One of the pleasantest features of the town is the fine park called the Arboretum. Here an interesting relic of the plague that raged in 1665 is placed. This is the so-called “Headless Cross,” or Market Stone, removed from Friar Gate, where it served as a means of communication between the stricken townspeople and the countryfolk, bringing in provisions. The market folk, coming with their mouths filled with tobacco, as a disinfectant, placed the meat and vegetables and dairy-produce they had brought upon the ground and witnessed the inhabitants drop their money into the hollow in the stone, filled with vinegar. With these strict precautions it was hoped to escape infection.
All Saints’ Church, the most important of the several in the town, possesses a tall and very beautiful late Perpendicular tower, built about 1520, according to legend, by the bachelors and spinsters of Derby. Still further, according to legend, it used to be the custom for the bachelors to ring the bells whenever a young woman born in the town was married.
There is, unfortunately, no direct evidence that the tower really was the work of the bachelors and the spinsters. It was probably built from the money given by a wealthy townsman, Robert Liversage, a dyer by trade. A battered inscription, “Young men and maidens,” no doubt gave rise to the story. It is now generally believed, except by the humblest people, among whom tales of this romantic kind live longest, that the inscription was once simply the pious invitation, “Young men and maidens, old men and children, praise ye the Lord.”
A cathedral-like size and breadth of proportion mark this fine tower, the product of the last days of Gothic, rising to a height of 174 feet above the pavement; and the quite humble old houses of the narrow street do but serve to show it to further advantage. It is heavily buttressed at the angles, in a manner sufficient to have made Ruskin storm, had he ever occasion to write of it; for it was his theory that towers should stand starkly four-square, without the aid of buttresses. But what would Gothic architecture be without those essential features! Something new and strange.
The tower being so fine, of what nature was the body of the church? That we cannot know, for it was rebuilt in a classic style by Gibbs, in 1725, and has the appearance of a great pillared hall, very fine of its kind, and extraordinarily spacious. It was quite a new church, not more than twenty years old, when Prince Charlie attended mass here in the ’45. There are many fine monuments, chiefly from the older building, among them the elaborate memorial, with coroneted effigy, of the famous Bess of Hardwick, that scheming, matchmaking, imperious woman, four times wedded and widowed, whose passion for building and rebuilding rivalled that for forming matrimonial alliances. She is said to have erected her own monument, and it is likely enough she did. Her fourth marriage, in her fiftieth year, to the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, embittered the existence of that unhappy man. He was custodian of Mary Queen of Scots. The anxieties of that charge, and a sorry time of it with his wife, shortened his existence. “Two devils,” he described the Countess and the prisoned Queen, and it is likely enough he privately thought Queen Elizabeth, who was for always worrying him, a third. The quarrels of Earl and Countess were notorious, and the Bishop of Lichfield wrote him what was intended to be a comforting letter on the subject. The tenor of it ran that the case certainly was unfortunate, but, after all, this was the usual lot: