Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Bess and her fourth husband had not long been married when Queen Elizabeth found herself in need of a custodian for the deposed queen of Scots, newly landed in England. The choice fell on Shrewsbury – loyal, incorruptible and wealthy – and it was at his country houses (Sheffield Castle, Sheffield Lodge, Chatsworth) that Mary spent the next several years. Mary and Bess struck up a kind of friendship, and though the earl assured Lord Burghley that their talk together was all of ‘indifferent trifling matters’, they were much in each other’s company. If Bess did later scheme to see her grandchild Arbella on the throne, then perhaps her dream was born here, as she sat at her needlework in the exalted company that in her obscure girlhood would have seemed so unlikely.

  Arbella’s grandmother on her father’s side, Margaret, Lady Lennox, came from a very different background. Like Queen Elizabeth, Lady Lennox was a granddaughter of Henry VII of England, and hers was the illustrious bloodline that made Arbella’s birth a matter of such moment. The survivor of nearly sixty years of intrigue and catastrophe, Lady Lennox was a bitter and disappointed woman, one with whom life had dealt harshly. In contrast to the ever-rising Bess, Lady Lennox was facing an old age of poverty – poverty, at least, for one who never forgot that she was royalty.

  She was born from the second marriage of Henry VIII’s elder sister Margaret Tudor (whose first marriage to James IV of Scotland had produced the Scottish royal line). It had been a stormy match that saw the dowager queen finally hounded out of Scotland, and Margaret Lennox’s youth had not been happy. As a teenager, ‘Little Marget’ had been taken by her uncle Henry VIII to be brought up with his daughter Mary, and there was a time (after both Mary and her half-sister Elizabeth had in turn been declared illegitimate) when Margaret, though herself a Catholic, was officially her uncle’s heir. At the same time, unfortunately, she was thrown into the Tower for an unsanctioned betrothal to Thomas Howard, a near relation to the disgraced Anne Boleyn. (This, interestingly, was the alliance which prompted parliament to pass an act imposing the death penalty for royal marriages undertaken without the monarch’s approval.) Then the birth of Prince Edward released her from her perilous pre-eminence in the succession, Thomas Howard died of ‘Tower fever’, and Margaret was thrust into a diplomatically useful alliance with Matthew Stuart, earl of Lennox, a powerful Scottish noble with a good claim to be the next heir to the Scots crown after the infant Mary.

  Lennox was ‘a strong man, of personage well proportioned … very pleasant in the sight of gentlewomen’; Margaret was ‘sensible and devout’. Their arranged marriage in 1544 turned into some sort of love-match. But their life was far from easy, for Lennox’s alliance with the English cause cost him his Scottish lands. The couple lived as pensioners of the English throne in Yorkshire, Margaret’s fortunes rising during the reign of her fellow Catholic and old classmate Mary Tudor (who gave her precedence, in court and succession, over the Protestant princess Elizabeth) and sinking when Elizabeth came to the throne. As the likelihood of acquiring power in England diminished, the Lennoxes’ eyes turned again north of the border. In 1564 Lord Lennox was allowed to return to Scotland and attempt to repossess his confiscated lands there, but Lady Lennox, remaining in England, was soon in trouble, suspected of disloyalty, and spent a second period in the Tower for her part in planning the match between her eldest son, Lord Darnley, and Mary, queen of Scots.

  The Lennox or ‘Darnley’ Jewel8 – still in the British royal collection – was made to commemorate the changing fates of Matthew and Margaret’s royal claims. ‘Who hopes still constantly with patience shall at last obtain victory’ reads the Latin motto. A winged crown reposes amid figures of the optimistic virtues, Faith and Hope. The locket case is inlaid and enamelled with a whole anthology of emblems: a crowned salamander (the creature which, like the much-enduring Lennoxes, can survive scorching flames); the phoenix risen from the ashes. But flames and ashes were indeed the end of the marriage between Darnley and the queen of Scots. In 1567 he was murdered in an explosion at Kirk o’ Field, possibly with the connivance of his royal wife, and the ensuing scandal forced the Scots queen to flee.

