While Arbella could simply walk away from her lodgings in Barnet, William had to be freed from a more formal captivity. Still, escape from the Tower was far from unknown – and William had successfully negotiated a fairly comfortable existence there. In the first weeks of his confinement (as witnessed by his and Arbella’s letters), William’s health had declined. July, he later said, was the very worst month of all to be shut within such dank and airless chambers. But, as a result of his complaints, he had been granted ‘the liberty of the Tower’ – freedom, that is, to move around the extensive precincts: a crowded complex the size of a village, which also contained a royal palace, a mint, an armoury and a menagerie.
He had also been moved from the lieutenant’s own quarters to rooms above Traitor’s Gate. These he proceeded to furnish with goods either bought on credit (or with money loaned to him by the lieutenant, who later protested wildly that William had trimmed a tapestry to fit a fireplace, making it impossible to return) or sent to him from Arbella’s house. Four decades later, during the Civil War, when William’s own twenty-five-year-old son was similarly imprisoned in the Tower by parliamentary forces, William wrote to him there: ‘It seems it is a place entailed391 upon our family, for we have now held it five generations … I like not the place so well but could be very well contented the entail should be cut off, and settled upon some other family that better deserves it.’ But now, he would make the most of such familiarity.
The Jesuit John Gerard, escaping a few years before, had simply lowered himself from a riverside window to a waiting boat below. William’s room over Traitor’s Gate likewise looked to the wharf and the river, but his windows were mere arrow-slits. He had to find another way. This was not as hard as one might think. William could walk around to enjoy fresh air and exercise; and, in his eleven-month stay, he had had ample time to become familiar with the routine of the Tower, including the comings and goings of the tradesmen who catered for its large community. Most days, a cart laden with hay and firewood trundled along the alley just within the Tower’s southern walls, and pulled up beneath the arch just opposite St Thomas’s Tower. The carter proved amenable to bribery.
Outside the Tower, William’s friends had done a good deal of groundwork. The day before the escape itself, Edward Rodney had taken lodgings across the river from the Tower, at the house of his former landlady in Southwark, telling her he had been unwell, and wanted a change of air. Next, his servant appeared there with some bulky luggage: ‘a cloak, a cap,392 a cabinet and a fardel [bundle], all lapped in a white sheet, to be laid in his chamber’, followed the next day by a buckram bag ‘full of stuff’.
Next came a gentleman (one of Arbella’s gentleman servants) in a cloak lined with purple velvet, purple hose and a green doublet, who told the landlady a second version of the story. Rodney’s illness, he said, was but a feint; the truth was, he had taken the lodging to meet a gentlewoman of fashion, ‘by whom he hoped to receive much good’. This seemed to be borne out by his re-appearance in company with a lady (probably Mrs Bradshaw) with a wart under the eye. Early in the afternoon, she sent the goods off in the charge of a waterman, who was told to convey them to St Katherine’s Stair. Gentleman and lady themselves departed at around three o’clock – just as Arbella in Barnet was starting her ride – having first peered into the street to make sure there were no watchers. The landlady, curiosity aroused, sent her servant to follow them, but could discover no more than that they had taken a boat, at Pickleherring by the Tower.
In twos and threes, inconspicuously, all the conspirators were making their way downriver: the attendants by water; Arbella and her party on horse. William was the last of all – and everything depended on careful timing. They had to meet at Blackwall, then take oar and set off away down to the sea before their absence was discovered – or before the tides of the Thames could put another problem in the way.
On the day of his escape393 (as Sir John More heard it), William had his servant give it out that he was sick with the toothache; an excuse for his not being seen in the usual way. The servant, apparently, had been told (and believed) that William ‘was gone but to lie a night with his wife, and would surely return thither of himself again’. The first stage of the plan at least went off without discovery. William had been provided with a disguise, ‘a peruque and beard of black hair’ and a tawny cloth suit. Thus clad, he slipped out of his room, and unobtrusively followed the cart as it trundled away. Again, the Venetian ambassador’s report differs from More’s in the details, though not in essentials. Foscarini (and the bill of those imprisoned later gives some credence to his version) says William had most help from his barber, who ‘bandaged a leg, put on a false beard’ and, thus disguised, came to the Tower and asked for himself.
