Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Portraits of Bess from the time of Arbella’s youth show a spare woman dressed in uncompromising black, her sandy hair turning grey. She is not uncomely; but the sharp nose and thin rigid mouth bespeak a formidable severity. The antiquarian Edmund Lodge called her ‘a woman of masculine understanding – proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling’. It was a harsh judgement on the woman who was to raise the young Arbella; a man’s judgement, maybe, resentful of a woman who had achieved what Bess had achieved in terms of power and property. In the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole had a malicious rhyme for her:

  Four times35 the nuptial bed she warmed

  And each time so well performed

  When Death had spoiled each husband’s billing

  He left the widow every shilling.

  Bess was indeed36 a triumphal survivor – but her life, while successful, had not been easy. Her father, John Hardwick of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire (then a simple manor house), died in 1527 in Bess’s infancy, and the family was left in penury. His widow married again, but her new husband was himself imprisoned in the Fleet for insolvency just a few years later. Perhaps her early experience of struggle to overcome disruption and hardship hardly encouraged Bess, later, to regard the troubles of a more privileged granddaughter with particular sympathy.

  Bess was not yet fifteen when she married her first husband, Robert Barlow, a young man whom she nursed devotedly when he fell sick in the house where she was staying. But Barlow died in 1544, still a minor. Her second husband was Sir William Cavendish: a widower and father already, a rising man knighted by Henry VIII and profiting from the dissolution of the monasteries. He was twenty-two years older than her, but by all accounts they were very happy. Children came quickly – six surviving to adulthood – and in 1549, through family connections, they bought the manor of Chatsworth in Derbyshire and began to purchase lands around it, close to Bess’s family. They rebuilt Chatsworth as a grey castellated block (itself long since replaced) with meagre windows, framing a central court; the old style from which fashion was only just moving away.

  The advent of Catholic Mary, ‘Bloody Mary’, to the English throne was a blow to the Cavendish family. But Sir William’s death in 1557 put an end to an official inquiry into his professional dealings. Bess recorded her own feelings, on this occasion, with a mixture of emotion and efficiency. ‘Memorandum. That Sir William Cavendish Knight my most dear and well beloved husband departed this present life the 25th day of October … I most humbly beseech the Lord to have mercy and rid me and his poor children out of our great misery.’ Bess, some thirty years old, was left with six young children, two stepdaughters and five thousand pounds owing to the treasury. Yet perversely, it may have been now that the preoccupation of her life was born – to continue what her husband had begun and found a great dynasty.

  After two years of widowhood, Bess married again. Sir William St Loe was one of the most ardent supporters of the new Queen Elizabeth. He was well-to-do, a successful courtier, and besotted with Bess to the point of folly. He appears gladly to have taken on not only her family commitments but the further beautification of the Cavendish home in Derbyshire; he dowered Bess’s stepdaughter, arranged her boys’ entry into Eton, and jokingly addressed letters to ‘my own dear wife Chatsworth’. Bess’s huge influence over St Loe, and his expressed intention of leaving all his lands to her, led to accusations of sorcery being bandied around his family. His death – after some five or six years of marriage – left her very rich indeed.

  Bess’s fourth and last marriage, concluded three years later, was to be her grandest. But her alliance with George Talbot, sixth earl of Shrewsbury, a wealthy widower whose massive property in the north and the midlands ran close by Bess’s own, was to end so badly that it shook the country.

  At first Shrewsbury, like his predecessors, seemed to fall happily under the spell of Bess’s forceful personality. ‘Of all earthly joys, that hath happened to me, I thank God chiefest for you,’ he wrote to her soon after their marriage. But the earl’s onerous new duties as custodian to the Scots queen placed an enormous strain on the family. There were, from the start, essentially three people in the Shrewsburys’ marriage, since the earl was never allowed to be far away from Mary. From Shrewsbury’s main home at Sheffield, the party moved between Tutbury, Wingfield, the springs at Buxton and Chatsworth, as dictated by orders from London and the pressing need to clean the overcrowded houses – some forty-eight moves in sixteen years, made in mounting disharmony.

