Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Arbella, as she heard, was to experience the same distant captivity that had destroyed her royal aunt Mary.

  She wrote to Sir Thomas Fleming, the lord chief justice, and Sir Edward Coke, lord chief justice of common pleas, protesting that she was to be removed ‘far from these courts of justice where I ought to be examined, tried, and then condemned or cleared’. She wanted them ‘to enquire by an habeas corpus358 or other usual form of law what is my fault and if upon examination by your lordships I shall thereof justly be convicted let me endure such punishment by your lordships’ sentence as is due to such an offender.’ If they could not offer her ‘the ordinary relief of a distressed subject’, then she asked them to intercede that she might still receive ‘such benefit of justice … as both his Majesty by his oath hath promised and the laws of this realm afford to all others’. If no answer was made, then perhaps it is because no answer could be made – no answer that was at once logical and politic, anyway. Coke was later to recall that he had sworn, in his judge’s oath, ‘Ye shall not delay any person of common right for the letters of the king’ – that is, you shall not keep anyone in custody merely on the king’s instruction; ten years later, he even dared remind James of those words. The Magna Carta had stated clearly: ‘No free man shall be seized or imprisoned … except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.’ Four decades later the Leveller John Lilburne would believe so passionately in the universal applicability of the right to trial by jury that he, an ardent social revolutionary, none the less sent several imprisoned royalist noblemen law books for their defence. But in 1611 things simply did not work that way.

  Over the next few weeks Arbella wrote letters with a frenzy that – like the ill-health she suffered – recalled her Hardwick days. She wrote to an unnamed knight (described by an earlier biographer as Sir Oliver Cromwell, wealthy uncle to the protector): ‘Sir, though you be359 almost a stranger to me …’ The letter, like all the others, begs that he will help ‘a poor distressed gentlewoman … out of this great distress and misery and regain me his Majesty’s favour which is my chiefest desire’. To a relative she described herself as ‘the most penitent and sorrowful creature360 that breathes’. To Cecil she wrote of ‘my soul overwhelmed361 with the extremity of grief’.

  She wrote to Viscount Fenton in a slightly different tone. He, she had heard, had been speaking against her. Rather tartly, she pointed out that ‘the fault cannot be uncommitted’,362 and added an ominous rider: ‘if you remember of old, I dare to die, so I be not guilty of my own death, and oppress others with my ruin too if there be no other way.’

  In amid all this high emotion, she had to find the energy to deal with one of William’s bills. An Italian jeweller363 called Prospero Gorges was demanding – if that is the word for a document so obsequious, so lavishly detailed about his own woes – £6 8s 6d for some silk and amber points he had made for Seymour. Arbella, desperate, forwarded the note to William’s brother Francis, begging him to show it to Mary Talbot ‘or any friend you think will lay out so much for me at this time when it seems everyone forsakes me but those that cannot help me’.

  In the middle of March the journey north was to begin. On 13 March a warrant was sent to the bishop of Durham, which laid out in full what James felt to be his grievance. His cousin the Lady Arbella ‘hath highly offended us364 in seeking to marry herself without our knowledge … and in proceeding afterwards to a full conclusion of a marriage with the self same person whom (for many just causes) we had expressly forbidden her to marry.’ It went on to censure William’s duplicity, after the ‘solemn protestations’ he had made to the council of intent to leave off the affair. But James’s central point seems to have been the setting of a bad example:

  forasmuch as it is more necessary365 for us to make some such demonstration now of the just sense and feeling we have after so great an indignity offered unto us, as may make others know by her example that no respect of personal affection can make us neglect those considerations wherein both the honour and order of the state is interested.

  None the less, he emphasized ‘the difference between us and her. That whereas she has abounded towards us in disobedience and ingratitude, we are (on the contrary) still apt to temper the severity of justice with grace and favour,’ as witnessed by his sending her to the bishop’s virtuous care.

