The experience of guarding Mary taught Bess the importance of security. Hardwick New Hall famously has a lot of windows, but in March 1603, when Queen Elizabeth was dying, Bess’s favourite son William ‘laid in supplied of gunpowder, arms and armour, in case of possible attack’ and Bess, spotting her ‘bad son’ Henry approaching the lodge, was able to have him kept out and Arbella kept in. Bess’s descendants also paid attention to entrances and exits. The Little Castle at Bolsover is a toy, an architectural joke, but living through the ‘civil wars’ of his mother and stepfather had taught its builder, Bess’s son Charles, how to make a house secure, and in the real Civil War his two eldest granddaughters were confronted by the Parliamentarian army. The sisters’ experience of life under siege informs their co-written play The Concealed Fancies, where a character says that she can bear up because ‘I practised Cleopatra when she was in her captivity’, probably alluding to the now lost Cleopatra tapestry at Hardwick New Hall, and there is a reference to Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, which made Mary Queen of Scots the model for its duplicitous Duessa.