Dodderidge had also named James Starkey as someone willing to help Arbella and he too was interviewed. What emerged was a picture of a lonely and deeply unhappy young woman. Arbella had spent the prime of her life, from eighteen to twenty-eight, in the Derbyshire countryside. From 1597, when she was twenty-three, she lived at her grandmother’s new home, Hardwick Hall, which still stands “more glass than wall.”
[…]
She topped Hardwick with her initials, “ES,” for Elizabeth Shrewsbury, but Arbella, educated to rule a kingdom, did not even have a bedroom she could call her own. Too young, her life was one of memories: her time at court and the stories she had heard about the secret marriage of Katherine Grey to the Earl of Hertford, as well as that of her parents. They had become an obsession.
A turning point had come the previous spring. Arbella had been led to believe she was going to be invited to meet the Duke of Nevers, a French nobleman of royal blood who was coming to court at Easter. The rumors were that he hoped to marry her, but in the event his visit had been a short one and she had spent another Easter at Hardwick. Starkey had often found her crying over her books and she asked him to help her leave Hardwick. He refused, but he did agree to carry out some of her requests.
[…]
But Bess Shrewsbury wanted nothing more to do with Arbella and begged Cecil and the Vice Chamberlain, Sir John Stanhope, to take her granddaughter off her hands. They refused and so Bess put Arbella under close watch: she was allowed no choice in the company she kept or the things she did, her letters were intercepted, and her angry grandmother would regularly pinch her nose and abuse her.
Arbella’s letters to Brouncker asked bitterly “if the running on of years be not discerned in me only,” that she should be treated worse than an infant. When her complaints were ignored, she went on a hunger strike, refusing to eat until she was moved from Hardwick. By the second week of February 1603 she was obviously unwell and “enforced to take much phisick.” In this weakened state she heard some grim news. Starkey had been unable to bear the shame and terror of the interviews and early in February he had hanged himself. Arbella was so distressed by his death that Bess finally agreed to move her to the house of her uncle William Cavendish, who lived at nearby Owlcotes, on condition that she start eating again.
tl;dr:
Arbella Stuart was, towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth I of England, one of the two primary candidates to inherit the throne, the other being James VI of Scotland (who did get the throne). Since Elizabeth didn’t want to pick a successor (I still never really understood why – she just wouldn’t do it), Arbella became too important to let go, but too inconvenient to bring into the fold, so she was forced to stay at a house she hated, under the care of a grandmother who hated and abused her. She spent the best years of her life essentially under house arrest because of her relation to the Queen, and was eventually so miserable and abused that she tried to starve herself to death until they agreed to at least put her in a different house.
Source:
Lisle, Leanda De. "Westward… Descended a Hideous Tempest" After Elizabeth: The Rise of James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England. New York: Ballantine, 2005. 93-94. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Letter 8, Steen (ed.), Letters, p. 135.
Steen (ed.), Letters, p. 34.
Further Reading:
Lady Catherine Grey / Catherine Seymour, Countess of Hertford
Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, 1st Baron Beauchamp, KG
Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury / Bess of Hardwick
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley KG PC
[Sir William Cavendish]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cavendish_(courtier)
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