Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  There was a kind of grim appropriateness to James’s proposal, for it was Esmé Stuart who had been given, and who had passed on to his son, that Lennox earldom which Bess always felt should have been Arbella’s anyway. Perhaps in consequence of this issue being broached, Burghley and Walsingham were moved in the summer of 1590 to attempt again to retrieve from James the Lennox jewels, which her grandmother had willed to Arbella. ‘Sundry times have I moved the king that the jewels appertaining to the Lady Arbella might be restored to her,’ wrote the English ambassador wearily. ‘Nevertheless I am still deferred.’ That same year, reports circulated abroad that Arbella had secretly married the earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, nicknamed the ‘wizard earl’ for his interest in strange science. This was a dangerous rumour, being coupled with claims that the Catholic Percy, in line with his family history of raising rebellion in the papist north, was to proclaim Arbella queen and restore England to the old faith.

  Although Arbella was away in Derbyshire at this time, temporarily out of sight, she can hardly have been out of Elizabeth’s mind, much though the queen may have wished she could be. And as the 1590s dawned, the scene of Arbella’s life shifted southwards again. She returned to London and to the court – and this time it would be for a longer stay.

  ‘Exile with expectation’

  BY 1591, PARMA’S son was once again being spoken of as a match for Arbella. The Spanish war still sapped England’s resources, and a double agent employed abroad in the matter begged for a picture of Arbella by ‘Hildyard’ (Nicholas Hilliard) with which to promote the match. Arbella would be needed for sittings. Bess herself accompanied her granddaughter south. She had to recruit friends and consult legal counsel over the highly public lawsuit that had ripened out of the dispute over Shrewsbury’s legacy, while the furnishing of Hardwick, now that her additions to the original manor house were nearing completion, demanded an extensive spending spree on plate and tapestry.

  Bess probably also hoped to discuss Arbella’s future with her old friend and mistress Elizabeth. If the queen would not pair Arbella off, surely she could at least increase her income? The two hundred pounds a year allowed to a baby princess had now, for a sixteen-year-old, begun to look distinctly scanty. Arbella’s gaffe at Greenwich seemed to have been long forgotten: only a year later, the queen had asked after her most kindly. So Arbella and her waiting gentlewoman Mrs Abrahall were among the ladies who went south that autumn in Bess’s cumbersome coach. Charles and William Cavendish, with their wives, went too; the forty sheep and two fat oxen sent from Bess’s estates in Leicestershire travelled separately. This was to be an extended, eight-month visit, and a retinue of some forty persons, including Bess’s cook and brewer, made up a quasi-royal procession.

  Bess’s account books tell the story of the journey, from ‘my lady’s setting forth’, across the Trent by the Sawley ferry, through Loughborough, Leicester and North-hampton (‘pears 1d’), down Watling Street and into London via Barnet, jolting over roads still ‘very deep and troublesome’, as a contemporary put it. They took almost a week on the journey. Towns rang out their bells in welcome at the first sight of the distinctive Cavendish livery.

  The party was ultimately making not for London itself, where the family had two residences, but for Shrewsbury House in rural Chelsea: a great three-sided structure facing onto the river, surrounded by pasture. ‘The manner of the most gentlemen and noblemen is to house themselves in the suburb of the city, because the air there being somewhat at large, the place is healthy; and through the distance from the body of the town, the noise not so much and so consequently quiet,’ wrote one observer, praising the ‘gardens and orchards very delectable’. Hasty building work had been necessary to accommodate so very large a party – stables were converted into dormitories – but the place had one great advantage: upriver to Richmond, or downriver to Whitehall or to Greenwich, access to the court was easy.

  Before the ladies could make their appearance, a little preparation was necessary. Londoners, wrote the duke of Württemburg, ‘are magnificently apparelled … The women have much more liberty than perhaps in any other place; they also know well how to make use of it for they go out dressed in exceedingly fine stuff, and give all their attention to their ruffs and stuffs.’ Fifty yards each of velvet and damask, forty yards of satin and more were purchased, and Tasker, the household’s London tailor, was summoned for a hasty refurbishment of country wardrobes. Johns, the queen’s own tailor, made the yet grander dress designed as a New Year gift for Elizabeth. It cost a sizeable £59 14s, plus another fifty pounds for embroidery.

