Review by Choice Review
Guy (Clare College, Cambridge), the author of the acclaimed biographies Queen of Scots (CH, Jan'05, 42-3013) and Thomas More (CH, Mar'01, 38-4089), has written a superb account of what he claims are the neglected decades of Elizabeth's reign, which began with the assassination of William the Silent in 1584 and ended with Elizabeth's death in 1603. Guy avoids the celebratory mode: the masterful sovereign and beloved Protestant heroine described in Sir John Neale's famous 1934 life, Queen Elizabeth, is not in evidence. Rather, Elizabeth is timorous, vacillating, and often fulfills Lord Burghley's opinion of her rule: "This argueth the queen would have her ministers do that she will not avow." As with his other books, Guy provides a sprightly narrative and analysis that draws on archives rarely frequented by earlier historians. Although scrupulous, he occasionally errs: Burghley did not take a degree from Cambridge, and Guy supplies the wrong age for the Duke of Anjou. Also, the author overstates the originality of his work: the late Wallace MacCaffrey covered much of the same ground in his classics, Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572-1588 (CH, Jan'82) and Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588-1603 (CH, Feb'93, 30-3404). Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Douglas R. Bisson, Belmont University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THE BIOGRAPHER IS meant to exhaust his subject; sometimes the subject exhausts the biographer. She is all the more apt to do so when the very news of her birth flies across Europe, when she unexpectedly inherits the throne at 25, reigns for 44 years and seems over those decades to be the only one for miles around who subscribes to the motto "I see and keep silent." Many of Elizabeth I's biographers, contends the Tudor historian John Guy, have emerged from the immense, half-legible, long uncataloged archive "wearied and demoralized," too depleted to write of the older Elizabeth. We have as a consequence wound up with half her story. That is one way of accounting for what Guy calls "the forgotten years." The underexamined decades are ones of war abroad and of political machinations at home. Philip II sends the Spanish Armada to invade England five times in all; Elizabeth's conflict with Spain will last longer than World War I and II combined. (She adopted a different measure: Her support of the Dutch against the Spanish, she groaned, had outlasted the Trojan War.) Which leads one to wonder if biographical burnout alone is to blame for the alleged amnesia. Is there not another reason the dynastic dueling, the catfight with Mary, Queen of Scots, have assumed center stage? Certainly the marriage plot commands greater primacy in a woman's life, the more so for a princess whose first suitor materialized when she was 18 months old. Middle-aged women make less good copy. Guy comes to this volume from, among other recent works, a biography of Mary, Queen of Scots - it is a little like writing about Wellington after Napoleon - but bears no grudge. He is fairly certain he admires Elizabeth. He is in any event unafraid of "an aging spinster." Dispensing with her early years in a sparkling introduction, he makes the case that Elizabeth is, at 50, newly liberated. She has shunned legions of suitors. She is unchallenged by heirs. ("Princes," she famously observed, "cannot like their own children.") Guy wastes no time on Henry VIII's efforts to secure a son, or on the irony that his daughter should remain unmarried and childless. He does remind us of the tenuous position Elizabeth occupies among the many who dismiss her as a "heretic bastard." He then catapults us ahead to 1584. London is on high alert against Roman Catholic assassins. Two swarthy foreigners find themselves imprisoned - at least until the queen notices that her favorite Venetian musicians are missing. Guy's Elizabeth is deliciously human. Helpless before marzipan, she is greedy, temperamental, afraid of the dark, prone to black moods, black humor, black teeth (all that marzipan), vain, vindictive, an inveterate snob. She goes in for trashy Italian novellas and garish haute couture. Unpredictable even to those who know her best, she keeps her court guessing - then changes her mind. She does not hesitate to dole out grisly punishments: She orders a young Jesuit, found guilty of treason, to be removed from the gallows and disemboweled while still conscious. She is ferociously eloquent. A champion multitasker, she manages "to handwrite one letter, dictate another and talk all at the same time." This leaves plenty of time for foot-stamping and tantrum-throwing. In Guy's account Elizabeth rants, thunders, rails and rages. The word "tetchy" hovers over these pages as ominously as the Spanish Armada. A great deal of sulking goes on at court as a consequence. Elizabeth is at once more fragile and more monumental than she has generally seemed; without a crown on her head, she could pass for the class bully. Slightly pockmarked, bald from an early age, she has by her 60s lost so many teeth that she is difficult to understand. She battles recurring digestive ailments, chest and throat infections. She has bad dreams. She holds fast, however, to her triple mandate, in itself sufficient to make any late-16th-century English monarch tetchy: Elizabeth means "to offer her people justice in the law courts, to defend the Church of England and to defend her realm from foreign invasion." While she believed herself a queen first and a woman second, few others did. That tension animates the life. Guy is exquisitely attuned to the backwards-and-in-heels nature of Elizabeth's reign. Confined to the company of women in her chambers - she even employed a female fool - she necessarily operated at a remove from her advisers. She had no choice but to dress for a meeting, an obligation her father had been spared. That was a painstaking production for any monarch; Elizabeth's toilette occupied her chamberwomen for a solid two hours. A Royal Navy ship, joked the wags, could be rigged in less time. Billing herself as the "Virgin Queen," she also appreciated a fine-looking man at her side. She did not react well when that consort pursued his passions elsewhere or, for that matter, when a female attendant took it upon herself to marry. (Elizabeth assaulted and injured one young bride. An alternate tale had to be concocted, involving a wayward candlestick.) As one diplomat noted, Elizabeth was "angry with any love." She nimbly wriggled out of marriage plans and meted out affections. She knew when to bestow a pet nickname or a portrait of herself, which could leave a grown man swooning. For all the flirtations, for all the manipulations, the later years distinguish themselves mostly for the betrayals. At court, she is surrounded by a slippery cast of moles, spies and turncoats who busily conspire, as much against one another as against the common enemy. The perfidy all around is startling. It is one thing for Elizabeth's great ally, the king of France, to convert to Catholicism without