Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Arbella Stuart to Sir Henry Brounker, 9 March 1603

  ‘This unadvised young Woman’

  THE WALLS OF Hardwick’s Court are high. On a cold January afternoon of 1603, as the weary horseman wound his way up from the road, with the great gold house flaunting itself on the ridge above him and the country rolling away below, the inhabitants can have had little warning of what lay in store. It was outside the gatehouse that Sir Henry Brounker dismounted and flung his reins to the lackey. But as he strode across the flagged courtyard, the arrival of a government officer stained with hard winter travel must have caused an immediate flurry.

  He passed into the house, and through the great hall where the servants ate. For once, there can have been no need for the steward to hush the noise with his traditional cry of ‘Softly, my masters.’ Everyone present must have guessed that Brounker’s arrival meant matters of urgency. Walls or no walls – festive season or not – this was one visitor who could not be denied entry.

  Brounker sent his name up to Bess. As he waited in the hall, where the stags of Cavendish and Hardwick are carved over the gigantic fireplace, the motto – Cavendo tutus, ‘safe by taking care’ – must have struck him ironically. At once, instructions came back that he should be admitted. Up the shallow stone treads of that wide, dramatic staircase, his route took him past the carved soldier’s head at the door to the family chambers, an image meant to signify that Bess and hers were protected from just such intrusions as this.

  With a kind of grim appropriateness, the family were on the highest, the state floor. They were in the gallery, lined with portraits of Bess’s ancestors and descendants. Designed for dancing, and for exercise in inclement weather, the Gallery at Hardwick Hall is a prodigy of its kind. To stand amid its unheatable expanses is to have the sensation less of a room than of a street, lined with buildings two or even three stories high, and roofed over merely by some whimsy. The massed windows look towards the back of the house, away from the clamour and the trouble that had come so abruptly. But the events of January 1603 made Bess’s celebration of her dynasty seem like a mockery.

  In the Gallery, under the pictures of the queens of England and Scotland, under the giant alabaster statues of Justice and Mercy, Brounker found Bess and Arbella walking, with their waiting gentlewomen and William Cavendish. The scene bore a brief, transitory resemblance to that which had been enacted at Hatfield some forty years before, when the messenger came to tell the then princess Elizabeth that she was queen. Perhaps Bess even thought for a moment that it would have a similar outcome. Or perhaps not – the brief interval between the announcement of Brounker and the man’s appearance was yet long enough for a brief and bitter family conference, a first alarum of controversy.

  Arbella, with her secret knowledge, can have had little doubt what Brounker’s arrival signified. Just ten days before, she had embarked on a perilous course which was to send waves of consternation through the government, focus a glaring spotlight upon Hardwick Hall and its inhabitants, and bring the threat even of the headsman to her very door.

  As she set these events in motion, Arbella, frantic, may have sought no more than, in her own passionate and oft-stressed phrase, ‘a small and ordinary liberty’. But it is possible that, in those confused months when even those living remote from court must have guessed Queen Elizabeth’s reign was ending, she also sought the English throne. The question which would tax ministers at the time – and historians ever after – was whether this should be dismissed as a private plan, with political implications she was too inexperienced or too desperate to see; or whether it was, rather, a bid to take her place upon the public stage to which she must have believed her birthright entitled her.

  By the winter of 1602, Arbella was at the end of her tether. She had lived long enough in obscurity. She had to act – even at the risk of acting foolishly. She had to take control of her own life, even though to do so was to live very dangerously. The project upon which she now embarked was to arrange for herself a marriage with the earl of Hertford’s eldest grandson, Edward Seymour – elder brother of the very William Seymour whom she actually did marry in 1610. This was the match that had been mooted three or four years before, a proposal of which Arbella evidently knew.

  In the enduring debate over the nature of her intentions, private or political, her choice of bridegroom is suggestive, to put it mildly. This proposed marriage with Edward, unlike her final alliance with William Seymour, could be no match made from personal liking. Not only was Edward Seymour still only in his teens, but the pair had never even met. The inevitable conclusion is that Arbella was drawn not to the boy but to his bloodline; his descent, through his grandmother Lady Catherine Grey, from Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary.

  It seems possible that the match proposed at the end of the last century had been reborn under the aegis not of the earl of Hertford but of his son, young Edward’s father, Lord Beauchamp. Just as Arbella may have sought to bolster her own claim with that of the Seymours, so Beauchamp, more ambitious than his father, may have sought at once to strengthen the position of his own house and to absorb a rival. But Arbella, without information on the internal dynamics of the Seymour family, applied herself to the old earl; and the earl of Hertford, unlike his impetuous son, was a man whom experience had made wary. Few houses, even in Tudor times, had a more troubled history than did the Seymours. Queen Elizabeth never forgot that it was a Seymour queen who had supplanted her mother; and she had had no reason to love Hertford’s father, Somerset. In the days of the boy king Edward VI, the earl had seen both his father and his uncle Thomas Seymour die on the block. The earl was only a boy when he first spent time in the Tower for his father’s fault; a young man when he fell in love with the Lady Catherine Grey, to be forgiven only when in 1568 Catherine died, still in captivity. Some thirty years later, a legendary entertainment of the queen at his house of Elvetham in Hampshire had bought him a brief return to favour – but not favour enough to save him from the Tower after that attempt, in 1595, to have his marriage to Catherine and his heirs legitimized. Since then, Hertford had trodden very carefully. The last thing he wanted, with little realistic hope of gain, was another dangerous controversy. And what Arbella proposed was not just fantastical – a fantasy of disguised suitors and captive ladies that might have come from one of the popular romances of the day – it was also bordering on treasonable.

  Doleman’s Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England, in which he described the Seymours as the popular candidates for the throne, had suggested that Arbella’s claim could be strengthened with an alliance to some other title. Tales had already linked Arbella with Edward; with Edward’s father Lord Beauchamp; and with Beauchamp’s younger brother Thomas, for whom, the Venetian envoy wrote, she had ‘a great preference’, he and Arbella making a pair ‘of like age and of most favourable conditions of mind and body’. In the public mind, it seems, any Seymour would do to make a significant match for Arbella, and the implication does seem to be clear: this is a political, rather than a personal, story. A marriage between a Seymour – any Seymour – and Arbella Stuart would combine two claims, neither of which, alone, was quite strong enough to overbalance that of James. If they were united, it might be a different story. Arbella could hardly have made a more dangerous – or a more ambitious – choice of bridegroom.

  In that early spring of 1603, Queen Elizabeth I at last was dying. Since the execution of the earl of Essex she had suffered bouts of depression and a terrible loss of energy. In the country as in the queen, the turmoils of the past few years had given way to a paralysing ennui. In the summer of 1602 Elizabeth had seemed to rally: ‘I have not seen her better disposed these many years,’ a friend at court wrote to Arbella’s aunt Mary Talbot. No doubt it was another turn of the screw to those with reason to await her tardy end. But by the autumn her memory and spirits alike were failing. At Christmas, Sir John Harington wrote to his wife: ‘Our dear queen … doth now bear show of human infirmity
; too fast for that evil we shall get by her death, and too slow for that good which she will get by her releasement from pains and misery.’ Elizabeth’s will to live had been sapped by the death of favourites and friends; but still she refused to name a successor. ‘They were great fools that did not know that the line of Scotland must needs be next heirs,’ she told Harington privately – but in public it was still a different story.

  In December 1602 Arbella had begged the help, as he later confessed, of James Starkey, the sympathetic chaplain-cum-tutor who had become her ally in the Hardwick household. Swayed first by promises of future reward – that if she were ‘translated into another place’ he should be her personal chaplain – supported by Arbella’s vague boast of ‘good friends, and more than all the world knew of’, Starkey does seem also to have regarded Arbella with a genuine pity. They were probably much of an age, in a house where most of the gentry were much older, or much younger. One has the sense of shared grievances chewed over as they read together in Arbella’s study, both growing more dissatisfied with their respective positions in the household as the years went by. Another malcontent – another Morley. And, of course, another studious man; the type with whom Arbella did seem to be most in sympathy.

  As 1602 turned to 1603 Starkey was wintering in London. He had long ago promised to bear messages for Arbella when need be, and in December she sent word to him, asking him to make good his promise. But Starkey’s nerve may have failed him at the last for, instead of the helpful envoy she needed, there arrived at Hardwick word that Starkey would not, after all, be coming north until the following Easter. Her ladyship, he wrote, ‘knoweth well that I supported her rather to endure her grief and discontent patiently than by an inconvenient course to prejudice herself’. He was backtracking hastily.

  When Starkey failed her, Arbella was forced to try another member of the household. John Dodderidge, ironically, was an old and trusted retainer of Bess’s; one who, two years before, had even witnessed the old lady’s will. Perhaps that duty had reminded him of Bess’s mortality, and the need to think of his future; or perhaps he was fond of Arbella. In any event, he agreed to take a message to a lawyer, an agent of the great earl of Hertford. But he was aghast when Arbella asked him, instead, to go directly to the earl himself, as distant in degree as in miles. ‘She told me I must go a hundred miles135 for her. I made answer that I durst not, for fear of my lady’s [Bess’s] displeasure and endangering of my service,’ he wrote in his confession. His instructions were to go to Hertford’s house in Tottenham, some eight miles north of London, ‘and desire someone of trust about my lord to give you leave to speak to him’, then to deliver a verbal message.

  When he heard the content of this message, Dodderidge, like Starkey, protested his ‘unworthiness and insufficiency’ for so complicated a piece of manoeuvring in high society. To matchmake among the nobility was a task far outside his sphere, and this was a match of more than usual sensitivity. But his scruples were overruled. Dodderidge set out on Christmas Day, on a horse borrowed from Arbella’s uncle Henry, another rebel in the divided Cavendish family. On that day, as Dodderidge told it, ‘presently after dinner [Henry] went out at the gates and, calling me to him, told me his man should deliver me a horse.’ Dodderidge, Arbella instructed him, was not to let Hertford think that Arbella was moving in this matter herself, but to imply the idea came from her uncles Henry and William. ‘I had no conference with the Cavendishes,’ Dodderidge wrote, ‘though my Lady Arb. willed me to name her uncles; yet I asked her whether they were acquainted in the matter or not, and she answered me they were.’

  It is his confession that provides the first inklings that Arbella was not acting entirely alone. And it is possible Arbella would have been able to call on more help in the neighbourhood. Starkey’s note, backtracking on his offer to act as courier to Arbella, was delivered to Hardwick by Frances Pierrepont, Bess’s Catholic eldest daughter, whose home was only a few miles away. Old Sir John Byron136, residing nearby, might himself be no friend to Arbella, but his son – Brounker later wrote – was ‘at her devotion’, and his young daughter Margaret soon her most devoted lady. It became apparent, over the weeks ahead, that Arbella had her networks and her means of communication, enabling her to act with a degree of autonomy.

  Dodderidge, Arbella wrote137, was to urge that Edward Seymour should at once come to Hardwick secretly. ‘The shortness of time will help to keep counsel.’ He was to see that Hertford sent with his grandson some ‘grave, ancient man’ who could distract Bess with talk of business while the two younger people looked to see if they could like. They were to bring with them, as identification, some family heirloom as token; ‘some picture or handwriting of the Lady Jane Grey, whose hand I know’ – or perhaps even, she suggested, the Greek Testament Jane had sent to her sister Catherine on the day before her execution, with a message inscribed on the blank pages that it would ‘teach her to live and learn her to die’. It seems an ominous token for Arbella to invoke thus early in her adventure. But she seems, all too presciently, to have felt a certain identification with the Grey sisters.

  The party was to come disguised, pretending that they had come to sell a piece of land. ‘If they come like themselves they shall be shut out at the gates, I locked up, my grandmother will be the first shall advertise and complain to the queen.’ But it was Hertford himself who did that, and instantly. Arbella had mistaken his attitude completely.

  The old earl was bound to panic when Dodderidge arrived in Tottenham at three o’clock on 30 December, still dinnertime at this holiday season, and had him hailed from the midst of his Christmas festivities. Hertford refused even to hear Dodderidge’s proposal without two of his own gentlemen servants as witness. So much for secrecy. Kneeling, Dodderidge delivered his memorized message, while Hertford, ‘mightily distasting and disliking, grew impatient’. Dodderidge – no doubt bitterly remembering Arbella’s assurance that there was no danger in the affair – was shut up in a room to write a full account of the matter. ‘Thou art prepared for punishment,’ he was told, terrifyingly. With ‘weeping tears’ he begged to be sent back to ‘his lady’.

  The next day, Hertford sent his own messenger to the court to alert the privy council. Dodderidge, already repeatedly interrogated by Hertford himself, was sent under guard through the London streets to court, where he faced Robert Cecil’s questioning before being locked into the Westminster Gatehouse gaol. Arbella never received the letter he wrote to her, lamenting – with a rather touching absence of reproach – that ‘my entertainment here138 is contrary to all expectation, so that except your honour fully satisfy this bearer, my Lord will not think otherwise of me that I am some counterfeit … I beseech your honour therefore to consider the estate I am in.’ Instead, without warning, she learnt of the disaster from another source.

  The involvement of the privy council could have only one outcome – an official inquiry. Travelling fast despite hard weather, their representative Sir Henry Brounker, personally briefed by the queen, set off for Hardwick to gather evidence. His first impressions were not favourable. There were several men of ill-repute – not locals, but men ‘seldom here of many years before’ – already clustered around the place, Brounker noted suspiciously. The officer who was ushered into the Gallery on that day of early January was a government hard man of some experience; one of those who had held the City of London against the Essex rebellion and interrogated the populace on the earl’s ‘seditious and provoking speeches’. He had been employed as Cecil’s agent to the Scottish court, and if part of his business in 1600 was to quiet persistent Scottish fears about Arbella’s rumoured marriage to Duke Matthias, he probably arrived at Hardwick already weary of her and her marital possibilities. None the less, from the start, he seems to have handled Arbella expertly, juggling harshness with the pretence of sympathy.

  Brounker’s report139 sounds a self-congratulatory note as he describes how he dealt with the task of separating Bess from his quarry. ‘Then drawing
[Bess] on with other compliments to the further end of the gallery, to free her from the young lady, I delivered your Majesty’s letter. In the reading thereof I observed some change of countenance, which gave me occasion again to comfort her with the assurance of your Majesty’s good opinion and favour.’ Bess tried to fall on her knees before him. This was a situation fraught with real danger, as the two women who had seen the Scots queen go to her death would know.

  Brounker spoke with Arbella at the other end of the vast room, while Bess could only watch the scene impotently from almost sixty yards away. (Ironically, Brounker may not have realized how sound carries along that great echoing room – but Bess had the ears of an old lady.) First he told Arbella how pleased the queen had been with her New Year’s gift. A reassuring message, this, since to accept a gift was to accept the giver; when the queen had rejected the earl of Essex’s last Christmas gift, her refusal had struck observers ominously. And yet, Brounker continued, there was a matter the queen ‘took unkindly’ – one that only ‘the naked laying open’ of Arbella’s heart could clear up satisfactorily.

  ‘During the delivery of this message, it seemed by the coming and going of her colour that she was somewhat troubled yet (after a little pause) she said that the matter was very strange to her.’ Brounker asked Arbella if her conscience did not accuse her ‘of any late undutifulness’, but ‘she would by no means acknowledge so much as a thought to offend your Highness.’ He asked whether she had had no late intelligence with the earl of Hertford; she denied it, ‘but with great show of humility both in words and gesture’.

  So it went on. And on, and on. Brounker told Arbella that ‘It was not strange for a young lady to err.’ That ‘that which was past could not be recalled.’ That it were better her offence should be discovered to proceed from ‘vanity and love of herself rather than want of duty and contempt of your Majesty’. Finding her ‘still obstinate’, in the end he changed his tone from the paternal to the aggressive and, producing from his pouch Dodderidge’s confession, said that rather than having to ‘trouble her with many questions’ they could both take a shorter way; told her she was foolish to deny everything, ‘for it is so openly confessed as there is no denial.’ The techniques of interrogation do not change much. Still, Arbella insisted to Brounker that her uncles were innocent in the matter; but by now, she could claim it only ‘faintly’. He promised to keep anything she told him from her grandmother – a promise he would break immediately. He told her, too, that ‘no extremity was meant to any.’ This at last did move her, and as Arbella became more distressed, he decided to let her stew. He told her to go to bed and calm herself, and to write an account of all her dealings, if she was unable to make herself clear any other way.