Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Closer to tragedy than to comedy, surely, was Arbella’s detailed pretence of an anonymous lover. In the second half of the letter, she dwelt on him incessantly. The invention of a ‘dearest and best beloved’ may have been politic, but to flesh out the bones so fully seems unhealthy for a teenager, let alone for a grown woman of twenty-seven. And there is something worrying about the very nature of her fantasy.

  This was a man, Arbella boasted, who ‘can take nothing ill at my hand … [though] I have dealt unkindly, shrewdly, proudly with him’. Shades of the quarrelsome Shrewsbury marriages, in the shadow of which she had been raised? ‘I may compare the love of this worthy gentleman (which I have already unrevocably accepted and confirmed) to gold which hath been so often purified that I cannot find one fault, jealousy only excepted.’ This was a man

  whom I have loved too well (ever since I could love) to hide any thought word or deed of mine from him unless it were to awe him a little when I thought his love converted into hate, … or to make him weary of his jealousy by letting him see it was the only way to make him fall out with me.

  And yet this paragon is revealed as a Machiavelli, a Polonius figure, who has spoken against Arbella at court in order to disguise their relationship. ‘All the injuries he could he hath done me …’ Carefully, she added that ‘he tells me plainly he will not offend her Majesty for my sake, and will rather forsake me forever than incur her Majesty’s displeasure, though the time [of it] be never so short.’ If he had been a little less scrupulous, we would surely imagine him more enthusiastically.

  Arbella refused to name the man; for his safety, she says. ‘Secrecy is one of his virtues and he hath as many I believe as any subject or foreign prince in all Europe.’ The assumption now must be that he was a fantasy; Arbella herself soon admitted as much, albeit in circumstances that rob her words of their weight. Close-watched as she was, she could have had scant opportunity to form such a relationship (though she would prove able to hold a clandestine correspondence, such as the one with her uncle Henry). Even more persuasive is the fact that had she already fallen in love elsewhere, she would surely never have begun negotiations for Edward Seymour. Certainly no ideal lover ‘great with her Majesty’ manifested himself in the months ahead. And the initial attention paid to these claims by contemporaries like Bess died away over the days and weeks ahead, as the increasing wildness of Arbella’s writing lost her all credibility.

  It is elsewhere in this letter one should look for emotional actuality. As Arbella set these words down, ‘while I writ, I wept and I marvel it was not perceived, for I could neither forbear weeping at meal times nor in truth day nor night.’ No, her romantic lover wasn’t real; just a useful figure of fancy who had taken on more life in her imagination than was altogether suitable for a grown woman. But then, a grown woman is just what Arbella was not allowed to be, as she herself complained bitterly.

  Consciousness of her years and the indignity of her position were in her mind a few days later, when Arbella wrote to Cecil and Stanhope about her treatment at Hardwick. This is another letter that began in a ‘presentation hand’ to match the controlled and formal phrasing, but quickly descended into a furious scrawl.

  Arbella demanded some ruling be given to Bess,

  whether it be her Majesty’s pleasure147 I shall have free choice of my servants to take, keep and put away … whether I may send for whom I think good or talk with any that shall voluntarily or upon business come to me … And whether it be not her Majesty’s pleasure I should as well have the company of some young lady or gentlewoman for my recreation, and scholars, music, hunting, hawking, variety of any lawful disport I can procure or my friends will afford me.

  These would be in addition – she added, with what in an age of less careful letters would be taken as irony – to ‘the attendance of grave overseers, for which I think myself most bound to her Majesty as it is the best way to avoid any jealousy’.

  But Arbella wanted more than a companion in her custody. She wanted to know ‘Whether, if the running on of the years be not discerned in me only, it be not her Highness pleasure to allow me that liberty (being the 6th of this February 27 years old) to choose my place of abode.’ Bound, as she said, in ‘an extraordinary yoke of bondage’, she now asked the authorities at least to declare how long she should have to wear it, ‘and without ambiguity to prescribe me the rules wherby it pleaseth her Majesty to try my obedience’. But that was exactly the kind of definite pronouncement from which Elizabeth’s government would always shy.

  Dismissing her previous letter as ‘the first fruits of my scribbled follies’, never meant, she disingenuously claimed, for official eyes, Arbella in this long communication none the less returned to the theme of the lover who had proved so useful, so compelling, a fantasy. Still seeking to address and be addressed in her own right, she said she would reveal her lover’s name but only in person, to the queen’s own messenger. Time and again, her letters reflect her distaste at being addressed only as Bess’s protégée; her rage at finding her own addresses broken against a wall of officialdom.

  Even in that first disastrous approach to Hertford, she reproached the earl with having applied to Bess in the matter of her marriage rather than to her own self. Her friends, as she wrote in the message Dodderidge was to deliver, ‘think your lordship did not take an orderly course in your proceedings, for it was thought fitter that my Lady Arbella should have been first moved in the matter, and that the parties might have had sight the one of the other, to see how they would like.’ The idea that liking should play at least some part in the choice of a marriage partner was slowly coming into currency at this time; but there is another theme here that reverberates through the letters of the sixteenth century. It was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to achieve direct communication with the powers that be. Arbella begged for ‘two lines’ in her majesty’s own hand; just so had the queen of Scots sought a meeting with Elizabeth; just so had the young Elizabeth, on her way to the Tower, once begged some direct communication from her sister Mary.

  But Arbella had timed her request badly. In London, the death of the countess of Nottingham, Elizabeth’s kinswoman and friend, had thrown the queen into a last depression. Her formal robes had long since become too heavy; soon, all too symbolically, the coronation ring had to be cut from her swollen finger. ‘All the fabric of my reign, little by little, is beginning to fail,’ she wrote to Henri of France. The state of the queen’s health naturally increased speculation as to Arbella’s position, since Robert Cecil’s plans for James’s succession were still a close secret. As so often, ripples of gossip spread far beyond Arbella’s own circle, to auditors for whom the drama at Hardwick was only a play within a play. Hungry as she was to speak to the outside world, it was as eager to hear her. But it was just such a dialogue the authorities wished to prevent.

  King James in Scotland had already expressed concern about Arbella, having been ‘credibly informed, that she is lately moved by the persuasion of the Jesuits to change her religion’. He shed what sound remarkably like crocodile tears over ‘the frailty of her youth and sex’, thus exposed to ‘evil company’. In February Cecil secretly sent him a modified reassurance.

  I know not how148 any minister of state could have made that point [her religion] secure … But, Sir, though consciences are secretly wrought in youth … yet I assure you (for my own part149) I have heard so little proof of her being Catholic, as if I were to speak for a wager I should think it an extravagant information.

  Those around Arbella, he added, were notable Protestants – Bess; the chaplain and confidant Starkey. But Starkey himself now added fuel to rumour’s flames.

  Life had left James Starkey a disappointed man. He had been taken into William Cavendish’s household almost ten years before – ten years of ‘servitude and bondage’ – on the promise of a clergyman’s living which, however, had never materialized. The stingy William was notoriously ‘sparing in his gratuities’. Starkey’s involve
ment in Arbella’s affairs seems to have preyed on a mind already inclined towards melancholy. He had been questioned, perhaps treated harshly. But he had also been ‘hardly used by his friends’, Cecil himself noted compassionately. In the early days of February, in London, he hanged himself – a decision almost unthinkable in a seventeenth-century cleric, taught that such an act meant eternal damnation. He left a lengthy ‘confession’ detailing all his dealings with Arbella. He asked her forgiveness, ‘being sorry150 that such a one should be made an instrument of the bad practices of others, whose device was to turn me out of my living and deprive me of my life, the Lord forgive them all’, and took pains to exonerate himself and his connections: ‘For my own part I was busied about the recovery of my parsonage … My friends and kinsfolk I protest are blameless and without fault, being unacquainted with this matter.’ He added: ‘If I had a thousand lives I would willingly spend them all to redeem the least part of her [Arbella’s] reputation.’

  Perhaps it was this warmth of feeling which led the authorities to tax Starkey with having aspired to Arbella’s hand himself. There was the matter of a Bible, the cover of which he had caused to be inscribed with the letters J.A.S. These were his own initials, to be sure (since the A was added only that it ‘might distinguish James from John’ and the printer erroneously ‘set the three letters apart’: so trivial had the debate become). But they could also stand for James and Arbella Starkey. This was another ridiculous surmise, given Arbella’s respect for her own rank, and her use of Starkey as intermediary in promoting another match. But it shows the climate of suspicion that made the wretched chaplain another victim of Arbella’s story.

  The French ambassador instantly reported Starkey’s death to his king. The Venetians, ever sensational, chimed in a month later. ‘In the house of Arbella Stuart they have found the body of her chaplain and tutor with his throat cut. He was the most intimate of all those about her. Rumour says that he killed himself because he was conscious of his own intrigues.’ The Venetians were not always accurate as to fact – witness their misinformation as to the means and place of Starkey’s death – but they had a greedy ear for gossip. They also reported home that James and Arbella were

  the real claimants151 … descendants in equal degree. At present the queen has conceived some fear lest Arbella should escape … the queen has, therefore, very quietly increased the guards round the castle, fifty miles from London, where the unhappy lady has lived so many years, buried, as one may say. The ministers are anxious on the subject.

  Indeed, they had reason to be.

  ‘So wilfully bent’

  FEW DOCUMENTS152 SPEAK so eloquently of distress as the pages that lie among the Cecil papers, written by Sir Henry Brounker and labelled ‘The Exposition of Lady Arbella Stuart’. In the first days of March 1603, Brounker had returned to confront her again at Hardwick, bringing the council’s response to her provocative allegations, and answering an urgent plea from Bess. From Hardwick, he sent back to London a record of his interrogation, setting out Arbella’s answers to some thirty questions, quizzing her on everything she had already said. First the reader sees the version over which Arbella and Brounker laboured together – so blotted as to be almost illegible, Arbella’s signature and her occasional comments crowded out by Brounker’s crabbed hand. Following it comes the neat copy made by Cecil’s secretary, evoking a world away from the Hardwick fray. ‘Being demanded … Being demanded … Being demanded’ – both documents give a vivid impression of the pounding queries.

  It was a far more hostile approach than she can ever have encountered in all her sheltered life. She didn’t answer as cannily as the fifteen-year-old princess Elizabeth had done, when Sir Robert Tyrwhitt interrogated her about her relationship with her stepmother’s husband, Thomas Seymour. But Arbella was younger than Elizabeth in experience, if not in years. She didn’t even answer as doughtily as the princess Mary Tudor had always done, when ordered to abandon her royal prerogative and her faith. But at first she kept her head, and answered quite cogently.

  ‘Being demanded why she was distracted between fear and hope she answered that she feared her Majesty’s displeasure by reason of the letters she received from her, and by her innocency she hoped to recover her Highness’ favour,’ Brounker reported. ‘Being demanded who persuaded her to play the fool in earnest she said that that was but a poetical fiction.’

  But half a dozen demands in, the questions began to focus more sharply upon personalities. Brounker was trying to discover the identity of her supposed lover. Whenever he asked her for a name, Arbella answered ‘the king of Scots’. At first that, too, made a kind of sense. ‘Love’, after all, could mean the cousinly affection James had professed. (Arbella later complains that courtiers, blind to ‘the power of divine and Christian love … cannot believe one can come so near God’s precept … as to love an unkind but otherwise worthy kinsman so well as nobody else (it seems to your knowledge) doth any but their paramours.’) But far beyond this comprehensible point, she was sticking to her story.

  Being demanded what the gentleman was that was so worthily favoured by her Majesty and had done her so much wrong and wherein, she answered it was the king of Scots whom her Highness favoured so much as for fear of offending him she might not be allowed the liberty of the land to sue, nor to send into Scotland to claim an earldom or the [Lennox] lands or recompense for them.

  Plausible enough, surely. But by the end of what must have been an exhausting interrogation, her reiterated answer was not so plausible. It was as if the only effect of all Brounker’s insistence was to drive Arbella back on her single piteous ploy.

  ‘Being demanded who that gentleman is by whose love she is so much honoured, she sayeth it is the king of Scots.’ Was Arbella just panicking, or was this policy? She may just have been casting around for a name with which to silence Brounker. A name which could not immediately be dismissed out of hand, a safe scapegoat who was placed above fear of being hauled over the coals for her accusation. But she may instead have been trying to incriminate a rival – albeit, as so often, clumsily.

  Bess could only write apologetically to Cecil and Stanhope:

  It is not unknown to you153 what earnest and importunate suite my unfortunate Arbella hath made for Sir H. Brounker’s coming down. I was in hope she would have discovered somewhat worth his travel, but now she will neither name the party to whom she hath showed to be so affectionate, nor declare to Sir H. Brounker any matter of moment, spending the time in idle and impertinent discourses.

  Bess was inclined to take it all as a personal insult: ‘them that have laboured to withdraw her natural affection from me … little respected her undoing so they might overthrow me with grief.’ She begged for Arbella’s ‘speedy remove’: ‘it may be that a change of place will work some alteration in her.’ Angry though Bess was – and, in her attempts at coercion, going just the wrong way to work with Arbella – she yet displayed some understanding of the girl she had raised for all those years. But Bess’s goal by this stage was just ‘to keep her quiet till I may understand further her Majesty’s pleasure’, a task not made easier by the fact that Arbella, as Bess wrote in outrage, had ‘most vainly prefixed a day for her remove’. Set a deadline, essentially.

  Soon after Sir H. Brounker’s departure154 hence, I look she will fall into some such extremity of making wilful vows as she did lately. She said before Sir H. Brounker that if she had not been suffered then to remove hence she would have performed her vow and the like I daily doubt she will do at any toy she will take discontentment at … She is so wilfully bent, and there is so little reason in most of her doings, that I cannot tell what to make of it. A few more weeks as I have suffered of late will make an end of me.

  The ‘vow’ to which Bess so despairingly refers was one which has echoes in our century. Arbella, Bess had reported to Cecil towards the end of February, ‘is so wilfully bent that she hath made a vow not to eat or drink in this house at Hardwick, or where I am, till she
may hear from her Majesty’. (The phenomenon of self-starvation was far from unknown, even stripped of the saintly religious dimension it might have known in an earlier century. In the 1650s Nicholas Fontanus described women who ‘have no stomach to their meat, and being taken with a strong loathing of aliment, their bodies waste and consume’.) For very ‘preservation of her life’, Bess had to let Arbella be carried in a litter to Oldcotes, two miles away. Bess added that her granddaughter was ill, with ‘a sharp pain in her side’. ‘Arbella hath a doctor of physic with her for a fortnight together, and is enforced to take much physic this unseasonable time, but finds little ease … I see her mind is the cause of all.’ It is the first significant mention of Arbella’s health – and of her use of self-starvation as a weapon – but these are issues which were to loom large in years to come, and to affect the widely debated question of her sanity.

  Throughout her life, and ever since, Arbella has often been spoken of as ‘distracted’ or, more seriously, rumoured actually to be mad. It is tempting to dismiss the allegation out of hand – like Hamlet, Arbella surely ‘knew a hawk from a handsaw’. But her letters do at this stressful juncture in her life exhibit signs of exaggeration or fantasy amounting almost to delusion. She herself called the ‘scribbling melancholy’ into which she had fallen ‘a kind of madness’, adding that there ‘are many such’.

  It has been suggested that as a writer Arbella was deliberately building a fantasy world. ‘Writing was a mechanism155 to maintain self-respect,’ wrote Sara Jayne Steen, editor of Arbella’s letters. ‘In the world she created on paper, a strong and beloved woman rightfully rages against her oppressors.’ As a way of counterbalancing the automatic diagnosis of hysteria, imposed by men like Cecil and Brounker, this is a useful theory, which surely contains a good deal of truth. But Bess’s letter encapsulates the grounds for several other possibilities.