Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Essex’s great rival for the queen’s favour was Sir Walter Ralegh, but Ralegh – as Charles Cavendish noted – was ‘in wonderful declination yet labours to underprop himself by my lord treasurer’. Hence, no doubt, his attentive presence at Burghley’s supper party.

  The bold and bearded captain of the queen’s guard, dressed in jewels worth a king’s ransom, Ralegh was a dashing figure, fit to dazzle older and wiser eyes than those of the youthful Arbella. But, on trial for his life in later years, accused of plotting to place Arbella on James’s throne, he declared that she was ‘a woman with whom he had no acquaintance’. This was one aspect of court life to which Arbella (like Ralegh himself) never grew accustomed – the falsity, the political necessity that would make yesterday’s friend into today’s enemy. ‘What fair words have I had of courtiers and counsellors,’ she later recalled in her misfortunes – adding bitterly: ‘and lo they are vanished into smoke.’

  But without the dubious benefits of hindsight, 1587 seemed a time of unalloyed personal triumph for Arbella; a time when the queen ‘by trial pronounced me an eaglet of her own kind’, as she put it dramatically. In fact, her own qualities were hardly the point. With one potential claimant, Mary, out of the way, it was important to demonstrate that James did not stand alone in the succession. So even that expensive education was hardly touched upon. ‘Her Majesty examined her nothing touching her book [lessons],’ Charles wrote. It was Arbella’s royal blood, not her brains, which was in demand here – except, of course, in so far as her accomplishments made her a more marriageable commodity.

  Over the next fifteen years, Arbella’s name would be coupled in international gossip with those of every single prince in Christendom. Promise of her hand (and implicitly of the succession) would become an invaluable tool in Queen Elizabeth’s lifelong game of diplomacy; Arbella was to be Elizabeth’s deputy in the long courtship ritual that had proved the queen’s best political weapon. Elizabeth had kept one foreign power after another in line with the promise of her hand, and her kingdom along with it. Now the ‘best match in her parish’ could no longer plausibly play that game. ‘I am an old woman to whom paternosters will suffice in place of nuptials,’ she told her courtiers pathetically. But she could offer an alternative match – Arbella. The young relative whom she always preferred to keep out of sight in Derbyshire could be transformed, when diplomatic necessity required, into ‘a near cousin of her own, whom she loves much, and whom she intends to make her heir and successor’, as the French ambassador would later describe her. The second-best match in the parish, in effect. It meant that Elizabeth, as she looked at Arbella now, was reminded not only of mortality, but of the loss of her own sexuality. But politically, it was a good card – and this was a moment when Elizabeth had to play her hand especially skilfully.

  By 1587, with his great Armada already in preparation, the Spanish King Philip’s envoy to Elizabeth, Mendoza, had already broached the possibility of a marriage between Arbella and the duke of Parma’s son, Rainutio Farnese. Now, with England facing a war it could not afford, such a diplomatic solution was very appealing. But in Scotland, the idea had alarmed King James. Professing indignation at his mother’s death, he incensed Elizabeth by demanding to be named as her heir. Having got wind of the proposed Farnese match, he demanded, furthermore, ‘that the Lady Arbella be not given in marriage without the king’s special advice and consent’.

  More Scottish unrest must have struck Elizabeth as an unnecessary complication at this difficult time. She had dubbed Mary Stuart the ‘Daughter of Debate’; Mary’s niece showed every irritating sign of proving just such another figure of controversy. But Elizabeth, though she could harbour an unjust grudge, never let it stand in the way of policy. It was certainly time to give the girl a brief moment in the limelight. A visit to the court at Theobalds, an acknowledgement of Arbella’s rank, would increase her value for the king of Spain – and teach the king of Scotland not to count his chickens before they were hatched.

  Arbella could hardly have been fully aware of such considerations, but her relatives were better placed to assess the situation, and had no intention of letting the hopes of their thrusting house rest on a single curtsey. Over the next year Arbella spent much of her time in the south, in the care of Gilbert and Mary in their London homes. Just a month after her appearance at Theobalds, Arbella’s few household goods were on the road back to Derbyshire: ‘two beer jugs, gilt with covers; one great bowl, gilt with a cover; two livery pots, parcel gilt; eleven spoons …’ But if she went with them, it was only briefly, for on 10 October Sir Henry Goodere wrote to Mary Talbot (who was away with the court) concerning Arbella, left with her ladies in London and in his care. Arbella’s ‘diet’ was putting him to considerable cost, he wrote: ‘my housekeeping doth stand me57 in five marks every week now more than I spent before the ladies came to Newgate Street.’ Just so did courtiers complain about the far greater charge of playing host to Queen Elizabeth – though most of them felt it more than worth the expense.

