Arbella Read online

  She was surrounded, too, by unsuccessful marriages (remarkably unsuccessful even in a society where one in three among the country’s older peers40 were estranged from their wives, officially or unofficially): the Shrewsburys themselves; the relationship of Grace and Henry (‘There is no good agreement between Mr Henry Cavendish and the lady his wife; he hath lately charged her to be a harlot with some of his men and named the men to her’ a family retainer would later report); Mary Stuart’s disastrous alliances; Mary Talbot’s domination over her husband. In later life, Arbella would write of an acquaintance who was ‘as near a free woman41 as may be and have a bad husband’. Really, old Lady Lennox, in her lifetime, had presented the nearest thing to a successful role model. ‘Sweet Mage’, her husband had addressed her in his letters. But he was writing from distant Scotland, while she was held in another country, hostage for her husband’s good behaviour. Even theirs was not exactly a happy ever after story.

  ‘Little Lady Favour’

  WE DO HAVE a sunnier picture of Arbella from the early 1580s. Sir Walter Mildmay, the chancellor of the exchequer, writing to his brother-in-law Walsingham from Hardwick on 17 June 1583, gives evidence of the little girl’s progress in a postscript:

  Sir – After the closing42 up of my other letter to you, I received this little enclosed paper written with the hand of Lady Arbella, daughter of the late earl of Lennox. She is about seven years old and learned this Christmas last, a very proper child, and to my thinking will be like her grandmother, my old Lady Lennox. She wrote this at my request, and I meant to have showed the same to her Majesty, and withal to have presented her humble duty to her Majesty, with her daily prayer for her Majesty, for so the little lady desired me.

  ‘My little Lady Favour’ was how Robert Beale, clerk to the privy council, described her charmingly. Arbella seems habitually to have been presented to important visitors. Bess must have been eager to show her off to anyone who had access to Queen Elizabeth’s ear and could report favourably. This was a woman whose very considerable energies were focused on the future of her family, and in that dynastic firmament Bess’s ‘jewel’, as she so often called the little girl, was potentially the brightest star. In these years the Fugger newsletters (reports circulated privately around the great German banking house) repeatedly mention the young girl cousin ‘who, after the queen’s death, will be next heiress to the throne’.

  In the letters of the Cavendish family one can trace an oddly mixed attitude to the orphaned relative who could grow up either an overwhelming asset or a liability; a celebrity, or a glamorous cuckoo pitched into their nest. For the child, this cannot have been easy. But on a day-today basis, there is no reason to assume Arbella was not tolerably happy. A report from Bess’s steward describes her as ‘merry’. A great-aunt, Elizabeth Wingfield, on two separate occasions described her Arbella as being ‘as good a child as ever there was’. She adds in a minatory tone that no efforts of hers will be spared to increase the little girl in virtue, but she also takes care to reassure Bess that her grandmother’s ‘jewel’ is in good health. The suggestion is that there was no overt difficulty. If Arbella suffered the pressure of high expectations, she also enjoyed the privileges of luxury: nurses; tutors; toys. She was taught to ride out with hawk and hounds (Mary and Alethea Talbot were famous huntresses), as well as to embroider; to sing, and to play the lute and the viol. Music was an important part of any social education, but Arbella’s was a particularly musical family.

  In many ways, Arbella was lucky in the people who arranged her upbringing. The stories and successes of her cousins suggest that in the Cavendish households there was no painful division between learning and love of life. For example, her cousin William (Charles Cavendish’s eldest son, the future duke of Newcastle) would exchange verse letters with his own children; a pleasurable game for all the family. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes became a friend as well as tutor to his whole household – a household famous as much for skill in horsemanship and swordplay as for the mathematical genius of Charles Cavendish’s younger son, the little cousin Charles whom Arbella would mention fondly. So the young Arbella’s tastes were far from entirely cerebral. She wasn’t another Jane Grey, famously found indoors while her family were out at sport, and glorying in her distaste for finery. Arbella heartily enjoyed the pleasures of the world: clothes, food, flattery.

  But there are similarities between the two girls. In the end, it was her books which Arbella would call ‘my dead counsellors and comforters’; a consolation in a life of many difficulties. Lady Jane had told Roger Ascham43, tutor to the princess Elizabeth, that ‘One of the greatest benefits God gave me is that He sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster, for when I am in the presence of either father or mother, I think myself in hell till the time comes when I must go to Mr Aylmer.’ Arbella would later take refuge in literature in much the same way. ‘I go rather for a good clerk than a worldly wise woman,’ she was to say, a little ruefully.

  Sir John Harington would later write of Arbella’s ‘virtuous disposition44, her choice education, her rare skill in languages, her good judgement and sight in music, and a mind to all these free from pride, vanity and affectation, and the greatest sobriety in her fashion of apparel and behaviour as may be, of all of which I have been myself an eyewitness’. Arbella’s cousin, the composer Michael Cavendish, dedicating a book of songs and madrigals to her, wrote of her ‘rare perfections in so many knowledges’. Poets were later to dedicate volumes to Arbella. ‘Great learned lady’45 was how Amelia Lanyer would hail her in the dedication to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: ‘Rare Phoenix, whose fair feathers are your own, / With which you fly, and are so much admired.’ Though the extravagant nature of the compliments may be put down to contemporary court politeness, it is still noteworthy that all the compliments tend the same way.

  The sixteenth century boasted a small but highly significant minority of very learned ladies. Queen Elizabeth had been educated in this tradition, and made scholarship fashionable in the aristocratic world where she set the time of day. ‘The stranger that entereth into the court of England shall rather imagine himself to come into some public school of the universities than into a prince’s palace,’ said one observer wonderingly. Bess of Hardwick’s own cultural tastes were simple, and a few religious texts are the only books listed in her possession in the household inventory: Calvin on Job, Solomon’s Proverbs, a book of Meditations. But she knew what was due to her upwardly mobile family, and when it came to Arbella’s schooling, the queen would have been Bess’s role model in every way.

  For Arbella, this was fortunate in the manner of her education as well as its content. In 1570, Elizabeth’s great tutor Roger Ascham had published his book The Schoolmaster: a how-to manual for anyone desirous of educating a Renaissance princess. Besides his method and curriculum, Ascham laid down principles of education that seemed like sparing the rod and spoiling the child to many of his contemporaries. Learning, he wrote, ‘is robbed of her best wits by the great beating’. He suggested praise and encouragement rather than chastisement: ‘I assure you there is no such whetstone to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning.’

  The glory of a well-educated Renaissance princess lay in arts and languages, and knowledge of classical antiquity. The beginning of Elizabeth’s day, wrote Ascham, ‘was always devoted by her to the New Testament in Greek, after which she read select orations of Isocrates, and the tragedies of Sophocles, which I judged best adapted to supply her tongue with the purest diction, her mind with the most excellent precepts, and her exalted station with a defence against the utmost power of fortune.’ In Latin, the princess read ‘almost the whole of Cicero and a great part of Livy’.

  Like Elizabeth, Arbella was taught to speak, as well as to read, French and Italian as well as the classical languages. Ascham favoured a double translation method: turning one language into another and then back again. His methods obviously worked, since the queen, and later Arbella, could bot
h dictate Latin extempore. By the time she was thirteen, Harington noted that Arbella ‘did read French out of Italian, and English out of both, much better than I could’. Harington, who had translated Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso into English, added that Arbella had caused him to read her part of the work ‘and censured it with a gravity beyond her years’. She, like the young Elizabeth, was praised for her ‘towardness’, her precocity.

  There was, after all, a tradition of female learning in Arbella’s family. She was related to many of the ‘learned ladies’ of the day. Her grandmother Lady Lennox had been a poet, whose verses to her imprisoned lover Thomas Howard surpassed the fashionable norm. One poem of Margaret’s displays the sentiments upon which her granddaughter Arbella was to call when, in 1603, she struggled to invent an idealized fantasy lover of her own.

  I may well say46 with joyful heart,

  As never woman might say before,

  That I have taken to my part

  The faithfullest lover that was ever born.

  Great pains he suffers for my sake

  Continually night and day

  For all the pains that he does take

  From me his love will not decay.

  With threatening great has he been paid

  Of pain and eke of punishment,

  Yet all fear aside he has laid:

  To love me best was his content.

  Decades later, the educator Bathsua Makin, in her treatise on learned ladies (following the lead of Lanyer, who wrote of Arbella as accompanied by the Muses), specifically listed Arbella (like Jane Grey) among the poets – tantalizingly, since no poems of hers, if any there were, survive today.

  On the Cavendish side, Cousin William would write plays, as would his daughters. William’s second wife was the famous duchess of Newcastle, the author of philosophical publications like Nature’s Pictures and The Description of a New World. She was mocked as ‘Mad Madge’, a notable eccentric, but her husband warmly supported her efforts. Two of the three girl cousins with whom Arbella would have had most to do, the daughters of Gilbert and Mary Talbot, became published authors. All three47 – Elizabeth, Mary and Alethea – married men from intellectual families: in Mary’s case that earl of Pembroke who was Shakespeare’s patron, the nephew of Sir Philip Sidney and son of the countess of Pembroke who has been credited with more or less of her brother’s Arcadia.

  Elizabeth Talbot, whose marriage later made her countess of Kent, was famous for her medical cures and recipes: distillation of watercress and of spearmint made up with beeswax, wines or oils. ‘To take away hoarseness: take a turnip, cut a hole in the top of it and fill it up with brown sugar-candy, and so roast it in the embers and eat it with butter.’ After her death in 1651 they were published under the title of A Choice Manual, or Rare Secrets in Physick and Chirugery Collected and practised by the Right Honourable the Countess of Kent, late deceased. It was still in print fifty years later, despite the daunting nature of some of the recipes: ‘Take three round balls of horse dung, boil them in a pint of white wine.’ ‘Take a hound’s turd …’

  The youngest Talbot sister, Alethea, married the earl of Arundel, famous for his collection of antiquities, and patron to Inigo Jones, who brought the fruits of the classical revival to England. But she also published her own volume of medical recipes, Natura Exenterata, which had a more scientific foundation than those of her sister, setting chemical experiments alongside the more traditional recipes and advice on planting and horse-breeding. She was painted proudly holding the instruments of navigation as well as the pearls of medicine.

  Alethea Talbot and the title page of her book

  Elizabeth and Alethea took their interests from their mother; the traditional female skill of brewing remedies was one Mary Talbot pursued most enthusiastically. ‘My invective against pancakes causeth my wife to send you a little glass of her cinnamon water,’ Gilbert Talbot later wrote to his friend Robert Cecil. ‘Inflame it will not, for there is no wine in it, but cinnamon in borage water only.’ Arbella would likewise have had an earthier element to her education among the herb gardens Bess caused to be laid out at Hardwick. She would later draw on metaphors from the domestic life she knew, writing of conceits which time and experience ‘have grafted in my heart and I have watered in tears’. She would send to Gilbert the ‘stoppingest [most constipating]’ dish she ever did see. On another occasion, she drew an extended metaphor from needlework, describing how a case against her has been made by

  patching up every idle word48 to every foolish imagination … lining it with secret whisperings and shaping it as best pleaseth their fantasy who have made you present her Majesty with a misshapen discoloured piece of stuff fitting none … slubbered up in such haste that many wrong stitches of unkindness must be picked out and many wrong placed conceits ripped out.

  Arbella, like every girl of rank, was taught the art of embroidery. She wrought pieces which, sent to the queen as a New Year present, displayed the child’s skill and played their part in the important gift culture of the sixteenth century. She was, after all, surrounded by notable needlewomen; not just Bess, in whose draughty homes there were many walls to fill, but the Scots Queen Mary, who stitched away the hours and years of her captivity.