  Queen Elizabeth’s insistence on having as few people as possible near the Scots queen multiplied alarmingly the number of establishments that the earl had to maintain in order to house his children (‘heavy burdens, although comfortable’, he called his offspring). There were an ‘infinite number of hidden charges’ brought on by his position, and by the early 1580s the supposed richest man in England was in such difficulties that he wrote of having his old plate melted down to pacify his creditors. But his pride was wounded even more sharply. To the demands of Mary’s custody was added, he increasingly came to feel, Bess’s determination to enrich her own children at his expense. ‘My riches they talk of are in other men’s purses,’ he said grimly.

  When the two great landowners had married, the financial settlements had been complicated beyond belief. All Bess’s property (other than the entailed Chatsworth) naturally became Shrewsbury’s. In return, however, he made her promises of inheritance and upkeep, including the settlement of a large sum on each of her two younger sons, William and Charles, when they came of age. A few years down the line, this agreement had been amended by mutual consent, so that Shrewsbury instead then and there returned to his wife’s ownership a certain percentage of the lands that had been her own. He thus gave back to Bess her financial independence; and, shrewd business-woman that she was, she used her holding wisely. But as his countess became richer, the earl’s wealth decreased, and he resented it furiously. Only ‘brawling’ finally brought Bess her daughter Elizabeth’s disputed dowry. And ‘brawling’, increasingly, was the way she communicated with her husband.

  George Talbot, sixth earl of Shrewsbury, Bess’s fourth husband

  Their feuding even became physical. Bess’s son Charles Cavendish had to take refuge in a church steeple for twenty-four hours after being attacked outside Chatsworth by a party of the earl’s servants. In July 1584 (when Arbella was eight, and able to understand the servants’ gossip) Shrewsbury and a party of armed men tried to take forcible possession of Chatsworth, and were repulsed by Bess’s favourite son William, ‘with halberd in hand and pistol under his girdle’. Shrewsbury, outraged, complained to the queen’s advisers. ‘It were no reason that my wife and her servants should rule me and make me the wife and her the husband,’ was how he tellingly described the insult.

  The authorities, to placate Shrewsbury, clapped William Cavendish into Fleet prison, since ‘it was not meet that a man of his mean quality should use himself in a contemptuous sort against one of his lordship’s station and quality.’ In view of his position as Queen Mary’s gaoler, the great earl was always dealt with as tenderly as could be. But the class dimension to the indictment is interesting: Shrewsbury himself would sneer at his wife’s ‘base stock’. The Cavendishes (whose blood it was that mingled in Arbella’s veins with that of the royal Stuarts) really were Johnnies-come-lately – like Burghley, Leicester, Ralegh and so many of the Elizabethan mighty.

  The younger generation, Arbella’s aunts and uncles, were drawn into the quarrel between the Shrewsburys. When Bess and George had married in 1567, two more alliances had been built into the deal, to make an indissoluble partnership of persons and property: Shrewsbury’s son Gilbert Talbot married Bess’s daughter Mary, while Bess’s eldest son Henry Cavendish married Shrewsbury’s daughter Grace. When the split came, Gilbert sided with his stepmother (and mother-in-law) against his own father. Shrewsbury blamed the influence of Gilbert’s dominating wife Mary. With far more enthusiasm, Henry Cavendish flung himself onto
the other side, beside his stepfather (and father-in-law) Shrewsbury, against his mother. ‘My bad son Henry’, Bess later described him angrily. Arbella’s uncle, and ally in her first rebellion, Henry was an interesting character: a volunteer soldier in the Low Countries; a rake who would be described as the ‘common bull’ of the district; a sometime traveller whose servant’s journal of his voyage to Constantinople in 1589 still survives today. (They travelled through Germany, Venice – ‘a most foul stinking sink’ – and Dalmatia; and Poland on the return journey.) He was the heir to Chatsworth and his hostility may have played a part in driving Bess, who had already quit the Shrewsbury stronghold of Sheffield Castle, out of that territory also.

  Once sharing a home with Shrewsbury ceased to be a possibility, Bess (with her son William, his family, and often Arbella too) went back to her childhood home of Hardwick. In 1583 she bought the house outright, for nine and a half thousand pounds, from the estate of her brother James who had died bankrupt. This was the core of Hardwick Old Hall, as it is known today, to distinguish it from Hardwick Hall, which gave Bess her famous sobriquet. The quarters must have been cramped. One way and another, even the redoubtable Bess was feeling the strain. ‘For herself she hopes to find some friend for meat and drink and so to end her life,’ she wrote to Walsingham in April 1584, melodramatically.

