Elizabeth I
by
I just re-read this, as background revision, while watching the 2022 drama series 'Becoming Elizabeth'.
Alison Plowden is a queen of this genre. Her writing is addictive. Her research is meticulous, her detail mindboggling, her immortalised subject re-humanised. Elizabeth's life was fascinating regardless whose account you read - and I've read dozens - but this is among the better ones.
With her mother, Anne Boleyn, executed when Elizabeth was two, and her parents' marriage annulled, she was declared illegitimate. At twenty-five this dogged survivor succeeded her half-sister 'Bloody Mary', who had imprisoned Elizabeth for almost a year on suspicion of supporting Protestant rebels.
Tagged the 'Virgin Queen', Elizabeth considered herself married to England, never settling on a groom when any choice of foreign prince could have worked politically against her favour. Her true great love, Robert Dudley 'the Gypsy', was beneath her in rank, of famously treasonous stock and of dubious public renown after the mysterious death of his wife Amy.
More moderate a ruler than her father and half-siblings, one of her mottoes was 'video et taceo' ('I see, and say nothing'). Her Religious Settlement evolved into today's Church of England. Her eponymous age saw English drama flourish, led by Shakespeare and Marlowe, with seamen like Francis Drake knighted as heroes.
Her forty-four year reign, for many years politically shaky after she was branded a heretic by the pope, eventually brought England stability, helping forge its sense of national identity.
Renowned by detractors as short-tempered and indecisive, Elizabeth was also famously charming and no flibbertigibbet. On the contrary, she was a wily mistress of prevarication. Blessed with the 'common touch' she was hugely popular with her subjects, nicknamed 'Good Queen Bess' and 'Gloriana'.
The Spanish Armada's failure associated her with one of English history's greatest military victories. Her Tilbury speech to the troops, delivered wearing a silver breastplate over a white velvet dress, is legendary.
The reader of Alison Plowden's Elizabeth I is left feeling entertained, informed and satisfied.
A great addition for the more widely read Elizabeth I buff, a sound starting point for novices of this the subject and genre. Can't imagine anyone being disappointed by this book about England's all time favourite monarch.
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