Arbella Read online

  Charles left his wife Elizabeth widowed after eighteen months, and his daughter a baby. The Lennox title and lands now belonged to Arbella – or so her relatives in England felt. But the Scottish government claimed differently. Citing the minority of young King James, which might be held to make all grant of title and estate provisional, and Arbella’s English nationality, they instantly moved to repossess the Scottish Lennox property.

  Old Lady Lennox begged Queen Elizabeth’s intercession with the Scottish regent in a letter full of bullet points: ‘1st. How the dower can be avoided17 by their laws. 2nd. How the regent can disinherit the daughter of Charles Stuart. 3rd. If he will not permit the dower to be answered.’ Elizabeth was sympathetic; she could afford to be, since she, at least, was being put to no expense. A message was sent off18 to the effect that ‘The queen finds it very strange that any disposition should be intended of the earldom to the prejudice of the only daughter of the late earl of Lennox.’

  The queen of Scots likewise spoke out on her niece’s side. In a draft will19 she wrote: ‘I give to my niece Arbella the earldom of Lennox, held by her late father; and enjoin my son, as my heir and successor, to obey my will in this particular.’ It was perhaps unhelpful that she had previously tried to will the Scottish crown itself to Charles, Arbella’s father, as next heir after James. In any event, in the matter of Arbella’s inheritance, as in so much else, James disappointed his mother. On 3 May 1578 the twelve-year-old king bestowed the earldom on the old and childless bishop of Caithness, Charles Stuart’s uncle. Shortly afterwards, with the bishop’s connivance, a deal was struck by which the earldom of Lennox was handed on to James’s cousin and favourite, Esmé Stuart, the fascinating Lord D’Aubigny.

  The Lennox title was one thing; the Lennox lands another, and in practical terms even more important. In letters a quarter of a century later Arbella herself, suffering from a lack of the independence money might have brought her, would make repeated reference to ‘my long desired land’. Her early background, indeed, was one of comparative poverty. Until the spring of 1578, Arbella and her mother seem to have lived much of the time with Lady Lennox in Hackney. The young Stuarts had never set up their own establishment, probably lacking the money; and Lady Lennox’s own means were limited indeed. Her poverty, indeed, may explain her compliance in her son’s match with Elizabeth Cavendish: a rich girl, but only gentry-born. Lady Lennox’s records showed regular payments to Bess, probably on a considerable loan, and she had also repayments due on debts to the crown.

  Elizabeth Lennox should have had her own dowry of three thousand pounds from her stepfather, the earl of Shrewsbury; but, her marriage having been arranged ‘suddenly and without my knowledge’, the earl – also somewhat strapped for cash, despite his huge land holdings – refused to pay.

  Then, in the first days of March 1578, the old countess of Lennox fell ill with sharp pains. Granted a brief respite, she none the less called her household together to say goodbye. On 9 March she died20. Wardship of the infant21 Arbella was given to her mother Elizabeth – though for a noble orphan to be placed in the care of its relatives was by no means a foregone conclusion. Rights in a child’s estate and person, with the future right to dispose of them advantageously in marriage, fell to the crown and could be given or sold on by the master of the wards, Lord Burghley. In this case, however, the Shrewsburys had made their request just a few days beforehand, with a prescience that struck some contemporary observers rather oddly.

  On the day she fell ill, Lady Lennox had dined with Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth’s perennial favourite. This conjunction of events produced vague rumours of poison; but there were always rumours of poison after the sudden death of any person of note. The story surfaced a few years later in a scurrilous Catholic propaganda publication called Leicester’s Commonwealth, which suggested that Robert Dudley had put several people away.

  It is true that in the next decade Leicester – a man so often disappointed of the crown he sought, and an old friend and ally of Bess – would seek a match between his son and Arbella. If Lady Lennox opposed such an alliance, he would indeed be better off with her out of the way. But there is no evidence for this, nor any real reason to impugn Leicester’s reputation – especially since, while Lady Lennox’s death is commonly described as ‘sudden’, one contemporary remark places it rather in the context of a ‘languishing decline’.