He was told the barber was there. He went in and Seymour disguised himself in the barber’s clothes and both went out together; nor did the guards raise any difficulty as they took him for the man who had just gone in; nor did they say anything to the barber, for he was accustomed to go in and out almost daily.
Either way, William had a nerve-wracking few minutes ahead of him. At a steady pace – not fast enough to attract attention – it was a long ten minutes from his own chamber to the first real taste of freedom. Along Water Lane and through the Byward Arch; past the menagerie, where the lions roared, and round the looping path; out by the Middle Tower, where the soldiers were on duty. It must have taken a steady nerve, under all those eyes. Then William was outside the Tower – but still his path, ironically, took him back against its walls and under the very rooms he had inhabited so recently, on to the Tower’s south-eastern corner, just before the shallows of St Katherine’s Dock. Here Rodney and the boat were waiting. So far, so good – but they were very late. There had been some kind of delay. It may have been as basic as the carter’s late arrival. By the time William could embark on his escape, Arbella was already nearing the river.
William and Rodney knew it was too late to try to rendezvous at Blackwall as arranged, so they pressed straight on down the Thames to Leigh. There, the waters were by now too high for their little rowing boat, and so they hired a fisherman to take them out to an empty coal vessel, the Charles, that lay at anchor out to sea. The collier’s captain394 was to remember Rodney’s grand clothes – ‘a full suit of satin with gold and silver lace’ – and another younger man, William, ‘in a suit of Murray coloured stuff’, along with a servant and a Frenchman. He remembered still more vividly the enormous sum of forty pounds they offered him, saying that, because of a quarrel, Rodney had to flee the country. Forty pounds was a fortune to a working man. The captain agreed to postpone his trip to Newcastle, and take them to Calais. Like Arbella’s party, William got successfully away.
Tuesday morning, and it looked as if the attempt might yet end well. But behind the fugitives, in London, an early discovery was almost upon them. Rodney had incautiously left a letter for William’s brother Francis Seymour, with whom he himself usually shared lodgings. It was vaguely worded – apologies for not having shared some secret – but it was enough to send Francis rushing round to the Tower when it was given to him early on that Tuesday.
‘Myself being come395 to his [William’s] lodging,’ Francis recounted to his grandfather the earl, ‘I asked his man for him, who told me that he had not slept of all that night, and that he would not that morning be troubled.’ Francis, ‘not therewith satisfied’, insisted that he ‘must and would’ speak with his brother. When the servant ‘perceived he could not resist, he confessed the truth, which he had no sooner done, but at the very same instant comes the lieutenant, to whom I showed this letter of Edward Rodney’. By that time Arbella was only just reaching the open waves, and William only just leaving Leigh. It was not far enough away for safety.
Francis and the lieutenant hastened to see Cecil at Greenwich. The king was alerted, the council in London summoned. Francis was examined, as he wrote to his grandfather: ‘1st. How came he by the letter? 2nd. Why did he not inst
antly carry it to the Treasurer? 3rd. Whether Rodney had not slept with him the night before? 4th. What conference they had? 5th. Whether he knew where the fugitives were bound?’ Ordered to hold himself ready for more questioning at Hertford House, Francis wrote another self-pitying letter,396 this time to his step-grandmother the countess, protesting that he was ‘as clear of their escape or any of their practices as is the child that was but yesterday born’.
The old earl reacted to the news with his own burst of exculpatory letters, lamenting that ‘I should in these my last days be grandfather of a child that, instead of patience and tarrying the Lord’s leisure (lessons that I learned and prayed for when I was in the same place whereout lewdly he is now escaped), would not tarry for the good hour of favour to come from a gracious and merciful king’. William’s ‘foolish and boyish’397 action so shook his grandfather that the old man had to scrawl a postscript to Cecil explaining that his candle had set fire to the bottom of Francis’s enclosed page. This fury seems rather unfair in view of the fact that all three of his own marriages had been made in secrecy, and without sanction. But Hertford’s anger only reflected the reaction of the authorities.
