Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  But William Seymour, alone amid the leading players of her life, survived Arbella by almost fifty years; a half-century which saw him develop from the rather shadowy figure of his first marriage to one of the most prominent peers of the day. Within a few months of Arbella’s death, he was petitioning to be allowed home. He wrote to James on New Year’s Day 1616: ‘Vouchsafe dread Sovereign to cast your merciful eyes upon the most humble and penitent wretch that youth and ignorance have thrown into transgression …’ A favourable answer came back very quickly – as it probably would have done even had he written a degree less humbly. When Arbella was alive, the authorities preferred William should be as far away from her as possible. With her dead, to have him back in the realm and beyond the influence of any foreign power just saw a satisfactory line drawn under the whole sorry situation.

  The day after William arrived back, in February, the king gave him an audience and a pardon; in November he was created a knight of the bath in company with Charles, prince of Wales. Four months after that, he married again. It was not quick, by the standards of the day, and one has to remember that if it was only eighteen months since Arbella’s death it was more than five years since he had lived with her, and that only briefly.

  His choice of bride seems significant: Frances Devereux, eldest daughter of the great earl of Essex Arbella had known (and sister to the incumbent). ‘Dear Lamb’, he would address her warmly in letters, signing himself ‘Your most faithful and affectionate husband’. But this Frances is revealed in her later dealings as yet another formidable lady. A portrait shows her long-nosed and tight-lipped, a lock of her father Essex’s hair welded into a macabre earring. If she tried to rule her husband, it was a pattern repeated in their children; their son John (‘the mad duke’) cited as reason for separating from his wife ‘her endeavour to govern him’. During the difficult years ahead, no matter how kindly William and Frances wrote, it is noticeable that they did not seem to be often together. But perhaps the times were to try them rather high.

  In 1620 William was elected a member of parliament, but on his grandfather’s death a year later (his father and elder brother Edward being dead already) he was translated to the House of Lords as earl of Hertford. Arbella’s steward Hugh Crompton and his fellow gentleman servant Edward Kirton both became MPs under his patronage. Much of William’s life at this stage seems to have been lived far from court, at Netley on Southampton Water, a former Cistercian abbey, and in the mansion Inigo Jones had built for him on the site of another abbey at Amesbury.

  The earl of Clarendon wrote later that William had been ‘so wholly given up to a country life, where he lived in splendour, that he had an aversion, and even an un-aptness, for business’; that he ‘loved and was even wedded so much to his ease that he loved his book above all exercises; and had even contracted such a laziness of mind, that he had no delight in an open and liberal conversation, and cared not to discourse and argue upon those points that he understood very well, only for the trouble of contending’. This, mind you, was to be set against his ‘honour so unblemished’ and ‘notable steadiness’, and perhaps this cocktail of qualities itself helped to make him significant in the noisy, divisive years ahead. As England began to split into factions, William was repeatedly spoken of as someone whose own choice would draw many others to either the royalist or the parliamentarian side. ‘It was thought his example would either keep out or draw in many with him.’

  Perhaps his enforced wanderings in France (where noblemen more easily placed went to learn swordsmanship and the handling of the ‘great horses’) had toughened him in some way. Found in a duel some years later, ‘the earl closed with [his opponent] and had him down at his mercy’. ‘It seems my lord of Hertford was infinitely abused and provoked,’ the raconteur added excusingly.

  In the Civil War, he was to play a part first political, and then military. As early as 1628 he was one of the justices urging Charles I to think better of a proposed taxation. This time, the advice was successful: but in 1640 he was one of the twelve English peers whose petition, ‘in all humility’, failed to steer the king away from his collision course with parliament. Besides the new monopolies and the Scottish wars, the peers lamented ‘sundry innovations in matters of religion [and] … The great increase of popery’. If William had made a conversion on the continent, it was not of any great depth or durability. He subsequently waded into a debate between whether jure divino, divine right, lay with the bishops or the presbytery, declaring that ‘For my part I think that neither the one nor the other, nor any government whatsoever, is jure divino’ – a sentiment, for a committed royalist, surely revolutionary enough in its own way.