  And Arbella, after all, was the young lady of the hour. She had come away from her first court visit carrying with her the heady whiff of flattery. The queen herself, in the end, had awarded the palm, though it was typical of her not to praise the girl directly. Instead, she placed her words where they mattered politically. To Madame de Châteauneuf, wife of the French ambassador, Elizabeth made a calculatedly tantalizing remark. She asked the Frenchwoman whether she had remarked the little girl who had dined at her own table. Madame de Châteauneuf agreed she had, speaking politely of Arbella’s grace and charm. Indicating Arbella, the queen said: ‘Look to her well58: she will one day be even as I am and a lady mistress [une maitresse dame]. But I will have gone before.’

  These were words of the kind that spread rapidly through a court and beyond. To Arbella and her family, if they heard them, they would have sounded like a promise. To James of Scotland, and to Elizabeth’s ministers, they would represent a threat. In either case, they came to prove a most uncomfortable prophecy.

  ‘Court-dazzled eyes’

  THESE WERE HALCYON public days for Arbella. Court visits, a plethora of marriage proposals – it seemed likely her fortune would map out in accordance with the wildest dreams of her hopeful family.

  There seemed none to challenge her among the other English candidates for the succession. The Seymour line had been brought low when Lord Beauchamp – elder son to the earl of Hertford and the ill-fated Catherine Grey – had made an illicit love-match with a ‘lady of much lower quality’, as the Spanish ambassador reported disapprovingly. His bride was the daughter of Sir Richard Rogers – a notorious smuggler,59 no less, whose title of knight concealed the fact that he owned several pirate ships. Queen Elizabeth, moreover, had never acknowledged the legitimacy of Hertford’s sons: Lord Beauchamp bore his title by courtesy and common usage only. As for the Stanleys, they were always the line least likely to succeed. Not only were they the most junior, but their candidate was another ageing woman: the forty-seven-year-old Lady Derby, granddaughter of Mary Tudor. Lady Derby, moreover, had recently spent several years in custody for having treasonably caused an astrologer to predict the date of the queen’s death, and the name of her heir.

  If Elizabeth wanted a check on James’s vaulting ambition, Arbella was the only realistic choice. But to Arbella herself, the widening of her horizons probably presented itself less as a political opportunity than as a chance to escape from her grandmother’s charge – what she would later call her grandmother’s custody.

  One letter Arbella wrote to Bess in the early months of 1588 offers an insight into the relationship between them. She was staying with Gilbert60 and Mary much of that Armada year, and a stilted bread-and-butter note she wrote, in French, to Burghley from the Talbots’ house in Coleman Street still survives. Her letter to Bess is very different. In many ways it is a domestic epistle. ‘My cousin Mary61 hath had three little fits of an ague, but now she is well and merry.’ Enclosed are the ends of
Arbella’s hair, ‘which were cut the sixth day of the moon, and with them a pot of jelly which my servant made.’ (Bess, who kept an astrologer in her household, presumably wanted Arbella’s hair – thus dated on the lunar calendar – for astrological or magical purposes; or else, perhaps, to prevent their being obtained by any ill-wisher hoping to cast his own spell.) The letter ends: ‘thus with my humble duty unto your Ladyship and humble thanks for the token you sent me last, and craving your daily blessing, I humbly cease … Your ladyship’s humble and obedient child’. So many ‘humbles’ in one sentence suggest a formidable recipient, even making allowance for the rhetoric of the sixteenth century. Above all it is still a child’s letter, with a child’s uncomfortable approach to an elder.

  But Arbella was starting to grow up – not always easily. In the early summer of 1588 she made a second visit to the court, now at Greenwich, again with the Talbots. A marriage between Arbella and Parma’s son was again spoken of as a possibility, and though it might have been little more than diplomatic obfuscation, the gambit had at least to seem to be taken seriously. Spain’s mighty Armada was already on the seas. The mood of the court was darker than when Arbella had made her first visit to it at Theobolds. Astrologers had always predicted (said the chronicler Holinshed) ‘most wonderful and very extraordinary accidents’ for 1588, and events looked like proving them right. Throughout the early months of the year the country had begun to move onto a war footing. Ships were built, stores requisitioned, a network of warning beacons set up on hilltops across the land.

