Household accounts show Arbella buying a set of viols; visits from the musicians in service with the earls of Rutland and of Essex; visits from the local waits. (Her uncle Henry kept a private orchestra notable even at a time when the standard of English performance was famously high.) Bess’s accounts a few years later show payment to a quartet of men and boys come to sing four-part songs: ‘Given to them that plays of music with Will, 20s.’ Bess’s payments also mention ‘those that built the bower’ – maybe the set for a masque, with all its attendant ceremony. The Queen’s Players visited Hardwick in 1596 and 1600, as did Lord Thomas Howard’s and Lord Ogle’s troops and those of the earls of Huntingdon and of Pembroke; not the best companies at the height of their reputation, but enough to fire a girl’s imagination. Arbella had the habit of describing her life in theatrical terms. She and those around her would be ‘actors’; she herself one who had not yet learned her part in the play. But increasingly, over the years ahead, she would discover in herself the desire to write her own lines; not simply to rehearse those laid down by her family.
The mating game in which Queen Elizabeth used Arbella as a pawn carried a huge human cost, and it was Arbella and her grandmother who had to pay. It was in the queen’s interest to keep Arbella out of the way at Hardwick, where faction was less likely to form around her. She had suffered under the open intrigues of Catherine Grey. But from Arbella’s standpoint, the life that seemed agreeable enough at first must have palled eventually. Everything we know about the beliefs Arbella’s upbringing had fostered in her suggests that she had not been raised to expect a quiet private destiny. And now – just at a time when her horizons should have been broadening – she found herself instead suffering a lack of freedom and privacy that even her contemporaries came to find extraordinary. Bess (to whom Arbella was clearly still a child) wrote to Lord Burghley a description of their life that is all the more chilling for being quite unconscious of its cruelty:
I have little71 resort to me, my house is furnished with sufficient company: Arbell walks not late; at such time as she shall take the air it shall be near the house, and well attended on: she goeth not to anybody’s house at all: I see her almost every hour in the day: she lieth in my bedchamber. If I can be more precise than I have been I will be.
It is almost a surprise when Bess adds: ‘I find her loving and dutiful to me.’
‘Slanderous and unlikely surmise’
IT WAS THE rumour of a Catholic plot to kidnap her that had seen Arbella packed off back to the fastness of Derbyshire for her own – and the nation’s – security. One Sir William Stanley, an English Catholic renegade living at the Spanish court, had warned a companion (so a captured Jesuit revealed under torture that August) that ‘he must do service with a lady’. The companion asked who that might be. With Arbella, Stanley answered, ‘who kept with the earl of Shrewsbury’.
‘It is Arbella72 … who they most certain would proclaim queen if her mistress [Elizabeth] should happen to die, the rather as they might still rule after their own designments under a woman’s government, and if they had her most of their fears would be passed, for any that would hinder them in England.’ Semple and Rowlston, two Scots Catholics, had promised ‘to convey her by stealth out of England into Flanders: which, if it be done, she shall shortly visit Spain’.
Stanley’s plan, for an armed invasion of England by Spanish forces, was probably designed not to place Arbella on the throne but – having cleared her prior claim out of the way – rather to install a Catholic claimant; perhaps his cousin, Lord Strange. As Stanley passed on to Rome, so he talked again, telling another table of Catholic diners that ‘one young lady,73 as yet unmarried, was the greatest fear they had, lest she should be proclaimed queen, if it should so happen that her Majesty should die.’
