Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  It is no small comfort451 unto me in my hard misfortunes that I have now opportunity whereby I may show obedience unto his sacred Majesty and the state … I acknowledge myself beyond measure bound to your lordships for the very mild proceedings which through your honourable mediations I have found.

  In December 1611, William was secure enough – or cheeky enough – to request that the lieutenant of the Tower send on to him the clothes and furnishings he had left behind when he made his escape. Sir William Waad replied452 in a long and indignant letter to Cecil. If William had died in the Tower, ‘or been by order discharged out of his place’, his property there would have fallen to the lieutenant as a legitimate perk – ‘and I hope it is not meant his escape shall be construed to his benefit or my disadvantage’. In any case, Waad protested, nothing of William’s was really his own, but ‘either from the Lady Arbella, or bought by me, or yet unpaid for’. Nothing William had left behind was of value enough to compensate him, Waad, for the sums he himself had paid out already, since ‘no penny since Christmas last’ had been paid towards William’s ‘diet’. The apothecary’s bill alone had come to £32 16s – ‘whereof there are divers cordials, almond milks, juleps, electuaries and other things very costly’. But William’s challenge, and Waad’s horrified response, offer a light interlude in a story which otherwise becomes ever more gloomy.

  Several events of 1612 contributed to making Arbella’s situation more precarious. In May, Robert Cecil died of stomach cancer, unaided by the ‘scorbut’ [scurvy] grass Gilbert Talbot had him sent fresh from the Peak District every fourth day, or by Mary Talbot’s prescription of quintessence of honey. Thus Arbella lost a man who might still have been of help to her in the future. Cecil’s letters of the summer before showed that he felt she really had gone a step too far. But he was a humane man; one who (despite his rejection of William) had often proved his right to boast that ‘my manner is not to fly [from] men in difficulties.’ He had been, what is more, a long-time friend to the Shrewsburys. But Cecil himself was out of tune with James’s court, as the king gave more and more power into the hands of his male favourites. Some claim that the ‘Great Little Secretary’ had already begun to look like yesterday’s man even before he died, in agony of mind and body, still only in his forties.

  Coincidentally or otherwise,453 it was in the month after Robert Cecil’s death that Mary Talbot’s case was finally heard, on 30 June, by a ‘select council’ including the three chief justices and the master of the rolls. We have a record of the prosecution’s speech on this occasion; it is traditionally attributed to Francis Bacon, though there remains some uncertainty about this. The case was certainly a tricky one, worthy of all Bacon’s ingenuity.

  Lady Shrewsbury – ‘a lady wise, that ought to know what duty requireth’ – was charged with contempt in refusing to answer questions eleven months before. But this was obviously a subsidiary issue. Mary’s true offence was her alleged part in Arbella’s escape, which had thus to be proved to be contrary to national security. However, if it were, this would only highlight the fact that Arbella herself should logically be on trial. But Arbella was not – in 1612 or at any subsequent time – brought to trial or charged with any offence; for any attempt to do so might have shown all too clearly that there were no grounds upon which she could be held with propriety. From the start, Francis Bacon (if it were he) took his stand upon what sound more like social or moral than legal grounds.

  My lady [Arbella] transacted the most weighty and binding part and action of her life, which is her marriage, without acquainting his Majesty, which had been neglect even to a mean parent; but being to our sovereign, and standing so near his Majesty as she doth, and she then choosing [a man of] such a condition as it pleased her to choose, all parties laid together, how dangerous it was, my lady might have read it in the fortune of that house wherewith she is matched; for it is not unlike to the case of Mr Seymour’s grandmother [Catherine Grey].

  She had been ‘extremely ill-advised’, he said, excusingly. The repeated attempts of the authorities tacitly to dismiss Arbella as a puppet – a child, or an idiot, void of legal standing – seem meant to justify their holding her thus, without the chance to prove either guilt or the contrary.

  But now did my lady accumulate and heap up the offence with a far greater than the former, by seeking to withdraw herself out of the king’s power into foreign parts. That this flight or escape into foreign parts might have been a seed of trouble to this state, is a matter whereof the conceit of a vulgar person is not incapable.