  For Arbella, too, a personal crisis was approaching. Her trip to Greenwich with the Talbots ended badly. Arbella’s own later comment that she had been ‘disgraced in the presence at Greenwich and discouraged in the lobby at Whitehall’ showed that the incident still rankled fifteen years later. Further information is frustratingly vague, but perhaps the inexperienced Arbella had taken the queen’s flattering words upon her last visit a shade too seriously. In 1603, when she was again in trouble, the Venetian ambassador relayed an old story that at Greenwich, the twelve-year-old Arbella had

  displayed such haughtiness62 that she soon began to claim first place; and one day on going into chapel she herself took such precedence of all the princesses who were in her Majesty’s suite; nor would she retire, though repeatedly told to do so by the master of ceremonies, for she said that by God’s will that was the very lowest place that could possibly be given her. At this time the queen in indignation ordered her back to her private existence without so much as seeing her before she took her leave.

  The ambassador, when he wrote this, had only just arrived in England; he was recounting hoary hearsay. But beneath a layer of exaggeration – the ambassador adds, inaccurately, that the queen never saw Arbella again – the story has the ring of plausibility. By the rules of court protocol, the insistent Arbella had a point – and she had been raised to value her rights highly. (This, moreover, is the kind of mistake to which royal heirs were prone; just so had a younger Elizabeth furiously censured Catherine Grey for her ‘arrogant and unseemly words’. And Catherine Grey was considerably older, and used to the ways of the court.) If the story is true, then Elizabeth – frantically trying to conduct peace negotiations until 17 July, just two days before the Armada was sighted off The Lizard – must have been exasperated by such an ill-timed storm in her domestic teacup. Since the Farnese marriage was clearly off, the girl’s presence may have seemed redundant, even embarrassing.

  A contemporary view of the Spanish Armada and the thanksgiving celebrations afterwards

  But the earl of Essex seems to have spoken up in support of Arbella. Essex was Elizabeth’s new favourite, her ‘wild horse’; but even he, as Arbella herself later recalled, though ‘then in highest favour63 durst scarce steal a salutation [with Arbella] in the Privy Chamber’. It seems possible that Arbella showed signs of becoming too close to one of the queen’s favourites – an offence Elizabeth always punished swiftly.

  Not yet twenty, Essex was tall and pale, ardent, athletic, religious and egotistical, given to attacks of prostration and melancholy. Stepson to Leicester, kinsman to the queen and royally descended from Edward III, he was proud of his birth, bitter at the rise of the ‘bare gentleman’ Ralegh, and resentful of Elizabeth’s power over him at the same time as he exploited his power over her. It is hard to envisage a man more sure to be chivalrously sympathetic towards Arbella’s attempt to claim pre-eminence as a princess of the blood; and, slight though the incident may have been, Arbella many years later remembered it keenly, recalling with gratitude ‘My noble friend who graced me … in his greatest and happy fortunes, with the adventure [at the risk] of eclipsing part of her Majesty’s favours from him’. Whatever the risk to Essex’s own standing with Elizabeth, his championship – indeed, the whole episode – would hardly have endeared the young girl to the ageing ruler.

  As the Armada bore down upon England, Arbella was sent north to Derbyshire: away from the danger, but also away from the centre of activity. She was old enough to know that if the Spanish army did land in Kent, or sail up the Thames to take London – and all England was aghast at the very real possibility – then she, pawn or prisoner, would be one immediate target for the invading army. But now the preparations to repel invaders, the great victory on the sea – all these could reach her only as rumour. Because of her relatives’ importance, perhaps she heard the news with just enough tantalizing freshness to bring home what she was missing; a Shrewsbury-owned ship, the Talbot, had been sent to join the fighting. The earl of Leicester wrote directly to the earl of Shrewsbury about the queen’s famous speech at Tilbury. ‘Our gracious Majesty hath been here with me to see her camp and her people, which so inflamed the hearts of her good subjects as I think the weakest person amongst them is able to match the proudest Spaniard that dare land in England.’ Arbella had been an important figure, a featured player, in this stirring episode – but now the most insignificant courtier, soldier or inhabitant of a southern coastal town must have experienced the great events more directly.

