Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  In 1590 Essex had married the widow of Sir Philip Sidney when England’s parfit gentil knight died on the battlefield of Zutphen. But, having made the grand gesture of giving his protection to his comrade’s widow, he did not allow the wedded state to curb his sexual freedom, and Elizabeth, who always fought for a high moral standard at her court, had to wink at many infidelities. Born into an ancient but impoverished Welsh family, entirely dependent on the queen’s favour, Essex had been dubbed ‘the poorest earl in England’. But that did not mean his ambitions could be bought off cheaply. Indeed, he sucked in honours and power ‘too fast like a child sucking on an over-uberous nurse’, as one courtier later put it unforgettably.

  Cecil sought above all else the safety of the English crown. This he saw as lying in a cessation of the endless war with Spain, and, when the time came, in a smooth passage on to the next dynasty. Essex hungered for personal glory, and gathered around him the puritan hawks, who believed that the conflict with Spain should be pursued aggressively.

  It was among these new men that Arbella’s future had constantly to be renegotiated. We know from Sir John Harington that rumour linked Essex’s name politically with Arbella’s. Arbella herself,84 in one of her later letters, suggested that if her cousinly affection for James were mistaken for something warmer, such misunderstanding would be no more than fit return for his ‘unprincely and unchristian giving ear to the slanderous and unlikely surmise of the earl of Essex and me’. We also know, from Arbella’s own later writing, that in her mind at least, she and Essex were linked personally. ‘Shall not I say I never had nor shall have the like friend?’ She remembered him, on the anniversary of his death, as ‘My noble friend … who graced me in his greatest and happy fortunes [at the risk of] eclipsing part of her Majesty’s favours from him’. This edifice of emotion was built, perhaps, on very slight foundation. But Arbella, in the 1590s, was living the empty kind of life in which a tiny happening could be blown up into the most vivid fantasy.

  There were rumours that the earl of Essex sought royal power for himself; ‘wore the crown in his heart these many years’, as the earl of Northumberland later put it jealously. If so, Arbella was a pawn Essex could hardly fail to consider in his game, if not actually to play. Were he not already married, it might have been suspected that he had his sights, as Arbella’s husband, on the crown matrimonial – of the same sort Darnley had demanded from Mary; the same sort Leicester had dreamed of winning from Elizabeth. But history would not repeat itself so easily.

  Arbella and Essex were very alike, in too many dangerous ways – both setting great store by their noble birth; both erudite; both with a streak of hysteria never far below the surface; both potentially self-destructive (Essex was forever risking the queen’s favour on wild, quixotic missions to win attention for friends and family); both all too apt, when things went wrong, to hurl wild accusations at a third party. Both unapt for policy, they were both, in their different ways, potentially dangerous to the realm’s stability.

  There are no surviving letters between them, nor any real evidence that such existed. If there were any correspondence, of course, it would have been conducted in deepest secrecy. Few of Arbella’s letters survive, before she sprang so prolifically into print in 1603; and Essex spent the last hours of his liberty in burning his secret papers, determined they ‘should tell no tales to hurt his friends’. The impact of their relationship on Arbella’s life must be explored in emotional, rather than objective terms. If the friendship born of a few kind words at court never meant as much to him as it did to her – if the flame of his easy interest flickered briefly and early went out – she did not know it. From the distance of the midlands, how would she? If the manoeuvrings for the succession were like a battle fought out on a chessboard, then the last ten years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign represent the endgame. And this was a game Arbella, in Derbyshire, was literally in no position to play.

  ‘The disabling of Arbella’

  LATER IN HER life, the finale of Arbella Stuart’s story would find dramatic reflection in one of the most famous plays of the day. Indeed, Sara Jayne Steen85, who edited her letters, has convincingly argued that she was an inspiration for Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi – first performed in her old home of Blackfriars at a time when rumours were rife that Arbella had been driven mad by her incarceration just a mile away. That came further down the line, in the time of marriage and flight, captivity and insanity – a time when Arbella, like the Duchess, had begun to ask:

  Why should only I,

  Of all the other princes of the world

  Be cas’d up, like a holy relic?

