So close to the throne, yet so far away
by Jill Armitage
Publisher Amberley Publishing
Price £20
Release Out now
One of the most heavily covered periods in British royal history is the expansive and near-infinitely complex saga of Henry VIII’s reign and how Elizabeth I ultimately ended up on the throne. One of the less-researched parts of that tapestry concerns one Arbella Stuart, a cousin to both England’s Queen Elizabeth I and Scotland’s King James VI, born into an age of uncertain claims to the throne and a multitude of plots and schemes to manipulate the direction of power this way and that.
Arbella Stuart has been dubbed by some as ‘the almost queen’ or, like this book’s title states, England’s uncrowned queen. This would definitely imply a direct claim to the throne, or indeed at the very least a strong indirect one. However, it is in this very title that we encounter the story’s first – and greatest – problem.
As Jill Armitage herself so vividly describes in the book’s opening chapters, the period following Henry VIII’s death and throughout Elizabeth I’s reign to 1603 was one of unprecedented volatility in not only the English court, but also that of Scotland and even those on mainland Europe, too. In particular, when Queen Elizabeth became ill with suspected smallpox, every corner of the English court seemed rife with schemes, attempted conspiracies, arranged marriages and a variety of tactics to place people as close to a position of accession as possible.
Yes, Arbella Stuart was high born and the result of a marriage intended to link the Scottish and English crowns, but Armitage’s account, like most others on Arbella, largely fails to convince the reader that she had any realistic chance of ever becoming queen. In that regard, the title is somew
