Doleman was if anything rather polite – in a patronizing sort of way – about Arbella herself: ‘in that she is a young lady99, she is thereby fit … to procure good wills and affections, and in that she is unmarried she may perhaps by her marriage join some other title with her, and thereby also friends.’ It was he who, pragmatically, had suggested that her religion was ‘no great motive, either against her or for her,’ being presumably ‘tender green and flexible yet, as is her age and sex’. But Doleman also unerringly put his finger on the real weakness of her position. No-one ever accused the Jesuits of being fools. Arbella, he wrote, ‘is nothing at all allied with the nobility of England, and except it be the earl of Shrewsbury, in respect of friendship to his old mother-in-law … I see not what noble man in England hath any band of kindred or alliance to follow her.’ Her kindred on her father’s side being ‘mere Scottish’, she ‘hath only the Cavendishes100 by her mother’s side, who being but a mean family for a princess, might cause much grudging … to see them so greatly elevated above the rest’. The real question, as the exiled Derrick had phrased it, was ‘what support Arbella hath in England or is like to have’. It was a question that could only be answered discouragingly.
Arbella herself, meanwhile, could neither act nor speak in her own cause. She was growing up in seclusion, as Bess settled into old age far from the seat of power. Through all those years of Arbella’s childhood, Bess had tried to give her granddaughter the training and trappings of a princess; to fit her for an offer which never came. But now something more active was needed, and Bess had no means (or perhaps, at her age, no volition) to move thus aggressively.
Queen Elizabeth had lived too long. One can never say for certain that Arbella’s chances of the throne would have been better had the moment of decision come early in the 1590s. James was always the stronger candidate. But yet there is a sense of a chance slipping away; of the throne being decided (as one historian put it) by ‘time, survival and delay’101. While Arbella sat at her stitchery, all but incommunicado at Hardwick, the king of Scots, from a greater geographical distance, was manipulating, offering, corresponding; doing deals and demonstrating royal authority. He began hinting that he might tolerate Catholics in return for their support, and in 1594 his position had been strengthened by the birth of his first son, Henry. Now, besides Tudor blood, the male chromosome and experience of government, he could also offer a dynasty.
At this dangerous point, in the summer of 1595, came evidence of more unhelpful scheming on the part of Mary Talbot. A man called Nicholas Williamson, an imprisoned Catholic, was under investigation for suspicious activities. Amid the mass of documents102 in the Cecil papers bearing his name is a declaration he made in June of that year, attempting to buy favour by giving, as was demanded, ‘the smallest particular’ of any ‘plot or practice for the succession’. Paragraphs of his lengthy statement chronicle various of Mary Talbot’s dealings, like her quarrel with the Stanhopes – for fear of poisoning by whom, she said, Gilbert would not dine much abroad when he visited London shortly. (The Stanhope family, that year, were offering Williamson a place in Essex’s service if he provided damaging information against Gilbert and Mary.) He ran over all the old plots, and the points raised in Doleman’s Conference. But he also retailed Scottish gossip to the effect that the queen ‘would never set Lady Arbella up in regard to [because of] her Majesty’s love of the now lords of her council, who, or most of them, were then sure to be displaced.’
For her Honour’s friends by her father’s side would then be her chiefest enemies, and her chiefest friends those by her mother’s side, the chiefest of whom (naming my lady) was of so imperious a nature and so conceited against the most of the council … that when she should have a ruling hand she would overrule those whom now she least affecteth.
Asked what, if anything, he had ever heard spoken ‘touching any expectation to the succession’, he could only relay some tittle-tattle Mary Talbot had given him concerning the poverty of the earl of Huntingdon (descended from the Plantagenets) and the recent suspicious death of the earl of Derby (Ferdinando, Lord Strange, claimant of the fourth main, the Stanley, line). But at a time when telling the queen’s horoscope was treason, even that could seem dubious.
