Behind the Palace Doors

by Michael Farquhar

  It was the elder Seymour, knowing something of what a displeased queen was capable of, who wisely reported Arbella’s potentially treasonous attempt to marry his grandson. But the reaction at court to her audacious maneuver was oddly subdued. Queen Elizabeth was fading, and Robert Cecil, who inherited his father’s position as chief minister, was eager to keep things calm as he secretly orchestrated the succession of King James of Scotland. Arbella’s foolish marital endeavors were officially attributed to unnamed “base companions,” who, “thinking it pleasing to her youth and sex to be sought in marriage,” led her astray.

  Arbella was warned to “content herself to live in good sort with so dear a parent and so worthy a matron” as her grandmother. To the young woman trapped in Derbyshire, this might as well have been a death sentence. And, on the face of it, Arbella seems to have lost her mind.

  Struck in what she called her “extraordinary yoke of bondage,” Arbella began writing a series of rambling and very bizarre letters that made some question her sanity. She declared, for example, that her attempted betrothal to Edward Seymour was in fact a clever ruse on her part—a piece of “honest cunning,” as she called it—to expose the plot the Seymours had hatched for Edward to marry her. “I thank God it fell out better than I and my dearest and best trusted could have devised or imagined though we have beat our brains out these three years,” she wrote.

  While this “revelation” may have been merely a weak attempt by Arbella to extricate herself from the Seymour marriage debacle, another pronouncement really did make it seem as if she had gone mad. Most people in their right mind would have been bathed in relief had the queen’s government essentially winked at their treasonable activity, but Arbella seemed to be deliberately courting real danger when she announced that she was engaged to an anonymous suitor. “I may compare the love of this worthy gentleman (which I have already unrevocably accepted and confirmed) to gold which hath been so often purified that I cannot find one fault, jealousy only excepted,” she wrote. At one point, when pressed, she claimed this mystery lover was none other than King James himself.

  The frenzied writing and outrageous assertions bewildered government officials. “I think she hath some strange vapors to the brain,” concluded Robert Cecil. Arbella herself suggested that her “scribbling melancholy,” as she called it, was “a kind of madness.” But was the madness real, or feigned?

  Some historians say she was merely writing out her fantasies, a harmless exercise to amuse or comfort herself. Others have suggested that she suffered from porphyria, a malady often characterized by outbreaks of manic, unsettling behavior, and believed to have manifested itself occasionally in the British royal bloodline—most notably in King George III (see Chapter 21). Then there are those who propose that Arbella—far away from court and essentially imprisoned at Hardwick Hall—was desperate to keep the focus on herself as a contender, even if the attention she drew might be negative. If this was the case, she certainly succeeded.

  Rumors of her (imaginary) engagement rocked the court and reportedly drove Elizabeth closer to her grave. It “is well known that this unexpected event has greatly disturbed the queen,” the Venetian envoy reported, “for she has suddenly withdrawn into herself, she who was wont to live so gaily … so anxious is she that the rumours of this beginning of troubles should not spread beyond the kingdom, that she forbade either persons or letters to leave any of the ports.”

  Harsh interrogations of Arbella yielded nothing in the way of information regarding her phantom lover, just more puzzling behavior, including her refusal to eat. Bess of Hardwick, utterly exasperated by her granddaughter’s shenanigans, begged the council to remove the young woman from her charge. “She is so wilfully bent,” Bess wrote, “and there is so little reason in most of her doings, that I cannot tell what to make of it. A few more weeks as I have suffered of late will make an end of me.”

  No matter how much Arbella, and now Bess, hated it, she was stuck at Hardwick Hall and, because of her royalty, deprived of the essential freedom to choose her own destiny. “When it shall please Her Majesty to afford me those ordinary rights which other subjects cannot be debarred of justly,” she wrote defiantly, “I shall endeavour to receive them as thankfully now as if they had been in due time offered.”

  The storms Arbella raised at Hardwick were stilled when Queen Elizabeth I breathed her last on March 24, 1603, and King James peacefully succeeded her. The onetime potential heir was suddenly no longer relevant. Still, she remained determined to “shape my own coat according to my cloth.” And this time it would cost her everything.

  King James was prepared to be magnanimous toward his former rival, proclaiming his desire “to free our cousin the Lady Arbella Stuart from that unpleasant life which she has led in the house of her grandmother with whose severity and age she, being a young lady, could hardly agree.” Arbella was welcomed at court, with the precedence due her rank, and, at twenty-seven, given perhaps the greatest gift she could imagine: a home of her very own. Soon enough, though, trouble would find her.

  Not long after James I was crowned, Robert Cecil uncovered a plot to kill the king and, with the help of Spain, put Arbella on the throne. One of the accused leaders of what became known as the Main Plot was that dashing figure from the Elizabethan court, Sir Walter Raleigh. But evidence presented against him at trial was largely insubstantial, and as the prosecution’s case began to unravel, intimations of Arbella’s involvement began to emerge. Fortunately, Robert Cecil quickly put a stop to them. “Here hath been a touch of the Lady Arbella Stuart, the king’s own near kinswoman,” Cecil declared at Raleigh’s trial. “Let us not scandal the innocent by confusion of speech. She is innocent of all these things as I, or any man here: only she received a letter from my Lord Cobham [one of the accused conspirators] to prepare her, which she laughed at and immediately sent to the king. So far was she from discontentment that she laughed him to scorn.”

