Arbella
Page 36
As we already know, ill-health was nothing new to her. The earl of Northampton wrote mockingly490 about it in letters that, while undated, seem likely from internal evidence491 to date from that spring of 1613, when Arbella herself referred to her ‘late dangerous sickness’. She was, he wrote, in very great danger:
of no special disease492 but of a wasting with an extreme debility. She hath neither taken broth nor any drink more than once these three days which excess of fasting breeds idleness. She will admit no doctor either for the body or the soul at this present, but commands her women to read sometimes a psalm, out of which she sometimes picks a verse to raise her meditation with a show of great repentance for her sins, and resolves touching her own state that she cannot continue. Nothing puts her so much out of patience as the proffer of the doctors either of physic or the other kind of divinity to draw near, for then she storms with extremity.
The day before, he wrote, she had been in ‘a kind of trance’ until roused by the shrieks of her women. Then she laughed, and told them that the hour was not yet come. Clearly those around her thought death could not be far away.
Northampton, however, saw her situation differently. He wrote with the most extreme lack of sympathy of his incredulity in anything that concerned Arbella, based ‘upon my former knowledge493 and experience of more giddy parts played formerly by her than any man or woman that I never know’. Perhaps it was a kind of tribute, in a way. ‘She pretends to fast494 from meat and drink, but God knows what supplies are brought in when the curtains are drawn.’ The rapid recovery characteristic of porphyria, Sara Jayne Steen points out, often led to accusations of duplicity. ‘She prays, she rails,495 she cries, she laughs and talks idly. Her mind runs only upon Devonshire by whom she affirms that she had a child and at this instance that he nightly lies withall.’ The earl of Devonshire, until his death in 1606, had been that great Elizabethan courtier Lord Mountjoy: Essex’s friend, devoted lover to Essex’s sister Penelope Rich, and one of those with whom Arbella’s name had implausibly been linked in 1603. (Mountjoy’s illegitimate children by Penelope Rich could not inherit his title, which was subsequently purchased by Arbella’s uncle William in 1618.) In the absence of other evidence, one can only assume Mountjoy was the subject of her fantasy. ‘When they cannot make [Arbella] drink by any instance or persuasion, the only trick is to persuade her to drink to Devonshire’s health. Thereupon she never suffers the pot to be taken from her hand so long as there is one drop in the bottom.’ This ‘experiment’ Northampton recounted to make his friend ‘merry’.
From this extremity of weakness and delusion, Arbella had clearly recovered, to some degree. But on 8 September 1614 the council, hearing that ‘The Lady Arbella, prisoner in the Tower,496 is of late fallen into some indisposition of body and mind,’ sent a clergyman to her, a ‘person of gravity and learning … to give her that comfort as is expedient for a Christian in cases of weakness and infirmity’. He was ‘to visit her from time to time, as in your judgement shall be thought fit’, and to ‘give her spiritual comfort and advice’. They asked that his first visit should be ‘speedy and undelayed’. The matter obviously had some urgency.
In the autumn of 1614 Arbella took to her bed; and if it is probably exaggerating in literal terms to say that she would never rise again, it is certainly true metaphorically. For a year, as the physicians complained after her death, Arbella would not allow doctors to feel her pulse or inspect her urine; she did not, apparently, want to be cured.
She may have been constrained to take to her bed by illness, mental or physical; the Tower had broken stronger constitutions than hers. She may conceivably have been making a play for sympathy. The tactic had a good pedigree in the seventeenth century; Arbella had used it herself at Barnet and perhaps at Hardwick. It had been a favourite of her girlhood friend the earl of Essex; and Thomas Overbury had paved the way for his own murder when he asked his supposed friend Carr to provide him with drugs that would give him symptoms convincing enough to move James to mercy.
But when Arbella refused medical attention, it is possible that she was responding to a different lesson learned from the death of Overbury. In Unnatural Murder, her analysis of the Overbury case, Anne Somerset horrifyingly described the medical practices of the day, and posits a theory that Overbury (however many people were trying to poison him) may in fact have died from septicaemia from the wound his doctor had made to bleed him. This doctor’s usual practice was to keep such a wound open by the insertion of ‘five to seven peas’, and daily to anoint it with balsam of earthworm or bats. If this is a reasonable sample of the remedies on offer, Arbella might have refused them with the greatest rationality.
