Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  As so often, Arbella’s timing could hardly have been worse. In the summer of 1610, James already had every reason to feel both alarmed and touchy. The spring had seen a Catholic fanatic strike down the French king Henri IV, a former Protestant, and the shock waves that reverberated from the murder saw recusant Catholics in England stripped of their arms and forbidden to come within ten miles of the court. Barely weeks after Henri’s death, Cecil had been busy trying to negotiate a happier arrangement between the king and his parliament, by which James would give up some of the more unpopular royal perks in exchange for relief from the massive royal debts. But the negotiations had not gone smoothly. The Commons had taken the king’s tone as an infringement of their liberty. He for his part ‘neither could nor would’ submit to any questioning of his prerogative. These were ominous foreshadows of the years ahead.

  Parliament had been prorogued for the investiture of the prince of Wales; but even here was another source of concern for a king becoming sensitive about his heir’s popularity. James had given orders that the investiture ceremonies should be cut back to the bone, finding his son, in the words of the interregnum historian Arthur Wilson, ‘too high mounted in the people’s love’ already. It was no time to be flouting James’s authority.

  Henry, prince of Wales

  Arbella’s conditions of restraint were not so uncomfortable. Parry’s was a pleasant house and garden, described by the topographical writer John Norden as ‘a capital messuage,335 bounded by the Thames … a fair dwelling house, strongly built, of three stories high’. The council’s warrant to Parry granted her ‘one or two of her women336 to attend her’ – without, however, ‘access of any other person until his Majesty’s pleasure be further known’. Inevitably Arbella’s state of mind was very far from easy; but this was far from being her darkest hour. She must by now have expected that she would be in trouble – briefly – and probably went to Lambeth in a spirit both combative and hopeful. Shortly, moreover, she had a very particular hope to keep her company.

  Touchingly, her first concern is for her servants. Men like Freake and Dodderidge, who had been with Arbella at Hardwick, would remain in her service until the end of her life. The names of Kyrton and of Mrs Bradshaw, intimate attendants present at Arbella’s recent marriage, are present in the accounts of that projected marriage seven years before. The destinies of several satellite families followed those of Arbella and William, and theirs is an important subtext to her story. A generation later, Lucy Hutchinson described the ardent attachment between Arbella and her waiting gentlewoman Margaret Byron, Lucy’s mother-in-law, who had come to Arbella at nine years old and ‘minded nothing but her lady’.337 When Arbella was taken away to prison, Sir John Byron (the same whom Brounker had described as being at Arbella’s devotion) came to take his sister home. But even then, for many melancholy hours, Lucy related, Margaret Byron would sit and weep in remembrance of her ‘unfortunate princess’.

  ‘There are divers338 of my servants with whom I never thought to have parted whilst I lived,’ Arbella herself wrote to Gilbert in the middle of July. They had been her second family. ‘But since I am taken from them, and know not how to maintain either myself or them, being utterly ignorant how it will please his Majesty to deal with me, I were better to put them away now, than towards winter. Your lordship knows the greatness of my debts and my unableness to do [anything] for them.’ As an afterthought, she mentions her horses: ‘The bay gelding and the rest are at your lordship’s commandment.’ But her next letter339 returns to her domestics; Gilbert had obviously stepped into the breach, and she thanked him for his care of them.

  Another letter that summer,340 to the privy council, asked that two of her imprisoned gentlemen servants, Hugh Crompton and Edward Reeves, be moved away from the dangerous air of the Marshalsea, where there were prisoners dead ‘and divers others sick of contagious and deadly diseases’. She gave what sounds to us like a curiously unfeeling reason for her care. ‘Consider that they are servants, and accountable for diverse debts and reckonings, which if they should die would be a great prejudice to me and others.’ ‘If Crompton should die341 the poor lady would be infinitely distressed,’ Gilbert wrote, ‘he being the man in whom she most reposed trust touching her debts.’ But in view of her other letters it is permissible, perhaps, to believe that Arbella was making the appeal she thought best suited to the council’s hard-headed practicality, and that her real concern for her men was less mercenary.

