Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  The way was often hard – all the harder, perhaps, once she had reached the midlands, her old familiar territory. Past Sheffield, where she stayed with Gilbert and Mary, the road at one point was so bad that three men had to mend it before Arbella could pass – and then the party found themselves lost in the falling darkness. Time and again there are payments to a coachman sent to guide the wanderers to their next lodging place; guides across the moors to Chatsworth; guides again to lead her on from Buxton. Buxton had first been developed as a spa by the old earl of Shrewsbury, and the queen of Scots had praised its health-giving ‘milk-warm waters’; Arbella tried them too, and gave a pound to ‘him that kept the well’. She visited Wrest Park, where she had stayed in 1603, now home to her cousin Elizabeth and her husband; she visited Shrewsbury’s old seat at Sheffield; and with Mary Talbot she made a trip to Rufford, where her parents had met and married. It was as if she were making some kind of pilgrimage – as if, in a life that had been abruptly ruptured by the events of 1603, she felt the need to reacquaint herself with the places of her past.

  This was an interlude, but also something more than that. Perhaps the best holidays do change you in some way, and the trip into Derbyshire seems to have set the seal on Arbella’s determination to break away from the wearing life of court. In her home country she was not so alone as she must often have felt down south, and this was the environment she sought. She stayed with Isabel Bowes at Walton Hall near Hardwick. This was obviously a friend, for a letter from Lady Bowes to Arbella in London the following winter is warm in tone. (‘I would be glad to know297 how your ladyship proceeds in your Irish suit: but I long more to hear how you keep your health this wet winter.’) Arbella had obviously asked Lady Bowes and her brother Sir George St Paul to find her a house in the district. With Sir George, Arbella seems also to have made certain financial plans.

  Back in London, she began negotiating to change the way in which she received her income. In the summer she had been desperately petitioning for the right to license the selling of wine (the suit was made out in the names of St Paul and another of her recent hosts). But in late December she was writing to Cecil offering to return the licence in exchange for the payment of her debts, and to trade in her diet – her allowance of dishes for herself and her servants – for another thousand pounds a year. She was probably wise to choose the bird in the hand rather than the flock in the bush; the grant of wine was potentially worth thousands, but she had come to realize the money might prove hard to collect. ‘Some friends of mine298, of good judgement and experience’, had advised her to get the patent validated by the royal seal. But there is more here than normal caution. Arbella was liquidating her assets.

  She hoped, with the aid of the extra money, to be able ‘to live in such honour and countenance hereafter as may stand with his Majesty’s honour and my own comfort’. She did not intend to do it in the expensive whirligig of society. Already her heart and mind – if not yet her heels – were carrying her away from the court. Many of her contemporaries saw it as a kind of death to withdraw from the centre of power and influence; to live retired and within their means. Some, like Essex, quite literally chose to risk their lives instead. But in this as in so much else, Arbella was out of her time. It is as if Bess’s death had set something free; allowed her to consider other ways of living, to weigh up different possibilities.

  The shrewd Venetian Correr had written in his report two years before that the king ‘promised when he ascended299 the throne, that he would restore her property, but he has not done so yet, saying that she shall have it all and more on her marriage, but so far the husband has not been found, and she remains without mate and without estate.’ Without mate and without estate … It was all too neat a summary. But Arbella had decided that, whatever the risk, she was not prepared to stay that way.

  The great crisis of Arbella Stuart’s life was almost upon her. But it began in confusion, appropriately. There was a false dawn to the day that saw the long drama of her marriage. In December 1609 all her world knew that she was in disgrace; but no-one knew why, precisely. As John Chamberlain wrote on the thirtieth: ‘I can learn no more300 of the lady Arbella but that she is committed to the lord Knyvet, and was yesterday again before the lords. Her gentleman-usher and her waiting woman are close prisoners since her first restraint.’

  This was just the kind of story the Venetians sniffed out most expertly. ‘His Majesty had a hint301 last week that [Arbella] intended to cross the sea with a Scot named Douglas, and had some idea of marrying him.’ Arbella’s Lennox grandmother had been born into the Douglas family. Arbella, Correr reported, was taken by the captain of the guard (Fenton) and his wife – Arbella’s cousin, Bessie Pierrepont – from the house of one of the Seymour family, ‘under pretext of friendship and an invitation to sup with them’. Instead, deceitfully, ‘they conveyed her to the palace where she was placed under guard several days.’ But Arbella, questioned, ‘answered well’ and was set at liberty.

  A little later, the Venetian suggested a new and more colourful story. On 28 January 1610, Correr writes: ‘Lady Arbella’s troubles302 are caused by a consignment of money which her excellency made at Constantinople for a Moldavian prince … The Moldavian was many months ago at the English court, and as I hear, with the king’s consent negotiated about a marriage with the lady.’

