Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Even the mile and a half’s trudge to the inn where the horses and her trusted steward Crompton waited must have tried Arbella in her weakened state, unused to exercise for some weeks; and to ride her ‘good gelding’ astride, in masculine fashion, was an awkward new experience. ‘Yet the stirring of the horse brought blood enough into her face,’ as the courtier Sir John More, in the long account he wrote to a friend, reported vividly. South and east they rode, through the suffocatingly lush greenery of early June … until, at six o’clock in the evening, the trio clattered into Blackwall on the River Thames, fourteen miles away.

  In a life that often followed the pattern of a tragedy, this dashing ride seems like a scene from an altogether more rumbustious style of drama. Arbella, normally studious and easily distressed, could behave with courage and vigour on occasion, and all her adult life she fought against the unjust exercise of authority. ‘I must shape my own coat according to my cloth,’ she once wrote defiantly, ‘but it shall not be after the fashion of this world but fit for me.’

  At a tavern in Blackwall more of her servants were waiting, with baggage and a change of clothes. But there was no sign of William, whose carefully arranged escape from the Tower should by this time have brought him here in safety. For an hour and a half – as one of the watermen later told it – the group lingered, fearfully. At half-past seven Arbella’s companions urged that night was falling, the tide would soon turn, and they must be away. They were to be rowed downriver to where a French captain called Corvé would wait until nightfall, equipped with a password by which to know their party.

  Arbella insisted on giving William yet another half-hour’s grace before she would leave Blackwall. She had no means of knowing what had happened to him – delay, capture, even a change of heart. The phrase ‘time and tide wait for no man’ can never have made itself felt more agonizingly.

  Eight o’clock on a moonless night, and still no sign of William. They had to go now, or wait until morning. Leaving a pair of servants behind to direct William on after them, two boats put out onto the water, the one rowed by ‘a good pair of oars’ for Arbella and her companions, and the other for the luggage that had been smuggled out of William’s lodgings. They slipped past Woolwich, through deserted marshland and down the flat featureless banks of the Thames estuary. At Gravesend the tired boatmen, wearied with dodging shoals and obstructions, refused to row further in the dark and had to be persuaded on with a double fare. Even then they insisted upon stopping for a drink at Tilbury, while the fugitives waited miserably in the boats.

  As the oarsmen steered blindly in the dark, the river widened until the further shore would have been almost out of sight even on the brightest day. They were navigating a path through a maze of creeks and inlets, with the great beds of eelgrass blurring river and land, and sticky mudbanks to trap the unwary. Trying to find one ship among such a watery wilderness must have seemed like seeking a needle in the hay.

  Dawn, heralded by the cries of the estuary birds, was breaking as they approached the tiny port of Leigh around four o’clock on Tuesday morning. But the light was a potential danger, too. Soon men would be stirring in the shipyard. (Vessels – the Mayflower among them – would soon regularly be plying the New World route.) Corvé’s ship should lie a few miles further on; but would he still be waiting there?

  Seeing a brig close at hand, they hailed the master, John Bright, and asked him to take them to Calais. Bright2 refused – but the curious incident stuck in his memory. Later, he described the five passengers in vivid detail. Among the three men, he noticed one for his long flaxen beard, and the steward Crompton for the urgency with which he pressed on Bright a large sum of money. There were two women, he said. One, ‘bare faced, in a black riding safeguard with a black hat’, he took to be the notorious thief and cross-dresser Moll Cutpurse, already the Roaring Girl of stage fame, ‘and thought that if it were she, she had made some fault and was desirous of escape’. It was rather a fantastical guess on the part of Bright, but still not as dramatic as the real story.

  The other woman, Bright reported, ‘sat close covered with a black veil or hood over her face or head. He could not see her – only that under her mantle she had a white attire and that, on pulling off her glove, a marvellous white hand was revealed.’ Forty years before, it was the whiteness of a hand that had betrayed Arbella’s aunt, the queen of Scots, in one of her vain attempts to escape across Loch Leven.

