philippaofhainault:25 September 1615 ✧ The death of Lady Arbella Stuart“Arbella’s life s
philippaofhainault: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 -- source link
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