  The crisis of the country seemed to be dragging William out of his quiet life. He was one of the commissioners who negotiated the treaty of Ripon with the Scots; he was made a privy counsellor, ‘to the public joy’. His earldom was upgraded to a marquisate in thanks for his good work and good advice, and in the spring of 1641 the marquis of Hertford reluctantly accepted the appointment of governor to the prince of Wales (succeeding, at the latter’s suggestion, Arbella’s cousin William, Charles Cavendish’s son, now duke of Newcastle).

  At this delicate, but not yet openly divided, stage, his importance lay in the fact that he was clearly trusted in some measure by both king and Commons; the latter stipulating that William should be present when anyone came to talk to Prince Charles ‘lest any evil counsels might be given him’. But when, a year later, open conflict finally came, he seems to have made his choice unhesitatingly, ‘notwithstanding’, as Clarendon wrote, ‘all his allies, and those with whom he had the greatest familiarity and friendship, were of the opposite party’. One should perhaps remember that, after all, he would still have been the best contender for the throne himself had their enemies successfully eliminated the Stuart dynasty.

  The marquis of Hertford was appointed the royalist lieutenant-general of the west. He was on the same side as the duke of Newcastle, who held Yorkshire for the king until the defeat at Marston Moor. (A defeat, some said, triggered by the fact that Newcastle, in the artistic traditions of his family, was said to be too busy ‘fornicating with the Nine Muses’ to be an effective commander.) But William was set against his brother-in-law the earl of Essex, a commander of the parliamentary forces, and his sympathies must have been divided quite agonizingly.

  William was now in his fifties, and never an obvious choice for a military commander. His abilities in the field seem to have been mixed, and increasingly he came into conflict with his second-in-command, King Charles’s nephew, the young professional soldier Prince Maurice. (Especially they clashed over William’s reluctance to let his troops sack the countryside, while Maurice saw no reason not to give the soldiery their head.) William was eventually withdrawn from his military role – nominally, so that he should be closer to the king. Ironically, his brother-in-law Essex, on the other side, was himself being sidelined in much the same way. They were not natural place-winners in that family.

  But, as the tides of war turned against the royalists, William remained close to Charles I. He was with the king when Charles negotiated with parliament from his prison/refuge on the Isle of Wight, and by his side at the time of the king’s trial. William was one of the four noblemen who (so established legend has it) begged that they, as Charles’s advisers, should be executed in his place. This refused, they asked at least that they might be allowed to give his body burial and perform ‘their last duty to their dead master’. They were allowed to take the corpse from London to Windsor; but there, the new governor of the castle refused to allow the bishop of London to carry out the burial rite according to the discredited Book of Common Prayer. The lords, moreover, found the church so altered by despoilers that they could not find an appropriate burial place until a friendly resident showed them where Henry VIII lay, so that Charles might be interred in some royal company.

  William was now out of the war, allowed (on twenty thousand pounds’ security) to ret
ire to Netley. From there in 1650 he wrote to his wife, about a planned visit: ‘I am confident you will find it neither unpleasant nor unsafe if any place in England be safe, for all are now alike, but this has something the advantage being out of all roads.’ But he was still keeping the exiled Charles II supplied with money (one source says as much as five thousand pounds a year, besides what he had provided for his father Charles I). And in 1651 the council of state was ordering the marquis to move on again, to Amesbury. ‘We are informed that many dangerous and disaffected persons resort to your house.’ Not far away, in parliamentarian Marlborough, William’s brother Francis Seymour’s house had been commandeered by hostile forces, and his wife and daughter held prisoner, while William’s eldest son, Lord Beauchamp, was sent to the Tower for his efforts in the royal cause.

  As far back as 1644, indeed, sent abroad for his health (his uncle’s influence helping him through the parliamentary lines), the eighteen-year-old Beauchamp had carried a letter from Charles I to the earl of Essex, asking if they could not try to settle the dispute between them. The health troubles were serious ones; five of the eight children of William Seymour would predecease him, his eldest daughter Arbella among them. Sick with what was probably tuberculosis, Beauchamp was allowed out of the Tower to take the waters at Epsom, but in vain. In 1654 he died. ‘An unspeakable loss in England’, wrote Clarendon from abroad. By Beauchamp’s loss, wrote another royalist, ‘the west will be much unprovided. But I am confident the marquis of Hertford, tho’ he be old, would not be idle.’ Oliver Cromwell, himself ageing, sent a messenger to William to commiserate on his loss, and later invited him to an extraordinary meeting.