  She certainly wasn’t murdered for her money. Lady Lennox’s death left Arbella theoretically the richer of some jewels; but jewels apart, she didn’t even leave enough to pay for her funeral expenses. Still, she was buried in Westminster Abbey with the full panoply of royalty: the herald to proclaim every one of her titles; nobility in attendance. On her glorious painted tomb kneel the figures of her dead children – the half-dozen who died in infancy, Darnley with the crown above his head, and Charles, who had himself been interred in the same vault two years before. Invicta anima and patientia incomparabili, read the tributes; and indeed, an undefeated spirit and an incomparable patience were exactly what the much-tried Lady Lennox had required.

  The notoriously parsimonious Queen Elizabeth, unusually, picked up the bill for the funeral. Relations between the two women had not been easy. But Elizabeth had won. She was the queen; Margaret had died in poverty. And to have her buried other than as befitted her lineage would damage the queen’s own dignity.

  The tomb of Margaret, countess of Lennox, Arbella’s paternal grandmother

  Dignity was one thing. Practicality was another. In recompense, she said, for the funeral expenses, Elizabeth seized the remaining, English, Lennox lands. In this she was behaving in just the way she had deplored in the king of Scotland, but what was sauce for the gander wasn’t always sauce for the goose. As the contemporary historian Camden records it, the queen ‘would not give ear to those who affirmed that the Lady Arbella, daughter to Charles the king’s uncle and born in England, was next heir to the lands in England’. There was more of the undignified squabbling over rights that seemed to follow any death in the Elizabethan nobility. Arbella retained the estate of Smallwood, and its revenues of perhaps three hundred pounds a year. But even her grandmother’s jewels were to be another source of controversy.

  Lady Lennox’s will ordained the jewels22 – twenty-odd items ‘with other things that be not yet in memory’ – should be delivered to Arbella when she was fourteen. They included ‘a jewel set with a fair table diamond, a table ruby and an emerald with a fair great pearl … a clock set in crystal with a wolf of gold upon it … buttons of rock rubies to set on a gown’. The jewels were in the charge of her steward and executor Thomas Fowler – the same Thomas Fowler who had been questioned over the marriage of Arbella’s parents. (Later, his son was to care for Arbella. These Fowlers were one of the satellite families whose fate trailed Arbella’s own story.) Mary wrote to him in her own hand in the autumn of 1579: ‘Be it known23 that we, Mary, by the grace of God queen of Scotland, do will and require Thomas Fowler, sole executor to our dearest mother in law and aunt … to deliver into the hands of our right well-beloved cousin Elizabeth, countess of Shrewsbury, all and every such jewel …’ This was to be another of those ineffectual pronouncements the queen of Scots was so fond of making. Fowler, instead, made his way to Scotland, where he was – he claimed – waylaid and robbed. The jewels ultimately found their way into King James’s possession. They remained the focus of yet another longstanding dispute.

  At least in her grandmother Bess Arbella had an able protector, one who would defend her rights all the way. It was Bess who ensured that Queen Elizabeth was eventually persuaded to provide an annual pension for mother and child: four hundred pounds for Elizabeth and two hundred for Arbella. Lady Lennox’s death had certainly brought Arbella – and her mother – more directly into Bess’s turbulent orbit. In the autumn of 1578 Bess was writing to Walsingham of ‘my little Arbell’: ‘I came hither [Sheffield] of Crestoline’s eve and left my little Arbell at Chatsworth. She e
ndured very well24 with travel and yet I was forced to take long journeys to be here with my lord afore ye day.’

  The great Elizabethan households were by their nature peripatetic; in an age with little plumbing, houses had to be periodically vacated for ‘sweetening’. One has here a particularly vivid sense of the young Arbella swept along in her grandmother’s turbulent wake; uncomplainingly ‘enduring’ the hard journeys in horse litter or unsprung coach, wooden wheels jouncing along roads often little better than waterlogged tracks. There is no mention of whether Arbella’s mother travelled with them; to judge from one letter Elizabeth wrote to her mother when Arbella was rising two, the relationship between Bess and Elizabeth may have foreshadowed that of Bess and Arbella all too neatly.