  Arbella signed her first letter to Gilbert: ‘The poor prisoner your niece, Arbella Seymour’. There is pride in the new name – and there is hard reality. Her letters to the court were often, instead, signed with the tactfully ambiguous ‘A.S.’ When the king first saw a petition from his newly wed cousin he was so vexed that she had signed herself ‘Arbella Seymour’ that he could hardly be persuaded to listen to her plea. Indeed, the privy council had at first been unwilling to pass on Arbella’s petition at all; but they agreed ‘to oblige her’, the Venetian ambassador reported. Arbella had taken pains over it – four versions of this letter survive. ‘Restraint of liberty,342 comfort, and counsel of friends and all the effects of imprisonment are in themselves very grievous, and inflicted as due punishments for greater offences than mine,’ she had written in a rough draft, but the bold words did not make it into either of the final copies. By the same token, in the rough drafts she had written ‘we suffer’ and ‘our life’ on behalf of herself and her husband – but subsequently changed the pronouns to the more tactful ‘I’ and ‘my’.

  The council was supportively effusive about the elegance of the petition’s style. Cecil ‘declared that he did not blush343 to admit that his style, for all that he was first secretary, could not rival that of a woman, for he thought it would tax all parliaments to draw up an answer which would correspond to the arguments and eloquence of the petition.’ But James was not to be won, demanding ‘whether it was well that a woman so closely allied to the blood royal should rule her life after her own humour’. He had spent much of his life under the shadow of a contested succession, and had indeed some reason to fear the bogey of a child from this union – a child who had the blood of both Margaret and Mary Tudor.

  In September it looked as if those fears might prove well founded. The lady – said her woman Mrs Bradshaw, at an inquiry much later – was ‘distempered’.344 Her body became so swollen that a gown had to be let out. Such swelling would correspond with the modern diagnosis of porphyria, but this was unknown in the seventeenth century. Arbella seems to have leaped to the more obvious conclusion: ‘she her self let fall words that she thought she was with child.’ And Arbella was ‘apt enough to entertain that conceit’, Mrs Bradshaw said, rather touchingly.

  Letter from Arbella to Gilbert Talbot

  She began to swell, so Mrs Bradshaw said, within a month of her marriage (surely too soon – unless the betrothed couple had anticipated their wedding day?), and the distemper fell ‘into an issue of blood which came from her’, and which lasted several days. She showed the blood to her physician, Dr Moundford, and the matter should have ended there; though even at that, it would have frightened James badly. But the rumours proved so persistent that, three years after Arbella’s death, it proved necessary to call an inquiry to confound the tale that Arbella had indeed borne a living child, who had been smuggled away to safety. Mary Talbot, Moundford, the servants and William himself all denied it – but the story, at the time, was hardly calculated to soften James’s heart. Meanwhile, Arbella had to come to terms with the loss of the hope that had helped her face captivity bravely.

  The queen, Prince Henry and Cecil all counselled that James should be lenient to Arbella, and many of ‘the wisest men’ at court expected it. First among Arbella’s advocates was Queen Anna, ‘on whose favour I will still chiefly rely’. Anna, out of her ‘gracious commiseration’, did all she could, but to no avail. As Arbella’s correspondent reported: ‘when [the queen] gave345 your ladyship’s petition and letter to his
Majesty he did take it well enough, but gave no other answer than that ye had eaten of the forbidden tree.’

  That Christmastime Anna planned to stage a masque of Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, in which the dancing ladies can free the captive Love only by throwing themselves on the king’s generosity. Did others think of Arbella when they saw Anna’s masque – a rather uncharacteristically placatory one? Did she think of Arbella when she commissioned it? Dudley Carleton, attributing the match to lust on the lady’s part and folly on the man’s, represented the viewpoint of the cynics among the court; but to sympathetic women it might not have seemed unreasonable to cast Arbella as an endangered heroine in one of the popular romance narratives of the day.

  Certainly others understood Arbella’s peril more clearly than she did herself. Arbella’s route to the queen was through Jane (or Jean) Drummond, her own kinswoman and one of Anna’s closest ladies, and when Jane was forced to report lack of success (albeit softened with promises of the queen’s continuing favour) Arbella sent another indignant note expressing gratitude – and disbelief. ‘I cannot rest satisfied346 till I may know what disaster of mine hindreth his Majesty’s goodness towards me, having such a mediatrix to plead so just and honest a cause.’

  Jane, hearing the court gossip, was less sanguine. ‘The wisdom of this state347, with the example [of] how some of your quality in the like case has been used, makes me fear that ye shall not find so easy [an] end to your troubles as ye expect, or I wish.’ Arbella, still indignant, would reply that ‘I never heard nor read of anybody’s case that might be truly and justly compared to this of mine.’ She was sweeping over the obvious similarities with Catherine Grey. But Jane Drummond’s was to prove an accurate prophecy.

  One letter in Arbella’s handwriting was evidently meant to come from William, referring as it does to the liberties and the lieutenant of the Tower, where he was held. He begged the council’s intercession in restoring him to James’s ‘most wished-for favour348 and my former liberty … I must confess I have offended his Majesty, which is my greatest sorrow, yet I hope not in that measure that it should deserve my utter ruination and destruction, since I protest my offence was committed before I knew it to be an offence.’

  This, evidently, was the excuse the pair had agreed upon – that they had entered into a binding engagement at that meeting on 2 February, at a time when, in the wake of the Moldavian debacle, Arbella could reasonably claim to believe that the king had given her permission to marry any Englishman. (‘Seeing herself deserted she had imagined that she could not be accused if she sought a husband of her own rank,’ she had told the council hardily at that second inquiry.) It is an excuse that would have seemed reasonable to many contemporaries. The era knew two forms of betrothal, and depending on the exact form of words used (whether Arbella and William had promised to take each other in the future or the present tense) it may indeed have been a contract very nearly as binding as a marriage vow.

  Of course, that argument is negated by the public message William sent to Arbella, specifically denying any such commitment. But once the theme had been chosen, the couple would embroider it enthusiastically – embroider it as Arbella did the gloves she sent this summer to the still supportive queen. Arbella also wrote to the king, pleading the ‘great affliction to my mind’ engendered by his severity:

  I most humbly beseech your Majesty349 … to consider in what a miserable state I had been, if I had taken any other course than I did; for my own conscience witnessing before God that I was then the wife of him that now I am, I could never have matched with any other man but to have lived all the days of my life as an harlot.

  At some point in the course of summer and autumn, Arbella seems to have despaired of attaining James’s pardon through intercessors. It was always her taste to speak directly. She began pouring out letters to him, carefully worded to please his flattery-loving ear. His Majesty’s ‘handmaid’, his ‘most humble faithful subject and servant’, claimed that ‘the thought never yet entered into my heart, to do anything that might justly deserve any part of your indignation.’ If any such thing had been done inadvertently, she begged, ‘let it be covered350 with the shadow of your gracious benignity, and pardoned in that heroical mind of yours.’ In exculpation for what she had done, she pleaded ‘the necessity of my state and fortune, together with my weakness’. This would move him, surely; James liked to think of a woman’s weakness. Arbella signed off her letter with her prayers for the ‘most happy prosperity’ of himself, his queen ‘and your royal issue in all things for ever’ – a protestation of loyalty to James’s dynasty. But James was not swayed.

