Devices and Desires Read online

  Bess, when told of Arbella’s proposal to Seymour, took it so badly ‘as with much ado she refrained her hands’. In private, with Arbella, she may not have refrained. While sentimental on occasion, she rarely allowed herself to be swayed by sentiment. Justice and Mercy may have graced her fireplaces, but they were not virtues to be practised in the case of an ungrateful and disobedient granddaughter. Bess now wished to be rid of Arbella quite as much as Arbella wished to be rid of Bess. Brounker left Hardwick with a letter from Bess to the Queen, in which she begged that Arbella ‘be placed elsewhere, to learn to be more considerate’.11 Removal, however, did not find favour at court. Cecil and Sir John Stanhope (vice-chamberlain of the royal household, son of Sir Thomas and enemy of Gilbert and Mary Talbot) informed Bess that the Queen chose not to make too much of Arbella’s marriage proposal, putting it down to ‘base companions’ and her own foolishness. Arbella was to be pardoned, and though she should be watched, it was important that she shouldn’t be seen to be a prisoner, nor subject to ‘any extraordinary restraint’. The Queen could think of no ‘other place so fit for her’ as Hardwick.12

  This was not what Bess wanted to hear. ‘The bad persuasions of some’, she told the Queen, had ‘so estranged her [Arbella’s] mind and natural affection from me, that she holds me the greatest enemy she hath’. Now far from holding out for a husband worthy of Arbella, any husband would do; she had ‘little care how meanly soever she were bestowed’, as long as it was ‘not offensive’ to the Queen.13 Cecil and Stanhope may have argued against ‘extraordinary restraint’, but Bess was all in favour. Having been informed that Arbella ‘could go away at her pleasure and against my will’, she employed whatever measures were necessary to ensure that ‘she should not’. Bess’s ‘ancient gentlewomen’ became Arbella’s guards.14 Arbella had been sending and receiving letters through her servants. Now her letters – to John Hacker, for example, a servant of Mary Talbot’s, asking Mary to come to Hardwick – were intercepted by Bess, who dictated false answers, written by Timothy Pusey, to encourage further correspondence.

  Hardwick had become a battleground, as Bess and Arbella squared up to each other, and as with Bess and Shrewsbury, the servants took sides. Bess could deploy her ‘ancient gentlewomen’, but Arbella had the support of her own ‘regiment’, as well as that of some of Bess’s servants whom, according to Bess, she had ‘corrupted’, such as John Dodderidge and James Starkey (Starkey was the first casualty – after being interrogated by Cecil’s men, he hanged himself). When Arbella sent her page to fetch some books from her room, he wasn’t allowed to enter. When she went to ask for Bess’s blessing after dinner, she received a ‘volley of most bitter and injurious words’ and retreated to her chamber, only to be followed by Bess, whereupon ‘another skirmish’ ensued, accompanied by a ‘storm’ of threats.15

  Immured at Hardwick, Arbella grew desperate and turned to invention – a mystery lover, ‘a noble gentleman whose name I conceal’. Her romantic hopes were, she wrote, resorting to architectural metaphor, built on rock: ‘let the winds and billows and tempests show that though my building be low yet it is not builded upon the sand for then I had been ruined, but like the wise Architect who first draws his platt and after makes an estimate of the charges, giving some allowance more than he thinks will be needful, and then finding himself able to go through cheerfully, sets his workmen to their several works’.16 Bess had no patience with such fancies – ‘what truth there is in this new matter I know not. I have found her to swerve so much from the truth, and so vainly led in the first practice that I cannot give any credit to her’.17

