Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Anna has gone down in history as an incorrigibly vain and frivolous woman – a political nonentity – and Arbella’s own comments have had something to do with this. But it is far from the whole truth. The new queen, rather improbably, had become Arbella’s best ally. Indeed, the two women had something in common; enough to make them, when first they met, form a defensive alliance.

  Like Arbella, Anna arrived at the English court fresh from something of an emotional crisis. The Danish princess had never become resigned to the Scottish custom whereby the heir to the throne was removed from his parents’ orbit to be brought up wholly by another noble. When James rode south, leaving her to follow, she used the interval to make an armed attempt to seize her son Prince Henry. Thwarted, at a time when she was four months pregnant, she violently ‘beat her belly’, and suffered a miscarriage. (In one of their previous quarrels, her husband had hurled at her the charge of insanity.) Like Arbella, Anna had a pride in her own royal lineage, which her husband was at pains to dismiss: ‘king’s daughter or cook’s daughter, you must be alike to me being once my wife,’ he had written to her in the midst of the battle for Prince Henry. Like Arbella, she was in her late twenties, twenty-nine to Arbella’s twenty-seven. And the new queen, noted Anne Clifford, selected for her favour only such younger women, not the established elderly ladies the privy council had sent northwards to meet her.

  One of the seven triumphal arches erected for James’s entry into London in 1604

  Throughout her years in Scotland, report after report had mentioned Anna’s political influence. ‘The queen, as ever, knows all,’ one envoy would write, after detailing a piece of intrigue. The queen, wrote the French king’s ambassador extraordinary, ‘was naturally bold and enterprising; she loved pomp and grandeur, tumult and intrigue. She was deeply engaged in all the civil factions, not only in Scotland, and in relation to the Catholics, whom she supported and even first encouraged, but also in England.’ Anna had herself converted to Catholicism a couple of years before her arrival in England; a move accepted complacently enough by her husband, as long as she was discreet. He had even found it rather useful; a tantalizing carrot (would Anna convert him also?) with which to keep Catholic opinion supportive of his claim.

  But in England, Anna found herself cut off from more active political engagement. When James headed south with certain of his nobles, they were those of his own faction; he left those of the queen’s party behind. Anna arrived in England isolated – a woman disenfranchised. She had the popular knack, as Arbella wrote approvingly:

  if ever there were such a virtue243 as courtesy at the court I marvel what is become of it, for I protest I see little or none of it but in the queen, who ever since her coming into Newbury has spoken to the people as she passeth and receiveth their prayers with thanks and thankful countenance.

  The queen even showed herself about ‘barefaced’ – i.e. without the protective travelling mask ladies usually wore – to the ‘great contentment’ of the people. James, by contrast, was soon beginning to show his distaste for the carefully orchestrated accessibility by which Elizabeth had endeared herself to the populace. Told that his people loved to see the king’s face, he replied impatiently: ‘God’s wounds, I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse.’

  To the end of Anna’s life, her graceless husband would make a parade of submitting his choice of male favourites for her approval. It was a unique, an ‘only James’ solution to the problem of juggling bisexual urges and domestic harmony. But there were strongly marked limits to Anna’s sphere, and probably Arbella did not well understand the compromises Anna was forced to make – any more than she enjoyed the solaces Anna found.

  For a long time the queen remained a protector to Arbella, who in turn was believed to have some influence over her. But the two were never going to be a natural match on a day-to-day basis; nor were the daily pursuits of Anna’s court congenial. Arbella’s words have become the indictment of Anna, when she wrote to Gilbert wearily that:

  there were certain child’s plays244 remembered by the fairs ladies. Viz. I pray my lord give me a course in your park. Rise pig and go. One penny follow me, etc., and when I came to court they were as highly in request as ever cracking of nuts was. So I was by the mistress of the revels compelled to play at I knew not what (for till that day I never heard of a play called Fier) but even persuaded by the princely example I saw to play the child again.

