Behind the Palace Doors (14 page)

In the face of exile, with all its inherent dangers, Arbella appealed to the rule of law. She wrote to several judges protesting that she was to be removed “far from these courts of justice where I ought to be examined, tried, and then condemned or cleared.” She asked the judges that if they could not offer her “the ordinary relief of a distressed subject,” then to intercede so she might still receive “such benefit of justice … as both his Majesty by his oath hath promised and the laws of this realm afford to all others.”

King James was not about to let legal niceties stand in the way of his divine right to wrath. He would punish the way
he
saw fit, not the courts. So, without the law to protect her, Arbella was reduced to writing frenzied letters to people she barely knew. In one missive to an unnamed knight, she opened, “Though you be almost a stranger to me,” and continued by begging him to help “a poor distressed gentlewoman … out of this great distress and misery and regain me his Majesty’s favour which is my chiefest desire.” It was all to no avail.

Arbella swooned when the bishop of Durham and his men came to take her away. Then, refusing to budge, she left the men no choice but to carry her out on the mattress of her bed. The journey north was no smoother. A planned one-night stay in Highgate, for example, became six as Arbella fell ill (or pretended to). King James finally ordered her removed “by strength of men’s hands,” if necessary. Then, at Barnet, the party was forced to stop again as Arbella claimed she could go no farther. The king was naturally suspicious and sent a physician to examine her.

According to one report, the doctor found Arbella “very weak, her pulse dull and melancholy for the most part, yet sometimes uncertain; her water bad, showing great obstructions; her countenance very heavy, pale and wan; nevertheless, she was free from any fever or any other actual sickness, but of his conscience he protested that she was in no case to travel until God restored her to some better strength both of body and mind.”

Whether by design or not, Arbella had won from the reluctant king an extended respite in Barnet. She did not waste the opportunity. With the help of her maternal aunt Mary Talbot, she began amassing money for an extraordinarily ambitious, if not impossible, plan: to free herself from the clutches of the bishop of Durham while her husband made a simultaneous escape from the Tower of London; then to sail away together to the Continent, where they would live forever free of the vengeful king. It almost worked.

On Monday, June 3, 1611, Arbella, disguised as a man and accompanied by her gentleman servant, slipped out of Barnet, headed for the town of Blackwall on the Thames. There she was to meet her husband after his own escape from the Tower. Because of her rank and station, and because she was supposedly sick, Arbella had not been held in close confinement. Escape was relatively easy, therefore. She just got on a horse and, riding like a man, took off.

William Seymour was held in similarly loose confinement at the Tower, where he was free to move about the complex and enjoyed a furnished suite of rooms above Traitor’s Gate. And though his escape was certainly nerve-wracking enough—he might have been exposed at any moment—in the end it was really, like Arbella’s, just a matter of walking away in disguise.

Yet despite the relative ease of their escapes, the plan was treasonous and exposed them to extreme dangers—torture and execution among them. Furthermore, freeing themselves was only the first step. They still had to connect at Blackwall, and that would prove agonizing.

Arbella arrived first, and with no sign of her husband, she waited. Hours went by and no William. He had been delayed and, because it was getting late, decided to go straight to the port of Leigh, where they were to board a ship to France. Arbella had no way of knowing this, however, and, after waiting in Blackwall until it became too dangerous to stay there any longer, sadly moved on to Leigh herself. There she and her small party found the boat that was to take them to Calais. William wasn’t on it. Arbella was in despair, but with the winds turning, they had to be off. She didn’t know that her husband had connected with another ship and had set sail as well. Only one of them would ever make it to France.

King James was wild with fury when he heard that the couple had slipped away. Not only had his authority been flaunted, but he believed his throne was at stake should Arbella ally herself with a foreign power. Catholics were rooted out as potential enemies, and Bess of Hardwick was arrested. A royal proclamation demanded the return of the fugitives who had committed “divers great and heinous offences,” while foreign courts were alerted to the news in the most urgent terms. The chase was on.

“James always reacted with near-hysteria to the thought of any threat,” wrote Sarah Gristwood—“a legacy of that youth of
alarums, excursions and abductions, when the assassin’s dagger was never far away. To his ever-fearful imagination, this was not a romantic escapade. It was a political threat—an enormity.”

A small armada was sent to search for the runaways in the English Channel. Griffen Cockett, captain of the pinnace
Adventure
, spotted Arbella’s ship off the coast of Calais, where she had insisted it stop to wait for William. The captain of her ship, a Frenchman by the name of Tassin Corvé, tried to run from the
Adventure
, but the winds were against him. Cockett opened fire, which, after some time, finally convinced Arbella to surrender. Still defiant, she was “not so sorry for her own restraint as she should be glad if Mr. Seymour might escape,” reported Sir John Moore.

