Arbella: England's Lost Queen by Sarah Gristwood was picked up next due to the glimpses of Arbella Stuart in the Bess of Hardwick bio just perused. The whole later Elizabethan & Jacobean periods don't seem to be the darlings of historians, so that's another reason right there, along with history so soon repeating itself. All you good Tudor peeps ought to be familiar with the sad tale of the sisters Grey & their treatment at daring to marry (& breed, in Catherine's case) whilst standing a wee bit too close to Elizabeth's throne for Her Majesty's comfort. Then there was the perhaps engineered union of Charles Stuart (son of Margaret Douglas, brother to Darnley) & Elizabeth Cavendish, with which the queen was not amused, either. This brief union (Charles died of the male Tudor curse, consumption, less than 2 years into it) produced Arbella, who would grow up to make a clandestine marriage of her own with William Seymour, Catherine Grey's grandson (see how nicely we tied that paragraph up?  ). One's bloodline handing one a nice stool in the succession queue was, in those days, a full-time & hazardous occupation at best. If Arbella had been born a boy & raised an Englishman, you betcha Elizabeth would've preferred that to handing her throne over to her worst enemy's son. Alas, standing in the throne's shadow AND being a girl was no picnic, as we've seen with Mary I & the unfortunate Greys, & twas no different for Arbella. The author opines that Elizabeth simply lived too long for Arbella, born in 1575, to have had her chance. By 1593 James VI of Scotland had the beginnings a of a Stuart dynasty in the person of his healthy infant son Henry, later solidified with the addition of the future Charles I. Burghley & Walsingham favored not the Scots line, & Elizabeth had effectively bastardized the Grey line, leaving only Arbella to succeed her; however, they predeceased Elizabeth & Robert Cecil leaned toward James, as did many of the nobles who were allegedly "sick of petticoat government". Ironically, at Elizabeth's death Arbella was nearly the same age Elizabeth had been when Mary died, & could have reigned a goodly amount of years as well. Arbella's life became the tragedy it did, says Gristwood, simply because Elizabeth kept breathing. Had she died only 10-12 years sooner, Arbella may well have found herself a crowned queen. At 16-18, trained & educated by Bess of Hardwick in the expectation of gaining the throne & much in the same manner as Elizabeth & Jane Grey were, Arbella had not yet displayed the instability of her later years. She would've been young enough, inexperienced enough, & malleable enough to be governed by a Regency Council, & a fresh matrimonial prize to parade about Europe as well. In fact, once Elizabeth was too old to play the mating game herself, she used Arbella in her stead to dangle a potential English alliance with ones of her heir presumptives. The problem, says the author, was that Elizabeth used & discarded Arbella according to whim. Arbella was infrequently invited to Court & therefore largely unknown to the courtiers jockeying for position (she was even rumored to be Elizabeth's bastard brat the 1st time she went! ). As soon as she became old enough to loom as a larger threat to Elizabeth, she was banished to Hardwick Hall with her grandmother &, while not a total prisoner, virtually kept in a similar captivity as her Auntie MQOS. Arbella's bed was kept in Bess's bedchamber, her schoolroom & private parlour could only be entered through it, & Bess herself wrote to Burghley of how she kept the closest tabs on her granddaughter, whom she saw "once every hour at least". Imagine the stultifying existence, not just for an intelligent, spirited teenage girl, but for a lonely, friendless woman in her mid-20s! Historians differ on what exactly ailed Arbella, but concur she likely suffered from depression & possibly porphyria. Certainly she seemed unbalanced (they used to call "female hysteria", as any abnormal woman was known by, "strangulation of the womb" LOL) in the period immediately preceding Elizabeth's death, chafing to get the hell outta Granny's room & have a husband & family of her own, which first Elizabeth & later James would not permit. Apparently there's lots of nice hysterical letters still extant, from which the author quotes prolifically. Arbella thought Elizabeth's death had freed her, & she did get to leave Hardwick & join the new Court, but James, who admittedly had reason to be paranoid of potential rivals dating all the way back to the Ruthven Raid & then some, used her just as Elizabeth had for the 1st 10 years of his reign. Looky, dontcha think our good cousin Arbella would make a splendid Queen of Poland?  No wonder Arbella, by this point in her mid-30s, grew desperate enough to take the chance to marry, but the combining of her Lennox blood with that of the Greys meant the union of the surviving heirs of both Margaret & Mary Tudor (save James himself), sending James into a state of alarm & panic. The escape of Arbella & her William is breathtaking, the fact that they were able to pull it off simultaneously astonishing, the capture of Arbella in sight of Calais sadly tragickal, putting her into the Tower for the rest of her life in her husband's place. Interestingly, an autopsy was conducted upon her when she finally died at age 39, &, like Catherine Grey before her, it was determined she died of "malnutrition" or what we'd now call anorexia. The appendices & source notes are the bestest part of this particular book & gave me lots of post fodder ideas The only irksome things were the author kept comparing Arbella's plight to various pieces of English literature I've never read  & the plethora of Arbella-scrawled passages. Yesm her voice was important & all, but can't ya just hurl that stuff into the appendices in its entirety & just hit the highlights instead of subjecting peeps to such torturous prose to break up the reading?  I'd recommend it, tho, considering tis the 1st bio of Arbella Stuart to come out since the 70s  Irrelevant sidebar: the author says there has NEVER been a bio done on Margaret Douglas....NEVER! Methinks she was pretty interesting & survived 3 trips to the Tower with her body in one piece. Wonder why no one's ever written about her? Anyone looking for subject matter for a historical book? |
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