  Watched by Bess and William Cavendish, Arbella sat ‘scribbling’ her letters. Letter-writing had become a refuge and a release. Her letters to Brounker, to Bess, to the Queen are immensely long and frequently incomprehensible. Contemporary opinion held Arbella to have lost her wits – ‘I think she has some strange vapours to her brain’, wrote Cecil in the margin of one of her outpourings – but there was method to her madness. Her longest letter, written to Brounker on 9 March, ran to 7,000 words, and though incoherent in parts, it’s also strikingly eloquent, a plea to be heard. She was writing on the second anniversary of Essex’s execution for treason (Arbella had always claimed a special relationship with Essex, who had taken her part when she’d been disgraced at court back in 1588): ‘they are dead whom I loved, they have forsaken me in whom I trusted . . . doth her Majesty favour the Lady Catherines husband [the Earl of Hertford] more than the Earl of Essex friend?.’ She was perfectly sensible of Brounker’s view that the more she wrote, ‘to the less purpose it was’, but she offered a persuasive explanation for her writing mania: ‘being allowed no company to my liking and finding this the best excuse to avoid the tedious conversation I am bound to, I think the time best spent in tiring you with the idle conceits of my travelling mind till it make you ashamed to see into what a scribbling melancholy (which is a kind of madness and there are several kinds of it) you have brought me’.18 For Arbella, letter-writing became the only means she had of making sense of her predicament both to herself and to others, of honouring her ‘travelling mind’. At times she was nonsensical and rambling – ‘a kind of madness’ – but her later letters, after her departure from Hardwick, are perfectly lucid, indeed concise.

  Such was the impasse at Hardwick that both Bess and Arbella begged for Brounker to return. On 21 February, Bess told Cecil that Arbella had been suffering from ‘extreme pain of her side’, which Bess considered, no doubt rightly, as being all in ‘her mind’, and that she had now resorted to hunger strike: ‘she is so wilfully bent that she has made a vow not to eat or drink in this house at Hardwick or where I am till she may hear from her Majesty’. At the end of her tether, Bess had sent Arbella, accompanied by William Cavendish, to Owlcotes.19 By 2 March, Brounker and Arbella were back at Hardwick. When questioned as to the identity of her mystery lover, Arbella at first remained silent and then, resorting to farce, came up with a name: James VI. Once again, Bess begged Cecil and Stanhope to remove her granddaughter: ‘she is so wilfully bent and there is so little reason in most of her doings that I can not tell what to make of it. A few more such weeks as I have suffered of late will make an end of me.’20

  But with the Queen steadily sinking – she had now contracted bronchitis – this was a critical moment. If James was to succeed peacefully, it was important to prevent Arbella from causing trouble, or simply drawing attention to herself, especially in London. Brounker and Cecil insisted that she remain at Hardwick, safely out of sight. Arbella, frustrated and with nothing to lose, made one last bid for freedom. Neither Gilbert nor Mary Talbot had come to her aid – Bess made sure of that – and an appeal to Edward Talbot had been swiftly passed on to Cecil, by Edward himself, who wanted no part of Arbella’s schemes. However, Henry Cavendish, who always welcomed an opportunity to thwart or irritate his mother, had shown himself more amenable. Despite Bess’s vigilance, Arbella managed to communicate with Henry and concoct a plan for her escape.

  On 10 March, Henry and Henry Stapleton, a local Catholic recusant priest, attempted to station themselves in the church tower at Ault Hucknall, a mile or so from Hardwick, from where they were to look out for Arbella when she emerged for her daily exercise. But when they failed to get the key for the church from the vicar, and then received a message, brought by Arbella’s page Richard Owen and ‘old Freake’, Bess’s embroiderer, that she was unable to walk out, they decided to come to the gates of Hardwick. Bess described what happened next. Arbella wished to speak to Henry, so Bess let him in, with the proviso that he couldn’t stay for more than two hours, though ‘Master Stapleton’ was refused entry because she ‘disliked him of long’. It was easy enough for Bess to monitor the comings and goings across the entrance court from her rooms, and when she saw Arbella and Henry approaching the porter’s lodge, she had them stopped. Arbella ‘asked if she were a prisoner and said she would see and so went to the gates and would have gone out but was not suffered’.
She had to content herself with speaking to Stapleton through the gates, before he and Henry departed. Since then, Bess had learned that there were more than forty armed horsemen secreted around Hardwick, at Hucknall and Rowthorne, waiting to spirit Arbella away. Arbella was now forbidden to walk ‘abroad’ and spent her time ‘writing and sending up and down in the country and to London’.21 Her escape had been foiled, but only thanks to Bess’s cool head.

  This brought Brounker back to Hardwick for a third time. He arrived on 17 March and interviewed all those involved in the escape plot, except for Henry Stapleton. He finally decided that Arbella must be removed, both for her own sake – ‘so settled is her mislike of the old lady’ – and for that of Bess, who was growing ‘exceeding weary of her charge, beginneth to be weak and sickly by breaking her sleep and cannot endure long this vexation’. The Queen was dying, and it now seemed unwise to leave Arbella in the Catholic heartland of the Midlands; so fearful indeed was William Cavendish that he’d laid in supplies of gunpowder, arms and armour, in case of possible attack.22 Towards the end of March, Arbella left Hardwick for Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, the home of Henry Grey, Earl of Kent, who was married to Gilbert and Mary’s daughter, Elizabeth. Her departure came as a relief to Bess. On 20 March, she added a codicil to her will cutting out both Arbella, a ‘loving grandchild’ no longer, and Henry, her ‘unnatural son’. She could not prevent Chatsworth from going to Henry, but a house without its contents was useless to a poor man. Effectively Bess was preventing Henry from ever living there.

  The Queen died peacefully at Richmond Palace in the early hours of 24 March 1603. Later that morning, Robert Cecil, together with his privy councillors, proclaimed James VI King of England, before riding to London to read the proclamation at Whitehall. Whether or not Elizabeth signalled her approval of James in her dying moments is a matter of debate. It made little difference either way. The decision had been made for her. Thanks to Cecil and his behind-the-scenes manoeuvring (a draft of the proclamation had been sent to James on the 19th, the ports had been closed within hours of the Queen’s death, and, as had been prearranged, a messenger, bearing a ring as proof of death, had been dispatched to Scotland), James’s accession was accomplished with remarkable ease and lack of bloodshed.

  In early April, Frances Pierrepont wrote to tell Bess that she had heard that the new King was nearing Berwick, on the border, and that ‘all things in the southern parts proceed peaceably, only my Lord Beauchamp is said to make some assemblies’. It was hoped that these would ‘suddenly dissolve into smoke, his force being so feeble’.23 And so they did. On 20 April, James reached Worksop, where he was entertained by Gilbert Talbot. In a state of high excitement at the impending royal visit (Elizabeth had never graced any Shrewsbury property), Gilbert had written to local friends, requesting their ‘company’ and, always keen to make a saving, adding that he would ‘not refuse any fat capons, or hens, partridges or the like’.24 At Worksop, James enjoyed some fine hunting (one of his great passions, along with young men) in Sherwood Forest, as well as some ‘most excellent soul-ravishing music’.25 Gilbert could congratulate himself.

  James was still making his way south when the Queen’s funeral took place on 28 April at Westminster. Bess did not attend – the journey to London was by now too long and hard – though the death of the Queen whom she had known for over fifty years, and who was some twelve years her junior, must have been a strange and sombre moment. James had put forward Arbella, his closest living relative, as chief mourner, but Arbella felt that ‘since her access to the queen in her lifetime might not be permitted, she would not after her death be brought upon the stage for a public spectacle’.26

  22.

  ‘It doth stick sore in her teeth’

  By 1603, Bess was eighty-three. Her knees gave her trouble (she kept a ‘pair of pullies lined with black taffeta’ – knee protectors – in her bedchamber) and, inevitably, given the damp and chill of Hardwick, she suffered from arthritis, but her mental powers, her appetite for business and her energy for feuding – all were undiminished. She was still lending money, still bringing legal suits, still expanding her estates, still adjudicating and advising in the disputes of neighbours and acquaintances and still matchmaking. But given her age, those around her, those hoping for a slice of the cake, watched closely. Bess was, variously, deferred to, grovelled before, resented and feared; the ‘olde ladie’ behind her back; ‘your Ladyship’s ever most humble and ready to be commanded’, from those looking for favour.1

  One such was Henry Cavendish, whose fortunes were entirely dependent on Bess. Henry and Grace were living, wretchedly, in gloomy Tutbury, and in desperate straits financially. In reply to a letter from Robert Cecil in April 1603, pleading Henry’s case, Bess remained unmoved: ‘I wish he had lived so that he were clear of all faults imputed to him . . . I have been so hardly and unnaturally dealt withal by him and others who I take it specially sought my overthrow.’ Since Henry had set out to ‘hurt and hinder’ her and had conscripted others in his cause – some of them supposedly loyal members of Bess’s own household – she begged Cecil’s pardon if she declined to come to her son’s aid.2 By behaving so ‘unnaturally’, by entering into Arbella’s schemes, Henry had once again proved himself unworthy of trust and undeserving of help.

  It probably came as no surprise to Bess to learn that Henry was implicated in the Bye Plot, one of two plots in 1603 to depose the new King. English Catholics, like Mary Talbot, had high hopes of a new, tolerant regime under James, whose wife after all was a recent convert, who was the son of a Catholic mother (not a consideration that carried much weight with James), and who had not hitherto showed any particular enthusiasm for persecuting Catholics. But although James claimed that he was willing to turn a blind eye to Catholic worship so long as it was ‘quiet and decently hidden’, religious toleration was not on the cards. Disappointed Catholics started scheming.

  The Bye Plot, in July, which involved both Catholics and Puritans, proposed to kidnap James and force him to introduce religious toleration. The more serious Main Plot, a few months later, went further: James was to be killed, along with Prince Henry and Robert Cecil, and Arbella, who was not actually consulted, was to be put on the throne. Once again, freedom of worship for Catholics was the aim. Three of the principal Main Plot conspirators were known to Bess: Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham (son of her old friend, described as ‘a most silly Lord, but one degree from a fool’); his brother George – Bess’s godson; and Sir Griffin Markham, a Derbyshire neighbour. Cobham had tried to enlist Spanish help, and had written to Arbella, who promptly handed over his letter to the King. When the treason trials took place at Winchester, in November, Henry Cavendish’s name came up and he was summoned to court.3 Henry was exonerated. Not so the conspirators, who were found guilty and sentenced to death, although three, including Lord Cobham and Griffin Markham, received a last-minute reprieve from the King.

  Arbella too was cleared of any involvement. Far from wishing to supplant James, she had every reason to be grateful to him. Shortly after his accession, James had written to the Earl of Kent: ‘we are desirous to free our cousin the Lady Arbella Stuart from that unpleasant life which she hath led in the house of her grandmother with whose severity and age she, being a young lady, could hardly agree’.4 Arbella, as she’d long wanted, came to court, with a pension of £800 (somewhat short of the £2,000 she’d hoped for) and a position as carver to the Queen. Court, as she soon discovered, was both ruinously expensive – all the gifts, all the dressing up – and for a serious-minded bluestocking not especially congenial. In letters to Gilbert and Mary, she complained of the lack of courtesy and refinement, the ‘everlasting hunting’, the tiresome round of entertainments and ‘court sports’ beloved by James – children’s games, for example, played until two or three in the morning.5 The hectic frivolities of James’s court proved just as distasteful as life at Hardwick; one form of imprisonment had merely been exchanged for another.*

  While Be
ss remained very much in charge of her affairs, she increasingly looked to William Cavendish, her second son and second-in-command, to take care of day-to-day business. In 1604, William married again, this time Elizabeth Wortley, the widow of a wealthy Yorkshire landowner. Elizabeth, it was said, did not always see eye to eye with her mother-in-law and, as a woman of expensive tastes, would probably not have been delighted by William’s rather gloomy bachelor bedchamber on the ground floor of the New Hall.* The newly-weds spent about two thirds of their time in London, where William was much engaged in business on his own and Bess’s behalf, as well as, after 1605, with the House of Lords. When in Derbyshire, they stayed at either Owlcotes or Hardwick, but it was the latter that William used as his business headquarters. Next to his bedchamber was an office, and beyond that, the ‘Evidence House’. In the early 1600s, this was furnished with 492 drawers, with tasselled pulls, made by William Bramley, while the door was reinforced with tin plate, and iron bars, from Bess’s forge at Wingfield, were fitted onto the windows.

  Exactly how Bess and William coexisted at Hardwick, not to mention how the Old and New Halls operated together, is a puzzle. It might have been expected that William and Elizabeth would have based themselves in the Old Hall, where they could have had their own suite of very grand rooms. But that was not the case. The Old Hall seems to have been used to accommodate occasional guests and upper servants – John Digby and William Reason, for example, both had rooms there. There’s also evidence that it became something of a party house, where, free from Bess’s control, a lot of illicit sex and drinking went on (of which more later). William had his own servants at Hardwick, some with wonderfully Shakespearean names – Smout and Nodin – together with Freake, a ‘running’ footman, who may have been the son of Old Freake, and Newsam the carrier, who was kept busy carting shopping back from London. And he regularly bought foodstuffs – eggs, oatcakes made by ‘Millington’s wife’, and quantities of fish (sole, plaice, herrings, skate, thornback, haddock, crab, lobster, turbot) from two fishmongers, Dixon and Boothby.6 Yet food was apparently cooked in one kitchen, by one set of staff.