  But it was Shrewsbury who was really isolated. Bess, over the years, had carefully kept in touch with all the powers at court: Walsingham, Burghley, Hatton and the earl of Leicester, her old ally. Visiting the springs at Buxton for his health, bravely trying to mediate between the Shrewsburys, Leicester advised the earl to make up with the countess. ‘She is your wife and a very wise gentlewoman.’ The bishop of Coventry put it more bluntly: ‘If shrewdness and sharpness be a just cause of separation between man and wife, I think few men in England would keep their wives long.’ The prolonged dispute drew in the privy council and even the queen herself, always coming down on the side of Bess who, with no desire for a formal separation, painted herself as a patient Penelope.

  What brought matters into the public domain was, of course, the issue of the Scots queen. In the autumn of 1583, rumours had begun to spread of an affair between the earl and his royal charge. Mary believed Bess had spread the rumours and, through the French ambassador, begged that Queen Elizabeth would ‘see justice done to me’. The famous scandal letter saw the Scots queen’s anger burst its banks. Her declaration that she was writing ‘without passion and from motives of true sincerity’ must draw one of the hollowest laughs in history. Bess (said Mary) had accused Queen Elizabeth herself of licentiousness, sexual malformation and a vanity so extreme that Bess and her daughter Elizabeth had trouble concealing their laughter at the courtiers’ extravagant compliments. Gossip from over the embroidery frames was dredged up and set in the harshest possible light, for the most dangerous possible audience. Bess (wrote Mary) had said:

  Firstly that one37 to whom she said you had made a promise of marriage before a lady of your chamber, had made love to you an infinite number of times with all the licence and intimacy which can be used between man and wife. But that undoubtedly you were not like other women … and you would never lose your liberty to make love and always have your pleasure with new lovers.

  Sir Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester

  This was dynamite – but there was no explosion. It seems likely Burghley prudently kept the letter from Queen Elizabeth, or that Mary herself thought better of sending it. But in December 1584 Bess and her sons William and Charles were called to court to deny, in public, that they had initiated the rumour that Mary had had a child by Shrewsbury.

  The days when the countess and the Scots queen had sat together at their embroidery were very far away. Now Arbella, once perhaps their common project, had her share in Mary’s vituperation. ‘Nothing has ever alienated the countess more from me’, Mary wrote in one of her letters to the French ambassador in March 1584, ‘than the vain hope she has conceived of setting the crown on her granddaughter Arbella’s head, even by marrying the earl of Leicester’s son.’

  The charge, up to a point at least, was true. In 1584, Bess and her old friend the earl of Leicester did speak of arranging a marriage between Arbella and Leicester’s son Robert, Lord Denbigh; Leicester’s visits to Buxton and Bess had not been only in his self-imposed role of mediator. In March 1584 Lord Paget wrote to the earl of Northumberland: ‘A friend in office is very desirous that the queen should have light given her of the practice between Leicester and the countess for Arbella, for it comes on very lustily, insomuch as the said earl hath sent down the picture of his baby.’

  That match died with young Robert himself only weeks after it was spoken of, but Leicester’s presumed ambitions in promoting it were already common knowledge. A doggerel verse entitled ‘Leicester’s Ghost’ circulated during the earl’s lifetime:

  First I assayed38 Queen Elizabeth to wed,

  Whom divers princes courted, but in vain;

  When in the course unluckily I sped

  I sought the Scots’ queen’s marriage to obtain;

  But when I rept no profit for my paine,

  I sought to match Denbigh, my tender childe,

  To Dame Arbella, but I was beguiled.

  The next verse suggests that Bess and Leicester between them were preparing ‘a new triumvirate’:

  If Death awhile young Denbigh’s life had spar’d

  The grandame, uncle and the father-in-law,

  Might thus have brought all England under awe.

