Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  My tale was heard and yet it was not told,

  My fruit is fallen and yet my leaves are green,

  My youth is spent and yet I am not old,

  I saw the world and yet I was not seen;

  My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,

  And now I live and now my life is done.

  The bill of arrests408 made after Arbella’s flight abroad was a long one, with suspects dispatched to the Fleet prison in the City, the Marshalsea in Southwark and the Gatehouse in Westminster.

  And the man who had made Arbella’s wig had already been released … But such a wholesale, panicky collection of prisoners could not be held for long. Some were quickly released: Sir James Croft, for example, guilty at the worst of a little slackness, and pathetically pleading his thirty-five years’ loyal service to the crown. But not Markham,409 nor Crompton, nor indeed the countess of Shrewsbury.

  The cooler heads among James’s advisers were prepared to treat this as a marriage with only private implications; to assume, as John More wrote to Sir Ralph Winwood,

  that if this couple410 should have escaped, the danger was not likely to have been very great, in regard that their pretensions are so many degrees removed, and they ungraceful [i.e. out of favour] both in their persons and in their houses, so as a hot alarm taken at the matter will make them more illustrious in the world’s eye than now they are, or (being let alone) ever would have been.

  By contrast, some, as More said contemptuously, ‘aggravate the offence in so strange a manner, as that it might be compared to the [Gun]Powder Treason’. The earl of Nottingham, the lord admiral, who even in the first flush of alarm had advised James simply to let William and Arbella go off and live together, had found his cool voice drowned in a clamour of anti-Catholic feeling.

  But by the end of June efforts were being made to put a good face on things, to play down the threat – for foreign consumption at least. Cecil’s letters to ambassadors abroad stressed that the fugitives were to be presented as ‘contemptible creatures’ and James as concerned only with the affront to his authority. The Venetian ambassador had a meeting with the king, and came away with the impression that unless Arbella were found to have made a treasonable alliance with Catholics (in which case she too could face execution), nothing harsh was planned; ‘for all may be attributed411 to her great love for the person she had chosen to be her husband’. James, no doubt furiously resenting the need to justify himself, protested that ‘he had resolved to marry her suitably to her rank; he knew quite well what was right and proper.’ The French ambassador, rushing on a round of exculpatory visits, protesting that neither his courier nor the captain of the French vessel had known the identity of the lady passenger, had his excuses accepted, diplomatically. The earl of Hertford, who had at first been summoned to London for questioning, was allowed to relapse into his quiet country life – chastened enough grovellingly to submit for the council’s approval every chiding letter he wrote to William, his ‘ingrate boy’. None the less, six weeks after412 the escape he was writing jokingly to Cecil about his wife’s ‘inveterate malice’ against the rabbits of a warren belonging to Cecil. ‘She went thither without me on Thursday last, with bows and arrows, making reckoning to murther many.’ But far into July, while the countess of Hertford practised field sports, Arbella in the Tower was still being interrogated regularly.

  There were, as one diplomatic dispatch put it, ‘many in this city of London who heartily deplore her unhappy case’. The Florentine secretary413 noted that ‘from the least to the greatest, every one rejoiced over this escape and showed so great an affection to the Lady Arabella that it nearly surpassed convenience’. One Captain Flick, who grumbled over the dinner table about the king’s iniquities, was himself briefly sent to the Tower. Popular opinion was reflected in a stage success of that year, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (speculatively identified as the lost Cardenio of Shakespeare and Fletcher). Two lovers, ‘the Lady’ and ‘Govianus’ – described as ‘the rightful king’ – are imprisoned for their love by ‘the Tyrant’. Though kept apart, they are allowed by their gaolers to meet until Govianus is forced to leave the land. The specific parallels to Arbella and William were made in slips of paper pasted into the original text, either to circumvent the censor or to cash in on public opinion, which was evidently running in the lovers’ favour. (Fletcher’s The Noble Gentleman414 makes more significant allusion; so much so, however, that it has been argued that the play could not have appeared in this form until some years after the event.) James was being touched in his most sensitive part: his dignity. The wound was hardly likely to make him regard Arbella kindly.

  Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, was placed in charge of the inquiry. Member of a powerful clan, Northampton had seen his father executed by Henry VIII and his brother (the duke of Norfolk) by Elizabeth, so that his own career had been blighted by ‘contempt, oblivion and secret nips’. He was sixty when his farsighted support for James’s claim brought him the prospect of power at last, and he had no intention of letting it get away. A crypto-Catholic, and yet regarded with suspicion even by Spain’s ambassador, he beguiled James with displays of scholarship and sycophantic flattery. His report to his ‘most excellent most gracious and most redoubted415 and dear sovereign’ certainly makes awkward reading. But his conclusion was that ‘the mystery hath been involved in one crafty pate [Mary’s] to which the principal herself [Arbella] will appear in a sort to be but an accessory … Your Majesty hath been advertised before that my La. of Shrewsb. was the only worker and contriver of the lady’s bedlam opposition against your Majesty’s direction …

  ‘Lady Arbella dares not clear her [Mary] by oath, though she clears all foreign princes.’ Mary’s purse, he added, was the ‘only instrument’ of the escape, but ‘this mystery was managed with so great art’ that it was unlikely they would ever be able to prove ‘more than that my La. of Shrewsbury had by her traffic for a penny some kind of pennyworth’. Even though ‘by confession we can prove that of that £1800 which [Arbella] brought together, £1400 at the least came out of her aunt’s purse … yet the matter will be drowned in obscurity.’ Arbella and her aunt would die rather than denounce one another, he said.

  Northampton further wrote that Mary, ‘intending to work her own haughty ends out of the passion of one that was pliant to advise [Arbella], hath kept within her breast the poison that was to break out.’ Thus the investigators, he complains, were left ‘to work upon acts intermediate, that in the first appearance only regard the satisfaction of a young lady’s instant humours’. But Arbella being once abroad – the bird, as Northampton colourfully put it, being ‘freed of her cage’ – no-one could doubt but that she would be ‘a fit scholar to receive some deeper infusion when time should serve, distance secure and combination encourage’. A fit subject for Catholic indoctrination … Mary herself provided ample evidence to support this theory.

  More relates that the biggest charge against the countess was having put together a large sum of money for the fleeing couple. ‘She is said to have amassed416 a great sum of money to some ill use, £20,000 are said to be in her cash [account] … And though the Lady Arbella hath not as yet been found inclinable to popery,’ More added significantly, ‘yet her aunt made account that being beyond the seas in the hands of the Jesuits and priests, either the stroke of their argument or the pinch of poverty might force her to the other side.’

  Arbella answered the committee of inquiry ‘with good judgement and discretion’, to the effect that she had sought only freedom to live with her husband. Mary Talbot, by contrast, ‘is said to be utterly without reason,417 crying out that all is but tricks and jigs; that she will answer nothing in private, and if she have offended the law she will answer it in public.’ Ironically, of the two, it was Arbella who was within weeks reported ill. Mary, like a true daughter of doughty old Bess, gives the impression of having thrived upon a life full of drama and controversy.

  Her husband Gilbert, who had correc
tly removed himself from the council table while the inquiry was carried out, seems to have been given the impression that Mary’s captivity would not be of long duration; perhaps even short enough to spare him the embarrassment of its being known outside court circles. Charles Cavendish wrote to a friend on 19 June: ‘my lord putteth me in hope418 that her abode [in the Tower] will not be long … I understand she had not gone thither if she had answered to lords, so for that contempt she suffereth.’ But the family reckoned without James’s nervous terror of any potential threat – and perhaps without Mary’s own intransigence.