  The so-called prince was a pretender to that distant throne – an adventurer by the name of Stephen Bogdan (from ‘Bugdania’ or Moldavia, now Romania), who had come to England seeking James’s backing, and gone on to Venice to boast that the king had promised him a royal bride. If, as Correr believed, James had acquiesced in Bogdan’s marriage with Arbella – ‘to depend on his making good his claim to his state’ – James probably knew this was one prospective match to which he could consent in perfect safety. Given the improbability of Bogdan’s ever taking his throne, it is even possible the king of England was enjoying a private black joke – albeit one unlikely to have struck his cousin as funny.

  There seems at this time to have been yet more debate as to whether Arbella was not secretly inclining to Catholicism. As Chamberlain put it: ‘she be not altogether free from the suspicion of being collapsed.’ Many of her tastes and associations might more easily suggest a bent towards puritanism than papistry. But the plots of James’s first months on the throne had shown how extreme opinions could wind up meeting on the far side of a circle: in practical terms, all that really mattered was whether Arbella was or was not outside the middle ground so beloved of authority. (As James had once written: ‘I did ever alike hate both extremities.’) Correr again:

  In reply to a question on religion303 Lady Arbella said that she had never any intention to become a Catholic but her troubles and worries have prevented her from attending church for some time. She complained loudly of the small account in which she is held, and recalled the frequent promises of the king. His Majesty has taken it all in good part and has ordered that she be repaid for the moneys remitted to Constantinople. Her pension will be increased. All the same she publicly declares she is not satisfied. She claims the restoration of her patrimony and asks to be married or at least to depart and choose a husband.

  She would, he said, ‘neither affirm nor deny304 that she had thought of leaving the kingdom; she merely said that ill-treated as she was by all, it was only natural that she should think of going.’

  Arbella, by now, was making little attempt to hide her discontent. Indeed, her concern was all to have her wrongs heard and righted. She was past caring if she made a clamour. Perhaps it is not surprising that, with this seething volcano of rebellion on his doorstep, James made good his promise to give Arbella more money. If, as Chamberlain believed, ‘the chiefest cause of her discontentment’ was want, it must have seemed worth a little cash not to drive her, as the ambassador put it, ‘to farther despair’. Two hundred pounds’ worth of plate as a New Year gift, an increase in the annual pension, and a thousand marks to pay her debts: the sums she
received were not so little, but they did come too late.

  That winter Arbella kept much to her own rooms; ‘nor is she visited except by intimates.’ In February 1610 Correr was reporting that she ‘is seldom seen305 outside her rooms and lives in greater dejection than ever. She complains that in a certain comedy the playwright introduced an allusion to her person and the part played by the prince of Moldavia. The play was suppressed.’ The unnamed play306 is usually taken to have been Ben Jonson’s Epicoene – an identification made the more readily since Jonson, at around the same time, was in trouble with Lady Bedford over a slanderous epigram, and came with a ready-made reputation for scurrility. The identification rests on one throwaway line about the prince of Moldavia and ‘his mistress, mistress Epicoene’ (with a crack about whether the boastful bachelor has ‘found out her latitude’). But the anti-feminist satire about the emasculating Ladies Collegiate led by Lady Haughty (James’s dislike of learned women was obviously filtering through) and the deceit of the eponymous Epicoene, set up as the one silent woman a noise-hating bachelor could bear to wed, offers more general grounds for dismay. It is, alternatively, possible that the offending piece was The Knight of the Burning Pestle, thought to be by Beaumont and Fletcher, a multi-layered satire where, in the crudely romantic ‘play within a play’, the knight disdains the prince of Moldavia’s daughter. Too thin a ground for anger, surely – except that The Knight of the Burning Pestle is believed first to have been performed in the exclusive, private Blackfriars Theatre, on Arbella’s very door, and for just the sort of sophisticated audience whose ridicule Arbella would feel keenly.

  Arbella, Correr added, was ‘very ill-pleased. She shows a determination to secure the punishment of certain persons.’ The Venetians sometimes got facts wrong, but they handled temperament sensitively. Correr, who had bestowed on Arbella that dauntingly accurate tag ‘without mate and without estate’, added at the end of February that there remained ‘much suspicion about’307; partly because ‘the malcontents may some day use her as a pretext for their schemes,’ partly because she was ‘a lady of high spirit and ability’. Was it likely such a one would indefinitely tolerate the situation he had already described so acutely?

  That month of February, Arbella had her own reasons for remaining secluded. By the end of it, she was being examined as to her relations with a man much closer to home (and closer to the English throne) than the would-be ruler of Moldavia. Indeed, it is possible that when Arbella, according to Correr, confessed ‘that fault of her womanish credulity in the matter of love with the prince of Moldavia’, she was herself putting Stephen Bogdan forward as a stalking-horse to conceal her real lover’s identity.

  V

  1610–1615

  ‘A pattern of misfortune’

  ‘I shall think myself a pattern of misfortune in enjoying so great a blessing as you so little a while.’

