In 1066 and All That there is a spoof exam question: ‘How can you be so numb and vague about Arbella Stuart?’ All the same, her name means little today. If she is known at all, it is as one of those fiendishly muddling and worryingly inbred claimants to the Tudor succession who all seem to be called Seymour or Stuart. Sarah Gristwood has rescued Arbella from the tangles of royal genealogy and reinvented her as a figure for our times. Her story is extraordinary. Anyone who doesn’t know their Stuarts from their Seymours should read this book.
Arbella, who was born in 1575, was the first cousin of King James I. She was the daughter of the Earl of Lennox, who was the brother of Darnley, the husband of Mary Queen of Scots. Arbella’s mother died young, and Arbella was brought up at Chatsworth by her grandmother, the formidable Bess of Hardwick. Royal blood was at once Arbella’s curse and her fortune. Her claim to succeed Queen Elizabeth was not as strong as that of her cousin James, but it was enough to make her a threat. Elizabeth, who refused neurotically to discuss the matter of her successor, determined that Arbella should never marry and found a dynasty. Poor Arbella was banished to Hardwick, where she languished as a virtual prisoner of her grim granny Bess. To pass the time, she sewed – just as her aunt Mary Queen of Scots had sewed when she too was a prisoner of Bess of Hardwick.
Until the age of 27 Arbella is silent. And then, amazingly, she grabs control of her life. Acting entirely on her own initiative, she smuggled a messenger out of Hardwick bearing a secret proposal of marriage to Edward Seymour.
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