When James heard of the escape on Tuesday morning (according to an earlier, more urgent, dispatch by Foscarini), ‘The council was summoned immediately398 and proclamations were issued and printed that same day.’ By midnight the king’s shipwright,399 Phineas Pette, had received orders by messenger to take twenty musketeers out to sea to search all vessels. Admiral Monson had been dispatched to Blackwall to question the watermen there, and picked up some tale that among recent visitors to the tavern where Arbella had waited had been her cousin, Mary Talbot’s daughter, Elizabeth Grey. Even as he questioned, men put ashore from a ship newly arrived, carrying another story of a strange party – Arbella’s – taken by a French boat towards Calais.
But the winds that only slightly impeded Arbella’s progress altered the whole course of William’s journey. ‘The wind standing cross400 to go for Calais’ (as the bailiff of Ipswich later reported), William’s ship instead put into Harwich on Tuesday night. There on the Suffolk coast it stayed – powerless to move, but safe from harassment, since there was no mass communication to give instant broadcast to James’s fury – right through another long day. Behind Arbella, back in London, the pursuit gathered speed.
The royal proclamations401 demanded the fugitives’ apprehension and return by anyone from whom they should ask help, declaring that they had ‘by the wicked practices of divers lewd persons … found the means to break prison and make escape’ after their committal ‘for divers great and heinous offences’. (And that even after Cecil had persuaded the king to soften the wording considerably.) ‘It is supposed’, wrote the Venetian ambassador ominously, ‘that those who fled with Arabella [sic] will pay the penalty of their act with their lives.’
‘Couriers were sent402 in all directions, and especially to France … Today [Wednesday] the king returned to London, and the lords of the council have spent the whole day with his Majesty in secret consultation.’ The countess of Shrewsbury was arrested; a house search through the city began weeding out papists; frantic letters were sent to ambassadors; a new order was sent out that Catholics and puritans alike should take the oath of allegiance. ‘Both parliament and council thought403 this the sole way to preserve the king’s life,’ reported the Venetian ambassador. James always reacted with near-hysteria to the thought of any threat – a legacy of that youth of alarums, excursions and abductions, when the assassin’s dagger was never far away. To his ever-fearful imagination, this was not a romantic escapade. It was a political threat – an enormity.
What the alarmists feared, of course, was that William and Arbella, once abroad, would throw themselves into the protection of a Catholic power and present an alternative, a Catholic, contention for the throne (though John More recorded an alternative speculation: that they might have been ‘most pitied by the puritans’404 had they made their way to France). Such fears gained a certain weight from the involvement of Mary Talbot, that noted Catholic sympathizer, who was from the first recognized as a prime mover in the affair: ‘an obstinate popish recusant’, she would be called at the inquiry, who had ‘perverted also the Lady Arbella’. From the start, it was ‘generally affirmed’,405 as the Venetian ambassador wrote, ‘that this flight took place by the advice and help of some personage of weight’ – and rumours of the involvement of some foreign power can only have been fostered by his report that Arbella’s ship also carried a courier from the French ambassador, bearing dispatches to his king.
Meanwhile the culprits, the cause of all this consternation, had been borne apart by the water, unable to find each other across the expanses of the sea. It would have had the makings of farce, if it were not so patently brewing for tragedy. As Wednesday wore along, William still lay at Harwich – in an agony of frustration, no doubt, but in safety. For Arbella, disaster was imminent. The English ship that sighted her tiny bark in mid-Channel had received its orders to stop and search all vessels only a mere two hours before. So the Venetian reported, anyway. The guard ship ‘ordered her to strike her sail and haul to’. Being disobeyed,
the royal ship proceeded to compel obedience by firing, but finding this useless she dispatched her frigate and as the sea was calm and the wind had dropped, about a league off Calais she came up with the Lady Arabella’s ship and instantly seized her without meeting the smallest resistance from her crew.
Foscarini recounted how, the king having returned from London to Greenwich, ‘Lord Salisbury [Cecil] had an express from Dover with news that Lady Arabella had been captured … Lord Salisbury went at once to the king, and the news was most welcome at court.’