  In the matter of some unknown dispute, Elizabeth Lennox was furiously resentful that Bess had not given her the benefit of the doubt she would have accorded to others: ‘I have not so evil deserved25 as your Ladyship hath made show.’ In a postscript to one letter, thanking the earl of Leicester for his efforts in the matter of the Lennox inheritance, the twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth shows a young woman’s resentment of parental authority. ‘My mother hearing of the infection26 at Chelsea, whereof, although there was no great danger, yet her fear was such, as having not any fit house that for necessity I must presently come hither [to Newgate Street] by her commandment which I have obeyed.’

  All three generations were together for the Christmas of 1581 in Sheffield. But during the Twelfth Night celebrations, Elizabeth Lennox fell sick; and on 21 January 1582, she died. Five days earlier, already ‘sick in body’, she had made her will. ‘In her extreme sickness,’ as Bess put it, ‘and even at the approaching of her end (which I cannot without great grief remember) [she] did most earnestly sundry times recommend to her Majesty’s great goodness and favour that poor infant her only care.’

  The young countess left27 behind her entreaties that Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton, Burghley and Walsingham – Queen Elizabeth’s four closest courtiers – should continue their ‘wonted favour’ towards her ‘small orphan’. To the queen herself she left her ‘best jewel set with great diamonds’; to her mother, her white sables; to Shrewsbury, whom she thanked for being a good father both to her and to Arbella, her gold salt cellar.

  Touchingly, she arranged gifts to be given to her brothers and sisters against the next New Year. Arbella, by the queen’s good grace, she left to Bess’s charge. Elizabeth Lennox was buried in the parish church of Sheffield; from now on, Arbella’s primary relationship was to be with Bess.

  There is no record of the six-year-old Arbella’s feelings about her mother’s death, just as there had been none of the young Queen Elizabeth’s feelings at the violent death of her mother Anne Boleyn. But the countess Elizabeth (unlike Anne the queen) had by Bess’s testimony been with Arbella almost constantly. It is easy to believe that the relationships between aristocratic parents and children, distanced as they were by servants, were less close than those among the less privileged classes. But in the 1570s one Peter Erondell (in a volume of dialogue, The French Garden, written as a translation exercise) painted a different picture. His noble heroine Lady Ri-Melaine goes to supervise the wet-nurse who is bathing her baby son, her ‘little boykin’, with a display of tenderness that still moves today: ‘O my little heart!28 God bless thee, rub the crown of his head, wash his ears, and put some fine clout [cloth] behind them to keep them dry and clean … What a fair neck he hath! Pull off his shirt, thou art pretty and fat my little darling, wash his arm-pits: What aileth his elbow? O what an arm he hath!’ If this tenderness was in any way reflected in the relationship between Arbella and Elizabeth Lennox, the child’s loss was great indeed. None the less, it is the feelings of Bess, not those of the orphaned Arbella, about which we hear. Shrewsbury wrote to Walsingham29 that Bess ‘taketh her daughter’s death so grievously and so mourneth and lamenteth that she can think of nothing but tears’. He added – piteously but, given Bess’s wealth, unconvincingly – that the child Arbella was now destitute.

  Seven days later30, Bess was sufficiently recovered from her grief to think of the future. ‘Your Lordship’, she wrote to Burghley, ‘hath heard by my lord how it hath pleased God to visit me; but in what soever is to lay his heavy hand on us we must take it thankfully.’ She thanked Burghley, too, for his many favours: ‘how much your lordship did bind me, the poor woman that is gone, and my sweet jewel, Arbella, at our last being at court, neither the mother during her life nor I can ever forget.’ Now she asked another favour: that the four hundred pounds’ pension31 paid to Elizabeth Lennox be added to Arbella’s two hundred for ‘her better education’. ‘Her servants that are to look to her, her masters that are to train her up in all good learning and virtue, will require no small charge.’ Bess never got the extra money. But her justification for requesting it – Arbella’s relationship to the queen – was a theme upon which Bess harped repeatedly. The child, she wrote to Walsingham, is ‘well near seven years old and of very great towardness [precocity] to learn anything and I very careful of her good education as she were my own and only child, and a great deal more for the consanguinity she is of to her Majesty’.

