Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  There is a note of sharpness here. On one occasion Arbella complains of being kept in the dark, and of having no answer for friends who enquired as to Gilbert and Mary’s plans. ‘These people257 do little know how circumspect my aunt and your lordship are with me.’ Nevertheless, when she was stricken with the measles258 in the Christmas season of 1604–5, she may have stayed with the Talbots to recover.

  From her strange new world, Arbella would beg her aunt to ‘let me hear of my faults from you when you will have me mend them.’ She needed a touchstone of moral reality. ‘I neither think259 those faults which are thought so here, nor those qualities good which are most gracious here now.’ Nostalgically, she commended herself to her uncle Charles and all her cousins. Distance from the family in Derbyshire had made her heart grow fonder. She wrote often in terms of jest: ‘I shall as willingly play the fool260 for your recreation as ever.’ On another occasion she wrote: ‘I make it my end261 only to make you merry, and show my desire to please you even in playing the fool.’ For, she added, ‘no folly is greater (I trow) than to laugh when one smarteth.’ But underneath her humour, there sounds always the same note of worry.

  * * *

  The spring of 1605 saw Arbella return to Hardwick after an absence of two years. The year before, she had been begging Gilbert for ‘some Hardwick news’. Now it was time to go back, on a visit of reconciliation to her aged grandmother, who had been unwell. A neighbour of Bess’s wrote anxiously to Gilbert that he hoped her visit might help to mend ‘such controversies and suits as yet depend unended betwixt your lordship and my old lady’.

  Arbella had already been drawn in to Gilbert’s dispute with Bess (who felt she was still owed four thousand pounds from the old earl’s will) and had had to intervene with the king. She tried to mediate more directly, writing to her uncle of her hope for ‘my grandmother’s good inclination to a good and reasonable reconciliation between herself and her divided family’:

  Yon know I have cause262 only to be partial on your side, so many kindnesses and favours have I received from you and so many unkindnesses and disgraces have I received from the other party; yet will I not be restrained from chiding you (as great a lord as you are), if I find you not willing to harken to this good motion, or to proceed in it as I shall think reasonable.

  Now Arbella had something quite out of the common run to bring to Hardwick as a gift: the promise that she was on the verge of securing, finally, the barony that would translate William Cavendish to the ranks of the peerage. Even better – in that it put her in an even stronger position – the king promised her a patent of nobility with the name left blank, to bestow on whom she would. This was still most unusual for admission to a noble rank; knighthood was to be had more easily.

  But Arbella also took the precaution of equipping herself with a letter from the king to Bess, urging the old lady to treat her granddaughter kindly, ‘with her former bounty and love’. Bess was inclined to take this amiss. She sent southwards a tart letter to be read to the amused king. Bess found it very odd (she said) that Arbella should be taking such pains to return to Hardwick when last she ‘had desired so earnestly263 to come away’. She wrote that ‘for her part she thought she had sufficiently expressed her good meaning and kindness’ by her old settlement of land which would bring in seven hundred pounds a year, and ‘as much money as would buy a hundred pounds a year more’. Though Arbella would always be welcome to her, Bess added, ‘she had divers grandchildren that stood more in need than she.’

  She none the less gave Arbella ‘a cup of gold worth a hundred pounds and three hundred pounds in money’. And James had at last increased Arbella’s pension in December 1604. But when, a decade later, peerages came to be sold in an unofficial marketplace, the going price for a barony was ten thousand pounds or more, not three hundred and a gold cup. Moreover, to push through William’s barony was likely to cost Arbella herself considerable sums in sweeteners, and, increased pension or no, she still had little to spare.

  William may have accompanied Arbella when she retired south again, perhaps to urge his niece on. A letter to Gilbert reported that:

  Mr Ca[ve]ndish is at London264, come to court, and waits hard on my Lady Arbella for his barony; but I am confidently assured that he will not prevail, for I understand that my Lady Arbella is nothing forward in his business, although we be certainly informed that my lady hath a promise of the king for one of her uncles to be a baron … It is not likely to be Mr William, for he is very sparing in his gratuity.

