Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

In his official report to the council on 19 March, Brounker was reassuring. ‘There is no fear176 of any new practice … unless the opinion of her Majesty’s sickness, which is here too common, draw on some sudden resolution.’ A thorough search found ‘neither shot, pikes nor anything else here and the country slow enough and unready’. But the new note sounded here suddenly, of open preparation for armed warfare, is harsh and unexpected. And, along with the emollient report sent to the whole council, Brounker also wrote to Cecil privately.

  ‘I must remember your honour that this Stapleton is a very wilful papist, and had long since practised to convey my Lady Arbella into Norfolk, and there to keep her among seminaries and priests, and to defend her by a strong party if need required, as Arbella herself told me.’ Afterwards, Brounker added, she would have denied the last part if she could ‘and entreated me to conceal his name’. She really wasn’t cut out for conspiracy. Of Arbella herself, Brounker wrote to Cecil, ‘she is certain in nothing but her uncertainty. She justifieth herself and desireth liberty.’

  Every man’s mouth177 is full of the queen’s danger, and Arbella receives daily advertisements to that purpose … I suppose her wilfulness (which is greater and more peremptory than before) ariseth out of a hope of the queen’s death. I find her so vain and idle as I seldom trouble her, neither doth she much desire my company, though I pretended I came to see her wrongs righted and to compound all matters between her grandmother and her.

  He believed that had she managed to leave Hardwick on the tenth, her purpose (‘if there were any’) had been to head ‘for Scotland’, since Hull, the nearest shipping place, was forty long miles away. This suggests a flight rather than a coup; but news of the queen’s sickness ‘may alter her opinion’.

  I am verily persuaded178 that her remove only will stay her practice, which I perceive is resolved by herself and others. If her Majesty should miscarry … I do not see how she can be kept in this place two days, and therefore it were good that her remove were thought on in time, if her escape may breed danger.

  Even at this late date Arbella’s adventure – the whole adventure of the succession – could still have ended very badly. The Venetian envoy pointed out that, Arbella having ‘no taint of rebellion or aught but schemes for the future’ against her, it would ‘in the ordinary course’ be impossible to prosecute her. ‘All the same’, he continued pertinently,

  as the situation is growing more serious,179 and the queen’s anger is mounting, many people fear that just as Mary Stuart’s first crime was her secret betrothal to the duke of Norfolk, so the joy of Arbella’s ill-matched and unconsummated marriage may be changed into a bloody tragedy.

  ‘That strange outlandish Word “change” ’

  BROUNKER ARRIVED BACK at Hardwick to find that Arbella had shut herself into her room. But she slipped out to him a final blunt letter. ‘Pardon me if without ceremony I shut you out of doors, if you will not at my most earnest entreaty forbear to come to me, self-confined within this chamber, till I be absolutely cleared and free every way, and have my just desires granted and allowed.’

  Things at Hardwick had evidently gone from bad to worse. Bess, Brounker reported, was ‘sickly by breaking of her sleep and cannot long continue this vexation’. On 22 March the council sent orders to Sir Francis Leeke and John Manners of Haddon, neighbours and family connections, to aid in the task of guarding Arbella. But all such decisions were taken in an atmosphere of mounting uncertainty.

  It is hard, looking back, to grasp how deeply everyone was dreading the outcome of spring 1603. The world as the Elizabethans knew it was ending, and who knew what the future would be? The contemporary chronicler Thomas Dekker wrote after the event of how easily ‘the general terror that [Elizabeth’s] death bred’ might have been followed by ‘the feared wounds of a civil sword’.

  The report180 … like a thunderclap, was able to kill thousands. It took away hearts from millions. For having brought up even under her wing a nation that was almost begotten and born under her, that never shouted any ave but for her name, never saw the face of any prince but herself, never understood what that strange outlandish word ‘change’ signified – how was it possible but that her sickness should throw abroad an universal fear, and her death an astonishment?

  It was in this climate they all stood immobilized, waiting for the lightning. But when it came, they survived – and the Gordian knot of England’s future was cut almost immediately.

