Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  James’s very coronation204 was cut short – ‘all parts of that solemnity which are not essential to it are forborne’ – and precise limits were set on the numbers of servants officers and noblemen might bring in their train. On 25 July, a rainy St James’s Day, king and queen were crowned without the customary feast. The Venetian envoy reported that land access to Westminster Abbey was barred by armed guards and boats forbidden on pain of death to bring visitors from the City. The royal couple came by barge from the Tower, where the monarch traditionally spent the night before the coronation, and the ceremony was performed ‘after the ancient manner’. The Garter King of Arms proclaimed James in each of the four quarters of the church, demanding whether the people would have King James their king; the people assented ‘with applause, shouting and throwing up their hats’. After a sermon upon the theme that the powers that are, are ordained of God, the king was anointed through specially made gaps in his undergarments; decked in the crown and robes of Edward the Confessor; and installed on the Throne Royal to receive the homage of the peers. When the queen in turn had been anointed and crowned, the party had left for Hampton Court that very night, before setting out on a progress of the southern counties.

  The coronation of King James and Queen Anna

  Arbella can safely be presumed to have been at the coronation, dressed like the rest in crimson velvet. There is no specific record of her presence, but her absence would certainly have occasioned remark. And she was with the court when they moved on to the medieval bishop’s palace at Farnham in Surrey. She was placed, as Scaramelli put it from there on 20 August, near the king and queen as a princess of the blood royal: ‘in her appointments205, table and rank she takes precedence of all the other ladies at court. She has already begun to bear her Majesty’s train when she goes to chapel.’ It was a place of honour, albeit one that must have reminded Arbella of what she had missed: the chance to be the one whose train was borne so carefully. Scaramelli himself pointed out that there was a certain mystery in the situation, and that many rumours were occasioned by the fact that Arbella, official appearances apart, ‘is living very retired’. Perhaps she was not finding her new life easy.

  For the first time in her life, at the age of twenty-seven, she was free – or bereft – of the tutelage of her family. Gilbert and Mary had sponsored her introduction at court, had done their best to ease her path, but now she was on her own. Her uncle was being sent back to an official post in the midlands, on a route which ‘though it bend directly northward206 will not hinder you from thinking or looking to the south’, as Arbella wrote to him on 14 August. For the next few years of her life, Arbella’s correspondence with these two close kin offers our best source of information on her progress, until Mary Talbot comes to take a yet more direct part in her story.

  Arbella’s relatives were leaving her ‘to take my fortune in an unknown climate, without either art or instruction but what I have from you’. Though, she wrote, ‘I be very frail’, yet her aunt and uncle would see in her the good effect of their prayers, ‘to your great glory for reforming my untowardly resolutions and mirth’. She signed the letter ‘Your disciple’, mischievously. But, in all seriousness, she was indeed setting sail on an uncharted sea.

  ‘Much spoken of’

  THEY WERE STORMY waters that Arbella had to navigate; and almost simultaneously with her arrival at court had come a wave that could have swamped her completely. In the first fortnight of July the ever-vigilant Cecil – anxious to place his mark irrevocably on the new regime – unearthed two linked conspiracies against the new king. The lesser, the so-called ‘Bye’ Plot, the work of the Protestant George Brooke and the Catholic Griffin Markham, aimed to kidnap James and force him to extend a promise of greater religious toleration all around. Markham was an old neighbour of Hardwick days, a friend of Arbella’s family. (His brother would enter Arbella’s service, and be her first companion on that disguised escape abroad.) But she was not directly concerned in his plan.

  The second plot, the ‘Main’ Plot, was more serious. A handful of conspirators – who included two Catholic priests, Lord Cobham (Brooke’s brother, and Bess of Hardwick’s godson), Lord Grey and, most notably, Sir Walter Ralegh – allegedly planned to kill James and his son Henry and, with Spanish assistance, to place Arbella on the throne.

  Cobham was ‘a most silly lord, but one degree from a fool’; and Ralegh’s involvement is ambiguous. He later claimed with some plausibility that in discussing where a Spanish army might land, he hoped only to draw the plotters on. But Ralegh was visibly a fish out of water in the new regime. He had steered an erratic path through the politics of the 1590s, his bitter rivalry with Essex forcing him into Cecil’s party. But now that enmity with Essex – ‘my martyr’, as James had taken to calling the earl – stood him in bad stead; even Cecil had found it politic to forget his quarrels with Essex and dwell instead on ‘the mutual affections of our tender years’.

  What is more, an adventurer like Ralegh was never a natural colleague for Cecil, and in the last years of the old queen’s reign his had been one of the names blackened in the letters sent by Cecil and by Northampton to the Scottish king. Ralegh had greeted James with pamphlets promoting a war with Spain, had even offered to finance an attack out of his own purse; clearly he stood in the way of Cecil’s long-sought peace with that country. There were certainly reasons why it was politic for Cecil to discredit Ralegh. No-one asked too loud or too insistently whether his lifelong hostility to Spain did not make his participation in the Main Plot unlikely.

  Arbella’s name, early in her new career, was thus once again dubious currency. ‘Most of the conspirators207 belong to her faction,’ the Venetians reported, adding that she was ‘reputed a Catholic’ – though once again there are enough details wrong to cast doubts on their accuracy. Cobham – so the evidence at his trial revealed – had sent to Arbella a deeply compromising letter. He suggested that she should write to Philip III of Spain, promising toleration for Catholics, the cessation of help to the Protestant Dutch and her agreement never to marry without his consent. She was also to write to those Spanish satellites, the archdukes of Austria (governors in the Netherlands) and the duke of Savoy. This document Arbella immediately turned over to the authorities. From the isolated heights of Hardwick it might have seemed possible to imagine herself queen. Now she was out alone in the wider world, she clearly saw things differently. But the bald facts of Arbella’s role come too glib and easy. They need more illumination. There is here a sense of hidden wheels turning; of deals that we cannot see.

  Later in her court career, Arbella would write to Gilbert of a miracle she saw: ‘a pair of virginals208 make good music without help of any hand but of one that did nothing but warm (not move) a glass some five or six foot from them.’ We do not know any details of this pseudo-scientific party piece, though it seems to have been a regular sight of the town: ‘A dancing bear, a giant’s bone/A foolish engine move alone.’ But the image had a clear applicability. ‘If I thought thus great folks invisibly and far off work in matters to tune them as they please, I pray your lordship forgive me …’

  But the dozen epistles she sent to her aunt and uncle through the second half of 1603 make little direct mention of the treason. Instead, Arbella wrote about the other side of her new life; the all-important trivialities. She wrote of her upkeep – not the long-delayed pension this time, but the lesser, still useful, matter of a ‘diet’: a number of dishes which would be provided from the king’s table to feed Arbella and her own retainers. She suspected that the king – who after all had made ‘protestations of extraordinary affection’ to a cousin still too inexperienced to doubt them – was having his kindly intentions diverted by ‘evil counsel’. She wrote of new customs and manners that seemed to her bizarre. From isolated Hardwick, she had been pitchforked into a world where the normal preoccupations – somewhat in abeyance, during this extended progress – were gallants and games, ‘embroiderers, jewellers, tire-women209, s
empsters, feathermen, perfumers’; a world where, in Ben Jonson’s words, a lady might kiss a page, be a stateswoman, censure poets; ‘answer in religion to one, in state to another, in bawdry to a third’. The change must have been extraordinary.

  On the one hand, she could not resist bragging in a brief note north – so brief, because there is ‘some company come to fetch me’210 to the royal presence – that ‘I am as diligently expected, and as soon missed as they that perform the most acceptable service.’ The lonely girl was enjoying the pleasures of company, although she clung to some of her old ways. ‘Because I must return at an appointed time to go to my book,’ she wrote, ‘I must make the more haste thither.’ On another occasion she was less enthusiastic, grumbling about the toothache, and of ‘this everlasting hunting’ – James’s passion. Arbella did not exactly complain – how could she? – of her ‘never intermitted attendance211 on the queen who daily extendeth her favours more and more towards me’. But her tone was weary.