This, to most of Arbella’s contemporaries, seemed a perfectly realistic prediction. In the event James of Scotland acceded peacefully, and history (never interested in also-rans) has glossed over any other possibility. But at the time, as one of the modern authorities, Howard Nenner, puts it, there was ‘simply no contemporary agreement74 as to whether the crown ought to pass automatically at the death of Elizabeth to the next in hereditary line; whether the next in hereditary line might be passed over because of a “legal” incapacity to rule; whether the next monarch ought to be determined in parliament; or whether the queen should be exhorted in the waning days of her life to nominate her own successor’. (The same confusion, presumably, is reflected in the declaration of the hereditary heir Hamlet that in the imminent ‘election’ for the throne of Denmark, Fortinbras had his dying voice.) There was no consensus as to whether the throne went by strict order of birth; by greatest suitability (out of the shortlist of the blood royal); or by divine selection – and the third was the most uncertain of interpretation. ‘Set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose,’ said Deuteronomy – but simple success (in battle or otherwise) was the most obvious evidence of favour, surely? Henry VIII’s daughters had both laid stress on parliament’s ratification of their title: James, by contrast75, would come to the throne in defiance of that legislation which Henry’s parliament (and Elizabeth’s) had laid down. No wonder that, in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, a positive snowstorm of pamphlets attacked the problem, most urging the queen to declare her successor. But if the constitutional issue offered an interesting philosophical problem, it was the religious struggle – a Protestant heir or a Catholic one? – that gave the question its point, its impetus and its vitality.
In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, as the tides of the Counter-Reformation lapped against England’s shores, the midlands had become a centre of covert Catholic activity. Disguised missionary priests found hiding places in the homes of sympathetic gentry. There were several such helpful households close to Hardwick: Lady Foljambe at Chesterfield; the notorious Vaux sisters; the Fitzherberts; the Markham family near Rufford, whose names figure later in Arbella’s story. The Jesuit priest John Gerard described thrusting himself hastily into one such ‘priest’s hole’ below the floorboards, where he hid for four days, sustained only by ‘a biscuit or two and a little quince jelly’, while officers unavailingly searched the house. The arrival of these Jesuits, well educated and highly motivated, heralded a fresh wave of missionary activity in the 1590s. ‘There is’, wrote the Jesuit Henry Walpole in 1591, ‘a great hope and inclination to the Catholic faith of late in England, in court, camp and country.’ Many of the gentry and nobility (many ladies, especially) found their old faith renewed or reactivated by these persuasive men, and among them was Arbella’s aunt Mary Talbot, who from this time was repeatedly cited for her open papistry.
Nor was she alone within her family; through the centuries ahead, indeed, Catholicism continued to run deep through the Talbot line. But it must have been yet another source of controversy within a divided clan. Bess was a stalwart of the Protestant party, and the old earl of Shrewsbury’s reputation was such that in 1590, shortly before his death, the notorious persecutor of Catholics Topcliffe could write to him, excusing his late arrival at Shrewsbury’s home on the grounds that he was on the trail of a Catholic suspect – sure that this excuse would be sufficient. (Though what, in this context, is one to make of the queen of Scots’ sometime claim that Shrewsbury, like the other northern earls, was secretly of her party?)
Soon after the old earl’s death,76 when Gilbert and Mary Talbot had become the new earl and countess of Shrewsbury, the family letters reflect accusations of recusancy. Bess’s daughter Frances was one target, along with her husband Henry Pierrepont. Next comes an allegation that Gilbert himself had seen a book of the sacrament ‘and did not mislike it’. Gilbert was never openly taxed with Catholicism. This was true of most of the senior nobility whose support, after all, was essential in maintaining order in distant parts of the country. But another letter suggests that his wife’s open papistry might put an end to his political career; and indeed, for one of his rank, he did long
languish in comparative obscurity. Suspicion touched Charles Cavendish, favourite brother to Gilbert and Mary. The tactless Lady Cook urged Mary not to be ‘deaf like an adder’ in matters of religion; clearly, Mary had taken up this cause with her accustomed obstinacy.
The religious beliefs of the sixteenth century are hard to grasp from a twenty-first-century perspective. We have to come to terms with the simultaneous existence of passionately held and mutually incompatible modes of belief as well as with the fact that men and women were prepared to die in agony over subtle differences in religious practice. Even among the most committed, it must have been hard to keep up with the changing doctrines of the century. The earl of Essex was emerging as the figurehead of the Protestant party; yet his mother’s new husband was a Catholic, and he himself increasingly found it politic to extend some protection to imprisoned Catholics, thus endearing himself to the continental royalty.
