A courtier might manage to save money where it didn’t show. The inveterate letter-writer Dudley Carleton described a drunken courtier who fell overboard into the Thames, whose breeches were ‘but taffetta and old linings’, so that when he was hauled up by the seat the first thing that appeared ‘was his cue and his cullions’. But a more obvious way to make ends seem to meet was to borrow. Men of rank owed money, often to one another, in a mad merry-go-round of usury. Ben Jonson satirized the court as ablaze with jewels ‘not paid for yet’. When Arbella finally performed in the queen’s Masque of Beauty, John Chamberlain wrote that ‘one lady and that under a baroness277 is said to be furnished [jeweled] for better than an hundred thousand pounds, and the Lady Arbella goes beyond her, and the queen must not come behind.’ That Twelfth Night, Chamberlain continued, ‘there was a great golden play at court. No gamester admitted that brought not £300, at least.’ No wonder Arbella wrote of the ‘even [ever?] greater mounds of my debtors’,278 of a poor fortune which ‘should supply nothing clearly’. Her problems should be seen in the context of the Jacobean aristocracy. But that didn’t help her, day to day.
In this plight, she could use all she could get of power and influence. The visit of Anna’s brother, King Christian of Denmark, in the summer of 1606 seemed to give her an opportunity. Arbella – besides her regular presence in attendance on the queen – seems to have been called in to mediate in a parting dispute between the jovial but loutish king and Arbella’s kinswoman Margaret Stuart, coupled with her husband the old admiral, the earl of Nottingham. The Danish king, it was said,279 had joked that in marrying a woman so much younger than himself, the earl risked becoming a cuckold. The occasion was a ceremonial review of the fleet, at which Arbella was present, and one version of the story has the king, who spoke no English, trying to tell the countess by sign language that it was time their party was away, and accidentally seeming to make the two-fingered horns … It sounds like a storm in an ale-cup, frankly. But since the countess had complained in writing, it was an embarrassment to King Christian as he set sail for home, and his secretary Sir Andrew Sinclair appealed for Arbella’s defence. She gave it with a readiness that is painful to see. ‘I shall think that breath280 of mine best bestowed which may add, if it be but a drop, to the sea of [his Majesty’s] honour … I beseech his Majesty this indiscretion of my lady of Nottingham may not impair his good opinion of our sex or climate …’
The following year saw a brisk interchange of letters through which Arbella tried to maintain this important connection, sending gifts of ‘handiwork’ and similar ‘womanish toys’. Those to the Danish king himself, or to his wife, were written in Latin as a common tongue, and the formal, not to say oleaginous, phrases contrast with her ardent and lively private style. She clung to the Danes, for ‘by the patronage281 of so worthy a prince, so interested in them of whom my fortune depends [James and Anna] … I cannot doubt but at last to come to some such stay as shall give me perpetual cause to pray for his Majesty.’ In the rough draft she had written, even more tellingly, that she could not doubt ‘but to live safe’.
In the end, Arbella was to lose more than she gained by the Danish connection. In the spring of 1608 would come a demand – or rather, a series of them, since Christian had letters sent from his sister Queen Anna, his nephew Prince Henry and the courtier Sir John Elphinstone – that she should send to Denmark her lutenist Cutting, to fill the place lately vacated by John Dowland. She had no choice but to comply, ‘although I know282 well how far more easy it is for so great a prince to command the best musicians of the world than for me recover one not inferior’, and although she was losing ‘the contentment of a good lute’. Cutting’s feelings in the matter seem never to have been considered. But then, neither were Arbella’s.
‘Without mate and Without estate’
ARBELLA’S LIFE WAS soon to be affected by events far from the English or the Danish courts. The first months of 1608 saw a bitter cold. Above Westminster, John Chamberlain wrote, ‘the Thames is quite frozen283 over, and the archbishop came from Lambeth on Twelfth Day over the ice to court. Many fantastical experiments are daily put in practice as certain youths burnt [mulled] a gallon of wine upon the ice,’ and one honest woman (‘they say’) begged her husband to get her with child upon the frozen water.