  Even if Arbella had ‘put on a mind to continue her loyalty, as nature and duty did bind her, yet, when she was in another sphere, she must have moved in the motion of that orb, and not of the planet [James] itself.’ It had always been the practice of the wisest princes ‘to hold for matters pregnant of peril to have any near them in blood to fly into foreign parts’. The sum total of accusation made sounds rather anti-climactic for the ‘great and heinous offences’ proclaimed so dramatically after Arbella’s escape, and the convoluted prose of the prosecutor’s long speech makes it sound as though he is labouring rather consciously. Being neglectful to her ‘parent’, picking an inappropriate husband, attempting to flee her sovereign’s power … only the last sounds like a political offence, surely? Perhaps the charges might have rung differently when rank and grandeur carried moral weight. But perhaps not.

  The woman whose case was supposed to be at issue here – not Arbella, but Mary Talbot – refused to answer any questions, on the double grounds, first, that as a peeress she had the right to be heard by her peers, and second, that she had made a solemn vow not to speak upon this subject. Her stubbornness did not help her. As Chamberlain described it, the council found themselves – understandably – ‘much aggravated’. The prosecutor addressed Mary directly. ‘This fact of conspiring in the flight of this lady [Arbella] may bear a hard and gentler construction. If upon overmuch affection to your kinswoman, gentler; if upon practice [conspiracy] or other end, harder.’ As for her obstinate silence: ‘Nay, you may learn duty of the Lady Arbella herself, a lady of the blood, of a higher rank than yourself, who declining … to declare of your fact [refusing to admit your fault], yield-eth ingenuously to be examined of her own.’

  Mary was fined the enormous sum of twenty thousand pounds: a penalty so large it was never likely to be collected in full, though the threat could always be held in reserve, and was indeed later used against her. She was returned to the Tower to be held at the king’s pleasure. Perhaps Arbella was glad to have her aunt still near, but that can at best have been cold comfort. She must certainly have been daunted by this fresh evidence of how seriously the authorities still regarded her escape.

  Arbella suffered another blow immediately after Cecil’s death: her allowance from the exchequer454 was halved, from sixteen hundred pounds a year to a mere eight hundred. The events of 1612 were piling up. In July, Lord Beauchamp, William Seymour’s father, died, bringing William a generation nearer to the throne. In November, tragedy struck the royal family when Prince Henry died very suddenly, from what later generations have diagnosed as typhoid, though there were rumours of poison. Not even the last-minute dose of Ralegh’s famous cordial, sent from the Tower, could save him. James’s posterity now rested on Elizabeth and Charles: a young girl and a sickly boy.

  Henry’s death must have hurt Arbella. The prince had lost any youthful sympathy for her – the Scots, said More in that earlier letter, had filled the king with fearful imaginings after her escape, ‘and with him the prince, who cannot easily be removed from any settled opinion’ – but he was another former well-wisher whose influence might yet one day have moderated her punishment. One by one, her possible friends were being taken away.

  Throughout her imprisonment in the Tower, there is no record of her uncles trying to help Arbella; nor indeed her cousins, though the Talbot daughters were becoming women of influence. (Elizabeth and Alethea between them would successfully win Lady Anne
Clifford the right to sue to the king about her lands.) To be fair to Arbella’s relatives, their first efforts would probably have gone into the more realistic attempt to free Mary. But Arbella must have felt quite forgotten. Looking at the documentary evidence – the acts of the privy council, when the interrupted records begin again – it strikes one unpleasantly that her name is mentioned only in the context of some sort of trouble. When nothing goes wrong, when she makes no stir, it seems as if king, court and council forgot her all too happily.

  None among the collection of Arbella Stuart’s own letters can authoritatively be said to date from her time in the Tower. Most of the appeals she wrote have since been reallocated455 to the time of her earlier imprisonment in Lambeth. But one fragment may be the exception. The paper is torn in half across a sentence, and there is no evidence as to whether the missive was ever finished or sent. It is up to each reader to decide whether the tone of self-abasement goes beyond even the most extravagant rhetoric Arbella had used in her earlier custody.

