My review of Elizabeth & Leicester: Power, Passion, Politics, by Sarah Gristwood

Elizabeth & Leicester: Power, Passion, Politics

by Sarah Gristwood 

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

After thoroughly enjoying Sarah Gristwood's other historical biographies, it was with eager anticipation that I turned to this. The legendary courtship between my favourite Tudor monarch and her Master of the Horse, Robert Dudley (later knighted Earl of Leicester), has for centuries intrigued scholars and captivated the public imagination, my own notwithstanding. I have read every great biography on this iconic royal and, like others, feel a creeping dread whenever I finish another, of having exhausted all material to date. Many is the time I have scoured library after library in vain, only to end up rereading things. Such was the extent of my joy at finding this book one late Sunday afternoon, and by such a great writer.

So many of our favourite Tudor events are tied up in this passionate liaison between Elizabeth and Leicester. There was the early period our two protagonists spent imprisoned in the Tower of London, in their youth, which begs so many questions surrounding the formation of their bond. The later mysterious death of Dudley's wife Amy, early in Elizabeth's reign, made the queen and her favourite free to marry whilst, paradoxically, preventing them from so doing due to the episode's inevitable controversy. Elizabeth's infamous offer of Dudley as husband to her rival cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, scandalised royal courts across Europe. In maturity our star-crossed pair together oversaw the later entrapment of that scheming would-be usurper queen and the showdown of the mighty Spanish Armada in oratory scenes long immortalised. Robert became, in effect, the consort that never was, trailing companies of liveried servants and horsemen and entertaining his 'heretic queen' on a scale so lavish it as to become the talk of Christendom. Literature, drama, opera and ballet abound with these tales.

Their tiffs and tirades, too, often more oblique than overt, often more written than personally enacted, became the stuff of courtly legend. Robert involved himself in the plot to marry off the Queen of Scots to the Catholic Duke of Norfolk, placing Elizabeth's throne on potentially shakier ground than that on which it was already precariously perched. The widowed Leicester even twice remarried behind Elizabeth's back, arousing her jealously and ire as could no other favourite. As puffed up and proud as she, Robert was her egotistical match, even blatantly overriding her orders not to accept overlordship of the Netherlands whilst there as her representative in wartime.

Yet the pair remained ultimately inseparable. Robert's surrogate and stepson Essex, ungratefully snatching up liberties unthinkable to other courtiers in Elizabeth's dotage, never came close to enjoying the closeness of his predecessor, indeed lost his head on the executioner's block for overstepping his mark and attempting insurrection.      

I also enjoyed and appreciated the sixteen-page Appendix chapter on Arthur Dudley (who claimed to be Robert and Elizabeth's child), which precedes a fascinating examination of fictional portrayals over the centuries. 

For narrative style I preferred Gristwood's earlier books, Blood Sisters: The Women Behind The War Of The Roses and Arbella: England's Lost Queen. By comparison, I found this stylistically longwinded, its sentences too convoluted with dashes and parentheses. Hence my four rather than five-star rating. Even so, I loved it.

This book is thorough, accurate, impeccably referenced and error-free – hallmarks of quality – leaving no stone unturned. On an academic level it succeeds.

A must for all Elizabeth I readers.