  ‘The women-folk of England lay great store by ruffs and starch them blue, so that their complexion shall appear the whiter,’ wrote Thomas Platter in his Travels in England of 1599; and starch both blue and white appears in the household’s account book in their first London days. Armed with their face-flattering finery, the Shrewsbury party joined the court at Whitehall: a palace built astride a highway, with the main road from Westminster to the City passing through its very gates. Curiously public though it was, Elizabeth’s principal residence showed no lack of luxury. Two thousand rooms straggled over its twenty-three acres; out of doors there were the huge tiltyard, the cockpit, King Henry’s tennis court and the privy gardens, adorned with heraldic beasts atop painted pillars.

  Arbella and her grandmother were at Whitehall for the twelve-day Christmas festivities: dancing, music, gaming and jesting (Bess gave twenty shillings to the queen’s jester Ramsey), and every night a play. Lady Ri-Melaine in The French Garden describes one such social evening: ‘We have been long at supper, then afterwards we have had dancing … then came a mask [masque] which made a fair show. They played at cards, at cent, at primeroe … at tables, at draughts, at chess.’ But despite the cheer of the Christmas season, the court had changed since Arbella’s last visit. There was already an imperceptible decline from the energy of the Armada days, when first the tension of crisis, then the flush of victory, had for a time masked the reality of an ageing queen, a weary country.

  Leicester’s death had been only the first of a series of bereavements as much political as personal. Elizabeth lost her spymaster Walsingham, her ‘Moor’, in 1590, and Chancellor Christopher Hatton, her ‘Lids’, in the November of 1591. A counsellor a year … Both men died bankrupted in the service of their sovereign. They were the old guard, the team with whose help Elizabeth had first governed – now were represented primarily by Burghley, and even he was slowly ceding place to his son Robert Cecil.

  In January 1592 the earl of Essex returned to court from the French wars. There is no record of whether he and Arbella met, but it seems a probability. Back in Shrewsbury House, her family was not short of company. Bess’s visitors were people of fame and influence: Lady Sheffield (she who once claimed she had been secretly married to Lord Leicester, and was mother of his ‘base son’); Sir Fulke Greville; Lady Walsingham; Lady Warwick, the queen’s old friend; Charles Howard the lord admiral; the new lord chancellor. The circles in which Arbella was moving were certainly exciting compared to those in the country.

  The talk in town in these months was of the Spanish army’s advance in France, and of whether the papists or the puritans really represented more of a danger; of the Catholic priest, tortured by the queen’s rackmaster Topcliffe, who at his execution claimed Topcliffe had boasted to him of ‘very secret dealings’ with the queen, ‘having not only seen her legs and knees but felt her belly’. (The dreaded, fanatically Protestant Topcliffe was a friend and correspondent of Bess, and the Shrewsbury household would have been scandalized by that story.) There was talk, too, of Robert Greene’s new book of ‘conny catching’, in which he set out to warn his fellow Londoners against the practices of criminals (‘the nip and the foist [cutpurses], the priggar [horsethief], the Vincent’s law [cheating at bowls], the courber [lifter of goods from open windows], and the black art [picking of locks]’); of the petition against playhouses in the City; and of the king of Scotland
’s investigation into the witch Agnes Sampson, who confessed to having gone to sea in a sieve the Hallowe’en before, with two hundred of her fellow witches, and sailing to the kirk of North Berwick where they landed and danced a reel.

  When it came to Scotland, Arbella was in the gratifying position of herself providing fresh food for gossip. In December 1591 – perhaps in lieu of returning her jewels, perhaps disturbed by news of her fresh presence around the court – James thought it politic finally to initiate a correspondence with his cousin. He wrote to her an effulgent Christmas letter from Holyrood House:

  As the strict band67 of nature and blood, whereby we are linked [one] to other, craveth a most entire good will and mutual intelligence to be entertained betwixt us, so we have of long time carried a most earnest desire to contract that acquaintance by letters, as witness of the conjunction of hearts which our so far distant bodies will not permit …

  The earnest desire might, one thinks, have been achieved rather earlier; but, interestingly, James offers as an excuse the uncertainty of knowledge ‘as to the sure place of your abode’. Was Arbella kept in such secrecy?

