Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  It has also been suggested that Arbella, in common with her royal Scottish relatives James and Mary, suffered from the then unrecognized disease porphyria, which may also have been responsible for the madness of George III. (For more on porphyria and the Stuart dynasty, and also on the ‘hysteric affection’, see Appendix B.) Genetic and biochemical in nature – emerging usually only after puberty, often in the twenties, more often in women – it can skip generations down the family tree. Mary, during her two most serious attacks, suffered an excruciating pain in her side. A ‘very acute pain in the pit of the stomach shooting to the back and sides’ was noted by the doctors of George III. Just so Arbella (on 4 March) described herself as ‘scarce able to stand what for my side and what for my head’. Later in her life she would exhibit other of his symptoms: the convulsions, the trouble with her eyes, the insomnia. An inability to eat and an excess of speech were also noted in George III. Crucially, of course, she also shared to some degree his pattern of mental disturbance.

  Porphyria has been described as an intoxication of the nervous system – and drunk is exactly what Arbella’s reeling train of thought often seems to be. (King George’s conversation was described rather aptly as being ‘like the details of a dream in its extravagant confusion’.) The disease often appears intermittently, with an abrupt onset and an equally rapid recovery, and can be exacerbated by stress, malnutrition or various medications regularly prescribed in the seventeenth century, all three of which conditions applied to Arbella at this time. If she was indeed a sufferer from porphyria, then the situation at Hardwick would have represented a downward spiral which would render attacks ever more acute. But to fix upon the idea of a convenient disease as the sole explanation of Arbella’s state may be to narrow the focus unduly.

  That the mind could regularly affect the body was a wholly acceptable idea in Arbella’s day. Mental distress was given considerable weight in the writings of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy suggested that his age was particularly prone to the ‘malady’. One main cause, he said, was study: ‘many times if discontent and idleness occur with it [scholars] are precipitated into this gulf on a sudden.’ Many of the causes of melancholy Burton offered – solitariness, faction, loss of liberty, ambition – fit Arbella neatly. And ‘the mind’, Burton wrote, ‘most effectually works upon the body, producing by his passions and perturbations miraculous alterations, [such] as melancholy, despair, cruel diseases, and sometimes death itself.’

  It is easy, moreover, to find contemporary expressions of distress even more extravagant than those in which Arbella indulged. The queen herself was subject to hysterical episodes and depressive attacks. The earl of Essex experienced attacks of nervous prostration even more acute; on one such occasion he was described by his adviser Henry Killigrew as being in such ‘an extreme agony and passion’ that his buttons (curious symptom!) burst from his doublet. And Harington wrote that, in the months before his last rebellion, Essex ‘shifteth from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion so suddenly as well proveth him devoid of good reason or right mind’.

  In earlier days Essex, when wishing to bring the queen under his thumb again after some temporary coolness, never hesitated to put his bouts of illness to good employ. By the same token, Arbella’s bout of self-starvation came at a time when her other bids for attention seemed to have failed her. The shrewd French ambassador De Beaumont suggested to his employer that the whole affair was being taken too seriously, and he seems not to have been alone in this view, reporting on 26 February: ‘What I have written156 to his Majesty concerning the marriage [sic] of Madame Arbella is confirmed by the judgement of the wisest and most penetrating.’ He had earlier noted: ‘People are only astonished that the queen has lost her repose for some days about it.’

  If Arbella wanted to keep the royal eyes focused upon Hardwick, something more was clearly needed. And if appetite had become for Arbella an instrument of power, then this time, at least, her technique was effective. In her immediate desire, she got her own way. ‘I am wearied of my life,’ Bess wrote to Cecil, ‘and I earnestly pray you to send Sir Henry Brounker hither.’ Cecil perforce complied, and Arbella was brought back to Hardwick to face his questioning.

