Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  In Bess’s home, her granddaughter would always be a subordinate. The inventory of contents shows each of the rooms Bess habitually used furnished with one – just one – high chair and footstool. The high back was not just for comfort; it was a symbol of authority. Arbella’s chair, though upholstered in cloth of gold, was described as small. This was another queendom in which she could never wield power.

  Hardwick in all its appointments, in every departure from usual arrangements, proclaims that it was built for the convenience of one ageing and autocratic woman. No wonder Arbella came eventually to hate ‘this my prison’, as she would later describe it bitterly. Sequestered inside its glowing golden stone, amid the painted tales and embroidered images chosen by Bess to reflect her own past, Arbella must have wondered what was to be her story.

  Arbella was later to claim that she was shut up in Hardwick with only ‘ancient gentlewomen’ to attend her. She begged for some young company. She had her own immediate attendants among the community and later, when the great row came, she was to make a sharp distinction between those servants who owed allegiance to her – ‘my regiment’ – and her grandmother’s great majority. But loyal though these attendants may have been (even prepared, Arbella suggests, to give and take blows for her sake), she clearly came to feel that there was something lacking in their society.

  For the first part of the 1590s, for many months of the year, Hardwick bustled with William’s family: the three young sons and three daughters born to his first wife Anne Keighley. We know little of Anne – ‘the most excellent of women’, in the words of the tombstone erected by her second son. But while perforce considerably older than Arbella (she married William in 1582, when Arbella was only seven), she must also have been younger than her husband, who was nearing fifty with the turn of the century. Perhaps Anne was a companion for Arbella, and a conduit of London news and gossip after the couple’s visits to their Holborn house.

  But in February 1598, soon after the birth of her youngest child, Anne died. Two of her daughters did not long outlive her. And in 1599, Bess’s accounts record the charges for the ‘full furnishing’ of Oldcotes (or Owlcotes), the house she had built for William just a couple of miles away. William, as his mother’s lieutenant, may have spent much of his widowerhood still at Hardwick; in 1602 he promised his eleven-year-old son Will a rapier, dagger, embroidered girdle and spurs if he would speak Latin with his cousin Arbella until Lent Assizes. But the house was not getting any livelier, as the long years of the 1590s passed away.

  ‘They are dead whom I loved’

  AS THE QUEEN continued to age, marriage proposals for Arbella as her possible heir were never likely to diminish in frequency. In 1599 the chief candidate was Matthias, brother to the Archduke Albert (heir to the Holy Roman Empire). Albert had married the former Spanish infanta, and since the death of her father King Philip II in September 1598 the pair jointly ruled the Spanish Netherlands, so this was a potential alliance powerful enough to cause the watchful James some panic in prospect. In 1600 the Venetian ambassador in Germany wrote home of a new theory about fresh plans for an alliance with France. In Rome they said that ‘the marriage treaty108 between the French king and the great duke [of Tuscany] cools, for the queen of England has promised a near cousin of her own, whom she loves much, and whom she intends to make her heir and successor.’

  In the event, Henry went ahead with the lucrative Tuscan marriage, but he put forward instead for Arbella one of his bastard sons. Sir John Harington was gallantly horrified at the idea that Arbella, ‘a goodly young lady109, aged about twenty four years, should be so disparaged as to be matched with a bastard of France under fourteen’. Such a match, he suggested, might ‘make a new Helena to burn our Troy dormant, and run away by the light’. But in fact Arbella – besides being flattered by the comparison with Helen of Troy! – may well have been grateful for the fruition of this or any other of all these tantalizing possibilities.

  The most interesting proposal passed without remark, to be revealed only in an inquiry held later, in 1603. At that time, a gentleman110 called David Owen Tudor – a satellite of Arbella’s family, who subsequently sent his young son to be her page – admitted that he had, ‘three or four years past’, been approached by the earl of Hertford’s solicitor ‘to move a marriage between the Lord Beauchamp’s eldest son and the lady Arbella, which this examinate utterly refused to do’. The solicitor then asked Owen Tudor at least ‘to help him to the speech of the said lady Arbella’, but again Owen Tudor refused. He was prudent to do so. A marriage between Arbella and Beauchamp’s son – the grandson of Hertford and Lady Catherine Grey – would unite two important claims to the throne, and could only be viewed suspiciously. At the time, the matter seems to have faded away – except that Arbella herself, as later events would prove, did not let it slip from her memory.