  Arbella was grateful for Cecil’s defense but “by reason of these grave events, kept in a state of constant perturbation of mind,” according to the Venetian envoy. And things were about to get much worse.

  The court of King James became almost as much a prison for Arbella as her grandmother’s Hardwick estate. It was an alien place for one who had been as exceedingly sheltered as she was, filled, as one contemporary described it, with “malice, pride, whoredom, swearing and rejoicing in the fall of others … so wicked a place as I wonder the earth did not swallow it up.” Indeed, flagrant drunkenness and debauchery were the new order, led by a king reveling in the company of grasping male favorites. Intelligent women such as Arbella found little favor from the deeply misogynistic monarch, and even less access. Furthermore, Arbella lacked the financial resources necessary to play any meaningful role in a court that valued conspicuous consumption.

  “She is not very rich,” reported the Venetian ambassador, “for the late queen was jealous of everyone, and especially of those who had a claim to the throne, and so she took from her the larger part of her income, and the poor lady cannot live as magnificently nor reward her attendants as liberally as she would.”

  Worst of all, Arbella would still never be allowed to marry a man she favored without the king’s consent. And it was unlikely that a sanctioned marriage would ever be forthcoming. “Any child of hers could still present a future threat to his dynasty,” wrote Sarah Gristwood. “This reality dawned on Arbella only slowly. She must, by contrast, quickly have become aware that in the new court, forgetful of Elizabeth’s example, there was less kudos than ever in her unmarried state.”

  So there she was, a royal lady “without mate and without estate,” as one observer succinctly put it. But Arbella Stuart was not prepared to let life or love pass her by. On June 22, 1610, she did the unthinkable and secretly married the man of her choice. The fact that he was Edward Seymour’s younger brother made the illegal match all the more reckless. Perhaps she was crazy after all, or coldly calculating. Or maybe she was just
a fool in love. Whatever the case, James I would prove far less forgiving of his cousin’s follies than Queen Elizabeth had been.

  Word of the couple’s engagement had reached the king and council before they married. After being closely questioned, both Arbella and William Seymour continued to deny any such arrangement. They were warned sternly to abandon any thought of getting married and seemed to comply, although Arbella, as was her way, did so only grudgingly. She spoke at length before the king and gathered nobles, “denying her guilt and insisting on her unhappy state,” as the Venetian ambassador reported. Then, at the insistence of King James, she humbled herself before him and was restored to favor. Soon after, she joined the rest of the royal family in the ritual investiture of James’s oldest son as Prince of Wales. It would be the last time Arbella would ever enjoy the king’s benevolence; only a few weeks later she was secretly married.

  Unlike Edward Seymour, whom Arbella had never met before seeking his hand in what appeared to be a political alliance, she did seem to love William Seymour—at least a little, even if he was more than a decade younger. “Love maketh no miracles in his subjects, of what degree or age whatsoever,” she had once written. And though William’s ardor was less obvious, there is evidence that he loved Arbella, too. Given his family’s history, he was certainly smart enough to realize that there could be little political advantage in wedding his royal cousin—quite the opposite, in fact. And throughout the ordeal that came as a consequence of their illicit union, William remained steadfast in his devotion to his wife.

  The marriage did not stay secret for long. After what would be a very brief honeymoon in each other’s arms, William was hauled off to the Tower and Arbella into the custody of Sir Thomas Parry, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. Separation of the couple was deemed imperative lest any further intercourse result in a baby with the royally rich blood of both Margaret and Mary Tudor. The thought of that was enough to make King James shudder.

  Arbella and William were reunited a month after their wedding, but only to face a joint interrogation. William denied at first that a marriage had ever taken place; Arbella, on the other hand, remained defiant. According to the Venetian ambassador, she “freely confessed it and excused the denial of her husband on the score of fear. She endeavoured to demonstrate that neither by laws divine nor human laws could she be prevented.”

  Clearly Arbella was oblivious at this point to the danger she faced. Certainly her living conditions with Thomas Parry gave no indication of trouble. His home on the Thames was pleasant enough, and Arbella was allowed one or two of her servants. However, the fate of the rest of her servants concerned her. They were like a second family of sorts. “There are divers of my servants with whom I never thought to have parted whilst I lived,” she wrote to her uncle. “But since I am taken from them, and know not how to maintain either myself or them, being utterly ignorant how it will please his majesty to deal with me, I were better to put them away now, than towards winter. Your lordship knows the greatness of my debts and my unableness to do [anything] for them.”

  Arbella boldly signed the letter to her uncle “the poor prisoner your niece, Arbella Seymour,” apparently quite proud of her married name. She made the mistake of signing a petition to the king the same way—a note of defiance that seemed to reflect her woeful underestimation of how dire her circumstances really were. Several rough drafts of the petition indicate the same thing. In one discarded version she wrote, “Restraint of liberty, comfort, and counsel of friends and all the effects of imprisonment are in themselves very grievous, and inflicted as due punishments for greater offences than mine.”