One Edward Thurland103 wrote to Gilbert in August warning him that he was in trouble for rumours concerning Arbella; adding, in the same letter, that Mary too was at some risk, being known to have heard mass in her husband’s house. In this year Gilbert Talbot, Arbella’s only highly placed English relative, seems to have been warned off any activity on his niece’s behalf. Essex was pro-Scottish, the Talbots’ hands were tied … Doleman believed Burghley favoured Arbella, but it seems more likely that the Cecil interest would be dedicated to ensuring an uncontested succession by whoever the front-runner should prove to be. Moreover, thanks to Elizabeth’s longevity, Burghley’s would not in the end be the relevant voice. Warmly though Arbella’s claim might be discussed abroad, there seemed suddenly to be no person or party of power in England with real reason to support her candidacy at home.
‘This my prison’
AT THE END of 1595 Arbella Stuart had just turned twenty. The years of her autonomy – of action, attempt, adventure – were still far ahead. And yet something seems already to have died – the phantasm, perhaps, of the life for which she had been raised. It seems almost apt that at the end of 1595 James in Scotland heard that she was ‘not like to live’, though we do not know what her illness, if any, may have been. It is dangerous (if all too easy) to view Arbella’s life only from the political perspective; to see her stamped by failure here, so early in her adulthood. But if we do ask ‘what went wrong’ with her hopes of ruling the country, the answer lies in these years, surely.
If it is true that Arbella Stuart had at one time been an important candidate for the throne, it is probably also true that by the start of 1596 the most influential of Elizabeth’s court had ceased to take her seriously. Among later historians, Joel Hurstfield in 1961 saw James, Arbella and the Spanish infanta as the three among the many contenders who went on counting through the 1590s. Today, Pauline Croft makes a significant distinction between the inner circle – for whom Arbella was never a likely prospect – and the outer circle, the majority. And, as she points out, death or disaster could bring an outside hope into the lead all too easily. But most of Arbella’s contemporaries could never have known that she had been ruled out of the game. Nor, crucially, could she.
For the remainder of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Arbella Stuart was the victim of a campaign of obfuscation, baffled by the smokescreen the queen and her ministers successfully threw up over the question of the succession. She was still spoken of for this or that foreign prince – more princes than ever – and the crown would go with her, surely? But somehow, all the promises came to nothing. The deception was probably not aimed at Arbella herself, or even at those who might support her; Elizabeth’s desire to keep everyone guessing was ingrained, the result as much of temperament as of international policy. But then again, if enduring hope kept any potential supporters from building an aggressive party, then that was a good thing – from the viewpoint of those in power.
Ironically, it was the very length of time Arbella Stuart spent in hopes of the crown of England that would finally drive her to rebellion. We need not imagine her waiting at Hardwick in tranquil passivity. If we borrow for a moment the Elizabethan belief in human nature as dominated by four humours, hers – like her uncle Gilbert’s, like her cousin James’s – fits the pattern of the ‘melancholic’ temperament all too neatly. Melancholy man or woman was studious and solitary; steadfast in choice though ‘long a-choosing’, subject to ‘perpetual sadness’ or irrational joy. It was proper to all melancholy men, wrote Robert Burton, the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘what conceit they have once entertained to be most intent, violent and continually about it’. The fixed conceit in which Arbella had been reared – this troublesome, this obsessive conceit – was th
at of her royalty.
* * *
The pieces on the board were taking on a new shape, and James was pulling far ahead. Much, though, still depended on the way the powerful men in London played their game; and between them, the factions (wrote one courtier, Sir Thomas Lake) were ‘never more malicious’. For both Essex and Robert Cecil, 1596 saw significant advances. But they were holding very different territory.