  In November, the month of the official victory celebrations, Arbella was at Wingfield in Derbyshire, attended only by servants. It was a great block of an old house, perched on a craggy eminence – but the mood of the place obviously did not affect her unduly. On 5 November the steward Nicholas Kinnersley wrote to Bess: ‘My Lady Arbella at 8 o’clock this night was merry; and eats her meat well; but she went not to ye school these six days: therefore I would be glad of your Lady coming.’

  But Bess, like the queen herself, was suffering from a personal loss in the death of the earl of Leicester, cruelly timed at the very moment of the victory rejoicing. Arbella knew the earl – but she is more likely to have been ruffled by a sense of events passing her by. Did she have another cause for wildness at this time? It is tempting to speculate64 that Arbella’s wilful mood might have been connected to the recent kindness of the most romantic young man in England, Leicester’s stepson, Essex; tempting to anyone who has ever lived through the years of adolescent fantasy.

  In all events, Bess came to Wingfield, gladdening the heart of her steward, and swept her recalcitrant granddaughter back to Hardwick. There are suggestions that she may from this point have treated her ‘jewel’ less deferentially. Arbella, the old earl of Shrewsbury told his confidential servant in 1590, ‘was wont to have the upper hand65 of my wife [Bess] and her daughter Mary, but now it is otherwise (as it is told to me), for that they have been advised by some of their friends at the court that it was misliked.’ Perhaps, as Arbella began to grow up, her grandmother began to find her less easy to handle.

  Bess had, moreover, other fish to fry. The quarrels of Arbella’s family had once again become a public scandal. When the old earl of Shrewsbury died in November 1590, Arbella cannot have felt it too much. He had long ceased to be a part of her life. But his departure was the cue for fresh disputes among the Cavendish/Talbot clan. Bess’s attempt to claim what she felt was due to her from her hus
band’s estate thrust her into fresh conflict with the new earl and countess of Shrewsbury, Gilbert and Mary Talbot, and the rest of the family flung itself into the debate. Gilbert could not – or would not – give Bess the portion to which she felt she was entitled by her marriage settlement. For Arbella, this can only have led to some fracturing of old rapports, pitting her almost filial relationship with Mary and Gilbert against the loyalty she owed to Bess. But perhaps, in that family, fractured relationships felt like normality.

  Bess had commissioned another portrait of Arbella, to hang in her new picture gallery at Hardwick, alongside other illustrious relatives and ancestors. This is the picture in which Arbella wears that long and lavish rope of pearls, tied with a black ribbon bow at the throat to show up the whiteness of her skin. These jewels may have belonged to Bess: the fabulous pearls feature in enough Cavendish portraits of the era to suggest they were loaned around the family. Heavy restoration in the early part66 of the twentieth century damaged the painting of the face, and the only characteristics of Arbella that remain are the long nose and beautiful hands, so like the sovereign’s own.

  Arbella stands with books to her hand and a tiny dog (symbol of loyalty) at her feet. Her light brown hair hangs loose down her back: a symbol of virginity and marriage-ability. But the key feature, for Bess the indefatigable campaigner, may well have been the inscription painted in one corner. Above the date and Arbella’s age (thirteen and a half) are the same old words that had been used on the toddler’s portrait: ‘Arbella Stuart, Comitessa Leviniae’. Countess of Lennox … Bess could cling on to family rights with the determination of a bull terrier, and her granddaughter inherited the trait.

  She was now the subject of more marriage negotiations than ever. At fourteen or fifteen, Arbella had reached the age where she (like Shakespeare’s Juliet) might be considered marriageable. (Betrothals were often contracted between high-born children but these, being unconsummated, could be broken.) Almost every week, accordingly, she was mentioned in dispatches, in the conversations of ambassadors and the reports of spies. In 1588 and again the following year King James, frantic for alternatives to the ever-threatened Farnese alliance, suggested that Arbella should marry Ludovic Stuart, son of his first favourite Esmé and one who, he promised, ‘longeth after Arbella’. This idea Elizabeth squashed quickly, ‘with harsh words and much contempt’: to have Arbella a Scottish pawn would quite obviate her value as counterweight to James’s pretensions.