Many, of course, took the pragmatic line. ‘In 1580 there were 66 English peers,’77 wrote the historian Lawrence Stone; ‘20 of these were Catholic recusants, about 10 were of strongly Puritan sympathies, about a dozen were supporters of the Anglican settlement, and the remaining 24 were relatively indifferent to religious issues and anxious only to back the winner.’ Queen Elizabeth preferred, as she put it, not to open windows into men’s souls. ‘There is only one faith and one Jesus Christ; the rest is a dispute about trifles,’ the queen declared once, shockingly. In 1593 Henri IV, the Protestant king of France, converted to Catholicism in order to bring peace to his country and power to himself. ‘Paris is worth a Mass,’ he said cynically. One Catholic commentator78 on the succession would sum up Arbella’s own position pragmatically: ‘I know it not, but probably it can be no great motive, either against her or for her’ – in other words, it was likely to be negotiable. There was, moreover, a secret but influential group of thinkers in London whose beliefs tended towards what the sixteenth century called atheism and we might call free-thinking. Prominent among them was Sir Walter Ralegh, who was to be important in Arbella’s story.
Arbella, in later life, was to say frankly that she would go with ‘papists, Turks, Jews or infidels’ if they would help her have her liberty. Could the diverse influences of her background have bred in her a broad tolerance – a genuine indifference to precise religious forms? William Seymour,79 the man she eventually chose for her husband, was described by a Jesuit who met him abroad as ignorant of religion to the point that marked him rather an atheist than a heretic; atheist (or agnostic) even in modern terms, since he apparently expressed doubts about the immortality of the soul.
Bess obviously raised her granddaughter in the established faith. (If proof were needed, Bess’s accounts, while in London, once mention ‘given for my Lady Arbella and Mr Cavendish unto the parson of Chelsea for their communions, 10s’.) The French ambassador, usually to be relied upon for a common-sense summary, stated clearly, later in her life, that he saw no reason to doubt Arbella was of the religion usually practised in her country. But time and time again, among more excitable spirits, there was to be speculation as to whether Arbella was or was not ‘inclinable to papistry’. This, of course, was the politically interesting possibility; for the Protestants already had a candidate – James – handy. As far back as 1589 an all-purpose informer named Barnes was reporting on the feelings of the English Catholics, for whom ‘all platforms fell to the ground80 on the death of the queen of Scots. Their next design will be built on other ground than religion, and they harp much on Lady Arbella, despairing of the king of Scots.’ Had she married Parma’s son, wrote a member of the Catholic Arundel family, ‘all would be holiday.’
For her own part, Arbella once described herself, perhaps not too seriously, as being half a puritan, and her wide reading of the Bible would fit with that Protestant tradition. Though her later alliances tended the other way, this may have been mere expediency. Then again, the Catholic influence in her childhood had been strong. Lady Lennox had been a Catholic who raised her son Charles in that faith until the authorities intervened, and there were usually disguised Catholic priests in the household of the ardently Catholic Queen Mary.
So Burghley, after the unmasking of the Catholic Stanley plot, wrote to Bess in late September, warning her to look to the security of the neighbourhood. Bess, scouring the district for ‘traitorous and naughty persons’, wrote triumphantly of her victory over ‘one Morley’,81 who, having
attended on Arbell, and read to her for the space of three years and a half, showed to be much discontented since my return into the country … saying he had lived in hope of having some annuity granted him by Arbella out of her land, or some lease of ground to the value of £40 a year, alleging that he was so much damnified by leaving of the university.
Seeing that Arbella herself had not the power to give it, he had the temerity to request of Bess some payment for this long service. Bess promptly ‘took occasion to part with him’. But the day after leaving Hardwick with his things ‘Morley’ was back, begging for work again and ‘very importunate to serve’ even ‘without standing upon any recompense’, as Bess recounted incredulously, and suspiciously. This merely heightened Bess’s doubts as to his ‘forwardness in religion’ – ‘though I cannot accuse him of papistry’, she added scrupulously.
