Childhood
Arbella's father died in 1576 when she was still an infant. She was raised by her mother Elizabeth Cavendish until 1582. The death of her mother left seven-year-old Arbella an orphan, whereupon she became the ward of her grandmother Bess, rather than Lord Burghley the Master of the Court of Wards, as might have been expected.
During most of her childhood she lived in the protective isolation of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire with her grandmother, who had married George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury in 1568. There were, apparently, periodic visits to the court and to London, including court visits during the summers of 1587 and 1588 and one that lasted from November 1591 to July 1592.
Starting in early 1589 or thereabouts "one Morley ... attended on Arbell and read to her", as reported in a dispatch from Bess of Hardwick to Lord Burghley, dated 21 September 1592. Bess recounts Morley's service to Arbella over "the space of three years and a half". She also notes he had hoped for an annuity of some £40 a year from Arbella based on the fact that he had "been so much damnified by leaving the University". This has led to speculation that Morley was the poet Christopher Marlowe, whose name was sometimes spelled that way.
Read more about this topic: Lady Arbella Stuart
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her fingers’ touch
And from her fingers ate its bit.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Pleasing illusion: “if my childhood had been the Paradise it should have been, all would now be well.””
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)