In The Concealed Fancies, a play by two of Bess’s great-granddaughters, a character says ‘we have been brought up in the creation of good languages, which will make us ever ourselves’. Many members of the Cavendish family can be seen as engaged in the creation of good languages, often in ways inflected by things they had learned from the years of Mary Queen of Scots’ captivity. For Bess herself, building was a language. Her youngest son Charles inherited her passion and was responsible for remodelling Welbeck Abbey and beginning Bolsover Castle, though it was his son William Cavendish who completed it and who also supplied the epitaph now above Bess’s tomb in Derby Cathedral which celebrates her as an ‘aedificatrix’, that is a female builder. Tombs too spoke a language, and so did needlework, which was important not only to Bess but in the lives and writing of some of her descendants. The good languages of architecture, needlework, household management, and interior decoration are all ones which the Cavendishes drew on examples set by Bess, but there is one further language for which Bess set no precedent but Mary did: poems, which Arbella Stuart seems to have written and Bess’s great-granddaughter Jane certainly did.