  To this world of women and childish games she was relegated, for the coming of James to the English throne saw the reintroduction of the consort’s court, in abeyance for half a century during the reigns of two women and a boy. The queen now had her own household, her own officials; and to this establishment (often, but by no means always, residing with the king’s) Arbella as an unmarried woman would naturally be assigned. Anne Clifford wrote of waiting often on ‘the queen and Lady Arbella’ at Basingstoke. Indeed, Arbella’s own references are to ‘we on the queen’s side’, ‘the queen’s coach’ and ‘the queen came hither’. But ‘we on the queen’s side’ were not those with whom Arbella would ever be in sympathy.

  The ladies Anna took to her bosom were an experienced, worldly gang. Arbella had taken against them almost as soon as they met. ‘Our great and gracious ladies245 leave no gesture or fault of the late queen unremembered,’ she had written to Mary back in August, ‘as they say who are partakers of their talk as I thank God I am not.’ The past might have been a bond, since Anna’s first intimates included the ladies Essex and Rich, widow and sister to the earl of Essex, and the countess of Bedford, Lucy Russell, whose husband had ridden in his rebellion. But the years Arbella had spent in lonely virtue at Hardwick had been used by the women who were now her companions to accrue a formidable history of sexual and political intrigue. Penelope Rich, for example, was well known to be the mistress of Lord Mountjoy, who fathered several of her children. Arbella wrote to Gilbert of how ‘I daily see246 some even of the fairest amongst [our sex] misled and willingly and wittingly ensnared by the prince of darkness.’

  As early as the autumn of 1603 Anne Clifford was writing (with all a teenager’s self-righteousness) that ‘all the ladies about the court had gotten such ill names that it was grown a scandalous place, & the queen herself was much fallen from her former greatness & reputation she had in the world.’ And the old earl of Worcester wrote to Gilbert: ‘I must a little touch247 the feminine commonwealth … The plotting and malice among them is such that I think envy and hatred hath tied an invisible snake about most of their necks, to sting one another to death.’ As Arbella wrote to Gilbert again:

  I dare not write248 unto you how I do, for if I should say well I were greatly to blame, if ill I trust you would not believe me I am so merry. It is enough to change Heraclitus [the ‘weeping philosopher’] into Democritus [the ‘laughing philosopher’] to live in this most ridiculous world, and enough to change Democritus into Heraclitus to live in this most wicked world.

  Perhaps her secluded life had made her a little prudish, but her opinion was shared by many contemporaries. It is one with which history has found no reason to disagree. ‘A nursery of lust and intemperance’ was how Lucy Hutchinson described it decades later. (Lucy was the wife of John Hutchinson, a Puritan commander in the Civil War – and one whose mother-in-law Margaret Byron, significantly, had served devotedly in Arbella’s household.) The holy state of matrimony, wrote the antiquary Simonds D’Ewes, ‘was perfidiously broken, and amongst many made but a may-game … even great persons prostituting their bodies to the intent to satisfy and consume their substance in lascivious appetites of all sorts.’ The court was full – said Mrs Anne Turner, one who should know, at her trial for the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury – of ‘malice, pride, whoredom, swearing and rejoicing in the fall of others … so wicked a place as I wonder the earth did not open and swallow it up.’ Webster began his Duchess of Malfi with mention of a court ‘of flatt’ring sycophants, of dissolute / And infamous persons’. As the Duch
ess’s virtuous suitor said:

  a prince’s court249

  Is like a common fountain, whence should flow

  Pure silver-drops in general. But if’t chance

  Some curs’d example poison’t near the head,

  Death and diseases through the whole land spread.

  Of course, James’s was hardly the first court to be accused of dubious morality. In 1540 Arbella’s own grandmother Margaret Lennox had been sent away from Henry VIII’s court for overmuch ‘lightness’ with an attractive courtier. Four years earlier, one observer had remarked that it would not be surprising if she had slept with Thomas Howard, ‘seeing the number of domestic examples she has seen and sees daily’. But James – kissing his male favourites in ‘so lascivious a manner’ in public as to lead to the wildest speculations about his behaviour in private – went just that step too far.

