Her presence is commemorated only by a name carved inconspicuously on a plaque with dozens of others – but perhaps it is not an unfitting resting place. The south aisle of the Lady Chapel holds three central tombs. In the middle is the one Arbella shares with her aunt Mary; to one end of it is the austere tomb Torrigiano designed for Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother and founder of the Tudor dynasty; to the other end is the gaudy tomb of Margaret Lennox, Arbella’s grandmother, with the sons who predeceased her carved kneeling on its side – Charles Stuart, and a crowned Lord Darnley. The south aisle, intentionally or not, is a monument to the distaff side of history.
Most of the royal palaces Arbella knew have changed beyond all recognition. Greenwich and Whitehall look quite different today – as, of course, does the Seymours’ Somerset House, though work is continuing to explore its Tudor archaeology. The City and Blackfriars are full of Elizabethan echoes for those who know where to look, but the site of Shrewsbury House – today’s Cheyne Walk – is covered by modern Chelsea. Further upriver, Hampton Court is the only one of the royal palaces still to boast much that belonged to Arbella’s day. The chapel, the great Tudor kitchens, the apartments laid out for Henry VIII and used by James all show much about how things actually worked in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; how difficult, for example, was access to the monarch. A courtier writes of Arbella once, clamouring at the door of the king’s own chamber; here, in wood and stone, you have mapped out the very face of this lèse-majesté.
Of the other sites in the south of England, Burghley’s Theobalds is long since gone, seriously damaged in the Civil War and subsequently taken down in pieces – its staircase all the way to Herstmonceux in Sussex. That it left its name and site to a country park seems unlikely to have consoled Burghley. To feel some measure of Theobalds’ grandeur, it is better to go to Hatfield, the house Robert Cecil built when King James took Theobalds away from him; or perhaps to the contemporary Audley End – though there the visitor should be aware that, impressive and seemingly complete though the standing structure is, it represents less than a third of the house’s size in its heyday.
The few remaining objects associated with Arbella are spread around the country, and indeed beyond it. The Lennox Jewel is on display in James’s old home, the palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh. The Book of Hours bequeathed to Arbella by Mary, queen of Scots, made its way to the Hermitage museum in Russia. Arbella sent the book, as a souvenir and a valuable piece of property, to her husband in France, who seems to have sold it there; during the French Revolution it was repurchased, by one Peter Dubrowsky, on behalf of the tsar.
No-one has ever traced for sure the embroideries by the Scots queen which Arbella sold to her aunt Mary Talbot in order to finance her escape abroad. But they may not be that far away. In Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk are preserved the ‘Marian Hangings’ – three great green velvet curtains set with myriad embroidered panels (many of allegorical significance) worked and signed by Bess of Hardwick and her prisoner the queen of Scots. The panels are believed to have been gathered together and set onto the curtains by Alethea Talbot, Arbella’s cousin and Mary Talbot’s daughter, coming to Oxburgh when a descendant of hers married the son and heir of the Norfolk family. It is most likely that some of the embroideries came to Alethea through her mother-in-law, the Catholic countess of Arundel, to whom Queen Mary bequeathed her rosary and the white veil she wore at her execution. But even if some embroideries went along with the bequest, they can hardly have been so numerous as to encompass all the panels of the extraordinary Marian Hangings. The assumption is that Alethea (heiress to her parents’ mansion of Worksop) must have added other panels she found in the Talbot property. It seems probable that some of these were the embroideries Arbella sold to Mary Talbot.
Like her property, the images of Arbella, too, are scattered. The National Portrait Gallery in London, of course, has portraits of many of Arbella’s contemporaries, but only a crudely reproduced sketch from a contemporary pamphlet to show Arbella herself. The portraiture of Arbella Stuart is contentious territory.
The two pictures that hang and have always hung at Hardwick – of the toddler and the teenager – are the only two which can be called Arbella with complete safety. There are many other possible Arbella pictures in the huge box file in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery. But these dubiously identified portraits can only be graded on a sliding scale of probability.
Thus the charming face by John de Critz hanging in a gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina, and once described as Arbella, is more probably Elizabeth of Bohemia, as is the child with parakeets and monkeys in the collection of Woburn Abbey. The youthful picture at Glamis Castle, on the other hand, with its screaming red hair and air of determination, carries a measure of conviction. Of course, the pretty Isaac Oliver miniature does paint ‘Arbella’ with her hair blonde; but Glamis was the childhood home of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and this family connection makes the identification more likely.
One image turns up in several different versions, belonging to Longleat, to Berkeley Castle and to the Government Picture Collection, and is variously attributed to Robert Peake the Elder, to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, and to Paul van Somer. (And Longleat, at least, has some reason to claim Arbella’s portrait; William’s widow left to her granddaughter a picture of ‘my dear lord’s first wife’ which had been hanging in the Dining Room, and this granddaughter had married into the neighbouring Thynne family, Longleat’s owners.) This is an older, or at least a more sober, Arbella; dark clad under the long rope of pearls. The posture and the pearls are always the same, but the expression – isolated from its heavy Jacobean background – varies considerably. In one version (and one stage of restoration), it is an alert, wary, questing face. In another, it is simply melancholy. This is not the way one wishes to see Arbella; but when you consider the marks life may have written on her face, it does have an air of authenticity.