Even at the time, voices were raised in query as to whether the physicians did not hurt more than they healed. If Arbella were a porphyriac – if her belief that William was coming to join her was indeed the delusion born of illness – she would be especially well advised to avoid the ‘cordials’ she had previously been prescribed,497 a combination of laudanum and red wine, often stored in lead vessels. She may have learned as much from experience. But nothing here is cut and dried. Nothing was cut and dried even in the case of Sir Thomas Overbury, so much more extensively documented after the murder inquiry. Even Overbury’s apothecary opined that he died ‘of a consumption proceeding of melancholy by reason of his imprisonment’, and Overbury himself had written that if he were kept any longer in gaol his mind would ‘over-throw my body forever’.
However one interprets the words, Arbella’s mind probably did overthrow her body – or perhaps it might be better to say overrule it. It is possible she had resolved on her own destruction. ‘I dare to die,498 so I be not guilty of my own death,’ she had written earlier in her captivity. To refuse medical attention – just as Queen Elizabeth had done in her last illness – did not, to seventeenth-century thinking, constitute the mortal sin of suicide. Even to refuse food did not put one in that dreadful category. And Arbella had, after all, very little reason to go on living; there was no chance she would ever be let out, ever know anything more than this constricted existence. As Ralegh wrote from the Tower:
Despair bolts up my doors,499 and I alone
Speak to dead walls: but these hear not my moan.
If ever Arbella looked back to the days when she called Hardwick her prison, wrote of captivity and her grandmother’s custody, she must have remembered them wryly. By comparison, the Arbella of Hardwick days had been lucky. As she had written all too prophetically in 1603, ‘Daily more and more, to my unceasing grief, I am and hereafter shall be more unfortunate than I lately thought I could possibly have been.’
She had written, too, that death alone could make her absolutely and eternally happy. Almost half a century before, the Fugger newsletters had reported the death of Spain’s mad crown prince, Don Carlos, King Philip’s son:
The prince of Spain500 during his imprisonment, apart from a few times, has not wished to touch food. Nevertheless he had been persuaded to give up such a whim. But when the hot days began he waxed impatient on account of his incarceration and behaved in unseemly fashion. It is said that he caused his room to be deluged with water and oft walked barefoot in it. About ten days ago, for several days – some have it as many as six – he would partake of nothing but fruit and drink great quantities of cold water. By means of this he caused his digestion and his whole body to become greatly discomforted. When after this he wished to take food once more, he was no longer able to retain it and was taken so ill in the forenoon that he passed away last night at one … It is said that the king has neither seen him in his illness nor wished to go to him, neither has the queen nor the princess.
Nothing more lonely can be imagined – unless it were from Arbella’s story.
The chronicle of Arbella’s imprisonment is silent through her last illness. No reports survive (were any written?) from one September to the next. But it cannot have been pretty. As a winter so harsh England saw ‘the greatest snow which ever fe
ll upon the earth, within man’s memory’ was followed by a summer of unusual heat, Arbella’s state declined.
The post mortem suggests she died more or less of starvation, and that is something that happens very slowly. First the deprived body consumes fat, then muscle tissue. Then it starts to cannibalize tissues – such as the optical nerves – that are not essential to survival. However her last illness started, it must have come as a relief to her when, on 25 September 1615, Arbella Stuart finally died.
Arbella’s actual death, the Venetian ambassador reported afterwards, was ‘almost instantaneous, accompanied by a sudden tremor and loss of power in the lower limbs’. But earlier, he had written that her aunt Mary, a short while before (days? weeks?), had found her ‘almost entirely unconscious and moribund’.501 Mary wrote of her shock at this ‘heavy loss’ in a December letter to the countess of Cumberland, Anne Clifford’s mother. Her niece’s state had not been made known to her until two days before Arbella’s death, when she was ‘in all men’s opinions that were about her’ considered likely to die that very night; the next morning Mary had misleadingly been told that Arbella was, instead much better. Hoping that Arbella died ‘a saint’ – which for her surely meant a Catholic – Mary apologized for being unfit to write of any other matter when her heart was ‘possessed’ with this.