The first news had come from Griffen Cockett, captain of the Adventure, the ship that captured Arbella. But by the Thursday morning Admiral Monson, Cockett’s superior, was adding his might – anxious (to judge by his huffiness about the ‘negligence of the postmasters’ who delayed his first dispatch) not to miss his share of the glory. Under pretext of asking for orders about Arbella’s treatment, ‘unwilling she should go ashore until I have further authority’, he recounted his own adventures. Having been becalmed off Gravesend in his first vessel, a ‘light horseman’, he had seized the chance of the first wind and ‘the next ketch or fisherman I could meet withall’, and set off towards Flanders in his commandeered craft. Meeting another ship at sea, he heard that the Adventure had already returned to the English Downs; guessed that she had made her capture; and at once turned around to follow.
William knew nothing of this. All that Wednesday his ship had still lain at Harwich, and it was not until Thursday morning that she finally set sail – by which time Arbella was being brought captive back to England.
Early on Friday morning – late, but peaceful – William finally reached Ostend. ‘A little before the landing,’ ran the report collated from Harwich by the bailiff of Ipswich, ‘one of the ship asked the young gentleman what his name was. He said it was William Sea.’ While ‘William Sea’ and his companions made their way from the shore up into the town in the fresh morning air, the ship’s company, still ignorant of the dramatic part they had played, turned back for England: ‘bound towards Newcastle’, as the bailiff reported. ‘Hearing at sea that inquisition was made for such persons as they transported, they have put into the harbour and repaired unto the town, whom we have made stay of until your lordship’s pleasure be further known.’ More fodder for the hungry maw of the official inquiry.
For William, all that now lay behind him as he took his first steps into a foreign country. While he was sending word406 to Gravelines to scour the coast for news of his wife, Admiral Monson was receiving his instructions: Arbella was to be taken directly to the Tower. She had been their quarry; with Arbella secured, no-one bothered to pursue William further.
‘A spectacle of his Majesty’s displeasure’
ARBELLA ENTERED IMPRISONMENT with her head held high, buoyed up b
y her captors’ admission that William was still at liberty – less sorry that she should be taken, in John More’s expressive words, than glad that Mr Seymour should have got away. To that unselfish relief there may well have been added, for the moment, a degree of nervous excitement; a febrile energy born of the action and drama of her escape. She may still have been on an adrenaline high. If Arbella was subject to fits of despair, she also had a capacity for quite unreasonable hope. It was yet another way in which she resembled her royal aunt, Mary. It would take not days, nor even months, but years for all hope to drain quite away.
But she could hardly fail to think of William’s grandmother, Catherine Grey, whose case had so directly foreshadowed her own, and perhaps of Catherine’s dwarfish sister Mary (and their sister Jane, who had lost her head … but hers was a different story). Half a century before, Catherine had come to the Tower new-married, ‘being great with child’, and her captors must have hoped that both she and the baby would die. Perhaps that is why the furnishings for her rooms were chosen from the official stores with such callous economy: one damask coverlet ‘all to-broken and not worth tenpence’, as the then lieutenant of the Tower scrawled in the margin of the records contemptuously; a single chair, ‘an old, cast thing’; and a quilt ‘stark naught’. Now she, Arbella, would have to contend all over again with the question of servants, and furniture, and the ‘several cares of a householder’ of which she had once written so joyfully.
Catherine had survived childbirth, and her baby, William’s father, was christened in the Tower’s own church. Her husband Hertford could visit her – ‘passed through the doors of the prison standing open, to comfort her who mourned for the sentence pronounced, and pay my marriage debt’, as he put it proudly, when their second child was born. But despite her blessings Catherine (and short Mary’s gigantic husband Thomas Keyes, the court sergeant) had still died in captivity, and Mary herself been let out only to live a brief, ghost’s life in poverty. Catherine’s uncle had written pitifully of her ‘miserable and most woeful state’; of how he never saw her ‘but I found her either weeping or saw by her face that she had wept.’ And yet Catherine had had hope to comfort her. Even while she sickened, while she refused food, she had thought of her babies. Arbella had no such distraction. Her husband was beyond the sea. The words of Chidiock Tichbourne407 might have been written for her; Tichbourne, the young Catholic who wrote them in the Tower, before he died for his part in the Babington conspiracy:
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