Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  The statement she handed him the next day was ‘confused, obscure and in truth ridiculous … not a letter fit for me to carry or for her Majesty to read’. He ordered her to write another draft; together, they went through several and, in the few days he spent at Hardwick on ‘this endless business’, Brounker became convinced that ‘her wits were throughout disordered, either with fear of her grandmother or conceit of herself.’ He recruited the help of Bess, to whom ‘in duty and discretion’ he had disclosed all, and who took the whole story so ill ‘as with much ado she refrained her hands’ (i.e. from striking Arbella).

  The letter Brounker finally carried back to London did not smack of disorder. It was terse, and bold in its brevity. Arbella’s aunt, Mary, queen of Scots, had consistently failed to recognize the strength of the forces ranged against her. It seemed to be a Stuart characteristic.

  ‘May it please140 your most excellent Majesty. Sir Henry Brounker has charged me with many things in your Majesty’s name the most whereof I acknowledge to be true and am heartily sorry that I have given your Majesty the least cause of offence.’ But she did not sound sorry, despite the rhetorically obsequious sequel – ‘I humbly prostrate myself at your Majesty’s feet.’ And on 15 January, two days after Brounker, delayed on the way by a bad fall from his horse, had arrived back in London ‘very secretly’, she smuggled out of the house a message for her aunt, Mary Talbot, the countess of Shrewsbury. ‘I beseech her to come down with the like speed she would do if my lady my grandmother were in extremity.’ Her gentlewoman Bridget Sherland – who found it easier to get outside Hardwick, since Arbella herself was ‘restrained from her liberty’ – added a yet more urgent plea. If Mary Talbot does not come, ‘she will make my lady think that all her friends will forsake her when she hath most need.’ Mary Talbot did not come – perhaps because the appeals were intercepted by the authorities. But in fact, she and Gilbert play a puzzlingly vague part during this whole vital episode of their niece’s story.

  Mary’s servant Hacker, the man via whom Arbella sent her letter, was one of the strangers whose presence in the district around Hardwick Brounker had remarked suspiciously. In view of the Catholic Mary’s later involvement in Arbella’s affairs, it would not be surprising if it transpired that she was party to Arbella’s plan. Instead, a few weeks ahead, there would come a report that the Talbots and Cecil had grown ‘very great and inward friends’ – so great, it would be rumoured that Cecil was conspiring with them to put Arbella on the throne: an absurdity, to anyone who has the access to Cecil’s secret correspondence with James that we do today. And it was also even rumoured, again, that Arbella – with the Talbots’ connivance – was to marry Cecil himself; or Lord Mountjoy, the confirmed lover of Penelope Rich, Sidney’s Stella; or Fulke Greville, a confirmed bachelor nearing fifty.

  The vaunted friendship between Talbot and Cecil was in fact of no new date; access to their letters makes it clear that Gilbert had long been Cecil’s ally personally as well as politically. Probably his influence went with Cecil’s in these months to ensure events at Hardwick ended peacefully. We cannot feel quite as sure of Mary’s role, though. Was she at first Arbella’s ally in rebellion – a part she would play again later in her story? Even Arbella’s own letter to Mary is redolent of a painful uncertainty. It sounds suspicious – even paranoid. But if Arbella were paranoid, she had reason to be.

  Like other appeals Arbella wrote at this time, the letter to Mary Talbot was intercepted by Bess’s servants, forwarded to Cecil, and a feigned reply dictated. The calendar which lists the Cecil papers for this period makes no bones about it. ‘A feigned answer141: Am sorry my occasions are so great that I cannot now come to you.’ Or when Bridget Sherland wrote to a Mr Bradshaw, to the same effect as she had to Hacker: ‘The messenger that was to have carried the abovesaid letter returned a feigned answer by word that Mr Bradshaw was not at home.’ The letters were in the same handwriting often seen on Bess’s communiqués: that of her trusted steward, Timothy Pusey.

  Such surveillance was a commonplace of the times – the Venetians, a few weeks later, casually noted that the queen had intercepted letters from Arbella in her hands – but the swiftness with which the mechanism swung into place corroborates the idea that she was under surveillance already. With such a cloud of deliberate disinformation around her it is hardly surprising if, later in these desperate months, Arbella did lose her grip on reality; hardly surprising, too, that her old childhood affection for her grandmother soured into a resentment that looked very like hate.

  She was not the only one weary of the situation. Bess herself wrote to the queen, grumbling at Brounker for his ‘preciseness’ and Arbella for her ‘vanity’. She was seventy-six, and she had grown very tired of keeping her granddaughter, on the queen’s behalf, in what had come to look increasingly like custody:

  … seeing she hath been content142 to hear matters of any moment and not impart them to me, I am desirous and most humbly beseech your Majesty that she may be placed elsewhere, to learn to be more considerate, and after that it may please your Majesty either to accept of her service about your royal person or to bestow her in marriage, which in all humility and duty I do crave … for I cannot now assure myself of her as I have done.

  Bess was another who, like Hertford, had taken risks in her younger life but now wished only to live securely. Nor, herself tough and eminently practical, was she a woman to regard Arbella’s impracticable plan and subsequent histrionics with sympathy.

  As they waited together at Hardwick, what finally overthrew both ladies’ nerves was the intelligence that the queen, represented as annoyed but lenient, none the less wished Arbella to remain where she was. It cannot have helped that the queen was represented, in this case, not only by Cecil but by the vice-chamberlain, Sir John Stanhope – that same Stanhope who had quarrelled so violently with Gilbert and Mary Talbot; or, perhaps, that Brounker, at this stage, was inclined to play down the matter; concluding that ‘the poor lady was abused, my Lord [Hertford] guiltless.’

  Arbella’s follies were officially attributed to convenient (and anonymous) ‘base companions’ who, ‘thinking it pleasing to her youth and sex to be sought in marriage’, had led her astray. She herself was warned in future to ‘content herself to live in good sort with so dear a parent and so worthy a matron’ as her grandmother. Any further involvement in ‘such like plots and practices’ might not be treated so gently, ‘for being of such like blood she is, her Majesty will look for an extraordinary account of her proceedings.’

  Cecil and Stanhope expressed their conviction of Hertford’s innocence in terms Arbella can only have found patronizing. If the earl’s own ‘precise carriage’ in the matter had not belied any suggestion of his complicity, then ‘the incongruity of his grandchild’s years143 … besides the absurd election of ministers [Dodderidge and Starkey] and course of proceeding’ were sufficient to do so. As it had ‘a corrupt beginning’, so the business had ‘a fond [foolish] end’, they concluded complacently. To Arbella, surely, insult was added to injury.

  Bess, for her part, was warned not to take any overt precautions to secure Arbella for fear of fanning the ‘fond bruits’ (foolish rumours) already around. Robert Cecil suggested she might instead ‘impose some care upon some discreet gentlewomen … and some honest gentlemen, to attend her among the rest, who, without using any extraordinary restraint, may have eyes sufficiently unto her if she do anything unfit’. Bess, the queen advised, should ‘remain contented and look to your health’. Ironically, dissatisfaction at these answers may have brought Arbella and Bess nearer into sympathy than they had been for years.

  In the middle of January Arbella wrote again to the queen, thanking her for her ‘most gracious interpretation144 of this accident’, and giving her assurance that she would never again willingly ‘yield to grief as I have done heretofore and that very lately, to almost my utter overthrow of body and mind’. None the less, she begged again for ‘even that small and ordinary liberty
I despaired to obtain of her [Bess] my otherwise most kind and natural parent’. Those things she had done without Bess’s knowledge, she protested, were things ‘she should have had more reason to wink at than to punish so severely’, had Bess not been stricter ‘than any child how good, discreet and dutiful soever would willingly have obeyed’.

  In Arbella’s ‘most distressed state’ she had ‘with silent and stolen tears implored and expected relief’ from the queen. Her only goal, she wrote, had been to end her exile from the royal presence. ‘This hath been the principal end of all my desires without which I can think no state happy.’ She boasted that, unwise as her proceedings might seem, she had none the less ‘preserved your Majesty’s most royal lineage from any blot as any whatsoever’. Elizabeth used to boast of being her father’s daughter. Arbella, who never knew her father, or many of his kin, had to fall back on the more generalized ‘lineage’, but that she invoked as frequently. ‘I should have adjudged myself unworthy of life if I had degenerated from the most renowned stock whereof it is my greatest honour to be a branch …’

  It was an attempt at the tone of ritual compliment habitual in elevated Elizabethan society. Elizabeth herself had written of her ‘exile’ from the presence of her hardly-yet-known stepmother, Catherine Parr. But on this occasion the strained note of tribute failed of its effect, as did any appeal to common emotional ground. The queen was not to be won over. There was no relief, no summons south. It was hardly likely there would be, at this of all unlikely junctures, when the government’s interest was to ensure that Arbella – and anyone else in the line of succession – should be kept isolated, well away from the centre of power.

  But the conflict between Arbella and Bess had gone too far to settle down as Cecil and Stanhope no doubt confidently expected. By 29 January the situation at Hardwick had reached such a pitch that Bess again wrote to the queen about ‘this unadvised young woman’. Vindictively, or just desperately, she admitted that she ‘would not care how meanly soever she were bestowed, so as it were not offensive to your Highness’; for

  the bad persuasions145 of some have so estranged her mind and natural affection from me that she holds me the greatest enemy she hath, and hath given herself over to be ruled and advised by others, so that, the bond of nature being broken, I cannot have any assurance of her good carriage. I cannot but doubt there is another match in working, but who the party should be, I cannot conjecture … Sometimes she will say that she can be taken away off my hands if she will.

  That there were ‘others’, that there was ‘another match … working’, was an idea Arbella tried hard to promulgate. The friends, like the match, are usually taken to have been imaginary, but Arbella herself was eager to blur the line between fantasy and reality. To keep the authorities’ attention on herself, by appearing on the brink of another marriage, may have been her only chance of breaking what had become an intolerable stasis.

  ‘A mind distracted’

  THE LETTERS ARBELLA Stuart wrote from Hardwick, in the last months of what she had come to see as her captivity, are bizarre and wonderful documents. The longest single letter runs to some seven thousand words, and the content is often so confused as to lead contemporaries to question Arbella’s sanity. For the biographer hitherto starved of the subject’s voice, this sudden explosion of words is an embarras de richesse hard to handle gracefully. To pull out only the plums – the vivid, comprehensible phrases – from what is at times an almost impenetrable mass of text would fail to reflect the real confusion that so horrified the recipients. To drag the reader on an enforced route march, line by line, on the other hand, could be productive of nothing so much as a bewildered hostility.

  Some compromise has to be achieved. The letters Arbella wrote in the spring of 1603 colour everything else we know about her story. And out of the morass there emerges in the end the picture of a personality almost unparalleled among women’s writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  The first of her self-explanatory letters146 amounts to two and a half thousand words of rhetoric and special pleading, written a day or two after Bess sent her plaint, and nominally addressed to the old lady herself. With ‘a mind yet distracted between fear and hope’, Arbella ‘set down the reason of this my proceeding’, the words often scratched through as the pen raced along in Arbella’s informal, as opposed to her neat ‘presentation’ handwriting. Far from being, as she claimed, without ‘ceremonies’, it is on the contrary so convoluted, so elaborately (and often confusedly) styled as to give the modern reader, on first perusal, little sense of her meaning. On perhaps the fourth reading, it is revealed as the sustained fantasy of a scheme hatched between Arbella herself and a fictional lover; extraordinarily sustained, considering that it was clearly dashed off in a passion.

  She described a scheme so complicated one thinks of Shakespeare’s plots. Arbella’s ‘dearest and best-beloved … told me he would have me enter into some great action to win myself repute, to try her Majesty’s love for me’. This great action was to be the unmasking of traitorous intentions – in persons other than Arbella herself, naturally.

  Arbella’s approach to Hertford was, she now claimed, her opening gambit in the role of agent provocateur. She had wanted to expose – to dramatize, if you will – the consequences of just such a potentially treasonable marriage proposal as that which, she asserts, had indeed been made from the Hertford camp. Her intent was ‘to have it known to her Majesty that such a matter was propounded seriously, and by some desired … but utterly neglected or rejected by myself from the first hour I heard of it.’ Perhaps it was the nearest anyone could have got to a viable excuse – whatever doubts one might harbour as to its plausibility.

  Ingeniously, she worked in already-known details, like her ‘ridiculous’ choice of messenger. The council’s word there had obviously stung. Now, she claimed that her apparent blunder was a deliberate decision. ‘I sent such as I thought likeliest to displease his Lordship [Hertford].’ Self-righteously, she protested that she never wished to provoke or produce too much evidence against Hertford. ‘I cannot find in my heart to disclose the counsel of any stranger or enemy … for all my Lord of Hertford’s discourteous dealings with me.’

  Arbella professed herself delighted with the result of her plan. ‘I thank God it fell out better than I and my dearest and best trusted could have devised or imagined though we have beat our brains about it these three years.’ The eyes of the authorities had been opened. ‘It was convenient her Majesty should see and believe what busy bodies, untrue rumours, unjust practices, colourable and cunning devices are in remote parts among those whom the world understand to be exiled her Majesty’s presence undeservedly.’

  There was a little dig here: see what you get for shutting me away in the midlands? Arbella went on to sound the note of warning more openly: ‘I cannot rule love and ambition in others as I thank God I can do both very well in my self.’ But she did not labour that point. Time and again, her ‘device’ was presented as merely a piece of ‘honest cunning’, the queen’s anger at which was ultimately to have been converted into laughter. It reads not like a realistic fantasy, but rather like the type of plot contrivance often seen on the stage of the day. Indeed, in this letter Arbella referred to herself and her supposed companion in the language of the theatre – as ‘actors’ who made themselves merry ‘making ourselves perfect in our parts’.

  Bess at once forwarded the document to court with a tart covering note. Arbella, Bess wrote, ‘hath set down in her own hand this declaration so fraught with vanity. Such as it is I have set it hereinclosed but I could not by any possible means prevail with her to set down the matter plainly, as I desired she would in few lines. These strange courses are wonderful [extraordinary] to me.’

  Arbella probably realized her grandmother would submit her apologia to the authorities. In fact, she may well have counted on her words reaching the queen. Such indirection was a not unusual technique; to approach the ruler uninvited, wh
en one was out of favour, was to strain etiquette precariously. So although Arbella later kept up an appearance of anger at the liberty Bess had taken, the manuscript of the letter itself tells a different story. In front of the words ‘your ladyship’ is a different, abortive, phrase crossed out: ‘your Ma …’. This is one of several such significant revisions.

  Arbella vented her contempt for those who had tried ‘what promises, oaths, vows, threatenings, unkindness, kindness, fair means and foul, neglect of others, withdrawing of counsel, hope of redress or anything in the world’ could do to persuade one of ‘my sex, years and (hitherto) unhappy fortune’. Arbella seems to have loved words for their own sake; an Elizabethan tendency that makes her letters all the harder to assess across a distance of four centuries. They could well be taken as more baffling, more eccentric than they should be – unless you compare them with one of the queen’s own elaborate letters, or an allusion-packed speech in a Shakespeare play.