  In one sense her protests were entirely justifiable. Both Mary and Arbella were ‘without reason’ only if you take respect for the letter of the law to be a proof of insanity. Arbella clearly believed that, while it may have broken the social code, her marriage had not broken the law of the land. It is hard to say if she was right or wrong. One can prowl through the statute books; track the passage419 of Henry VIII’s old act; ponder the Venetian ambassador’s idea of loesa majestas … but the fact is that English law in the early seventeenth century was as much a matter of custom as statute; and custom came down heavily in favour of royal authority.

  Arbella, with her scholar’s respect for a written code, her imperfect understanding of other personalities and her pronounced sense of right and wrong, relied on the fact that there was no clear reason why she should ever have been imprisoned. But there were a plethora of reasons why it was unrealistic to claim she could not be. King James had demonstrated his disregard for English law when, on his journey south from Scotland, he ordered a thief hanged without trial or ceremony. Only the marriage that was itself the chief of her offences, moreover, had removed Arbella, as an unmarried woman, from James’s familial authority.

  And Arbella had now committed a definable offence. As Bishop Goodman put it, in the History of His Own Times he wrote soon after the end of James’s reign: ‘be the crime what it will,420 yet the breaking of prison is punishable.’ She had attempted, without papers or permission, to leave England for the dominions of a foreign power: ‘a great offence against the law’, thundered the bishop sanctimoniously.

  Yet Goodman’s very apologia for James reflects the unease with which many viewed Arbella’s case. It is true, he admits, that the king might seem to have behaved tyrannously. ‘To be imprisoned for the honourable estate of marriage was against God’s law and the law of nature: yet I confess it hath been frequent and usual with princes, especially with Queen Elizabeth.’ Let us hear what King James said in his own defence, the bishop suggested, hopefully.

  ‘First, that the Lady Arabella was his nearest kinswoman, and therefore both in duty and respect unto him he should not have been neglected in a business of that high nature. Secondly that she was his ward, and therefore in the course of common law she ought not to have disposed of herself.’ He adds, thirdly, that James ‘did often proffer marriages’ to Arbella, which she turned down: a statement for which there is no independent authority. But the real point is ‘Fourthly, that she did match with one of the blood royal who was descended from Henry the Seventh, so that by this match there was a combination of titles, which princes have ever been jealous of.’ It is an appeal not to legality, but to practicality.

  ‘A bird in a cage’

  THE TOWER WAS permeated with Arbella’s family’s history, and the portents surely made her sojourn there more gloomy. Half a century before, the great fortress had been home simultaneously to William’s grandmother Catherine Grey; to Catherine’s husband Hertford; and, by a curious coincidence, to Matthew Lennox, the grandfather Arbella never knew. Later, Arbella’s grandmother Lennox and her ladies scratched into the walls the time and place of their imprisonment, when the queen of Scots married Darnley. Later yet – on the marriage of Arbella’s parents, indeed – Lady Lennox, captive again, had here embroidered for the queen of Scots gifts made with grey hairs from her own head.

  The walls of the Tower were laced with carved graffiti. What time – where time had no value – it must take to carve a name, a message, even in this soft sandstone. What useless determination, what a torment of wasted energy. It would be the boredom, in the end, that killed you slowly here. The young Leicester and his brothers carved a verse, and the ornate Dudley crest. Even Guildford Dudley – not the most industrious of youths – scratched out Jane Grey’s forename with painstaking exactitude. On the walls of the Salt Tower, the carving of an elaborate sphere – detailed enough to be used to tell a horoscope – is the legacy of one Hew Draper, accused of practising sorcery against Bess of Hardwick in 1560. (The old story that Bess had herself been held here, unwilling confidante to Catherine Grey, is now discredited – but hers was still a presence from which it was hard to get away.) In the Beauchamp Tower, in 1585, the Thomas Bawden who piously inscribed that ‘it is virtue maketh life, so sin causeth death’ was an agent of the earl of Shrewsbury, accused of carrying letters for the queen of Scots.