While Cecil had become ‘the greatest councillor in England’, Essex was ever more ‘wearied’ of the ‘dissembling courses’ of the court. Essex was the man of war, seeking the bubble reputation in the cannon’s mouth. Cecil was the man of peace. In the summer of 1596 Essex (together with Sir Walter Ralegh; two natural enemies thrust into a brief alliance) set off on a raiding expedition towards the Spanish coast. Their flamboyant achievement was to capture and sack the port of Cadiz and destroy the fleet the king of Spain was building towards another Armada. It was a feat tailor-made to give English morale a useful boost in these gloomy years. But they missed, to Elizabeth’s fury, their chance to capture the laden Spanish treasure fleet. Essex always had the capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The balance of power was shifting in the Cecils’ favour. The day Essex set sail from Cadiz was the day Cecil was sworn in as secretary of state. Robert Cecil’s intelligence network was coming to rival that of Essex, and at the beginning of 1597 Francis Bacon, Essex’s chief agent and adviser, transferred his allegiance to Burghley. It was becoming increasingly likely that the next head to wear the English crown would be the one that enjoyed Cecil support; but still no-one knew whose it might be. The smokescreen still kept the future from view. Arbella still seemed to be of importance to almost everybody.
Essex’s own spy network threw up evidence of another abortive plot to kidnap Arbella – a feeble one, but it may further have focused his mind upon her: ‘how beautiful’104, as the agent noted, ‘how virtuous and how inclined’. Essex’s voyage had been one move in the anti-Spanish alliance Elizabeth cemented that year with Henri IV of France – and Henri (seeking a divorce from his barren wife Marguerite de Valois) was looking for a new bride. That summer, the rumour mill was busy – especially when Arbella’s uncle Gilbert was chosen to lead the celebratory embassy. James in Scotland was said to suspect105 ‘that the queen of England would persuade the French king … either to divorce or kill his wife and to marry himself with the Lady Arbella to bring him into the succession of England’.
But Henri the shrewd saw it more realistically. As he told his minister Sully:
I should have no objection106 to the infanta of Spain, however old and ugly she might be, provided that with her I could marry the Low Countries; neither would I refuse the princess Arbella of England, if, since as it is publicly said the crown of England really belongs to her, she were only declared presumptive heiress of it. But there is no reason to expect either of these things will happen, for the Spanish king and the English queen are far from making such plans.
Just how far was proved when – perhaps flushed with the honour done her husband – Mary Talbot dared to ask if two of her daughters could be appointed maids in waiting to their cousin. The right to have maids of honour was granted only to the heir presumptive, and Elizabeth ordered the Talbot party home immediately.
It was characteristic of Mary to push too far, too fast. The same was all too true of Essex, and 1597 saw his position shift for the worse. A year which began with a flaming quarrel between queen and favourite (he took to his bed sick; she visited him; he recovered) continued with the disastrous ‘islands voyage’, which failed in its object of sinking the Spanish treasure fleet, through a cocktail of ill luck and ill judgement. The earl’s behaviour, indeed, was by now so erratic that historians have speculated on the insanity which comes from advanced syphilis.
But still the common people cheered him to the rafters whenever he showed his handsome head. These middle years of the 1590s were trying times. Endemic corruption in the palaces combined with economic hardship in the land as the high taxation consequent on campaigns abroad combined with a string of harvests so bad that children died of famine and inns could not afford to brew beer. These are the conditions that focus hate on bureaucrats: ‘pen gents’, as the Cecils were contemptuously described. These are also the conditions that breed popular heroes – demagogues – and Essex fitted the bill perfectly. His victory in Cadiz had given him ‘a charter of the people’s hearts’. He knew it, and fostered it, all too visibly.
The deals, the diplomacy were all spectacles Arbella could watch only from a distance. We can never know how much information she was able to obtain; but it was not enough, as events ahead were to prove, to enable her to judge her chances appropriately. Indeed, the high ridge on which Bess built her Hardwick homes seemed to lend its own bedazzlement to the eye. Looking out from Hardwick over the empty landscape, one might easily imagine that other figures would be as easily placed as pieces in a board game; might lose touch with any sense of reality.