  News of ‘the rare parts [abilities] it has pleased God to endow you withall … to the great honour of that house whereof we are both issued’ came as a great pleasure to Arbella’s ‘kindly affected kinsman’, he wrote, perhaps rather disingenuously. In the secretary’s copy which may have replaced his own rough draft, James promised to ‘the more frequently visit you by my letters … expecting also to know from time to time of your estate by your own hand’. Sadly, there is no record of such a correspondence being continued on either side.

  In the spring the court moved away, but it seems Arbella, with her grandmother, stayed in London. It was then, most likely, that she sat for her portrait, though Bess’s accounts show it was summer before the painters were paid: ‘Given 27th of July68 to one Mr Hilliard for the drawing of one picture, forty shillings. Given unto the same Mr Hilliard, twenty shillings. Given unto one Rowland for the drawing of one other picture, twenty shillings.’ ‘Rowland’ was Hilliard’s sometime apprentice Rowland Lockey, who may well have been employed to make a copy of the master’s work. The twenty shillings given to Hilliard after the original fee represents the amount of Bess’s habitual tip. Clearly, this was a picture with which to be pleased.

  But the cost seems small when you consider that over those eight months Bess had spent an astonishing £6,360. Two hundred pounds had gone on jewellery to make a show at court (‘five little jewels at 14s a piece, for an other little one of a bee 6s 8d’); £321 6s to the heirs of the bankrupted Sir Christopher Hatton for the seventeen Gideon tapestries which would eventually line the long gallery of Hardwick Hall. (Thrifty Bess managed to get a five-pound reduction on the strength that Hatton’s arms would have to be replaced with her own.) The household’s smallest expenses are diligently chronicled: on one Friday fast day, oysters 5d, lampreys 6d, half a saltfish 6d, a chicken 6d, a capon 2s 8d, butter 9d, grapes 4d, 1 quart French wine 4d. There were more weighty transactions, too – ‘about my Lady’s law matters, £40’ – and other incidental expenses: a hundred pounds to found a clergy scholarship and thank the bishop of Bristol for loan of his barge to move the party to court down the river. In February Mrs Digby, Bess’s lady in waiting, had a baby. ‘At christening of the child, £4; the midwife and nurse, 10s each; given by Lady Arbella 40s.’

  Just after Easter more velvet and lace were purchased, along with some pairs of the perfumed gloves the queen had made fashionable, and Spanish leather shoes. Authors like Philip Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses railed against the elaborate dress that made women ‘puppets’ (‘sleeves hanging down to their skirts, trailing on the ground, and cast over their shoulders like cow tails … three or four degrees of minor ruff, all under the master devilruff’). But Arbella would have been a strange sixteen-year-old had she objected to finery.

  The Shrewsbury party spent three Whitsun weeks at court, which had now moved downriver to Greenwich; a smaller, luxurious palace and one of Elizabeth’s favourites. From the privy apartments, with their direct access to the water, Elizabeth would wave to her ships as they passed by. The hive was abuzz with rumours about the latest scandal – the queen’s maid of honour, bold Bess Throckmorton, who had left court fat on a plea of sickness and had returned two months later without her swollen belly. Ordered to reveal the father of her child, she fearfully named Sir Walter Ralegh. The queen sent a furious summons to recall Ralegh from the high seas. It was another object lesson in the perils of unlicensed love – if Arbella hadn’t seen enough already.

  It must have been with some regret that Arbella returned from court to Chelsea. But Bess took her train to pay a last official visit to court on 11 June; a visit heralded by the usual flutter of tailors, and the purchase of a ‘powdered ermine gown’ – for Arbella, probably. Her grandmother stayed at Greenwich until the middle of the next month (well after Sir Walter and his wife had been sent to their separate cells in the Tower), finally setting out northwards on 31 July. Arbella stayed on in the south after her grandmother left – but only briefly.

