Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  We have one letter Arbella wrote to William during their marriage; it is quoted briefly in the prologue and in full in a later chapter. From that, from the gifts she made him and from the risks she took to be with him, it seems clear that Arbella at least came – as was her duty – to love her husband deeply. That, after all, was the seventeenth-century ideal: not an unsanctioned Romeo and Juliet passion, but a growth into connubial affection. A few decades earlier Catherine Grey, told by her mother: ‘I have provided a husband for you … if you are willing to frame your fancy and good will that way,’ answered: ‘I am very willing to love my lord of Hertford.’ The proverb ‘There belongeth more to marriage than two pair of bare legs’ did not suggest that a wedding was a callously arranged bargain: marriage was indeed meant to be more – the meeting of spirits that alone could help ‘increase unto Christ’. No battle was perceived between pure affection and practicality; quite the reverse, indeed. A few decades later Arbella’s kinswoman Margaret Cavendish would boast simultaneously her devotion to her husband and her lifelong freedom from the romantic passion; the one being seen as the opposite of the other, rather than as a corollary.

  About William’s feelings it is far harder to be sure. We have no private letters from him to Arbella, nor was his personality, at this early stage of his career, analysed by contemporaries. His motives were probably practical, up to a point. He may have had his share of Seymour ambition. His later letters show that he knew his family’s history. Sixty years earlier his ancestor Thomas Seymour had approached the young princess Elizabeth with a blend of passion and pragmatism. And William was, after all, like Thomas, that drug on the market, a younger son, whose usual portion would be ‘that which the cat left on the malt heap’, as another younger son, Thomas Wilson, wrote disgustedly. But if we jump forward, to a time when William had become a public personality, we do get the picture of a man who – even if he were making a political bargain – would surely have kept his part honourably.

  The newly restored Charles II, recreating for William his great-grandfather’s title of duke of Somerset, would tell his parliament that ‘it is for an extraordinary person, who hath merited as much of the king, my father, and myself as a subject can do’. Certainly, in his relation to the later Stuart kings, William would show himself capable of self-sacrifice and loyalty. Having offered his life for that of the condemned Charles I, he was then summoned by Cromwell to consult on the future of the country; not, surely, a man to be dismissed as a nonentity. And though Arbella was the more eager of the pair, William did make repeated attempts to be allowed to live with his wife; did enjoy conjugal relations with her; did take her servants into his household after her death; did cherish her portrait for the rest of his life. Marrying again in later years, he named his eldest daughter after her. Having said all that, looking at the one early image we have of William – a dreaming curate, so different from the puffy-cheeked royalist commander of the mid-century – it is easy to imagine that he was just that brand of romantic who would idealize a dead wife (especially a dead royal wife?), but espouse a living one less successfully.

  It was certainly Arbella who had to take the more active part in planning the practicalities of their union, their income and their eventual escape. (The Duchess of Malfi, too, would be called upon to orchestrate the same tasks.) Perhaps it was inevitable that she should be the promoter of their marriage; as the Duchess lamented, it was

  The misery of us,314 that are horn great,

  We are forc’d to woo because none dare woo us.

  And even the later tributes show William as someone in whom steadfastness of purpose combined with a curious passivity.

  Certainly his behaviour in the weeks after his betrothal did not manifest any great ardour. On 20 February he sent a letter to the privy council, pleading ‘the clearness of an unspotted conscience and a loyal heart to his Highness’. He urged his belief that the noble lady ‘might, with his Majesty’s good favour, and no just offence, make her choice of any subject within this kingdom, which conceit was begotten in me upon a general report after her ladyship last being called before your lordships’. He had therefore thought no wrong in seeking her in marriage, ‘which is God’s ordinance common to all’. He wrote that he sought Arbella,

  myself being a younger brother315 and sensible of mine own good, unknown to the world, of mean estate, not born to challenge anything by my birthright, and therefore my fortunes to be raised by mine own endeavours, and she a lady of great honour and virtue, and, as I thought, of great means.

  If he really thought Arbella was of great wealth, he must have been the only one around the court who did. It seems unlikely. Practical motives, of course, would have been quite acceptable in William’s own century. And if William’s motives were mercenary, he none the less gallantly took the blame for the affair:

  I boldly intruded316 myself into her ladyship’s chamber in the court on Candlemas Day [2 February] last, at what time I imparted my desire to her; which was entertained, but with this caution of either part, that both of us resolved not to proceed to any final conclusion without his Majesty’s most gracious favour and liking first obtained.

  They claimed to have had no doubt such ‘favour’ would be forthcoming. After the inquiry into her rumoured Moldavian match, Arbella seems to have believed she had won James’s permission to make any English marriage – that he had, in the words of her later letter, ‘given me your royal consent317 to bestow myself on any subject of your Majesty’s’. This the king had done, she said, a few days before she became contracted to William, and also ‘long since’.

  But there is another point of interest in William’s words. That Candlemas meeting between himself and Arbella, he said, had been their first. Their first of any significance to the council? Or really the first time they had encountered one another? If the latter, it would suggest that their alliance was indeed conceived as one of policy. Either way, in the weeks that followed they had achieved only two meetings alone, away from the court in the comparative anonymity of the crowded London streets: at a Mr Bugg’s house in Fleet Street and at a Mr Baynton’s – ‘at both of which we had the like conference and resolution as before’. Now William promised again that: ‘there is neither promise318 of marriage, contract, or any other engagement whatsoever between the lady and myself, nor ever was any marriage by me or her intended, unless his Majesty’s gracious favour and approbation might have been first gained therein.’ These fulsome declarations probably reassured the council as to William’s part. Arbella, typically, was less accommodating.

  The king, reported the Venetian ambassador, having had the pair examined apart, summoned them both together before him, there being present also the lords of the council and Prince Henry. One can only imagine the scene. Arbella spoke at length, ‘denying her guilt319 and insisting on her unhappy plight. She complained again that her patrimony had been conceded by the king to others. She had sold two rings he had given her.’ Arbella was then required to beg the king’s pardon, but replied that, seeing herself deserted, she had imagined she could not be accused if she sought a husband of her own condition in life; ‘however, if she had erred in this assumption, she was ready most humbly to ask pardon.’

  This did not satisfy the king, who demanded that she ‘should confess directly320 that she was in fault, and ask frankly for forgiveness’. That ritual abasement was important; Elizabeth, in her day, always similarly insisted on an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Arbella – said the ambassador – complied. She received fresh promises of money ‘and leave to marry provided only that it should be someone to the taste [gusto] of his Majesty’. There seems to have been sufficient uncertainty in the wording that Arbella could persuade herself that she had leave to marry, period – as long as she did not perpetrate the diplomatic outrage of looking outside the country. So she and William were both set at liberty. But the affair was not over so quickly.

  After the council’s stern warning, William sent Arbella a message – to be
read out by a third party – that he

  hath seriously considered321 of the proceedings between your ladyship and himself, and doth well perceive, if he should go on therein, it would not only prove exceedingly prejudicial to your contentment but extreme dangerous to him … He doth, therefore, humbly desire your ladyship … that you would be pleased to desist from your intended resolution concerning him, who likewise resolveth not to trouble you any more in this kind, not doubting but your ladyship may have one more fitting for your degree, and himself a meaner match with more security.

  What could her feelings have been? It was an unforgivable thing to do … unless it was a feint, a matter of mutually agreed policy.

  A Scottish lord wrote to Cecil on 31 March mentioning Arbella’s intentions with William – ‘we have much talk of her business here.’ Talk was right. The relationship might be in abeyance, but it was not over. Still, for the moment, at least, James continued his wonted ways in happy ignorance. Arbella got the price322 of her seeming complaisance and received the rights to sell wine, whisky and aqua vitae in Ireland for twenty-one years, made out in her name with those of two Derbyshire gentlemen in whose houses she had stayed the previous summer. James also promised to pay her debts and increase her pension. In April, apparently back in highest favour, she sat with the royal family under a golden canopy to receive the prince of Württemberg.

