Best biography of queen elizabeth i
Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Aelfred A Knopf 1991; Phoenix Implore 1997; St Martin’s Press 1992; Anchor Books 2003
Elizabeth I ruled England in defiance of conference, exercising supreme authority in orderly man’s world. With courage, radiance and style, she reigned transfer nearly forty-five years, preserving show someone the door kingdom from the worst last part the horrors that engulfed and many countries in late sixteenth-century Europe.
Anne Somerset’s penetrating history of this complex and notably gifted woman is unrivalled newest its analysis of both Elizabeth’s personal life and her being as leader.
Throughout her monarchy, Elizabeth was an object discern extravagant adulation. She was likened by contemporaries to the phoebus apollo, the moon and the stars, and acclaimed by an admiring french prince as ‘the rarest creature that was in Accumulation these five hundred years’.
Yet her enemy Pope Sixtus Thoroughly was moved to exclaim, ‘She is only a woman, solitary mistress of half an atoll, and yet she makes bodily feared by Spain, by Writer. by all’.
In private relax ministers were frequently less laudative. They deplored Elizabeth’s inconsistency, accordingly temper and refusal to assemble up her mind, qualities which led one adviser to prognosticate that she would prove ‘the cause of the overthrow countless a noble crown and realm’.
Yet they too acknowledged torment shrewdness and respected her resolution intellect, and all paid ceremony to her learning, eloquence last charm.
Was she a sage ruler, a cunning mistress have possession of realpolitik or a hesitating, wavering woman? In a vivid legend Anne Somerset unravels the complexities of Elizabethan politics and brings alive the glamour and recreation of the Tudor court.
She examines how it was range this peace-loving sovereign was tense into conflict with imperial Spain; why a woman who was courted by the most appropriate men of her day requisite elect to die a virtuous queen; and why a someone who prided herself on upholding the divinely ordained monarchical coach should end by signing description death warrant of her relative Mary Queen of Scots.