  ‘In all humility, the most wretched and unfortunate creature that ever lived prostrates its self at the feet of the most merciful king that ever was desiring nothing but mercy and favour … Mercy it is I desire, and that for God’s sake.’ In this letter, and this letter alone, Arbella says that ‘if it were to do again’, she would not adventure the loss of the king’s favour ‘for any other worldly comfort’. Thus to regret her marriage, in Arbella’s terms, was to have fallen low indeed. But it seems possible the letter was never sent. Could Arbella not bear, even at this desperate juncture, to humiliate herself so completely?

  ‘Far out of frame’

  THE SPRING OF 1613 saw the court in celebration, of a muted form. The princess Elizabeth, James’s only surviving daughter, was to be a Valentine’s Day bride. Her marriage to Frederick, elector Palatine – the same marriage that, a war later, would make her Bohemia’s tragically exiled Winter Queen – was not to be delayed by the recent death of Elizabeth’s beloved brother Henry.

  The bride wore white and silver tissue, jewelled ‘like the Milky Way’. Poignantly, blindly, Arbella seems to have thought that she would be allowed out of her prison to take some part in the festivities. She ordered four costly new dresses. She had several hundred pounds’ worth of pearls embroidered on a single gown. (Only three days after her death the jeweller, still unpaid, would be suing for it, and the lieutenant of the Tower ordered to take the ‘said gown as [well as] all other her ladyship’s apparel’ into his safe custody.) James, it is true, wore six hundred thousand pounds’ worth of jewels, and a mere Lady Wotton wore a gown so embroidered it cost fifty pounds a yard. But for a prisoner, and an impecunious one at that, Arbella’s still seems a fantastical gesture, often taken as proof that her wits were awry.

  Perhaps Arbella thought James might use the occasion for one of his famous displays of mercy. Perhaps she thought that the bride would request the presence of the cousin to whom she had always been close. Elizabeth may instead456 have nudged her prospective bridegroom into pleading for Lord Grey, still languishing in prison for his part in the plots of 1603. But whatever requests Frederick made were greeted coldly. ‘Son, when I come into Germany, I will promise you not to importune you for any of your prisoners,’ James promised his prospective son-in-law sourly. If Judas were alive again, and condemned for betraying Christ, some courtier would be found to beg his pardon, the king said angrily.

  So Lord Grey died, still in prison, a few years later. And the closest Arbella got to Elizabeth’s wedding celebrations was to see from her window the glow of fireworks on the Thames; to be deafened by the ordnance fired from the Tower as the bridegroom-elect passed by; and perhaps to hear whisper of the bustle as he was brought, by way of a wedding treat, to see the lions in the royal menagerie. When Elizabeth set sail across the Channel, it was yet one friend more gone away. Queen Anna had now lost two children in as many months: one dead, one gone to live abroad. She and her husband even enjoyed a ‘pacification’, under the influence of their common misery. James gave to Anna the palace of Greenwich, where she began building in the new Palladian style. Any chance of her continued championship of Arbella must have gone with Elizabeth and Henry.

  But there were more powerful reasons why Arbella was not released for Elizabeth’s nuptials; why there was never a chance she would be. In the months before the wedding, Waad had garnered suggestions of a fresh conspiracy – one declared by Arbella herself and fostered, if we are to believe her niece’s extraordinary words, by Mary Talbot.

  The previous autumn, Arbella falling ill, Waad had sought permission for her own physician Dr Moundford to attend her, and Arbella claimed that her revelations now were made to requite this ‘kind tenderness’.457 Moundford’s report of Arbella’s allegation – ‘here is a fine piece of work,458 that aunt of mine will never be quiet’ – at first sounds almost cosy. But from the authorities’ viewpoint, there was nothing comfortable about the plan she revealed (or pretended to reveal) of escape and bloodshed, plot and papistry.

  At Lambeth (so Arbella now said), her aunt ‘among others’ would have delivered her into the hands of the papists. To this Arbella (‘not knowing … how it should be done,459 nor to whom I should be delivered’) would not consent – ‘and in full resolution never to change my religion shortly after did take the sacrament’, she added, virtuously. But long-ago Lambeth, it seems, had not seen the end of the conspiracy. When Waad (in the presence of Moundford and of a divine, Dr Palmer) taxed her with the continuance of the plan, ‘we could not say460 that her lady[ship] did deny it, but rather put it off by her sudden rising,’ Moundford reported. She had initiated the interview ‘at the time appointed’ by her; she could end it. She was still royalty. But her mood was not always autocratic. On 12 January, visiting Arbella in the afternoon, Moundford found her asleep, and so spoke to her gentlewoman, who said her mistress could take neither food nor rest. Waking, Arbella answered his salutation ‘drowsily and heavily’. He asked her how she did. ‘Not well,’461 she answered. ‘I know not how I should do better. I am every day so troubled with my aunt.’

