Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  We get a hint of some such machinations from the Venetian ambassador, who in the middle of March reported that James’s agent at the English court, rather oddly, was ‘endeavouring to procure that the council … should give [Arbella] leave to carry out the marriage’. The Scottish aim, the Venetian implied, was further to weaken Arbella’s chances by (a) exposing her as a woman who made a hasty marriage in an ill-advised manner; (b) tying her to one who still suffered the slur of illegitimacy; and (c) bringing her within the treasonable compass of the ‘ancient law’ forbidding those of the blood royal to marry without permission, on pain of the capital penalty.

  The ambassador may have been over-dramatic, especially in regard to the ‘ancient law’. He himself admitted that as a newcomer to England he found it hard accurately to assess the question of the succession, especially since it could not be discussed freely. But his suggestion that this Machiavellian Scottish plan was made ‘in concert with those of his friends on the council’ is suggestive to a degree.

  One does not, to consider such a theory, necessarily have to condemn Cecil as a villain. He was a man with a mission – to secure a smooth succession – and one who would do whatever was necessary to achieve it. But personally he wished Arbella no harm. In the months ahead, he was often to stand her ally. It was thanks in part to him that Arbella, in the short term, gained real benefit from James’s accession – benefit, at least, if you don’t look back, and compare what she got with what she might have hoped to gain. She rode south with relief in her heart. She would never again return to her grandmother’s custody.

  IV

  1603–1610

  ‘My own woman’?

  ‘If you leave me till I be my own woman … then your trouble, and mine too, will cease.’

  Arbella Stuart to Sir Henry Brounker, 1603

  ‘An unknown climate’

  LONG AFTER THE event, setting down her memoirs, a court lady gave a romantic picture of Arbella’s first meeting with the new royal family. She described how193 at Welbeck – the Derbyshire home of Arbella’s uncle Charles Cavendish – Queen Anna, with her young daughter Elizabeth, was surprised by the kind of masquerade in which she delighted.

  A band of Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses, leading a flock of sheep ‘whose wool was white as snow’, were followed by a troop of huntsmen, leading tame deer whose horns were tipped with gold. These swains told the queen that Diana the virgin huntress, hearing of her approach, invited her to repose herself in the goddess’s own bower. The welcoming deity, wrote the anonymous lady, proved to be none other than Arbella herself …

  It cannot be true, unfortunately. On the dates given, in early May, not only was Arbella known to be much further south, but the new Queen Anna was still in Scotland. The story is as false as the rumours passed on by the Venetian Scaramelli, who on 1 May reported that ‘Lady Arbella has been released194 and gone to meet the king with three hundred horse, after that she will attend the queen’s obsequies.’ In fact Arbella’s introduction was nothing like so immediate, or so unquestionably joyful. But it was dramatic enough in its way. Everything changed for Arbella in 1603.

  She was, of course, not alone in the worrying sense of sands shifting beneath her feet. Everything changed for the country, the court, the ministers too; and, perhaps most of all, for James VI of Scotland – now also James I of England – and his immediate family. In fact, it is tempting to wonder how much of James’s kindness to his new-met cousin was down to sheer fellow-feeling. In truth, at the English court they were both strangers in a strange land, though Arbella came south from her extended pupillage, and he from the barbarous country across the border. They had both been waiting on the outcome of the same game, and if James had won, then perhaps that too made him feel magnanimous towards the loser. Quitting the Scottish capital with unflattering haste, he surged south into the richer pastures of England on a wave of universal good feeling – brief though the honeymoon might prove to be.

  Everyone went rushing up to meet him on the way; some seeking titles, some to promote their ideas. James, in waiting, had followed the time-honoured policy of promising all things to all men; or at least tacitly suggesting he might be amenable to seeing things their way – whatever that way might be. ‘There is a foolish rhyme195 runs up and down in the court,’ John Manningham wrote,

  of Sir Henry Bromley, Lord Thomas Howard, Lord Cobham and Dr Neville, the Dean of Canterbury, that each had gone to move the king for what they like –

  Neville for the Protestant

  Lord Thomas for the papist

  Bromley for the puritan

  Lord Cobham for the atheist.

