Bess of Hardwick, page 46
…this fatal day, Ash Wednesday, and the new dropping of tears of some, might make you remember – if it were possible you could forget…And were not I unthankfully forgetful, if I should not remember my noble friend, who graced me…[an] unproved prisoner and undeserved exile, in his greatest and happy fortunes…eclipsing part of Her Majesty’s favours from him; which were so dear, so welcome to him?…I am constrained to renew these melancholy thoughts, by the smarting feeling of my great loss, who may well say I never had, nor never shall have, the like friend…15
That same day Arbella sent her page, Richard Owen,* and another servant, Henry Dove, to an inn at Mansfield where Henry Cavendish was waiting for her instructions regarding the escape scheduled for the following day, Thursday. He was almost certainly the writer of the letter that Arbella had burned. The plan was that Henry would wait at Ault Hucknall church where, under the pretext of taking a walk in the park, Arbella would meet him at noon; an escort of armed men was to hide in the woods nearby. Richard Owen returned to Hardwick, and Henry Dove remained with Henry Cavendish.
By suppertime on Ash Wednesday, Bess had received a report that her son Henry had been seen acting suspiciously. He was staying at the Mansfield Inn in the company of John Stapleton, a well-known Catholic. Stapleton was ‘son and heir to Stapleton of Carleton in Yorkshire’, Bess explained later. ‘It is 8 years since I saw him. He hath written to me many times to know if he might come [to Hardwick] but I disliking him would not suffer him.’ These two gentlemen were accompanied by a party of thirty or forty horsemen, all armed with daggers and pistols, and one of the horses had a small pillion seat ‘to carry a woman behind him’, and the rider had attempted to hide this with his cloak.
On Thursday morning, Henry Cavendish and Stapleton rode into Ault Hucknall with eight of their men, leaving the remainder hiding in and around the area, some at Rowthorne, where ‘Stapleton hath lurked three days, as I heard even now’, Bess wrote. She was alarmed enough at the report to disperse her own men in and around the village to watch and listen, and it is to them that we owe the next part of the story. They heard a villager ask Dove what Henry and his men were doing there, and he answered, ‘to take my Lady Arbella away’. Henry and Stapleton called on the parson, Mr Chapman, and told him ‘they were desirous to speak with Lady Arbella for her good, and they desired to have the key of the steeple to see if my lady Arbella did come to them’. Reverend Chapman was wary, and pretended to have difficulty finding the key, but Mrs Chapman forthrightly burst out: ‘If you had been here on Saturday last you might have seen her for she was at the church.’ At this Stapleton took off his hat and threw it on the ground.16
The two men were invited into the parsonage for refreshments, and soon afterwards two of Arbella’s servants, Richard Owen and her embroiderer Freek, arrived with a message. Arbella had set off for her walk at noon, but had been stopped by a member of the household who had reminded her that it was time to eat. Realising it would be unwise to make an issue of it, Arbella sent word that they would have to try again on another day. There was some discussion among the men, who said it would be two weeks before they could remuster.
Henry and Stapleton then mounted their horses and rode off, appearing at 2 p.m. at the porter’s lodge at the main gate of Hardwick. They were alone, but Bess knew that ‘well-armed’ men were hidden nearby, so her gates remained locked. Henry sent in a message that they wished to visit his niece, but Bess refused to allow Stapleton through the gates, ‘for I have disliked him of long, for many respects’, she wrote later to Sir Henry Brounker. However, she continued:
…for that Arbell was desirous to speak with my bad son Henry I was content to suffer him to come into my house and speak with her, rather than she to go to him, but sent word not to remain here above two hours…Arbell and Henry Cavendish had not talked, as I think, a dozen words together, [before] they both came down and offered to go out of my gates. One of my servants entreated them not to…go out until they had my consent. Arbell seemed unwilling to stay, yet at length, by persuasion did stay until word was brought to me. When I understood of it, I sent word to her that I did not think it good she should speak with Stapleton, and wished her to forbear it, for I thought Stapleton no fit man for her to converse with.17
Demanding of her grandmother whether she was now a true prisoner, Arbella said she would soon see, and walked out of the house towards the porter’s lodge. On Bess’s orders the porter refused to open the gate, so Arbella exchanged a few words with Stapleton through the gate, telling him to return to Mansfield and stay there until he heard from her. She then asked Henry to return on the following day but Bess forbade it, ‘so I think he will not come,’ she wrote. The two men then left. There was very little Henry could do, in fact. Had he stormed the house with his band of armed men, his mother, as well as people whom he and Arbella respected, would inevitably have been hurt. Once again the strategy had not been thought through. Henry was ‘no sooner gone out of my gates’, when Arbella announced that she intended to take a walk, ‘which’, wrote Bess, ‘I thought not convenient’. She had won the day simply because she had been able to impose her will over Henry and Arbella, but knew she could not guarantee Arbella’s safekeeping in the future: ‘she being here one day, I fear I shall not have her here the morrow if I should suffer her to go out of the gates. In my opinion it were best she were removed…’18
At the end of what must have been a very trying and emotionally fraught day, Bess sat down and wrote a full report of everything that had happened and despatched it at once by a fast rider to Sir Henry Brounker. On learning of the Stapleton involvement, Robert Cecil – always paranoid about a Catholic plot – feared that the attempt to ‘rescue’ Arbella might, after all, be part of an attempt to marry her to a claimant to the throne. Perhaps there had been a secret lover. It was particularly sinister at a time when the Queen was probably dying, though few people besides himself and Elizabeth’s attendants knew this. Once again Brounker rushed up to Hardwick, but Arbella refused to see him. She locked herself in her room, sending him a note which said that she would not come out ‘till I be absolutely cleared and free every way, and have my just desires granted and allowed’.19 After Brounker left, the Privy Council sent messages to Sir John Manners at Haddon Hall, and Sir Francis Leake at Rufford Abbey, requiring them to lend assistance to the Dowager Countess in looking after Arbella. They were neighbours and old friends of Bess, as well as being connected by marriage.
By this time Bess had taken as much as she was prepared to stand. On 20 March she amended her will, adding a codicil to revoke the bequests she had formerly made to Arbella and Henry, ‘and resolved that neither…of them shall have any benefit by any such gift or legacy’.
At 2 o’clock on the morning of 24 March 1603, Queen Elizabeth died. On the previous evening, Robert Cecil and Lords Nottingham and Egerton had begged her to name her successor but she was already beyond speech. However she did, so they claimed, make a little sign with her hands and fingers, which they took to indicate a crown. This was interpreted as her wish that King James should be her successor, and it was indeed convenient, for by the greatest good fortune Cecil had already arranged relays of fresh horses posted along the road from London to Scotland, and for Robert Carey* to stand by, ready to ride with the news to the Scottish King.
As soon as Elizabeth had breathed her last, a ring was dropped from her bedchamber window as a signal to Carey, who was waiting below, ready for his epic ride. One version of this event says that this ring was a sapphire one, given by Carey to his sister Lady Scrope, who was in the Queen’s chamber with instructions to drop it as a secret signal that the Queen had died. However, there was no need for secret signals since Carey was standing by under Cecil’s specific orders. Another version is that the mother-of-pearl, gold, ruby and diamond ring that Elizabeth wore every day was taken from her finger. And that it was this ring, bearing the initial E in diamonds, and the initial R for Regina in blue enamel, which was taken to James, so that he could be sure that Elizabeth was truly dead. This remarkable ring survives today and was recently on exhibition at Greenwich for the first time in living memory.20 It was designed as a locket and opens to reveal miniature enamelled busts of Elizabeth and Anne Boleyn. There is something very touching in the knowledge that, although Elizabeth never mentioned her mother after coming to the throne, she nevertheless carried this secret daily reminder of her.
To avoid possible public disorder, news of the Queen’s illness had been suppressed by order of the Privy Council. Rumours had inevitably leaked, but the news of her death was received quietly, and on the following day King James VI of Scotland was proclaimed King James I of England. It was a peaceful transition, smoother than anyone in the Privy Council had dared hope. They had feared a possible uprising featuring rival claimants, especially when Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp, left London secretly on the evening before Elizabeth’s death. But there were no riots, no dissent at all. Indeed, the only galloping horsemen were those hastening to Scotland to introduce themselves to the new King, just as the roads to Hatfield had once been crowded at the time of Elizabeth’s accession.
Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp, may well have had something planned, for according to rumours he was in the West Country and – backed by the French – had mustered a force of up to 10,000 men, ready to support his claim to the throne, and that of Arbella, against James of Scotland. However, Frances Pierrepoint wrote to her mother that a visitor from London had just told them ‘that all things in the southern parts proceed peaceably; only my Lord Beauchamp is said to make some assemblies which he [the visitor] hopeth will suddenly dissolve into smoke, his [Beauchamp’s] forces being feeble to make headway against so great an union’.21 Nothing further was heard of this matter, but in the State papers is a report that Lord Beauchamp had yielded to pressure from his father Lord Hertford, who threatened to have himself carried to London, crippled as he was, and pledge his son’s name to the proclamation of the new King.22 Reading this, the researcher is tempted to wonder whether Beauchamp was not, after all, somehow involved in the marriage proposals Arbella had made concerning his son.
An uneasy quiet settled at Hardwick, as if Bess and Arbella were each waiting to see how they would be affected. They did not have long to wait. In early April the King wrote to Henry Grey, 6th Earl of Kent, and asked him to take Arbella in. ‘We are desirous to free our cousin the Lady Arbella 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’.23
Henry Grey was a distant kinsman to Arbella. Her cousin Elizabeth (daughter of Mary and Gilbert Talbot) was married to the Earl’s nephew and eventual successor, and the popular young couple lived with the Earl on the Earl’s estate, Wrest Park near Bedford. It is likely that the King had been prompted to make this request by Robert Cecil, at Gilbert Talbot’s urging, since Gilbert was at Whitehall at the time. Whatever prompted it, a request from a new King was unlikely to be refused; an invitation to Arbella to visit her cousin at Wrest Park was duly received, and she packed and departed south, to the great relief of all parties.
Bess had been constrained by orders from the Queen concerning Arbella’s movements and marital prospects; Arbella had regarded Bess’s care as smothering and ambitious – and not without some justification. But it was a sad end to Bess’s dreams and ambitions for her granddaughter, and she considered the episode a poor and ungrateful reward for the love and care she had lavished on Arbella since her birth.
Arbella was the highest-ranking female relative of Queen Elizabeth, and, as such, she was invited to attend the State funeral on 28 April as the Principal Mourner. She petulantly refused on the grounds that since she had not been allowed into the Queen’s presence during the latter’s lifetime, she refused to be brought upon the stage now ‘as a public spectacle’.24
The account books indicate that life at Hardwick quickly resumed normality after Arbella’s departure, but Bess was not untouched by recent events. She was six years older than Queen Elizabeth, and had known her ever since the time when, as a vulnerable teenage princess, she had stood as godmother to Henry Cavendish. The death of such a vital personality, who had played a key role in Bess’s life for over forty years, and who had wielded an almost omnipotent power, was bound to cause shock and a sense of personal loss, as well as provoking thoughts of Bess’s own mortality, since she had outlived almost everyone in her own generation.
Added to this, Bess had been subjected to upsetting tantrums for months, terminating in the emotional trauma of Arbella’s departure, which everyone felt was likely to be a permanent separation. There was bound to be an effect. Even today, when life expectancy is more than twice that of an Elizabethan, the elderly are not resilient to profound emotional shock. At the age of seventy-six Bess still possessed an indomitable spirit, but the events of the previous six months caused her at last to start feeling her age.
CHAPTER 22
END OF AN ERA
1603–08
EVEN AFTER THE DEATHS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH AND HER friends, Bess managed to remain in touch with the latest news, gossip and legislation from the Court; it was not unusual for three or four letters to arrive in the same week containing identical information. One of her most useful and informed correspondents was Dr James Montague, Dean of the Chapel Royal, to whom Bess gave gifts of ‘above three hundred pounds’ in one year.1 Her letters to Robert Cecil and others on business matters were as cogent and decisive as ever, but from 1603 there is a creeping sense of Bess starting to become an observer of the lives of others rather than an initiator of events. The trauma of the events of the past months – Henry and Arbella’s betrayal of her, as she saw it, and the Queen’s death – had been a watershed.
Visitors to Hardwick variously reported that Bess was ‘well for her age’, ‘increasingly frail’, or suffering from hip pain and ‘walking with the aid of a stick’. William Cavendish took over more and more of his mother’s work, and obviously had her total confidence, which was not well received by his siblings who saw him, rather, as feathering his own nest. As a Member of Parliament, William was a frequent visitor to London, and in a position to keep his mother well informed. He had a precise mind and, like his father, had a good head for figures. He was clever in business matters, but he lacked his mother’s ability as an entrepreneur, and, more than that, her humanity. Bess, though, regarded William and his children as the future of the Cavendish family and everything she had worked for.
From letters and visitors’ reports we know that Bess kept abreast of events which affected the lives of Henry, Mary and Charles, though she did not interfere and was not directly involved in them. Thus she knew that Gilbert and Mary did not join the trek to Edinburgh. As soon as the death of Queen Elizabeth was confirmed, and probably acting on Cecil’s advice, Gilbert wrote to King James, saying that he would be honoured to serve him, and hoped there would be no lack of trust because of his father’s role in the life of the King’s mother. And he tentatively suggested the King might like to break his journey south by staying with him and his wife at their house at Worksop.
A week later the King wrote to reassure him: ‘Assuring you that as you have uttered your tender affection and most dutiful care to serve us, whereof we never had any distrust…We will at all occasions make it known to you how far we respected your friendly courage in all the process of that which is past, since the decease of our late dearest sister the Queen [Elizabeth].’ He ended his letter by accepting Gilbert’s invitation to stay at Worksop.2 This was more than Gilbert had hoped for and he was cock-a-hoop at the opportunity to gain the new King’s favour so early in the reign. He immediately wrote to the local gentry advising that the King was coming to Worksop, and inviting them to be part of the company, adding that he would ‘not refuse any fat capons, and hens, partridges, or the like’.3 It was to be a sort of up-market ‘bring-your-own’ party.
On 20 April Gilbert and Mary welcomed the new King and his entourage to the great Smythson-designed house, which Mary, Queen of Scots had twice visited. Probably more than any other single factor, Worksop had been responsible for the old Earl’s financial difficulties at the end of his life. Yet how pleased he would have been that it was to be used to entertain the monarch. Sadly for Bess, who is said to have designed the Great High Chamber at Hardwick specifically with a royal visit in mind, her wish was never gratified.
The King was happy to dawdle at Worksop. He could not, by tradition, take possession of Whitehall until after Elizabeth’s funeral had taken place later the same week. Bess would have heard immediately – as would the entire county and beyond – of the lavish entertainment provided by Gilbert and Mary, and aware of the poor state of their finances she must have winced, knowing that they were incurring further debt in the hope of what they might gain in favours in the future. She had seen it all before.
The cost of this royal visit might have been the reason why, a few days after the King left Worksop, Gilbert asked a friend of Bess, Sir John Bentley, to try to effect a reconciliation between himself and his mother-in-law, ‘who in the end,’ Bentley reported, ‘seems to have agreed’.4 Nothing came of this initiative, for in the following January there is a letter to Gilbert from Sir Francis Leake in which Leake ‘hopes that the opportunity for a reconciliation with the Dowager Countess will soon occur’.5
The funeral of Queen Elizabeth took place on a spring day. Her body had been embalmed and transported by State barge from Richmond to Whitehall. There, watched over by relays of lords and ladies, it lay in state on a black velvet bed until 28 April. Thousands lined the procession route, just as their parents and grandparents had done at her coronation. The Elizabethan chronicler John Stow reported that Westminster was crammed, ‘the streets, houses, windows, leads [roofs] and gutters’ all packed with a silent, expectant multitude. There was a long procession of a thousand participants, but it was Elizabeth’s coffin the public wanted to see. It was borne on a horse-drawn chariot draped in black velvet. Alongside marched a dozen noblemen – six either side – clad in black mourning robes and carrying long poles from which flew banners depicting the arms of England, the lion of England, the dragon of Wales, the Tudor greyhound, the fleur-de-lis of France, and other heraldic devices. The banners provided the only spot of colour that day.
