Gilbert had taken his place now as seventh Earl, received the usual pompous letters of condolence from Lord Burghley and others, and was duly admitted to the order of the Garter. His notions of earldom expressed themselves chiefly in a gorgeous style of living which (in Hunter’s opinion) “alone earned for him the title of the great and glorious Earl of Shrewsbury,” irrespective of either intellectual or official distinction. Naturally his wife with her “pomp and court-like ways” was in full accord with him, and the renewal of the “All-for-Money” family fray was inevitable. In addition to his strife with the old Countess, he fought with Henry Talbot his younger brother, with Lady Talbot the widow of his elder brother Francis, with his own mother’s people the Manners family, with a prominent neighbour Sir Richard Wortley of Wortley, and, as aforesaid, with the Stanhopes of Nottinghamshire, to whom his wife despatched the violent message of hatred quoted in a previous chapter. It stands to reason also that he could not live at peace with his tenantry. As an ordinary man he does not seem to have been mentally vigorous enough, as a man of the world not sufficiently master of his hates and prejudices to come to an understanding with them. It was, after all, the most difficult task of his Lordship, and one for which his Court and town experiences had not fitted him in the least. Most pitiful of all was his deadly feud with his brother Edward. As Gilbert’s letters show, this arose entirely out of the dissensions over property, though Edward and Henry, appointed as executors of their father’s will, were wise enough to decline the task and allow it to devolve on to the experienced shoulders of their splendid stepmother.
This feud between Edward and Gilbert flourished wickedly. There is no need to bore the reader with the insertion of the pages of truculent correspondence which ensued. Gilbert eventually challenged the other to a duel, and Edward firmly declined to fight his own flesh and blood. From the ancient chivalric standpoint this may look like a lack of virility. But to fight would have been the height of unwisdom for two young, well-born men, fathers of families, and in circumstances that would have been wholly preposterous except for their absurd expenditure. It is this very refusal of Edward Talbot which causes one to discount the current story—set forth with the support of arguments, probabilities, and reasons in the Harleian MSS.—to the intent that Edward conspired, in Medici fashion, with Gilbert’s own physician, Dr. Wood, against Gilbert’s life, the medium chosen for the murder being a subtly poisoned pair of perfumed gloves.
Thus it was as well for the whole family that my Lady came to the fore again and wrestled with Gilbert, for he had flattery enough from some of his friends to feed his vanity in his new position. The garrulous Richard Topcliffe covered several pages in a letter expressing gladness that it had pleased God to set the heir in the seat of his noble ancestors. “At such an alteration of a house as now hath chanced by your father’s death, there is ever great expecting towards the rising of the sun.” It is an absurd, toadying letter, of which the only sincere part is the writer’s definition of it at the close as “my tedious dream.” Of such letters Gilbert received his share, like his father, and was flooded with all sorts of other correspondence—official, semi-official, and private. He assumes his father’s office in the lieutenancy of three counties, issues his orders for armament. He meant excellently well no doubt, but was not in the worldly sense a success. He could never, like his father, have borne the Queen’s heavy burdens from sheer devotion to a patriotic ideal and from horror of incurring her disfavour. His disputes with his tenantry so overpowered him that he was forced to refer the matter to the Queen. Her opinion was against him and on the side of the tenants. Meanwhile the Stanhope quarrel became a regular county affair, and, as Hunter puts it, “was pursued by both parties with such precipitation and violence that it was rendered impossible for the neighbouring gentry to preserve neutrality.” It is not surprising that five years after his father’s death he was thoroughly out of favour. Yet Elizabeth could be very kind to his children. One of her gentleman ushers, his friend, Richard Brakenbury, writing from Court, sent him in a letter to Rufford a pretty picture of the way she fondled his little girl:—
“If I should write how much her Majesty this day did make of the little lady your daughter, with often kissing (which her Majesty seldom useth to any) and then amending her dressing with pins, and still carrying her with her Majesty in her own barge, and so into the Privy Council lodgings, and so homeward from the running, you would scarce believe me. Her Majesty said (as true it is) that she is very like my Lady her grandmother. She behaved herself with such modesty as I pray God she may possess at twenty years old.”