  But the appearance of normality was only that – an appearance. At the end of May, William was telling his friend and relation Edward Rodney of ‘his resolution concerning his marriage’. Rodney quoted William as believing that Arbella had ‘the king’s consent to make her own choice without exception’:

  he never spake323 unto me of the means which he used in the reobtaining of her love, nor once mentioned unto me either letter, token, message or ought else which had passed between them, only that since it pleased her to entertain the matter … and since he found himself bound in conscience by reason of a former pledging of faith unto her, that he resolutely intended it.

  It was a weird double world in which the couple must have been living: outward appearance, secret reality. Only a week or so after William’s conversation with Rodney, Arbella was engaged on one of the most important (appropriately enough, since it was to be the last) ceremonies of her court career. The seventeen-year-old Prince Henry was to be invested as prince of Wales, the first prince of Wales in a century. The ceremony at Westminster; the festivities at Whitehall, were crowned on 5 June by a masque, Tethys’ Festival, of even more than usual splendour.

  Queen Anna represented Tethys, Queen of the Ocean, with the princess Elizabeth as the River Thames, followed by Arbella as the Derbyshire Trent. Her cousins Alethea and Elizabeth also took part. Their father Gilbert had been active in the investiture itself the day before, and the presence of her family at court may help to explain why Arbella committed so little to paper at this time. Thus we cannot be sure who knew of her plans – though it is always tempting, wherever rebellion lurks, to suspect the influence of Mary Talbot, countess of Shrewsbury.

  As Tethys received the homage of the tributary rivers, Henry’s younger brother Charles presented him with a diamond-studded sword, and frolicked charmingly with a flock of pre-pubescent noble maidens. Arbella was rigged out in a head-dress

  composed of shells324 and coral, and from a great murex shell in the form of the crest of an helm hung a thin waving veil … The upper garments had the bodies of sky coloured taffeta, for lightness, all embroidered with maritime invention … Her long skirt was wrought with lace, waved round about like a river, and on the banks sedge and seaweed all of gold.

  The spectacle finished only within half an hour of the rising sun, and yet there was still a staggering banquet for the ‘viewing and scrambling’. But Arbella’s mind can hardly have been on the festivity. The ceremonies dispatched, the court moved downriver to Greenwich. James set off for a few days alone with his cronies, and perhaps his absence seemed to the couple like an opportunity.

  A river nymph’s costume for Tethys’ Festival

  On Thursday, 21 June William returned to London, to beg Rodney to be a witness at his wedding. The two men (with the gentleman servant Edward Kyrton) were rowed back to Greenwich, arriving about midnight. With Arbella they found Crompton and Edward Reeves, another of the gentleman servants, and her gentlewomen Mrs Biron and Mrs Bradshaw. The party (as William later confessed) ‘did sit up in the Lady Arbella her chamber325 all the night until they were married’. The ceremony was conducted by ‘one Blagen [or Blagew]’, son to the dean of Rochester, on the Friday morning, ‘between four and five of the clock’.

  They may have had to wait to find a priest who would perform this risky service. But the hour was not so unusual, astrology being as likely a reason as practicality. Old Bess had married William Cavendish at a similarly uninviting time of day. In one all-important matter things were done according to ceremony, and the presence of all those witnesses was duly noted down by Crompton in Arbella’s account book. She had taken this much warning at least from history; it was the shortage of witnesses to Catherine Grey’s marriage long ago that had made it possible for William’s father to suffer the slur of illegitimacy.

  There is no doubt that the marriage ceremony was in itself legal. While marriage in a church with banns or else a special licence was the favoured norm, a mere declaration was enough. When the Duchess of Malfi said she had heard that ‘a contract in a chamber326’ – like Arbella’s – would suffice, she was merely reflecting reality. The Lawe’s Resolution of Womens Rights,327 in 1632, said specifically that ‘There needs no stipulation or curious form of contract in wedlock making … It may be made by letters.’ And the canons of 1603 had set twenty-one as the age at which consent of a parent or guardian was no longer legally necessary.