  Even little Anne Clifford wrote of galloping north with her mother so fast they killed three horses under them with heat on the road.

  Setting out from Edinburgh on 5 April, James worked his way slowly south through the north country and the English midlands, receiving hospitality, and granting new honours, all the way. He took time to think kindly of Arbella – spurred thereto, perhaps, by a word from Gilbert and Mary Talbot, whose guest he was at Worksop near Sheffield on 20 April. However cautious a part the Talbots had played in Arbella’s adventures while at Hardwick, they played a key role in her rehabilitation. She relied upon them in the months ahead – though her letters to them betray flashes of doubt and resentment underneath the surface humility. There was, after all, no-one else to whom she could turn. And they did their best for her, in their own way.

  At Worksop the new king was entertained by ‘excellent soul-ravishing music’, and so much flesh, fish and fowl that Gilbert had to call in supplies from all the surrounding country. Surely the Talbots took the chance to plead for their niece. James loved, wherever possible, to see himself as merciful. Now he could afford to be magnanimous – desirous, as he put it, ‘to free our cousin196 the Lady Arbella Stuart from that unpleasant life which she has led in the house of her grandmother with whose severity and age she, being a young lady, could hardly agree’.

  Arbella had by this time197 been taken to Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, seat of the earl of Kent, whose nephew was married to Arbella’s cousin Elizabeth, daughter of Gilbert and Mary Talbot. Kent was a neutral connection – neutral, at least, in the sense of having no direct hand in the Cavendish family controversies. But he was an ageing man and a hardline Protestant who had, as a commissioner at the trial and execution of Mary, queen of Scots, ‘showed more zeal for her destruction than befitted a person of honour’. His home is hardly likely to have represented quite the freedom Arbella sought – Kent could so easily have transformed himself from host into severe gaoler. But with the affairs of the country in such flux, with the old regime overlapping the new, Arbella could hardly expect her own life to be anything other than awkward and uncertain still. Presumably she had recovered much of her health: a rapid change, perhaps, but if she had indeed been suffering from an attack of porphyria, just such a dramatic recovery would have been characteristic.

  The queen’s embalmed body still lay in Whitehall, where the privy council, the Venetians reported without visible surprise, still ‘wait on her continuously with all the accustomed ceremonies down to the very table service as if she were still alive, and so will it continue according to ancient custom until the king gives order for her funeral.’ Strange stories spread about the queen’s last days: that one of her maids of honour had met the dying woman’s spirit walking in the corridor; that two of her ladies found a card, the Queen of Hearts, fastened with a nail through the forehead to the seat of her chair. Three days after the death, most gruesomely of all, Lady Southwell described how the queen’s body burst inside its coffin ‘with such a crack that it splitted the wood, lead and cerecloth, so that today she was fain to be new trimmed up’.

  Small wonder that James chose to linger outside the capital until after Elizabeth was finally buried in Westminster Abbey on 28 April. A thousand people followed the procession – the hearse topped by a life-sized wax effigy and followed by her riderless palfrey �
�� through packed streets whose crowds gave up, said the chronicler John Stow, ‘such a general crying, groaning and weeping as the like hath not been seen or known’. Little Anne Clifford wanted to be a pallbearer but was not sufficiently ‘high’. By contrast Arbella, who as the queen’s highest-ranking female relative was invited to be chief mourner and lead the black-hooded peeresses, refused:

  The Lady Arbella Stuart198, being of the royal blood, was specially required to have honoured the funeral with her presence; which she refused, saying that since her access to the queen in her lifetime might not be permitted, she would not after her death be brought upon the stage for a public spectacle.

  As last words go, it had a devastating finality.

  The new king entered London on 7 May; and changes were felt immediately. The very next day, Sir Walter Ralegh was summoned before the council. James’s secret allies in England (Cecil and Henry Howard, soon to be made earl of Northampton) had long been poisoning his mind against their potential rivals, the ‘diabolical triplicity’ of Ralegh, Lord Cobham and the earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy. Now Ralegh was told that his prized office of captain of the guard would be given instead to the Scotsman Sir Thomas Erskine (soon created Viscount Fenton) – ‘whereunto Sir Walter in very humble manner submitted himself’, ran the official privy council report, with what would prove to be mistaken confidence.

  One of the new king’s first acts was to release the earl of Southampton and Sir Henry Neville, who had been imprisoned since the Essex rebellion. There had been considerable concern lest James should wreak revenge on those who had promoted the execution of his mother; instead, it was noted with some curiosity, he seemed to take more to heart the death of the earl of Essex. The presses rolled out a belated publication of Essex’s Apologia, his refutation of the Conference, that inflammatory document published eight years before, which had suggested succession did not have to follow proximity of blood. (James’s own Basilikon Doron, in which he laid out his theories of kingship, had already become a bestseller, needless to say.)

  Everyone who had rebelled against Elizabeth was suddenly in favour. Everything that could subtly denigrate the old regime was in vogue. The French ambassador (busy, wrote Scaramelli maliciously, trying to justify his alleged support for Arbella’s and Beauchamp’s claim on the grounds that he did only ‘the duty of every good Catholic199 – namely, to protect and succour a lady’) had attended Elizabeth’s obsequies in a mourning cloak six yards long. Granted audience to meet the new king, he was disbelieving when told that his plan to deck all his followers in mourning would be greeted by James with the deepest disapprobation. ‘No-one, be he ambassador, Englishman or stranger, is admitted into the king’s presence in black; for indeed neither the memory or the name of Queen Elizabeth is nowadays mentioned in court.’ Out with the old, in with the new … Perhaps it was an unattractive policy. But at least it meant that James could be brought to regard his fellow newcomer – his fellow victim of Elizabeth’s procrastination – with a certain sympathy.

  On 11 May a letter was sent from the new king to the earl of Kent at Wrest Park:

  We have been informed200 by our cousin the countess of Shrewsbury [Mary] of the great desire which our cousin the Lady Arbella hath to [come] to our presence … We do well approve those desires of hers, and for that purpose are well pleased she do repair to our court at Greenwich in the company of her aunt, where we shall be willing to confer [with] her and make her know how well we wish her in regard to her nearness of blood.

  When the two Stuart cousins met at Greenwich, Arbella would have seen a middle-aged man with a sparse beard cut square and shrewd, slightly mismatched eyes, his manner an odd mixture of the pontifical and the pawky, reflecting a personality in which arrogance jostled with insecurity. It is the grotesque descriptions of James which live in posterity – the slobbering tongue too large for his mouth; the ungainly weak-legged walk; the hands which he would never wash fiddling constantly around his codpiece. But it is only fair to say that those who saw him thus early in his English career – even those who wrote in secret and had no need to flatter – seem to have noticed no such peculiarities.

  As for what James would have seen, when he clapped eyes on his cousin for the first time, the answer is probably a girl; attractive enough but unremarkable, a girl conspicuously nervous in her manner. A girl. And James, devoted to his male favourites, never rated the female sex very high. Treat your wife, he wrote in a manual of advice for his son, ‘as your own flesh, command her as a lord, cherish her as your helper, rule her as your pupil … Ye are the head, she is your body; it is your office to command, and hers to obey.’

  The Venetians, who faithfully documented Arbella’s coming, made an odd report which accords ill with anything else we ever hear of her. ‘Lady Arbella, who is a regular termagent201 [a virago, in another version] came to visit the king on Sunday last with a suite of ladies and gentlemen.’ Perhaps their words can be discredited, since they added implausibly: ‘and they say that should the Queen [Anna] die she would be wedded and crowned at once.’ But Arbella may have been unusually edgy – have been, even, suffering from the last lingering remnants of her Hardwick illness. Another man, Lord Cobham, was shortly to say that ‘when he saw’ Arbella, he put aside the ideas he had had in a ‘humour of discontentment’ and resolved never to hazard his estate for her. And a Talbot retainer hinted at a tumultuous pattern of speech, a lack of composure, which did not characterize her behaviour under normal circumstances.

  King James I

  Her future was still very unclear. That same May, while she was at court, Gilbert overheard James saying she should go back ‘from wherein she came’202. Ironically, it was Cecil (to whom James had every reason to be grateful) who asked the new king ‘to deal tenderly’ with his cousin. He suggested perceptively that ‘she would not go thither nor to any other place as commanded thereunto, for so she might think that she were still under a kind of restraint … so it would redouble her grief and affliction of mind wherewith she had been too long already tormented.’ Now that Arbella had spoken with the king, Cecil explained, ‘if she had not given him satisfaction, she might conceive that she should never be able to give him satisfaction.’ But if she were given liberty to choose her place of abode, as she herself had once begged, she could be convinced to choose one convenient to his new Majesty.

  James was persuaded to leave Arbella ‘to the charge of her own good discretion, assuring himself that she would do nothing of moment whatsoever without his privity and good allowance’. And so from Wrest Park, Arbella moved to Sheen, to the home of Queen Elizabeth’s old friend the Swedish-born marchioness of Northampton, the peeress who had taken Arbella’s own place as chief mourner at the royal funeral.

  Did Arbella resent being passed around like an awkward parcel? Or were events moving almost too quickly? Hers was a nature in which shocks went deep, and she must have been still in recovery from her Hardwick troubles. (If she were actually in recovery from an attack of porphyria, it would certainly account for the ‘termagent’ of the Venetians’ description.) But in any case there were practical reasons for a delay. With Anna still in Scotland, the distaff side of the new royal court had not yet been assembled. Nor had it been arranged how the newly independent Arbella was to support herself in this expensive environment. After the drama and introspection of her letters from Hardwick, the first letters she wrote in her new life are all to do with money.

  Arbella’s pension had ceased with Queen Elizabeth’s death; and presumably she could no longer count on Bess’s support. So, on 14 June, from Sheen, she is begging Cecil ‘to remember the king’s Majesty of my maintenance’203, as he had promised her uncle Gilbert he would do. By the twenty-second she had obviously had only an unsatisfactory answer and was reduced (since the king seemed to have shifted his mind over a yearly pension) to begging at least for ‘some sum of money which needeth not be annual’ with which to settle her present debts. The very day after, the twenty-third, she w
rote again to her ‘honourable good friend Cecil’, imploring his help both ‘in procuring it as soon, and making the sum as great as may be’.

  Cecil, clearly, was no longer the enemy in her mind. But perhaps it was the fear of another flood of letters, the like of which he had suffered earlier in the year, which ensured that Cecil immediately after this did at last extract an interim gift from James. Arbella had written: ‘If I should name two thousand pounds for my present occasions it would not exceed my necessity.’ She got six hundred and sixty six – but for the moment it would do. Hearing the happy news, she sat down on the twenty-sixth and penned a short note of thanks to Cecil, ‘whose important affairs I am constrained to interrupt with this necessary importunity’. On the thirtieth she wrote yet again, to say that she had at last received the funds, ‘for which I acknowledge myself greatly bounded to your lordship’. (Cecil had been ennobled by a grateful James.) She had signed the last four letters as ‘Your lordship’s poor friend’ – probably a reminder of her literal poverty. Now, at last, with greater confidence, she signed as his lordship’s ‘assured’ friend.

  In July, with Queen Anna arrived in England and the coronation imminent, Arbella at last joined the court. But this was not the settled and stately establishment of Elizabeth’s day. Not only were English courtiers jockeying for position with the Scots who had come south in James’s train, but it would be winter before the new royal family moved into the London palaces. Perhaps in a perverse way the enforced disruption helped the heterogeneous new court to settle down together. But the reason was terrible. In the capital, the people were dying like flies. The plague, an endemic hazard in London in the summer, had struck with unusual ferocity.