While agents and ambassadors spoke of Arbella’s moving across the seas to France or Spain, at the end of 1597 she and her grandmother were preparing for a journey of a few hundred yards. But even that was to be marked by triumphal music, played by members of the Hardwick household (two of whom, the chaplain James Starkey, and Bess’s confidential servant John Good, or Dodderidge, were to be intimately involved in Arbella’s story). And perhaps, after all, the event was significant enough in its way. Their new home, Hardwick Hall, was at last ready.
More space must have been needed urgently. Not only Arbella and her own attendants but William and his family were living at Hardwick, and the records of 1597 show Bess dressing seventy-four servants in her livery of blue or ‘mallard colour’. But space, one feels, was only a part of the story. This was an age when men ruined themselves in mortar, as the late Sir Christopher Hatton had done at Holdenby. Building, wrote Francis Bacon in 1594, was the only way ‘to cure mortality by fame’, and Bess had always been interested in her properties, even beyond the norm of her day. The very stone of Hardwick proclaims her identity. A repeated device around the roof of the Hall, standing high on a Derbyshire escarpment (‘exposed to all the malice of the heavens’, as the queen of Scots had said of Tutbury), exalts a countess’s coronet and the initials E.S. – Elizabeth Shrewsbury – to the sky.
‘Hardwick Hall/More glass than wall’, as the mocking jingle had it, must have astonished the countryside. Bess even, for the sake of symmetry, squandered the costly glass on fake windows to mask the chimneys. Thus lavishly endowed, Hardwick had to excess the ‘largeness and lightsomeness’ Burghley had praised in Hatton’s Holdenby, but it cannot have had warmth. A later owner wrote that it was icy. The windows grow ever larger as you rise through three stories. On the ground floor was to be found the service area – kitchens, pantry – and also the nursery, where William’s children were taught by the chaplain Starkey, along with the base level of the tall hall and chapel. The first floor was the dwelling space of the family, and of some of the upper servants and visitors. The second floor held the great Gallery, the High Great Chamber – the most lavishly decorated room in the house – and the bedroom which would be given to any visiting royalty.
There is a theory that Bess was building a fitting backdrop for a Queen Arbella, but it is hard to walk around the house and still subscribe to that story. The only sign of Arbella’s presence is her own coat of arms – tucked in above the larger Hardwick shield – in the back room she was to call her study. It is a pleasant room107, with large windows overlooking lawns, but accessible only through Bess’s private suite. In that, it was a ‘disadvantageous chamber’, Arbella would grumble bitterly.
The inventory Bess had drawn up in 1601 lists the contents of the room precisely. There was little solid furniture – a cupboard, a square table, a joined stool – but a lavish array of textiles: ‘Six pieces of hangings of yellow, blue and other coloured damask and sating wrought with gold flowers and lined with can
vas’; a carpet ‘of needlework wrought with antiks’; another ‘of russet velvet paned with gold and silver lace and layed with gold and silver lace and fringe about, lined with yellow and green satin bridges’. Some of the household’s attendant ladies obviously crammed in to sleep here and in the tiny room that abuts the chamber, for the inventory lists several beds. But Arbella herself, under ‘a canopy of darnix blue and white with gilt knobs and blue and white fringe’, was still sleeping just across the passageway, in her grandmother’s room; a crowded space packed with the huge number of coverlets needed to warm so old a lady. (A closet off it held their private closed stools.) In an age of shared chambers and even beds – an age before corridors, when only the curtains of a four-poster protected its inhabitants from traffic through the room – a lack of privacy must have been something Elizabethans took for granted; until, perhaps, some particular stress of circumstance impressed it on them forcibly.
Hardwick Hall, compared to the great houses of the day, is tiny; less than half the size of Bess’s Chatsworth. In practical terms that didn’t matter. The Old Hall still stood only yards away to act as overflow accommodation and servants’ quarters, and to perform some of the functions that made a great house resemble a small city. Bess’s account books show that the two houses were run as one household, and in the courtyard of the Old Hall were to be found the dairy and slaughterhouse, stables and smithy. But the occupants of the new Hall must have found it hard to get away from each other – in particular, to get away from Bess.
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