Arbella: England's Lost Queen by Sarah Gristwood

Author:Sarah Gristwood [Gristwood, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448109838
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2017-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

‘My estate being so uncertain’

ARBELLA, AMID THE bustle of the court, took time to think of her family. She could now be useful; a conduit in the all-important game of patronage and favour. Even before the coronation, she had begged Gilbert to invite her uncle Henry and his wife to join them in town ‘because I know my uncle253 hath some very great occasion to be about London for a little while and is not well able to bear his own charges’. (‘They shall not long be troublesome to you, God willing,’ she added. We all have relations about whom we feel that way.) She had pursued advantage for her uncle Charles and for the earl of Kent, her recent host. And her uncle William wrote home to old Bess that: ‘His majesty, four days since hath been moved by my Lady Arbell for me.’

But neither Arbella’s position nor her skills were reliable. Her currency was access to the king, and this was unpredictable. The great royal palaces resembled villages more than houses. Within one, Arbella would have had her own apartments. (The favourite Robert Carr, taking over the Whitehall apartments which had belonged to James’s daughter before her marriage, found himself with forty-one rooms which he furnished with a serious collector’s complement of pictures and tapestries.) By the same token, the king had his private chambers; a set of rooms where he could spend most of his time surrounded by male intimates and accessible only briefly to the clamorous masses.

A retainer of the Talbots’, shrewd Thomas Coke, gives a vivid picture of Arbella almost literally clamouring at the king’s door on some family errand: ‘I observed254 that she wrestled extraordinarily with my lord duke [Lennox], Sir George Hume and Sir Richard Asheton for access to the king, and betwixt jest and earnest rather extorted the same from them by fear than obtained it by kindness.’

Coke clearly liked her: ‘this lady permitteth me to treat her with much less awe than I find in myself when I attend some others.’ But her rank still forbade of his casting doubt on her word or her judgement – which he would otherwise have done, evidently. Through Coke’s long letter we picture Arbella promising more than she could perform, brazening her way through to the king’s presence and promises with sheer beginner’s luck; not something that would last, in an environment so competitive and so wary. ‘What end this day’s speech with her honour will sort, God knoweth, but surely she seemeth to have mastered them all that limited her before,’ Coke concluded dubiously.

Before he left for the north Gilbert had asked another Talbot retainer, Sir William Stewart, to keep an eye on Arbella. Stewart was able to report back that ‘although her virtue255 and knowledge has been envied of to me, yet her ladyship has acquired many favourers and sundry well-affected to her humour and good merits by her good behaviour’. She was, he said, ‘considerate and wise’. But she had few natural allies.

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