  These were the years when deals and dangers came thick and fast. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, everyone knew the queen’s life must soon end; but no-one knew when – or what would happen afterwards. Still came the stream of admonitory literature: 1598 had seen the posthumous publication of Peter Wentworth’s Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for Establishing her Successor to the Crown, urging that neglect of this duty could only condemn her Majesty’s people to the ‘merciless bloody sword’. Still, James in Scotland told111 his parliament that he expected to need force of arms to push through his claim. Still, no-one knew for sure even who the Cecils favoured. Doleman had believed that old Lord Burghley favoured Arbella – but then, at almost the same time, had he not married his granddaughter to a claimant of the Stanley line? In the summer of 1598 Burghley had finally died, urging his son Robert on his deathbed that ‘three things thou have before thy eyes,’ last and hardest of which was to invest a ‘true and lawful successor’. Robert Cecil was thus bearing ‘the whole weight of the state’ as another crisis burst upon queen and country.

  Ireland had always been the running sore of Tudor foreign policy. Essex’s father had died there, worn out by his efforts to claim Ulster for Protestant colonists and for the English crown. Since the middle of the 1590s the powerful Irish Catholic lords had been in open rebellion under the earl of Tyrone. In 1598 came the appalling news that, at the Battle (or Massacre) of Yellow Ford, almost a thousand English soldiers lay dead at Tyrone’s hand – and, even more dangerous, that Tyrone had appealed for help from Spain.

  Essex had by now a strange love/hate relationship with Elizabeth; indeed, his greatness was said to arise as much from her fear as from her love. ‘The Queen’s conditions are as crooked as her carcass,’ he said of her once in anger. At one notorious council meeting he turned his back on her, she boxed his ears and he, momentarily, reached for his sword. Both, by any normal etiquette, had behaved unforgivably. And as Essex retired, furious, to the country, he sent to a friend a letter that voiced dangerous ideas. ‘What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects receive wrong? Is an earthly power or authority infinite? Pardon me, pardon me, my good lord, I can never subscribe to these principles.’

  Nevertheless, in this new Irish crisis, Essex was recalled. He was still England’s premier soldier. Early in 1599 he accepted the post of lord lieutenant of Ireland, and left London at the head of the largest army sent abroad in Elizabeth’s reign. But he took the command with uncharacteristic pessimism. This, he knew, was a poisoned chalice of an appointment. He was, in his own words, ‘tied by my own reputation to use no tergiversation’, but: ‘You might rather pity me than expect extraordinary successes from me,’ he told the council grimly.

  A triumphant Essex with past campaigns in the background

  All Essex’s exploits, and most of his titles, were military: earl marshal, master of the horse and of the ordnance. But those who live by the sword see their reputations die by the sword. Essex, sent over the sea without adequate supplies, led a campaign so disastrous he lost three-quarters of his men without ever engaging the main body of the enemy. Worse still, against express or
ders, he agreed a disastrous truce with Tyrone. There had always been speculation that his real business in Ireland was just that: to make an alliance with the rebel leader and, with his help, to seize the English throne. Now, it seemed all too likely.

  Horrified by news of how his treaty had been received in England, Essex abandoned his post to return to London and explain himself to the queen in person. After four days of frantic gallop he reached the court at ten in the morning, brushed his way through the layers of courtiers who should have protected the queen’s privacy and forced his way into Elizabeth’s very bedchamber, catching her in an old woman’s state of undress. An ‘unmannerly (but I think in any lovers opinion) pardonable’ offence, Arbella later described it naïvely, disregarding the fact that in the bedroom, as much as he had done in the bogs of Ireland, Essex was displaying a subversive contempt for authority. But one of the things he had in common with Arbella was a conviction that, if they could only win through to the queen’s side, all their misdeeds would instantly be forgiven them. Instead, he was dismissed from all his offices of state and placed in custody at York House.

  Crowds of well-wishers flocked to see him, until forbidden by the authorities. Tyrone in Ireland confirmed that Essex had been working against his own government, and Essex vainly appealed to James in Scotland for armed support. By now he had severed all ties of loyalty to Elizabeth. But what finally pushed him over the brink was that hoary old Elizabethan chestnut – lack of money. Way back in the heyday of his favour, in the summer of 1590, the queen had granted him the decade-long right to license the selling of sweet wines, and the core of his income (his only income, now he was stripped of all offices) derived from this monopoly. At the worst moment possible, the licence now ran out. The queen refused to renew it – and Essex knew despair. The new post he had hoped for, the mastership of the court of wards, had been given to Cecil while he was away.

  It was said of Essex that he had only one enemy – himself – and one friend: the queen. Now the friend had turned her back and he was left with the enemy. ‘Ambition thwarted in its career doth speedily lead on to madness,’ Sir John Harington wrote of him, in words which could shortly have been applied to Arbella also. But Essex (like Arbella, again) saw his life as barren of viable options. In the autumn of 1600 he appealed again to the unwilling James, weighting his plea with the unwelcome news that Cecil, as he now believed, was promoting the succession of the Spanish infanta, now archduchess in the Netherlands. Probably Cecil was merely pursuing his lifelong policy of bringing to an end the war with Spain, and going about it, as ever, discreetly. (Or was he indeed trying to counterbalance the menacing prospect of a James–Essex alliance by implicitly holding over James’s head a threat mightier than poor Arbella could present: an infanta riding into London at the head of an unanswerable foreign army?) In the first week of February 1601 Essex’s patience, never extensive, ran out. For years his home had been the headquarters for a motley band of the disaffected: deserters, malcontents, puritans and papists. Now Essex and his followers planned a coup. Their pretext was to rid the queen of her evil advisers, like Secretary Cecil. But they ended by seeking her overthrow, even if it could only be had bloodily.

  It is impossible to read of the Essex rebellion without disbelief, so nearly does its conduct verge on the farcical. When their plans were suspected Essex panicked, locked into his house the officials sent to reason with him, and took to the London streets with some 150 supporters, crying that his life was in danger. But the popular uprising he had anticipated failed to materialize. It was one thing to cheer the romantic Essex. But risk your life for him? That was another story.

  In the City, the rebels faced more disappointment. One Sheriff Smyth, so Essex believed, had promised a band of citizenry – but no leader of Essex’s crew had actually checked this with the sheriff, who now denied all thought of complicity. As the earl’s daunted band fought their way back to the Strand, the government troops were assembling. Essex barricaded himself inside his house and set about burning his papers; gunpowder was brought from the Tower, to bring the house down around his ears if necessary. At around ten in the evening Essex surrendered. The rebellion had died as abruptly as it was born – thanks, as one contemporary put it, to ‘the providence and celerity of the secretary’, Cecil.

  Essex was brought to trial112 on 19 February 1601. Sir Edward Coke accused him of having hoped to be ‘Robert, king of England’. ‘He has been devising five or six years to be king of England,’ Cecil had said a few days earlier. Essex denied it hotly. ‘God, which knoweth the secrets of all hearts, knoweth that I never sought the crown of England … only seeking to secure access to the presence of the queen, that I might speedily have unfolded my griefs unto her Majesty against my private enemies.’ He had done, he said, only what ‘the law of nature and the necessity of my cause’ forced him to do. But he was sure to be found guilty. The French ambassador, indeed, gave an uncomfortable description of the jury of peers. ‘While the earl and the counsel were pleading my lords guzzled as if they had not eaten for a fortnight … they went into a room to give their verdict, stupid with eating.’

  Essex had hangings, bedding, pewter and a Bible brought into the Tower, where he was held. But his was to be a brief stay. His execution was set for Ash Wednesday, 25 February. It was – most unusually – to be a private beheading, within the Tower walls. London had not risen for the earl but now it seethed with sympathy. So the headsmen (two of them, so that ‘if one faint, the other may perform it’) were smuggled in secretly, and separately from ‘their bloody tool’. The queen had turned her face away. ‘Those who touch the sceptre of princes’, she said, ‘deserve no pity.’