  Even as Brounker rode north again, the queen’s condition was deteriorating. As he arrived in Derbyshire, the French ambassador had reported Elizabeth to be ‘already in a manner insensible’ – seated upon cushions on the floor, one finger in her mouth, her eyes fixed on the ground, silent for hour after hour. ‘All agree that she is worse,’181 he wrote again, showing ‘an extraordinary melancholy in her countenance and actions’.

  Some attribute the cause of her illness to the extreme displeasure that she has conceived in her mind about what has passed concerning Madame Arbella; others about the affairs of Ireland … Many also declare that she is seized in her heart for remorse for the death of the earl of Essex, who was beheaded just two years ago.

  The old canard survived: that Elizabeth was brought low by some special cause (and that cause probably Arbella), rather than by the inevitable intimations of mortality. She spent her nights brooding upon the affair, wrote the Venetians dramatically. But it was becoming clear that, for whatever reason, the end could not be far away. On 20 March – just as Bess in Hardwick was sending for witnesses to cut Arbella and Henry out of her will – Cecil sent James a draft of the proclamation proposed to declare him king of England. Perhaps James needed182 such reassurance, for an official in Berwick on the border was sending his own message south: ‘The Scots are very discontented and murmur desperately at a rumour of the Lady Arbella’s marriage.’ As for the capital, ‘London is all in arms for fear of the Catholics,’ reported the Venetian envoy.

  On 21 March, in Richmond, Elizabeth finally took to her bed. As she lay there, an abscess in her throat burst and she declared she felt better; but it was obvious that her state was critical. The clerics, whose duty it would be to usher her from one world to the next, were summoned to remain in constant attendance.

  On the twenty-third, her ministers again begged the queen to name her successor. She was beyond speech – but it was later said that with her fingers she made a sign (a crown?) above her head; this convenient signal was taken as indicating King James of Scotland. At six in the evening, she signalled for the archbishop of Canterbury to kneel by her bed and pray. At ten she fell into a deep sleep; in the small hours of the next morning she died, departing ‘easily, like a ripe apple from a tree’.

  One of Queen Elizabeth’s ladies removed from her finger a sapphire ring and dropped it out of the window to her brother, Sir Robert Carey, who was desperate to be the first to bring James glad tidings. He handed the token to the king in Edinburgh just three days later, possibly before word had spread to Hardwick, or to the Seymour strongholds in the south-west. This tardy passage of news was to the advantage of the government. The privy counsellors, who had spent the night of Elizabeth’s death scattered restless through the corridors, had issued word that no-one was to leave the palace without permission. At dawn, they left Richmond to ride to Whitehall and there, on the green opposite the tiltyard, at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, Robert Cecil proclaimed King James’s authority.

  The grandees of the land – heralds, privy counsellors, lords, courtiers – then formed up in procession to move down the Strand and through Ludgate to read the proclamation twice more in the City, and formally, in the king’s name, to claim possession of the Tower. It was a long walk. For much of the way they were treading the ground Essex’s rebels had trod but recently. They must have known that – if Cecil’s precautions had failed, if news of the queen’s death had leaked out just a few hours early – armed interception was again a possibility. None came. James succeeded smoothly; withou
t so many ripples as might shake a cockle boat, as Cecil put it complacently.

  There was an air of pleased astonishment throughout the land. Robert Cecil’s elder brother, aware of how very differently things could have gone, wrote to congratulate his sibling. From York, where the news had only just arrived on 27 March, he described ‘the fullness of the joy that these parts receive of the expectation of a happy and quiet government’. People had expected, instead, that ‘their houses should have been sacked and spoiled’.

  Even the thirteen-year-old Lady Anne Clifford was aware that trouble was expected. ‘About the 21st or 22nd of March my aunt of Warwick sent my mother word about 9 o’clock at night that she should remove to Austin Friars her house for fear of some commotions,’ she wrote in her diary. Instead, the next morning ‘King James was proclaimed in Cheapside by all the council with great joy and triumph. This peacable coming in of the king was unexpected of all parts of the people. Within 2 or 3 days we returned to Clerkenwell again,’ she reported, anticlimactically.

