Before death intervened, Marlowe was planning, according to Kyd, ‘to go unto the K. of Scots’ and ‘persuade with men of quality’ … But on whose behalf would he have been dabbling in – presumably – the question of the succession?
Thus far, any putative connections traced would seem to place Marlowe/Morley in what you might call the government camp. But that is not the only possibility.
Kit Marlowe was closely connected to (‘very well known to’ was his own term) Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and had ‘read the atheist lecture’, it was said, to Sir Walter Ralegh and others. Ralegh and Northumberland (with Cobham) were members of the ‘diabolical triplicity’ accused of trying to keep James from the English succession; Ralegh was later even accused of trying to place Arbella on the throne. The ‘wizard earl’ Northumberland had once been rumoured to be her husband. Marlowe/Morley could have found work to do here, either as go-between or as spy.
But possibilities are not proof. Pending any further evidence, Charles Nicholl described the possibility of Kit Marlowe’s being Arbella’s tutor as the most fascinating of all the false trails in researching The Reckoning. But he concluded regretfully that Marlowe cannot be Morley simply ‘because I want him to be’. It is an eminently reasonable position, with which, on balance, one has to agree.
We want the anonymous Morley to be the exciting Marlowe, just as we want Marlowe’s death to have been more than a tavern brawl; to have been significant in some way. And, of course, one would love to think of Arbella companioned by that ‘pure elemental wit’.
But Marlow/Marlowe/Marley/Morley was not an uncommon name. We know of five people called Christopher Marlowe or Morley (never mind the other variants of the name) in London alone at this period, and the passage of time gives undue prominence to the few individuals the record of whose existence still survives, masking the fact that these were only a few pebbles on a vast seashore.
The most one can say is that the theory that Christopher Marlowe spent some time in Arbella’s service does read pretty easily. But pleasant reading is not proof. It is not even probability. The identification is a possibility; no more than that. Among the many theories surrounding the elusive Marlowe, this must go down as just another tantalizing uncertainty.
Appendix B
Arbella and porphyria
The question of whether Arbella Stuart did or did not suffer from porphyria cannot be answered with complete certainty. But the question obviously has far-reaching implications for any understanding of her writings, and indeed of her very identity. The physical symptoms she suffered could be attributed to many different causes, but when combined with mental disturbance – with extensive evidence of the disease throughout her family tree – they are suggestive in the extreme.
The family member who has been diagnosed with most certainty is James I, thanks to the detailed notes made in 1613 by his doctor, Sir Theodore Turquet de Mayerne, who compared the colour of his urine to the dark red colour of Alicante wine. But Ida Macalpine, Richard Hunter and C. Rimington – who did the first vital work on porphyria in the royal line in the British Medical Association’s 1968 collection of articles on the disease, entitled Porphyria – A Royal Malady – trace the disease right back to Margaret Tudor (great-grandmother to both James and Arbella). They observed symptoms in Mary, queen of Scots, and in James’s granddaughter Henrietta Anne, duchess of Orleans, and suggest that this disease – rather than typhoid – was responsible for the early death of James’s son Henry. More recently, John C. G. Rohl, Martin Warren and David Hunt, in their book Purple Secret: Genes, ‘Madness’ and the Royal Houses of Europe, noted Antonia Fraser’s suggestion as to the ‘mysterious hysterical manner of the death of James V’, father to the queen of Scots. Indeed, I noted with interest a letter from Eleanor Brandon – James V’s first cousin, daughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister Mary – in which she laments to her husband that ‘I have been very sick and at this present my water is very red … I have [no appetite for] meat and I have such pains in my side and towards my back as I had at Brougham’ (quoted in Ashdown, Tudor Cousins). Steen, in Daybell’s Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, states that symptoms observed also in Arbella’s father support the idea that she suffered from acute intermittent porphyria (AIP).
In their return to the subject, George III and the Mad Business, Macalpine and Hunter dealt with Arbella specifically. While stopping short of a categorical affirmative (‘if’ she also suffered from porphyria), their opinion is plain to see:
Arabella [sic] had three attacks of serious illness and during each her mind became deranged. Some speak of her as insane during most of her life – a falsification she shared with George III. She suffered from nervous symptoms very similar to those of her relations: she had pain and weakness, headaches and colic. Like her aunt, Mary queen of Scots, she was thought to feign illness under pressure of adversity, and like her cousin James’s her urine was discoloured.
