Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  And yet there was a sting in the tail of the proceedings, when she came to consider them afterwards. Serjeant Hale, opening the case for the prosecution, had said: ‘As for the Lady Arbella she, upon my conscience, hath no more title to the crown than I have.’ He gave a little pause – as if he had missed the expected titter – before adding that he for his own part did disclaim and renounce any such rights. He was proclaiming official belief in her innocence, but an innocence grounded in her irrelevance; suggesting she cannot have been trying for the crown because she had no plausible title to it, no more than a mere lawyer a Serjeant Hale. Ralegh, indeed, had picked up the theme. ‘What pawn had we to give the king of Spain?’ he asked. ‘What did we offer him? Or how could we invent to offer him the letter of an Arbella, whom he could not choose but know to be of no following; what a mockery is this!’ But, as with so many of the events of 1603, perhaps the Main Plot needs to be considered more carefully.

  Cobham was tried the day after Ralegh and, wrote Dudley Carleton: ‘For anything that belonged to the Lady Arbella, he denied the whole accusation, only said she had sought his friendship and his brother Brooke had sought hers.’ Cobham, who ‘discredited the place to which he was called; never was seen so poor and abject a spirit’, may not be the most convincing witness. Yet to discount his speech leaves a number of anomalies.

  If, as is usually reported, Arbella passed on Cobham’s letter unopened, how did she know the matter was treasonous? The Venetians stated flatly220 that she presented the letter to the king ‘without even having broken the seal’ (sigillata senza haverla ne anco aperta; a phrase which, if anything, could be translated yet more forcefully). It was this act of loyalty, they said, which ‘has saved her life’. Perhaps they simply got it wrong; the usual report is only that Arbella did not ‘entertain’ the letter, which hardly precludes her having given its contents at least one horrified glance. But still there are discrepancies. The Venetians, in the late autumn, mentioned it as having been delivered ‘this last August’, by which time Cobham was already in prison and she would certainly have regarded dubiously any communication from him … But why, at that time, would he have sent it? It was far too late in the day.

  A document discovered only in the 1990s casts a new light on the mystery, and gives a far stronger suggestion of Arbella’s complicity in the plot. ‘The most comprehensive manuscript221 of its kind relating to the Main Treason’ is how it was described by Mark Nicholls, who explored the document in a 1995 essay. It lays out the evidence, gained from the interrogations of the summer, that the government planned to use against Ralegh and Cobham, and Arbella’s name appears repeatedly.

  ‘19 July B: First, Brooke confesseth that Cobham wrote to Arbella and received answers and sent him to Arbella to persuade her to write severally to the king of Spain, the infanta, and the duke of Savoy.’ The ‘received answers’ is crucial, obviously. And again, from another confession Cobham made on 13 August:

  Being asked what was the cause that moved him to have [conference] with Arbella, answereth, that Frances Kirton222 [noted by Nicholls as being Cobham’s kinswoman, in service with Arbella] told him that Arbella was desirous to know why his lordship’s brother was so busy to have intelligence with her, Cobham answered he knew not. Kirton replied that the lady was desirous to be acquainted with him and to be advised by him, pressing him earnestly to write to the lady …

  And again: ‘17 July, D, F, G: Cobham confesseth he received and wrote letters to Arbella, but burnt the same.’

  It’s hard to see why Cobham should invent such letters. Indeed, since the letters were burnt, it’s hard to see why he should mention such damning evidence at all – unless by now, a month into the interrogations, he was scared to the point where he was speaking the truth involuntarily.

  Yet little of this came out in court (at least, not so far as we can judge, from evidence that is sometimes scanty). In the interval between August and November there appears instead to have emerged this famous unopened letter; the letter Arbella handed over to the crown, so very virtuously. She was declared ignorant, in the official story. ‘For the Lady Arbella223, the archduke and the king of Spain, they were merely ignorant of any such thing,’ as Cecil wrote flatly to Sir Thomas Parry on 1 December.

  Had she been, once again, conspiring for the crown? Once the plot was uncovered, did she agree to save her neck by providing documentary evidence for the government? It would explain why she escaped so lightly, when her recent offences, and those ahead, were treated so seriously.