  To Burghley, Bess wrote again: ‘Although she were everywhere her mother were during her life, I can not now like [Arbella] should be here nor in any place else where I may not sometimes see her and daily hear of her, and therefore [I am] charged with keeping house where she must be with such as is fit for her calling.’ The little girl was ‘very apt to learn and able to conceive what shall be taught her’, added Bess, encouragingly.

  Bess could not have been an easy woman to live with, or one with whom a child would necessarily feel at home. In a letter of 1577, her son-in-law Gilbert Talbot described to Bess the effect she had on his toddler George. The child, he said, ‘drinketh every day32 to Lady Grandmother’; but ‘if he have any spice, I tell him Lady Grandmother is come and will see him; which he then will either quickly hide or quickly eat; and then asks where Lady Danmode [Grandmother] is.’ The effect is of a formidable personality – a family martinet, if not actually a bogey.

  Ten days after Gilbert had written that letter, little George died. Shrewsbury wrote to Burghley unsympathetically that ‘I doubt not33 my wife will show more folly than need requires.’ To Walsingham he wrote: ‘my wife is not so well able to rule her passions, and has driven herself into such a case by her continual weeping as is likely to breed in her further inconvenience.’ Bess seems to have been a woman of untrammelled feelings; and in the orbit of such a one, it is difficult for a younger and more fragile personality to develop freely. But there is another warning bell sounding here. The earl’s letter also indicates the growing lack of sympathy between the Shrewsburys themselves.

  ‘Good lady grandmother’

  WE CANNOT, AT this point in her story, feel that we have really ‘met’ Arbella. Perhaps it would not even help if we could step back through the distance of the centuries. She was, after all, still only six years old, and anyone who has spent time with children knows how their gaze – the wide, unreceptive gaze of the toddler in the portrait – seems to interact only briefly with the adult world and then move on, fast as sun and showers on an April day. But if we look forward to the Arbella of the adult letters, we can see some of the traits she would display marked out already.

  We can see how she came by her powerful head of anger, and her refusal to settle for the hand her life had dealt. We can see her curious blindness to other people’s reactions, her intelligence and her emotional timidity. It is harder to see her playfulness and her independence, her capacity for self-mockery. But these were not qualities of which the Elizabethans wrote. Contemporaries praised Arbella for her goodness and her gravity: censured her only for haughtiness, or for her failure to understand and accept the politics of her day – for her failure, in other words, appropriately to assess her position in relation to other people. Perhaps that, too, is something she learned from her family.

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p; Her childhood – nature and nurture alike – gave her many gifts. But neither was calculated to make her life easy. Hers was a fractious family. As early as 1575 the earl of Shrewsbury was reported by his son Gilbert as being ‘often in great choler upon slight occasion’. By the time the six-year-old Arbella came wholly into Bess’s care in 1582, the situation had deteriorated yet further. A gentleman servant of Bess’s wrote seeking new employment on the grounds that ‘this house is a hell.’ And Arbella was to be another cause of strife between the earl and countess. In the usual way of marital disputes she was used as pawn, to be placed on the board wherever necessary. ‘My lord sending the little lady Arbella to me,’ grumbled Bess to Lord Leicester, ‘being a thing I desired much the contrary …’ As Robert Beale, clerk to the privy council, wrote: ‘The matter of the Lady Arbella’s remaining34 with [the earl] might have been well brought to pass if the countess could have [been] brought to have sought it at his hands in humble sort.’ But Bess was not well acquainted with humility.