  William (or his mother) was perhaps persuaded to be less clutch-fisted, for he got his barony. The queen that spring had borne another child, and Arbella was to be godmother to the new princess. William was among the eight barons who bore a canopy over the royal baby as she was carried to the font, and proclaimed to the sound of trumpets as ‘the high and noble Lady Mary’. (She lived little more than two years, predeceased by a subsequent baby.)

  Arbella was approaching her thirtieth birthday, but her own marriage was still the subject of many rumours. The accession of James had lowered her value in the market, but not wiped it out. She obviously relished the possibility, archly telling Gilbert that ‘you may soon be dispatched265 of me for ever (as I am told) in more honourable sort.’ There had been talk of Count Maurice of Nassau, leader of the Protestant Dutch, though that would have dealt a blow to James’s cherished plan of peace with the Spanish. And in the spring of 1604 there had already been whispers that the Polish ambassador – he who had been so anxious to get home before the freezing of the seas – had carried a good report of Arbella with him. Later in the year, sure enough, Poland’s King Sigismund III would formally ask for her hand.

  William Fowler had written to Gilbert that ‘The Lady Arbella spends her time266 in lecture, reading, hearing of service and preaching, and visiting all the princesses. She will not think of marriage.’ It was about as convincing as saying she never wanted the throne. At the time she seemed a very sought-after match. Besides Nassau, besides the king of Poland, there was a Prince Anhalt who ‘hath written to me … yet she nothing liketh his letters nor his Latin,’ Fowler added.

  Fowler was Queen Anna’s secretary and master of requests; son to that Fowler who had served old Lady Lennox, he had already written fulsome praise of Arbella in some bad poetry. Certain words of his in this letter have been taken to suggest he would have gone further, had she not been such a great lady: ‘I dare not attempt her,’ he wrote. But ‘attempt’ could just mean ‘approach’ – and there is a suggestion one of Arbella’s suitors may have paid him as an emissary.

  Fowler believed the prize would fall to Sigismund. ‘Poland will insist, for his marshal is upon his journey. God give her joy in her choice of destiny.’ The prospect appealed to Arbella’s connections, actual and potential. ‘A great ambassador267 is coming from the king of Poland,’ reported the earl of Pembroke (engaged to marry Arbella’s cousin Mary) to his prospective father-in-law Gilbert Talbot. ‘So may your princess of the blood grow to a great queen.’ But by 1605, it was clear that this triumph was not to be realized.

  The fact is that James was no more likely to let Arbella wed than Elizabeth had been. Any child of hers could still present a future threat to his dynasty. This reality dawned on Arbella only slowly. She must, by contrast, quickly have become aware that in the new court, forgetful of Elizabeth’s example, there was less kudos than ever in her unmarried state; James knew well the political value of his own wife and thriving nursery and was fond of using an uxorious metaphor. ‘I am the husband and the whole isle is my lawful wife,’ he said, when urging the union of England and Scotland. And: ‘By the law of nature the king becomes a natural father to all his lieges at his coronation.’ But he was quick to clamp down on any sign of women stepping outside the role of home and hearth: John Chamberlain recounted how he even ordered the clergy to inveigh from the pulpit against ‘the insolencie of our women’. (Their fashion for mannish dress – ‘broad brimmed hats, pointed doublets, thei
r hair cut short and shorn, and some of them [with] stilettos or poinards and such trinkets’ – was especially condemned – lending Arbella’s future disguise an especial poignancy.) In Elizabeth’s day, the cult of the virgin queen had filled the gap left by Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary. But now? It was a depressing time to be a virgin lady.

  In the summer of 1605, after all those proposals had vanished into smoke, James, with his wife and son and their courts, made a formal visit to Oxford. The timing gave rise to a curious coincidence. Four days were crammed with entertainments and disputations, and while the elders lodged at Christ Church, Prince Henry stayed at Magdalen, being formally admitted as a member there. On his arrival, ‘being conducted to his lodgings268 in the president’s apartments, [he] was entertained there with disputations, in which Mr William Seymour … performed the part of respondent.’ It is the first mention of Arbella’s future husband in royal circles. With his companions, he ‘gave his Highness so much satisfaction in the readiness of their wit that, in testimony of it, he gave them his hand to kiss’.

