The Tower of London by Anderson Caldwell

Author:Anderson Caldwell [Anderson Caldwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Great Britain/Tudor and Elizabethan Era
ISBN: 9781612300993
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2016-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

The Tower never housed a more celebrated number of occupants at one time than in James I’s reign. Joining Raleigh, Percy, and the rest was Arabella Stuart, James’s first cousin and next heir to the throne after his immediate family. Stuart was also a malcontent, and her proximity to the succession proved her undoing.

Arabella was born in 1575 to Charles, Lord Lennox, and Elizabeth Cavendish, a daughter of Bess of Hardwick. Her ambitious and single-minded grandmothers, Bess and Margaret, Countess of Shrewsbury, had plotted her marriage with an eye towards the throne. For this transgression, Queen Elizabeth had sent both to the Tower, albeit comfortably housed in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings, which Margaret had previously occupied for her machinations to marry her other son, Darnley, to Mary Stuart.

Now, with her parents and both grandmothers dead, Arabella was left isolated and lonely at James’s Court, with no prospects of marriage. Though she was a princess of royal blood, James had no interest in finding a husband for her. So, at the age of thirty-five, when she fell in love, she took matters into her own hands. Unfortunately, the man she coveted was the much younger - by twelve years - Earl of Hertford’s son, William Seymour. James, of course, prohibited the marriage, for Seymour was also of royal blood, the son of Hertford’s union with Lady Catherine Grey, which Elizabeth had prohibited. James specifically ruled out this potentially dangerous match - she could marry anyone else, except the man she loved.

Arabella, with a combination of Stuart recklessness and Bess’s determination, pressed the young man into a secret marriage in her private apartments at Greenwich. Their bliss was short-lived, however. Within two weeks, Seymour was sent to the Tower and Arabella to the country - it may as well have been the North Pole.

The couple planned to escape - or, rather, it was planned for them by Arabella’s aunt, wife of the Earl of Shrewsbury, another of Bess’s daughters. Recently converted to Catholicism, the rich countess had planned to send Arabella abroad to become a Catholic aspirant to James’s throne.

Disguised as a man, though encumbered by attendants and a suspicious amount of luggage, Arabella made it to the Thames where a boat took her down the estuary where she was to meet Seymour. Missing him, she arranged a ship to take her across the Channel, where she waited for him off Calais. Seymour, disguised as a carter’s boy, followed a cart that had brought firewood to his living quarters, unchallenged by the guards. But he missed his rendezvous with Arabella. Meanwhile, the alarm had gone up. The Countess of Shrewsbury was sent to the Lieutenant’s Lodgings, while Arabella was tracked to Calais, where she was caught waiting outside the harbor for Seymour. He came ashore safely at Ostend; the two were never reunited.

As for Arabella, she spent the rest of her short life in the Tower. She received a large allowance and was treated in accordance with her royal standing, but her fantasies of release were never realized.

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