  Throughout that late summer and into the autumn the court, and Arbella with it, was travelling around the southern counties – Farnham, Basing, Fulston. As Cecil grumbled in a letter to Gilbert, the plague ‘drives us up and down so round as I think we shall come to York’. Woodstock drew particular disfavour – a small and outmoded old palace whose excellent hunting recommended it to James, but which, Cecil complained to Gilbert, was unsavoury (‘for there is no savour but of cows and pigs’) and uneaseful, in that none of the English counsellors could so much as get a room. It was a rag-tailed procession that crammed into buildings too small for them, clad ‘in ruinous suite of apparel’ since no-one dared order new garments for fear infection would come with the cloth.

  In London, the plague’s death toll, counting ‘the out parishes’, reached 1,396 in the fourth week of July alone; then 1,922 the week after. (The overall population was something like 200,000.) Among their friends and relations, it was said, people were finding it quicker to number the living than the dead. The city, wrote Thomas Dekker, had become ‘a vast silent charnel house’, whose music was ‘the loud groans of raving sick men; the struggling pang of souls departing; in each house grief striking up an alarum.’ Stray dogs in the streets, believed to carry the infection, were rounded up and killed – more than five hundred of them in Westminster alone. The annual Bartholomew Fair was cancelled, and it was reported that ‘a coach passed through London strangely and wonderfully dressed, for it was all hung with rue from the top to the toe of the boot to keep the very leather and nails from the infection, even the very nostrils of the horses being stopped with the herb grace.’ Such were the only preventatives.

  Outside the city, the royal party moved ever onwards, and the disease with them. ‘The queen goes from hence tomorrow,’ Arbella wrote from Woodstock. But ‘The plague follows the court,’ the Venetian envoy reported. ‘Two of the Queen’s household are dead. People are well and merry and dead and buried the same day.’ On 18 September the queen’s court arrived at Winchester, followed two days later by the king’s. Sure enough, the plague came with them, but the city took strict – and fairly effective – precautions. So did the crown; by the end of September, the Venetian added that all who did not have urgent business were sent away from court, nor could anyone enter there without a signed ticket to prove they had not come from an infected area.

  Winchester was where the trial of the conspirators would take place, but still Arbella makes no mention of it. It is as if two worlds exist side by side – the one open for discussion, the other impossible to mention. Her relatives seem to have spoken forcefully to her on the subject of discretion, and she was trying, though concealment never came naturally. In one letter she wrote to Gilbert, on 16 September, she curtailed a story of a Dutch visitor – of how the royal party had made ‘merry at the Dutchkin’212 – lest her uncle should ‘complain of me for telling tales out of the queen’s coach’.

  In the separate letter she wrote to Mary on the same day, the echoes of danger and reproof sound even more clearly. The last letter from her aunt had obviously warned Arbella to write more cautiously. ‘I … interpret your postscript213 to be a caveat to me to write no more than how I do, and my desire to understand of your health.’ She had been making some incautious remarks about the moralities of the new court. Perhaps even that could prove dangerous if her letter were intercepted; little would be forgiven in the woman the conspirators had intended should replace James on the throne.

  The interception of letters was a serious concern. Over the next months we get to know the named and trusted messengers: old family allies and servants, preferred as couriers to the king’s mails. There was repeated fear lest some letter should prove to have gone astray: at one point, Arbella offers to number hers for security, and a relative, Lord Pembroke, writes of ‘the danger of missuperscribing letters’214. The post in the early seventeenth century, a regular subscription courier service, was not one to be trusted with any dangerous matter, since it was primarily a government convenience and anything it carried might be subject to scrutiny. ‘I beseech you215 let us know if you received [the letters] safe,’ wrote Arbella, at last awake to the risk: ‘if I had thought they would have been sent by post I would have written more reservedly.’