  Whatever their personal grief, the Lennox family briefly held on to power, the earl ruling Scotland as regent for his infant grandson James. But the earl himself was assassinated in 1571, his bleeding body carried past the young boy. The darker emblems on the Lennox Jewel had begun to look more appropriate: the pelican in her piety, plucking her own breast that her young might feed from her blood; united hearts wounded by arrows. A demon dragging a distressed woman by her hair is considered to represent Time, and by 1574 Margaret Lennox, long since released from imprisonment on compassionate grounds, must have felt time had run out on her and her own chances of success or happiness.

  There remained only the dynasty. When Lady Lennox petitioned to be allowed to visit her northern estates for that fateful trip, broken at Rufford with such dramatic consequences, her request was at first regarded dubiously. ‘I greatly suspect that she has no other purpose than to transfer the little prince [James] into England,’ Fenelon, the French ambassador, warned his master darkly. Permission for the journey was reluctantly granted, however, on condition that Lady Lennox did not attempt any communication with the queen of Scots along the way. She retorted that she had no wish to speak with the woman who had murdered her son. A feint? When the court learned of the marriage of Lady Lennox’s son to the daughter of the Scots queen’s companion, it seemed all too likely.

  While Shrewsbury couldn’t leave his post as custodian to Mary, while Bess was left at large, Lady Lennox obeyed her summons south, lamenting all the way. Back in London, she found herself committed to the Tower9 for the third time in her life. ‘Thrice I have been cast into prison, not for matters of treason but for love matters,’ she complained sadly.

  The affair did not quickly die away. The queen’s spymaster10, Sir Francis Walsingham, himself drew up a list of questions to be put to Lady Lennox’s steward Thomas Fowler:

  ‘Whether about midsummer last he was not sent to his mistress’ house at Templenewsam.’

  ‘If he was, for what cause.’

  ‘Whether during his being at Templenewsam he went to speak to Lady Shrewsbury …’

  Charles Lennox’s secretary was also subjected to ‘some kind of persuasion cunningly used’. But the authorities failed to uncover any plot involving the queen of Scots; any ‘large treasons’. There is no evidence that Bess (who seems to have maintained an obstinate silence throughout) suffered any punishment beyond a vague house arrest. It was simply too embarrassing to have the wife of the Scots queen’s gaoler herself thrown in prison, as Bess herself was probably well aware.

  Even the luckless Lady Lennox was soon released to her house in Hackney, where the young couple were living very quietly. The new countess Elizabeth was already pregnant. A family friend of the Shrewsburys visited them there in the spring and found all well. ‘I trust very shortly that the dregs of all misconstruction will be wiped away, that their abode there after this sort will be altered,’ commented Shrewsbury’s son Gilbert piously.

  The precise date and place of Arbella’s birth11 are uncertain, but on 10 November 1575 Lady Lennox was writing to the Scots queen from Hackney: ‘I yield your Majesty12 my most humble thanks for your good remembrance and bounty to our little daughter here.’ The unexpectedly warm tone of the letter may well have given pause to the authorities when, inevitably, it was intercepted by Burghley. Lady Lennox signed herself affectionately ‘Your Majesty’s most humble and loving mother and aunt’, and the young countess Elizabeth added obsequious prayers for Mary’s ‘long and happy estate’ from one ‘who loves and honours your Majesty unfeignedly’.

  Arbella’s unusual name stands out from the usual Tudor litany of Elizabeths, Margarets and Marys. (Latinizing it to Arabella, as became usual in later centuries, doesn’t help to explain it away.) It is true that the sixteenth century did have a colourful range of Christian names to set beside the old favourites: the
Casebooks of the astrologer and doctor Simon Forman featured an Appellina Proudlove, an Aquila Gould and an Actaeon Dove. But Arbella’s name may have been chosen for the Queen Annabella (Drummond) who had featured in the annals of Scottish royalty. She had, after all, a good claim to the Scottish throne, as well as to the English one.

  James the heir, Arbella the spare … Perhaps, after all, the more hopeful prophecies of the Lennox Jewel were beginning to look a little more likely.

  ‘Most renowned stock’

  ARBELLA’S SEX WAS probably a disappointment to her grandmothers – though not, perhaps, to Queen Elizabeth. A boy might have become a candidate for the throne attractive enough to threaten an ageing, childless woman. But, male or female, Arbella had an important place in the convoluted web of debated rights13 that constituted the English succession in the late sixteenth century.