  A plan of the Tower, 1597

  No such markings survive to spell out the exact site of Arbella’s imprisonment, or even the conditions in which she was first held. The best source of information about prisoners in the Tower are the acts of the privy council which regulated any change in their state – but the acts from 1605 to the end of 1612 are missing, destroyed in a small Whitehall fire soon after they were set down. In this vacuum, a legend grew up – recounted by subsequent biographers – that Arbella (like the young princess Elizabeth) was taken to the Bell Tower, an isolated apartment on the south-west corner of the inner fortress, in the oldest part of the Tower and thus perhaps the gloomiest: a place reserved for top-security prisoners, since it was accessible only through the lieutenant of the Tower’s own quarters.

  In the reign of Henry VIII, the Catholic martyr John Fisher had been held in this circular, vaulted chamber. ‘I decay forthwith, and fall into coughs and diseases of my body, and cannot keep myself in health,’ Fisher had complained. The Bell Tower, redolent of hardship and of mystery, makes a good backdrop for a heroine; and the Victorians – who loved a persecuted princess – had a passion for placing prominent prisoners in a definite (and still conveniently extant) locality. But it is now established421 that the princess Elizabeth was held, instead, in the royal lodgings decked out for her mother Anne Boleyn. A wealth of new information422 has emerged in the last few decades suggesting that Arbella, too, was held here in the old palace, close to her aunt Mary Talbot.

  The royal lodgings were situated in the south-east corner of the Tower precincts. They were dismantled in stages through the eighteenth century, and a lawn stands there today. They had, indeed, fallen into disrepair when James and Anna, as custom dictated, spent the night before their coronation there. (Elizabeth, unsurprisingly, had disliked the place and rarely used it.) Within a year or two of James’s accession, work was put in train to convert these apartments into a state prison for high-ranking offenders, though Gilbert Talbot still complained that rain came in through a hole feet wide above Mary’s head. But his complaints423 were heeded, and Mary wound up with ‘three or four fair rooms’424 in the old palace, as her brother Charles reported with satisfaction. Arbella certainly – since the bill of work describes the pipes – had a kitchen where her own servant could prepare her food. But that does not mean her conditions were easy.

  There were essentially two kinds of imprisonment in the Tower, though within those broad categories there were many anomalies. A prisoner who (as William had done) had ‘the liberty of the Tower’ might move comparatively freely around the bustling precincts, and enjoy a measure of communication with the outside world. Mary, who for much of her time there did have this liberty, conducted her financial affairs almost normally.

  Thus Sir Walter Ralegh, a prisoner for thirteen years in all, could not only have beer brought to him by his own boatman and see his steward to give orders about his estate; he also had the company of his wife and young son Wat as well as two personal servants. (Prisoners often had company. The earl o
f Southampton famously had his cat, which climbed down the chimney to find him.) While in the Tower, Ralegh fathered a second baby, and there are further records of ‘a preacher and three boys in ordinary’, and a tutor-cum-personal-secretary. An extra floor was built into the Bloody Tower to accommodate them.

  Ralegh had a room kitted out as a study in which to write his History of the World, and a garden where he could plant the exotic specimens he had brought back from his travels. In a converted chicken shed outside he could cure tobacco, experiment with turning salt water to sweet, try vainly to extract ore from the minerals he had brought back from Guiana in the New World, and brew his famous Great Cordial: a concoction of pearl, musk, hartshorn, bezoar stone (found in the stomachs of ruminants), herbs and spirits. From the Tower he sent long and welcome letters of advice to the young prince of Wales. ‘None but my father’, the prince exclaimed, ‘would keep such a bird in a cage.’ Perhaps his conditions changed with the ebb and flow of security, for Ralegh complained to Queen Anna that he could get neither rest by night nor breath by day; that he had become so unaccustomed to exercise as no longer to be able to walk up the lawn in the Tower a few yards away; that his son slept next to the room where a child had died of plague. But Robert Cecil was wont to say that Ralegh had not been so well housed or attended upon in his liberty.