The Embroideries at Hardwick Hall

"I chose this partly because I love Hardwick. It’s an amazing place. The embroideries are one of the most fascinating aspects of it, because it’s got this huge collection unequalled anywhere. All Elizabethan houses were full of embroideries, but in most cases the contents have been dispersed. At Hardwick there’s never been a sale, and it just piled up. There’s no other building in the world with such a wealth of original fabrics, which have always been in the house, and these are very richly illustrated in this book. Somehow I find it fascinating to use this book, because as you move through the pages you just seem to be moving into the Elizabethan age. You really feel that you’re there, because all the different aspects of it – the animals, flowers, stately women or grotesque faces, crossbows, carriages and so on – show the sort of fascination Elizabethans had with symbolism. They didn’t think abstractly very much, I don’t think: when they thought of geometry, they thought of a woman symbolising geometry and holding a pair of compasses. On the whole, Hardwick was a woman-dominated house, because it was this rich widow who created it, Bess of Hardwick. She was keen on illustrations of Patience, because she thought she’d been very patient, having survived her four husbands and all sorts of dramas and excitements, and having won through at the other end, becoming the richest woman in England. Men seem to come rather badly out of the art at Hardwick."