Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  Arbella must have known – think of Babington! – that beheading was not the worst form of execution. (Not even when your head stayed on through the first stroke; or when you had to fumble blindfold for the block, like Lady Jane Grey.) She must surely have wondered, hearing of her own aunt’s fate, just how much it hurt, and whether it was true, as they told Anne Boleyn – another dead queen – that the pain was ‘very subtle’; wondered what you would feel when you saw that lump of polished wood in front of you, when you had to step firmly up to it and quietly kneel, when every instinct swore at you to scream, to fight, to run away.

  In the time of her own danger, years later, Arbella was to make an oblique reference to Mary’s fate. Queen Elizabeth always claimed that her officials exceeded her wishes in rushing through an execution she had never really intended. Wrote Arbella:

  Let me lose50 my head … which her Majesty hath threatened to take … Her Majesty I know would be highly offended to have such a matter effected without her Highness liking but what will not or cannot one of [the councillors] do and gild over with some colourable rule of policy, or officious pretence of superabundant love?

  Whatever their relationship while she lived, Mary left to Arbella her Book of Hours51, a devotional-volume-cum-diary which she had brought with her from France. On the blank sheets she had written notes and poems, and had inscribed it in her own hand: Ce livre est a moy, Marie Reyne. (Arbella, towards the end of her life, would send it to her husband in Paris, inscribed from ‘Your most unfortunate, Arbella Seymour’.) We do not know when she was given it, or with what words or ceremony. But the removal of the Scots queen had taken her another step closer to the crown. The political events following Mary’s execution were to precipitate Arbella’s first steps onto the public stage – and her formal introduction to the woman whose throne she might inherit.

  II

  1587–1602

  ‘Lawful inheritress’

  ‘She would be the lawful inheritress.’

  M. de Châteauneuf, French ambassador, 1587

  ‘She will one day be even as I am’

  EVERY PROMINENT ELIZABETHAN needed a friend at court. The man without eyes and ears there – without a voice to plead his cause – was ‘like a hop without a pole’, as Lord Burghley said pityingly. The provident Bess was never likely to neglect such an obvious provision for her family. Amid the web of important contacts she nurtured so carefully, she did not disdain the regular letters from her half-sister, Elizabeth Wingfield, in London.

  In one December of the mid-1580s Elizabeth Wingfield sent Bess a significant bulletin, a sprawling sheet of paper crammed with news aplenty. Concerning the important seasonal present Bess would make to Queen Elizabeth, ‘Lady Cobham does not advise52 a gift in money,’ while the queen had given ‘many good words’ what she would do for Bess in the matter of ‘my lord’s hard dealing’ – referring to Bess’s quarrels with Shrewsbury.

  Having thus dealt with Bess’s grand affairs, Mistress Wingfield moved on to a more domestic matter. Seven yards of green velvet were needed to make a dress for Arbella – on the brink of her teens – but the tailor had only five yards and a quarter. This too, in its way, was an important business. Clothes mattered in the display culture of the sixteenth century. Dress was tied to status so directly that sumptuary laws decreed what rank was required before you could wear silk or velvet, and then how much of it: a velvet trimming? A cap? Or – like the royal Arbella – a whole gown? If clothes always mattered, Arbella’s had begun to matter acutely. The time was approaching53 when she could be expected to make her curtsey at court. Now, if ever, was the time for finery.

  You went to court with a fortune on your back – literally. An outfit could be worth more than an estate. ‘’Twere good you turned four or five hundred acres of your best land into two or three trunks of apparel,’ wrote Ben Jonson sardonically. Contemporary portraits show Sir Walter Ralegh, for example, in short capes almost solid with pearls. If he had indeed laid his cloak down in the mud for the queen to walk over, he would have been making a gesture grandiloquent enough to be worth remembering in story.

  The gowns Elizabeth herself wore for formal show – and she had three hundred of them – are sewn with eyes and ears, flowers, whole menageries of mythical animals. Even lesser ladies, on public occasions, wore their dresses tricked out with ornamented buttons, knots of ribbon, elaborate embroidery, the fabric itself ‘pinked’ or ‘paned’ (cut in a decorative arrangement of holes, or slashed to show a different material underneath). Roger Ascham once praised the young Elizabeth’s ‘simple elegance’, her contempt for ‘show and splendour’. Perhaps it is lucky Ascham never saw the style later chosen by his pupil. When we read Sir John Harington’s praises of the young Arbella’s sobriety in dress as well as behaviour, we have to remember that everything is comparative; in later life Arbella, too, would order four hundred pounds’ worth of pearls to be embroidered on a single gown. She would fantasize about courtiers bowing before her and marvelling at the ‘sudden and gorgeous change of my suite’, as she revealed herself in metaphorical garments, ‘strange and new and richly worth more than any lady in this land’.

  The princess Elizabeth had worn simple gowns in black and white, suitable to a Protestant’s modesty; her hair plain, no cosmetics except a faint marjoram scent, in ostentatious contrast to her Catholic sister Mary’s gaudy finery. A portrait of Arbella painted in her early teens shows her too clad in a white satin gown decorated with trimmings of black. But the magnificent double rope of pearls around her neck, the outsize pendants in hair and ears, belie any suggestion of economy. Bess would have seen to it that Arbella had everything of the finest. The old lady knew how to spend money where it counted.

  Fashions reached new heights of extravagance in the later years of the century, and it was no sinecure to dress an Elizabethan lady. The gown itself came like a self-assembly kit; the lavish unwashable fabric was to be used and reused, and preserved very carefully. From the skin up Arbella would have worn first a chemise or ‘smock’ of cambric or silk finely embroidered, and maybe perfumed. (Drawers were commonly worn only by fast Italian ladies.) Over that came a corset, made in two parts and thus described as a pair of ‘bodies’, stiffened with wood or whalebone, and with a rigid centre piece projecting the long line of the ‘stomacher’ downwards. Then came the petticoats, tied by ‘points’ or laces to the bodies. The petticoats were held out by the bell-shaped farthingale, which was itself supported by a strip of padding or rope tied around the hips below the waist, and commonly known as a bum roll. Over this went the gown itself, a sleeveless coat-like garment hooked onto the stiff front panel. The huge padded sleeves were attached separately, and that is even before ruffs and cuffs had been pinned into place … Getting a court lady into her clothes was something like kitting a knight out in his armour. Contemporaries noted the martial quality of a lady’s ‘privy coats by art made strong’. ‘Were they for use against the foe/Our dames for amazons might go!’ wrote one Philip Gosson.

  As Arbella’s attendants latched the cumbersome fabric around their young mistress, the girl standing doll-still in the midst of the activity would have known that when she went to court she would indeed be entering a battleground. Court was the arena in which power, position and lucrative employment were won. It stood alone as the only source of advancement; the ‘only mart’, said the poet Gabriel Harvey, ‘of preferment and honour’. Failure could be terminal, and mistakes were public: the earl of Oxford, breaking wind as he bowed, retired to his estates for seven years (only to be greeted, on his return, by a mischievous queen: ‘My lord, I had forgot the fart,’ she said). The very fury with which the rejected railed against this place of ‘glittering misery’ told its own story. ‘Go tell the court it glows and stinks like rotten wood,’ wrote Sir Walter Ralegh.

  The ritual of the court was to figure largely in Arbella’s life, and though later she would be a fish out of water in King James’s riotous establishment, she had a certain taste
for splendour. She could be unusually free and unassuming with subordinates, but her letters reiterate a great pride in her ‘renowned stock’, the ‘most royal lineage’ she shared with the queen. She was ‘not ignorant of either my birth or my desert’, she would write proudly. In the summer of 1587, when she faced the exciting challenge of her presentation, she knew she was facing an encounter even more significant for her than for most girls. Was ambition – even an aspiration to the throne itself – nurtured when, at the impressionable age of eleven, she saw the queen in glory?

  In 1587 Elizabeth I was approaching her thirtieth year on the English throne. She had lost none of that famous wit, but she was fifty-three and, defy age as she may, the image of the potent, ever-youthful Virgin Queen was beginning to petrify into the mask-like persona she would maintain till her death: the beruffed and bejewelled Gloriana. Though ten years later a bedazzled German visitor still found that in looks and vigour the queen need yield little to a girl of nineteen, Nicholas Hilliard, with his unsparing painter’s eye, told a different story. His ‘Ermine Portrait’ of 1585 shows a face already sagging into the idiosyncratic contours of age, in bitter contrast to the delicate, lush framework of lace and embroidery around it. Her fifties had brought a check to her driving energy and the queen was becoming ‘daily more unapt to bear any matter of weight’, as Walsingham had noted recently. Her motto was Semper eadem, always the same; but she could no longer easily impose the fiction on her court. Men, she noted grimly, turn always towards the rising sun.

  To write, even to speak, of the future of the realm was treason. The queen was notoriously sensitive about ‘the curious and dangerous question of the succession’. To ask her to name her heir, she once told the Scottish envoy, was ‘to require me in my life to set my winding sheet before my eye’. But, in a world where the succession had been for decades the most important topic of secret speculation, no-one could fail to know that Arbella Stuart had a claim to the throne second only to that of her cousin, the Scottish king, James VI. If James were to be excluded from the succession by his foreign birth, Arbella would be the ‘lawful inheritress’,54 reported the French ambassador urgently. When Arbella appeared at court, every officer and suitor knew that this unknown child could well be their next sovereign.

  It was an extraordinary moment in history. Elizabeth Tudor had never met her rival Mary, queen of Scots; would never meet Mary’s son James. But now she confronted a representative of the dynasty that would succeed her; a living reminder of her own mortality.

  Arbella, for her part, was facing the nation’s ‘dread and sovereign mistress’. It was an ordeal for anyone. Age had not made Elizabeth less formidable: ‘When I see her enraged against any person whatever, I wish myself in Calcutta,’ wrote an ambassador apprehensively, ‘fearing her anger like death itself.’ But Arbella had more reason than most to be afraid. This was the woman she had been raised to emulate, the one who held her fortune in her hands. What is more, she curtseyed before the terrifying figure who, just five months before, had ordered the beheading of her royal aunt Mary, whose unburied body still lay stinking at Fotheringay.

  Mary’s ghost haunted Arbella’s visit in more ways than one. It was the tense political situation that followed the execution that lay behind the young girl’s summons to court, like a skull just discernible beneath the painted skin. But she could not be expected to think of politics, when faced by such a dazzling scene; and in some ways, perhaps, Arbella got off lightly. Instead of the vast, forbidding – and almost entirely male – crowd that might have greeted her in London, she met a court in holiday mood. The queen was on her summer progress, engaged on one of those extraordinary annual jaunts by which as many as two hundred courtiers and the entire apparatus of state trailed laboriously and expensively around the southern counties. Arbella, sponsored probably by her uncle and aunt Gilbert and Mary Talbot, joined the royal train at Theobalds, the quasi-palace created near Enfield by Lord Burghley.

  Even by the standards of the great Elizabethan ‘prodigy’ houses – infinitely theatrical, imaginative and expensive – Theobalds was the wonder of its age. Large as a village, fantastical as a dream, it was a place where stone and wood were bent to imagery. To entertain his queen, Burghley ‘thought no trouble, care, nor cost too much’. The green leaves of high summer in the magnificent grounds were echoed inside for Elizabeth’s pleasure. An entranced visitor55 described the presence chamber decorated with oak trees, their foliage so convincingly painted that when the windows were open (and Elizabeth could not endure closed windows) birds ‘flew into the hall, perched themselves upon the trees and began to sing’. The ceiling was laid out with the sun, stars and signs of the zodiac, the whole working its course ‘by some concealed ingenious mechanism’ and functioning as a planetary clock. This great chamber, wrote Arbella’s uncle Charles Cavendish, had ‘at the nether end a fair rock with duck and pheasants and divers other birds which serves for a cupboard’. Luxury abounded: a container in the gatehouse was made to look like a bunch of grapes and, during the queen’s visits, ran constantly with wine, white and red.

  The façade of Theobalds, drawn by John Thorpe.

  But every gaudy ‘device’ contained hidden layers of meaning. There was a grim subtext to the royal visit itself. This sojourn of an unprecedented month, longer than ever before, was designed to mark Elizabeth’s eventual forgiveness of her host for his part in pushing through the execution of the Scots queen. Truly, as Arbella trod between the carved snarling lions which decorated Burghley’s wide stone stairs, the complexity – as well as the fascination – of a wider world than she had hitherto known could hardly have been presented to her more vividly.

  Her reception was encouraging beyond dreams. The child was given an honour after which ambitious men had sighed for years. Arbella was invited to dine in the presence – seated beside the queen herself. ‘Majesty’, said Elizabeth, ‘makes the people bow.’ So the food and table furnishings were borne in to the sound of trumpets and kettledrums. A lady in waiting prostrated herself three times before the queen’s seat – whether or not Elizabeth was actually present – before rubbing the plate with bread and salt and giving each guard a taste of the dish in case of poison. At home, Arbella was served on bended knee, and addressed as ‘Highness’ at her grandmother’s insistence. She was used to ritual. But nothing like this, surely. It was a test, and she performed well. Charles Cavendish reported56 to his mother Bess – detained at home in the midlands on one of those enforced, unsuccessful reconciliations with her husband on which the queen still insisted – that her family’s young hope ‘can behave herself with great proportion to everyone in their degree’.

  ‘I believe she will dance with exceedingly good grace,’ he added. This was an accomplishment particularly important in Elizabethan society. The queen herself had been an expert performer, and remained a critical spectator. A number of manuals promoted the art on both philosophical and practical grounds. (‘Dancing is practised to reveal whether lovers are in good health and sound of limb,’ wrote one author; ‘a pleasant and profitable art which confers and preserves health’, said another.) But Elizabethan dances required a good deal of training as well as considerable athleticism. The stately processional pavane might be designed primarily to display, peacock-like, your clothes, but a livelier form left you inventing solo steps according to your own skill and your dancing master’s fantasy. One version of the galliard required a man to leap in the air and kick a tassel held above shoulder height; in la volta, he twirled the woman off the ground with a single arm around her waist, and broken legs were not unknown among the clumsy. A woman’s costume spared her the more terrifyingly active of these public feats, but a lady had elegantly and discreetly to manage her farthingale or her train. She had, moreover, to know whether the Italian custom, whereby a lady could invite a man to dance, was really common practice in England; and how to comport herself when neither inviting nor, worse, invited. Arbella acquitted herself admirably.

  T
he newcomer did not lack notice from the grandees of the court. Her host Burghley, the lord treasurer himself, received her very kindly. The political ‘fox’, as his enemies called him, was in private life a paternal and domestic man, and an ally of Bess’s to boot. ‘My lord treasurer bade [Arbella] to supper,’ Charles wrote to Bess:

  He spoke openly and directed his speech to Sir Walter Ralegh greatly in her commendation as that she had the French, the Italian, played of instruments, danced, wrought [embroidered] and wrote very fair, wished she were fifteen years old. And with that rouned [whispered] Mr Ralegh in the ear, who answered ‘it would be a happy thing.’ At supper he made exceeding much of her, so did he in the afternoon in his Great Chamber publicly.

  This was a time, Charles wrote, when the court was ‘in that height’ – on the very brink of change, the balance of power shifting between the figures of Elizabeth’s prime and those who surrounded her in her twilight years. The older generation – men like Leicester and Hatton, Walsingham and eventually even Burghley himself – were to give way to a younger set. Leicester’s stepson the earl of Essex, newly arrived at court at this time, was already so intimate with the queen that ‘he cometh not to his own lodging till birds sing in the morning,’ as his servant reported triumphantly. Leicester had been Bess’s friend; Essex was to be Arbella’s ally. They may already have met: the young earl had accompanied his stepfather when Leicester visited the spa at Buxton. He was, of course, half-brother to ‘the youthful Lord Denbigh’ for whom Arbella had briefly been intended.