  In December she wrote to James that ‘your Majesty’s neglect of me351 and my good liking of this gentleman that is my husband’ had driven her to act independently. That was the final, the secretary’s draft; in Arbella’s own first draft352 she had written of her ‘love to this gentleman’. But scaling down ‘love’ to ‘liking’ was a useless piece of tact, when she was openly accusing James of negligence. Indeed, Arbella offered James a blatantly backhanded compliment: that he, surely, would never do evil [separating a couple] that good [political security] might come of it – even though it were ‘as convenient as malice may make it seem to separate us whom God has joined’. Such a consideration would be as impossible for so good a king ‘as David’s dealing with Uriah’. David, desiring Bathsheba, ordered her husband Uriah to be placed in the front line of battle … This was going very far. And yet Arbella seems still to have had hopes that the festive Christmas season, a traditional time for leniency, might bring pardon. She wrote to the queen, enclosing a copy of her petition to James ‘at this time353 when … his Majesty forgiveth greater offences as freely as he desireth to be forgiven’. She asked Anna to consider ‘how long I have lived a spectacle of his Majesty’s displeasure’. Anna may well have been aware of it; but persuading James was another matter.

  Arbella had already admitted, in a letter to William’s brother Francis, that: ‘I must confess I fear354 the destiny of your house and my own … Your brother’s constancy notwithstanding, yet I bring him nothing but trouble.’ To William himself, Arbella wrote encouragingly, and movingly – so movingly that it is painful to read at the letter’s end that William has not written to her (not ‘so much as how you do’) for ‘this good while’. Not that she reproaches him. Write ‘when you please’. But her own letter is redolent of tenderness. It is worth quoting at length. ‘Sir’, she addresses him formally:

  I am exceedingly sorry355 to hear you have not been well. I pray you let me know truly how you do and what was the cause of it, for I am not satisfied with the reason Smith [their messenger] gives. But if it be a cold I will impute it to some sympathy betwixt us having my self gotten a swollen cheek at the same time with a cold. For Gods sake let not your grief of mind work upon your body. You may see by me what inconveniences it will bring one to …

  … we may by God’s grace be happier than we look for in being suffered to enjoy ourselves with his Majesty’s favour. But if we be not … I for my part shall think myself a pattern of misfortune in enjoying so great a blessing as you so little a while. No separation but that deprives me of the comfort of you, for wherever you be or in what state so ever you are, it sufficeth me you are mine. Rachel wept and would not be comforted because her children were no more, and that indeed is the remedy-less sorrow and none else … I assure you nothing the state can do with me can trouble me so much as this news of your being ill doth … Be well, and I shall account my self happy in being

  your faithful loving wife.

  Arb.S.

  Just so, in 1563, Catherine Grey had lamented to William’s grandfather: ‘what a husband I have of [in] you, and my great hard fate to miss the viewing of so good a one.’ Catherine’s husband Hertford had once been betrothed to her sister Jane, just as Arbella had once sought William’s brother Edward. And another Cecil, Lord Burghley, had had to enquire – just as his son Robert enquired about Arbella – wheth
er Catherine’s was a private match, or a political story. Both Cecils were inclined to the former theory, and to leniency. But one way and another, the echoes were beginning to sound ominous.

  ‘A poor distressed gentlewoman’

  INSTEAD OF RELEASE, the first days of 1611 brought whispers of a fresh controversy. It was a ‘great secret’ as yet, but the tongues were clacking. The Lady Arbella was ‘called before the lords356 … she shall be sent to Durham … with intent that she and her husband shall not come together’. The story of the possible pregnancy had leaked out; and coupled with it there may have been the idea that William and Arbella had managed to meet during their imprisonment, due to the sympathy, laxity or sheer cupidity of their gaolers. It is notable that when the time came for their escape abroad, both prisoners told their attendants they were simply going to enjoy a brief conjugal visit, and had their excuse accepted, in a way that suggests this was no novelty. And the last thing the authorities wanted was a repeat of Catherine Grey’s story, whereby an alternative line of succession would plague the crown for generations to come.

  In January Arbella was informed that her husband was condemned to life imprisonment in the Tower, and that she herself was to be sent north, into the bishop of Durham’s custody – ‘clean out of this world’, as she wrote despairingly. Things could be worse yet. The Venetians wrote that

  It is thought that357 the king will send her even further, and by putting her out of the kingdom [to Scotland] he will secure himself against disaffection settling round her. Her husband is confined to the Tower for life and more closely guarded than heretofore; this has thrown him into extreme affliction nor are there wanting those who bewail his unhappiness.