Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Arbella, to be sure, was threatening wildly – but when she talked as wildly in her Hardwick days, inventing a presumably fictitious plot to claim the attention of the court, Henry Cavendish had arrived with forty men, which suggests at least a nugget of hard reality. By the same token, it is worth noting that Waad, like Brounker before him, was inclined to believe the basis of Arbella’s story: ‘Now, that there was a plot472 for the Lady Arbella’s escape, it is out of question.’ Arbella’s devoted gentlewoman Mistress Bradshaw, he said, had left her service rather than be party to it, riding north on a carrier’s horse – though later evidence suggests it was in fact ill-health that drove Mrs Bradshaw away. He weighed the evidence, including the demeanour of the two women. ‘Therefore I note these contrary courses of these two ladies; the lady Arbella charging, imputing and discovering her aunt in this sort, and the countess will not take knowledge of these offences, but seeketh all means of reconciliation.’

  Shrewdly, Waad noted that when Mary was told her niece wanted her ‘removed’, she did not demand the cause of it (‘which in reason she should have done for her own clearing’). The implication is that she knew already; that Arbella’s allegations were justified. But when Waad told the countess that Arbella’s words had been reported at court, she turned upon him, ‘cursing and banning most impiously’. Was she trying to protect herself – and perhaps also her niece? Mary said that Arbella would be sorry when she ‘came to her self’. Arbella, she said, was in ‘some melancholy humour’, caused by distress at her husband’s ‘deboshed carriage’.473 (His debts? His conversion? Or the modus vivendi which, in tacit rejection of their relationship, he seemed by now to have agreed with the authorities?)

  But Arbella may indeed have been sick. She certainly had been so the previous autumn: she herself referred to her ‘late dangerous illness’, and the mentions of ‘fits of distemper474 and convulsions’, of the ‘dangerous distemper’ Waad said ‘could be no fiction’, come often enough to suggest that this was no single event, quickly over. Mary Talbot, frantically and repeatedly trying to reach her niece, claimed she needed to ‘minister physic’475 to her. Mary even threatened herself to write to the king, demanding access to Arbella: strange behaviour in one concerned only that she was herself about to be caught out in a major felony.

  Arbella may have been at once ill and actively scheming: just because they are after you doesn’t mean you aren’t paranoid. But, again, Arbella may have been ill and, through her illness, deluded to a greater or a lesser degree. (And Mary may have failed to press for Arbella’s words only because she knew how unlikely they were to relate to reality.) Several earlier biographers have pointed out that any easy diagnosis of insanity, with its dismissive implications, should be treated very cautiously, simply because it is unlikely anyone would have tried to free a lunatic. But episodes of porphyria can come and go quickly; when Mary said that Arbella would soon regret her words, she may have known from experience that it would be so. We are left with only one comparative certainty: that the same war was raging in Arbella’s mind as in her body. This was the idea towards which Moundford was reaching when, exasperatingly, he prescribed her ‘my old cordial of patience and humility’. ‘Good madame, said I: remember one rule which I have often repeated. I did learn it of a wiseman. If thou be crossed, cross not thyself.’ She was suffering, he suggested, from Agritudo (sickness) rather than Morbus (disease), and the cure lay in her own hands.

  On 10 March Chamberlain was writing that ‘the Lady Arbella hath been dangerously sick476 of convulsions, and is now said to be distracted’; on 26 April, that Arbella was under restraint, though she ‘continues crackt477 in her brain’. (He added that the countess of Shrewsbury was under extra restraint ‘upon good cause as the voice goes’; clearly, contemporaries did not insist on a one-dimensional reading of the story.)

  The affair dragged on. Soon afterwards Lord Grey was made close prisoner for what turned out to be no more than a matter of ‘love and dalliance’478 with Arbella’s gentlewoman. (Chamberlain thought it was with Arbella herself, a more dangerous possibility.) Another prisoner, Thomas Bull, whose relationship with Arbella’s kinswoman Mistress Pierrepont was revealed by ‘some speech of my Lady Arbella’s in some of her distempers’, complained they were all kept so close in consequence that for twelve weeks they did not leave their lodging.

  Then, on 6 May 1613, Sir William Waad was discharged from his position as lieutenant – ‘removed suddenly from his place, to the great contentment of the prisoners,’ wrote Sir Thomas Lake. Arbella’s part in this is difficult to assess. On the one hand, she was apparently his victim. Waad was dismissed not only because of the ‘continual complaints’ as to his general comportment, but on the specific charge of ‘certain gold embezzled479 from the Lady Arbella, whereof either he or his lady or his daughter cannot so clearly acquit themselves’. On the other hand, Arbella may have set Waad up; have used him to position herself in a favourable light, in a manner as deliberate as the measure of a masque, or the composition of the tableaux vivants of a later century. Here the evidence comes from Viscount Fenton,480 who wrote to a relation on 20 May that Arbella had obtained a duplicate key to her prison. She had persuaded Waad’s daughter to lend her a key, from which she took a wax impression. But she did not plan to use it in the obvious way. Instead, she asked Fenton to present her duplicate to the king, in a dramatic gesture designed to show that with the means of escape in her hands, she none the less chose instead to submit herself to James’s mercy.

  By her stroke with the keys, of course, Arbella also rid herself of a lieutenant she probably had every reason to dislike. It was said that Waad was accused of being too lax with other prisoners, and too strict with Arbella herself. It was, moreover, he who had first set in motion the train of events that led to her recapture, after his early alarm when William had got away. But if Arbella’s theatricals were aimed at impressing James she had, as usual, misjudged her psychology. Evidence of her continued ability to behave autonomously, even in the Tower, is more likely to have thrown the king into fresh anger and alarm than to have convinced him of her loyalty.

  Arbella’s actions in these months are confirmed by other sources: some words of Carr’s, and the fact that Waad’s daughter and a servant of the Talbots were themselves committed to the Tower at this time. But where Waad’s removal was concerned, it may be that all Arbella said and did does not represent the whole story. The plot around her, indeed, could even have been a pretext or an opportunity stage-managed by a third party – for there was a third party which, in these months, urgently needed a way to get rid of Waad, and a way to keep the Tower’s prisoners isolated from each other while pursuing their own plan. And that third party included persons powerful enough to make Waad’s dismissal a certainty.

  * * *

  At the end of April 1613,481 one Sir Thomas Overbury was committed to the Tower. The nominal reason for his imprisonment (the discourtesy of his having refused an appointment abroad) was even shakier than the grounds for Arbella’s incarceration. But the fact was that Overbury, a long-time friend and mentor of the king’s favourite Carr, had dared oppose Carr’s marriage to Frances Howard, niece to Henry Howard, that earl of Northampton who had been so unpleasantly busy about Arbella and Mary’s affairs.

  For Frances, perhaps with the connivance of her lover and her uncle, the incarceration of Overbury on a pretext was only the precursor to a darker plan: his murder. For this, she and her conspirators needed to get rid of Waad. Venal in his own way though the lieutenant may have been, he was active, observant and no fit man for their plan. So Waad was fired; and if the Overbury murder were the real reason he was got rid of, one still notes with interest that one of the instruments of his fall – one of the two noblemen Northampton arranged should call for Waad’s removal – was none other than Gilbert Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury.

  Waad was replaced by Sir Gervase Helwys, ‘a somewhat unknown man’, who was profoundly grateful for this new promotion – gratefu
l enough to keep his eyes tight shut, maybe, as a stream of poisoned tarts and jellies from Frances Howard made their way to the unfortunate Overbury, topped off by a poisoned enema from a bribed apothecary. By the autumn Overbury was dead. A few years later, his death was to rebound dramatically upon everyone involved. But then, in 1613, it passed off quietly. Carr married Frances Howard, very soon after Overbury’s putrid corpse had been buried with excessive haste in the Tower precincts. And in the Tower that autumn, attention was focused once again upon Arbella, and another possible escape.

