Arbella: England's Lost Queen

In this U.K. bestseller, Lady Arbella stuart emerges as a most contemporary royal, a young woman determined to shape her won destiny in the midst of her plot-ridden world. Arbella was niece to Mary Queen of Scots and cousin to Elizabeth I--who indicated that the teenage Arbella was to be heir to her throne. A critical pawn in the struggle for succession, particularly during the long, tense period when Elizabeth lay dying, the young Arbella endured twenty-seven years of isolation at the grand Hardwick Hall, held by her Schoening and powerful grandmother. The accession of James I, Arbella's first cousin, ended the young woman's royal aspirations but thrust her into James's licentious court. Then, at age thirty-five, she risked everything to make a forbidden marriage. An escape in disguise, a wild flight abroad and capture at sea led in the end to an agonizing death in the Tower. Yet nothing is as remarkables as the almost modern freedom with which, in a series of extraordinary letters--more passionate and extensive than those of any compelling personality. "Fresh, vivid and beautifully detailed ... Much of the narrative is high melodrama and Gristwood Conveys it with exactly the right mixture of suspense and sympathy" ("Independent).

Sarah Gristwood is an Oxford-trained historian, journalist, and broadcaster.

The history of Tudor England is rife with claimants to the throne. Gristwood tells one of the more heartrending of these stories: that of Arbella Stuart, the young cousin of the future James I, who appears at times to have been bred by her grandmothers for the precise purpose of challenging the throne. Raised mostly by her maternal grandmother, Bess Hardwick (wife of Mary Stuart's jailer), Arbella grew up isolated and virtually imprisoned by Bess, with an inflated sense of her status and destiny. As a young woman, she attempted to gain her freedom with schemes that were treated as dangerous intrusions into dynastic policy. Her rambling letters from this period suggest that desperation had driven her mad. By the time of Queen Elizabeth's death, Arbella's royal hopes were dashed, but the new king, James, invited her to court. While she gained some independence then, she was still enough of a political hot potato that the king would not sanction her marriage. Frustrated, Arbella eventually arranged her own marriage and ended up, as a result, in the Tower, where she apparently starved herself to death a few years later. Despite the intriguing story, Gristwood occasionally engages in excessive foreshadowing and inconclusive speculation when facts are thin. But she fully supports the contention that contemporaries took very seriously this now obscure young woman's pretensions to the throne. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.