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. Because Arbella’s importance depended on being royal, she needed a spouse with the correct bloodline, which somewhat limited the field. Edward Seymour was ten years her junior and she had never met him, but the breeding was right, as the powerful Seymour clan had Tudor blood in their veins.
Arbella’s outrageous plot was of course discovered. Elizabeth was furious, and she put her spymaster, the creepy ‘pygmy’ Robert Cecil, on the case. To her credit, Arbella refused to put up and shut up. In a state of manic energy, she poured out a frenzied torrent of letters. She scribbled all night, baring her soul, weaving half-crazed fantasies. She starved herself, and quarrelled with granny Bess. Some thought her mad, but Gristwood speculates that Arbella was suffering an attack of porphyria, the genetic disease of George III, which causes episodes of madness, verbal incontinence and wine-coloured urine.
Queen Elizabeth’s death released Arbella from captivity at Hardwick and she travelled to the court of James I. But her sheltered youth had not prepared her for life at the court of Queen Anne of Denmark, which was a nest of bad girls, seething with lust, intemperance and bitchiness. Arbella wasn’t rich – her lands had all been pinched by rapacious monarchs -and she couldn’t afford the ruinous extravagance of court, where a pearl- embroidered dress cost more than an estate. Once again, her response was to escape once more into marriage and again with a member of the Seymour family. This time she pulled it off, contracting a secret marriage at the age of 35 with Edward Seymour’s 25-year-old brother William.
What was going on here? Older biographers wrote dewy-eyed stuff about Arbella’s search for true love and domestic happiness, but Gristwood, interestingly, sees Arbella as a feisty political player. Her marriage was not about romantic love, but political ambition – about creating a dynasty to rival the Stuart kings. It all ended in tears, of course. Arbella and William were imprisoned and separated – the last thing King James wanted was a child to complicate the succession. Arbella tried to escape, dressed as a boy. She was caught, and clapped into the Tower where she died, probably of starvation, aged 40.
Sarah Gristwood succeeds triumphantly not only in bringing alive the dead politics of the Jacobean court, but also in making vivid bricks with very little straw – the evidence on Arbella is patchy to say the least. This is an enthralling account of an extraordinary life.
Jane Ridley’s The Architect and his Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens (Chatto, £25) was recently awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize.
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