  That October, weeks after the Oxford visit, Arbella was thanking Prince Henry, in terms which to our ears sit oddly with the fact he was still only eleven years old, for some ‘late high favour and grace269 it hath pleased your Highness to do at my humble suit’. (‘I both understand with what extraordinary respect suits are to be presented to your Highness; and withall that your goodness doth so temper your greatness as it encourageth both me and many others to hope that we may taste the fruits.’) She used the prince’s tutors Sir David Murray and Adam Newton for her intermediaries.

  Henry, while always on good terms270 with Cecil, was growing up to gather around him a group linked to the old Elizabethan war party; Essex’s party. He had indeed been brought up in close companionship with Essex’s son. That, perhaps, was the mantle he aspired to wear – the flower of Protestant chivalry. He was interested in the visual arts and the moral debate, fond of the society of older people and notably unsympathetic to his father’s foibles and favourites. A little bit of a prig, maybe … He had a certain amount in common with his kinswoman Arbella, and there is a received impression that she was close to him and to Elizabeth, the sister he adored, although evidence is scanty.

  A contemporary view of the Gunpowder plot

  But something was always happening to cast Arbella in a dubious light. The first days of November saw the discovery of the Gunpowder Treason. Cecil may have learned of the ripening plot before 5 November. Once again there were rumours that, in the later words of Bishop Goodman, Cecil had decided to ‘first contrive and then discover a treason’ to prove his own diligence and convince James of the Catholic threat.

  The Catholic conspirators planned to install the young princess Elizabeth on the throne as a puppet ruler – one who would accept religious toleration – James ‘and his cubs’ having been blown away. But the Gunpowder Plot was never really the one-man act we celebrate on 5 November, Guy Fawkes’ Day. Guido Fawkes was an obvious scapegoat for the whole conspiracy: the professional; the man with his hand on the fuse; and one of the few plotters, moreover, who survived long enough to be tried and vilified amid a blaze of useful publicity. The conspiracy really belonged to men like Robert Catesby; gentlemen who found their way to advancement blocked under James just as it had been under Elizabeth, and who had appeared as minor figures in the Essex rebellion of five years before.

  Arbella was not directly implicated in this plot. (Indeed, had it succeeded271 in making James’s daughter a papist puppet queen, Arbella might even have become figurehead for a rival Protestant party.) But her position could not but be made more vulnerable by this latest threat; the more so since Gilbert’s name briefly arose in the investigations – probably due to the involvement of a remote Talbot connection with one of the plotters, coupled with his wife’s known Catholic sympathies.

  Arbella probably watched the trials; as, from hiding, did the king, queen and Prince Henry. Chief in rank among those who were brought low was the earl of Northumberland, whose relative Thomas Percy had taken active part in the plot. That and his religious sympathies ensured that Northumberland was sent to the Tower for the long stay. With Ralegh and Cobham already within its walls, he was the last of those against whom James in Scotland had been warned – the ‘diabolical triplicity’.

  ‘To live safe’

  BY 1606, ARBELLA was ever more desperately short of money. As the Venetian ambassador put it:

  The nearest relative272 the king has is Madame Arbella … She is not very rich, for the late queen was jealous of everyone, and especially of those who had a claim to the throne, and so she took from her the larger part of her income, and the poor lady cannot live as magnificently nor reward her attendants as liberally as she would …

  It was the old, miserable story. In May she was petitioning Cecil for ‘such fees as may arise273 out of his [Majesty’s] seal which the bishops are to use … I am enforced to make some suit for my better support and maintenance.’ She also asked Sir Walter Cope – chamberlain of the exchequer – to make an additional recommendation to Cecil, ‘for that I thought274 his mediation would be less troublesome to you than if I solicited your Lordship myself’. It is a faintly desperate humility.

  She didn’t get her fees, on this occasion. There were so many gaping mouths to feed and Arbella was far from alone in her financial straits. James’s court made a fetish from lack of economy; from consumption not only so conspicuous but so literal that more than one courtier was said to have pissed his revenues down the privy. It was the early seventeenth century that instituted the wasteful ostentation of presenting a splendid banquet, only to whip it away uneaten and serve one even more grandiose. The search for novelty (a pair of porpoises as side dish) was as notable as the sheer gluttony. Massinger wrote of

  Their thirty-pound butter’d eggs,275 their pies of carps tongues,

  Their pheasants drench’d with ambergris, the carcases

  Of three fat wethers [sheep] bruised for gravy to

  Make sauce for a single peacock.