  In November, Northampton was writing again to Carr – a letter which, while itself vague enough to apply to anyone, is endorsed with the single word ‘Arbella’. It began with some suggestive words which seem to expand on the fact that Mary Talbot, who had just been allowed out on leave to visit her ailing husband, had suddenly been recalled to the Tower again. ‘Though a letter was in drawing with an humble suit for longer leave,’ Northampton wrote, ‘yet upon better advertisement my lord [Shrewsbury] resolves to send her back to Mr Lieutenant.’ Northampton went on to explain the details of the newly uncovered plan.

  With much ado,482 and withal by good fortune, we have hit upon the place destined to the escape. It falls out to be under a study of Mr Revenes but of these things I shall have occasion before it be long to deal more thoroughly. In the meantime his Majesty will be pleased to reserve this secret from all the world but yourself, till we sound the bottom, for it hath thus far been carried with a great deal of art.

  Much, of course, hinges on the identity of ‘Mr Revenes’, and Northampton’s handwriting has been variously interpreted; Reeves (Arbella’s faithful servant) has been offered as one possibility. But it is suggestive that, shortly after this letter was written, a Mr ‘Ruthen’ (also ‘Riothen’) – presumed to be Patrick Ruthven, the earl of Gowrie’s brother mentioned earlier – was committed close prisoner. Ruthven’s servant was also examined, and asked whether he had ever heard the noise of hammering coming from his master’s study. (He had; but had put it down to some experiment being carried on with one of Ruthven’s regular visitors, an alchemist. Experimentation seems to have been a popular Tower hobby.)

  The link between the two prisoners was given more definite form in the spring of 1614. Arbella had been selling jewellery – some of the pearls she had bought for princess Elizabeth’s wedding. (She seems – predictably – to have been cheated by her agent.) But the point was that the errand man claimed, when questioned, that he had not known they were Arbella’s. ‘He answered that Master Ruthen483 both delivered the pearls and gave him warrant [to sell them].’ And to whom did he hand the money? Why, to Master Ruthen. It is enough to make the least suspicious wonder if Ruthven were not helping Arbella to collect money for yet another escape attempt.

  Once again, it would seem, Arbella was conspiring with a man who not only was a distant connection through her grandmother Lady Lennox, but who also felt he had his own claim to the Scottish throne, through a disputed marriage some way back on the family tree. Smyth, Arbella’s servant, and Dr Palmer, the divine Arbella had asked to oversee the sale, were both imprisoned that summer; ‘for my Lady Arabellay’s escape out of the Tower’, in the words of one contemporary. (It was only recently that Smyth had finally been allowed to speak with his mistress, and it is tempting to wonder whether the authorities did not permit the chaperoned meeting in the hopes of overhearing something compromising.) On 7 July Chamberlain recounted that ‘Dr Palmer, a divine,484 and Crompton, a gentleman usher were committed to the Tower last week for some business about the Lady Arbella.’ On 6 August her servant Reeves, too, was described by the Reverend Thomas Larkin as having been returned to imprisonment in the Tower about a fortnight ago for ‘some new complot for her [Arbella’s] escape and delivery’.

  But if there were such a plot – and that seems fairly certain – it was now over. King Christian of Denmark visited England again this year, but where was the ‘holy friendship’ he had boasted when she needed it? Chamberlain’s letter went on to say that Arbella was ‘far out of frame485 this midsummer moon’. This was not just a repeat of the ambiguous rumours that had spread in 1603. There was indeed grave reason to fear for Arbella’s health, in mind as well as body.

  ‘I dare to die’

  EVEN WILLIAM, ABROAD, had long been hearing reports dire enough to convince him that his wife had become ‘distracted of mind whereby he knew that she could not live long’. Knowing that King James had no mind ‘to let him and his lady486 come together’, he was resolute to show that he was neither ‘beast nor fool; but that he hath courage enough to anger the best of them’. He was now openly called ‘a prince of England’ by some of his companions. (Maddeningly, the edges of this document have been burnt so that the subsequent mention of how William’s ancestor, the conquering Henry VII, had once sailed from Brittany into Wales with a thousand men stands alone in menacing uncertainty.)

