Virtue and Vice

Perched high on a Derbyshire hillside, Hardwick Hall feels like a world apart. Yet the Hall, like its builder, Elizabeth Shrewsbury (better known as Bess of Hardwick) was caught up in the whirl of cultural change that transformed Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Visit the 'Virtue and Vice' exhibition to learn how England was transformed by the political, religious, and social upheaval known as the Reformation, and by encounters with new ideas, societies and beliefs. All of these threads twine together in the rich history of Hardwick Hall and the colourful life of its builder, Bess.