Elizabeth the third

Queen Elizabeth I wasn't the only red-headed woman wielding power in 16th-century England – another was building an entirely different empire. By Adam Goodheart

Bess of Hardwick: Empire Builder. By Mary S Lovell. WW Norton & Company, €25

Flame-haired and gimlet-eyed, Elizabeth was a force to be reckoned with. She was born amid the upheaval and intrigue of Henry VIII's reign, adroitly navigated the treacherous countercurrents after his death and over the decades that followed emerged as one of the most powerful women England had ever known. Expertly, she played her wits and charm to court powerful men, foil her enemies and relentlessly further her own ends. At the finish of her long life, she held sway over an empire.

No, I'm not talking about the Virgin Queen. I mean the other red-headed Elizabeth: the 16th-century real-estate magnate, social climber and serial spouse commonly known as Bess of Hardwick. Bess was not royal – and she was far from virginal – but she was, in her own way, more than a match for Elizabeth I. And Bess's life story, though hardly typical, may better capture the bumptious energies and bold new possibilities of the Elizabethan era.

An experienced biographer of formidable women (including Beryl Markham, Amelia Earhart and the Mitford sisters), Mary S Lovell evocatively describes the society in which Bess moved. Bess was born to a rural family of moderate means in1527, in a world where high mortality rates made multiple marriages common, creating complex webs of kinship among multiple sets of half-siblings, step-siblings, in-laws and cousins (who often complicated things even further by marrying one another).

There were many losers in this high-stakes game (child brides, say, who died young of the plague), but also a few winners: those who outlived their spouses and did better with each new marriage, cannily accumulating wealth and power as they went along.

In the Tudor marriage sweepstakes, it came up all cherries for Bess. Whereas with Henry VIII it takes a complicated mnemonic rhyme to recall the fates of his spouses (Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived), with Bess it's much simpler: died, died, died, died. She outlived four husbands, starting with the landowner's son she wed when she was 15 and he 13, who wasted away a little more than a year later.

Bess's next bridegroom, Sir William Cavendish, was a crafty speculator who made his considerable fortune after the Reformation, when he assisted in disposing of properties confiscated from the Roman Catholic Church. Soon after his death in 1557, Bess married a dashing knight named Sir William St Loe – her only true-love match. Just as important, he was a crucial early supporter of the young queen, Elizabeth, who rewarded his loyalty handsomely. Finally, after this second Sir William's untimely passing in 1565 (poisoned, apparently, by his brother), Bess snared the Earl of Shrewsbury – a gouty, bilious-tempered nobleman who compensated somewhat for these flaws by being perhaps the richest landowner in England and by falling madly in love with her.

As Lovell puts it, Bess "must surely have possessed some great charm, some essential charisma" that drew such eligible men. Bess's portraits depict her as no great beauty – in her plain oval face there is more than a little to remind one of her descendant, England's current Queen Elizabeth. What comes through from the historical record, and from Lovell's impressive research, is a sense of Bess's intelligence, self-confidence and impatient ambition. (A telling anecdote: when she was overseeing the construction of Hardwick Hall, one of her several stately homes, Bess ordered workmen to pour boiling water on the mortar so they might work through the winter.) By the latter part of her life, she was the second wealthiest (and arguably the second most powerful) woman in England.

Bess's DNA – unlike the other Elizabeth's, of course – has had a prodigious life of its own. She would become a progenitor not only of the current royal family but of many of Britain's great noble dynasties: Herberts, Talbots, Howards and Cavendishes.

But her legacy, and that of the age she exemplified, reaches far beyond the pages of Burke's Peerage. Though Lovell doesn't mention this, as Bess lay dying, in the winter of 1608, a small group of her countrymen were struggling to found a colony across the Atlantic. Her son William would become one of the principal backers of the new Virginia Company. In the venturesome, land-hungry, born-to-shop nation that would eventually sprout from that seedling, it isn't hard still to find something of the spirit of this distant ancestress.

Adam Goodheart is the CV Starr scholar at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland