The Queen That Never Was: The Twisted Tale of Lady Arbella Stuart

Early in her reign, Queen Elizabeth I—sensing her court was teeming with doubters and double-crossers—made it clear she’d cede her power to no husband. This also meant, of course, she would not produce an heir, which must have turned her bloodline-crazed dad, Henry VIII, in his tomb.

What’s more, she refused to name a successor. “Assuredly, if my successor were known to the world, I would never esteem my state to be safe,” she told parliament in 1559. Into this vacuum stepped an array of noble sons and daughters with even the flimsiest claim to the throne. “In the 1590s, there were at times as many as a dozen viable contenders to succeed Elizabeth I,” said Elizabeth Goldring, art historian and author of Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist.

In 2024 Goldring, along with Emma Rutherford, who runs The Limner Company, a portrait miniature consultancy, discovered a long lost miniature of one such claimant to the throne: 16-year-old Lady Arbella Stuart, great-great-granddaughter of Henry VII, the first Tudor king, and niece of the doomed Mary Queen of Scots. Described by her first cousin (twice removed) Elizabeth I as “an eaglet of her own kind,” and by the Venetian ambassador as having “very exalted ideas,” Arbella was at times favored above the Queen’s eventual Scottish successor, James I. “Arbella is one of the greatest ‘might haves’ of history,” said Rutherford.

The rediscovery of this long-forgotten portrait, which sold earlier this year, pushes Arbella’s almost-unbelievable story back to the forefront of Tudor and Elizabethan history, an age littered with tales of highborn daughters moving about like pawns on a chessboard, but few got as close to the throne as Arbella.

Raised in gilded captivity by her dynastically inclined grandmother, Bess of Hardwick, who described Arbella as her “jewel” (to be prized, polished and hidden away), Arbella grew up isolated and believing she’d be queen, much like Queen Victoria centuries later. Unlike Victoria, that never happened. Such exalted notions can’t be good for the teenage psyche (she would suffer from fragile, and at times dangerously unstable, mental health for the rest of her life.)

In the spring of 2023, Rutherford was contacted by the then-owner of the miniature to see if she could identify the sitter. She brought in Goldring, who had written a book on the miniature’s painter, Nicholas Hilliard. “Emma and I ended up researching the miniature together for the next twelve months and having a whale of a time on what turned out to be an incredible journey of discovery,” said Goldring.

There were hints. “After almost thirty years of looking at portrait miniatures it takes a lot to make my heart beat faster,” said Rutherford. “I had never seen anything like it…there were so many clues in the painting which could help us identify the sitter.”

Bess of Hardwick was a meticulous keeper of household expenses, so Rutherford and Goldring were able to trace a payment to England’s premier portrait miniaturist of the time, Hilliard, as well as tips paid to Elizabeth I’s gardeners at Greenwich Palace, where the portrait was painted. They were also aware Hilliard had painted Arbella in the early 1590s, “albeit the conventional wisdom was that the resulting portrait was no longer extant,” said Goldring. “It seemed almost too good to be true that we could have found Hilliard’s portrait of her...But the deeper we dug in the archives, the more evidence we found relating to this commission, all of which pointed to the sitter being Arbella.”

Forgotten for centuries and likely tucked away at the back of a drawer or cupboard, the watercolor portrait was “remarkably fresh and vibrant”, said Goldring. As Rutherford recalls, “it was unglazed and unframed and loosely held in a Victorian leather case. One sneeze could have obliterated something that had survived for over 400 years virtually untouched.”

Though small in size, the portrait tells a story of soaring ambitions. In the summer of 1592, Grandma Bess hired Hilliard to paint Arbella standing in the flowering gardens of Greenwich Palace dressed in the impossibly-high-ruffed dress of a queen, and making what Goldring realized was a preposterously bold allusion to the famous “Ditchley portrait” of Elizabeth I from the same year (now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London).