  This was only one breach of public decorum. Tales abound of public drunkenness; of banquets at which the tables were overturned by the press of greedy courtiers. At the wedding of Philip Herbert (a favourite of the king’s and soon to be a family connection), the guests were so rowdy that ‘there was no small loss that night of chains and jewels, and many of the great ladies were made shorter by the skirts.’ In the morning James, as was his prurient habit, visited the newly-weds in nightgown and cap to enquire how matters had gone, and spent an hour with them ‘in or upon’ the bed. Even the experienced Cecil complained to Sir John Harington: ‘I wish I waited now250 in [Queen Elizabeth’s] presence chamber with ease at my food and rest at my bed. I am pushed from the shore of comfort and know not where the winds and waves of a court will bear me.’

  Cecil kept his high office. Queen Elizabeth’s ‘Pygmy’ had become James’s ‘Little Beagle’. But lesser men had to share influence with the Scots who had come in James’s train. The new king carefully did not give too many of them formal power, in the shape of a seat on the privy council. But they packed his private household and thus controlled access to him to some degree, while the lavish gifts he gave them aroused universal jealousy. The distrust between the two nations made itself widely felt. ‘We all saw a great change between the fashions of the court as it is now and that in the queen’s time for we were all lousy by sitting in the chamber of Sir Thomas Erskine’ – a prominent Scotsman – Anne Clifford wrote contemptuously.

  Moreover, Arbella was not the only one to be quickly wearied by James’s ‘everlasting hunting’. The new king’s passion for the chase (and for retiring to a hunting lodge with only his Scottish cronies) quickly became a problem of government. His ministers had little choice but to follow him as best they might, writing bitter little notes about the difficulties of trying to do their work without so much as access to a secretary.

  The Venetian ambassador wrote early in the new reign that James ‘seems to have almost forgotten that he is a king except in his kingly pursuit of stags, to which he is quite foolishly devoted, and leaves [his ministers] in such absolute authority that beyond a doubt they are far more powerful than ever they were before’. This was not quite right; James took the most active interest in his government, and was inclined to rate his own kingly powers and experience high. But, hating crowds and towns, convinced that constant outdoor exercise was essential to his health, he would let nothing stand in his way.

  Still, his passion for outdoor life was only one side of his personality. James was the ‘most learned king in Christendom’, as well as the ‘wisest fool’. In the first January of his reign he threw himself into the Hampton Court conference, at which he hoped once and for all to mediate a settlement among the different religious groups in England. Probably Arbella (reported as spending her time listening to sermons) would have enjoyed involvement in the discussion. Instead, she was struggling with a kind of domesticity. She had been made carver to Queen Anna, and feared she attacked the meat badly.

  After I had once carved251 the queen never dined out of her bedchamber nor was attended by any but her chamberers till my lady of Bedford’s return. I doubted my unhandsome carving had been the cause thereof, but her Majesty took my endeavour in good part, and with better words than that beginning deserved put me out of that error.

  Carving was an elaborate art in the seventeenth century, when each kind of flesh had its different technique, described with a different vocabulary, so that a goose was ‘reared’ and a swan ‘lifted’. It was an aristocratic skill – but in any case, the proximity of majesty was held to gild any role it touched, and in performing this service for the queen Arbella was taking an elevated place in the ritual of the court; one which drew down on her some jealousy. (In the same letter to Gilbert, Arbella mentions Mary Talbot’s prospects of being made cup-bearer, and even relays malicious gossip that Mary too had succumbed to envy of her niece.) Courtiers were frantic for seemingly menial offices. That very rising man Thomas Erskine (Viscount Fenton) was considered to have pulled out a major prize when he was appointed groom of the stool – literally, of the closed stool, or toilet. To attend the king at such a moment was, after all, to have unparalleled intimacy … Nor were Erskine’s lavatorial duties merely nominal. ‘His Majesty has been a little loose since coming to Royston,’ he wrote to Cecil, ‘but not to extremity.’

