#n arbella stuart
25 September 1615 ✧ The death of Lady Arbella Stuart
“Arbella’s life seemed to have ended not with a bang, but with a whimper—and that is no finish for a story. It is true she left not obvious legacy: in the most direct sense, her few goods were immediately seized on the privy council’s authority. In the broader sense, her contribution is an elusive matter. And yet, almost four hundred years after her death, she does not live in posterity. Several chains of action and event—genealogical, historical, ideological—make it hard to end her tale in 1615. They are tenuous, amorphous; so much so that to overemphasize any one is to perform the conjurer’s trick of misdirection. To proclaim that this, this, is why she mattered, is to evoke a strong aroma of sawn-up lady. But together the fragments of the kaleidoscope make Arbella Stuart a curiously ubiquitous ghost; one whose presence cannot easily be dismissed, thought she may haunt only the fringes of history.” – Sarah Gristwood, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen
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![catherineofbraganza:“Sir John Harrington later wrote of her [Arbella Stuart] ’virtuous disposition,](https://64.media.tumblr.com/2d231b05e41059737a75c37e11e3ece1/0cbea090cd29aba6-08/s540x810/dbfcd7c200965ac346def001f2928e57a1e694bb.png "catherineofbraganza:“Sir John Harrington later wrote of her [Arbella Stuart] ’virtuous disposition,")
![catherineofbraganza:“Sir John Harrington later wrote of her [Arbella Stuart] ’virtuous disposition,](https://64.media.tumblr.com/05da12b4b7d751b7a73551fefe2ea05f/0cbea090cd29aba6-43/s540x810/db1d1f56e4f18abb0edf6f2a3e4c462c505306d6.png "catherineofbraganza:“Sir John Harrington later wrote of her [Arbella Stuart] ’virtuous disposition,")
“Sir John Harrington later wrote of her [Arbella Stuart] ’virtuous disposition, her choice education, her rare skill in languages, her good judgement and sight in music, and a mind to all these free from pride, vanity and affectation, and the greatest sobriety in her fashion of apparel and behaviour as may be, of all of which I have been myself an eyewitness.’ Arbella’s cousin, the composer Michael Cavendish, dedicating a book of songs and madrigals to her, wrote of her ’rare perfections in so many knowledges’. Poets were later to dedicate volumes to Arbella. ’Great learned lady’ was how Amelia Layner would hail her in the dedication to Salve Deux Rex Judaeorum: ‘RarePhoenix,whose fairfeathersare your own, /Withwhich youfly andare so much admired.’ Though the extravagant nature of the compliments may be put down to contemporary court politeness, it is still noteworthy that the compliments tend the same way.” — Sarah Gristwood, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen
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