  The bishop, Dr William James, presented himself in Lambeth at eight in the morning on 15 March. He described the scene to the privy council with vivid urgency. Arbella, he wrote,366 was so distressed that cold drops burst from her forehead. She demanded a sight of the king’s warrant; he gave it, and ‘used all the poor skill’ he could muster to persuade her to go quietly. He told her tales of those less fortunate, of prisoners and martyrs: a strange way to soothe a fearful hysteric, surely. Arbella’s host-cum-gaoler Parry and her own doctor Moundford added their pleas, but in vain. Whether through obstinacy or real incapacity, she could not be moved, and in the end the bishop’s men were forced to carry her into the street on her mattress.

  Dr Moundford had to administer cordials three times to his fainting patient on the way from Lambeth to Highgate where (since they were clearly never going to make the intended destination of Barnet) a house had hastily been commandeered for a one-night stop. She was lifted from the litter and carried into the house, where she remained half swooning but sleepless until midnight. The bishop, ‘being somewhat distempered himself’, could do little to soothe her (later, he claimed ‘half a year’s sickness and lameness’ as legacy of his attendance on the lady). But the next morning he appeared at her bedside, urging ‘the sweet day, and air, and duty of her journey’. Arbella was having none of it; nor, more to the point, was Moundford. He said she could not possibly travel that day. The bishop had urgently to send a letter to the privy council. The lists of official expenses367 for Arbella’s enforced journey feature the cost of messengers with alarming regularity. The stay at Highgate grew from one day into six, but the rest did not help her. Moundford, in his determination of ‘cherishing her to life’,368 yet suspected shrewdly that no cordials could ‘warrant either amendment of her health or continuance of life if some contentment of mind be not gained’.

  On 21 March, the king’s orders obliged the bishop to remove his charge forcibly to Barnet. She was to be taken ‘by the strength of men’s hands’, if necessary. Once again, she had to be carried to the litter in her bed: ‘the means prescribed,369 which were employed with all decency and respect’. Gilbert wrote to Moundford thanking him for his care. ‘For my part370 I can do her very small service more than by my prayers.’ As a privy counsellor, he had had to sign the order for Arbella’s remove; he had absented himself from more than enough council meetings already. He tried to speak to James on his niece’s behalf. The king was unsympathetic: ‘It was enough to make any sound man371 sick to be carried in a bed in that manner she is, much more for her whose impatient and unquiet spirits heapeth upon herself far greater indispositions of body.’

  He may have had the vestige of a point about his cousin’s ‘unquiet spirits’: suffering Arbella undoubtedly was, with violent pains in the head and bouts of sickness – but not so sick that she was not planning ahead. She and William had jointly signed a document372 relieving Crompton of any responsibility for their financial affairs: ‘discharging him of all accounts, reckonings, receipts and demands whatsoever, whereby he may be charged by us or by either of us from the beginning of the world until the day of the date of this present’. Crompton would later confess to having acted as liaison between Arbella and her aunt Mary – to having handled ‘the preparation of means, and the receipt of monies’, with which to facilitate his mistress’s plans, and this sounds as if something drastic – a flight abroad? – were planned already.

  At Barnet the party ground to a halt again, and once more the doctors supported Arbella’s determination to go no further. James, suspicious, sent his son’s physician Dr Hammond to see her. He took her pulse and prescribed medi
cine – and agreed she could not travel immediately. Gilbert was present when Hammond made his report to the council, and reported that the doctor had found his niece

  very weak, her pulse dull373 and melancholy for the most part, yet sometimes uncertain; her water bad, showing great obstructions; her countenance very heavy, pale and wan; nevertheless, she was free from any fever or any other actual sickness, but of his conscience he protested that she was in no case to travel until God restored her to some better strength both of body and mind.

  Arbella herself wrote to Viscount Fenton that she had been ‘sick even unto the death’. And yet still she could not get ‘those ordinary helps374 whereby most in my case, be they never so poor or unfortunate soever, are preserved alive. I can get neither clothes nor posset ale nor any thing but ordinary diet … not so much as a glister [enema] when I call for it, saving your reverence.’