  Arbella Stuart to William Seymour, 1610

  ‘Affectations of marriage’

  WE KNOW FRUSTRATINGLY little about the birth of Arbella’s romance with William Seymour – the earl of Hertford’s second grandson, and younger brother to the Edward Seymour of Hardwick days. At this most sensitive moment in her story, it is as if, temporarily, she steps away from us again – out of the direct communication of her letters and into the mists of supposition. But her first feelings for William, the nature of the negotiations into which they entered together, were not something to be put down on paper. And in the gossiping letters of James’s courtiers it was actions, not emotions, which held sway.

  There is a theory that the two met as far back as 1605, on that royal visit to Oxford when William spoke before Prince Henry at Magdalen; or (again in Oxford) in 1606, when he offered Latin verses to King Christian. There is another that they met only when William quit the university, having taken his degree in December 1607, and came to court. But the time and place of their first encounter are not really the point. However acrimonious relations had become in those strained last months of the old queen’s reign, Arbella never really lost contact with the Hertford family. How could she, in the small world of the Jacobean aristocracy? In her duties around Queen Anna, Arbella would constantly have been in company with the countess of Hertford, until the earl summoned his wife home from court; the two women were much of an age, and the earl’s young third wife was less than a decade older than her step-grandson William. In 1606, a request made by the painter William Larkin308 to become a freeman of the Painter Stainer Company was sponsored by the earl and by Arbella, and it had been from a Seymour family home that Arbella had been brought in for questioning in December 1609.

  The acquaintance between Arbella and William was public. Even their engagement seems hardly to have been a secret for long. On 2 February 1610, in the palace of Whitehall, William Seymour went to the chamber of Arbella Stuart and shared with her some sort of betrothal ceremony. Less than a fortnight later, on the fifteenth, the young secretary James Beaulieu was writing that

  The Lady Arbella who309 (as you know) was not long ago censured for having without the king’s privity entertained a motion of marriage, was again within these few days apprehended in the like treaty with the Lord of Beauchamp’s second son, and both were called and examined yesterday at the court about it. What the matter will prove I know not, but these affectations of marriage in her do give some advantage to the world of impairing the reputation of her constant and virtuous disposition.

  Arbella was not just embarked upon a reckless adventure. In 1603 she had launched herself towards wedlock on a tide of desperation and naïve ignorance. Seven years later she had reason to know more about the ways of the world – but her nature had not changed profoundly. She seems still to have acted with the Duchess of Malfi’s own misplaced rationality:

  Why might I not marry310?

  I have not gone about, in this, to create

  Any new world, or custom.

  But in the Duchess we have another royal lady who married without the permission of her relatives and who paid dearly. For Arbella as for Malfi, it could never be that easy.

  In seeking an alliance with a fellow royal, Arbella may have had dynastic ambitions that yet fell far short of seeking here and now to usurp James’s position. She may just have wanted to hold for her own children the place she herself had held in the succession, in case of any future vacancy. She may have seen that ambition as harmless enough. James would see it very differently.

  Given that Arbella wanted desperately to marry (and, given the paucity of other options, it is hardly surprising that she should), the list of potential bridegrooms was very short. To negotiate, on her own responsibility, with any foreign prince would be at once impracticable and quite definitely treasonous. If she married a man from her own country, she could at least claim to believe she had the king’s authority. But if she married a man of birth much lower than her own, she would in effect be negating, throwing away, that royal blood she had been reared to value highly. And she could immediately discount those of the nobility with whom her court life had no contact, and those who were contracted already. The list dwindled very rapidly.

  Arbella of her own choice sought two husbands – two brothers – from the royal branch of the Seymour family. And in 1608 this family had been newly proved royal: the earl of Hertford finally, remarkably, succeeded in producing the clergyman who had married him to Catherine Grey half a century before, and the offspring of that marriage were officially recognized as legitimate (which, under the terms of Henry VIII’s will, of course, would have meant that they should have inherited the Tudor crown – except that one of James’s first acts had been to have parliament lay that will aside, providentially).

  It may seem illogical thus to stress the political implications of Arbella’s match, and then to propose it as a kind of love story. But we need to look at the individuals involved – and also at the concept of love as it was presented in the early seventeenth century. In the case of the match Arbella had once proposed with th
e unseen teenager Edward, there can be no question of personal affection. In the case of her match with William, by contrast, there is reason to believe that her emotions were engaged; and that at least one factor in her choice was the character of her betrothed.

  William Seymour311 was a man whose tastes matched Arbella’s own – one of the few at James’s court of whom that could be said. As a student, he (unlike many of his fellow noblemen), had used his time at Oxford to take his BA. ‘Loving his book above all other exercise,’ said Clarendon after the Restoration, he would later take his MA and a DMed at Oxford, besides twice serving as chancellor of that university. But he also shared Arbella’s value for the royal blood they had in common (and perhaps her flexibility in religion), and though he was at this time only in his early twenties312 and thus well over a decade the younger, her sequestered life had not allowed her to develop early. ‘Love maketh no miracles313 in his subjects, of what degree or age whatsoever,’ she had once (about the marriage of a connection) written aptly.