  But the play strikes one note that echoes even as early as the 1590s. The Duchess’s jealous brother Ferdinand placed Bosola as a spy in her establishment to ‘note all the particulars of her ’haviour: what suitors do solicit her for marriage / And whom she best affects.’ By the same token, the records show many paid watchers circling Arbella. At a time when information was currency, the tutor Morley is only one candidate for an informer within her very household. It is hard to believe the whole endless business passed her by. In later years Arbella herself would jocularly write of an employee as ‘my old spy’.

  In the days before England had newspapers, anyone who wanted to know what was going on anywhere had to pay someone to tell him. This was the service the professional news reporter Peter Proby offered to Gilbert Talbot in 1592, boasting that he already sent news to the earls of Hertford, Pembroke and Derby. The Cecils, it is true, had access to the printed Italian news-sheets – but only erratically. ‘Intelligence can never be too dear,’ said Elizabeth’s great spymaster Walsingham, who often had to foot the bill himself and died so impoverished he had to be buried at night, lest creditors hold his corpse to ransom. After Walsingham’s death, different camps competed to be first with the story. The Cecils had their own intelligencers; the earl of Essex, helped by the Bacon brothers, Anthony and Francis, also found that an intelligence operation of his own, such as his stepfather Leicester had maintained, was a useful route to ‘domestical greatness’. He paid highly for information, and by 1592 he was able to bring news to the queen on a regular basis – of the Spanish king’s health; of the progress of the religious wars in France; and, indeed, details of the kidnap plot which had sent Arbella north so dramatically.

  This was a time when Queen Elizabeth would have herself painted in a cloak ominously decorated with human eyes and ears, reminding all who looked on it that she saw and heard everything happening within her realm; an age when the suspected Catholic Ben Jonson, epigrammatically inviting a friend to supper, felt it worth offering assurance that they would be safe from spies:

  No simple word86,

  That shall be uttered at our mirthful board

  Shall make us sad next morning: or affright

  The liberty, that we’ll enjoy tonight.

  For the intelligence gatherers, it was a risky business. Payment was only by results. Protection of the law was not guaranteed. Many of those who reported for the government on Catholic activity were themselves Catholic. Letter after letter reflects this uncertainty. An Elizabethan agent was not a highly trained and paid professional, answering only to one controller. Many followed other professions – as merchants, diplomats, servants, painters; or, of course, tutors (like, perhaps, Morley). Each frantically clamoured for commissions as he tried to get his news heard – and make a little income on the side.

  During this period, any number of powerful men would have wanted to know the details of Arbella’s associates, and of any approaches made to her. In 158987, during two months alone, the State Papers reflect a flurry of queries directed to the informer Barnes. Barnes is instructed to discover ‘what party Arbella and her favourers adhere to, and how they mean to bestow her in marriage’. Barnes relates how James ‘needs not Arbella’s marriage to advance his title, though he has been scared with her to keep him in order’. Barnes is checking that Lady Arbella’s friends are ‘unlikely
to take part with any new opinion not countenanced by the state’. Now, in 1592, the two or three years were approaching in which the claim of Arbella Stuart to the English throne was debated most vigorously. But the evidence, though plentiful, is deeply confusing; apt enough for this decade, maybe. Reports contradict each other; letters are written to obfuscate (and one has always to remember that in a small and densely intermarried world, the political and religious alliances that live in print often came into conflict with family loyalties). Any attempt to interpret the sheaves of correspondence which fluttered around the desks of powerful men is further complicated by the frequency with which their assistants and agents used a manner of speech so elliptical as to amount almost to a code. Thus Francis Derrick, an exile in Antwerp, would write incomprehensibly to the earl of Essex’s secretary Henry Wickham in the autumn of 1594 of his plans to sell his commodities ‘at the rate of Arbella’88. Among the merchants involved, ‘the principal offered first the Car. Allen; another offered Fitz; another Throk; and another, Jacques; but in the end all are agreed to give Arbella.’