(This important symptom had long been obscured. A letter written by Gilbert Talbot to Arbella’s physician at the end of March 1611 was reproduced at length by, for example, Hardy. But Hardy, with other of Arbella’s earlier biographers, while dutifully recording Arbella’s dull pulse and wan countenance, decorously omitted Gilbert’s report of ‘her water bad, showing great obstructions’.)
‘It may seem odd that her illnesses occurred when circumstances put her in a corner, but perhaps we should look at it the other way round. Only when there was political commotion was the state of her health noteworthy. Other attacks may well have gone unrecorded.’ As Macalpine and Hunter further note, ‘Information about her medical history is so mixed in with political events that they cannot be separated.’ That is indeed a problem of her biography.
But a concrete diagnosis of porphyria in Arbella might present its own problems for a biography written out of the intellectual climate of the late twentieth century. If Arbella’s agonies and rebellions were the result not of social or psychological pressures but of a biochemical imbalance, what then becomes of a feminist or a psychological reading of her story? It is interesting to see how two very different writers of the last decade tackle ‘the porphyria theory’. Sara Jayne Steen, introducing the Letters, collates valuable evidence to show not only that Arbella may indeed have suffered from porphyria, but why her attacks were particularly acute at certain times. She none the less concludes: ‘That Stuart had porphyria cannot be proved at this distance … But even if Stuart had the disease, as seems probable, that diagnosis should not be understood to imply that Stuart was not in control of her actions or striving to rule her own life. Until porphyria is advanced, the higher functions of reason remain intact between and sometimes during episodes.’
Rather than dismissing Arbella’s struggles because of her supposed disease, Steen is inclined to honour a courage that could go on fighting even in the throes of an ailment so excruciatingly painful. By contrast Ruth Norrington, whose recent biography, dedicated to Macalpine and Hunter, had as one of its main objects to place Arbella in the porphyriac line, has no doubts about the fact she was a sufferer. Norrington interestingly suggests that other bouts of ill-health Arbella experienced may be attributed to the disease. But unfortunately she makes no reference to the new evidence brought forward by Steen (explored in Part V).
The medical theories both of Arbella’s day and of our own do offer other possibilities. Jeffrey Boss, who wrote a paper on the hysteric affection, pointed out to me that, to a contemporary physician, Arbella’s symptoms, in 1603 and later, might have seemed to fit that diagnosis just as neatly.
Previously regarded as being caused by the condition of the womb, after 1600 the hysteric affection came increasingly to be regarded as a problem of the brain. The physician Thomas Sydenham, writing at the end of the century, noted the symptoms (in Dr Boss’s words): ‘Sometimes there are spasms like those of epilepsy, perhaps with distension of the belly …’ Arbella’s death was preceded by fits, and at one point the swelling of her body
led to rumours of pregnancy. ‘There may be the clavus hystericus, a severe headache sharply localized to a small area.’ Arbella often complained of pain in her eyes (one of Burton’s symptoms of melancholy) and in her head. Sydenham also lists abdominal pain, ‘incurable despair … fear, anger, jealousy, suspicion … caprice and no moderation’.
Long-standing hysteria, Sydenham noted, may lead to anorexia and cachexia – the state of self-induced debility and malnutrition that was to be specifically noted in the report of Arbella’s post mortem. ‘This fully developed mental state is found only in those who have had a long and hard struggle with the disease and have finally given in, and is most likely to have developed when, to the impaired bodily diathesis, has been added change of fortune, a grieving mind, anxiety, over-study or excessive exertion.’ Modern medicine may give different names to the conditions of the mind, but Sydenham’s description fits the Arbella of later years almost perfectly.
On the other hand, the mention of anorexia invites consideration of another condition: one with particular resonance for our own century. A ‘slimmer’s disease’ has indeed no relevance for Arbella’s world. But a recent book, Hungry Hell, written by former sufferer Kate Chisholm, shows that anorexia nervosa has a broader applicability. (And describes how the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who tutored the children of Arbella’s cousin William, rode over from Chatsworth to see one of the ‘Derbyshire Damosells’ who starved themselves in the name of holiness in the late seventeenth century.)
‘Not-eating is only the symptom, the outward expression, of an inward dis-ease,’ Chisholm writes. Victim of painfully high expectation and ambition, of isolation and what one authority described as ‘fatal impotence’, the anorexic refuses to eat in order, paradoxically, to preserve her identity. Susie Orbach (the author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue and of Hunger Strike: The Anorectic’s Struggle as a Metaphor for our Age) described it as a dramatic expression of women’s attempt ‘to negotiate their passions and desires in a time of extreme confusion’. That, surely, describes the quest on which Arbella Stuart was so painfully embarked in the spring of 1603. The balance of probability must be that she did indeed suffer from porphyria. But other diagnoses cannot be dismissed entirely.
Appendix C
Places and portraits
When the sixth duke of Devonshire showed visitors around Hardwick Hall, it was always the great Gallery that drew gasps of admiration. Those early Victorian tourists, he said, ‘begin to get weary and to want their luncheon, but they are awakened when the tapestry over the north door is lifted up, and they find themselves in this stupendous and original apartment.’ It was the sixth duke who installed in a then all but empty Hardwick many of the present furnishings in a conscious recreation of the sixteenth century, often simply returning pieces which had been scattered elsewhere around the family properties. To the structure of the house, to the basic decoration, he needed to do almost nothing. Though most of the other Elizabethan prodigy houses are long since gone, Hardwick has remained comparatively unchanged from Bess’s day. Ironically, it owes its survival to its unimportant position within the massed properties of the Cavendish family. When William Cavendish also inherited Chatsworth (through the death without heir of his elder brother Henry), the latter became the family’s principal seat. It was Chatsworth, therefore, that was completely remodelled in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Hardwick was left to moulder intact – as a dower house or, when the fashion for the historic and the picturesque set in, a romantic novelty.
The serendipitous result of this neglect is that anyone interested in Arbella Stuart’s life can trace her history here with unusual clarity. Trace the route Brounker must have trodden, through the claustrophobic Hall – relict of the style of Bess’s distant youth, a hangover from the medieval day – up the oddly modern stairs and into the Gallery, furnished much as it would then have been, still as chilly today. Or walk out into the courtyard – still as elegantly, implacably, walled in golden stone – and to the gatehouse where Arbella’s flight was arrested in 1603. The great symbolic set-pieces of décor are the same – the enigmatic plaster frieze of Diana in the High Great Chamber; the tapestries of the womanly virtues; the Hardwick arms with their wild roses and rearing stags. And – although she herself was never there – the house still boasts the needlework of Mary, queen of Scots, treasures even in Arbella’s day. The extraordinary textiles of Hardwick owe much to the house’s last private inhabitant, the Dowager Duchess Evelyn, who lived there until it was taken over by the National Trust in 1956. It seems appropriate that her special care should have echoed that of the needlewoman Bess – and that Hardwick’s treasures were preserved through female energy.
Today the M1 roars right below the hill upon which Hardwick stands, but you can hear it only from the Old Hall, the house where Bess and Arbella lived for a decade. If Hardwick Hall stands foursquare and impressive as when Bess entered it, Old Hardwick next door is a roofless ruin, belying the fact that the two houses were built within a decade of one another, and occupied simultaneously. But sufficient fragments of decoration survive – like the huge plaster Gog and Magog above the chimney in the Hill Great Chamber (or ‘Giant’s Chamber’) – to give some idea of what it would have been in Arbella’s day. And quite a small circle inscribed around Hardwick Hall brings within its radius a cluster of other places closely associated with Arbella. Rufford Abbey well repays a visit, though today it is perhaps evocative more of its monastic origins than of the half-hearted conversion that made it possible for Arbella’s parents to meet and marry there. Wingfield is another splendid ruin, its huge walls rearing broken out of placid farmland, open by the goodwill of the farmer and under the auspices of English Heritage. Owlcotes/ Oldcotes exists now only as a fragment of garden wall, unrecorded even by the Ordnance Survey. But however little remains, these sights have something to teach even in their mere topography. Bolsover, the house Charles Cavendish built, slightly postdates Arbella’s day. But Bolsover, like Hardwick, Wingfield and Tutbury, is built on a hill. The views over the dwarfed fields and dwellings below – the sense of literal eminence – is extraordinary. To live in such settings must teach a sense of grandeur. To walk from one view to another attended always by bowing retainers must be to feel oneself an earthly divinity.