  But the open hostility of the interrogation made a bad situation worse. Two days later, on 4 March, Arbella wrote Brounker a long and rambling letter – another document of which Cecil’s secretary had to make a tidy copy. But even from this a picture of what life at Hardwick had become emerges all too vividly. Arbella described how she and her cousin Mary (Gilbert and Mary’s daughter) had been walking in the great chamber ‘for fear of wearing the mats in the Gallery (reserved for you courtiers) as sullenly as if our hearts had been too great to give one another a good word, and so to dinner’. They had talked over the latest rumours – ‘spent a little breath evaporating some court smoke’. After dinner she went ‘in reverent sort to crave my lady grandmother’s blessing’ and got instead ‘a volley of most bitter and injurious words’.

  At last wounded to the heart157 … I made a retreat to my chamber, which I hoped by your character [authority] should have been a sanctuary … I went away … a good sober pace … though my ears were battered on one side with a contemned and in truth contemptible storm of threatenings with which my lady my grandmother thought to have won my resolved heart … and in the other summoned to a parley by my uncle William …

  The privy council was suggesting to Bess that William – ‘a gentleman that can please [Arbella] and advise her in due proportion’ – should be asked, or ordered, to take a hand in affairs at Hardwick. They expected ‘that he should interpose himself more decently towards the discourtesy of her meaning by these vain letters than he doth’. He should ‘ease your ladyship of that continual care which we see you take, the same being a great trouble to yourself and more proper for him, whose company is more agreeable unto her’. But Brounker dismissed William as ‘a weak man … of little love and respect here’; nor does Arbella seem to have regarded him with particular sympathy.

  The row continued all over the house. No room was safe – a particular pressure that Arbella clearly felt keenly. ‘I took my way down … and there we had another skirmish, where you and I sat scribbling till 12 of the clock at night.’ Still besieged by her uncle and grandmother, defended by her gentlewomen, her warrior women, ‘a troup of such viragoes as Virgil’s Camilla … I sat me down in patience and fell a scribbling’ – scribbling this very letter while her relatives, baffled, looked on.

  Leaving that ‘disadvantageous chamber’ where no-one could hear her or dared come to help her, she went downstairs to seek ‘some of my regiment’. She needed a messenger to carry her letter, but her own servants, she said, were now receiving ‘rude entertainment’ from those of Bess. None the less, her spirits were raised with the fair words ‘of certain hopeful young men who do just as I bid them without either other reason or warrant than my pleasure or service’.

  I went up to the great chamber158 and there found a troupe of (for my sake) malcontents taking advantage of the fire to warm them … My sudden apparition coming alone, through the hall … made a sudden alteration and wonderment among them for they that stood shrank back as if they had been afraid of me … With a general putting off of hats I should not doubt they should stop their ears against me.

  But one young man stepped forward, ‘with his hat in his hand and my glove in his hat’, and offered to do her bidding. His name was George Chaworth, a family connection, and he continued to be an actor in Arbella’s life, and in her letters. An actor, indeed, is how she describes him: ‘if you will admit him [to the play] his part is penning.’ She said that he speaks ‘loverlike and gentlemanlike’; he romantically signed his letters ‘Your honour’s true servant to death’. If Arbella in her letters liked to fantasize herself surrounded by true and loving friends then she did, in her servants, find just such loyalty. To the end of her life, Arbella inspired great person
al affection in her attendants – just like her aunt, the Scots Queen Mary.

  Arbella, shut up inside Hardwick all these weeks, must often have felt herself forsaken by all the world. ‘How many inquisitive questions are asked of me and how little inquisitive are my friends and acquaintances to what becomes of me?’ she asked. It is true her stepuncle Edward Talbot repudiated the appeal she sent to him. ‘I protest to Almighty God159 that I have ever lived a stranger to that lady [Arbella],’ he wrote to Cecil angrily, ‘without ever having had a thought of anything concerning her, or ever so much as a letter or message from her in all my life.’ But many eyes were watching the events at Hardwick. If she were trying to make a noise in the world, to make her voice heard in some way, she clearly succeeded. ‘Arbella is diversely reported of … Lady Arbella is under guard … especially are the minds of the kings of France and Spain well disposed towards her, for neither the one nor the other would willingly see a single sovereign in England, Scotland and Ireland,’ the Venetians reported.