  It is true that everyone, thus early in the new reign, had an interest in not rocking the boat by allowing things to end too bloodily. ‘The king’s glory consists as much in freeing the innocent as condemning the guilty’, Cecil proclaimed – or so Carleton reported to Chamberlain. The privy council put in a plea that the conspirators should be treated with mercy. But even had Arbella been completely innocent of the Main Plot, it is still worth remembering that Jane Grey had gone to the block for a plot to place her on the throne, although it had been none of her inventing. Elizabeth, too, had gone to the Tower for Wyatt’s rebellion. Arbella, by contrast, got off scot free (unless, perhaps, you count a presumed black mark against her name, of the kind James did not forget easily). If Arbella were to any degree ‘on the strength’, it would certainly account for Cecil’s support. As Arbella wrote to Mary later:

  I humbly thank you224 for your thanks to my Lord Cecil for me. I am a witness not only of the rare gift of speech which God hath given him, but of his excellent judgement in choosing most plausible and honourable themes, [such] as the defending of a wronged lady, the clearing of an innocent knight, etc

  The ‘knight’, whom the investigation early exonerated, was the trouble-prone uncle Henry.

  Whatever Arbella’s involvement in the case, the following weeks saw her suffering from an understandable reaction. As the Venetians put it, Arbella, ‘although now proved innocent225, and held in much honour by the queen, is, by reason of these grave events, kept in a state of constant perturbation of mind’. On 28 November her letter to her uncle was only a few lines long, due to the ‘extreme pain of my head’226. The few lines to her aunt thanked Mary for the pills and hartshorn; she meant to sweat that day for her ‘extreme cold’227. Mary had obviously been worrying about Arbella’s part in the affair. But her niece’s next letter was quick to reassure her. ‘When any great matter228 comes in question rest secure I beseech you that I am not interested in it as an actor, howsoever the vanity of wicked men’s vain designs have made my name pass through a gross and subtle lawyer’s lips of late.’

  On the day after she wrote from Fulston outside Winchester, the two Catholic priests involved in the plot were executed in the city itself, with all brutality. Sometimes, when a prisoner was to be hung, drawn and quartered, a compassionate executioner would let the victim swing until he was beyond pain before he was disembowelled. Not this time: Clarke and Watson were ‘very bloodily handled’ by the executioner; Clarke both strove to help himself and spoke after he was cut down. On 5 December Brooke, too, was executed, though the sentence was commuted to beheading, as was usual for the aristocracy.

  The executions did not cast a gloom over the court. The king’s players were sent for; preparations for the seasonal festivities began, and on 8 December Arbella was recovered enough to write more lengthily to both aunt and uncle. Her letter to Gilbert229 has rather a rambling feel, with its allusions to the martyrdom of St Ursula with her thousand virgin handmaidens, and to the biblical prophecy that the rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. Such verbal oddities cannot but raise the spectre of her Hardwick days. But in this letter, Arbella recovered herself quickly and moved on to serious business: gifts, patronage and bribery.

  Arbella added one last note on the conspiracy as the court moved at last to London (or at least, to Hampton Court, which James, the country-lover who called London a filthy town, tried to use as his urban base). ‘I have reserved the best news230 for t
he last,’ she wrote at the end of a long letter, ‘and that is the king’s pardon of life to the not-executed traitors. I dare not begin to tell of the royal and wise manner of the king’s proceeding therein, lest I should find no end of extolling him for it till I had written out a pair of bad eyes.’

  After the two priests and Brooke had died, the remaining conspirators, Ralegh apart, had, a few days later, been told to prepare themselves for death. They had said goodbye to their family and friends, been led to the very scaffold – and then (just at the moment, surely, when they finally cast the world away), taken back indoors on some pretext for an hour’s delay. They were then each in turn brought back to the scaffold, and informed they were granted a reprieve. It is fortunate that Arbella described this ‘royal and wise’ manner of proceeding in such strong terms – terms no spy would dare to take for irony. Otherwise, one might call the manner in which the wretched men were treated the last refinement of cruelty.

