Product Description

The acclaimed account of an extraordinary life previously lost in history yet spanning both Tudor and Stuart courts and encompassing espionage, a clandestine marriage, elopement, imprisonment and eventual death in the Tower of London.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #103874 in Books
• Published on: 2004-02-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Alison Weir
`Utterly compelling...an exquisite jewel of a book'

Independent
`Fresh, vivid and beautifully detailed...conveyed with exactly the right mixture of suspense and sympathy'

Sunday Times
`Carrying her learning lightly, Sarah Gristwood presents a powerful story of the dynastic insecurity of the Tudors and Stuarts'

Customer Reviews

nebulous to the point of becoming a non-story
This starts out well with the vivid story of an escape, but the rest of the book deteriorates rapidly. Part of the problem is that there just aren't the sources to make Arbella's life interesting and Gristwood falls back on either general detail (what people wore at court) and simply make up 'possibilities'. As an example, she creates a relationship between Arbella and Essex even while blithely admitting that there is no correspondance between them...

The narrative jumps around, but Arbella is never really 'there' as a character at all and so ultimately this is a very disappointing book.

The huge amount of speculation, and the way the author grabs hold of any little diversion (such as whether or not 'Morley' an obscure tutor of Arbella who appears in a single letter was really Christopher Marlowe - without ever discussing the implications if he were) make this a very disjointed narrative that is desperately trying to make itself interesting.

Sorry, but this didn't come together for me at all.

Much ado
A very attractive book at first glance, and one well presented, too.

It's a great story, but in the end there simply isn't enough meat on the bones to justify so many pages of print (and it isn't that big a read).

The author is skilled; the research is comprehensive; but alas, by half-way through, I was thinking, 'OK, I'm done here, thanks.' And this is the fault in the work - 50% of it is about nothing in particular, or about the author trying very hard to make something out of nothing in particular, and it doesn't really work.

Arbella's story is a fascinating one, but of itself it is, unfortunately, fairly lightweight. Would that the author had combined some other threads and this would have been a truly great piece of work.

Arbella - Non Regina
Arbella Stuart has a tendency to be very much forgotten, or at least marginalised in today's history. The inevitability of hindsight may lead a modern reader to dismiss her as a likely candidate for the throne on the death of Elizabeth, but Gristwood argues that this was a stronger possibility than we might credit, and certainly her incarceration shows that James I considered her to be a threat.

Gristwood here presents a highly readable account of Arbella, which is much more than just a biography. Her position was politically very difficult, being too close to the throne for comfort. Her eventual clandestine marriage, to a Seymour and descendant of Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, was too much for James I, who could see a potential rival dynasty emerging. The extracts from Arbella's letters are touchingly human. We are also given an analysis of potential likenesses of Arbella, and a consideration of the likelihood that she suffered from Porphyria.

An interesting and hightly readable book - recommended.