Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  The rich ‘wizard earl’ of Northumberland, a prisoner for sixteen years, made even more arrangements for his comfort than did Ralegh. He paid to take over the whole extensive Martin Tower, and took rooms on Tower Hill to accommodate the rest of his retinue. He had a canvas-roofed bowling alley installed alongside Martin Tower; paid for the walls where he walked to be gravelled for his greater convenience in wet weather; and imported two hundred books from his own library. In his still room, he tried to distil beer and wine into whisky.

  But even for such as Northumberland or Ralegh, the Tower was still a prison, and isolated enough. During his first confinement there Ralegh had vainly besought the then lieutenant to have him rowed out onto the river when the queen was due to pass by, in the hope of attracting the royal attention. Letters reflect how easily a prisoner could come to feel forgotten by the outside world – and how completely news from the outside world could be kept from them. Arbella would need, like Hamlet, to be content in a nutshell to accept such surroundings, such a situation, with equanimity. But in fact she seems not to have belonged to this comfortable company.

  Arbella does seem to have been treated with (for her rank) most unusual severity – treated, in fact, less as a princess than as a proven escapee. Later in her incarceration425 she was described as being kept ‘close prisoner’, and this – the second category of imprisonment – meant that you were not allowed out of your lodgings (however well or badly furnished those might be). It was unusual to keep anyone close prisoner for long, let alone a royal lady. It was widely recognized that the lack of fresh air told on the health, especially in view of the primitive sanitation facilities. Noblemen sent to the Tower seemed always to die there, the Venetian ambassador had written home, inaccurately but prophetically,

  But much was unusual about Arbella’s captivity. At one point, Mary Talbot accused her doctor of having told tales of her to the king, saying that as close prisoner Arbella could not have communicated any other way. Was even the right to send letters denied to her? If so, that – almost as much as shortage of air and exercise – must have told on her severely. It was not only physical hardship she had to fear, but a life of the most grinding emotional poverty.

  She entered the Tower, moreover, at a time when conditions there had suddenly become less easy. In 1606 a new lieutenant had taken over, one Sir William Waad (or Wade). ‘That beast Waad’, was how Ralegh described him bitterly. Waad was a man, said the Jesuit Father Garnet, ‘very kindly in his usage and familiarity, but most violent in speeches when he entereth matters of religion.’ He had taken part in the torture of the Gunpowder Plotters, and been sent to ransack the rooms of the captive Queen Mary. He was, in other words, a man likely to be prejudiced against Arbella by her presumed Catholic sympathies.

  Waad had begun to revive and enforce regulations that had been allowed to lapse, and to introduce new ones. From the time the curfew bell rang at five o’clock, prisoners would be confined to their own chambers. The ladies Northumberland and Ralegh would no longer be allowed to have their coaches driven in and out of the gates. On his arrival at the Tower, Waad had complained that the warders ‘have no care, many of them, to execute their office but perform their [duties] by deputy and seldom come to give attendance … some bankrupts, some given to drunkenness and disorder … also selling their places to unfit persons’. But a warder was expected to be a prisoner’s conduit to the outside world, his channel for obtaining essential goods and money. He expected then to be paid for his trouble, which opened the way for corruption. A few years before Waad’s arrival Bennett, warder to John Gerard, had let Gerard visit his friend Arden (from whose chamber Gerard eventually escaped), and carried messages between them. Gerard felt warmly enough towards his gaoler that he carefully left behind him a letter for Bennett, clearing him of complicity.

  Sir William Wade (also spelt Waad or Wadd)

  The autobiography of John Gerard426 highlights the anomalies of imprisonment in the Tower. Bennett had been told to check over Gerard’s letters, but proved unable to read, and Bennett’s wife prayed for the Jesuit while he was put to the torture. The gaoler afterwards brought him the luxury of an orange for his supper; Gerard carved the peel into the shapes of the cross, though his swollen hands meant he could not do so easily. Gerard had the rank of gentleman, and had the means to buy comforts, like the kind of mattress he preferred. None the less, his story makes eerie reading. At one moment he gave an account of the pain inflicted by the manacles. ‘I thought that blood was oozing out from the ends of my fingers … but it was only a sensation caused by my flesh swelling above the irons holding them.’ At the next, he described the five or six bread rolls he is brought for dinner, diet being graded according to a prisoner’s status. ‘Very good bread rolls,’ he wrote approvingly.