  But there was one last strangled gasp from the revolution that never happened, though the authorities could afford, in the end, to dismiss it fairly lightly. It is at this point that there steps forward from the shadows a figure who (while working always for his own interests) may well have helped to set in motion the events at Hardwick in 1603. Lord Beauchamp,183 son of the earl of Hertford, father of that Edward Seymour Arbella had sought as husband, had recently been reported by the Venetians as himself betrothed to Arbella. On the eve of Elizabeth’s death they also noted that Beauchamp seemed to have left London secretly.

  He was another whose hopes may have been raised by Elizabeth’s protracted refusal to name James as her successor. The writer of that anonymous letter from 1600 discussing the contenders for the throne while praising James clearly thought that Beauchamp instead would win the prize, though the correspondent regarded the prospect unenthusiastically. Around 28 March there was a rumour that ‘the Lord Beauchamp stood out and gathered forces’ against James. The same writer, John Chamberlain, continued to the effect that on the thirtieth it was known to be ‘a false alarm,184 for word is come since that [Beauchamp’s] father was one of the foremost in the country to proclaim the king.’ But in other quarters the story of Beauchamp’s resistance was also rife, and not dismissed as quickly. Bess’s daughter Frances Pierrepont wrote to her mother that a visitor

  sayeth that all things185 in the southern parts proceed peacably; only my Lord Beauchamp is said to make some assemblies, which he [the visitor] hopeth will suddenly dissolve into smoke, [Beauchamp’s] forces being feeble to make head against so great a union.

  But not that feeble,186 according to some of the rumours: John Manningham in London heard that Beauchamp’s force was ten thousand strong.

  The Venetians, too, reported that Beauchamp was ‘in the west187 and raising foot and horse, with the intention of proclaiming himself king in his own right, and more so in that of Arbella’. (They had already said, confusingly, that ‘the adherents of Lady Arabella, of the earl of Hertford and the earl of Huntingdon, not knowing what thread to hold on by, are all keeping quiet.’ But then, as they put it, the whole affair of the succession, though likely to prove peaceful, was something of ‘a hurlyburly’. Confusingly again, they describe both the earl of Hertford and his son as Hertford, in the European fashion.) They alleged that Beauchamp ‘was acting at the instigation of France, and the ambassador of his Most Christian Majesty has been put to great travail therein.’ A few days later they conceded that Beauchamp’s opposition was over – but by the old earl’s intervention, rather than his son’s own conviction, they said.

  The younger188 is beginning to yield to the elder and the rumour is dying away, for the elder, crippled as he is, swears that he will have himself carried to London and there sign the proclamation [of James’ accession] himself and pledge his son’s hand to the same.

  It was, so enduring legend says, the name of Beauchamp that had prompted the dying Queen Elizabeth to utter the famous words: ‘I will have no rascal’s son in my seat.’ With hindsight it seems likely that he was at the very least watching Arbella’s efforts with sympathy. He does not, however, seem to have suffered any penalties under the new regime – extraordinary, if all the Venetians said was true. Perhaps, after all, he was merely arming his household against civil unrest – a precaution taken by many nobles. In any event, after James’s accession he merely fades from view until his death in 1612.

  Arbella’s precise location in the confusion of these changeful days is uncertain. The Venetians wrote in the old queen’s last days that she had already been sent to ‘that same castle where Queen Mary of England did at one time keep her sister Elizabeth a prisoner’ – Hatfield, or Woodstock, possibly. To confirm this there is no evidence at all. All we know is that word did come that she was at last to move south; it is unclear just when, or to where, initially. Was she moved on Brounker’s advice, or by permission of the new king? Suddenly, Arbella’s doings were not so well reported, she herself was no longer the subject of such ardent official scrutiny. Suddenly she was irrelevant, to all those who had hitherto watched her so closely.

  Events had overtaken any move she might make; but, in fact, she made none. With James proclaimed ruler and her own supporters dispersed, Arbella seemed content to wait on the new regime, or at least to have lost the will to run away. As the Venetian envoy put it: ‘Arbella too, no longer mad, writes in all humility from her prison, that she desires no other husband, no other state, no other life, than that which King James, her cousin and lord, in his goodness may assign her.’ Had she lost? Or, as she made preparations to leave Hardwick at last, had she won all she really wanted – her liberty? Was Arbella Stuart trying for the throne in 1603? Or was hers a compromise position, seeking only personal goals herself, but desperate enough to compound with a political ally?

  Biographers until very recently denied Arbella had any desire other than personal, domestic happiness; have reiterated that there is no evidence she was guilty [sic] of so much as a germ of ambition. This is a question to which there can never be a definitive answer (and, pace those so-certain earlier writers, it is a question). But surely there is only one ground for denying that Arbella was affected by ambition, and that is her own claim to that effect – a claim made in a situation in which she would have been mad indeed to have declared differently.

  Follow the first lesson of any detective story, and look at what Arbella did, rather than what she said, and it seems that she must have had at least half an eye on the throne. Perhaps this perception is a reflection of our age, just as it was expressive of the Victorian biographers’ time to feel threatened by the idea of her as a contender. But the opinion of Brounker (an experienced contemporary who would no doubt have preferred to be able to dismiss Arbella as nothing more than a froward girl, so that he himself could get back to the scene of the main action) seems to have tended the other way. His last dispatches show him believing Arbella to be motivated by the queen’s imminent death, and suspecting she had powerful allies.

  But in truth, even before Arbella began negotiating her marriage, James’s accession was essentially a fait accompli. England hoped no longer to be governed by ‘a lady shut up in her chamber189 from all her subjects and most of her servants’, and the words Sir John Harington used of Queen Elizabeth’s decline also described Arbella all too accurately. Arbella’s sex told against her; a barrier that might not have seemed insuperable in Elizabeth’s heyday, but which reared its head once England had begun to chafe under petticoat government in the queen’s decline.

  Nothing, of course, could more effectively have ruined any remaining chance of the throne Arbella Stuart had in January 1603 than the events of the weeks which followed, as rumours spread that she was, as the Venetians reported, ‘half mad’ – or, as they put it more precisely, is ‘or feigns herself to be’ half mad.190 The idea of Arbella’s feigning herself to be mad sounds the Hamlet note loud and clear. Presumab
ly the Venetians thought she was attempting to avoid blame for the attempted marriage – effectively, to plead insanity. If she were, of course, then her plea worked, in that she kept herself out of the Tower. (And, as a bonus, got to speak her mind under the cloak of lunacy, like one of Shakespeare’s Fools.)

  There have been three basic explanations for Arbella’s distraction: the physiological, the psychological and the sociological; porphyria, pressure and patriarchal oppression … Here, a fourth is being added: the legal. The lines of thought are not mutually exclusive; if Arbella were truly terrified by the consequences of her actions, she may have seen an advantage to giving her frantic feelings rein. But surely no-one who has read the letters can believe they were entirely a pretence?

  By contrast – and by way of a fifth explanation – Father Rivers wrote to Father Parsons in March that ‘they give out’ that Arbella is mad,191 and that is an even more interesting theory. The Venetians added192 that the faction of the king of Scotland, in order to destroy public sympathy for Arbella, ‘are spreading reports defamatory to her good name’. Cecil at one stage instructed Bess to see that Arbella did not write so freely, ‘because the dispersing of her letters abroad of such strange subjects is inconvenient in many respects’. But who was so dispersing them, since those that have survived were addressed almost exclusively to men of his own party? Were there other letters, now lost, in which Arbella tried to rally help? Or did Cecil himself strategically leak certain details?

  The evidence for Arbella’s useful ‘madness’ is the letters, and no-one can plausibly suggest that they (at that length!) were forgeries. But certainly in the end, Arbella’s inept plotting played into Cecil’s hands. It is going too far to suggest that all the events of that spring at Hardwick were the result of an elaborate conspiracy by Robert Cecil. But is it going too far to suggest that, Arbella’s false step having once been taken, he seized his opportunity? Gave Arbella plenty of rope with which to hang herself and her chances? It was a technique the government had used before and would use again: with the earl of Essex’s rebellion and the Guy Fawkes plot and, most notably of all, when Walsingham suborned the messengers used by the captive Mary, queen of Scots, and himself used them to build up the collection of letters which would lead to her execution.