  ‘Cromwell received him with all imaginable respect; and after dinner took him by the hand and led him into his withdrawing room, where they two being alone, he told the marquis he had desired his company that he might have his advice what to do. “For”, said he, “I am not able to bear the weight of the business that is upon me.”’ William advised him to recall Charles II from exile, and to restore the monarchy.

  Cromwell died in 1658, leaving the protectorate in the unsafe hands of his eldest son. When the Restoration of the monarchy did indeed come in 1660, William was among the party who travelled to Canterbury to greet the king, and later that year Charles II recreated for him his great-grandfather’s title of duke of Somerset. But he did not live long to enjoy it. On 14 October his son-in-law, the earl of Winchilsea, was writing: ‘I doubt he cannot hold out long, the king was this afternoon to see him.’ William died at Essex House in London on 24 October 1660, of ‘a general decay of nature’. ‘A man of great honour, interest and estate,’ Clarendon called him, ‘of an universal esteem over the whole kingdom.’

  The bishop of Salisbury added that William, in times of distress, claimed to have found comfort in repeating Psalm 57 – and one sentence particularly: ‘Under the shadow of thy wings shall be my refuge, till this tyranny is overpast.’ To the bishop, as to the ageing William, the tyranny was presumably parliamentarian rule, which kept from England its rightful monarchy. And yet, how differently could the sentiment have been used earlier in William’s (and Arbella’s) story.

  But there is another ‘wrap’ to the story: one that would have pleased old Bess, and Lady Lennox – and Arbella and William too, probably. As the Talbot lands were broken up and the Seymour titles passed sideways, the Cavendish family rose ever higher in the seventeenth century. From Bess’s son William came the dukes of Devonshire, from Charles the dukes of Newcastle (and from her daughter Frances the dukes of Kingston) until, in the nineteenth century, marriage brought them into the Bowes-Lyon family. By then, William Seymour’s line (through his daughter Frances) had joined the Cavendish family tree. The house of Windsor came originally from James I’s daughter Elizabeth; so the blood of both Arbella’s grandmothers, and of her husband (along with that of the earl of Essex) is united in Britain’s present royal family.

  There is, alas, no reason to give credence to the rumours that Arbella bore William a living child. Mary Talbot was finally brought to admit she thought it unlikely, and William denied it. There is certainly no reason to put faith in the theory (issuing from America’s south in the 1940s) that her daughter was the New England Quaker Mary Barratt who, after marrying a William Dyer in London, went on to become America’s only female religious martyr. This was floated as a purely speculative possibility and carries with it not the faintest shred of proof, nor even of probability. And yet, the new world does have a share in Arbella’s legacy.

  In the years immediately after her death, the name Arbella crops up in other prominent north country families. Probably some of its bearers were named in compliment to our Lady Arbella: George Chaworth’s daughter, for example, and Lady Arbella Clinton, sister to the fourth earl of Lincoln (himself imprisoned in the Tower, not long before, for his opposition to the forced loan raised by Charles I). The Clinton family (through the maternal line, the Knyvets) were tied by a web of connections, social and political, to Arbella’s family. (Lady Chandos of Barnet had been a Clinton.) Even by comparison with that of Arbella Stuart, Arbella Clinton’s is a dramatic story.

  At the end of March 1630, eleven ships set sail from Southampton, bound for the Americas – not the aristocratic trading posts of Virginia, but the northern coast of Massachusetts. It was the desire for religious freedom that had sent them on this dangerous passage across the sea. On board the small fleet were Sir Richard Saltonstall (whose family were close friends to Captain John Smith), the wealthy Isaac Johnson (grandson to the puritan bishop of Lincoln) and his well-born wife – and another puritan, John Winthrop, whose name would go down in history. The ship named rear-admiral of the fleet was the Ambassador; the vice-admiral was the Talbot. The admiral, the flagship on which the prominent settlers sailed, had been renamed in honour of her ‘illustrious passenger’, Johnson’s wife. The old Eagle – a ship of 350 tons, with fifty-two seamen and twenty-eight pieces of ordnance – had become the Arbella before she put out to sea.

