Arbella: England's Lost Queen
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.87 (746 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0618341331 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 450 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-12-26 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
In this U.K. Yet nothing is as remarkable as the almost modern freedom with which, in a series of extraordinary letters more passionate and extensive than those of any other woman of this suffocating age Arbella Stuart revealed her own compelling personality.. bestseller, Lady Arbella Stuart emerges as a most contemporary royal, a young woman determined to shape her own 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. An escape in disguise, a wild flight abroad, and capture at sea led in the end to an agonizing death in the Tower. 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 scheming 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
"The princess pawn" according to P. B. Sharp. Sarah Gristwood does an admirable job of propelling us back into the atmosphere of Tudor England and into the early James years as we follow the life of the lost royal Arbella Stuart. Gristwood has a harder time putting a handle on the personality of Arbella. Was she flighty, hysterical, vain, unreasonable, ungrateful, and seething as she did over her virtual imprisonment by her formidable grandmother, Bess. Rosemary Armbruster said Four Stars. Finally learned something about her, after just seeing her name, and little else.. An excellent historical biography greenie227 What I enjoyed most about this book was that it tied together historical figures I had read about elsewhere -- the earls of Leicester and Essex, Bess of Hardwick, James I, Elizabeth I -- in a completely different context and from a widely different perspective. Sarah Gristwood did an excellent job placing Arbella and her struggles within the larger political stories of her day. Her writing, although mostly
But she fully supports the contention that contemporaries took very seriously this now obscure young woman's pretensions to the throne. . By the time of Queen Elizabeth's death, Arbella's royal hopes were dashed, but the new king, James, invited her to court. 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. (June)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Despite the intriguing story, Gristwood occasionally engages in excessive foreshadowing and inconclusive speculation when facts are thin. As a young woman, she attempted to gain her freedom with schemes that were treated as dangerous intrusions into dynastic policy. While she gained some independence then, she was still enough of a political hot potat