  Consumption of alcohol was no less extraordinary. Sir John Harington left a memorable description of a sodden banquet provided in 1606 to honour Queen Anna’s brother, the Danish king:

  Ladies abandon276 their sobriety, and are seen to roll about in intoxication. One day a great feast was held, and after dinner the representation of Solomon in his temple … The lady who did play the queen [of Sheba]’s part did carry most precious gifts to both their Majesties, but forgetting the steps arising to the canopy, overset her casket into his Danish Majesty’s lap and fell at his feet … Peace entered, but I grieve to tell how [she] most rudely made war with her olive branch … Hope and Faith were both sick and spewing in the lower hall …

  ‘We are going on hereabouts’, Harington wrote, ‘as if the devil was contriving every man should blow himself up by wild riot, excess, devastations of time and temperance.’

  It is not simply the amounts of money spent during the reign of James I that raise eyebrows. It is that it was spent so – in the puritan Lucy Hutchinson’s word – intemperately, with a kind of crude and wilful recklessness that still sticks in the craw. The trouble was that, after poverty-stricken Scotland, the coffers of the English crown seemed bottomless to James. His expenditure rapidly doubled that of the old queen. In 1608, the clothing of thirteen-year-old Prince Henry alone cost more than Elizabeth spent yearly on her famous wardrobe, and the king bought a new pair of gloves every day.

  James’s gifts to his favourites were similarly enormous. In 1603 the crown paid out less than twelve thousand pounds in cash gifts. By 1612 the amount had multiplied by six. The king gave ten thousand pounds in jewels to Lady Frances Howard on her marriage to Robert Carr; handed out honours and offices with a prodigality that rebounded on his own head. (‘You will never let me alone,’ the king cried once. ‘I would to God you had first my doublet and then my shirt, and when I were naked I think you would give me leave to be quiet.’)<
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  But the corollary to the amounts James gave was that he expected those around him to spend as freely. There was no mileage in quiet domestic economy. The aristocracy took their tone from a king ineradicably convinced that he had come to a land of milk and honey. The historian Lawrence Stone estimated that five thousand pounds a year was the smallest sum that could possibly support the establishment of an earl – and Arbella, who arguably ranked higher than an earl, had, at the highest computation, less than three thousand a year to support herself and perhaps ten servants. It was a great deal in the outside world where the rent of several manors might be less than three hundred pounds a year; but not much at court, where a presentation sword could cost the whole three thousand. And Cecil himself, with an income in 1608 of twenty-four thousand pounds, found (Stone writes) that his expenditure was almost fifty.

  And yet you had to come to court – to ‘the sun’, in the words of a play that was later to be associated with Arbella, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Noble Gentleman, ‘that draws men up from a coarse and earthly being’. Beyond the intoxicating prospect of a high-stakes game of favour and fortune there was increasingly a kind of intellectual (almost, in a roundabout sort of way, a moral) imperative; and plays like The Noble Gentleman, even while they set up the virtuous country-loving husband against his vain and courtly wife, perpetuated the dazzling mythology. ‘Either come up now and see this bravery or close your eyes whilst you live,’ was the challenge sent to Arbella’s friend Anne Newdigate in 1603. If the world of court and city was wicked in comparison to the quiet country, it was also the place to be if you wanted to improve yourself and your family.

  Soon after first coming south in 1603 Arbella had asked Gilbert for the use of a room in his house on Broad Street in the City: an occasional refuge from the incessant flattery and face-painting required of the court lady. But leaving the court permanently would not be so easy. Even had James allowed Arbella to dwell out of his sight – and courtiers needed specific permission to quit the court – what would she do, in a world where a woman of her rank had no career but matrimony? Better to try (however ill her upbringing might have fitted her for the task) to compete with those others who lay ‘sucking at the breast of the state’, in the disgusted phrase of one contemporary.