  By March, after all, Elizabeth was indeed ill with fever, and Cecil had messengers waiting to ride for Scotland instantly. The queen had made her last public appearance on 26 February. Now, though, she refused all that the physicians prescribed; she could not sleep, or swallow food easily. ‘The queen for many days has not left her chamber,’ noted the Venetian envoy Scaramelli:

  And although they say160 that the reason for this is her sorrow for the death of the countess [of Nottingham] nevertheless the truer cause is that the business of Lady Arbella has reached such a pitch … it is well known that this unexpected event has greatly disturbed the queen, for she has suddenly withdrawn into herself, she who was wont to live so gaily … so anxious is she that rumours of this beginning of troubles should not spread beyond the kingdom, that she forbade either persons or letters to leave any of the ports …

  Other letters seemed to agree. ‘The queen’s sickness continues, and every man’s head is full of proclamations and of what shall come of us after. She raves of Tyrone and of Arbella, and is infinitely discontented,’ wrote one observer. The Jesuit Father Rivers wrote to a friend in Venice that ‘the rumours of Arbella much affect the queen.’ Arbella had achieved one of her minor goals – to be taken seriously.

  Only the French ambassador sounded a characteristic note of calm. But even he was reporting that Arbella ‘has been brought from Hardwick to be declared Elizabeth’s successor’. Two days later:

  Whether Madame Arbella161 will be brought to this town and there made to live in prison or at liberty, I cannot yet tell you, such is the diversity of opinion and judgement; but I think rather the last than the first. Some call the affair a comedy, others a tragi-comedy. For myself I confess to you that I cannot yet see clearly enough to give it any name. Still I always keep to my first and strongest opinion that I have sent you – that I see no great cause for alarm.

  It sounds as if everyone else were reacting far less coolly.

  ‘A scribbling melancholy’

  IN THE FIRST days of March Arbella besieged Brounker with letters; so many that Brounker suggested ‘much writing’ contributed to ‘the distempering of her brain’. The daunting paragraphs, received as something between a threat and an irrelevance, must have baffled busy and practical men unbearably. ‘I think she hath some strange vapours to the brain,’ wrote Cecil (to whom Brounker, as a good government servant, showed all the correspondence) on one of her epistles. Even Arbella herself suggested that her ‘scribbling melancholy’ was ‘a kind of madness’, though today we might interpret it more kindly. ‘In the context162 of Renaissance composition [such writing] is “madness” of a kind,’ wrote Sara Jayne Steen, ‘but it sounds remarkably akin to what the twentieth century calls freewriting, which can be therapeutic and cathartic.’ She suggested that it allowed Arbella ‘to formulate on paper an identity she can accept’.

  But Arbella was addressing herself to the wrong audience. The very length of her epistles was self-defeating, while the fragmented syntax and the form, amounting in places almost to stream of consciousness, are daunting. She herself was well aware of the particular irony that matter so intimate, so idiosyncratic (one is tempted to say, so essentially feminine), should be carefully harboured and examined by men who found such exposure unimportant, irrelevant. They may even have found it almost indecent, at a time when verbal incontinence in women was specifically linked to a failure in sexual chastity.

  As Brounker set down his brutally businesslike Exposition, she wrote to him a ‘declaration’ notable first for its tone of profound abasement, the paper blotted with tears. She had learnt some hard lessons in little more than a month.

  ‘I take Almighty God to witness,163 I am free from promise, contract, marriage, or intention to marry, and so mean to be while I live … so far from my liking is it to marry at all that I take God to witness I should think myself a great deal happier in sentence of death.’ It sounds rather like one of Elizabeth’s own early protestations of virginity.

  But Arbella continued with a veiled threat. The only thing that could make her alter her ‘long settled determination’ is if she were to continue in her grandmother’s hands, and ‘if her Majesty continue her hard opinion of me’. Abashed or not, Arbella, even when beaten almost to the ground, never gave up trying to argue and to bargain; down but never quite out. Her letters are a contradictory – but very human – cocktail of resentment and placation. Arbella several times referred to herself as a puritan in these weeks, perhaps to disarm suspicions (shortly to be given a strong foundation of probability) that she was in league with a Catholic party. Her repeated hints that the government should look beyond English shores – that she was getting some foreign aid – seem, on the other hand, designed rather to tweak the noses of the government, or at least to make them take her seriously.