The restructuring of Chatsworth in the late seventeenth century was a comprehensive job. All that is left from the sixteenth century is the walled enclosure in the grounds, ‘Queen Mary’s Bower’ – along with a tower up on a hill, used for the hunt, and a painting and a tapestry picture showing Bess’s Chatsworth as it used to be. The entire village of Edensor on the Chatsworth estate, including the church where Arbella may have been christened, was swept away to clear the view when the grounds were landscaped, to be rebuilt a few miles off. But in the Victorian parish church there stands the transplanted double monument of Henry and William Cavendish, where the brothers – the one depicted as a skeleton, the other as a prosperous burgher – lie in eternal disharmony.
Bess herself was buried not here but in All Saints’ church in Derby. She had herself overseen designs for her tomb, created by the architect of Hardwick, Robert Smythson. But the elegant black and marble edifice, topped by the ubiquitous Hardwick stags, now sits uneasily amid the sparse cream-coloured surroundings of the classical church that replaced the original construction in the eighteenth century. It is as if Bess’s motto, ‘safe by taking care’, had let her down, finally.
Moving south, if Hardwick is the first site on an Arbella trail, then the Tower of London must certainly be the second. The upper room of the Bell Tower, where she was once thought to have been held, is now used for storage space. The old palace which is a more probable location has now disappeared, the site devoted to grass and gift shop. (A model reconstruction is promised shortly.) But traces remain. The hook to which the carter’s horse was tethered when William Seymour escaped is still nailed in the wall; the walls themselves still boast their graffiti; and the Bloody Tower
has been fitted out as it was for Sir Walter Ralegh.
From the Tower, it is possible to travel eastwards along the river towards Greenwich and Blackwall and on to Leigh, where the great open wastes of the waters can hardly have changed, and a small heritage centre, showing the town’s shipbuilding past, nestles among the boards offering a ‘seafood tea’. Westwards from the Tower, heading upriver, you can follow the route along the Thames which carried Arbella’s body from prison to grave. She is buried in the cramped south aisle of the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey.
Here the queen of Scots lies, immortalized in a profusion of white marble petticoats. It was the great Victorian ghoul Dean Stanley who, in 1867, penetrated through Mary’s tomb into the vault below. Night after night during his tenure at the abbey Stanley – ‘that body snatcher’ as Queen Victoria called him – would prowl with macabre fascination through the royal graves. The historian J. A. Froude accompanied him on one occasion. ‘It was the weirdest scheme – the flaming torches, the banners waving from the draught of air, and the Dean’s keen eager face seen in profile had the very strangest effect. He asked me to return with him the next night, but my nerves had had quite enough of it.’ The dean was made of sterner stuff. But having hacked away the flags from beside Mary’s tomb, and crept down the flight of stone stairs which led beneath the very monument, Stanley found what even he described as ‘a startling, it may almost be said an awful, scene’; a ‘chaos of royal mortality’.
There, in a brick vault claustrophobic as the heart of an Egyptian pyramid, ‘a vast pile of leaden coffins rose from the floor; some of full stature, the larger number varying in form from that of the full-grown child to the merest infant, confusedly heaped upon the others.’ James’s son, Prince Henry, was here, along with Rupert of the Rhine and Elizabeth of Bohemia. (The chapel Henry VII had built as chantry for the Tudors was already being taken over by another dynasty – even before Queen Anne’s eighteen stillborn children were added in the next century.) But the eighteenth-century historian Crull, on his own explorations, had noted two particular coffins which stood together – ‘much compressed and distorted’, Stanley noted, ‘by the superincumbent weight of four or five lesser coffins heaped upon them’. The lowest, ‘of a more solid and stately character’, was that of Mary, queen of Scots; the beheaded body moved south from Peterborough Cathedral when she had already been dead for a quarter of a century. The uppermost, a ‘frail and ill-constructed receptacle’ – so frail, indeed, that the skull peeped through – was that of Arbella Stuart.
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