The present house of Welbeck was built upon the site of an abbey for Premonstratensian canons, which was begun in 1140. Nothing, however, remains of the old place save some stonework in the cellars and a few inner walls. A portion of the house dates from 1604; in an engraving from the great Duke of Newcastle's book on Horsemanship we find that it originally bore some resemblance to a French chÂteau. Charles the First and Henrietta Maria were entertained here—the house being placed at their disposal whilst their host occupied Bolsover Castle, some miles distant. Ben Jonson devised a masque entitled "Love's Welcome" for the royal amusement, and there was such feasting and show that it cost between fourteen and fifteen thousand pounds.

The Abbey is richly furnished, and contains one of the finest collections of pictures and miniatures in Europe, and a wealth of ancient manuscripts. The miniatures were gathered together in the early part of the eighteenth century by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Of these treasures Mrs. Delany writes in 1756: "I have undertaken to set the miniatures of the Duchess of Portland [Lord Oxford's daughter and heiress] in order, as she does not like to trust them to anybody else, and for want of proper airing they are in danger of being spoiled. Such Petitots! such Olivers! such Coopers!" About that time the good lady describes an evening walk in park and gardens: "By the time we came in, the moon was risen to a great height, and we sat down in the great dining-room to contemplate its glory, and to talk of our friends, who in all likelihood were at that moment admiring its splendour as well as we". Later she confesses that Welbeck has a glare of grandeur, and that although she admires her Duchess when receiving princely honours and acquitting herself with dignity, she loves her best in her own private dressing-room!

The miniatures were wellnigh lost in the middle of the nineteenth century. The late duke had lent the collection to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, and a certain well-known literary man, who was in the owner's confidence, arranged for all to be sent to London, so that, like Mrs. Delany, he might arrange them in suitable order. There he pawned the whole lot for trifling sums, with seven different pawnbrokers; but, thanks chiefly to a well-known inhabitant of Worksop, all, with the exception of five, were recovered.

Here are two famous Riding Houses, one the pride of the author of the great work on Horsemanship in Stuart times. This is used nowadays as a picture gallery, the late Duke of Portland having built another of dimensions almost double. To my thinking, one of the chief beauties of Welbeck is the gilded gateway opening to the avenue on the road from Worksop to Ollerton—surely one of the most graceful and yet imposing structures of its kind in the country. Another and more singular attraction consists of the subterranean roadways—gigantic mole runs the cause of whose creation is, and probably always will be, a mystery to the world in general. The pleasure gardens are stocked with rare trees, and the vast lake has so natural an appearance that one forgets that it was made by human folk. The kitchen garden is notably fine: we are told that it covers thirty acres, and that the houses for peaches and other luscious fruits extend over a quarter of a mile. There is a story of a monstrous bunch of Syrian grapes having, some generations ago, been grown there, and sent by the duke of that time across country to Wentworth House. It weighed nineteen and a half pounds, and was carried—as was the trophy taken by the spies from Canaan—attached to a pole.

Finest of the Welbeck trees is the "Greendale Oak", which in 1724 was transformed, by cutting, into an archway, the aperture being 10 feet 3 inches high and 6 feet 3 inches wide, so that a carriage, or three horsemen riding abreast, could pass through. From the branches cut off at that time a cabinet was made for the Countess of Oxford—a fine piece of furniture, inlaid with a representation of her spouse driving his chariot and six through the opening.

Horace Walpole, in 1756, writes in his usual acid style: "I went to Welbeck. It is impossible to describe the bales of Cavendishes, Harleys, Holleses, Veres, and Ogles: every chamber is tapestried with them; nay, and with two thousand other morsels; all their histories inscribed; all their arms, crests, services, sculptured on chimneys of various English marbles in ancient forms (and to say truth) most of them ugly. Then such a Gothic hall, with pendent fretwork in imitation of the old, and with a chimney-piece like mine in the library. Such water-colour pictures! such historic fragments! There is Prior's portrait and the Column and Verelst's flower on which he wrote; and the authoress Duchess of Newcastle in a theatric habit, which she generally wore, and, consequently, looking as mad as the present Duchess; and dukes of the same name, looking as foolish as the present Duke; and Lady Mary Wortley, drawn as an authoress, with rather better pretensions; and cabinets and glasses wainscoted with the Greendale Oak, which was so large that an old steward wisely cut a way through it to make a triumphal passage for his lord and lady on their wedding! What treasures to revel over! The horseman Duke's manÈge is converted into a lofty stable, and there is still a grove or two of magnificent oaks that have escaped all these great families, though the last Lord Oxford cut down above an hundred thousand pounds' worth. The place is little pretty, distinct from all these reverend circumstances." Twenty-one years later he writes: "Welbeck is a devastation. The house is a delight of my eyes, for it is a hospital of old portraits." One is inclined to believe that something in the order of his reception had stung him into lasting pique.

The great ancestress of the owner of Welbeck, and of the other nobility in the Dukeries, was Bess of Hardwick, who built a magnificent country house on the "edge" overlooking the Vale of Scarsdale, some miles distant from the border of Sherwood Forest. This singular woman, as striking a personality as her contemporary and sometime friend Queen Elizabeth, occasionally passed in state along the "ridings".

Her life-story is a marvellous instance of genius devoted to the attainment of a high position. The daughter of a well-to-do squire, she was married at fifteen to a wealthy young gentleman whose estate lay ten miles away, and who, dying very soon, left her mistress of the greater part of his fortune. Her first house at Barlow, near Chesterfield, has entirely disappeared, save for a piece of old wall. She remained a widow for many years, then married Sir William Cavendish, by whom she had six children. After his death she chose Sir William St. Loe, inherited his extensive estates, then, well past her prime, accepted the offer of the widowed George, Earl of Shrewsbury; but before the marriage insisted that two of her young Cavendishes should be married to two of his young Talbots. For a few years her fourth venture proved satisfactory enough; but the custody of Mary Queen of Scots apparently became too much of a nerve-strain for both man and wife; and their wrangles finally became common property in high circles. She embroiled herself with Queen Elizabeth; she persecuted her husband for his so-called meanness—although she was exceedingly rich in her own right; and, worst of all, she sowed dissension between him and his own offspring. The poor earl's condition was melancholy enough; one has no doubt that he was thankful to the heart when they separated for the last time.

In the portrait at Hardwick Hall she is represented as a comely, roguish-looking matron in full maturity: a better idea of her character may be won from the effigy lying on the tomb she erected for herself in All Saints' Church at Derby. There one sees a face not unbeautiful, but cold and masterful in the extreme.

It was her grandson, William, first Duke of Newcastle, who first gave lustre to Welbeck, and perhaps, after all, he owed most of his celebrity to an intellectual wife, known in Restoration days as "Mad Madge of Newcastle". Few pictures of domestic life in the seventeenth century are more pleasing than that given by this lady in the short account of her girlhood, which opens her fantastical autobiography. Born the youngest of Sir Thomas Lucas's eight children, in a large country house near Colchester, she was trained under a system of education originated by her mother. The daughters, of whom there were five, were not kept strictly to their schoolbooks, but rather taught "for formality than benefit". Singing, dancing, music, reading, writing, and embroidery were their accomplishments; but Mistress Lucas, who was left a widow soon after the birth of Margaret, cared not so much for dancing and fiddling and conversing in foreign languages as that they should be bred modestly and on honest principles. In London, where they migrated for the season, they would visit Spring Gardens, Hyde Park, and similar places, and sometimes attended concerts, or supped in barges on the river.

As she grew to womanhood Margaret became filled with the desire to play maid of honour to Queen Henrietta Maria, chiefly because she had heard that the queen in her poverty had not the same number of ladies as in her prosperity. After much persuasion her mother allowed her to leave home, and she joined the Court at Oxford, and soon afterwards met William Cavendish, who was her senior by nearly thirty years. They married, and the battle of Marston Moor forced them into exile. Obliged to return to England, so that she might raise funds, she wrote one or two volumes of Poems and Philosophical Fancies, successors to another grotesque work entitled The World's Olio. These were the first three of ten immense folios, treating of every imaginable subject, and most slipshod in grammar and style, that she gave to the world, tenderly regarding them, in the absence of any other offspring, as her children.

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