Arbella: England's Lost Queen

Two not too distant relatives, Arbella Stuart and William Seymour, both with a claim to the English throne - having originated from the sisters of Henry VIII, Margaret and Mary, respectively - were briefly married and had very different lives. William successfully fled to Europe after his marriage to Arbella caused much royal displeasure (it was seen as a double threat to James I and both were imprisoned for that), didn't perish there and lived a good eventful life long after his wife died, was a trusted man in the court of Charles I, fought in the civil war, even Cromwell had time for him and died "a man of great honour, interest and state". His 70 odd years were not marred by the ill-fated marriage.Only 40 years of Arbella's life, on the contrary, tell a different, rather tragic and pathetic story. For someone who was thought of as very important indeed in her lifetime (with plots to put her on the throne cropping up here and then) and her name known to every royal house in Europe, she lived in seclusion and imprisonment most of her life. And that precisely because a) she was a woman and of b) royal blood, and therefore easier to be put away out of Elizabeth's beady eye and paranoia, and even later on, during much kinder James's rule. Never obscure in her time, she is still virtually unknown to the readers now.I see her story as that of a great potential (education, brains, royal blood) and an even greater lack of some other essentials someone like her needed to survive. Highly educated, cerebral and studious, - yet she had no idea of the real world outside, being kept a ward of her formidable Grandmother Bess of Hardwick. Being a blood royal, - and yet she had no friends or supporters thanks to Granny being more interested in advancing her wealth, building great houses which, of course, depended on being in favour with the Queen by keeping the "possible alternative" low, under strict control. Bess kept her royal "jewel" in subjugation with occasional beatings and pretty much all her life Arbella was treated as a little girl surrounded by "wise worldly adults". When she had enough and wanted to break free by arranging a marriage with one of the Seymours - similar heirs - their Grandad, old fart Herftord, just shopped her to the Queen.It looks like even in the sane, good times of her life she was never seen as an adult with autonomy; in the times of desperation and illness due to her lack of freedom, she was even worse: harassing a court official with rambling verbose and incomprehensible tear-stained letters, twisted under pressure into incredible lies such as only wanting to demonstrate how easily a plot around her can emerge and thus alerting the crown to be ever vigilant; later reneging on her marriage to save her skin. And the shame in all of that is that it never saved her skin, only buried her deeper in neglect and indignity as time went on.Hers was a life of constant plea: if not to one queen, then to another king, for freedom, for money, for being able to get married. A woman without a husband was nothing in those days, and her existence is a testament to that, despite her royal links and wealth of her relatives. Her royal blood worked against her, while her relatives enriched themselves even further, owned land, got married, had children - all the things denied to her. The royal blood even possibly carried down the generations porphyria which affected Arbella with pains and "madness". She was a comfortable prisoner even before she did anything, and a less comfortable one after she did it. She got nothing out of being "a good girl", and suffered for being a "bad one" because she did't know how to go about it.It's a depressing but fascinating story, but I can't help thinking that, had Alison Weir wrote it, it would have been an absolute masterpiece. There are some genealogical tables but it would be good to have more detailed ones, and some pictures of Arbella's famous handwriting.

I came to this book after reading a couple of biographies of Bess of Hardwick. Bess died in 1608, when her granddaughter Arbella still had seven years of life to live. I was curious, and was glad to buy this book and read it. Like me, Sarah Gristwood's interest in Arbella was also sparked by Bess of Hardwick, but also by the latter's relations with Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart. Arbella formed the fourth side of "an irregular diamond" and Gristwood writes that her "own allegiance was always to the Tudor model. I never heard the Stuart song ... But Arbella provoked in me a nagging sense of a story missed ..."Gristwood, in her preface, admits that, "The title of this book ... is something of a ... provocation. But, like every such statement, it contains a kernel of truth." Indeed, how could it not when Arbella was third cousin to Queen Elizabeth and first cousin to King James. (By the way, it is annoying to see James's wife, Anne of Denmark, referred to as "Anna"?)I was initially put off by the prologue to the biography, which opens like some cheap romantic novel. It is very well-written if you like your historical biography in a style such as this: "Trouble was in her very bloodlines ..." But once passed the prologue, Gristwood gets into her stride. Her research has been deep and wide, and her knowledge of the epoch cannot be contradicted. (The select bibliography runs to eight pages.)The chronological structure of the book is in five parts. The first covers the first thirteen years of Arbella's life; the second takes us up to her mid-twenties; the third part is devoted solely to four months in 1603 and Arbella's quest for freedom in parallel with the dieing days of Elizabeth's reign. Part four takes the story up to 1610 - even when her cousin James becomes king, the "confusion about Arbella's status was to fog her path" - whilst the final years of her relatively short life complete the fifth part. It was good to be able to revisit the subject of the prologue in this final segment.But there is an epilogue still to go, for "Arbella's life seemed to have ended not with a bang but with a whimper - and that is no finish for a story." Here she follows the fates of Arbella's nearest and dearest, especially that of her husband who had another fifty years of life left. (Arbella's supposed links with America are far too tenuous to be worthy of mention.) Then, Arbella's interest to historians is reviewed. And the moral of the book? Well, Gristwood writes, "There is a temptation to feel that any life deemed worthy of a biography must exemplify something; ... She seems to me ... to represent how far the human spirit can fall into frustration and despair without every giving up completely."There are some interesting appendices on whether it was Christopher Marlowe who was her tutor for a brief moment and whether Arbella suffered from porphyria. Gristwood is alert to the biographical challenge if Arbella did suffer from the same ailment that later would torment George III: "If Arbella's agonies and rebellions were the result not of social or psychological pressures but of a biochemical imbalance, what then becomes of a feminist or a psychological reading of her story?" A third excellent appendix addresses `people and places'.The book comes with some excellent colour plates, although William Seymour is missing. There is, alas, no map, which is unfortunate since the opening of the book describes Rufford hall and all the nearby places that matter. The book ends with family trees, source notes, a select bibliography, picture acknowledgements, and an index. I feel I should point out problems with the list of black & white text illustrations at the close of the picture acknowledgements section, as both the number of these and the page references are in error. (This is probably due to my reading the paperback edition.)

I knew nothing about Arbella until i visited Hardwick Hall, then decided to buy this book and have been very pleased with it. It is full of interesting historical information and reveals the life of Arbella chapter by chapter, each of which has been a roller coaster ride through Arbella life

An in-depth biography of a short life. Arbella (not, as I had erroneously remembered from school as "Arabella") was a pawn of powerful relations, who so nearly managed to get away and live her own life by dressing in male attire, dashing cross-country to a waiting ship that was to take her to the continent to meet her husband who had escaped the Tower of London. Sadly, because this is history and not fiction, we know the outcome was to be failure from the start.Unfortunately, apart from a few brief periods of excitement, such as the unsuccessful flight to Calais, most of her life was tedious in the extreme: an unmarriable, Royal heiress (descended from Henry VII's eldest daughter Margaret and so a legitimate heir to the thrones of England and Scotland), forever a threat and magnet for conspicacy, watched by spies (possibly including Christopher Marlowe) she was kept in a sort of extended adolescence as far from court as both Elizabeth I and James I & VI in turn could manage. In between bouts of illness she managed to get a good classical education, become a great embroiderer and write copious letters, but she never achieved the ultimate dream of her ambitious grandmother Bess of Harwick, she was never to become queen.

It was bought as a present and it was enjoyed very much very interesting very very good read thank you.

A very well written, interesting book with lots of contemporary accounts as well as theorising. Just my kind of book

Not bad - nothing too taxing - good for bedtime reading.