  ‘A confusion of imbassages’

  THE LETTERS ARBELLA wrote during her first months at court may have omitted some important matters, but they give a wonderful taste of what her new life was to be: crowded, colourful and competitive. If anything, the first Christmas and New Year of the new reign were more packed than usual with official celebrations. Because of the extended peregrinations outside the capital, several of the ambassadors extraordinary sent to greet the new king had not yet had their official welcome, but were already in haste to depart.

  It was, as Arbella wrote to Gilbert, a ‘confusion of imbassages’231 (embassies). Spanish, French and Florentine; a knight from the Pope; a chalice from the Turk; two envoys from the Venetians; the duke of Savoy’s envoy daily expected; and one poor unfortunate from Polonia (Poland) ‘fain would … be gone again because of the freezing of their sea’. In the autumn, Arbella had told how the Spanish ambassador, Juan de Taxis, count of Villamediana, had brought ‘great store of Spanish gloves, hawks’ hoods, leather for jerkins and moreover a perfumer. These delicacies he bestows among our ladies and lords, I will not say with a hope to effeminate one sex but certainly with a hope to grow gracious with the other.’ Now, at the New Year, gifts figured largely, in an exchange that was ritualized to an extraordinary degree. The earl of Huntingdon, handing over his gift of a purse (cash, neatly wrapped) on New Year’s Day 1605,

  was required to put his gift232 to the king of £20 in gold coins into a purse worth about 5 shillings, and deliver it to the Lord Chamberlain at 8am. Later in the day, he would be summoned to the Jewel House for a ticket to receive 18 shillings and sixpence as a gift for his pains, and to give sixpence there to the man in the box for his ticket; he should then go to Sir William Veal’s office, show the clerk that ticket, and receive the 18 shillings and sixpence. Then he must go back to the Jewel House again, to choose a piece of plate of 30 ounces in weight, mark it, and in the afternoon he can go and collect it …

  Presents to lesser persons did not have to be cash-coded so carefully. Arbella prepared ‘a trifle’233 to give to Cecil, in return for which she received ‘a fair pair of bracelets’. She had asked another lady for advice on the gift both she and her aunt Mary had to make to Queen Anna, and was told that ‘the queen regarded not the value234 but the device.’ Arbella’s adviser

  neither liked gown nor petticoat so well as some little bunch of rubies to hang in her ear, or some such daft toy. I mean to give her Majesty 2 pair of silk stocking lined with plush and 2 pair of gloves lined if London afford me not some daft toy I like better … I am making the king a purse. And for all the world else I am unprovided. This time will manifest my poverty more than all the rest of the year, but why should I be ashamed of it when it is others’ fault and not mine? My quarter’s allowance will not defray this one charge I believe.

  At least she was getting to grips with how it all worked. Arbella had been promoting the Talbots’ interests to the queen, and had succeeded in obtaining for them two patents, for which a reciprocal gift had to be given. (The whole arcane web of patents, ‘imposts’ and monopolies essentially gave a courtier the right to skim a layer of profit off a stated industry, in the shape, often, of an extra layer of taxation. Arbella herself would later petition for the impost on oats; these rights, while bitterly resented by the common people, were a major means of support for the high-spending aristocracy.) The Talbots’ thanks for these examples ‘will come very unseasonably235 so near Newyearstide, especially those with which you send any gratuity,’ she wrote to Mary. Rather than lose the thank-you in a large seasonal gift, better to get out of the way the compulsory New Year’s gift, and then send thanks and another gift separately; blame her, Arbella, for the delay … She could be practical enough when she wanted to be.

  Her pension had come through, but it was still proving woefully inadequate. The problems of showing sufficient seasonal open-handedness were eased when she received from Gilbert ‘a large essay236 [sample] of your lordship’s good cheer at Sheffield’ – perhaps the much-prized ‘red deer pies’ which were to feature regularly in their correspondence. ‘Your venison237 shall be most welcome to Hampton and right merrily eaten,’ was a message she wrote to him regularly. (In return she would send cheese, or ‘the sharpest salad238 that ever I ate … If you have of it in the country I pray you let me know, that I may laugh at myself for being so busy to get this.’) But the court needed a lot of feeding. ‘The king will feast all the ambassadors this Christmas,’ Arbella wrote to Gilbert. ‘It is said there shall be 30 plays.’

