Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  In the summer of 1601116, Wilson prepared for Cecil a list of candidates for the throne. In the first place he put James, in the second Arbella. They were followed – significantly, as it would turn out – by Lord Beauchamp, and then Beauchamp’s brother Thomas. The duke of Parma (Farnese) came tenth, and the infanta only twelfth. The ranks of the realistic contenders, from Cecil’s viewpoint, were thinning out nicely.

  Gilbert Talbot (and who knows what distress this caused to Arbella?) had long since fallen into line behind the secretary. One Rowland Whyte, in 1599, gave a vivid picture of how, the very day Essex was to be called before the Lords to explain the Irish debacle, the two groups – the Essex faction, and Cecil with Shrewsbury – rose and went in to dinner separately. Was it only coincidence that in 1601 Gilbert Talbot, under Cecil’s aegis, was finally appointed to the privy council, thereby giving him an alternative means of ‘advancement’ for his family? Or, as Harington put it:

  If some great counsellors do make some shows, and cast out some words afore fools in favour of Arbella’s title for [policy] … yet they labour, like oars on the Thames, to row one way and look another. It is least likely117 that when it comes to trial they [‘my Lord of Shrewsbury, or the countess and her brothers’] will hazard so great estates, so contented lives, so gentlemanly pleasures, so sweet duties, to advance their niece against law, reason, probability, yea, possibility.

  An anonymous letter from 1600118, intercepted and now found in the State Papers, in discussing the contenders for the throne dismissed Arbella’s English birth (she being, as the writer put it, ‘otherwise in descent Scottish’) as ‘too nice a point to stand on’, since James, the senior by the same line of inheritance, was ‘in every degree jure et dignitate potior’ – governed by right and authority. ‘Touching Arbella,’ it stated firmly, ‘no marriage that the Cecilians could build on presented itself.’

  There were, however, even rumours of Arbella’s marrying Robert Cecil himself: ‘Sir R. Cecil intends to be king119, by marrying Arbella, and now lacks only the name … Lord Shrewsbury, who can remove the blocks from the way of the marriage, is for him, thinking he cannot better establish his house.’ But these were surely without foundation, significant only in that they caused Arbella herself to retort that no man in England was her match in rank – untactfully, and, given Cecil’s mounting power, unwisely.

  One Captain North120 bragged in the taverns that he ‘had commission from her to deal with foreign princes … and that her common speech was that she thought no match in England good enough for her’. Was it of this kind of haughtiness, this potentially treasonable course of action, that Henry Howard was thinking when he wrote to James about Shrewsbury’s ‘idol’, who might be made ‘higher by as many steps121 as ascend to a scaffold, if she follow some men’s counsels’? Or was it of the dangerous friendship he noted, the ‘strong league’ among Mary Talbot, Sir Walter Ralegh and Ralegh’s wife, ‘a most dangerous woman’? This was a connection that a year or two later would resonate ominously.

  But Arbella was still held in considerable regard abroad. In 1600 the Fugger newsletters122 had still been calling her ‘successor to the throne’ and ‘heir to this kingdom’. In the middle of February 1601 they had described (obviously in error) how the queen had issued a decree excluding James, and set about negotiating a peace with Philip III of Spain ‘so that she may leave her kingdom at peace and transmit her crown to one of her blood relations and assure her [sic] of undisputed possession’. Cecil himself, in his first letter to James, had fostered doubt, warning that Queen Elizabeth (without James’s good behaviour and his, Cecil’s, watchful care) might yet ‘cut off the natural branch [James] and graft upon some wild stock’.

  As late as 1601, again, a letter home from the French ambassador in Rome details the Pope’s plans for England. Rainutio Farnese, now a married man and duke of Parma, was his first choice – if

  his Highness perceives123 the kingdom of England can be obtained without Arbella. But if, after the queen’s decease, Arbella should raise a strong party in England, and that for the easier conquest of the kingdom, it were necessary to join his forces with Arbella’s … the Pope intends instead of the duke of Parma to bring in the cardinal his brother, who might marry the said Arbella, and by these means they, joining both their forces, would sooner and easier compass their designs.