  No-one could see clearly, even at the time. No-one knew what Francis Bacon aptly called ‘that deep and inscrutable centre of the court, which is her Majesty’s mind’. Essex was demanding information and sending messages with a speed that left his own stance uncertain, while Cecil in particular – pacing the corridors with ‘his hands full of papers and his head full of matter’ – was always careful to avoid ‘unsecrecy’. None the less, in the correspondence of the time, the name of Arbella Stuart was mentioned, at first, most forcefully.

  In the summer of 1593 Robert Cecil’s agent in Rome reported a conversation with a priest in the staff of Cardinal Allen, leader of the Catholic exiles. ‘England is gone89,’ the priest mourned; ‘we know of their secret proceedings; they expect a new queen and another Cecil’ – that is, a Robert Cecil who would be to Queen Arbella what his father Burghley had been to Queen Elizabeth. In those months Allen had been offering himself as a mediator between England and Spain, and when, the next year, Francis Derrick wrote to Henry Wickham that ‘the traffic of Arbella90 is accepted. Allen is the principal merchant,’ it seems possible she was to be built into that deal. Married to a Spanish satellite, she could have secured a Catholic England. Yet here too the evidence is contradictory. A letter from a Captain Duffield to the Cecils, in November 1593, described how there was ‘small account made’91 of Arbella; how he had enquired of a third party ‘whether there were any liking or good will between the king of Spain and the Lady Arbella or not, and he said he knew not of any.’ The Catholic Church did not speak with one voice in the closing years of the sixteenth century. The Jesuits supported Spain, while the Catholics of France and Italy did not always love the Jesuits. The English Catholics, especially after the death late in 1594 of Cardinal Allen, were in disarray; ‘in the briars92, not knowing the way out,’ as one would put it dismally. Into the chasm dropped an important source of potential support for Arbella’s claim. And in other ways, too, things were not going hopefully.

  In years to come93 one anonymous but – from his analysis – clearly experienced observer was to suggest that the main opposition to Arbella would come from those who ‘have been offended by, or have offended’ her family. Arbella’s relatives the Shrewsburys do seem to have been scheming on her behalf, but this in itself was almost unhelpful, especially since the main agitator seems to have been the aggressive Mary Talbot. A letter from London in 1593 reported that ‘The queen here daily94 bears more and more a bad conceit of the earl of Shrewsbury and his countess for the sake of the Lady Arbella, which has been evinced in a late quarrel between his lordship and the Stanhopes.’

  The feud with the rising official Sir John Stanhope grew to embroil not only the Talbots but Mary’s brother Charles Cavendish. Charles challenged Sir John to a duel, only to cancel the affair in disgust when Stanhope turned up in an excessively padded doublet for protection; a whole six years later, Stanhope took a party of twenty horsemen to attack Charles near his midlands home. Mary Talbot, never one to take an injury lying down, sent Sir John a message wishing that ‘all the plagues95 and miseries that may befall any’ should light upon one who had ‘for your wickedness become more ugly in shape than the vilest toad’. Such flamboyant quarrels were not unusual; Essex himself had been in several violent brawls and affairs of honour. But the Cavendishes and the Talbots made up a particularly turbulent family. When, in 1594, Gilbert Talbot challenged his own brother Edward to a duel with rapier and dagger, alleging that Edward had slandered him, even Essex wrote advising calm.

  Such counsel might seem rather a case of the pot and the kettle, given Essex’s own impetuosity; but Essex, these days, was ‘a new man, clean forsaking all his youthful tricks’; a privy counsellor and, at Essex House on the Strand, centre of a glittering circle gathering around him. No-one at court, least of all Essex, could fail in these years to be weighing up the various claims; each problematic, but each a possibility. As Sir John Harington later recalled: ‘My Lady Arbella96 also now began to be spoken of and much commended, as she is well worthy for many noble parts, and the earl of Essex in some glancing speeches gave occasion to have both himself and her honourable friends to be suspected of that which I suppose was no part of their meaning.’

