My review of The Life of Elizabeth I, by Alison Weir

The Life of Elizabeth I 

by Alison Weir

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Published outside America as Elizabeth the Queen, this is my favourite biography of my favourite historical figure - and I've read almost every one published - by the UK's highest-selling female historian.

Alison Weir's detail and quality closely rivals the great Antonia Fraser who, before Weir in an earlier decade, wrote the now definitive work on Elizabeth's great adversary, Mary Queen of Scots, my next favourite historical figure.

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.

Whilst Weir's writing has been derided as 'popular history', the jealousy underlying such professional jibing is plainly evident. The Guardian's Kathryn Hughes wrote in 2005: 'To describe her as a popular historian would be to state a literal truth – her chunky explorations of Britain's early modern past sell in the kind of multiples that others can only dream of.'

In her website's Author Biography, Weir graciously shuns the derogatory connotation behind 'popular historian', remarking eloquently:

'History is not the sole preserve of academics. Although I have the utmost respect for those historians who undertake new research and contribute something new to our knowledge. History belongs to us all, and it can be accessed by us all. And if writing it in a way that is accessible and entertaining, as well as conscientiously researched, can be described as popular, then, yes, I am a popular historian, and am proud and happy to be one.'

This book is as thick as a brick, supremely informative and worth infinitely more than its considerable retail value. Kept me up burning the midnight oil for weeks. I reread it two years later, loving it just as much. Well worth the lost sleep. Can't praise it highly enough.