  But a later letter113 suggests that Arbella felt the event deeply. On the second anniversary of his death, writing out of what was by then her own dire trouble with the crown, Arbella described herself as the earl of Essex’s friend. ‘They are dead whom I loved, they have forsaken me in whom I trusted, I am dangerous to my guiltless friends … How dare others visit me in distress when the earl of Essex then in highest favour durst scarce steal a salutation in the privy chamber’ – a reference to that occasion, long ago, on which Essex had stood up for her at court. She wrote of her own ‘virtue … whither it be a native property of that blood I come of, or an infective virtue of the earl of Essex’, before describing how greedy he was of the queen’s favour, ‘as I protest he ever said to me’. Now ‘The newdropping tears of some’, she said, might ‘make others remember his goodness …’

  Cecil suffered a fresh wave114 of unpopularity and a neighbour of Arbella’s, Sir John Byron, reported that in nearby Mansfield the ‘Robin with the bloody breast’ as he was dubbed, was openly blamed for Essex’s fall, and armed vengeance threatened. Mansfield was the town nearest to Hardwick Hall, and the rumours must have reached the household – unless, indeed, the news was dispersed from there, which is perhaps more likely.

  Had Essex’s mourners seen more of him in his last days, perhaps they would have had less sympathy. On the scaffold he denounced his former life, ambition and womanizing especially. Histrionically, he blamed himself, upon the scaffold, for his rebellion – ‘this great, this bloody, this crying, this infectious sin’. In the days before his execution, he went so far as to denounce his own sister for having urged him to conflict – that same Penelope who out of her ‘exceeding love’ had served his interests ‘more like a slave than a sister’, as she answered bitterly. Yet the life and death of the ungrateful Essex were attended by the adulation of noblewomen: his wife, his mistresses, mother, sisters, cousin. The queen herself had never been immune to his charm. Why should Arbella be?

  ‘Helping myself in this distress’

  WITH ESSEX’S DEATH, one door closed for Arbella. Perhaps it had never been open that widely. But, as the earl of Northumberland assured James, ‘the world assumeth a greater freedom since Essex death to speak freely of your title.’ In April James sent ambassadors south, to congratulate Elizabeth on her escape fr
om the late rebellion – and to petition once again for the English Lennox lands. Had Elizabeth granted that request, it would have been a clear signal that she set his claims above Arbella’s. Instead, of course, the queen kept the lands – hoping, she wrote crisply, ‘to hear no more of these matters’ – and ignored James’s request that she would do nothing to prejudice his claim to her throne.

  But for all of that, the ambassadors took back to Scotland with them one promise, of the greatest value. They had visited Robert Cecil’s house in the Strand and with him, in deepest secrecy, hammered out an agreement. By his own lights, Cecil kept his loyalty. Elizabeth was not to be deposed during the period of her natural life. In return for this, Cecil would ensure that James succeeded her smoothly. This he was in a position to do. Cecil, as the popular jingle had it, by now ‘rule[d] both court and crown’. He himself was now king of England in effect, James noted shrewdly.

  Cecil had chosen. Not, yet again, that Arbella – or, indeed, anyone else – would have known it. At the start of the year, sending thanks for Arbella’s seasonal gift, Queen Elizabeth had promised Bess to be ‘careful’ of Arbella’s future, and then insisted that Bess should not speak to anyone of her (vague) promise; a piece of discretion completely excessive in any context other than that of the succession story. Father Parsons115 – who, as a leading figure in Catholic politics, gathered views from many sources, including correspondents in England – had been told Cecil was now committed to the Stanleys. The secret of the correspondence between Cecil and James was known to no more than half a dozen individuals, and James was warned to opt (unlike Essex) for ‘the choice election of the few’ rather than ‘any general acclamation’. Thomas Wilson, a member of Cecil’s staff, wrote sourly in The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600 that the crown ‘is not like to fall to the ground for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose head it will fall is by many doubted’ – and a bill was drafted to forbid the publication of any more succession theories.