  The final version of the petition was much more tactful, signature aside, and Robert Cecil reportedly admired the eloquence with which Arbella presented her arguments. King James was decidedly less impressed, however, infuriated by the signature and not persuaded by the content of the plea. He demanded to know “whether it was well that a woman so closely allied to the blood royal should rule her life after her own humor.”

  The king was no more amenable to intercessions on Arbella’s behalf from his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, “on whose favor,” Arbella wrote, “I will still chiefly rely.” One of the queen’s ladies, Jane Drummond, reported to Arbella that “when [the queen] gave your ladyship’s petition and letter to his majesty he did take it well enough, but gave no other answer than that ye had eaten of the forbidden tree.”

  Arbella’s reaction seemed almost deliberately naïve: “I cannot rest satisfied till I may know what disaster of mine hindreth his Majesty’s goodness toward me, having such a mediatrix to plead so just and honest a cause.” Jane Drummond appeared to understand the situation so much better: “The wisdom of this state, with the example [of] how some of your quality in the like case [Catherine Grey] has been used, makes me fear that ye shall not find so easy [an] end to your troubles as ye expect, or I wish.”

  Arbella seemed more realistic about her predicament when she began pleading to the king with a degree of flattering deference she had not previously demonstrated. She referred to herself as His Majesty’s “handmaid,” his “most humble faithful subject and servant,” and claimed that “the thought never yet entered into my heart, to do anything that might justly deserve any part of your indignation.” But if she had made the king angry, she begged, “let it be covered with the shadow of your gracious benignity, and pardoned in that heroical mind of yours.”

  The king’s wrath was not so easily soothed, however, especially after rumors of Arbella’s pregnancy reached him. In fact, he only grew angrier. Arbella, the king declared in a warrant, “hath highly offended us in seeking to marry herself without our knowledge … and in proceeding afterwards to a full conclusion of a marriage with the self same person whom (for many just causes) we had expressly forbidden her to marry.” Now she and William were going to pay. Seymour was sentenced to life in the Tower; Arbella to exile in Durham—“clean out of this world,” she wrote despairingly.

  “It is thought the king will send her even further,” reported the Venetian ambassador, “and putting her out of the kingdom [to Scotland] he will secure himself against disaffection settling round her. Her husband is confined to the Tower for life and more closely guarded than heretofore; this has thrown him into extreme affliction, nor are there wanting those who bewail his unhappiness.” Arbella wrote a tender letter to her imprisoned husband when she heard he was ailing. “Sir,” she began formally:

  I am exceedingly sorry to hear you have not been well. I pray you let me know truly how you do and what was the cause of it, for I am not satisfied with the reason Smith [their messenger] gives. But if it be a cold I will impute it to some sympathy betwixt us having my self gotten a swollen cheek at the same time with a cold. For Gods sake let not your grief of mind work upon your body. You may see by me what inconveniences it will bring one to …

  … we may by God’s grace be happier than we look for in being suffered to enjoy ourselves with his Majesty’s favour. But if we be not … I for my part shall think myself a pattern of misfortune in enjoying so great a blessing as you so little a while. No separation but that deprives me of the comfort of you, for wherever you be or in what state so ever you are, it sufficeth me you are mine.… I assure you nothing the state can do with me can trouble me so much as this news of your being ill doth … Be well, and I shall account my self happy in being

  your faithful loving wife.

  Arb.S.

  In the face of exile, with all its inherent dangers, Arbella appealed to the rule of law. She wrote to several judges protesting that she was to be removed “far from these courts of justice where I ought to be examined, tried, and then condemned or cleared.” She asked the judges that if they could not offer her “the ordinary relief of a distressed subject,” then to intercede so she might still receive “such benefit of justice … as both his Majesty by his oath hath promised and the laws of this realm afford to all others.”

  King James was not about
to let legal niceties stand in the way of his divine right to wrath. He would punish the way he saw fit, not the courts. So, without the law to protect her, Arbella was reduced to writing frenzied letters to people she barely knew. In one missive to an unnamed knight, she opened, “Though you be almost a stranger to me,” and continued by begging him to help “a poor distressed gentlewoman … out of this great distress and misery and regain me his Majesty’s favour which is my chiefest desire.” It was all to no avail.

  Arbella swooned when the bishop of Durham and his men came to take her away. Then, refusing to budge, she left the men no choice but to carry her out on the mattress of her bed. The journey north was no smoother. A planned one-night stay in Highgate, for example, became six as Arbella fell ill (or pretended to). King James finally ordered her removed “by strength of men’s hands,” if necessary. Then, at Barnet, the party was forced to stop again as Arbella claimed she could go no farther. The king was naturally suspicious and sent a physician to examine her.

  According to one report, the doctor found Arbella “very weak, her pulse dull and melancholy for the most part, yet sometimes uncertain; her water bad, showing great obstructions; her countenance very heavy, pale and wan; nevertheless, she was free from any fever or any other actual sickness, but of his conscience he protested that she was in no case to travel until God restored her to some better strength both of body and mind.”