  Captives were certainly expected to contribute towards their own keep. (As Chief Justice Montague had put it, half a century before: ‘The prisoner ought to live on his own good. And if he have no goods he shall live on the charity of others, and if others will give him nothing then let him die in the name of God … for his own presumption and ill-behaviour brought him to that punishment.’) The allowance given to the lieutenant of the Tower to cover the basic maintenance of each state prisoner was drawn from that prisoner’s own confiscated estates. (The aged Bishop Fisher wrote to Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell: ‘I have neither shirt, nor suit, nor yet other clothes that are necessary for me to wear, but that they be ragged and rent so shamefully. Notwithstanding, I might easily suffer that, if they would keep my body warm. But my diet also, God knows how slender it is at many times … I have nothing left unto me for to provide any better, but as my brother of his own purse layeth out.’) Moreover, it was expected that the lieutenant’s probity in passing the money on would be guaranteed by some gratuity. This system may have contributed towards the fact that Arbella was kept in conditions of some stringency; even if she were allowed to purchase comforts, she could hardly afford many. In her first days in the Tower,427 Arbella was supported by Mary Talbot. But Mary (having prudently handed over most of her funds to her husband, to prevent possible confiscation) was herself none too flush of cash, and her servants had to send for funds from Gilbert when Mary herself had no means of paying for her keep.

  Of the £2,800 that had been raised for the escape, all that her captors found with Arbella was £868, some gold and her jewels. The Venetian ambassador heard that she had, when she saw her captors’ ship approaching, given the rest of her money away, rewarding especially the gallant Corvé. But such wealth as she still had was confiscated, and handed over to the exchequer. James’s instructions to the council were ‘That they cause all such sums of money428 as are to be defrayed by his Majesty for the charges of apprehension of the Lady Arbella and her company, and her bringing up, to be paid out of such gold as hath been found upon her or in her company’. She had to pay for her own pursuit. It was both insult and injury.

  The jewels were delivered to one Sir William Bowyer, who was instructed to ‘take them to the Tower,429 and there, in the company and presence of the Lieutenant, show the said gold and jewels to the Lady Arbella, and to inform yourself from her ladyship to whom all the said gold and jewels belong’. If Arbella said they were hers, Bowyer was to ‘detain them to her use’ – that is, keep them to provide her income – ‘issuing and delivering no part therof upon any warrant from her ladyship unless you first acquaint the chancellor of the exchequer’. This was another blow to her rights, her identity.

  Arbella claimed that several of the jewels had gone missing since being taken from her, and the descriptions noted down sound a frivolous note that is oddly touching in the gloomy context.

  Item – A poignard diamond ring.430 Item – A flower de luce set with diamonds, which she thinketh is in a little box of wood, and left amongst her jewels. Item – In the same box was a ring wherein was set a little sea-water green stone called an emeryn [aquamarine]. Item – A little jewel like a horn, with a great ye
llow stone called a jacynth, with opals and rubies.

  Bowyer was later instructed to sell the jewels ‘at the cost price’,431 and to use the money to pay ‘such of her creditors as she shall nominate’. Though stripped of her pleasures, Arbella, in the Tower, was not free from the dreary pains and problems she had known in liberty.