  John Winthrop’s diary chronicled the voyage. The Channel winds at first served them little better than they had Arbella Stuart twenty years earlier. April had begun, and still the party lay near English shores; so near that ‘the Lady Arbella and the gentlewomen, and Mr Isaac Johnson and some of the others went on shore to refresh themselves.’ They finally weighed anchor and got through the Needles, only to be becalmed again as they waited for the rest of the fleet. They saw eight sail astern ‘and feared they might be Dunkirkers’ – the ships of England’s Spanish enemy, clustered around Dunkirk. The hammocks were taken down, guns were loaded, inflammable bedding thrown overboard. ‘The Lady Arbella and the other women and children remained in the lower decks that they might be out of danger.’ But ‘It was much to see how cheerful and comfortable all the company appeared, not a woman or child that showed fear,’ Winthrop wrote admiringly.

  The ships proved to be their own friends. Fear and danger ‘turned into mirth and friendly entertainment’. For the next two months Winthrop’s diary records their life at sea – the catching of cod, the coldness of the weather, the punishment of young men caught fighting and of a servant cheating at rations; the winds, the sighting of a whale, the birth of a child and the death of a cow; a storm in which few were sick ‘except the women, who kept under hatches’; days when they fasted, since it was too rough to prepare food; a day when they feasted the masters of the other ships in the roundhouse, ‘the lady and the gentlewomen’ being fed in the great cabin, out of the way.

  It was early June, on the Lord’s Day, when ‘we sounded (as we had so often before) and had ground at about 80 fathoms, and the mist thus breaking up we saw the shore.’ A week later they came at last to port and anchor, and landed at Salem (as it was later known) ‘where we supped with a good venison pasty and good beer, and at night we returned to our ship, but some of the women stayed behind.’ At Cape Ann, they gathered ‘a good store of fine strawberries’, and ‘American Indians came about us and laid
there all night.’

  The Arbella had got through her journey well, though other ships of the fleet had suffered more severely. The men went looking for new ground to settle – to what became Charlestown, on Massachusetts Bay. But tragedy was waiting for Winthrop in the new land, and the death of his son in an accident broke the flow of his diary. It is from different records that we know the fate of others. A letter the next year to the countess of Lincoln in England from her former steward, the settler Thomas Dudley, tells how many died ‘for want of warm lodging and good diet, and in the sudden increase of heat that they endure who are landed here in summer – especially after the salt meat at sea’. Every household, he said, had lost someone: two hundred of the original thousand had died, and some of the others had returned home. Isaac Johnson died early, on 30 September 1630, ‘his wife having died a month before’. She was buried at Salem, in an unmarked grave; she had spent little more than six weeks in the promised land.

  But just as the colony eventually prospered, as other settlers survived, so the name Arbella lived on, linked with a speech that became part of America’s mythology. It was during his voyage on board the Arbella that Winthrop (later the first governor of Massachusetts) wrote memorably of the settlers’ mission: ‘to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God’; to keep ‘the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace … For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.’

  Even in England, after her death, Arbella Stuart’s name was associated with ideas of liberty and democracy. It is interesting today to read contemporary speculation that England, after Elizabeth’s death, might have been governed as a republic or commonwealth, with Arbella as titular queen – the kind of monarchy with which we are now familiar, though it may have looked less convincing in 1603. The years of her troubles saw Sir Edward Coke (himself sent to the Tower in 1621, for his opposition to the crown) develop his ideas of civil liberties; the Civil War soon set out to institute the freedoms for lack of which she had suffered. In one ballad from the eighteenth century, Arbella’s enemies represent the ‘tyranny’ that would ‘strive to chain the free-born mind’. Verses that appeared soon after her death, entitled ‘The True Lovers’ Knot Untied’, put the theme more clearly: