Arabella Stuart

Arabella Stuart was an English noblewoman with a strong hereditary claim to the crowns of England and Scotland. Born in 1575, she was the daughter of Charles Stuart, Earl of Lennox, and Elizabeth Cavendish, and a great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII. Orphaned young, she was raised largely under the supervision of her formidable grandmother Bess of Hardwick, who ensured that Arabella received an education appropriate to a possible royal heir.

Because Arabella stood close to the succession, both Elizabeth I and James VI and I treated her marriage as a matter of state. In 1610 she secretly married William Seymour, another descendant of Henry VII, without royal permission. James ordered the couple into custody; they attempted to escape separately in 1611, but Arabella was captured at sea while Seymour reached the Continent. Confined in the Tower of London, she suffered declining mental and physical health and died there in 1615.

In G. P. R. James’ Arabella Stuart, set in Jacobean England in the first decade of the seventeenth century, Arabella Stuart centres on a woman whose royal blood makes her private life a political problem. In Sarah Gristwood’s Arbella, Lady Arbella Stuart was born close enough to the throne to be treated as a possible successor to Elizabeth I, yet never secure enough to control her own future. In Tracy Borman’s The Stolen Crown, the strongest claimants included James VI of Scotland, Arbella Stuart and descendants of the Grey and Hastings families, while ministers tried to prevent the issue from provoking rebellion or foreign intervention.