  Attendance was another issue. Her aunt Mary had her own servants about her. Charles Cavendish wrote to a friend on 28 June: ‘The king hath granted432 six of my lady’s servants to repair to her at all convenient time, and Mistress Anne to attend her continually there.’ Arbella requested a similar favour, less successfully. Memo:

  The Lady Arbella desireth433 that her servants that are now in the Tower, or so many of them as shall be thought fit, to be allowed to her. That Peter, who attended Mr Seymour, an ancient servant of hers, may be her bottle-man. To have herewith another servant, an embroiderer, whose name is Roger Fretwell. For a woman, she desireth the Lady Chaworth. Her desire is that Mr Yelvertone may receive her money and jewels. That Smyth, her servant, may have access unto her. There must of necessity be linen bought, both for her wearing [and] for sheets and table linen, whereof there is not any amongst her stuff. She hath xxxij [32] servants, for which some order would be taken.

  But few of her own familiar servants seem to have been allowed to her immediately. It was two years later that the above-named Samuel Smyth, ‘being employed by her ladyship434 in the managing of her private estate’, was finally allowed access to his mistress. Even then, the council’s orders were that he was to speak to Arbella only in the lieutenant’s ‘presence and hearing’.

  Arbella’s rank meant that she was never going to be treated brutally; the foul and stinking cells also found in the Tower were not for such as she. What she probably lacked most acutely was society. The Tower, after all, held435 some dangerous associates; people with whom Arbella might easily join forces. This may be why she was kept so stringently. Besides Mary Talbot, who had planned Arbella’s escape, it was still home to Ralegh and Cobham, who had allegedly plotted to place her on the throne; to Lord Grey, to whom, it was said, the plotters had planned to marry her; and to Northumberland, another potential bridegroom. And oddly enough, the Tower also held Scotsman Patrick Ruthven, younger brother to the earl of Gowrie. It was a Ruthven who, in Scotland, had conspired against Mary; a Ruthven who had abducted the king in boyhood; a Ruthven – the earl himself – who had once again seized and bound him in 1600. A contemporary rumour declared that that same earl, on an early visit to England, once fell in love with the young Arbella … The Tower seemed to be over-full of her putative suitors or their near relations. Except, of course, for the successful suitor, who had got away.

  ‘The most wretched and unfortunate creature’

  FROM OSTEND, WHERE his ship finally landed, William had made his way to Bruges. At first the authorities in London were in some doubt where to find him; ten days after the escape the English ambassador in Brussels, William Trumball, had been told that ‘we have no news436 of Seymour but suppose him harboured in some of your towns under the charitable shadow of the Spanish wing.’

  In fact, with Arbella safely under lock and key, William’s whereabouts were (or were presented as being) ‘a thing of no such consequence’,437 as Cecil told Trumball dismissively. Or, as another of the ambassador’s London acquaintances put it only a few weeks later: ‘Our tongues and ears438 have been so long busy about the Lady Arbella and your wandering esquire that now we care no more about the subject. His wandering into Germany is here little regarded, for the greatest harm he can do is to slip in again from whence he went.’

  A little of the unconcern may have been faked. Cecil did order Trumball to ‘carry always a watchful eye to observe what entertainment [William] doth find there; how he is respected, to whom he most applies himself; who especially resort unto him, and what course he purposeth to take either for his stay or his remove’. As for William’s own petition, as soon as he learnt of Arbella’s capture, that he and his wife should be allowed to live privately abroad together, that was treated with contempt. Indeed, as Cecil put it in his reply, he himself was ‘now neither willing439 to remember that I have done [William] any courtesies, nor mean to entertain any [acknowledgement of them to me’.

  Quite what poor William was supposed to do with himself – where he should go – was far from obvious. Trumball was told to warn him away from all Spanish territories, so from the Netherlands towns of Liège and Spa he crossed into France, giving out that he did so ‘out of respect to his Majesty,440 being advised by friends that his stay there increased his Majesty’s indignation’. But in October 1611 James was telling the Venetian ambassador ‘with considerable indignation’ that William was ‘seen openly at Paris’ – having already demanded that the Venetian doge should show ‘readiness to declare himself an ally in time of danger’ by packing Seymour off home to England if he showed up in that city. ‘The king is much concerned441 about the flight,’ noted the ambassador shrewdly, ‘more perhaps than he shows. It is commonly held that Seymour will go either to the states of the Pope or of his Catholic Majesty.’

  William had persuaded the archdukes, the Spanish governors of the Netherlands, to send an ambassador to James on his behalf. John More reported that the ambassador ‘hath brought a letter from the archduke442 in favour of Mr Seymour, no less strange than the rest, that his Majesty would be pleased to pardon so small a fault as a clandestine marriage, and to suffer him and his wife to live together.’ To William’s credit, he was not giving up on Arbella.

  William, unlike his wife, was at liberty; but his life had difficulties enough. In the first place, he was roaming the continent without money. ‘I think young Seymour will quickly wish himself back in the Tower where he was well provided for,’ Dudley Carleton had written to Trumball, grimly. The deal tacitly offered to William by the English government was that he would be let alone as long as he refrained from allying himself directly with the Catholics. They no doubt felt he should think himself grateful for small mercies. But unless he sought Catholic protection, the exile had no means of support. William himself wrote of how he had to leave Paris to be free of ‘those parts where I might be liable443 to the action of creditors … My only desire is to avoid disgrace in the country I left and repair unto merchants with whom I have yet some credit, to support my necessary expenses, and to be near England from whence only I seek and hope relief.’

  There was a very real fear that ‘some Jesuit444 or other ill-affected Englishman should seize upon Seymour and by his enchantments lead him blindfold to his perdition,’ as Trumball put it. ‘I wish’, wrote one mediator to the ambassador, William ‘had such supply from home445 as might enable him to return to his former and safer station.’ For this reason James446 eventually instructed the old earl of Hertford that he should make his grandson an allowance of four hundred pounds a year – adding, as a proviso, instructions to stay away from known Catholic strongholds. In addition to this income, throughout the period of her imprisonment he received sums of money from Arbella, drawn from funds that were already skimpy. But William protested his inability to live on such an amount; and reports state that he did indeed make at least a token conversion to Catholicism, perhaps not coincidentally.

  An article written in 1951447 by B. Fitzgibbon SJ for the journal of the Catholic Record Society gives as a fact that William was ‘received into the Church at St Omer in the late months of 1611’, the source being a set of dispatches by Guido Bentivoglio, the papal nuncio in Flanders. Bentivoglio was happy to report that Seymour had the firm intention of living and dying in the Catholic faith – this fact to be kept secret, the nuncio noted, for fear lest Seymour should suffer repercussions from the angry English. Fitzgibbon added that William’s second wife almost certainly had a Catholic upbringing since her mother (previously Sidney’s wife and Essex’s wife) had been received into that church, and married another convert as her third husband. But, scrupulously, Fitzgibbon also relayed the co
mments from the unknown Jesuit noted earlier about William’s ‘great ignorance’ of religion as a whole and his tendency rather towards atheism than Protestantism – the very comments, in other words, that suggest any conversion might have been motivated less by conviction than by expediency.

  Paris, Luxembourg, Paris, Liège. A word picture of William’s party describes how three young men, accompanied by an older one who acted as guide and interpreter, arrived in Luxembourg rather sketchily disguised. ‘They all called themselves merchants448 trading by sea and land,’ one of Trumball’s correspondents wrote, ‘but I could easily judge them from their physiognomy and their way of doing things that they were other than they said.’ The husband of the lady (Arbella), the writer added, ‘is about 28 with a black beard, a very fair skin, and of quite medium height’.

  It was no fun449 trailing back and forth over northern Europe, belaboured all the way by letters from a grandfather terrified lest William should indeed become ‘corrupted in your religion’ and so irate, old Hertford threateningly wrote, as almost to come to hate William’s memory. (‘The loss of the most gracious child, by God’s visitation,’ Hertford wrote, ‘is less grief to parents450 than the daily vexation of him that lives untowardly.’) But all in all, William had got off lightly. He was accurate as well as diplomatic in writing to the lords of the council, albeit rather grovellingly: