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Elizabeth I was born into a world of women.As a child, she was served by a predominantly female household of servants and governesses, with occasional visits from her mother, Anne Bolyen, and the wives who later took her place.As Queen, Elizabeth was cons
An intimate portrait of history's most fascinating monarch A genius, a beauty, a leader, and a manipulator. Elizabeth I has fascinated and enthralled history buffs and Anglophiles for centuries. The era that bears her name was one of the most exciting and dazzling in England's history. Christopher Hibbert's masterful biography introduces a new generation of readers, aware of the challenges women face in wielding power, to perhaps history's greatest monarch.
England, late 1547. King Henry VIII Is dead. His fourteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth is living with the king’s widow, Catherine Parr, and her new husband, Thomas Seymour. Seymour is the brother of Henry VIII’s third wife, the late Jane Seymour, who was the mother to the now-ailing boy King.Ambitious and dangerous, Seymour begins and overt flirtation with Elizabeth that ends with Catherine sending her away. When Catherine dies a year later and Seymour is arrested for treason soon after, a scandal explodes. Alone and in dreadful danger, Elizabeth is threatened by supporters of her half-sister, Mary, who wishes to see England return to Catholicism. She is also closely questioned by the king’s regency council due to her place in the line of succession. Was she still a virgin? Was there a child? Had she promised to marry Seymour?Under pressure, Elizabeth shows the shrewdness and spirit she would later be famous for. She survives the scandal, but Thomas Seymour is not so lucky. The “Seymour Scandal” led Elizabeth and her advisers to create of the persona of the Virgin Queen.On hearing of Seymour’s beheading, Elizabeth observed, “This day died a man of much wit, and very little judgment.” His fate remained with her. She would never allow her heart to rule her head again.
The forty-four-year reign of Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII and the last Tudor monarch, was considered a golden age. It saw the emergence of the great playwrights such as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, while the exploits of Sir Francis Drake and other ‘sea-dogs’ helped establish England’s position among the great maritime powers. This book looks at Elizabeth’s life through some of the many artifacts, buildings, documents and institutions that survive to this day. From the execution of her mother, Ann Boleyn, when she was just two-and-a-half-years-old, to her imprisonment on suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels, Elizabeth’s early life was a turbulent one, but her accession to the throne ushered in a period of stability. During her reign, England’s wealth and prestige grew through her patronage of seafaring privateers such as Drake, John Hawkins and Walter Raleigh. She encouraged the exploration and colonialization of North America, marking the birth of the British Empire and the establishment of British trade routes. Elizabeth was responsible for expanding the English Navy, its defeat of the Spanish Armada being considered one of England’s greatest military victories. In this magnificently illustrated book we see her birthplace at Greenwich Palace, her childhood homes, her prison in the Tower of London, the palaces she lived in, ruins of stately homes she visited, such as Gorhambury House, Kenilworth House, Upnor Castle and the Elizabethan town walls at Berwick, the many fortifications built during her reign to defend her realm, through to her final resting place in Westminster Abbey. Also found in this fascinating volume are books that she presented to her father and step-mother, Katherine Parr, with the binding embroidered by Elizabeth, her clothes, letters she wrote in her own hand, her coronation chair, her coat of arms asserting her title as Governor of the Church of England and her signature signing the death warrant of her cousin, the 4th Duke of Norfolk. This book is not just a journey back in time to the reign of Elizabeth I, but also a tour across the country to visit the sites which still evoke that golden era of the Virgin Queen.
View our feature on Sarah Gristwood’s Elizabeth & Leicester.Though the story has been told on film—and whispered in historic gossip—this is the first book in almost fifty years to solely explore the great queen’s attachment to her beloved Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Fueled by scandal and intrigue, their relationship set the explosive connection between public and private life in sixteenth-century England in bold relief. Why did they never marry? How much of what seemed a passionate obsession was actually political convenience? Elizabeth and Leicester reignites this 400- year-old love story in a book for anyone interested in Elizabethan literature.
The author of The Other Tudors delves into the Virgin Queen myth, Elizabeth’s secret “love life,” and the children she may have had as a result. “Virgin Queen” is the name for which the powerful and fearless daughter of Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn is best remembered, and may explain why Elizabeth was the last of the Tudor monarchs. But how appropriate is that reputation? Were Elizabeth’s suitors and favorites really just innocent intrigues? Or were they much more than that? Was Elizabeth really a woman driven by her passions, who had affairs with several men, including Thomas Seymour, while he was still the husband of her guardian Catherine Parr, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—a man adjudged to have been the great love of her life? Are the rumors of Elizabeth’s illegitimate children true? Was the “Virgin Queen” image a carefully thought out piece of Tudor propaganda? Historian Philippa Jones, author of the acclaimed The Other Tudors, challenges the many myths and truths surrounding Elizabeth’s life and reveals the passionate woman behind the scenes.
This book traces some of the cross-currents in Elizabethan culture, investigating ambiguities within literature which apparently praises the Queen, and the diverse meanings of descriptions of Elizabeth as a saint or goddess. It also considers both the Virgin Queen and the Virgin Mary in terms of the history of representations of gender, sexuality and power.
This long-awaited and masterfully edited volume contains nearly all of the writings of Queen Elizabeth I: the clumsy letters of childhood, the early speeches of a fledgling queen, and the prayers and poetry of the monarch's later years. The first collection of its kind, Elizabeth I reveals brilliance on two counts: that of the Queen, a dazzling writer and a leading intellect of the English Renaissance, and that of the editors, whose copious annotations make the book not only essential to scholars but accessible to general readers as well. "This collection shines a light onto the character and experience of one of the most interesting of monarchs. . . . We are likely never to get a closer or clearer look at her. An intriguing and intense portrait of a woman who figures so importantly in the birth of our modern world."—Publishers Weekly "An admirable scholarly edition of the queen's literary output. . . . This anthology will excite scholars of Elizabethan history, but there is something here for all of us who revel in the English language."—John Cooper, Washington Times "Substantial, scholarly, but accessible. . . . An invaluable work of reference."—Patrick Collinson, London Review of Books "In a single extraordinary volume . . . Marcus and her coeditors have collected the Virgin Queen's letters, speeches, poems and prayers. . . . An impressive, heavily footnoted volume."—Library Journal "This excellent anthology of [Elizabeth's] speeches, poems, prayers and letters demonstrates her virtuosity and afford the reader a penetrating insight into her 'wiles and understandings.'"—Anne Somerset, New Statesman "Here then is the only trustworthy collection of the various genres of Elizabeth's writings. . . . A fine edition which will be indispensable to all those interested in Elizabeth I and her reign."—Susan Doran, History "In the torrent of words about her, the queen's own words have been hard to find. . . . [This] volume is a major scholarly achievement that makes Elizabeth's mind much more accessible than before. . . . A veritable feast of material in different genres."—David Norbrook, The New Republic
Examines Queen Elizabeth I through the eyes of the women who shaped her life--from her bewitching mother, Anne Boleyn, to her dangerously obsessive sister, Mary Tudor, and from the rivals to her throne such as Mary, Queen of Scots to her rivals in love, like Lettice Knollys, who stole her closest male favorite.
The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was greeted by an outpouring of official proclamations, gossip-filled letters, tense diary entries, diplomatic dispatches, and somber sermons. English poets wrote hundreds of elegies to Elizabeth, and playwrights began bringing her onto the stage. This book uses these historical and literary sources, including a maid of honor's eyewitness account of the explosion of the Queen's corpse, to provide a detailed history of Elizabeth's final illness and death, and to show Elizabeth's subjects - peers and poets, bishops and beggars, women and men - responding to their loss by remembering and reconstructing their Queen.