  As she travelled north, she had no reason to think she would not soon be back. She was, after all, reaching the age of matrimony. No-one could have predicted then how long she would dwindle in Derbyshire, in ‘exile with expectation’, as she later called it bitterly. No-one could have predicted that, with the final demise of the Farnese proposal, Arbella had already missed her best chance of making an approved marriage; of accepting an uncontroversial and appropriate destiny. But time would prove that Arbella was entering a new and less hopeful phase of her life. It cannot have been long before the walls of cramped Old Hardwick began to close in around her after her long sojourn away.

  The 1590s were to prove a difficult decade for everybody; so much so that the historian John Guy identifies the years from 1585 to 1603 as the ‘second reign’ of Elizabeth I, distinct from her earlier success story. Those years, he writes, were characterized by ‘ambition, apprehension, expectation, insecurity, authoritarianism, self-interest’; discord, aggression, resentment, venality, paranoia and claustrophobia. ‘The nasty nineties’, Patrick Collinson, an essayist in the book Guy edited, calls them even more bluntly. To the political and social problems was added a pervasive uncertainty. In 1592, of course, no-one knew that the queen would still be alive as far ahead as 1603; in 1589 Essex had claimed, in a secret letter to James of Scotland, that she could not live ‘above a year or two’.

  Arbella was an important figure in the tide of intrigue that ebbed and flowed. The political machinations of the decade are vital to understanding her fate – why the girl who was bred for queenship wound up with so different a destiny. But as regards her own life, we have less information about her own thoughts, feelings, actions over these long years than we have for a single month – a week! – later in her story. Where Arbella herself is concerned, ten years go by in a few stray facts, and we can appreciate the significance for her of these static years only when, later, her suppressed emotion burst its banks and we have the evidence from which to understand the full force of her personality.

  To contrast reports of the life Arbella had so recently been living in London with a report of her time at Hardwick in the 1590s is to feel an abrupt sense of dislocation. While her portrait was being touted round the courts of Europe, while reports of spy after spy mention her name familiarly, her own existence contrasts most bitterly with the wide debate about her. The division between the figurehead – that marriageable, malleable puppet ‘the Lady Arbella’ – and the girl’s private reality would become ever more sharply apparent. The one was known in every court of Europe; the other was restricted even beyond the normal rules of her age and sex. While the turn of the decade had been for Arbella a time of possibility and excitement, the 1590s ticked by in inactivity. Surely it was here, in this time at Hardwick, that the seeds of her later rebellion were sown. Over these years her life would come to look increasingly freakish
, her royal blood cutting her off from the usual female pattern of matrimony, even as her sex damaged her royal expectations.

  For the next decade, there are few records of Arbella leaving Derbyshire69. In a region still considered so remote from London that Burghley had once written to Bess at Chatsworth urging her not to live so solitary ‘there amongst hills and rocks of stone’, Bess was building not one but two houses. By 1592 her modest family home was well on the way to becoming a grandiose pile with tall new wings and vast glittering windows grafted haphazardly onto the old core. Work on Hardwick Old Hall continued on and off into the mid-1590s, long after the foundations of the yet grander Hardwick Hall had been laid just a few hundred yards away. Here Arbella studied Hebrew and Spanish, reading Virgil and Plutarch as well as the Bible, cramming her mind with the stories and the figures who would live again from her own pen: Pope Joan; the Greek Camilla, who abjured marriage to lead a troop of warrior women; Esther, who became a queen to set her people free.

  A seventeenth-century drawing of Hardwick Old Hall; the New Hall is just visible over the wall on the left.

  It was not a harsh life. The Cavendish households were never short of lighter pleasures. Arbella’s cousin William, brought up at his father Charles Cavendish’s seat at nearby Bolsover, later wrote to King Charles II advising him, on his restoration, to bring back ‘all the old holidays,70 with their mirth and rites set up again’ that he obviously remembered from his youth: ‘May games, morris dances, the Lord of the May, the Lady of the May, the Fool and the Hobby Horse, also the Whitsun Lord and Lady, carols and wassails at Christmas, with good plum porridge and pies’. There were cards and board games, laid into the design of a table that still stands at Hardwick; there were the gardens, with their orchard and nuttery, their pavilions where a dessert course of white sugar candy or caraway comfits, prunes and strawberries, could be taken on a warm day.