It is a relief to turn to another picture, sold privately at Christie’s in 1981 and tentatively attributed to William Larkin, a painter whom Arbella sponsored professionally. Larkin kept few records, and the picture is untitled, but the features were said (in the nineteenth century, before restoration work on both pictures alike destroyed all certainty) to resemble those of Arbella in the adolescent Hardwick portrait. Certainly features, pose and demeanour closely resemble the portrait of Arbella’s aunt Grace, which hangs nearby.
This picture is an extraordinary visual game, a puzzle as deliberate as the famous Hardwick plasterwork. A young girl – finger to her lip, an expression of quizzical relish on her face – stands poised precariously on the back of a tortoise (used as a symbol by Darnley). A small bird perches on her other wrist, and her white dress juts out stiffly. At the bottom are the words Haec talis fugit – ‘such as she does not linger’ – suggesting the sitter may have died before her time.
The girl in the picture has been variously identified as Arbella, as Elizabeth of Bohemia, as Queen Elizabeth and as an allegory of wifely virtue. Plutarch described a statue of Aphrodite standing on a tortoise ‘as a symbol that women should stay at home and be silent’. The moral doesn’t really fit Arbella as a sitter, nor the peripatetic Winter Queen. But surely Queen Elizabeth is even less likely.
Only three images of William Seymour survive: the armoured Cavalier general of middle years; the elderly statesman, bewigged and bejowled; and an ethereal young man, with long pale hair and a goatee beard, looking like a romantic curate. It is presumably the last of the three with whom Arbella fell in love.
The Seymours have left their stamp on the south-west less clearly than the Cavendish family on the midlands. The Seymours’ importance in Amesbury passed to another family, and the great house William built there has long since been replaced; the building now on the site, converted to a nursing home, dates from the nineteenth century. Only a few older traces remain: a cave in the grounds where it is said John Gay wrote The Beggar’s Opera; two Tudor lodge
s which predate even William’s occupancy. But still, of course, the river Avon in its upper reaches flows almost by the very door; and still Stonehenge stands no further than a pleasant ride away.
William’s other wartime home of Netley is yet another of those gaping arched ruins; but beautiful even above the usual run, maybe. (Leave Southampton by water and you see it from the ship. You have to say this for William – he knew how to pick a locality.) But Netley is something of an outlier; the other ‘Seymour sites’ are grouped around the borders of Wiltshire and Somerset, closer to Amesbury. Here too is Longleat, which holds one of the three main collections of Arbella’s letters; the shirt Charles I wore on the block, supposedly preserved by William; and two ‘Arbella’ portraits: an attractive head and shoulders as well as the huge full-length image that looms above the main stairway. Little survives just a few miles from Longleat in the Seymours’ ancient seat of Maiden Bradley.
Salisbury Cathedral holds the splendid tomb of the earl of Hertford and Catherine Grey, their two sons kneeling at either side in almost life-sized red and gold effigy. (Just across the aisle, curiously, lies the marchioness of Northampton, Arbella’s hostess in 1603.) But William himself is buried in the parish church of Great Bedwyn, some ten miles to the north of Amesbury and hard by Wulfhall, seat of the Seymours in the sixteenth century. The walls of the church hold a brass plaque to William’s father Lord Beauchamp, and a window to the memory of Henry VIII’s third wife, the Seymour queen Jane. A marble bust – stripped by thieves of its supporting cherubs – commemorates Frances, William’s second wife, with the information that he lies nearby. His own grave is unmarked, curiously. But restoration work in 1853 found his body beneath the chancel. The tale is that he was buried beside his daughter, Arbella, at his own request.
In the two years of writing this book, I began to see traces of Arbella Stuart everywhere. It is a biographer’s trap, as invidious as overmuch sympathy.
I found her on a wall plaque spotted in Lauderdale House, north London, at the very moment I was telling a friend about her; in an old edition of the Ladybird children’s book on King James, picked up casually at a village fête (pictured all flashing eyes and heaving breast, looking as she might if played by Joan Collins circa 1960); and in an old volume called Arabella’s Letters which, picked out of the jumble sale box for the amusement of its title, turned out, incredibly, to be the correspondence of an Arabella Mary Stuart, a young American of the 1820s, who was coming to England to stay with a Sir William Seymour. There must surely be some familial connection, whether provable or imaginary. I found her in a newspaper column by A. N. Wilson; a novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard; and a talk (on a completely unrelated topic) by John Julius Norwich at the Cheltenham Literary Festival.
But A. N. Wilson wrote that the Gunpowder Plotters wished to place her on the throne (they didn’t); Elizabeth Jane Howard named a heroine after her and then made it clear the hero failed to recognize the allusion. And John Julius Norwich … ‘It’s like that question about Arabella Stuart in 1066 And All That,’ he exclaimed suddenly, trying to find a reference to illustrate the way some trivial facts, some peripheral people, do live in the suburbs of our imagination.