  Mary also believed that the countess had schemed more grandly still: ‘even that my son should marry my niece Arbell’. Bess, she said, had commissioned an astrologer, who foretold Mary herself replacing Elizabeth, to be followed by King James and Queen Arbella on the English throne. In 1585 the marriage of Arbella and James was indeed mooted by Walsingham himself, and in many ways it does seem the perfect solution to the problem of the succession. The idea of uniting in wedlock the English and Scottish kingdoms was by no means a novel one; the marriage of Arbella’s Lennox grandparents had been made with half an eye to that possibility. The marriage of Edward VI of England and the infant Mary, queen of Scots had been suggested; and Queen Elizabeth had lamented aloud that neither she nor Mary were a man, so that they might marry each other. But nothing came of any James–Arbella project. Had Elizabeth herself stepped in – never as keen as her ministers to see the direction of the succession signalled too clearly? Or was James simply not ready for matrimony? Whatever the government’s deeper plans, after these early ventures Bess seems to have been warned off further matchmaking. In all her dynastic games, Arbella’s marriage was one gambit closed off to her.

  A few years on39 – just weeks before his death in 1590 – Shrewsbury would speak bitterly of Arbella as ‘this lady who will bring trouble to his house’. Prophetically, he coupled Bess with her daughter Mary Talbot as being responsible for the storms ahead. Arbella had often stayed with her aunt and uncle, Gilbert and Mary Talbot, since her mother’s death; the couple had three daughters of their own, though the eldest was still some years younger than Arbella, and she was sometimes in their company. It is true that even with the Talbots, Arbella seemed affectionate, teasing … but never quite easy. But then, that sort of unease was very characteristic of the Cavendish family. And Gilbert and Mary – especially Mary – were to play a vital part in Arbella’s later life as correspondents and allies.

  Gilbert Talbot (heir to the earldom after his elder brother died in 1582) repeatedly tried to act as mediator between the battling elders. Despite his incessant quarrels with friends and relations, he emerges as not unlikeable from Arbella’s many later letters to him. ‘I will not be restrained from chiding you (so great a lord as you are),’ she could tease him gently. In his own letters through the years of Arbella’s childhood, his passion for hunting and hawking sits oddly alongside a chronicle of his many minor ailments. The medical man Simon Forman treated a Gilbert Talbot and found him ‘fu
ll of cold humours’, melancholy in his stomach and plagued with cold phlegm; a well-intentioned man, but a weak one, maybe.

  By contrast, Mary Talbot resembled her mother Bess in temperament: a formidable woman, famous in her day for her ambition, her learning and her grim defiance of authority. It was Mary Talbot, rather than Bess, who, in Gaudy Night, was the foundress of Dorothy Sayers’ fictional Shrewsbury College in Oxford. Sayers, in the persona of Harriet Vane, recalled that

  Bess of Hardwick’s daughter had been a great intellectual, indeed, but something of a holy terror; uncontrollable by her menfolk, undaunted by the Tower, contemptuously silent before the Privy Council, an obstinate recusant [Catholic, and non-attender at the Anglican church], a staunch friend and implacable enemy and a lady with a turn for invective remarkable even in an age when few mouths suffered from mealiness. She seemed, in fact, to be the epitome of every alarming quality which a learned woman is popularly credited with developing. Her husband, the ‘great and glorious Earl of Shrewsbury,’ had purchased domestic peace at a price; for, said [Francis] Bacon, there was ‘a greater than he, which is my Lady of Shrewsbury’.

  And that, ‘of course’, was a dreadful thing to have said about one, remarked Sayers/Vane sardonically.

  Her family mattered to Arbella, and not just in the clannish sense of her day, in which the extended family unit was a source of financial support and political security. Her later letters show that she felt a close and personal interest. She would attempt to mediate among her quarrelsome relatives, as well as to promote their interests with the powers in the land.

  But the matriarchal world in which Arbella was raised was to serve her badly in later life, when it came to dealing with the masculine atmosphere of James’s court. She was surrounded by strong, not to say inimical, female authority figures: Bess of Hardwick, Margaret Lennox, Mary Talbot … to say nothing of the watching queens, Elizabeth and Mary. The old earl felt the pressure: ‘I am removed to the castle, and most quiet when I have fewest women here,’ he once wrote misogynistically. Towards the end of his life he was to thank Elizabeth for setting him free of ‘two devils’ – his wife and Queen Mary. The young Arbella, as she grew up, must often have felt like a mouse in a cattery.