Arbella Read online

  About the Book

  ‘I must shape my own coat according to my cloth, but it shall not be after the fashion of this world, but fit for me’

  Niece to Mary, Queen of Scots, granddaughter to the great Tudor dynast Bess of Hardwick, Lady Arbella Stuart was born and bred in the belief that she would one day inherit her cousin Elizabeth I’s throne. Many at home and abroad anticipated she would be crowned Queen. However Arbella’s fate was to make a forbidden marriage, to die a lonely, squalid death in the Tower and to be written out of history.

  Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, including Arbella’s own extraordinary, passionate letters, Sarah Gristwood’s acclaimed biography paints a vivid and powerful portrait of a woman forced to tread a precarious path through one of the most turbulent, treacherous periods in British history, and in so doing rescues this ‘lost queen’ from obscurity.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Preface

  The Tudor and Stuart dynasties

  Prologue

  Part I ‘So good a child’: 1574—1587

  ‘The hasty marriage’

  ‘Most renowned stock’

  ‘My jewel Arbell’

  ‘Good lady grandmother’

  ‘Little Lady Favour’

  Part II ‘Lawful inheritress’: 1587—1602

  ‘She will one day be even as I am’

  ‘Court-dazzled eyes’

  ‘Exile with expectation’

  ‘Slanderous and unlikely surmise’

  ‘The disabling of Arbella’

  ‘This my prison’

  ‘They are dead whom I loved’

  ‘Helping myself in this distress’

  Part III ‘My travelling mind’: January—April 1603

  ‘This unadvised young woman’

  ‘A mind distracted’

  ‘So wilfully bent’

  ‘A scribbling melancholy’

  ‘Disorderly attempts’

  ‘That strange outlandish word “change”’

  Part IV ‘My own woman’? 1603—1610

  ‘An unknown climate’

  ‘Much spoken of’

  ‘A confusion of imbassages’

  ‘My estate being so uncertain’

  ‘To live safe’

  ‘Without mate and without estate’

  Part V ‘A pattern of misfortune’: 1610—1615

  ‘Affectations of marriage’

  ‘Your faithful loving wife’

  ‘A poor distressed gentlewoman’

  ‘To break prison and make escape’

  ‘A spectacle of his Majesty’s displeasure’

  ‘A bird in a cage’

  ‘The most wretched and unfortunate creature’

  ‘Far out of frame’

  ‘I dare to die’

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Appendix A: ‘One Morley’

  Appendix B: Arbella and porphyria

  Appendix C: Places and portraits

  Postscript to ‘Places and portraits’

  Family trees

  Source notes

  Select bibliography

  Picture acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  SARAH GRISTWOOD

  ENGLAND’S LOST QUEEN

  Preface

  It would, of course, be a crime to rifle through a volume of centuries-old letters as though it were an airport paperback. You would certainly never get the chance (so vigilant are the staff of the British Library’s Manuscripts Room) with the hefty tome labelled BL Harl. MS 7003. But in just one way, it would be an interesting experiment. Those letters that were written by Arbella Stuart would leap out at you instantly.

  Amid the cramped, indecipherable hands of many of her contemporaries, often as inaccessible to the novice as if they had been Linear B, Arbella’s writing stands out for its sheer size. Capitals are as tall as the top joint of a finger; and never larger, surely, than when she is writing something – like the huge S of ‘my Selfe’ – that proclaims her identity. Not only her neat, schooled ‘presentation’ script but her more frequently seen informal hand are clear as a bell to read (even to someone who habitually bins postcards on the grounds of illegibility).

  No doubt it would be a mistake to deduce too much from her letters’ appearance, especially at a time when the vagaries of a quill might change writing considerably. But it is hard to avoid when, at the end of an appeal to the king, her very signature is split in two, so that ‘your Majesty’s’ follows right after the text, succeeded by half a sheet of blank space before ‘most humble and faithful subject and servant’ comes with her name at the bottom of the page. These were the letters Arbella wrote from prison, and the management of space was surely a device to prevent anyone else adding a treasonable postscript, and getting her into worse trouble than she was in already.

