‘I never raised Rent’, said she,
‘Nor yet oppressed the tenant poor.
I never took no bribes for fines
For why I had enough before.
‘I would I had a milkmaid been,
Or born of some more low degree
Then I might have loved where I liked
And no man could have hindered me.’
Of course, it is by no means clear that Arbella would have shared the sentiment of the ‘True Lovers’ Knot’ (any more than it is clear that, had she and hers succeeded to the throne instead of James and his son Charles, the seventeenth century would have unrolled less bloodily). She has attracted many writers; Shakespeare himself may have pleaded her cause in Cymbeline, with its virtuous cross-dressing princess, forbidden marriage and banished husband. But since then, successive generations have reflected upon her the preoccupations of their own age – usually by amputating some inconvenient part of her personality.
The ballads that proclaimed her an innocent victim of royal tyranny disregarded her own immense pride in her royalty. The Victorians, in their determination to see her as a romantic heroine, ignored any trace of ambition in her. By contrast I, as a writer of the twenty-first century, am strongly drawn to the idea of Arbella as a contender; her ambition, her activity. But perhaps this, too, is a perception that will be challenged by later generations.
The historians who wrote of her in the middle of the twentieth century seemed to regard her with disapproval as a woman who wanted too much, and who behaved foolishly as she set about achieving it – if not insane then unbalanced, certainly; and perhaps that is a clue to the latest revival of interest. It is only recently that we have been able to acknowledge all her problems, her ‘distraction’ – to dwell on the agonized pages of evidence – and still to admire her.
Even Arbella’s defenders have felt the need in some sense to excuse her, to explain her away – ‘an eccentric even the Jacobeans failed to explain’, as her recent biographer David Durant put it. More often, she has been dismissed with a kind of casual cruelty. Her life, wrote the not untypical David Mathew, who in 1963 devoted to her one chapter in his book on King James, ‘had been a very sad adventure. Old Lady Shrewsbury made a mistake in arranging her conception.’ This is an extraordinary dismissal of a woman who lived, loved and wrote memorable letters; who enjoyed red deer pies and lute music, and may have inspired one of the greatest works of English literature – even if she failed either to rule a nation or to change the course of history.
After several decades of neglect, Arbella Stuart benefited from the rise of feminist criticism, which triggered a resurgence of interest in her through the 1990s. She has received fresh recognition as a writer and a rebel; ‘Arbella Stuart and the Rhetoric of Disguise and Defiance’, read the title of one American essay. Yet she fits only uneasily into the original, the simple, feminist model. Arbella did not eschew the ‘normal’ woman’s destiny of marriage. She sought it desperately. Although the choices open to her would undoubtedly have been more varied had she been born a boy, her painful youth saw her dominated not by a man or men, but by more powerful women. This seems to me a field of conflict which we, today, have not yet explored to any great degree. Is it a coincidence (as Sara Jayne Steen first asked) that the periods of greatest interest in Arbella Stuart have been those which have also seen us making delicate adjustments to our ideas about women and society – the dawn of the twentieth century; the years around the 1960s; the present day?
But Arbella’s true appeal is more fundamental. There is a temptation to feel that any life deemed worthy of a biography must exemplify something; must be, in some sense, exemplary. The life of Arbella Stuart has been variously taken to epitomize martyrdom (sexual, religious or political), rebellion and romance. She seems to me rather to represent how far the human spirit can fall into frustration and despair without ever giving up completely. ‘I am the Duchess of Malfi still,’ declared Webster’s heroine, abandoned and imprisoned. Whatever the failings of Arbella Stuart, she fought the same fight for her identity.
The portrait of Arbella as a toddler, by an anonymous artist, still hangs at Hardwick today.
The elaborate symbolism of the Lennox (or Darnley) Jewel alludes to the family’s turbulent past and ambitious hopes. The four figures represent faith, hope, truth and victory.
A phoenix rises from the ashes while a demon warrior, personifying time, drags a woman by the hair.
Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox, Arbella’s paternal grandmother.
The young Charles Stuart, Arbella’s father, with his elder brother Lord Darnley.
The Chatsworth Bess built was replaced in later centuries by the present graceful house.
Bess’s first building at Hardwick is now a roofless shell. But fragments remain, such as the stairway.
The giant statues – Gog and Magog – in the Hill Great Chamber.
Bess of Hardwick in her sixties in a portrait of the 1590s.
Mary, Queen of Scots, the prisoner who changed from friend to enemy.
Many of the embroideries worked by Mary, Queen of Scots (often with Bess of Hardwick) carry a hidden message. The menacing cat here has Queen Elizabeth’s sandy colouring.
Queen Elizabeth receiving the Dutch ambassadors (c.1585). The earl of Leicester and Charles Howard the lord admiral (later earl of Nottingham) are depicted among the watching courtiers. Despite the lavish decoration of the walls, the queen’s ladies in waiting sit on cushions on the floor.
Nicholas Hilliard’s A Young Man Leaning Against a Tree Among Roses is believed to have been modelled on the earl of Essex.
Elizabeth in 1595
Chief Minister, William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
Left: Hilliard’s miniature of Sir Walter Ralegh.
Right: Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s controller of intelligence.
In the Hardwick Hall portrait painted when she was thirteen, Arbella stands with books at her hand and a tiny dog, symbol of loyalty, at her feet.
‘Hardwick Hall/More glass than wall’. The rooftops of Bess’s great creation exalt her initials to the sky: ES (Elizabeth Shrewsbury).
Work on the Old Hall was not even completed when the new Hardwick Hall began to rise only a few hundred yards away.
The echoing spaces of the gallery, where the royal commissioner surprised Arbella in 1603.
The gatehouse, where Arbella was halted in her abortive flight.
This magnificent sea dog table, with its sensuous mythological beasts, stood at Hardwick in Arbella’s day.
Women and men alike went to court with a fortune on their backs. A pearl-embroidered doublet could cost as much as a year’s revenue from an estate.
But conspicuous consumption was not the whole story– a gown, like any other work of art, could carry a message, and the eyes and ears embroidered on Elizabeth’s dress signify that the queen saw and heard everything that happened in her realm.
James I
Robert Cecil, his chief minister and Burghley’s son.
London in the early seventeenth century. Old St Paul’s still dominates the skyline, while the Tower of London looms on the far right. The southern portal of London Bridge bristles with spikes bearing the severed heads of traitors.
Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. Arbella’s uncle and aunt were faithful correspondents through her court years.
Mary Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury. Arbella’s aunt.
Several versions of this portrait exist, all described as being of Arbella, though there are no records of the date or occasion of the painting. This one hangs above the great staircase at Longleat.
Appendix A
‘One Morley’
It was a letter in the Times Literary Supplement on 27 February 1937 that speculatively identified Arbella’s tutor Morley with that other spy, the playwright Christopher Marlowe; and indeed the two men appear to show a number of personal and biographical similarities.
About the Hardwick Morley,
Morley-the-tutor, all our information comes from that one letter cited from Bess to Burghley in the 1590s. But there are assumptions we can make based on this. For instance, it is fair to assume that Morley came to Hardwick more or less straight from university – Oxford or Cambridge – perhaps recommended by the university itself, since it sounds a little as if there had been some pressure on him to leave to fill this post.
Marlowe-the-playwright came out of Cambridge in 1587, not long before Morley appeared at Hardwick; and Morley was one of the variants of his name Kit Marlowe used at Cambridge (along with Marley – the version both he and his father favoured – Merling, Marlen, Marlyn, Marle, and more). Like the Morley of whom Bess writes, Kit Marlowe was said to have had questionable religious views – was indeed, at the time of his death, under investigation on suspicion of atheism. Like Morley, he was given to shooting his mouth off, whether inadvertently or on purpose; Bess says twice over that Morley had shown himself to be ‘much discontented’ – had been advertising himself as such around the household. While his discontent may well have been genuine, this was also a favourite technique of the Elizabethan spy. Advertise yourself as a malcontent, and wait for approaches; it was the technique Polonius would advocate in Hamlet while instructing his servant in surveillance.
The first suggestion that Marlowe was a government spy comes at Cambridge. When he received his MA in 1587, it was due only to the intervention of no less a body than the privy council. The university complained that he had mysteriously been absent from Cambridge for substantial periods; worse, that he had gone ‘beyond the seas to Reames [Rheims, home of the Catholic seminary] there to remain’. In other words, he appeared to be a papist, as Bess came close to suggesting of Morley. The privy council instructed Cambridge that this breach of rules should be ignored, and no questions asked. They did so, moreover, in the strongest terms. Marlowe’s absences were due to ‘good service’ and ‘faithful dealing’ done ‘in matters touching the benefit of his country’, and it was not her Majesty’s pleasure that anyone thus employed ‘should be defamed by those that are ignorant of th’affairs he went about’. Throughout his latter years at Cambridge, moreover, the shoemaker’s son from Canterbury seems to have been drawing an income from somewhere, as his expenditures regularly exceed his scholarship money. It is worth noting that the chancellor of Cambridge University at that time was none other than Burghley.
Essentially, the Marlowe-for-Morley theory as advanced in 1937 runs thus. Soon after leaving Cambridge, this eminently suitable agent was placed at Hardwick as an all-purpose informer by either Burghley (though Bess writes to him of Morley as someone he doesn’t know) or Walsingham. Like Burghley, Sir Francis Walsingham was a member of the privy council that secured Marlowe his MA.
Writer after writer – George Gascoigne, Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson in Arbella’s day – doubled the profession with that of spy. Several, in Marlowe’s day, also doubled the roles of spy and tutor. A tutor to the Talbot children had been accused of acting for the queen of Scots. If Marlowe were Morley, then he would not be unique in literary history. And the identification takes a little colour from literary sources: in Marlowe’s Edward II (II:ii) the scholar Baldock hopes to be ‘preferred’ through the agency of a lady, cousin to the king, ‘Having read unto her since she was a child’.