  Throughout these months Arbella spoke of Mary Talbot – this ‘thorn’ in her side462 – with unremitting hostility, ‘terming her the most wicked woman in the world, enemy to the state etc’, as Waad reported alarmedly. Arbella knew, she said, that all the world ‘will condemn463 me to undo my aunt that endures for me’, but said that she could not stay silent when the security of the whole state was imperilled by that aunt’s folly. She refused her aunt’s repeated attempts to see her; insisted Mary should be removed to lodgings further off; and even used items Mary had given her with ‘strange incivility’. As for Mary, Waad describes her clamouring at the staircase of Arbella’s rooms. How did the relationship between the two women, once so close, come to such a pitch?

  This sudden estrangement,464 and Arbella’s recent dangerous illness, had been triggered by a conversation held between Mary and Arbella the autumn before; the one from her chamber window, the other from the gallery of the lieutenant’s lodgings (proof that they were not allowed to associate freely). The root of the trouble, said Arbella, was: ‘I will not be of her religion.465 I had rather that all aunts should perish than that I should alter my religion.’ But, ardent Catholic though Mary was, her niece may have been speaking disingenuously.

  Arbella’s allegations were surrounded with the kind of verbal smokescreen that had cloaked her gambits in Hardwick days: her assertion that this was a truth that torture could not have obtained, but one she was admitting now because of Waad’s kindness; that no-one would suffer for their part in uncovering it, for ‘there is not the meanest gentleman466 in England, if I bring him into a business, he shall be cleared and suffer no wrong’; that her aunt, of course, would deny all this, but surely ‘the meanest word I speak467 shall be of more credit than all the oaths she can swear.’ Phrase for phrase, Arbella’s rhetoric – the hyperbole, the self-aggrandizement – was becoming more and more like that she ha
d used in 1603. And, as in 1603, one has to juggle the questions of intent and insanity. Was she delusional? Was she reporting sober fact? Or (the least attractive option) was she – to a greater or lesser degree, consciously or unconsciously – sacrificing the name and safety of those who loved her in the hopes of herself climbing a few steps higher into the favour of the authorities? Or was it a cocktail of all three?

  Once again, there is the possibility that Arbella may have been trying to win the king’s attention by herself ‘exposing’ plots, in a way which had worked, albeit drastically, ten years ago. Once again she seems – divide and conquer – to have been trying to ally herself with one official against the rest. Once again, her attempt was timed to tie in with a significant event; in this case, the royal wedding. Was this planned exposure the reason she had felt sure enough to order her dresses so confidently?

  At the beginning of February, questioned further (just as the royal wedding preparations were nearing their final stage), Arbella finally went so far as to declare that Mary Talbot did still have a plan to free her from the Tower and help her into the protection of the Catholics. To this Arbella had given scant assent: ‘The Lady Arbella doth not deny468 but of her self she would be delivered into the hands of the papists, Turks, Jews or infidels so she might be quit out of their hands. But she doth not like her aunt’s projects, though her aunt and she do both aim at one end.’ Arbella told Dr Palmer that she was now revealing the plot only for Waad’s sake; Mary Talbot had said the lieutenant’s throat469 would have to be cut. The men hastened to assure her that a project so dangerous would indeed require ‘force and bloodshed’;470 that ‘If the lord mayor would go about to deliver her from hence, he would not be able to prevail.’ But they may not really have felt so confident. The problem for their investigation was that the accusations against Mary Talbot ‘come all from one root,471 namely the only [unsupported] relation of the Lady Arbella’, so that the charge might yet ‘fail in the groundwork and foundation. Therefore it is to be advisedly considered how credit may be given to these accusations, and how they may be upheld by other concurring matter or circumstances.’ In trying to assess the situation, they were debating the very questions that trouble us today.