In windy Derbyshire, the cold was even worse. Bess of Hardwick – so legend goes – had been told in a prophecy that she would never die while she continued her life’s great work of building. When her bricklayers at Oldcotes sent word they could not work because the water to mix the mortar was frozen, she sent word that they should use boiling ale. But even this expedient failed.
More soberly, if less dramatically, Bess’s close relations had long known that, in her late eighties, the old lady’s health was at last failing. The messenger who took a New Year’s gift from the Shrewsburys reported (so Gilbert told Henry) that ‘she looked pretty well and spoke heartily.’ But Gilbert himself found otherwise when he and Mary went to Hardwick on a visit of reconciliation: ‘She did eat very little, and [was] not able to walk the length of her chamber betwixt two, but grew so ill at it as you might plainly discern it.’ Soon, Bess’s waiting woman sent a secret message that her mistress was so ill ‘that she could not be from her day or night’.
On 13 February she died; died, moreover, as she had lived. She had long since taken careful precautions for the ordering of her tomb, but her family relations were in disarray. William, her favourite son, was even then driving away her herds of sheep and cattle before they could be seized by the other heirs. (He had won not only the two houses at Hardwick, and Oldcotes, and a London property, but even the contents of Chatsworth, though that house itself was entailed on Henry.) Sir George Chaworth (the chivalrous servitor of Hardwick days, now grown successful) did not hesitate to congratulate Gilbert openly on so ‘great and good fortune to your lordship’ as the old lady’s demise. Mary Talbot, long estranged, was at the last minute bequeathed Bess’s best pearl-embroidered bed.
Arbella did not manage the long journey north in time to be at Bess’s bedside. Four days after her grandmother’s death, Cecil was writing to Gilbert that ‘my lady Arbella is gone towards you.’284 She arrived at Hardwick soon after, to find the rooms swathed in yards of black fabric, and stayed some weeks while her grandmother’s body lay in state, perhaps saying a last goodbye to the house and servants and garnering her old possessions. (She was long gone before the funeral – but then, Bess did lie embalmed for three months before her burial, long even by the norm of the day.) In March Arbella made a visit to Gilbert and Mary at Sheffield, writing to her aunt from Hardwick again before her final return to the south. The money Mary had asked her to convey to her daughter ‘shall be safely and soon delivered her’. But Arbella, Gilbert wrote in a letter, had seemed ‘ill at ease’.
Arbella, like Henry, had been cut out of Bess’s will in 1603, but the old lady had relented. The months ahead285 saw a burst of financial activity. She was popularly supposed286 to have negotiated the lucrative marriage between William’s son and the red-headed Christian Bruce, the twelve-year-old daughter of the master of the rolls, Lord Kinloss. She certainly pursued her own money matters with new energy and perhaps increasing desperation. She petitioned James287 for the right to import Irish hides, and to nominate the sellers of wine in Ireland. She seems to have made some stir: Francis Bacon made a note to himself in July 1608 ‘To remember to be ready288 for argumentation in my lady Arbella’s cause.’ Most controversially, in October 1608 Chamberlain reported
the muttering of a bill289 put into the exchequer or some other court concerning much land, that by reason of pretended bastardy in Queen Elizabeth should descend to divers persons. The chief actors named in it are Lady Arbella, St Leger of the west, and others. If there be any such thing, methinks the whole state should prevent such an indignity.
If Arbella did really try such a desperate measure, it is no surprise that she failed. But necessity was making her i
ncreasingly inventive.
She had been moved to take a hand in her own legal affairs. Litigation had become a regular occupation for the nobility, and a peer might not unusually have a dozen or more suits on the go; indeed, ‘he that hath not some is out of fashion,’ as the earl of Huntingdon told his son. Arbella found that her lawsuits kept her busy. ‘I have found by experience290 this term [legal term] how much worse they thrive that say Go ye to the plough, than Go we to the plough,’ she was writing grimly to Gilbert in the autumn, ‘so that once more I am settling myself to follow the lawyers most diligently.’ She begged of him the next two good clerical livings in his gift that should fall vacant; ‘not that I mean to convert them to my own benefit, for I aspire to no degree of Pope Joan,’ she joked; but they would be useful trading pieces in the relentless game of patronage.
In the welter of colossal court expenditure it took, by contrast, only a modest two hundred pounds for Arbella to purchase a town house in Blackfriars. ‘For want of a nunnery291 I have for a while retired myself to the Friars,’ she wrote to Gilbert that November. Five years before, in the first flush of freedom from Hardwick, she had described herself to him as pressed with ‘the several cares of a householder’. Now she could say it seriously.
There is a lovely description292 of a London lady’s home life in The French Garden. The fictitious Lady Ri-Melaine must, like Arbella, live within the City walls, since the great shopping centre of the Royal Exchange was ‘not far hence’. Having dressed and spoken to her servants, she receives two morning callers. All three women decide to visit the shops, since it is barely eleven o’clock, and dinner still a little time away. They haggle for lawn cloth and a waistcoat, for silk stockings and fustian ‘of good colour which will not stain’, for cloth of gold and silver lace. They inspect velvet (‘Raised velvet, pinked, wrought velvet, or tuff-taffeta?’), and hand over a hundred pounds in gold for enough pearls to make a necklace.
Returned to her house, the lady chides her butler to set every trencher with a knife, spoon and newfangled silver fork; to fill the copper tub with water to keep the drink cool; to check that the silver bottle is full of vinegar of rose, and that the drinking glasses are clean. The ladies will take their oysters before they wash; the peacock is well spiced and the turnips home grown. Her guests need not fear that the ‘herne’ [heron] will taste of the sea, ‘for they are brought us alive and we feed them in the house.’ The sheer number of comestibles mentioned – several pages’ worth – reminds us that The French Garden was written as a language exercise to encompass many useful words, so we cannot take it as a realistic menu. But the picture is none the less of a London growing fast, full (for those who could afford it) of foreign luxury.
‘Do you love cheese? There is Holland cheese, some Angelot, Auverne cheese, Parmesan. Will you have some grated cheese with sage and sugar?’ No? Then out to the nearby fields, to admire the flowers and the birdsong, and perhaps ‘fish with the line’ before an evening party with games: London was still very near the country, and bugloss grew in the banks of what became Piccadilly.
This was a boom town, and expanding rapidly; so fast it seemed likely in sober earnest to fulfil the prophecy the epigrammist Thomas Freeman had made in jest:
London has got a great way293 from the streame;
I think she means to go to Islington
To eat a dish of strawberries and creame.
The rush to the decadent city was another social ill for which ‘the pride of the women’, in King James’s words, was blamed, needless to say (‘because the new fashion is to be had no where but in London: and here if they be unmarried, they mar their marriages, and if they be married they lose their reputations and rob their husband’s purses’). But even in the 1590s when Fynes Moryson visited, he found the houses were built five or six stories high, due to the pressure of space, and so close together ‘that opposite neighbours may shake hands without stirring from home’. At every corner, Thomas Dekker wrote, ‘men, women and children meet in such shoals, that posts are set up of purpose to strengthen the house, lest with jostling one another they should shoulder them down.’
Blackfriars from the Agas map, mid sixteenth century
Under London Bridge the waters of the Thames, forced between the great stone piers, seethed and boiled into artificial cataracts. For several hours a day the river here was impassable even by the boldest waterman, and for several more hours a dangerous gamble, in which lives could easily be lost. But above, the bridge was like another street; top-heavy with tall houses carved and gilded, bulging out into space in defiance of gravity. Two carts could hardly pass in between the press of humanity, and the drawbridge mechanism that once let tall ships through had long since fallen into disuse, so that the forest of high masts was penned downstream. The thriving City was bursting its traditional bounds. The Blackfriars to which Arbella came was just one newly fashionable sanctum within the walls; a riverside district carved out of land freed up when the friars had been dispossessed.
Arbella lived in a house previously inhabited by the earl of Hertford’s brother, probably near to the south-western corner of the district, where the River Fleet ran into the Thames, London’s artery, alive with traffic. Baynard’s Castle, town home to her cousin Mary and her husband the earl of Pembroke, was a literal stone’s throw away. And Blackfriars had other attractions, like the churches where you could hear the most controversial puritan preachers. Sermons and shopping … It was a recipe for heaven to a woman who loved both dress and doctrine. She was close to St Paul’s, where gallants would show off their new suits before the noonday dinner, and close enough to Somerset House (renamed Denmark House in the queen’s honour) where Anna, ceasing to cohabit with her husband, had set up court amid the Strand mansions of aristocrats like Arbella’s cousin Alethea, now countess of Arundel.
The mansions were interspersed with luxury stores – like the ‘china houses’ that sold silk and porcelain imported from the orient, and served as places of assignation on the side. In 1609 the New Exchange, built on the site of the stables of Durham House, where Ralegh had lived, was launched under the auspices of no less a person than Robert Cecil. The New Exchange was a shopping centre filled with ‘manufactures of the most beautiful description’. It was originally to have been called ‘Armabell’, in compliment to Arbella – but James had decreed differently.
Arbella herself, in Blackfriars, found herself among printers, guildsmen and actors as well as aristocrats. Ben Jonson and the miniaturist Isaac Oliver rubbed shoulders on the one hand with the great duke of Lennox, and on the other with a thriving Huguenot colony. She was also, in the cheek-by-jowl nature of the City, not far in any direction from a prison. The Tower to the east was less than a mile away; to the west were Bridewell and the Fleet, and also the Ludgate gaol, the old medieval gatehouse, where debtors stretched their hands through the bars, imploring money. You could never get far from suffering and violence in Jacobean London. The parboiled heads of executed traitors, left to rot for years on pikes above nearby London Bridge, must surely have jolted any woman whom their plots had touched so nearly. But Arbella was pleased with her new dwelling. She was allowing herself increasingly frequent absences from court.
Then, in December 1608, she was taken ill with the smallpox, as Sir John Harington reported. ‘My lady Skinner294 attendeth her, and taketh great pains with her.’ This, of course, was a serious matter. Many died of smallpox; Queen Elizabeth herself had almost succumbed half a century before, so badly taken, she later said, that ‘Death possessed every joint of me.’ Many who survived were left disfigured – but since no mention was ever made of it, we can hope that Arbella was spared the hideous scarring. Lady Skinner may have been sufficiently enlightened to avoid the bloodletting which was the more aggressive course of treatment, and to rely (as Queen Elizabeth’s nurses had done) on rest and warmth, and herbal decoctions, with red cloth hung over the sufferer’s window to block the sun’s rays from damaged skin. The ailing Arbella missed the
extravagant Masque of Queens, in which Queen Anna and her ladies, portraying the female rulers of history, celebrated women’s power. But she survived the dangerous illness (just as she had survived the measles four years before). The following summer she was able to go north to recuperate with the Shrewsburys – taking, perhaps, the opportunity to pave the way for another journey.
In August 1609 Arbella set out from London on what can only be described as a progress; a winding tour northwards to the midlands which was marked by the same combination of hospitality and ceremony as any official royal journey. Even Gilbert seemed to be affected by the formality, writing to his steward that ‘my lady Arbella will be at Sheffield295 some day this week … Fish enough must be watered, for there will be an extreme great multitude in the hall every day. Fat beef and fat muttons must be had, and the beef in time killed and powdered. Fat capons provided and reserved till then …’
Arbella’s steward296 Hugh Crompton kept a detailed account of expenses along the way. (Also a list of all the sums he received over the following year, from one September to the next – £2,160, in total.) Overall, the trip cost her more than three hundred pounds. On the first night at St Albans: ‘Supper £2 8s 6d; breakfast £2 11s 10d; horse meat for 20 horses £2 2s 6d; hostelers 2s 0d; musicians 10s; poor at the gates 10s.’ Ten shillings for the bell ringers who signalled her arrival, two and six for a trumpeter. Ten shillings to a laundry woman; four shillings for cakes and ale at the alehouse in Nottingham; thirty shillings to a keeper who sent her a stag; three shillings to a farrier for ‘blooding and drenching Freake’s nag sick of the staggers’ – Arbella seems to have brought her old embroiderer (another Derbyshire native) northwards with her. The bulk of the sums are tips to the servants of her hosts and the officers of the towns through which she passed on her way: grooms, butlers, bakers, porters, waiting women, kitchen boys, coachmen. Five shillings to a gardener who brought her nosegays, six to a schoolmaster who presented her with some verses; ten to the footman who brought word her cousin Alethea was delivered of a boy; and always those alms to the poor. It is a great picture of an aristocratic journey.
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