Suitors abounded, of course: but Elizabeth, it should seem, was hard to please. She was beautiful, if the annals of her family say true,--she had wit, and spirit, and, above all, an infinite love of independence. After taking the management of her property into her own hands, she for some time reigned and revelled (with all decorum be it understood) in what might be truly termed, a state of single blessedness; but at length, tired of being lord and lady too--"master o'er her vassals," if not exactly "queen o'er herself"--she thought fit, having reached the discreet age of four-and-twenty, to bestow her hand on Sir William Cavendish. He was a man of substance and power, already enriched by vast grants of abbey lands in the time of Henry VIII.,[43] all which, by the marriage contract, were settled on the lady. After this marriage, they passed some years in retirement, having the wisdom to keep clear of the political storms and factions which intervened between the death of Henry VIII. and the accession of Mary, and yet the sense to profit by them. While Cavendish, taking advantage of those troublous times, went on adding manor after manor to his vast possessions, dame Elizabeth was busy providing heirs to inherit them; she became the mother of six hopeful children, who were destined eventually to found two illustrious dukedoms, and mingle blood with the oldest nobility of England--nay, with royalty itself. "Moreover," says the family chronicle, "the said dame Elizabeth persuaded her husband, out of the great love he had for her, to sell his estates in the south and purchase lands in her native county of Derby, wherewith to endow her and her children, and at her farther persuasion he began to build the noble seat of Chatsworth, but left it to her to complete, he dying about the year 1559." Apparently this second experiment in matrimony pleased the lady of Hardwicke better than the first, for she was not long a widow. We are not in this case informed how long--her biographer having discreetly left it to our imagination; and the Peerages, though not in general famed for discretion on such points, have in this case affected the same delicate uncertainty. However this may be, she gave her hand, after no long courtship, to Sir William St. Loo, captain of Elizabeth's guard, and then chief butler of England--a man equally distinguished for his fine person and large possessions, but otherwise not superfluously gifted by nature. So well did the lady manage _him_, that with equal hardihood and rapacity, she contrived to have all his "fair lordships in Gloucestershire and elsewhere" settled on herself and her children, to the manifest injury of St. Loo's own brothers, and his daughters by a former union: and he dying not long after without any issue by her, she made good her title to his vast estates, added them to her own, and they became the inheritance of the Cavendishes.