  For what was intended to be a one-night stop at Barnet, Arbella had been housed in an inn. This was clearly unsuitable for a longer stay, so the home of a Mr Conyers at East Barnet was requisitioned as a lodging. The bishop was (no doubt thankfully) going ahead to Durham to pave the way for his fragile prisoner, his place as chief custodian being taken by Sir James Croft. On 31 March Croft reported375 that on the day of the short remove Arbella ‘apparelled herself with what convenience she might by reason of her weakness’, but that when he galloped ahead as an advance guard, he found the Conyers house far from ready. It was just as well, perhaps, that the party had not already set out, since sitting up for the half-hour’s wait had already brought on Arbella’s faintness again. The doctor ‘averreth that her la [dyship] was afflicted at that time with a melancholy passion proceeding from her heart and forming up to the brains which caused a dizziness in her head with extreme pain, but that fit did not long endure’.

  Arbella’s eventual remove to East Barnet on 2 April was attended by ‘powerful’ sickness on the way, and the next day she was still exhausted from the mile-and-a-half journey. As a letter of her own to the privy council put it:

  I am in so weak case376 as I verily think it would be the cause of my death to be removed … My late discomfortable journey (which I have not yet recovered) had almost ended my days and I have never since gone out of a few little and hot rooms, and am many ways unfit to take the air. I trust your lordships will not look I should be so unchristian as to be a cause of my own death, and I leave it to your lordships wisdom to consider what the world would conceive if I should be violently enforced to do it.

  Proceeding north was clearly impracticable, and it was agreed Arbella should be allowed to stay at Barnet through April. She sent James a note of thanks for granting her the ‘Halcyon days377 … since it hath pleased your Majesty to give this testimony of willingness to have me live a while’. The much-tried bishop stopped at Royston on his way north to give a report to the king in person, urging Arbella’s grief, her ‘hearty and zealous’ prayers for the king and ‘her willingness,378 if it might be so, to sweep his chamber’, all of which pleased James so much that he called over Prince Henry to hear. The bishop afterwards sent back words of encouragement, via Croft, to Arbella herself. ‘My poor opinion379 is that, if she wrong not herself, God in time will move his Majesty’s heart to have compassion upon her.’

  On 17 April Croft wrote that rest and physic had made Arbella ‘somewhat better and lightsomer’ than before, but that she had still not so much as walked the length of her bedchamber, nor did he ever find her other than upon her bed.

  She apprehendeth nothing380 but fear and danger in the most ugliest forms, conceiving always the worst and much worse than any way can happen to her … that his Majesty should dispose of her at his pleasure she does not gainsay, but the horrors of her utter ruin and end which hourly present themselves to her phantasy, occasioned … by the remoteness of the place whereunto she must go, driveth her to utter despair.

  James was unmoved. He had been dropping hints that compliance on Arbella’s part might be rewarded, that she might not have to make more than a short stay in the north – but she did have to comply, and to be seen to comply. On 28 April he sent fresh orders, swearing that if he were king she would leave for Durham on the Monday following. He was king. But for all that, Arbella was certainly to have a little longer. And longer again, maybe.

  It took her four drafts381 to word a final petition, in which she begged for yet three weeks more, promising, if they were granted, then to make the journey without resistance (being assured on all sides that her cousin the king had no purpose ‘to make my correction my ruin’). But the subservient tone is belied by the comments written in the margin: ‘whereupon I must confess I bely myself extremely’, she added beside her promise to make no future resistance, aware she might seem to be admitting she had been guilty of resistance in the past. In the main body of the text, she hopes to receive James’s grace. In the margin: ‘what man of grace this is I cannot guess.’ Today, the comments sound like an alarm bell signalling the storms ahead. But at the time, the king heard no such warning. On reading Arbella’s petition, James – after much hesitation, reported Moundford, who with Croft had gone to court in person to plead Arbella’s cause – ‘did yield that one other month should be employed in her perfect cure’. He ‘used not one unkind or wrathful word382 of her, but mildly taxed her obstinacy’, and the letter, ‘penned by her in the best terms (as she can do right well) was commended’. Arbella would have until 5 June.