  What the gossips did not know, as they linked Essex with Arbella – what she did not know herself – is that the earl had long been in secret communication with James of Scotland. As far back as 1589 his sister Penelope had started sending James letters on her brother’s behalf – along, rather blatantly, with a portrait of her famously beautiful self. By 1593 Essex himself had caused Francis Bacon to open a correspondence with a confidential servant of James VI, and the relationship progressed so warmly that Essex, it was said, carried James’s letters in a black silk bag around his neck.

  It is still possible, given the convoluted nature of the political scene, to speculate about his motives. One Catholic exile, aware of Essex’s advances, none the less believed he was deceiving the Scots, and, seeking the crown himself, ‘takes [James] for his competitor’. It is true that one of Essex’s agents claimed his master was in favour of the Stanley claim, probably only to discover the plans of Sir William Stanley. But in the case of James, perhaps the approach should be taken at its face value. It is true that Essex, always a weathercock, may have been trying to cover all eventualities. He would certainly, with his lifelong anti-Spanish stance, have been appalled by the much discussed possible accession of the Spanish infanta – a child of Philip of Spain to whom, rejecting her own Protestant son, the queen of Scots had tried to will her rights in the succession. He was just as certainly hostile to the Seymour claim; indeed, it is arguable that to have seen any fellow subject elevated thus far above him would have tried him unbearably.

  But if from this point Essex ignored Arbella’s claim, he may have been reflecting a shift of mood already in existence. In June 1594, in the course of one long report to ‘Mr Robyn’, one John Brystone reported97 to the Cecils that ‘Arbella is out of request.’ The events of the year ahead conspired to put that point more forcibly.

  In 1594 there was printed, in Antwerp, a highly controversial book entitled A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England; its ostensible author ‘Doleman’ was usually taken to be a pseudonym for the leading Jesuit commentator and agitator Father Parsons. Banned in Elizabeth’s realm, the book filtered only slowly into English circles. It was the following November before Elizabeth showed a copy to the earl of Essex, who had almost certainly seen one (and prudently remained quiet about it) some months before.

  Title page of Doleman’s A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England

  The book provocatively called upon the earl to play the kingmaker (or queenmaker) after Elizabeth’s death; no other figure, it claimed, ‘could have a greater part or sway in deciding of this great affair’. This was a backhanded compliment indeed, and the shock was such that Essex immediately took
to his sickbed. In fact, he suffered no real harm. But one way and another, the book turned a spotlight on all the possible candidates for Elizabeth’s throne, and few were shown up flatteringly. When, in the autumn of 1595, the old earl of Hertford tried once again to win legal recognition for the validity of his marriage to Lady Catherine Grey, and thus for his sons’ legitimacy, the queen had them all clapped in the Tower. Was the harshness of her reaction inspired by the fact that Doleman had described the Seymours as the popular candidates for the throne? It cannot have helped, certainly. Nor can the fact that the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Michael Blount, was arrested after he was found stockpiling supplies to hold the fortress for the Seymours after Elizabeth’s death.

  It seems unlikely Arbella read Doleman’s book. But the ideas it contained may still have filtered through to her, slowly. As a supporter of the Spanish infanta’s claim, Doleman found or invented proof against all the Protestant claimants. (He also suggested that the crown should go less by strict right of lineage than by suitability.) Thus, against Arbella98 he alleged the double illegitimacy of her grandmother Lady Lennox, whose parents, he claimed, had both been secretly married to other people at the time of their own wedding. Cecil’s chief legal adviser, Sir Edward Coke, wrote in the margin ‘note the disabling of Arbella’ beside Doleman’s assertion that ‘it was intended to prove bastardy against Arbella.’ But both Elizabeth and Mary Tudor had survived far more damning declarations of bastardy; and James was attacked in a similar way. No-one ever took this seriously enough to cast it up against Arbella later in life. She was handicapped more fatally.