  One archivist mentioned to me that Arbella obviously cared how her letters were laid out on the page. Another, peering over my shoulder in the library at Longleat, asked: ‘Did she actually send that?’ – horrified, clearly. But curiously enough, both reactions make sense. Often Arbella Stuart’s letters begin in an elegant ‘presentation’ hand, then degenerate into an angry scrawl as her feelings carry her away. Afterthoughts are squashed sideways in the margin, where a calmer spirit might have broached another sheet. Letters are addressed, on the outside, with the self-conscious formality due a great lady; but marred, on the inside, with the heavy scratchings-out of one who desperately fears being misunderstood – and marred, all too frequently, with the blots of tears.

  For me, the attraction of Arbella Stuart’s dramatic life almost pales beside that of her passionate and complex character. Here, of course, her letters are key. She wrote of herself with a freedom possible to no other royal woman, and rarely seen again in any woman until comparatively recently. It is her letters that now – when the Stuart dynasty is gone as surely as the Tudor – still give her a claim to posthumous fame in her own, private identity.

  But there are other reasons to tell Arbella Stuart’s life; reasons beyond even the perennial pleasures of telling a good story. The title of this book, of course, is something of a ‘punt’, a provocation. But, like every such statement, it contains a kernel of truth. In her own day, many prominent commentators took Arbella Stuart’s chances of inheriting Elizabeth’s throne very seriously. History has an unamiable habit of losing the losers, and so that has been forgotten today. But I see no way of understanding Arbella’s fate, or her personality, unless we give her political importance the weight it had for her contemporaries – the weight it had, most significantly, for Arbella herself.

  David Cannadine, in History in our Time, wrote of King George VI: ‘At no stage in his career did he ever seriously make history. Instead, it was history that happened to him. And that is just about the hardest kind of history to write – or to live.’ Perhaps, in the end, history and Arbella Stuart approached on the street and passed each other by, unrecognizing. But it would be a treat to have such an intimate portrait of any woman born four centuries ago, even were there no political dimension to her story. Yet today, despite a good deal of interest in academic circles, to the general public Arbella Stuart has lapsed back into the realms of the almost-forgotten name; one of those ghosts who haunt the fringe of memory.

  My own interest in Arbella was first sparked by study of her grandmother Bess of Hardwick, and of Bess’s relations with the two queens, Elizabeth I of England and Mary of Scotland. I saw in my mind a curious pattern, like an irregular diamond, its four corners bearing each a miniature of the four women whose destinies were intertwined, two of the Tudor ‘type’ and two of the Stu
art: Bess and Elizabeth, Arbella and Mary. Bess left the great house of Hardwick as her stone memorial. Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart are the stuff of legend, offering an emotive alternative – the charismatic, or the romantic? – to every amateur of history. (My own allegiance was always to the Tudor model. I never heard the Stuart siren song; and to find myself having written the biography of a Stuart still fills me with a kind of incredulity.) But Arbella provoked in me a nagging sense of a story missed, a road not taken; a bewilderment that she – in whose veins ran the blood of all the others – could have disappeared so completely.

  In attempting to bring Arbella Stuart’s life to a wider audience I have of necessity made certain practical decisions, like modernizing spelling and punctuation to a degree. Selective source notes are given at the end of the book, but precise calendar dates are at a premium; partly because of the endless explanations necessitated by the two different calendars in use at this time, but partly because so many of the relevant papers are in any case undated. I describe the protagonists by whichever forename, surname or indeed nickname distinguishes them most clearly. These were difficult times for a biographer, with the same names recurring endlessly through a family tree, so that ‘William Cavendish’ could describe Arbella’s grandfather; her uncle; or two of the cousins with whom she had most to do. (It seems a particularly malign disposition on the part of Providence that three of the noblemen unrelated to Arbella who were most instrumental in her career should be the earl of Northampton, the earl of Northumberland and the earl of Nottingham, two of whom share the surname Howard and two the forename Henry.) Courtiers of the Jacobean years changed titles with promiscuous frequency – but Robert Cecil (who in the space of a mere fifteen became successively Sir Robert Cecil, Baron Cecil, Viscount Cranborne and the earl of Salisbury) remains Robert Cecil throughout the story; just as Gilbert and Mary Talbot remain Gilbert and Mary Talbot even after they followed their parents as earl and countess of Shrewsbury. Again in the interests of simplicity and readability, I have also kept capitalization of titles to the absolute minimum. Thus I refer to ‘King James’ but ‘the king’ and ‘the king of Scotland’; to the ‘earl of Essex’; and to the ‘privy council’. In a narrative so closely concerned with the affairs of the titled and the institutions of state, to do otherwise can produce a bewildering array of capitals that after a short time becomes exhausting to the eye.

  There are many people I want to thank for their help with this book. First Margaret Gaskin, who gave me not only huge amounts of her time and skill, but also her knowledge of the period – and her collection of books on the sixteenth century. Alison Weir, for her unfailing kindness and support to a novice in the field; my commissioning editor Selina Walker for equally unfailing patience; Araminta Whitley and Celia Hayley at Lucas Alexander Whitley for their continuing belief in the project, and Gillian Somerscales for copy-editing so sensitively. Carole Myer, Leonie Flynn and Daniel Hahn for their practical help and constructive comments, and Peter Bradshaw for the title. A handful of experts have given of their time and knowledge: Pauline Croft, Alan Cromartie, James Daybell, Kenneth Fincham, with Jeffrey Boss and Ralph Houlbrooke, Heather Wolfe at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Kate Harris and Robin Harcourt Williams. Anna Keay and Jeremy Ashbee at the Tower of London steered me towards some important conclusions; James Daybell and Sara Jayne Steen allowed me to see their papers on, respectively, Bess of Hardwick’s information networks and the political interests of the Cavendish-Talbot women. Their generosity is their own; any mistakes I may have made in interpreting their suggestions are of course all mine. When it comes to interpretation, I owe especial thanks to Duncan Harrington for his help in transcribing those texts which – unlike Arbella’s own! – did prove quite beyond me.

  The support of family and friends – like my husband Derek Malcolm, Richard West, Jane Eastoe and Carol Jardine, like Philip and Jill Janaway – tends to be taken for granted. But I have also met with kindness from very many strangers: from John Entwhistle and Kate Wheeldon at Hardwick Hall, who understandingly took me behind the scenes to see Arbella’s own room; to the chance-met lady in Great Bedwyn church who lent a total unknown the records of the local history society. Thanks for permission to use quotations from Arbella’s letters are due to the British Library; to the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Wiltshire, for use of quotations from the Talbot Papers; and to the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, for quotations from the Cecil papers.

  The source notes show what I owe to Arbella’s other biographers – but that hardly seems adequate to acknowledge one particular debt. In 1994 Sara Jayne Steen’s edition of the letters of Arbella Stuart was published by Oxford University Press. Her insight, her commentary, her interpretation represent a huge gift bestowed upon anyone else who approaches Arbella’s story.

  To all these, and more – I only hope the book is worthy.

  S.G.

  Greenwich Palace from the north bank of the Thames, 1544

  Prologue

  Even in the height of summer, there is always a breeze off the Thames – and this was still early in the season. When the small party put out onto the river from Blackwall at eight o’clock in the evening, the sun had already set. The tension, and the cold salty air off the water, each brought its own chill.

  It was more than eight long hours’ rowing from Blackwall to the ship that lay waiting by the open sea. Long enough for the clunk and scrape of the oars in the rowlocks, the slap and suck each time the blades sliced through the tiny waves, to become a torment of monotony. Long enough to suspect that every light and every craft threatened pursuit, every curious question from the watermen betokened a government spy.

  Behind them to the west lay the swamps of the Isle of Dogs, and beyond that, the City. Somewhere in the dark down to the south lay Greenwich Palace, where king and court would be sleeping. One of the little group upon the water should by rights have been there among them, lapped in the comfort and homage due to royalty. But her goal lay elsewhere.

  At least she and her followers had already accomplished the first leg of their illicit journey. On the afternoon of Monday, 3 June 1611, at around three o’clock, a party of three had ridden out of a ‘sorry inn’ near the village of East Barnet, towards the Great North Road. The ostler who had held their stirrups later recalled that one young rider, as he swung his leg over the saddle, seemed ‘very sick and faint’.

  ‘The gentleman would hardly hold out to London,’ the ostler remarked, none too perceptively. For, beneath the male attire, the rider was no gentleman, but the Lady Arbella Stuart, kinswoman to King James I. She would have to ‘hold out’: her aim was to flee the country. A leading contender for the English throne and throughout her life the focus of plot and intrigue, Arbella had recently dared to wed – secretly, and without the permission of her royal cousin. It was an act that, in one so close to the throne, was accounted virtual treason, especially since her choice of husband seemed more than suggestive to the authorities.

  At the age of thirty-five, Arbella had fallen in love with a man twelve years her junior: William Seymour, who, like Arbella herself, had a prominent place in the English succession. The news of their marriage had, a twelve-month before, sent the king into a frenzy. Since then, they had been kept apart – William held under lock and key in the Tower of London, Arbella under a kind of house arrest. Now, a double escape had been arranged, and this disguised ride was Arbella’s first stage in her plan to start a new life abroad with a young man whom she loved sincerely.

  ‘We may by God’s grace1 be happier than we look for in being suffered to enjoy ourselves with his Majesty’s favour,’ Arbella had written to William from her imprisonment, ‘but if we be not able to, I for my part shall think myself a pattern of misfortune in enjoying so great a blessing as you so little a while.’ No separation but death, she continued, ‘deprives me of the comfort of you, for wherever you be, or in what state so ever you are, it sufficeth me you are mine … Be well,’ she end
s her letter, ‘and I shall account myself happy in being your faithful loving wife.’ Perhaps James need not have been so quick to suspect a coup. Love had come late to Arbella, and from an unlikely source – but this hardly sounds like a match born of mere political expediency.

  Arbella had been appalled when word came to her custodian in London that, for even greater security, she was to be taken north to Durham – ‘clean out of this world’, as she wrote despairingly. She had written to the lord chief justice of England, claiming the right of habeas corpus, and demanding ‘such benefit of justice as the laws of this realm afford to all others’. Arbella, with brains and education, was never one to give up easily – but it was no use. The great right enshrined in the Magna Carta was denied her by her very royalty. Next, she besieged with letters all those who might intercede for her with James. ‘Sir, though you be almost a stranger to me …’ began one missive, desperately. After hopes failed her one by one, she resorted to simple stubbornness. When the time came to set out for Durham, she refused to leave her bed, and the king’s men had to carry her into the street, mattress and all.

  But the journey north gave her an opportunity. Barely ten miles outside the city, in Barnet, she fell ill and the party had to halt. King James suspected that she was faking. But her physician Dr Moundford declared that, while she might yet be ‘cherished to health’, she could not undertake long travel. Unable, so it was said, to walk the length of the room unaided, she was not closely guarded. She had, moreover, lulled the vigilance of her captors with ‘a fair show of conformity’. She had then deceived her female attendant – Mrs Adams, a minister’s wife – with the tale that she was going to the Tower, to bid her husband goodbye in ‘a private visit’. The unsuspecting woman ‘did duly attend her return at the time appointed’, recounted one contemporary. But there was never to be any return. On that June morning Arbella pulled a pair of ‘great French-fashioned hose’ over her petticoats, feeling for the first time the stiff unaccustomed padding of fabric between her thighs. She donned ‘a man’s doublet, a manlike peruque with long locks over her hair, black cloak, russet boots and a rapier’ – and, with her gentleman servant William Markham, simply walked away.