  The Elizabethans loved genealogy. Historians laboured to trace the queen’s descent from King Arthur of Round Table fame. Lord Burghley (though himself short of illustrious forebears) had a chamber of his great house Theobalds painted with trees, one for each county in England, and hanging from the branches the coat of arms of every noble who dwelt there. Arbella’s family tree was one of particular complexity; but she would have grown up knowing every detail of it.

  Since Queen Elizabeth had neither child nor surviving sibling, the chain of succession stepped backwards a generation. Discounting the Spanish royal family, who claimed distant rights through the fourteenth-century John of Gaunt, and distant Plantagenet descendants, there were at the time of Arbella’s birth four principal English families who could contend for the position of heir, deriving from the two sisters of Henry VIII.

  The most prominent claimant, and chief among the descendants of Henry’s elder sister Margaret, was Mary, queen of Scots herself. In 1575 she was widely held to be Elizabeth’s immediate heir. But as a Catholic, a foreigner and a prisoner14, her claim was obviously problematic in practical terms. The children of Margaret Tudor’s marriage to the king of Scotland, moreover, were as foreigners technically excluded from any rights in the English throne. By contrast, Arbella’s grandmother Margaret Lennox (sole surviving child of Margaret Tudor’s second marriage), had the advantage of having been born in England. Against that stood the fact that her father was already betrothed elsewhere when he married her mother: a serious matter in the sixteenth century, and enough to lay Lady Lennox open to the slur of illegitimacy. But no claim at this time was squeaky clean. The throne was still a prize to be played for, in a game of politics and pragmatism.

  Within a few years from 1575 the claims of the contenders on Margaret Tudor’s side had crystallized in a younger generation. The claim of Mary, queen of Scots passed to her son James, so usefully a Protestant. The claim of Margaret Lennox passed either to her grandson, that same James – thus doubly entitled – or to her son Charles and then to his daughter Arbella. James may have had the advantage of seniority, but he could easily have found himself excluded by his foreign nationality. The boy king of Scotland, moreover, was the target of repeated assassination attempts, while Arbella grew up in seclusion and safety.

  So much for the descendants of Margaret Tudor. The descendants of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary Tudor might be assumed to take a lower place in the succession. But Henry, in his latter years, specifically decreed that, in the event of his own children dying without heirs, the throne should pass to Mary’s line. (Opinion was divided as to whether the crown really could be thus willed, like a piece of private property.)

  Mary Tudor had been married off young to the ageing French king, Louis XII. Widowed without child, she married again and gave birth to two daughters, each of whom in turn had a family. The child of her younger daughter married into the Stanley family, the earls of Derby. Her offspring were not only the most junior line of inheritance, but those potential heirs who sought the throne least consistently; nor did they interact much with the other three branches of the family tree. There was, moreover, the taint of Catholicism about them. We can set them aside, for the moment.

  The situation was different in the case of Mary Tudor’s elder daughter, who married Henry Grey and gave birth to the tragic Grey sisters: Jane, Catherine and Mary. Unequivocally English and ardently Protestant, Lady Jane Grey went to the block in 1554 for her proximity to the throne. In the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign Catherine Grey had been widely regarded as Elizabeth’s heir apparent, her claim set above even that of Mary, queen of Scots. Elizabeth herself talked of adopting Catherine – but then Catherine made a clandestine marriage with Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, son to the lord protector who had dominated Edward VI’s minority (and himself descended, through his mother, from Edward III). When their secret wedding was discovered, the marriage, for lack of proof, was declared invalid, and Catherine was sent to the Tower, where her baby, Lord Beauchamp, was born. Hertford too was imprisoned, but the couple still managed to meet with their gaolers’ connivance, as proved by the birth of a second baby.

  Catherine was the only one of the three Grey sisters to produce sons and grandsons – men whose fate was to be closely intertwined with that of Arbella. Catherine died in disgrace in 1568; her story would be one with which Arbella grew up, and which affected her deeply. In 1575 the Seymour claim seemed to have been buried with Catherine. Her sons seemed disqualified by the taint of illegitimacy. There was no thought of reviving her claim in her hunchbacked sister Mary – who was in any case herself similarly disgraced for an unlicensed marriage, and died in 1578.

  But claims which could be set aside in the early days of Elizabeth’s reign, when it still seemed likely that the queen would marry and have heirs of her own body, loomed up again a few decades later. The Seymours, the Scots royal line and Arbella remained locked in a decades-long dance of relationship and rivalry. In her own generation, Arbella’s claim to the English throne was by no means the worst of the three on the table. But she – the only woman left in the race – was the individual who would suffer most bitterly.

