‘A MODERN POETESS’

The cruel places of history are for ever emptied of their suffering tenants, and it is only to our inappeasable sympathies that the lifelong prisoners seem to be recaptured, sent back to their intolerable hours and places, long after they have once for all, unchallenged, passed the guard. Every martyrdom of the past has ceased to be; it concerns no one how sharp, how insupportable it was in its day. There is no living pain now in all the universe to continue it, to answer it, to rehearse it, or perhaps to regret it. And if we complain that the past is not to be revoked or undone, we might rather confess the complete consolation of the passing of time, the undoing, the effacement, and the more than death. It is only by moments that we apprehend what it is to be past, or that we perceive how clean is natural oblivion; the uneasy human retrospection stirs nothing but itself, and wounds the now living heart with a present pity for that which is not. Nothing now on earth remembers.

The popular phrase is expressive: ‘I know the thing is over and done; but it afflicts me to think of it.’ So we acknowledge that there is no trouble but in the present, and that though our minds seem to travel into the past, in truth they do not budge; and we, prisoners of our own moment, are fluttered 19with the present sympathy, and not with the vanished sorrow, for this is not.

By far the greater number of human sufferings have been forgotten by man as purely and freshly as by nature. Of a few, that fictitious memory which is history and tradition renews the report with so much attention as to preserve something like the dramatic unity of time. To read of them and to think of them is nearly as long as it was to endure them. But of others again we have the brief record that shows long hollow spaces of time, perfectly dark and indescribed. Among these is the bitter life and death of Arabella Stuart, told by our popular historians in a short paragraph that ends with her death of a ‘broken heart’—the extravagant phrase interrupting the historical style and making the page conspicuous to childish learners.

Evelyn has her in his list of learned women, although she is not in the catalogue of those whom he sacrificed at one blow to the glory of the Duchess of Newcastle. ‘Hilpylas, the mother-in-law of the young Plinie, Cornelia so neere the greate Scipio,’ and Lucretia Marinella, who is not mentioned as any one’s mother-in-law, but as the author of a work Dell’ excellenzia delle Donne, con difetti e mancamenti degli Huomini—with the inferiority of these and such as these does he flatter the surpassing Duchess. The sorrows of Arabella Stuart would have made her name too sad a sacrifice for 20such a train. The other ladies are presented gaily and as it were in garlands: ‘They possesse but that divided which your Grace retaines in one.’

Nevertheless, Arabella was, even for an age when women of station were well taught, notable for her education. Her Latin letters are still there to attest it. She was named a ‘modern poetess’ by Mr. Philips, who was Milton’s nephew. These secondary, second-hand, relative distinctions are in touching disproportion with her original, immediate, and authentic sufferings. The delicately sharp edging that a more or less literary training gives to the natural human mind, making it aware, had been given to hers; and she was so prepared by delicate erudition that the loss of all she loved was complete to her, the suspense of imprisonment inconsolable, and its idleness more than mortal. She lost better than her life, for the prison ruined her reason before it released her body, twice rifled and destitute, and dismissed it to Westminster Abbey and the grave.

It is in her letters to her husband, and only in these, that Arabella Stuart is perceptible as she lived. The letters of entreaty to King James are the letters of those abject times. They declare her to be in despair, not because of the separation from her husband and only friend, and not because of her solitude in perpetual prison, but on account of the King’s disfavour, of her exile from his presence, and by reason of the remorse and contrition of one 21who had disobeyed him, even unwittingly. By these forms of ignominy did men and women rule, not their phrases only, but, apparently, their very thoughts. Such declarations were much more than a courtesy due to kings or the decorum of a style in letter-writing. Hearts beat hard to that most grotesque tune; those were real self-reproaches; they banished real sleep, human sleep, afflicted real consciences, set the tears of men running, and squandered and scattered to waste that human treasure, humility.

Lady Arabella’s remorse, as she took leave to remind the King, was poignant for her offence in having bestowed herself in marriage upon the King’s permission. He seems to have either forgotten or silently rescinded his consent, and for this she overwhelmed herself in professions of regret and promises of obedience. She sent to the Queen some little pieces of needlework, the sewing of which, she said, had beguiled the time ‘for her whose serious mind must invent some relaxation’. ‘Womanish toys’, she called them, conscious of her education, and she thanked the gentleman who was her gaoler for consenting to present them. Her way of submission was even approved by the tyrant. One of her letters to the King, said Montford, ‘was penned by her in the best terms, as she can do right well. It was often read without offence; nay, it was even commended by his Highness, with the applause of Prince and Council.’ The best 22terms are of course the most reverent. The clergy exhorted her with one voice. The stricter keeping, to which she so dreaded to be consigned as to fall ill of fear, was that of the Bishop of Durham.

She had the heart to deny her commended letters so far as to practise some secret disobedience, heaping up self-reproach for the vigils of her solitude. The letters to her husband, from whom she had been parted after but a few months of marriage, were contraband. Even in these, her allusions to the King were most dutiful, but her husband was her theme. ‘Rachel wept,’ she wrote, ‘and would not be comforted, because her children were no more. And that, indeed, is the remedyless sorrow, and none else! And, therefore, God bless us from that, and I will hope well for the rest, though I see no apparent hope.’ Her husband was ill, as she heard from others. ‘Sir,’ she wrote, ‘I am exceeding sorry to hear that you have not been well. I am not satisfied with the reason Smith gives for it; but, if it be a cold, I will impute it to some sympathy betwixt us, having myself gotten a swollen cheek at the same time with a cold. For God’s sake, let not your grief of mind work upon your body. You may see by me what inconvenience it will bring one to; and no fortune, I assure you, daunts me so much as that weakness of body I find in myself; for “si nous vivons l’âge d’un veau”, as Marot says, we may, by God’s grace, be happier than we look for, in being suffered to enjoy ourself 23with his Majesty’s favour. But if we be not able to live it, I, for my part, shall think myself a pattern of misfortune, in enjoying so great a blessing as you so little while.’

Again, she reminded him that he had not written to her ‘this good while’. ‘You see when I am troubled, I trouble you with tedious kindness, for so I think you will account so long a letter. But, sweet Sir, I speak not this to trouble you with writing but when you please. Be well, and I shall account myself happy in being your faithful and loving wife.’

As soon as these letters were discovered the writing was stopped. Enough was written, and enough even remains, to show the spirit, generous, worthy of liberty, capable of gaiety, forced to grief, of this unfortunate. A graver revolt against her tyrants was her escape to join her husband in flight from the Tower. Ill fortune set all the times, tides, and winds wrong on that unhappy adventure. She would not save herself without him. She was brought back, and from the new imprisonment there was no escape. The indignant King satisfied justice by refusing another little offering of her needlework. In her appeal to the Queen she had entreated that the gloves she had made might be accepted ‘in remembrance of the poor prisoner that wrought them, in hopes her royal hands will vouchsafe to wear them, which, till I have the honour to kiss, I shall live in a great deal of sorrow’.

24‘In all humility, the most wretched and unfortunate creature that ever lived prostrates itselfe at the feet of the most merciful King that ever was.’ These are among the last ‘best terms’ that Arabella Stuart penned.

Her King and Queen and country sent her civilization into solitude, gagged her classics, disproved her poetry, and thrust her ‘expanded mind’ into the inner darkness.

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