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 manege 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".