  But Arbella herself was not caught yet. Eight miles beyond Leigh, she finally reached Corvé’s barque, hung with the pre-arranged flag, in safety. Arbella begged for another delay but, with a contrary wind blowing over high seas, the ‘importunity of the followers’ convinced her they had to get away. In fact, the tides held them for another two hours before, through the advance whisper of a rising storm, they weighed anchor and set sail for Calais.

  Behind them in England – though Arbella’s party had no means of knowing it – William had indeed escaped the Tower. He was even now on the water, not far away. But the alarm had been raised soon after his departure. The king had been alerted and a proclamation issued against the fleeing couple for their ‘divers great and heinous offences’. Letters were dispatched to ambassadors abroad, ‘describing their offence in black colours, and pressing their sending back without delay’.

  Everyone connected with the pair was brought in for questioning:3 Dr Moundford; the gullible Mrs Adams; even the man who had made Arbella’s wig was urgently sought. The fugitives’ route was easily traced – thanks, in part, to the observant John Bright – from Blackwall to Leigh. Every vessel in the port was searched, every house in Leigh. In London, the earl of Nottingham, the lord high admiral, reassured James that, the wind being against them, the party could hardly have reached Margate. But nothing could abate the king’s panic and fury. The messengers who were sent scurrying to order the pursuit had ‘Haste, haste! Post haste! Haste for life. Life’ written on their dispatches, with the figure of a gallows ominously scrawled alongside. The admiral of the fleet4, Admiral Monson, hastily flung after Arbella every vessel he could raise in a hurry – one for the Flanders coast, one towards Calais. He even ordered an oyster boat, loaded with six men and shot, to set out while the bigger ships were still getting under way, and himself put to sea in a light fishing craft to watch the action from as close as may be.

  Nottingham, the experienced hero of the Armada, had been right about the winds; but pursuers and pursued alike, knowing that each hour mattered, had to battle on over the choppy sea. Most of Arbella’s life had been lived far inland. As the brisk, short waves of the estuary waters softened into the deeper swell of the open sea, perhaps the wide expanse around her convinced her that she really had got clean away. The little barque bucked its way across the Channel to within sight of Calais; but there again she insisted on waiting. This time, the pause was fatal.

  Griffen Cockett5, captain of the English pinnace Adventure, sent from the Downs, was not ‘half channel over’ when he first saw a sail ahead. ‘Under the South Sundhead we saw a small sail, which we chased,’ he reported afterwards to Monson. It was indeed Arbella’s vessel, which lay ‘lingering for Mr Seymour’. But the winds would not let the Adventure overtake its quarry; so the resourceful Cockett packed his men, armed ‘with shot and pikes’, into a smaller boat, and it must have been this that Arbella’s party saw being rowed towards them over the sea.

  It cannot have been, on the face of it, a very dramatic sight. But it was definitive enough, in its way. Corvé threw out all his sail and tried to make a run for it, but again the winds were against Arbella’s party, and the French barque hardly moved. The Adventure’s boarding party opened fire. Corvé bravely endured several volleys. (‘Thirteen shots straight into his vessel’ was how Sir John More, safe at home in London, heard the story later. Perhaps the small sea battle had been turned into something more spectacular along the way.) It was against the tinny rattle of musketry that Arbella at last came forward and surrendered herself, stil
l defiant: ‘not so sorry for her own restraint as she should be glad if Mr Seymour might escape,’ wrote Sir John, not unadmiringly.

  Resistance was at an end. Corvé stood to and struck his flag. The party from the Adventure had to commandeer the larger French barque to take the whole party, prisoners and captors, back to Sheppey. Monson sent for ‘his Majesty’s directions how to dispose of my lady, for that I am unwilling she should go ashore until I have further authority’. But in the meantime, he said gallantly, ‘she shall not want anything the shore can afford, or any other honourable usage.’ It was the last time she was to be treated so courteously.

  I

  1574–1587

  ‘So good a child’

  ‘Your sweet jewel is so good a child as can be this day.’

  Elizabeth Wingfield to her half-sister Bess of Hardwick

  ‘The hasty marriage’

  TODAY, RUFFORD ABBEY is an evocative ruin, incongruously set in a neat country park run by the local authority. The bulldozers that moved in during the 1950s seem to have sliced cleanly through the huge Nottinghamshire house, exposing the strata of the centuries: clear as the layers of rock in a geologist’s sample, and just as illustrative of history.

  Half buried in the ground are the remains of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbey, where birds now fly straight through the glassless windows of the cellarium. Above them gawp the gigantic windows – ruined in their turn – of the Tudor mansion built by the noble Talbot family, after the Cistercians were turned out in the dissolution of the monasteries. The hound dogs of the Talbot crest still prance above the stable doorway. The formal grounds, and yet more brickwork, were laid out in time for the royal house parties of Rufford’s second, Edwardian, heyday: the epoch which led D. H. Lawrence to borrow it for ‘Wragby Hall’, oppressive home to his Lady Chatterley. Finally – after the Second World War, after the county council took over – there were added the railings and notices, the disabled access ramps, of the late twentieth century.

  Rufford has everything, including a ghost. Several of them, actually, including a clammy baby, with a penchant for nestling up to lady guests, and a huge Black Monk – blame him for the man buried in a nearby churchyard, who ‘died after seeing the Rufford ghost’, as the parish register solemnly records. There is also a White Lady, flitting through the trees and weeping in classic style. This, so the guide books say, is Arbella.

  But there seems no particular reason why Arbella Stuart’s spirit, however restless, should choose Rufford for her return. Surely Hardwick Hall – or the Tower of London – would be more likely? On the other hand, Rufford Abbey was where it all began. This, almost forty years before that wild June ride to the river, was where Arbella Stuart’s parents met and married. Another ‘hasty marriage’, another source of controversy. But no-one will ever be sure whether the brief drama enacted at Rufford in November 1574 was a romance or a political story.

  Rufford lies a mere twenty-odd miles from Sheffield Castle and Chatsworth – the principal homes Arbella’s grandmother (Bess ‘of Hardwick’, as she is usually known) shared with her fourth husband, George Talbot, the sixth earl of Shrewsbury. It lies, too, hard by the Great North Road along which the widowed countess of Lennox, with Charles Stuart, her only surviving son, set out from London to visit their Yorkshire estates that autumn. On the way north they stopped at the house of an acquaintance at Huntingdon, and Bess, who was visiting Rufford, made the comparatively easy trip down to join them. No surprises there, surely. Company fresh from the court was always welcome – and there had, after all, been some talk of marriage between Bess’s daughter Elizabeth and ‘young Bertie’, son of the Huntingdon acquaintance. No surprise at all that Bess should invite the Lennox party to pause again at Rufford, and make another break in the wearisome winter journey.

  So far, so likely. But Bess also happened – happened? – to have brought Elizabeth, her only unmarried daughter, with her to Rufford. And Lady Lennox no sooner arrived at the Talbot house than she found herself so fatigued by travel as to keep to her rooms for several days with Bess in close attendance, thus leaving the young people to each other’s company. It would have been easy for them to lose themselves in Rufford – especially if no-one were trying to find them. The house was ‘a confused labyrinth, underneath all vaults, above entries, closets, oratories … I was never so puzzled in my life,’ reported a neighbour, Sir John Holles, the then sheriff of Nottingham, disgustedly.

  Did Bess have an ulterior motive in issuing her invitation? Did Lady Lennox have an ulterior motive in accepting? Elizabeth Cavendish (Bess’s daughter by her second marriage) was twenty years old to Charles Stuart’s nineteen. Perhaps the young people, thrown thus together, did start to fall in love. Whatever the feelings of the two principals, Bess had not got where she had by failing to seize an offered opportunity, and within days the wedding ceremony was performed at Rufford, with a speed that reflected the need for secrecy.

  Young love was certainly the version of events their families offered to the authorities in London, when news of the sudden marriage was broken at court. But only a few vulnerable lives stood between Charles Stuart and the English, as well as the Scottish, throne. The unlicensed marriage of a possible royal heir was something like treachery; and each of those two formidable dames, the Ladies Lennox and Shrewsbury, had a past history that made a plot seem likely. When news of the match reached court, the queen and the privy council, her closest advisers, were unconvinced, and furious. A wave of arrests, accompanied by threats of the Tower and of torture, surrounded Arbella Stuart’s conception.

  Trouble was in her very bloodlines; and it dwelt with one blood relative particularly. The real concern over the events played out at Rufford Abbey was the suspicion that they were just one move in a deep-laid plot involving that perennial bugbear of Elizabeth’s reign, the imprisoned Scots Queen Mary. Not only had Charles Stuart’s elder brother been that Lord Darnley who had married Mary, but now the deposed queen was being held in English custody, just a few miles away from Rufford, by no other than Bess’s husband, the earl of Shrewsbury.

  Mary’s arrival in England in the spring of 1568 had signalled a fresh series of shocks to the realm’s stability – a stability never easily preserved by a small Protestant land in a continent of covetous Catholic superpowers. In 1574 it was only three years since the queen of Scots had plotted Elizabeth’s murder; two since the duke of Norfolk had gone to the block for his part in that conspiracy. Just two years ago, in 1572, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris had seen thousands of Protestants slaughtered for their religion; now a new wave of Catholic missionary priests had begun to infiltrate England from the Jesuit seminaries. One year ago Queen Elizabeth had turned forty, and the chances of her marrying and bearing a child were beginning to look scant. The uncertainty about England’s future, and in particular the danger of a Catholic challenge, explain why events at Rufford were taken so seriously at court.

  From the isolation of the midlands, exculpatory letters were galloped south. Lord Shrewsbury wrote to the queen’s chief minister Lord Burghley (William Cecil) that the young people ‘hath so tied themselves upon [their] own liking as they can not part. The young man is so far in love as belike he is sick without her.’ Shrewsbury – unlikely to have been included in any scheme of Bess’s devising – was at a disadvantage here. Relaying his tale of young love to Burghley, he appended, dismally, ‘as my wife tells me’. He wrote to Queen Elizabeth herself that the marriage:

  was dealt in suddenly6, and without my knowledge … my wife, finding herself disappointed of young Bertie … and that the other young gentleman was inclined to love with a few days’ acquaintance, did her best to further her daughter to this match, without having therein any other intent or respect than with reverent duty towards your Majesty she ought.

  Mary Stuart, queen of Scotland, and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, Charles Stuart’s brother and Arbella’s uncle

  Lady Lennox wrote in a similar vein to Burghley: �
�Now my Lord7, for the hasty marriage of my son after that he had intangled himself so that he could have no other …’ But as she wrote she was already on the way back to London, delayed only by her ‘overlaboured mules’. She had been ordered south, with her son and new daughter-in-law, while the authorities conducted an inquiry into the affair.

  She knew as well as anybody what had frightened Queen Elizabeth so severely. It was, as Lord Shrewsbury put it trenchantly, ‘not the marriage matter … that makes this great ado. It is a greater matter.’ But he firmly dismissed the possibility of any ‘liking or insinuation’ with Queen Mary. He was sticking to his story of young love. He added a significant comment: that surely ‘that benefit any subject may by law claim’ should also be given to his family. All her life, Arbella’s rights as an individual would come up against her royalty.

  One can hardly blame the council for their suspicions. Around the proffered picture of a romantic young couple entwines a cat’s cradle of strings pulled by older and more powerful people: the two queens, of England and of Scotland; and those two forceful ladies, Arbella’s grandmothers. The latter were to be the dominant influences on her early life. It was certainly they – rather than Arbella’s short-lived parents – who most concerned Queen Elizabeth and her advisers.

  Bess of Hardwick, Arbella’s maternal grandmother, was by now almost fifty. This greatest of all the Elizabethan dynasts had been born into small gentry obscurity, but the cumulative gains of four marriages had made her one of the richest women in the land. The second, to Sir William Cavendish, had produced her children. The third had helped make her wealthy. Her fourth, to the earl of Shrewsbury, put her in a position to purchase for her daughter an alliance with royalty.