  Suppose her beloved (‘my little, little love’) should arrive at a nearby port ‘and come attended with 500,164 as I think that is the lowest number he is answerable for,’ she suggested provocatively. She couldn’t resist flicking the whip, furious that her ‘word and oath’ carried so little weight. ‘Alas what a dwarf I am thought at court.’ It touched her pride nearly. ‘You courtiers are wonderfully hardhearted and slow of belief.’ From the lines of these letters comes a sense of how very far Arbella has fallen – how strong had been her presumption that she would one day rule England, and how scourging was her present ignominy.

  On this occasion she presumed, she wrote, ‘to draw Sir Henry Brounker here with an allegory which I have moralised to him’. (One can only imagine his feelings with sympathy.) Being ‘in my opinion forsaken of all the world’, she felt justified in behaving desperately. Experience, she wrote, ‘had taught me there was no other way to draw down a messenger of such worth from her Majesty but by incurring some suspicion and having no ground whereon to work upon but that, and this being love, I adventured.’ Having lost, she offered ‘expiation’, an exaggerated promise of future good behaviour. The stick and the carrot, often in the same letter, seem to have been Arbella’s way.

  First I will never165 trouble her Majesty with any suit hereafter but forget my long desired land [the confiscated Lennox estates], and confine myself to close prison for as little liberty as it shall please her Majesty in the severest rules of wisdom and policy to allot me, and think it the highest favour I can possibly obtain, for I perceive daily more and more to my increasing grief I am and ever hereafter shall be more unfortunate than I lately thought I could possibly have been. Secondly I will make a vow I will never whilst I live, nor entertain thought nor conceal such or any other matter whatsoever from her Majesty …

  All this on condition she should be granted her ‘dear and due liberty’. ‘In her Majesty’s hand it is to mend it,’ she wrote, ‘and in God’s to end my sorrows with death which only can make me absolutely and eternally happy.’

  Earlier in the letter Arbella had written of herself as being ‘bound in duty and conscience to make all the means I could to de
fend myself from perishing’. But she had also written that ‘despair may drive me from mere fear to misliked courses,’ and that if her actions so far seem bad, she may yet ‘do worse’. The words are ambiguous, but a hint at suicide does seem to be a possibility.

  References to the possibility of Arbella’s own death bedevil her subsequent letters. On 4 March she signed herself off with a quotation in Latin: Damnata iam luce ferox166 – ‘furious by daylight, having been condemned’. The tag comes from Lucan’s Pharsalia; a passage in which, at day-break, trapped warriors heroically kill themselves to avoid defeat. On 9 March, contrasting her present melancholy in ‘this my prison’ with the time when Elizabeth pronounced her ‘an eaglet of her own kind’, she spoke of desperation, hinting again at suicide: ‘now I have lost all I can lose or almost care to lose.’

  She harped again on the fate of Mr Starkey: the ‘innocent, discreet, learned and godly Mr Starkey’, as she later recalled him sadly. But she was still only flirting with the idea of suicide, attracted and repelled simultaneously. On 7 March, complaining that the page she sent to fetch her books had been shut out of her ‘quondam study chamber’, and that she herself was not allowed to enter to receive the help ‘of my dead counsellors and comforters’, she declared that such tactics would not prevail. ‘If you think to make me weary of my life and so conclude it according to Mr Starkey’s tragical example, you are deceived.’ Unlike James Starkey, Arbella Stuart did not give up easily.

  As Brounker set off back to court again, Arbella began pounding him with letters, each following hard on the heel of its predecessor. Over the next few weeks, the eager young Chaworth was kept busy, as letters pursued Brounker down the Great North Road – letters written on 4, 6, 7 and 9 March. She had, after all, few other friends – and it has often been noted that a strange affinity can arise between interrogator and victim.