  The journey from Lambeth to Barnet, originally scheduled for a day, was running at twelve weeks already, and by now, her residence at Mr Conyers’ house had taken on an air of society. Prince Henry sent his chaplain Mathias Melwarde to her. She may have been soothed by evidence of sympathy from such as a Lady Chandos, staying nearby, who had written to Dr Moundford offering the best drink in her family’s cellars and urging him that ‘if you want for the honourable lady383 what is in this house, you will send for it.’

  More to the point,384 for the first time Mary Talbot was allowed to visit Arbella. Mary had already pleaded with James’s current favourite, the handsome young Scotsman Robert Carr, to intercede for her niece. He had rejected her with contempt: ‘he would rather lose his life385 than deal in a matter so distasteful to his Majesty.’ Perhaps Mary, like Arbella herself, had concluded that it was useless trying to move the king to pity. And hers was not a temperament to take opposition lightly.

  Some time in those weeks of sickness, Arbella’s goals had changed. While hiding any sign of improvement in her health, she and Mary, through Crompton’s agency, set about amassing a sum of money. William had written rather grimly of his new aunt by marriage that ‘I can expect no good from her,386 since I am credibly informed that she doth more harm than good.’ But Mary could be a remarkably effective ally. Arbella and William proposed to start life on the continent with £2,800, of which at least half came from Mary – and £850 of that from a source freighted with significance for Arbella. Mary bought from her some embroideries done by the Scots queen – not worth a tenth of the price, as they were later described387 scornfully. The time for letters was past. It was, finally, time for action.

  ‘To break prison and make escape’

  TO ARRANGE THE escape of one prisoner with so high a profile as Arbella Stuart was surely a coup. To arrange the simultaneous escape of her husband from the Tower of London sounds extraordinary. But while conditions of imprisonment in the seventeenth century could be appalling, they could also resemble a kind of house arrest; even house arrest with occasional leaves of absence, to be won not by good behaviour but by bribery. The conditions in which Arbella and William were held, at this stage, were predicated on the assumption that they would not want to run away; that, being who they were and what they were – dependent on their public identity, unable to move without a retinue of servants – they had simply nowhere to go.

  This was true – so long as they remained in the country; and to leave England without permission was against the law for anybody, never mi
nd a prisoner. Such, however, was the ambitious plan. Eighteen months before, perhaps the couple had hoped to be allowed to retire quietly to the midlands together, but by June 1611 those days must have seemed a long time away. And Arbella had already, in 1603, shown herself capable of venturesome (if misguided) action – even without the support of Mary Talbot, the redoubtable countess of Shrewsbury.

  Escape abroad had, after all, been achieved not so long before, in the love-match of Leicester’s bastard son Sir Robert Dudley and the old queen’s maid of honour Elizabeth Southwell. She had disguised herself as his page for the flight, and soon the pair would be living very successfully in Florence under the protection of the Medici. As Arbella lay in bed at Barnet she must have dreamed of another happy outcome: meeting William at Blackwall; heading out to sea with him; starting a new life in his company. They may have intended to settle in France; a letter in the Talbot papers proves that Mary Talbot had maintained contact with Mary Seton,388 once lady to Mary, queen of Scots and later abbess of a French convent. The letter mentions that Mary Seton had asked Arbella to present a petition for her – vainly, as she complained. But clearly the ladies of Arbella’s family had their own contacts beyond the sea.

  We know that Arbella’s plan miscarried; that her great effort ended in disaster. On the Monday morning, she and William were both captive in England, in comparative proximity. By Friday evening, they were in different countries: he in freedom, she in closer custody. Where – in the course of a mere four days – did it go so wrong, precisely?

  The Venetian ambassador,389 writing home some days after Monday, 3 June – after collecting all the news and rumours – gave a version of events rich in details slightly different from those recounted by Sir John More. On ‘the evening’ of Arbella’s escape, her waiting woman slipped the porter some dishes from Arbella’s table. A mild form of bribe, maybe? After slipping out390 through the gardens in her male costume, Arbella rode the thirteen miles to the river ‘in little more than an hour, it is said’.