Of course, poison had to be considered502 as a possibility. The day after Arbella’s death Sir Ralph Winwood, the secretary of state, ordered Dr Moundford and a panel of physicians to view the corpse: ‘according to former custom503 upon like occasions, when prisoners of great quality die in that place, her body should be viewed by persons of skill and trust, and thereupon certificate be made of what disease she died, as their judgement might appear.’ A post mortem was ordered – as it would have been even without the rumblings of a delayed scandal about the death of Overbury. The doctors, on opening her body, found the organs to be sound, her death being caused by
a chronic and long sickness;504 the species of disease was illam jamdiu producem in cachexiam [one that after a long time resulted in ill-health and malnutrition], which, increasing as well by her negligence as by refusal of remedies … by long lying in bed she got bedsores, and a confirmed unhealthiness of liver, and extreme leanness, and so died.
The liver – the unhealthy liver – was considered to be the seat of love, appropriately.
Arbella’s body went through the usual processes – the dehumanizing ritual of embalming: ‘By order dated 12th of October, 1615. – To Duncan Primrose,505 one of his Majesty’s Surgeons, the sum of £6 13s and 4d, for charges disbursed about the embalming of the late Lady Arbella.’ It seems to have been the end of the next July before the unfortunate Dr Primrose was paid. But all the other business was transacted quickly. The government clearly feared a popular outcry – needlessly, as it turned out.
Arbella’s corpse was taken to Westminster Abbey. A near contemporary – and many biographers since – describes how it was ‘brought at midnight506 by the dark river’ and buried ‘with no solemnity’ in the tomb James had recently erected for his mother Mary. But the Venetian envoy507 Foscarini recorded, instead, how sixty coaches followed her coffin to the grave, and perhaps it is fitting that her life ended in confusion, as it had begun. Queen Anna wanted the court to put on mourning, but James refused. ‘They decided that508 as she had died in some respects contumacious, the court should not put on mourning, and that she should be buried wherever her people desired,’ wrote Foscarini on 16 October. ‘Her death is deplored by a great number of the chief of the people. The king has not said a word about it.’
There was no official epitaph, but the bishop of Norwich composed these lines privately:
How do I thank thee, Death,509 and bless thy power
That I have passed the guard and ’scaped the Tower!
And now my pardon is my epitaph
And a small coffin my poor carcase hath;
For at thy charge both soul and body were
Enlarged at last, secure from hope and fear
That among saints, this amongst kings is laid,
And what my birth did claim my death has paid.
Arbella was scarcely cold, and the myth-making had begun already.
Epilogue
Arbella Stuart’s life seemed to have ended not with a bang but with a whimper – and that is no finish for a story. It is true she left no obvious legacy: in the most direct sense, her few goods were immediately seized on the privy council’s authority. In the broader sense, her contribution (Malfi apart; and perhaps that is enough) is an elusive matter. And yet, almost four hundred years after her death, she does live in posterity.
Several chains of action and event – genealogical, historical, ideological – make it hard to end her tale in 1615. They are tenuous, amorphous; so much so that to overemphasize any one is to perform the conjurer’s trick of misdirection. To proclaim that this, this, is why she mattered, is to evoke a strong aroma of sawn-up lady. But together the fragments of the kaleidoscope make Arbella Stuart a curiously ubiquitous ghost; one whose presence cannot easily be dismissed, though she may haunt only the fringes of history.
Shortly after Arbella’s death, the Tower became a more crowded place – crowded, ironically, with some of the people she would have known at court, and as a result of just the kind of morality that caused her to hate court life so passionately. At the beginning of September 1615 – while Arbella was still alive, but probably in no condition to take much of an interest – King James belatedly ordered an investigation into the death, two years before, of Sir Thomas Overbury. In the middle of September Overbury’s gaoler, Richard Weston, was arrested and given into the charge of Arbella’s old Lambeth custodian, Sir Thomas Parry.
It was the start of a landslide. The snowballing investigation ended not only with the wholesale execution of the lesser functionaries (among them the Tower’s lieutenant Sir Gervase Helwys, guilty of having turned a blind eye to murder) but with the trial of the king’s erstwhile favourite Carr and his wife, the court beauty Frances Howard – and, perhaps, with a widespread disgust at the court’s laxity. The whole scandalous story – how the two chief culprits followed Arbella into the Tower; how Frances sensationally pleaded guilty at her trial; how the king was moved to clemency – is well known. Less well known is the fact that the whistleblower, who finally won for Overbury his long-delayed justice, was probably none other than Mary Talbot, whose husband Gilbert first put the investigation into motion. Carr had, after all, contemptuously refused Mary’s request that he should intercede for Arbella with the king. Frances’s uncle the earl of Northampton (Pandarus in her affair with Carr) had hounded Mary herself after Arbella’s escape. And it was never wise to cross a countess of Shrewsbury.
While Robert Carr and Frances Howard moved towards a lifetime of disgrace, Mary Talbot herself was released from the Tower just before Christmas 1615, to nurse Gilbert. Long plagued by ill health, he died the year after. But in 1618 Mary was recalled to face questioning by the committee set up to investigate rumours that Arbella had borne a child. Once again, her refusal to answer saw her condemned to imprisonment in the Tower – this time for life, it was said, though in fact she was released in 1623. She lived there in some style and the best lodgings; Anne Clifford wrote of visiting her and Frances Howard there on the same day. She maintained her business and charitable interests; subscribed to the Virginia Company, and underwrote the building of the second court at St John’s College, Cambridge – even though the crown had reimposed the old fine of twenty thousand pounds, and taken her property of Worksop Manor in lieu of the money. She was almost seventy when she was released; nine years later, in 1632, she died.
Of Arbella’s cousins and near contemporaries, the daughters of Gilbert and Mary Talbot, Mary had a fate as bleak as Arbella’s own; tied to a barren marriage, she was compelled to raise her husband’s children by another woman, his cousin the writer Lady Mary Wroth. But Elizabeth, the countess of Kent, became famous for her
medical skill and the scale of her charity – and also the focus of a good deal of scandal. The lawyer and historian John Selden was employed as steward at the family seat, Wrest Park, and that great gossip John Aubrey claimed that the countess, ‘being an ingenious woman and loving men, would let him lie with her and her husband knew it. After the earl’s death he married her … Mr Selden had got more by his prick than he had done by his practice.’ It is a fine, smacking, Restoration story.
Alethea, scientific interests apart, travelled widely in pursuit of her own and her husband’s artistic interests. Taking her children abroad in the 1620s, she had herself portrayed by Rubens with child, dog, dwarf, English ambassador and the painter himself all in attendance, before installing herself in the Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal and making some stir in Venetian society. She returned home with a velvet litter drawn by donkeys, a gondola to use on the Thames and a quantity of ‘prodigious edible’ snails. Her life was not easy; the Civil War saw Alethea and her husband living apart in exile on the continent, ruined and estranged from their children and each other. But all the same, her travels sound more luscious fun than poor Arbella’s Derbyshire journey; just as her dramas have a different hue from Arbella’s stark black-and-white tragedy.
Most of the characters close to Arbella – with one notable exception – did not very long survive her. Queen Anna died in 1619 of congestive heart failure, her funeral (which the king did not attend) twice postponed until money could be found to pay for it. James himself died in 1625, at Theobalds, having long taken an ever more passive part in affairs. Sir Walter Ralegh was released from the Tower in 1616 that he might once again go seeking that fabled land of El Dorado, from which to replenish the king’s bare coffers. Returning empty-handed, he was rearrested on the old charge of having tried to place Arbella on the throne. He was executed in October 1618, in Old Palace Yard, Westminster; his death (like Arbella’s own) was soon to become a symbol of royal tyranny.