‘Morley’ may well have been simply a man who, in those years of reading and making music with Arbella, had become fond of her; fond enough to serve without salary … Returning tail between legs to Hardwick, at least he would get his bread that way. If this were the case, then his dismissal would have been just one more brick in the wall of what would become Arbella’s increasing isolation. However, Morley-the-tutor has been speculatively identified with a Catholic spy, ‘Morley, the singing man … who has brought divers into danger’, and/or with Thomas Morley of St Paul’s, the organist and composer. (A Catholic letter82 now in the State Papers, intercepted in the autumn of 1591, complains that the St Paul’s organist seemed to be a good son of that church; and yet word was that in his new post he had turned coat, and was responsible for Catholics being arrested.) But that particular road leads nowhere. The organist Morley may be a spy of Catholic background; Arbella’s Morley may be a spy with Catholic leanings as well as a musician; and yet the dates make it most unlikely that Arbella’s Morley is the St Paul’s man, whose work must have kept him in London almost constantly. (There remains the possibility that, as an acquaintance of Michael Cavendish, he may have introduced a relative into the Hardwick family.) But the conception of Arbella’s Morley as a spy opens the way to another, even more interesting, possibility. For Morley-the-tutor has also been identified with another spy: the playwright Christopher Marlowe, to whom he bears a number of circumstantial and biographical similarities. (See Appendix A for discussion.) It remains a possibility, though not a probability. But it is true that in these years there would be many watching Arbella, and her religion, carefully. Ironically, her political profile was never higher than for much of this twilight of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, just as her own personal horizons dwindled. Never was the name ‘Arbella Stuart’ bandied around the continent more vigorously.
The early 1590s saw the rise of a new generation of men at court who would decide Arbella’s future, but with whom her grandmother’s established contacts would not help. In her youth and middle age Bess had carefully cultivated powerful friends – Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester – but they had all faded too early. Bess and Queen Elizabeth had alike outlived most of those old allies. Down in London, new men would take their place. But while the pieces of English politics were recombined like the picture in a kaleidoscope, Arbella was mewed up in Derbyshire, a long way from the seat of power.
Change had already been in the air when Arbella left London. Lord Burghley, old and wracked with gout, begged his mistress for leave to retire. The queen would not allow it – but increasingly, over the years to come his son Robert Cecil would take over his functions as secretary. From the start of 1593 (when the latter
was sworn in as a privy counsellor) Burghley’s son faced Leicester’s stepson Essex across the council table. At first, perhaps, it was hoped that the two younger men would help their elders to recreate the working alliance that, in Elizabeth’s younger days, had bound together men of very different methods. At first, with his own son still in the background, Burghley helped and supported the young earl whose guardian he had once been. At first, it was still possible for courtiers like Gilbert Shrewsbury to steer a prudent middle way, juggling the friendships of both younger men. But increasingly, as Robert Cecil rose in importance, and as it became ever clearer that Essex sought pre-eminence, not cooperation, it became obvious that the two were oil and water. They would not mix easily. The court politics of the 1590s saw important divisions in terms of politics and ideology; but personalities, too, were part of the story.
Robert Cecil was a bureaucrat, an administrator of vision and ‘a courtier from his cradle’; a man of smooth and gentle manners whose physical appearance, however, was damaged by a slight hunchback and tiny build. The queen (who could be cruel) called him her Elf, or Pygmy. By contrast, Essex’s tall and flamboyant person was his chief attraction. If he really were the model83 for Nicholas Hilliard’s ‘Young Man amongst Roses’, with its long limbs and delicate face, then he had the kind of ravishingly romantic looks that glow right down through the changing fashions of the centuries. He never mastered the skills of the court; indeed, he despised them ostentatiously. And yet Essex was no longer just another pretty favourite but prospectively ‘a great man in the state’, as his new assistant Francis Bacon put it clearly. That very ardour, that youthful crudeness, may have been part of his attraction for an ageing queen whose palate was jaded of smoother flattery.
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