Place Name
Lady Arbella (also spelt Arabella) Stuart (November 10, 1575 – September 25, 1615) was a great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII and so, a legitimate – and at one time preferred – contender for the throne of England following the death of Elizabeth I. Support had withered in favour of James VI and I (her first cousin), but her lineage made her a perpetual threat to the Crown. While James initially welcomed her to court, her decision at age 34 to secretly marry William Seymour – another claimant to the throne – ignited the King’s fury. James viewed their union not as a romance, but as a plot to seize his crown. In 1611, King James imprisoned the newly married Mrs Seymour and placed her under house arrest, exiling her to Durham. Writing in the Barnet & District Local History Society bulletin, Gillian Gear, explains that Arbella did her best to delay her journey north: “She managed to turn an overnight stop at Highgate into one of six days, but after Sir James Croft arrived, she was forced to continue her journey. Contrary to some histories of Highgate, it was not from Arundel House that she made her escape, but from East Barnet. Arbella reached an unknown inn at Barnet on the 21st March. A letter from the Bishop of Durham to Salisbury from Barnet recorded their arrival. Post master Henry Hendry refused to dispatch the letter, and Croft had to send it with his own servant. A bill submitted for her stay at the Barnet inn showed the sum of 30 shillings to cover the cost ‘for glasses broken and rewardes to the meaner servauntes’.” Despite these raucous goings on, Arabella maintained she was too weak to continue onwards, and she was moved to the house of Thomas Conyers in East Barnet on April 1st. For ten weeks, this house became a gilded cage. While the King’s doctors examined her and the local Rector read her prayers, Arbella was secretly plotting. On June 3, 1611, Arbella executed a plan worthy of a spy novel. Disguising herself as a man – complete with “French-fashioned hose,” a black hat, a rapier, and a wig with long locks – she walked out of Conyers’ house. She trekked over a mile to a nearby inn, where horses and conspirators awaited to whisk her toward the Thames. Simultaneously, her husband William escaped the Tower of London by posing as a laborer. The plan was to rendezvous and flee to France. But the escape was undone by hesitation. Arbella reached a French ship, but she insisted on waiting for William in the channel. This delay allowed the King’s ship, the Adventure, to catch her. While William successfully reached Europe, Arbella was hauled back to the Tower of London. Broken-hearted and losing her “enthusiasm for life,” she died in the Tower four years later, at the age of 39. In a final irony, she was buried in Westminster Abbey in the same vault as Mary Queen of Scots – the very woman whose legacy had made Arbella’s life so perilous. William was eventually pardoned and returned to England, naming his eldest daughter Arabella in memory of the woman who risked everything to be his wife.