The case against the identification of Marlowe with Morley first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement the week after the original suggestion. In brief, the counterargument runs that Marlowe could not have been Morley since we ‘know’ that Marlowe was elsewhere at various points during the time we assume Morley was at Hardwick. But when you look at these instances from the perspective of Arbella’s movements, the rebuttal is not so conclusive.
To take a general point first: there is no reason why Morley-the-tutor – whoever he was – should have been uninterruptedly present in Hardwick for all of those three and a half years. Not only did Bess and her entourage spend much time away, but James Starkey, the chaplain who later read with Arbella, certainly took a winter out in London. More specifically, each of the Marlowe ‘sightings’ during these years (and they are few) can be contested. It is worth examining them individually.
(1) On 18 September 1589, Marlowe got into a fight in London, in the course of which his friend and fellow poet Thomas Watson killed one William Bradley. Both men were arrested and spent some time in Newgate. The record reports that the men taken up were Watson and ‘Christoferus Marlowe nuper de Norton Fowlgate yoman’ – in other words, Marlowe was (or was claiming to be) a resident of London at this time.
But: Some at least of Bess’s household were known to have been in the capital that week. Her agent opened her account ledger in London the next day.
(2) Marlowe was again arrested in London in May 1592, and ‘entered into a recognizance to keep the peace towards two Holywell constables’.
But: This falls into the period when Bess and Arbella were definitely down south, making that extended visit to London in connection with the proposed Farnese marriage.
And: That same visit covers the month of January 1592 when ‘Christofer Marley scholar’ was shipped back to Burghley from Flanders – site of Arbella’s marriage negotiations – apparently for trying to issue forged gold coins. (The absence of any apparent punishment for this very serious offence is one of the more convincing pieces of evidence that he was indeed still on government service.) Arbella was with the court that month, so her tutor would probably have been given leave.
(3) The last fact that is offered to prove that Marlowe could not have been Morley is a claim made in 1593 by the dramatist Thomas Kyd, that in 1591 he and Marlowe had shared a room in London where they both wrote.
But: Not only does Kyd not specify exactly when, how often or for how long they shared lodgings, his reason for making the claim was suspect. An ‘atheist treatise’ had been found in Kyd’s rooms. Shifting the blame onto his now-dead friend, and claiming the treatise must have been ‘shuffled’ with his own papers, made sense – whether true or false.
There are, in fact, no certain records of Marlowe being in the south when Bess and her family weren’t in town – circumstantial evidence for the Marlowe-is-Morley theory.
The best circumstantial evidence against Marlowe’s being Morley must surely be Bess’s manner of describing the tutor. Tamburlaine had appeared in 1589 and caused a furore. Would Bess, so soon thereafter, have referred to him thus baldly, as someone of whom Burghley would have no reason ever to have heard? And if Marlowe were that infamous, would he ever have been employed – as tutor, of all things! – in a respectable household? Then again, a well-known name in London theatrical circles may not have meant anything in Derbyshire … or even Chelsea. Nor, at a time when playwrights were not distinguished from the mass of entertainers, rogues and vagabonds, would a very grand old lady necessarily have deemed stage news worthy of her notice. There is, after all, no reference to Marlowe’s writing in any of the court or inquest papers that concern him. He managed to split the different sides of his life completely.
Christopher Marlowe died young; fatally stabbed in Deptford on 30 May 1593. The reason given at the time was an altercation with one Ingram Frizer, a man in the service of Thomas Walsingham, over the settling of a ‘reckoning’ – the bar bill for four men who had spent the day together. Charles Nicholl, in his study of Marlowe’s death The Reckoning, convincingly argues that there was more to it than this. He takes a microscope to the events of that room in Deptford, and argues convincingly that the meeting was a professional meeting of spies. His research also provides some suggestions why Marlowe could indeed be Morley.
Robert Poley and Nicholas Skeres, the two other men present at Marlowe’s death, had both been involved in the unmasking of the Babington plot to free Mary Stuart. Poley had been the undercover agent at the very centre of the story. He had also been involved in plans for Arbella’s marriage, through his agent Michael Moody, one of those who had been clamouring for Arbella’s portra
it in pursuit of the Farnese match.
Skeres, meanwhile, was later noted as an associate of (i.e. probably a spy upon) two Williamson brothers – one of them the former servant of the Talbots who had been questioned in the 1590s. In 1589 and again in 1591, Nicholas Skeres is recorded as being the earl of Essex’s man, employed in carrying confidential mail. Was Marlowe engaged in the same line of work? If Essex and Arbella were in communication, as has been suggested, they would have needed a conduit for messages, a secure and private postal service being an innovation of the next century.
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