Arbella

by Sarah Gristwood

  499 ‘Despair bolts up my doors’: Williams Sir Walter Ralegh 112.

  500 ‘The prince of Spain’: Fugger News-Letters 6.

  501 ‘almost entirely unconscious and moribund’: CSP Ven xiv 38. Art. X says ‘voiceless and almost entirely senseless’.

  502 Of course, poison had to be considered: A rumour that Arbella was poisoned was clearly still extant a century and a half later, for in describing the debate in parliament that saw the passage of the Royal Marriage Bill in March 1772 Horace Walpole wrote: ‘On the 24th the Bill was reported to the House, and opposed with vehemence by T. Townshend. The Lady Arabella Stuart, he said, was poisoned in the reign of James I. He wondered why the precedent had not been put in the preamble: it would have made as good a figure as prerogative.’ Journal of the Reign of George III i 71, quoted in Art. X 512n.

  503 ‘according to former custom’: Lewis Lives ii 340n.

  504 ‘a chronic and long sickness’: HMC Appendix to Eighth Report, MSS of the College of Physicians, 229.

  505 To Duncan Primrose: Cooper ii 298.

  506 ‘brought at midnight’: Cooper ii 245–6 says the body was brought ‘silently at night by the black river’, but gives no source. A letter of Carleton’s (Dudley Carleton to Alice Carleton, 16 Feb 1615, Carleton 131), describes the nighttime burial of Lady Cheke and adds that it ‘is of late come much into fashion’.

  507 But the Venetian envoy: CSP Ven xiv, 38.

  508 ‘They decided that’: CSP Ven xiv 45.

  509 ‘How do I thank thee, Death’: Handover Arbella Stuart 295. Also quoted by Bradley, Hardy and Norrington.

  Epilogue

  The Overbury case has been extensively chronicled; most recently, of course, in Anne Somerset’s Unnatural Murder. Mary Talbot’s later brushes with the authorities can be traced through the Acts of the Privy Council and the letters of John Chamberlain. Her daughters’ achievements are described in Hunter and Hutton’s Women, Science and Medicine; for the personal aspect of Alethea’s life see David Howarth’s Lord Arundel and his Circle. For Elizabeth, one of the most fruitful (albeit unexpected) sources was a 1979 essay by Elizabeth David in Petit Propos Culinaires.

  Lewis’s Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Clarendon is the first source for William’s career, from his marriage to Arbella right through the difficult years of debate, war and interregnum. His public career, indeed, gets honourable mention in all histories of the Civil War; little, however (even in the Seymour family histories) seems to have been written about him in a domestic capacity. An unexpected resource here was A Stuart Benefactress: Sarah, Duchess of Somerset, by A(rnold) Daly Briscoe: a biography of William’s descendant which yet incorporates an extensive section on William, the author having scoured the Seymour family archives to come up with the letters to his wife and son here quoted. I found considerable help also in the researches of the Bedwyn History Society; Great Bedwyn is the village in which William is buried, close to the ancestral home of his family.

  The public writings of John Winthrop are widely available – for example, in Early American Writing (Penguin 1994; the ‘city on a hill’ speech is on 112). His journal was published as A Journal of the transactions and occurrences in the Settlement of Massachusetts, and the New England Colonies, from the year 1630–1644: written by J. W. first Governor of Massachusetts (Boston, 2 vols, 1825–6). Other basic information about the voyage of the Arbella, and the new colony, comes from E. Keble Chatterton’s English Seamen and the Colonisation of America (Arrowsmith, 1930). James Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers in New England ii 552–3 (Little, Brown [Boston], 1860) bears witness to the fate of Isaac Johnson and his wife, the former Arbella Clinton.

  ‘The True Lovers’ Knot Untied’ appears in many of the older Arbella Stuart biographies (notably Bradley ii 275–8, Cooper ii 249–53). Cooper also prints in full the anonymous ballad supposed by Disraeli to be from Mickle (ii 254–9) and Felicia Hemans’ poem (ii 260–71). It may be appropriate to end on a brief note about other fictional, dramatic or poetic works in which the legend of Arbella is perpetuated; Steen (1, 104) gives a summary of them (notably, for British readers, Doris Leslie’s novel of 1949); to this I would add Ross Neil’s play Arabella Stuart (Ellis and White, 1879), and mention of the eighteenth-century writer Elizabeth Hamilton, who began a novel about her.

  1 A calendar, in this context, is one of the typed and indexed catalogues of many manuscript collections commissioned by the HMSO from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. They range from summaries to complete texts, from modern to original orthography. Roman numerals signify the volume; Arabic numerals the page.

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