  The apparent love-match of Arbella’s parents was in many ways an ominous start. Her family background reflects a familiar, frightening, leitmotif: an intimate association of love and death, sex and violence, that echoed in the events which followed Charles and Elizabeth’s wedding day. Illicit and controversial marriage runs like a fault-line through the chronicles of the Tudor family, erupting in Henry VIII’s appalling marital history; Mary, queen of Scots’ romantic disasters; and Queen Elizabeth’s early encounter with Thomas Seymour, the earl of Hertford’s uncle, whose attempted seduction of the young princess brought him to the block. Margaret Lennox saw the marriage of her parents end in divorce and armed conflict; her first love Thomas Howard died in the Tower – a ‘gentle beast’ who had lost his will to live, as the poet-earl of Surrey described him movingly. Her own subsequent marriage was almost torn apart by political necessity. Catherine and Mary Grey both married for love and died, in direct consequence, under lock and key. Catherine Grey’s son, Lord Beauchamp, was himself kept three years under house arrest by his own father for marrying against his wishes.

  This was a pattern that would recur in Arbella’s life, too. And yet, it was itself only one aspect of a violent heredity. When the baby Arbella was christened at the parish church of Chatsworth, her only recorded godparents were maternal aunts and uncles – in bleak contrast to the royal sponsors who had attended the baptisms of Bess’s own children. Few of the near relatives on her father’s side who might have been represented at the font were alive and at liberty. It was a bloody heritage.

  ‘My jewel Arbell’

  THE PORTRAIT OF Arbella Stuart as a toddler which still hangs in Hardwick Hall is surely too idiosyncratic not to have been painted from life. This is no mere map of the fashionable standard of beauty; not even infant beauty. Her hair neatly coiffed under a jewelled cap, she stands almost as broad as she is high in her embroidered robes. Pearls drip from the heart of each twining flower (the Cavendish eglant
ine?) on the padded sleeves; but her wide blue eyes, unmoved by all this grown-up glory, stare uncompromisingly from a face so square the pointed chin juts out like an afterthought. Not a toddler to tangle with, you would say. But court fashion has its place in her accoutrements: one podgy hand clutches a doll in the elaborate formal dress that was called the Spanish style, and the red-gold of the doll’s hair – and of Arbella’s own, whether by nature or artifice – reflects that of the queen.

  Family pride, too, looms large. On a massive triple chain around the infant’s neck there swings a shield with a gold countess’s coronet upon it, and the ominous Lennox motto, Pour parvenir, j’endure: ‘I endure in order to succeed’. (Perhaps it fits her better than the Cavendish motto: Cavendo tutus, ‘Safe by taking care’.)

  Along with the sitter’s exact age – twenty-three months – the picture is labelled, rather defiantly, ‘Arbella Comitessa Leviniae’ – countess of Lennox. Arbella’s gender would win her no favours in the patriarchal world of the sixteenth century; nor yet would her youth be granted much indulgence. Childhood, to the Elizabethans, was merely the tiresome prologue to the play, to be got over speedily. But her rank was another matter. Arbella had been born into the very highest rank of a hierarchical society. The nobility still attracted to themselves not only troops of lesser men (an earl of Shrewsbury earlier in the century had been able to raise four and a half thousand of his own men), but a satellite horde of client gentry. Many a knight was glad to wear an earl’s livery.

  That title, the Scottish earldom of Lennox, had belonged to Arbella’s father. Charles Stuart, always sickly, died of consumption in early April 1576, at the house in Hackney. It is hard to know how much was lost with his death. A portrait of an ethereally fair child standing next to the elder brother he resembled, Lord Darnley, is one of the few sources of information about Charles Stuart. But while it would be unfair to deduce his character from that of Darnley – ‘wilful, haughty, and vicious’, in the words of one Scots courtier – he was clearly not the perfect son. When Charles was a difficult fifteen-year-old, his widowed mother described him as the ‘greatest dolour’15 in a life not free from trials. ‘His father’s absence so long time in his riper years hath made lack to be to him in diverse ways … he is somewhat unfurnished of qualities needful and I being now a lone woman am less like to have him well reformed at home than before.’ A year later his new tutor, more optimistically, wrote that he ‘gives great promise for the future’16. If he did, it was never realized.