  The influence of the queen of Scots on the young Arbella is hard to assess. It is unclear just how much time the fugitive queen and her young niece ever spent together. Mary Stuart flitted like a ghost through the story of Arbella’s early life; perhaps more present in her legend than in actuality. There is a widespread belief that the queen of Scots enjoyed (as Antonia Fraser once put it) ‘a pleasant quasi-maternal relationship’49 with Arbella. But in sober truth it is hard to find documentary evidence to support the idea that they saw each other from day to day.

  Certainly – until she fell out so spectacularly with Bess – Mary thought and wrote kindly of ‘Arbelle, ma nièce’. There was much in her own situation which might incline her to do so: hurt at the way her own son James had rejected her; the boredom of imprisonment, which led her to lavish affection on lapdogs and ornamental birds; even, at first, pride and ambition, if she really had been party to making a match between Arbella’s parents. But how much of a relationship was there beyond notes or gifts, an auntly request for news, or to see the latest piece of embroidery?

  Over those long years of confinement the Scots queen did develop a rapport with the Shrewsbury family. But access to her, or even to any household where she was in residence, was at times restricted with the utmost severity. In February 1575 the wretched Shrewsbury had had to excuse himself to Queen Elizabeth for having allowed even the midwife to come to the house to attend on his daughter-in-law, and pleading pathetically that he and two of his children had christened the baby themselves, rather than bring in a priest. Burghley’s initial instructions to Shrewsbury had run to several pages of prohibitions. ‘The queen of Scots may see the countess, if she is sick, or for any other necessary cause, but rarely. No other gentlewoman must be allowed access to her.’ Shrewsbury’s eldest son Francis once told Queen Elizabeth that the queen of Scots was kept so close that none of his family had seen her ‘for years’.

  The level of security surrounding Mary obviously ebbed and flowed according to the political situation, and to her own level of clandestine activity. The rules Burghley made for her custodians may not have been kept consistently. But given Arbella’s political importance, her access to the Scots queen would surely have been monitored with especial care, while the presence of the little girl’s tutors and servants in any house where Mary was also staying would be a strain on security. We have seen how Bess left Arbella at Chatsworth while she went to Sheffield, where Mary was chiefly held; and we have seen how, on another occasion, the earl sent the little girl away. ‘It seems her Majesty has no liking our children should be with us where this queen is,’ as Shrewsbury wrote bitterly. Nevertheless, whenever they were in the same household, Arbella must have been perpetually aware of the existence of the captive queen whose p
resence explained so much that seemed odd about the Shrewsbury household – all the more so, perhaps, if Mary were kept shut away like the madwoman in the attic; the aunt Arbella was never allowed to see.

  Even if the relationship between Arbella and her aunt is set at its lowest, dismissing any idea of companionship or affection, the events of the late 1580s cannot but have made a powerful impression on a child. In September 1584 the queen of Scots had been removed from Shrewsbury’s gentle care and placed in the more stringent conditions that presaged her road to trial and execution at Fotheringay. For sixteen years she had been a dominant factor in the household Bess and the earl still occasionally shared; its enforced raison d’être. Now she was gone. Two years later Mary was brought to her death through her complicity in Anthony Babington’s plot to place her on the English throne; young Babington, that inept air-dreamer of a conspirator, had once, during Arbella’s babyhood, been a page in Shrewsbury’s household. When he was hung, drawn and quartered the news must have touched those around Arbella – as, in the spring of 1587, must Mary’s own end at Fotheringay.

  As earl marshal, it was Shrewsbury’s painful duty to give the signal for the axe to fall on his former charge. No wonder he turned his face away. It was one of his sons who galloped to carry the news to court. Mary Talbot, and Shrewsbury’s daughter Lady Mary Savill, were among the chief mourners at the funeral, and among the English ladies who were seen to kiss the queen’s grieving Scotswomen kindly.

  A terrier had nestled in the folds of Mary’s skirts when she knelt to the block at Fotheringay. Its fur had been soaked and matted with the blood that gushed from her severed neck. The ladies had taken it away and washed it, but they said it had pined and died from shock and misery. It was the kind of whispered story that would run up and down the servants’ stairs, repeated with ghoulish relish.