  The King’s Men239 performed several of them, probably including Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, and it is likely Arbella here saw Shakespeare act. The Robin Goodfellow ‘played before the prince [Henry]’ may have been a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But there was a form of celebration that concerned courtiers more directly, one which was to become identified with the reign. As Arbella wrote to Gilbert:

  The queen intendeth240 to make a masque this Christmas, to which end my lady of Suffolk and my lady Walsingham have warrants to take of the late queen’s best apparel out of the Tower at their discretion. Certain noblemen (whom I may not yet name to you because some of them have made me of their counsel) intend another. Certain gentlemen of good sort another.

  There was indeed the expected masque of noblemen, led and arranged by Arbella’s kinsman the duke of Lennox. But his masque of orient knights – supposedly come all the way from China and India to pay homage to the new King James – was not to be the chief attraction of the season. That position was reserved for the first masque presented by Queen Anna: the Vision of the Twelve Goddesses241 by the poet Samuel Daniel, in which – a major innovation – the queen herself was to appear as Pallas Athene. In the third stage of the masque, as was customary, each masquer invited an honoured spectator to the dance. None of James’s Scottish lords was numbered in that first dozen, save alone the duke of Lennox. Anna had made a very clear statement: her favour was a prize to be won separately from that of her husband. As part of Anna’s court, Arbella – besides being placed in the way of Catholic worship – was being drawn into a dissenting society; the French ambassador noted with horror that Anna went to the theatre when a satire was on ‘in order to enjoy a laugh against her husband’. (A few years later the Venetian envoy would be explaining how, the king having withheld one of the prized invitations to a masque, Anna invited him to come incognito, while Arbella offered to host his train.)

  The masque was an art form Anna was to make her own: superb, lavish and immensely costly spectacles built around a moral designed to hammer home the importance of the monarchy. Ambassadors clamoured for a seat in the audience, since the scale of the scenery meant that places in Hampton’s great hall were limited. The Spaniard and the Pole bore off the prized invitations, though Dudley Carleton reported that the French ambassador made ‘unmannerly expostulations with the king and for a few days troubled all the court’.

  Given the significance of the masque, we have to ask why – this time at least – Arbella was not in
cluded as a dancer; nor named, indeed, as a partner of any of the orient knights. Absence may be the reason – the toothache, or her still-troublesome eyes? It is even possible that she simply couldn’t pay for her costume. But one wonders if – in the structure Anna had framed – she was not also rather difficult to place. A lady of the very highest rank by birth, but one who was yet unmarried (and one, moreover, from whom that politically significant invitation to the dance might seem to be a shade too significant?). All through her life at court – as throughout her life before it – this confusion about Arbella’s status was to dog her path.

  Some rights could not be denied her. On 15 March she rode right behind the queen, ‘in a richly furnished carriage … with certain maids of honour in attendance’, backed by seventy splendid ladies on horseback, when the royal family made their triumphal progress through London, the ceremony postponed from the previous year because of the plague.

  First came the messengers242 of the chamber and the gentleman harbingers, the sergeant porters; the gentlemen and esquires, who were servants of the prince, the queen and the king; the clerks of the signet and privy seal, the privy council, the parliament and the council; the chaplains; the aldermen of London; the prince’s counsel at law; the queen’s counsel at law; the king’s advocate and remembrancer, the attorney and solicitor; Sir Francis Bacon, the king’s counsel at law; the sergeants at law; the masters of the chancellery, the secretaries of the Latin and French tongues, the sewers, carvers, cup-bearers; the masters of the tents, revels, armoury, ordnance …

  … and many more. The cheering crowds who lined the streets – the three hundred children of Christ’s Hospital, clustered on a specially built scaffold – must have waited all day for them to pass. The conduit of Fleet Street ran with claret. Seven great gates were erected to make formal stopping points for music and oration on the six-hour route from the Tower of London through the City to Westminster; one, near the Poultry, sounded Danish music to delight Queen Anna.