  Despite (or because of?) the crudities of her new life, Arbella’s intellectual interests were as active as ever. Several books were dedicated252 to her in her first court years. Hugh Holland’s Pancharis cast the presentation verses in a Latin he knew she, at least, would be able to read; Richard Brett, in dedicating his Hebrew and Latin Ritus jejunii Judaici, paid her a compliment even more marked. David Hume’s Davidis Humii Theagrii Lusus Poetici, John Owen’s Latin epigrams and John Wilbye’s second set of madrigals also bore her name. There was usually a compliment to Arbella’s own erudition in the dedication, as when George Chapman, dedicating his translation of the Iliad, hailed her as ‘our English Athenia, chaste arbitress of virtue and learning’. Even her taste for sermons was an intellectual as much as a theological interest, at a time when the argument might last so long the preacher had to pause for refreshment, and ‘puritan preachings’ were listed with masques and mad folks as entertainments of the day.

  But James had no use for learned women. To teach women Latin, he said, only made them more ‘cunning’. And faced with a girl who, he was told, was a prodigy of scholarly accomplishment, he asked sourly: ‘But can she spin?’ All those dedications didn’t count for much, in this new court, if Arbella wasn’t up to scratch with her carvery.

  ‘My estate being so uncertain’

  ARBELLA, AMID THE bustle of the court, took time to think of her family. She could now be useful; a conduit in the all-important game of patronage and favour. Even before the coronation, she had begged Gilbert to invite her uncle Henry and his wife to join them in town ‘because I know my uncle253 hath some very great occasion to be about London for a little while and is not well able to bear his own charges’. (‘They shall not long be troublesome to you, God willing,’ she added. We all have relations about whom we feel that way.) She had pursued advantage for her uncle Charles and for the earl of Kent, her recent host. And her uncle William wrote home to old Bess that: ‘His majesty, four days since hath been moved by my Lady Arbell for me.’

  But neither Arbella’s position nor her skills were reliable. Her currency was access to the king, and this was unpredictable. The great royal palaces resembled villages more than houses. Within one, Arbella would have had her own apartments. (The favourite Robert Carr, taking over the Whitehall apartments which had belonged to James’s daughter before her marriage, found himself with forty-one rooms which he furnished with a serious collector’s complement of pictures and tapestries.) By the same token, the king had his private chambers; a set of rooms where he could spend most of his time surrounded by male intimates and accessible only briefly to the clamorous masses.

  A retainer of the Talbots’, shrewd Thomas Coke, gives a vivid picture of Arbella almost literally clamouring at the k
ing’s door on some family errand: ‘I observed254 that she wrestled extraordinarily with my lord duke [Lennox], Sir George Hume and Sir Richard Asheton for access to the king, and betwixt jest and earnest rather extorted the same from them by fear than obtained it by kindness.’

  Coke clearly liked her: ‘this lady permitteth me to treat her with much less awe than I find in myself when I attend some others.’ But her rank still forbade of his casting doubt on her word or her judgement – which he would otherwise have done, evidently. Through Coke’s long letter we picture Arbella promising more than she could perform, brazening her way through to the king’s presence and promises with sheer beginner’s luck; not something that would last, in an environment so competitive and so wary. ‘What end this day’s speech with her honour will sort, God knoweth, but surely she seemeth to have mastered them all that limited her before,’ Coke concluded dubiously.

  Before he left for the north Gilbert had asked another Talbot retainer, Sir William Stewart, to keep an eye on Arbella. Stewart was able to report back that ‘although her virtue255 and knowledge has been envied of to me, yet her ladyship has acquired many favourers and sundry well-affected to her humour and good merits by her good behaviour’. She was, he said, ‘considerate and wise’. But she had few natural allies.

  She wrote to Gilbert about some piece of business which required ‘certain conditions and promises as well on your Lordship’s part as mine’; striving at the same time for some reassurance that she was not to be made a milch cow for the pressing needs of her family.

  I assure myself256 you are so honourable and I so dear unto you, that you will respect as well what is convenient to me as what you earnestly desire. Especially my estate being so uncertain and subject to injury as it is. Your lordship shall find me constantly persever[ing] in a desire to do that which may be acceptable to you and to my aunt, not altogether neglecting myself.