The Wealth And position of the Cavendish family date back to the marriage of Bess of Hardwick to Sir William Cavendish in 1547. It was a second marriage for both of them. Bess, who was probably aged 19 (just under half the age of the bridegroom), had already been briefly married to Robert Barlow, a Derbyshire neighbour; the marriage had produced no children and had probably not been consummated. It was while married to William Cavendish that Bess produced all eight of her children, of whom six survived to adulthood. From those six children four ducal families sprang—Kingston, Newcastle, Devonshire, and Portland—and an area of Nottinghamshire became known as the Dukeries in consequence.

Bess’s descendants owed their prosperity and advancement not to William Cavendish himself, who was detected in embezzlement and died in dire financial straits, but to her two subsequent marriages, first to Sir William St. Loe and finally to George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. As Horace Walpole supposedly had it,

This is not strictly true—Sir William Cavendish had little but debts to leave—but the wealth settled on her by St. Loe and Shrewsbury was immense, and the Cavendish children benefited greatly from it.

Bess’s surviving children were three sons and three daughters. Of the daughters, two, Frances and Mary, made good marriages, to Sir Henry Pierrepont and to Shrewsbury’s second son Gilbert, who after the death of his elder brother became the heir to the earldom. The third made a marriage which on paper was more splendid than either of these, but it did not last long and was unhappy in its consequences: Elizabeth, the middle girl, married Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, who, through his mother Lady Margaret Douglas, had inherited a possible claim to both the English and Scottish thrones.