William Seymour did indeed escape, to Bruges. It was “a thing of no such consequence,” Robert Cecil sniffed. Arbella was the real prize. And now she took her husband’s place in the Tower—never to emerge again.

There was no heroic end to the story, no dramatic last stand from the woman who had defied the will of two monarchs. Held in rigid confinement, alone and all but abandoned, Arbella gradually gave up hope, took to her bed, and slowly faded away. Four years later, on September 25, 1615, she died, having refused to eat or drink. “Her death is deplored by a great number of the chief of the people,” the Venetian envoy reported. “The king has not said a word about it.”

The reign of Charles I, who succeeded his father, James I, in 1625, was marked by frequent clashes between the king and Parliament that culminated in civil war. Charles and his Royalist supporters were eventually defeated by Parliamentarian forces in 1649, after which the king was tried and executed for treason
.

King Charles I had little in common with his father. Where James I had been rather crude, with a fondness for drink and pretty young men, Charles was dignified in every degree, a connoisseur of fine art, and completely devoted to his wife. Nevertheless, father and son did share one dominant trait: an exalted view of kingship. “The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth,” James I had rhapsodized, “for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.” Charles I tenaciously adhered to this principle, and in the end it cost him his head.

History has not been kind to the second Stuart monarch, and with much cause. Charles was an exceedingly small man who brooked no opposition and reacted violently to any perceived intrusion upon his royal prerogative. His worldview was
essentially medieval, with the king atop an ordered hierarchy where power trickled down. Parliaments, he believed, were merely instruments to carry out his will. In this Charles was woefully out of synch with the evolving political order, and his inability, or unwillingness, to recognize it had terrible consequences.

Though the precise causes of the bloody civil wars that ravaged Britain in the 1640s will forever be debated, the policies of Charles I certainly played no small part. Compromise was anathema to this king, and he was unwilling to listen to legitimate grievances over his arbitrary rule. To concede anything would be to diminish his high office and the established order. “I will rather die than yield to these impertinent and damnable demands,” Charles wrote with characteristic obstinacy, this time in response to resistance to the religious policies he sought to impose in Scotland, “for it is all one, as to yield to be no King in a very short time.” To defend his prerogatives, Charles I was willing to wage war in his own kingdom.

It might be argued, charitably, that Charles’s stance was principled, grounded as it was in his belief that law and order in the realm depended upon a strong king and obedient subjects; that anything less would inevitably lead to anarchy. But he betrayed his own elevated view of monarchy by consistently reneging “on the word of a king.” Whenever he was trapped, Charles simply lied to extricate himself and to regain the upper hand. This is what ultimately doomed him. Indeed, by the time compromise might have saved his life, the word of the king meant nothing.

Charles I was, in short, a bad king. Yet for all his many flaws, he managed to redeem himself when all was lost. A transformation took place during his trial and subsequent execution that actually made him great. “His death gave his life a tragic dignity,” wrote historian Charles Carlton. “In dying he showed grandeur in place of meanness, resolve instead of vacillation, honesty where duplicity had often been the norm.”

On January 20, 1649, King Charles, defeated in war and now a prisoner, was led into Westminster Hall to stand trial for treason. It was in this same hall, almost twenty-three years before, that the king sat regally upon his throne, attended by the nation’s great nobles, as he prepared for his coronation. Now, facing the assembled tribunal alone, without counsel, he heard the charges against him.

The king, it was declared, had “caused and procured many thousands of this nation to be slain” in the civil wars. “All which wicked designs, wars, and evil practices of the said Charles Stuart have been and are carried on for the advancement and upholding of a personal interest of will, power and pretended prerogative to himself and his family, against the public interest, common right, liberty, justice and peace of the people of this nation.” And for having caused the wars, the charges continued, Charles was “guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, burnings, spoils, desolations, damages and mischiefs” that arose from them.

The preordained verdict was death, for that was the only reason the court had been assembled in the first place. The veneer of a fair and open trial was merely a pretense for judicial murder. “I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it,” roared Oliver Cromwell, leader of the king’s enemies in Parliament.

There was no precedent for putting a monarch on trial, and certainly no mandate. Such a thing was inconceivable for many who believed the king was the Lord’s anointed and at the apex of an ordered society. Indeed, only a small faction of extremists in the House of Commons had called for the trial; the majority of members opposed had been forcibly debarred by the army. And the House of Lords had withheld its approval entirely. Ironically, then, a king charged with tyranny against his own people was himself being tried in an unrepresentative, entirely illegal proceeding.