  As the date of the treason trials, set for November, got closer, Arbella’s letters became shorter and more tense. One can sense the constraints of writing in such circumstances; how much she longed to pour out her heart through a secure channel but, missing such, could only yield to Mary’s requests to write often, be it never so briefly. On 4 November she was waiting for her aunt’s ‘long expected trusty messenger’216, and that expectation ‘shall keep me from troubling you with so plain and tedious a discourse as I could find in my heart to disburden my mind withall’.

  Given how hard it was to get news, it is easy to imagine how the distant Talbots must have worried that Arbella would suddenly be implicated more seriously in this latest scandal – especially when the interrogations threw up the name of her uncle Henry Cavendish, who was summoned south for questioning. Arbella, in this state of tension, complained repeatedly of her health. On 27 October ‘my bad eyes217 crave truce’, and prevented her from writing longer; on 6 November, with the trials about to begin, ‘my eyes are extremely swollen’218 again.

  The trials took place at the bishop’s palace, the prisoners being brought to Winchester from the Tower for the occasion. Above the ancient room, in symbolic authority, hung the great simulacrum of King Arthur’s Round Table; Arthur, from whom the Tudors had claimed ancestry. But Arbella’s interest must have been focused on one particular: how would her name come up in the debate? On the first days came the lesser-ranking figures; the priests, Markham, Brooke and their associates. On 17 November219 came the trial of Sir Walter Ralegh. Most of the court ladies were there, and in a ‘standing’ [gallery], seated beside the lord admiral, the earl of Nottingham, there was of course Arbella – who, as Sir Dudley Carleton pointedly remarked, ‘heard herself much spoken of these days’.

  A state trial in the seventeenth century was less an assessment of innocence than a public demonstration of guilt (which had already been decided in examination by the privy council). The accused was allowed no lawyer, and only the most restrictive opportunities to plead in his own defence, while the rhetoric of the official prosecutors could pound home the state’s authority. The attorney-general, Sir Edward Coke, invoked Arbella’s name in his first attack on Ralegh: ‘I think you meant to make Arbella a titular queen, of whose title I will speak nothing: but sure you meant to make her a stale [dupe]. Ah! Good lady, you could mean her no good.’ So far, so reassuring.

  But the charismatic, arrogant Ralegh spoke brilliantly on his own behalf. ‘My innocency is my own defence,’ he said. Once, Ralegh had given damning evidence at Essex’s trial. ‘What booteth it to swear the fox?’ the earl had sneered, proud of his own aristocratic disdain for dissimulation. Now it was Ralegh’s turn to stand accused. But Sir Walter, the ‘most hated m
an in England’, rebutted the points against him with such clarity that one spectator declared that while before he would have gone a hundred miles to see him hanged, afterwards he would have gone a thousand to save his life.

  Thrown on the defensive and casting around for someone to blame, the prosecutor Coke came perilously close to accusing Arbella – a softer target than the aggressive Ralegh. It was, ironically, Cecil himself who stood up to halt Coke, his nephew by marriage and his protégé:

  Here hath been a touch of the Lady Arbella Stuart, the king’s near kinswoman. Let us not scandal the innocent by confusion of speech. She is innocent of all these things as I, or any man here: only she received a letter from my Lord Cobham to prepare her, which she laughed at and immediately sent to the king. So far was she from discontentment that she laughed him to scorn.

  From his seat beside Arbella, the earl of Nottingham stood up. ‘The lady doth here protest upon her salvation that she never dealt in any of these things, and so she willed me to tell the court.’ Even Ralegh added his unflattering mite. Arbella was, he said – forgetting or more gallantly ignoring that early encounter at Elizabeth’s court – a lady of whom he knew little, and that little he never liked. In this practice, ‘I never heard so much as the name of Arbella Stuart,’ he said, rather oddly, ‘but only the name Arbella.’ ‘I had been a slave, a villain, a fool, if I had endeavoured to set up Arbella, and refused so gracious a lord and sovereign [James].’ Like the rest of the conspirators, Ralegh was sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered – but Arbella walked from the court free.