  William’s concern must have been partly on his own account. He had once again been venting his regular complaint, that he couldn’t live on four hundred pounds, and was threatening to travel to Rome – and with a known Catholic, the poet Henry Constable, who ‘persuaded him to ill courses’. (Constable – an old ally both of the Cavendish-Talbot clan and of Essex – had, twenty years before, hailed Arbella herself for her wit, judgement and memory, poetically yearning to place himself under the protection of her wing.) But Arbella herself was now reaching the end of her tether; ‘sad’, as Bosola said of the Duchess of Malfi,

  as one long us’d to’t:487 and she seems

  Rather to welcome the end of misery

  Than shun it.

  The Duchess counted this world, she said ‘a tedious theatre, / For I do play a part in’t ’gainst my will.’ But she (little knowing that her murder was planned) none the less believed she had found her own way out of her misery. ‘The Church enjoins fasting: I’ll starve myself to death.’ Arbella’s imagination was tending the same way.

  There is something both moving and disturbing about the shortage of information we have for the last year of Arbella’s life. It may be just the chance of some lost documents; but it feels more like a conspiracy of silence; as if at the last she gave in, and colluded with her oppressors. As if she – the protester, the writer – turned her back and retreated, finally, into muteness. If she had ever seemed histrionic – self-pitying, a spoiled little rich girl – now, surely, she had cause. And yet she seems at this juncture to have chosen the route of stoic suffering.

  We know she was subject to depression, to the ‘dumps’. At the start of her captivity in the Tower she had done everything she could to keep herself in spirits; asked for her lady companion and her embroiderer. But surely by now, without hope or stimuli, in whatever exercise she was allowed the black dog must have shadowed her footsteps every inch of the way.

  There is one particularly telling glimpse488 of Arbella in these last years, with the most frightening implications for her sanity. Imagine a July day, and Arbella (secretive? mocking? distraught?) stopping an unknown interlocutor on his way through the Tower and asking if he could maintain a confidence in order to prevent a civil war. No descriptive details come down through the bare statement given to the lieutenant. Indeed, the witness stressed that he lent Arbella an ear only to discover her plan.

  That plan was improbable in the last degree. It would be rumoured – Arbella said – that her husband William had died. He would seem to be buried, but in fact smuggled into the Tower, known only to a few. Her auditor protested that William would eventually be seen; Arbella said the windows to the garden would be boarded up. He told her how dangerous her project was; she countered that she was protected by foreign and domestic supporters. Asked if Mary Talbot were involved, she said ‘by no means’.

  Questions have been asked about the date of this document – 1613 or 1614? But what strikes home to the ordinary reader is its poignancy.

  Just as in the last months at Hardwick, Arbella could have been either
delusional or trying to delude; fantasizing for bitter amusement, or else to create a smokescreen to cover some more realistic plan. But, just as at Hardwick, one is inclined less to juggle with the medical possibilities – was she clinically certifiable, and if so for causes emotional, genetic, or biochemical? – than to pity the form her fantasy took.

  In her restricted life in the Tower, so short of other pleasures or distractions, her affection for William was never going to dwindle. More likely, she fanned the flames with brooding. But she must by now, and with the failure of the latest escape attempt, have despaired of ever seeing him again. A garbled story spread in the autumn of 1613 that William had died abroad; ‘should be dead at Dunkirk’,489 as Chamberlain told it. He had, indeed, by his own account, been sick of smallpox and ‘in great danger’. If Arbella heard the tale of his death – if it were not just a Chinese whisper originating with her own fantasy – it can only have added to her agony, just as the waxwork effigy of her husband’s corpse tormented the Duchess of Malfi.

  In the summer of 1614, after the failure of her last escape attempt, the conditions of Arbella’s imprisonment seemed to be set for the long haul. Crompton was allowed to organize her accounts, and pawn some more of her jewels. But such evidence of preparations for an indefinite stay can hardly have cheered her. She knew (she may have been deluded; she was never stupid) that her career had been a series of mistakes. She was helpless to herself and dangerous to her family – her ‘guiltless friends’, as she had written from Hardwick, that easy captivity. Every night, the sound of the keys turning in the locks forced home the lesson of how futile her schemes must be. With the dwindling light, as summer slipped into autumn, Arbella’s will to live faded away.