1066 And All That is a glorious spoof which (rather like Arbella herself) has gone through phases of popularity and neglect. Written for Punch in the 1930s, reborn for a cult audience in the 1970s, it is one of those pieces of inspired nonsense that come to make ever more sense the more you know about the topic. (‘James I slobbered at the mouth and had favourites; he was thus a Bad King. He had, however, a very logical and tidy mind, and one of the first things he did was to have Sir Walter Raleigh executed for being left over from the previous reign.’) And there, sure enough, at the end of the Tudor and Stuart chapters, is a spoof exam paper:
Question 11. How can you be so numb and vague about Arabella Stuart?
Well … precisely.
Postscript to ‘Places and portraits’
In the summer of 2003, a few months after the hardback publication of Arbella, an extraordinary discovery was made at Hardwick Hall. Restoration work meant that panelling had to be removed from what is now the dining room – from the recess where the sixth duke, as a boy, once kept his menagerie – and in the cavity between wood and wall workmen found a book bound in red leather and gold, L’ABC des Chrestiens, a manual of basic Protestant doctrine and French grammar, its title page dated 1583. How did it get there? By accident, or design? The little cache looked almost like the hiding place of a recalcitrant child, naughtily tucking the hated schoolbook away.
It is a deeply romantic story, the kind of which every antique shop browser (and every biographer!) dreams. Almost at once, there was speculation that the book might have been connected to Arbella. It is a huge temptation to link such a find to a known personality; sadly, most such romantic connections fade in the cold light of day. But this one is a little different. Consider Arbella as owner of the book and there are, at first, anomalies. Consider a little further, however, and you begin to see possibilities.
For a start, we are looking at an aristocratic owner, since this book, with its special Turkey binding, would never have been meant for the child of a servant; nor would many of the working classes have had access to this private room – the low great chamber of Arbella’s day, and meant for the leisure hours of the family. Next, the book’s original date, 1583, was almost a decade and a half before Hardwick Hall was built, so that we are looking either for two unconnected owners, or for someone who had occasion to return to the books of their childhood. To find the owner’s identity is a puzzle, a detective story – but (as with so much else in Arbella Stuart’s life) the facts are suggestive, surely.
(1) We know that Arbella was at Hardwick (‘old’ Hardwick) in the summer of 1583 – ‘about seven years old and learned’ in the words of Sir Walter Mildmay. We know she spoke French by 1588, when she wrote a note in that language to Lord Burghley.
(2) We know that she was present at Hardwick during and after the period (around 1597) when the panelling must have been installed. By then, Arbella herself was an erudite and multi-lingual twenty-two-year-old, past the stage of grammar books, or of secret cubbyholes.
(3) But we know that there were children of a suitable age present in the Hardwick household – Arbella’s cousins, the offspring of her uncle William Cavendish: Gilbert, the short-lived elder, and Will, who became the second earl of Devonshire. What is more, we know (4) that Arbella got roped in to the little boys’ schooling, to some degree. Witness the elder William’s joking promise to his son (then, in 1602, an eleven-year-old) that he would give him a rapier, dagger, embroidered girdle and spurs if he would speak Latin with his cousin Arbella until Lent Assizes. The children’s tutor, James Starkey, was the very same who would help Arbella in her intrigues of 1603.
Expensive books might well have been passed down through the family, especially since William Cavendish was notoriously close with his money. If Arbella did indeed hunt out her own old schoolbook for the benefit of her cousins we know, too, that young Will was less studious than she had been. The little boy who had to be bribed into speaking Latin grew up to be a likeable ‘waster,’ in the words of John Aubrey, who eventually died from what was described as excessive indulgence in good living.
Of course, we are in the realm of ‘Possibly …’ and ‘One can imagine that …’ We can never speak with certainty. But I, for one, can imagine this scenario easily. Arbella apart, there are simply not many other individuals whose ownership fits so neatly.
Family Trees
Source notes
Selective source notes follow the brief bibliographical essay given below for each section of this book; since these are far from comprehensive, I have favoured those references which relate to Arbella Stuart’s own story.
List of abbreviations used
Acts
Acts of the Privy Council
Batho
G. R. Batho, calendar* of Talbot Papers in the Col
lege of Arms (This is a collection quite distinct from – and less relevant to Arbella than – the Talbot at Longleat, to which I refer by the name Talbot [see below].)
BL
British Library Manuscripts Room (These documents may be further described under the name of the particular manuscript collection in which the paper is held: e.g. Sloane, Harleian [‘Had.’]; Lansdowne or Additional [‘Add.’].)
CSP Dom
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic (Some of these documents, transcribed after the compilation of the main calendar, are located in a supplementary volume, given as CSP Dom Add.)
CSP Scottish
Calendar of State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots (or Calendar of Scottish Papers)
CSP Ven
Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts relating to English Affairs. Preserved in the Archives of Venice
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