timothy Pusey, her steward and main man of business. William Cavendish, who recognised Pusey's legal and administrative abilities, retained his services but divided the receivership into two, one receiver being based at Hardwick and the other at London. Although independent of each other, the gross imbalance between expenditure and income meant that the Hardwick receiver regularly remitted surplus funds to his counterpart in London. His receivers might also deal with the bailiffs but the latter often liaised with other officials.

This book is not the one I had in my mind when I set out to write a book on William Cavendish, 1st Earl of Devonshire, and his horses. At the time, I intended it to serve as a case study of the relationship between an aristocrat and his horses, one that would be narrowly focused on equine pursuits. Of course, the proposal emphasised the centrality of horses to Cavendish and his peers, but, blinkered, I did not fully consider the wider implications inherent in that statement. So if initially I did not see it coming, once I started to write I found myself getting involved in a range of subjects that seemed relevant to my central theme of a man and his horses. Chapters on provincial and metropolitan visits expanded to incorporate information on the social, political, legal and administrative activities of Cavendish and his peers to the extent that they had to become chapters in their own right. In its final incarnation the book even has a chapter on entertainment and pastimes, admittedly some of which have a definite equine feel about them and would have surfaced in the narrowly conceived book anyway.

As the book mutated, the title had to change to keep pace with the shifting ground it was covering. In this respect the title, which was suggested by one of the referees, namely, Horses and the Aristocratic Lifestyle, accurately reflects the construction of the book. It contains ten chapters, neatly divided in the middle, with the first half dealing with equine themes and the second one covering lifestyle subjects. But this is not a forced coupling but rather a symbiotic one with cross-currents flowing freely between the two halves. Just as I found it impossible to write a book on an aristocrat and his horses without discussing his lifestyle, it would be equally impossible to write a book on the aristocratic lifestyle without highlighting the centrality of horses to it. This is particularly true of the period covered by the book, which focuses on the turn of the sixteenth century (1597– 1623), the years covered by the exant accounts. It encompassed developments in agriculture, industry and trade; improvements in internal communication; the growth of a social season, especially in London; and the benefits of peace brought about by the ending of the threat from Spain and the effect of dynastic union with Scotland, even if Ireland remained an open wound. The role of horses was crucial to all these developments.

The landed elite in England played a vital role in local administration. Only they had the time and funds, as well as the authority, effectively to govern the county. Over the course of his life Cavendish filled virtually all of the most important and prestigious offices in Derbyshire apart from the post of deputy lieutenant. Perhaps the reason for this was his uneasy relationship with his brother-in-law, Gilbert Talbot, who succeeded his father as lord lieutenant in 1590, or was related to the fact that others wanted it more, as his neighbour Sir Francis Leake did in 1603. Maybe Cavendish had other priorities, ones that kept him in the capital. As befitted a man of his status he paid his respects to James I, riding to York when the king travelled south to claim his inheritance in 1603. He also entertained Prince Charles at Hardwick in 1619. As sheriff in 1595–6 he met the judges of the Midland assize circuit at the Derbyshire border when they conducted gaol delivery county by county at the twice-annual assizes. From there, he escorted them to their lodgings. While he seems only occasionally to have attended meetings of the quarter sessions, he regularly travelled to the assizes until the second decade of the seventeenth century. As a commissioner for the subsidy he performed the thankless task of extracting money from his peers and other tax-payers and organising the transportation of the money to London.

Treating

By the time Cavendish served his year as high sheriff the office had lost many of its medieval functions, and with them the power that its holder could wield. The county court over which he presided continued to meet, but it did little more than elect knights of the shire in parliamentary elections. The sheriff still returned writs and empanelled juries, which, as Loades points out, ‘could be politically sensitive work in a local context’, and therefore enabled him to use his influence in his own interest. But it was costly, and never more so than when the assize judges came to the county. Once settled in their lodging, the judges were well looked after.

The aristocratic lifestyle was largely funded by the income that peers obtained from their landed estates, which during the period 1597–1623 was likely to be going up. Prices were rising for the products produced on their estates, as a growing population increased demand for foodstuffs and other basic commodities. If these items were mainly agricultural, fortunate landowners like William Cavendish, who had workable mineral deposits on their property, could earn an income from industrial ones too. Even continuing as before was likely to bring in additional money, that is, if they farmed their demesnes. Enclosure and improvement of wastes and open fields further augmented their income by raising output, whether in stocking rates on pastures or crop yields in the fields. When leases fell in, new ones were shorter and more expensive, mainly because of enhanced entry fines. Alternatively, a landowner could add the land to his demesne. As William Cavendish was a very astute manager of his finances, he did all of these things, although the size of the demesne on various manors did fluctuate over the course of the period.

Economically, the contribution that a stud made to the finances of a demesne farmer like William Cavendish was small, even excluding the money he received in rent. Unfortunately, his receipt books have not survived, but for a large-scale grazier such as him the value of his fatstock and wool far outweighed that of his crop of foals. Beeves and fattened wether sheep, fed on the estate, also helped to supply the dietary requirements of a large household and reduce expenditure on foodstuffs. Even so, by facilitating the management of a large scattered estate, horses, some of them bred in the stud, made an essential contribution to the generation of income. Officers like Roger Fretwell and Robert Parker were constantly in the saddle, riding around Cavendish's estate as they dealt with tenants and bailiffs and oversaw work on the demesne. Atkinson and his staff handled equine-related matters, and other servants carried out a wide range of specific tasks. Many of the servants were provided with a horse and either a replacement from the stud or an allowance to buy one when needed. The sums allocated enabled them to buy mounts of a reasonable quality: it would not do for Cavendish's representative to be seen riding an inferior jade.

The introduction and subsequent diffusion of private coaches around the country from the mid-sixteenth century onwards meant that it was now easier for a member of the landed elite like Cavendish to travel with his family and servants. The expansion of the postal system and the growth in the number of hackneymen made it possible for travellers to hire horses, while the establishment of a nationwide network of carrying services linking London with the provinces ensured that luggage could be delivered over long distances. Wayside inns proliferated too. Even so, journeys between the provinces and London were still arduous and time-consuming. When Cavendish and his peers travelled to London, their entourage was a larger and more varied one than was needed when they made provinicial visits, with more servants, vehicles, horses and luggage.

The passage of the cavalcade was an impressive sight, causing ripples of excitement as it trundled through town and village. On 9 December 1608 John Chamberlain, an astute commentator on the London scene, observed that Sir Henry Carey and his wife had come to town in great pomp, with five coaches, many horsemen and the pregnant Lady Carey seated on a litter. Cavendish travelled with fewer people in his party but it would still have attracted attention. At the beginning of Michaelmas Term 1601 he went with six servants and eleven horses but returned in December with seven servants, a gentlewoman appointed for his mother and thirteen horses. In April 1604 the widowed Cavendish travelled to London with nine servants and fourteen horses. Then, eighteen months later, he set out with his new wife, Lady Elizabeth, and his niece Arbella, accompanied by sixteen servants, including footmen and the drivers of the sumpters, and twenty-five horses. This was a special occasion, for Cavendish, elevated to the peerage in the spring as a result of Lady Arbella's nomination, was due to be presented in the House of Lords on 12 November.

Travel to and from London

When Cavendish made the long journey down to London after the death of his first wife he surely rode, as many men of his age and status would have done. Neither would he have altered his travel arrangements on those occasions when his second wife did not accompany him.

On 9 January 1616 John Holles esquire wrote a letter to his son John, then completing his education in Paris, in which he stressed the importance of good horsemanship as a defining quality of a gentleman but also indicated other skills that he should possess. He framed his advice as a question, the one quoted above. Clearly, the sons of the landed elite should receive a rounded education, one that might highlight the importance of horsemanship but provided them with social graces suitable for the salon as well. And in Baldesar Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, they had a code of behaviour to follow. Cavendish certainly knew the book, because in September 1605 his 15-year-old son, William, earned £5 for translating it into Latin and English. Cavendish's nephew, William Cavendish, the expert horseman, endorsed Castiglione's approach to learning life-skills when he wrote about the ‘music’ of training a horse, declaring that he ‘that has not a musical head can never be a good horseman. A horse well dressed moves as true, and keeps as regular time as any musician can.’

Horsemanship

Holles's exhortation to his son, with its emphasis on horsemanship and weaponhandling, reflects the importance of these skills to the landed elite as members of the cavalry in wartime. Indeed, many of Cavendish's contemporaries argued that the fashion for travelling by coach had led to a decline of horsemanship and, as a result, a shortage in the number of gentlemen who could fight on horseback. This did not materialise, but the firearm revolution and the shift in priorities in favour of the infantry did undermine the cavalry's historic role as heavily armoured men-of-war, armed with lances and riding powerful great horses. Even if England lagged behind the continent – Cavendish was still buying lances to supply soldiers serving in Ireland at the turn of the sixteenth century – change was apparent by then.

The landed elite regularly socialised with their peers, but giving and receiving hospitality entailed travel, and although the condition of the highways was not as difficult as was once assumed, one had to take care, especially in rugged countryside like the Peak. Viewing the Peak from Chatsworth in the 1720s, Defoe observed that ‘Upon the top of that mountain begins a vast extended moor or waste, which for fifteen or sixteen miles together due north, presents you with neither hedge, house or tree, but a waste and howling wilderness, over which when strangers travel, they are obliged to take guides, or it would be next to impossible not to lose their way.’ The lack of signposts, which were not compulsory until an Act of 1697, compounded the problem, especially in barren areas such as the Peak where even locals had to hire guides. While riding into Lancashire in the severe winter of 1614–15 Lionel, one of Cavendish's servants, required two guides to help him navigate his way across the Peak moors (‘that beinge great snowe’). Cavendish also required a guide on a visit to Buxton in August 1608. He and his party had been staying with Sir John Manners at Haddon Hall, and he hired a guide to take them to Buxton, paying him 1s. for his services. It seems as though Cavendish particularly wanted to visit Pooles Hole, a magnificent limestone cave inhabited in prehistoric times and a tourist attraction by 1600. He paid 1s. to a guide to take the company to the cave.

Socialising

Outwardly, the landed elite demonstrated their status by the way they conducted themselves and their relations with their peers, clients and dependants, hence Wotton's concern that the medieval notion of hospitality based on maintaining open house to all comers was fading. Of course, some individuals continued the custom: Sir Gervase Clifton of Clifton Hall (Nottinghamshire) ‘generously, hospitably and charitably entertained all, from the King to the poorest Beggar’. Sir John Weld of Willey Hall (Shropshire), on the other hand, advised his son ‘not to be busy in Building nor in too much hospitality’ as these two major items of expenditure would waste his estate.

The late sixteenth-century surge in the number of elite visitors to London was associated with attendance at court or Parliament, the pursuit of suits through the central law courts and study at the Inns of Court. The number of students enrolled at the Inns of Court rose rapidly, and Parliament, which was meeting more frequently than it had done since the Reformation Parliament of 1529–36, attracted at least a further 1,000 people. Because legal and political business brought an influx of members of the landed elite to the capital there was a social dimension too as individuals renewed their acquaintanceship with family, friends and associates from other parts of the country. Indeed, so many gentlemen were travelling to and staying in the capital, often for months at a time, that the government became alarmed, worrying lest the distractions would lead them to neglect their public duties and forget their responsibility to provide hospitality. Cavendish was no exception to the trend, spending up to two-thirds of the year in the capital. In the three years 1599–1601 he lodged in London for a recorded total of sixty-two weeks and five days. Cavendish, like others, timed his visits to London to coincide with the law terms, so he usually stayed there between May and early July and from October to the Christmas period and perhaps beyond. If he travelled back to Derbyshire for Christmas, he had returned to the capital by the end of January. Cavendish's long stays in London were not unusual, as the example of Lady Margaret Hoby attests. In her diary she records three visits to London from Hackness Hall in the period October 1600 to March 1605, which lasted five months (8 October 1600–18 March 1601), three months (13 March–30 June 1604: her husband alone) and four months (11 November 1604–7 March 1605).

Accommodation in London

The influx of seasonal visitors like Cavendish put pressure on the available stock of suitable lodgings, a demand that the erection of new housing in the West End partly met. Between October 1586 and 1601 Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, leased a house near Ivy Bridge from Mr Fortescue for a rent that went up from £12 to £15 for a half-year over the course of the fifteen years.