  Social approval was a different matter. A father whose daughter married without his consent might well feel himself as aggrieved as if he had been robbed of a valuable piece of property. One pamphlet, indeed, declared that children were ‘so much the goods328, the possessions of their parent that they cannot, without a kind of theft, give away themselves’. Romantic love was still widely mistrusted as a basis for matrimony. Ralegh, expecting his execution in 1603, wrote a letter to his wife urging her to remarry ‘not to please sense, but to avoid poverty, and to preserve thy child’.

  But times were changing. James himself propounded the comparatively novel idea that parents, while entitled to ‘forbid their children an unfit marriage’, had no right to force them to a distasteful one. Whereas Elizabeth had imprisoned courtiers for an illicit match, James – who approved of matrimony – had several times sentimentally smoothed over a marriage made without parental consent. Lawrence Stone saw a dramatic shift in a woman’s right to control her own marriage between 1560 and 1640. And can anyone believe the Jacobeans strangers to romance who has read a line of Shakespeare’s poetry?

  All parties agreed that once married, for better or worse, husband and wife had a duty to each other. William’s father Lord Beauchamp, kept by his father the earl from going to his own wife, wrote angrily that Hertford was hoping ‘in time to bring me329 not to care for my wife, whom I am bound in conscience, as well as by God, God and his law, to love as myself’. The injunction that no man should put asunder those whom God had joined was taken very seriously: Antonia Fraser has noted330 how recusant wives might be released from prison to bear their husband a child or cook the Christmas dinner. Once Arbella had married William, many contemporaries would have thought that (as she herself suggested) James was doing wrong to prevent him from enjoying her company. Perhaps Arbella was counting on James’s bowing to the sanctity of the marriage vows she had made, and accepting a fait accompli.

  Alas: your shears331 do come untimely now

  To clip the bird’s wings, that’s already flown.

  Will you see my husband?

  the Duchess of Malfi asked her brother briskly. But, as so often in Arbella’s life, it was not a question of m
orality that would trip her up. It was political reality.

  ‘Your faithful loving wife’

  AS WORD OF the marriage leaked out, the couple had only days in which to see each other freely. There is no reason to doubt that in this time they enjoyed sexual relations; passion apart, they would have had every reason to do so, since a marriage unconsummated could be more easily set aside. Contemporaries certainly had no doubts. Dudley Carleton – in a letter which reflects the double standards of the day – sneered about ‘the lady’s hot blood,332 which could not live without a husband’; by contrast, he pitied ‘the poor gentleman’.

  But the time was short. The authorities acted quickly. On 8 July William was summoned before the privy council and sent to the Tower. On the next day, Arbella was committed into the custody of Sir Thomas Parry, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, at Lambeth: probably less a matter of leniency than of the fact that there were not two prisons suitable for the incarceration of the nobility. And heaven forbid that the couple should be placed in any proximity. Though she might some day be granted liberty, she would never have free access to her husband ‘before she is too old to bear him children’,333 wrote the Venetian ambassador matter-of-factly. The great fear was always that these two would found a dynasty.

  Towards the end of July, the chroniclers of court gossip had much to report. ‘The great couple’, as Dudley Carleton called them, had been summoned for interrogation. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘The young man who was brought in first denied the fact; she however freely confessed it and excused the denial of her husband on the score of fear. She endeavoured to demonstrate that neither by laws divine nor human laws could she be prevented.’ The council had reproached William with having, as they saw it, broken his promise not to rekindle the relationship. Arbella leapt to his defence. William, she said, had done no more than Abraham or Isaac, who both disclaimed their wives for a time. But the Venetian saw it gravely. ‘A law forbidding334 under pain of “loesa majestas” and rebellion the descendants of blood royal to intermarry without leave is a serious injury to her case … rumour says she will not be so easily set free.’