  Another observer124 (anonymous, but writing in Italian) put together a lengthy analysis of the situation, running to some three thousand words. He was suggesting measures the new young king of Spain might take to protect himself from a rumoured marriage (with England’s crown for dowry) between Arbella and the French king’s nephew, the prince de Condé.

  But, as the first years of the seventeenth century wore away, one by one the powers in England came to recognize the inevitability of James’s accession. Northumberland, the ‘wizard earl’, had once raged to his wife (Essex’s other sister Dorothy) that he preferred the king of Scots to be buried than crowned, and that he and his friends would rather take their lives than see her brother’s ‘great God’ rule in England. He was one who might well have supported Arbella’s candidacy. But by the spring of 1602 he had changed his mind. A Catholic, he proffered support to James on the tacit condition the new king should tolerate ‘a mass in a corner’. Most of the English Catholics ‘do declare their affections absolutely to your title’, Cecil told James reassuringly. They had little alternative. For Spain to promote the infanta to the throne of England now looked increasingly unlikely, though Spain might still have backed an English candidate – an English king125, to give the precise word used in one Catholic letter – who would be supportive of its policy.

  The trouble was that England had had enough of queens. Even Doleman, despite advocating the infanta, had protested that Arbella, ‘a woman, ought not to be preferred, before so many men … and that it were much to have three women to reign in England one after the other, whereas in the space of above a thousand years before them, there had not reigned so many of that sex.’ In 1598, Henri of France’s special envoy reported to his master that the young men of the court, growing restless under the petticoat government of an ageing woman, declared that they would not submit to another female ruler. A labourer was seized for praying for a king – saying poor men could get nothing under a queen, ‘but a woman and ruled by noblemen’. And Catholic support for Arbella’s claim had died away. The bishop of London was able to send Cecil a reassuring report he had garnered of attitudes at the Catholic seminary at Douai. ‘Lady Arbella is a notable puritan126,’ was the word there, ‘and they hold the Turk more worthy of place than she.’

  Yet still the bandwagon rumbled on. In the spring of 1602127, London waited for the arrival of the French duke of Nevers. ‘I hear he desire secretly a sight of the Lady Arbella,’ the Jesuits concluded significantly, and a house in London was said to be prepared for Arbella’s own reception. But once again, the gossips waited in vain. The duke came late, and Arbella never came at all. This was just another busted flush; another chimera, another popular fantasy. Still, in the summer of 1602, a law student called John Manningham would jot an anagram in his commonplace book – Arbella Stuarta128: tu rara es et bella. To a young man around the city, her name was obviously in currency. But to Arbella herself at Hardwick the glamorous preparations for Nevers’ visit – the splendid wall hanging taken from the Tower, the entertainments in rehearsal – might by now have seemed like an absurdity, a message from another world. This was not her reality.

  It seems rather pathetic, and all too telling, that the only certain evidence of her activity in this stirring time was yet more embroidery. (As the imprisoned queen of Scots had put it, the pictures in the work and the diversity of colours made time seem to pass more quickly.) So Arbella became an adept. That gift to the queen in New Year 1601, received by Elizabeth with ‘especial liking’, was ‘a scarf or head-veil of lawn cut-work flourished with silver and silks of sundry colours’. This painstaking cut-work was a technique
only for the most proficient – or for those with most time on their hands. Two years later, in the midst of an official inquiry into her potentially treasonable conduct, the government agent took time out to pass on to Arbella a message that the queen wondered how she had made her latest New Year’s gift. Obviously, she was still stitching desperately away. We cannot doubt that as she did so, the black dog depression lay all too frequently at her feet. Three years before, her kinsman, the composer Michael Cavendish, had dedicated to her a collection of songs and madrigals.

  Why should my muse129 thus restless in her woes

  Summon records of never dying fears?

  And still revive fresh springing in my thoughts,

  The true memorial of my sad despairs?

  Even the songs were gloomy.

  Perhaps our best picture of Arbella’s daily round comes from two contemporary women who kept diaries. Lady Margaret Hoby seems to have been occupied enough; an active puritan and a notable housekeeper, her diary is largely filled with religious exercises. ‘In the morning I prayed privately and writ notes in my testament till 7 o’clock then I took order for dinner and things touching the house …’ Her hours, with prayer listed as much as five times a day, seem if anything to have been over-full: ‘I bestowed too much time in the garden and thereby was worse able to perform spiritual duties.’

  But for Anne Clifford, a connection of Arbella’s writing from Knole in Kent two decades later, the days often lagged. In amid her disputes with her husband, and her litigation to keep her own property, she wrote of saying her prayers in the garden, of playing cards with her steward, of a dog that pupped. But: ‘I sat still thinking the time to be very tedious,’ she wrote on one occasion, and: ‘The time grew tedious so as I used to go to bed about 8 o’clock & did lie abed till 8 the next morning.’ Yet again: ‘I spent the time as I did many wearisome days besides, in working and walking.’

  Clearly, Arbella was not the only lady of the day to find herself often in what she later called a ‘dump’. Like Arbella, Anne Clifford felt herself exiled from the court, writing bitterly: ‘All this time my lord was in London, where he had all and infinite great resort coming to him. He went much abroad to cocking, to bowling alleys, to plays and horse races & [was] commended by all the world. I stayed in the country having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart.’ But Anne, like Lady Margaret, had at least a household and child to keep her busy. By contrast, Arbella’s was a life without business, a life on hold; no life for an eager and untried young woman – no matter how fond of her books she might be.

  The Venetians left a word picture of Arbella from just after this time. (Elizabeth’s court had long been without a resident Venetian envoy. But the ambassador Scaramelli arrived in the last months of her reign, and from that point on the reports of successive Venetian envoys to doge and senate are a vital source of information about Arbella’s story.) She was, they said, a woman ‘of great beauty130 and remarkable qualities, being gifted with many accomplishments, among them the knowledge of Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, besides her native English. She has very exalted ideas having been brought up in a belief that she would succeed to the crown.’ She had always lived, they said, far from London and in poverty.

  Bess tried, at least, to do something about the poverty. It is unlikely she appreciated Arbella’s loneliness, but she seems, in the closing years of the sixteenth century, to have tried to make some financial provision of her own for her granddaughter’s future. She gave several gifts131 of capital, and negotiated property in her name. (A typical piece of shrewd dealing, and a gift well worth having, came when in 1594 she lent to the impoverished Sir Francis Willoughby three thousand and fifty pounds, at an annual interest of three hundred. As he had little chance of redeeming the mortgage, Arbella thus gained land worth perhaps fifteen thousand.) In the same year Bess paid to Arbella her mother’s long-awaited dowry, plus appropriate interest, and in 1599 gave her more than a thousand pounds to buy land in Lincolnshire. By such means the two hundred pounds allowed by the queen was augmented to some six or seven hundred a year. There were also many smaller gifts of money and of very valuable jewellery: in January 1594 it was a head-dress incorporating thirty highly prized pearls; in 1599, ‘Given to my daughter [sic] Arbella to buy her a pearl to enlarge her chain, £100.’

  In 1601 Bess the provident132 made her will. She had passed the biblical three score and ten, and her death could not be many years away. Though the serious legacy of Hardwick and its contents went to William and his family, she left to her ‘very loving grandchild’ a thousand pounds; all her pearls and jewels ‘except those as shall be otherwise bequeathed’; an ermine sable ‘the head being of gold enamelled’; and a crystal glass set with agate and lapis lazuli. Moreover, with the ‘poor widow’s mite’ Bess willed to the queen (two hundred pounds in a gold cup) she attached a request that the queen should take her ‘said poor desolate orphan’ back to court. She had already begged Elizabeth to find a husband for Arbella – but perhaps she and Arbella had begun to despair of such an eventuality.

  In the year following Essex’s death, reports began to spread that the Lady Arbella was mad, that she was heartbroken … The latter was true, in one way or another. In that same season, Arbella told the chaplain James Starkey, with whom she read, that she had ‘thought of all means133 she could to get from home, by reason she was hardly used in dispiteful and disgraceful words’. At twenty-seven, she was still being ‘bobbed [smacked] and her nose played withall’. Her distress, Starkey said unnecessarily, ‘seemed not feigned, for oftentimes, being at her books, she would break forth into tears’, as they sat together in the small room she called her ‘quondam study’.

  In the months ahead Arbella, her grandmother complained, would tell anyone who would listen that she had become a prisoner. But the Venetians show that this was not mere self-dramatization. At Hardwick (they wrote in 1603), ‘the unfortunate lady has now lived for many years, not exactly as a prisoner, but, so to speak, buried alive.’ Even to contemporaries, her treatment seemed extraordinary.

  Arbella had endured years of frustration. In the coming months, she was at last to make her move; to act on no authority other than her own. The earl of Essex, she wrote passionately, had ‘the favour to die unbound because he was a prince, and shall my hands be bound from helping my self in this distress?’ It proved easy, after the event, for contemporaries and historians alike to decry her plan as folly. But it is surely to her credit that she did attempt to take her destiny into her own hands. Her actions may better be seen as a desperate gamble, made by one who had little to lose, and no great range of options.

  Few indeed were the paths open to an unmarried woman in the seventeenth century, when even the law recognized only wives, widows and children. Though England was called ‘the paradise of married women’, wrote the Dutch historian Emanuel Van Meteren, ‘the girls who are not yet married are kept far more strictly than in the Low Countries.’ And time was getting on, at least by the norms of the nobility. Anne Newdigate134 – a gentlewoman her own age with whom Arbella contracted a friendship, writing thanks for ‘fine cuffs and kind remembrance’ – had been married at twelve, though probably in name only. The summer or autumn of 1602 saw the marriage of the Talbots’ daughter Elizabeth, some years Arbella’s junior, which must have rubbed salt in the wound. At twenty-seven, Bess had been twice married and a mother; as had Mary Stuart, besides taking and losing power in Scotland. At twenty-seven, Elizabeth had been queen of England for two years.

  A century earlier, in a Catholic England, Arbella might at least have had the option of entering a nunnery. Now Robert Burton, in the Anatomy of Melancholy, could only suggest half seriously that a benefactor should be found ‘to build a monastical college for old, decayed, deformed or discontented maids to live together in, that have lost their first loves, or otherwise miscarried’. Arbella’s was a culture that saw marriage as the only successful destiny for a woman, a rule broken by Queen Elizabeth only with great dif
ficulty. The only other career open to a female member of the gentry or nobility was to take service as gentlewoman to a lady of higher rank. But the only woman of higher rank than Arbella was the queen herself; and hers was just the household from which Arbella had been purposely excluded.

  What is more, Arbella had been bred in the belief that she might one day rule her country. The Venetians said so very specifically. In the months when the question of the succession became acute – now or never! – it is unreasonable to expect that she should complacently have sat to watch the tide of events pass by.

  The question of whether Arbella herself sought the crown – and, if so, with whose aid – can never finally be answered. Earlier biographers chose to believe she did not, preferring her retiring and womanly, but contemporaries judged differently. If they were right, then the phrase ‘hope often deferred makes the heart sick’ might have been written expressly for Arbella. If the worm was about to turn, the only surprising thing was that it had not done so already.

  In the latter half of 1602 Arbella – neither, she said, ‘a credulous nor, worse, a fainthearted’ fool – contacted unnamed friends in Yorkshire. Is it significant that this was Lennox territory, or even that William Cavendish’s wife, Anne Keighley, had come from Yorkshire? And that it was still Catholic to a great degree? Fearing her grandmother would take them, and with them the last chance of seizing independence, Arbella sent her jewels and money away.

  III

  January–April 1603

  ‘My travelling mind’

  ‘I think the time best spent in tiring you With the idle conceits of my travelling mind till it make you ashamed to see into what a scribbling melancholy (which is a kind of madness) you have brought me.’