Indirectly the magnificent Dowager could only be gratified by such favours. Her main energies now were given to “pushing” Arabella in the great world. Incidentally also it was her affair to go on building, building, that she might live and flourish. Constructive imagination of a certain kind she undoubtedly had. She loved grandeur, comfort, and domestic beauty, and could conceive and plan their achievement. She was led to her building by her sense of importance, coupled with the praiseworthy desire to establish her offspring in a fine house, and so increase their social advantages. That was the beginning, and her practical imagination aided her. But rumour says that it is not by the golden light of imagination that she was helped to expand and continue her enterprises, but by the glare of morbid superstition. Some soothsayer she met—history does not say at what period of her life—told her that so long as she went on building she would never die. All hard-headed as she was she has not escaped the imputation of credence in fortune-telling, for she went on building to the end. Moreover, there is the more excuse for her superstition, since, as we know, crystal-gazers and conjurers with their charmed plates of gold, their phials and symbols, came and went in the country and about the English and foreign courts. It is more than possible that such persons, though included in Shrewsbury’s roll of “practicers” and suspects, occasionally found their way into my Lady’s parlour in Chatsworth or Hardwick. There is behind this old soothsayer’s story a deeper meaning. She built that she might exist, but in her building she truly lived, for in her strongly constructive instinct all her higher faculties, in their finest, their Aristotelian sense, found their outlet, while her heart realised a certain happiness.
By this time she was just seventy, and still in full vigour, though tolerably scarred and embittered in heart and soul. Through Arabella and her second son William, both of whom she really seems to have adored, she had still a great hold upon life. It was her main business now to fight old age, face her fourth widowhood resolutely, live in comfort, and provide for those she loved or who were in any sense dependent on her.
Arabella cannot, of course, have had a particularly joyous or smooth childhood under the sway of that keen, tempestuous temperament, but at any rate she imbibed and inherited an enormous amount of vitality. She was too young to be overcast by the pitiful, short-lived love story of her parents, and her grandmother brought her up jealously and in an atmosphere of state which helped to single her out from the other grandchildren of the family and from the family circle. A letter from the Countess, written when Arabella was but a baby, may be included here:—
“The Countess of Shrewsbury to Lord Burghley, respecting the assignment of an Income to the Lady Arabella. A.D. 1582.[[85]]
“After my very hearty commendations to your good Lo. where it pleased the Queen’s Majesty my most gracious Sovereign, upon my humble suit to grant unto my late daughter Lennox four hundred pounds, and to that her dear and only daughter Arbella two hundred pounds yearly for their better maintenance, assigned out of part of the land of her inheritance: whereof the four hundred pounds is now at her Majesty’s disposition by the death of my daughter Lennox, whom it pleased God (I doubt not in mercy for her good, but to my no small grief, in her best time) to take out of this world, whom I cannot yet remember but with a sorrowful troubled mind. I am now, my good L., to be an humble suitor to the Queen’s Majesty that it may please her to confirm that grant of the whole six hundred pounds yearly for the education of my dearest jewel Arbella, wherein I assuredly trust to her Majesty’s most gracious goodness, who never denied me any suit, but by her most bountiful and gracious favours every way hath so much bound me as I can never think myself able to discharge my duty in all faithful service to her Majesty. I wish not to leave after I shall willingly fail in any part thereof to the best of my power. And as I know your L. hath special care for the ordering of her Majesty’s revenues and of her estate every way, so trust I you will consider of the poor infant’s case, who under her Majesty is to appeal only unto your Lo. for succour in all her distresses; who, I trust, cannot dislike of this my suit on her behalf, considering the charges incident to her bringing up. For although she were ever where her mother was during her life, yet can I not now like she should be here nor in any place else where I may not sometimes see her and daily hear of her, and therefore charged with keeping house where she must be with such as is fit for her standing, of whom I have special care, not only such as a natural mother hath of her best beloved child, but much more greater in respect how she is in blood to her Majesty: albeit one of the poorest as depending wholly on her Majesty’s gracious bounty and goodness, and being now upon seven years, and very apt to learn, and able to conceive what shall be taught her. The charge will so increase as I doubt not her Majesty will well conceive the six hundred pounds yearly to be little enough, which as your Lo. knoweth is but so much in money, for that the lands be in lease, and no further commodity to be looked for during these few years of the child’s minority. All which I trust your L. will consider and say to her Majesty what you think thereof; and so most heartily wish your L. well to do.