alerting her. That defection is worth a great deal. For far lower stakes, Elizabeth's military commanders deviate from instructions. Sir Francis Drake defies her. Sir Walter Ralegh disobeys her. Her closest adviser enters into clandestine negotiations with the Spanish. Elizabeth would appear to have had one of the broadest backs in history, given the number of people plotting - or reported to be plotting - behind it. She was herself a gifted conspirator, at one point writing to Istanbul, to the sultan's mother, in the hope that she might prevail on him to open a new front with Spain. Generally, civil and foreign wars and dynastic succession dominated the agenda. If the plots sound plucked from Shakespeare, it is because Elizabeth's reign - the dates and preoccupations of which largely align with the playwright's writing years - provided some of the raw material. To one subversive Jesuit - "a fantasist with the mind of a demented magpie," as Guy puts it - we appear to owe both "King John" and "Richard II." Guy proceeds episodically through these years as Elizabeth hurtles from one crisis to the next. It is a structure that could induce a "history is one damned thing after another" weariness but does not, so effectively does Guy plunge us into the action. Slightly more problematic is the remedial work he must occasionally perform with the back story; he can abandon us in a thicket of the past perfect. He is quicker to indicate where the herd of previous chroniclers have turned right and he intends to turn left, where earlier portraits have been airbrushed, where defective translations have left us peering farther down Elizabeth's cleavage than either the original text or her wardrobe actually allowed. He does so gracefully, retiring rather than incinerating straw men. The result is a fresh, thrilling portrait of a woman who, undermined and outflanked by her advisers, manages to hold off those armadas for decades. By the end, we come to understand why she and everyone around her had cause for exhaustion. For the rest of us, it is an invigorating performance. Elizabeth is prone to black moods and, helpless before marzipan, black teeth. STACY SCHIFF'S most recent book, "The Witches: Salem, 1692," will be published in paperback this fall.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 12, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Many readers love a good Tudor story, whether in nonfiction or fiction form, but still the question needs to be asked when a new biography of Elizabeth Tudor emerges: Why? Meaning, of course, what's new? Any treatment of Elizabeth I rests on essential facts: she was the daughter of Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, whose obligation to provide a male heir was unfulfilled and resulted in her beheading; she survived a perilous childhood at the mercy of her very Catholic elder half sister, Queen Mary I; she occupied the English throne for 44 years, overcoming numerous obstacles to the safety of her person and her kingdom. Guy's (The Children of Henry VIII, 2013) copious research results in a fresh, absorbing biography that makes an excellent choice for librarians advising readers new to the fascinating Tudor era. The author's particular focus is Elizabeth's later years, when she was an aging spinster . . . cultivating the impression that she was ageless, timeless, perennially young while attempting to vigorously assert her authority as a woman in a man's job.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The last Tudor monarch is often portrayed as a tempestuous warrior queen in her prime, but Guy (Queen of Scots), a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, asks readers to reconsider the nuances behind such a description, especially in the second half of her 44-year reign. With the remarkable advantage of access to long-buried and misfiled primary sources, Guy argues that the mature Elizabeth I did not stridently seek war (after participating in a disastrous land war), but instead reacted to and prepared for Spain's onslaught of armadas while seeking peace. Elizabeth's dangerous childhood informed the later years portrayed here. Whether dealing with her councilors or with the temperamental Earl of Essex, Guy argues that she remained queen first, woman second. Still, the aging monarch receives a balanced treatment: her fear of getting old feels relatable, while her fearless interference in Scotland serves as a reminder of her intense belief in her divine right to rule. The invaluable, newly discovered documents allow for clarification and occasional rebuttals against misinterpretations or cases of "pure invention" by the queen's near contemporaries and other historians. Guy, whose previous work biased him against Elizabeth, uses that initial inclination to give readers a fuller view of the confident, experienced, and adaptable queen whose long, eventful reign-one sprinkled with "Kafkaesque elements''-continues to fascinate. Maps & illus. Agent: Grainne Fox, Fletcher & Company. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, once described Elizabeth I (1533-1603) as a "sphinx whose riddles he could not unravel." Historian Guy (Thomas Becket) sheds light on the enigmatic queen in this meticulously researched and highly readable revisionist biography. Relying on over 250,000 pages of primary documents and drawing on 30 unpublished letters, the author aims to move beyond the "hoary myths" that have long surrounded the Virgin Queen. Although general readers may not be interested in the historiographical squabbles outlined in the preface, they will be fascinated by Guy's careful psychological portrait of the aging monarch in the sunset of her reign and the difficult period in the late 1500s that saw England at war with Catholic France and Spain, beset by economic crises, threatened by revolt in Ireland, and preoccupied with worries over the succession. Guy explains how the queen came into her own during these years, while also providing new insights into her private fears, goals, thoughts, and methods. Focusing on the particular problems Elizabeth faced as a woman in a patriarchal society, Guy deals sensitively with the issue of why she never married; her role in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots; and the difficulties she faced in attempting to assert control over war policy. VERDICT Recommended for lovers of British history and feminist biography. [See Prepub Alert, 11/23/15.]-Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The Whitbread Award-winning author delivers an outstanding biography of Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603). This page-turning book is history, biography, scholarship personified, and a crystal-clear look at Elizabeth in the war years that erases the myths and presents the real woman. Historian Guy (Henry VIII: The Quest for Fame, 2014, etc.), who is exceedingly well-versed in Tudor studies, deconstructs original sources, chooses which of many are more likely to be true, and shows Elizabeth as a vain, paranoid queen who endorsed torture and fought for her rights and privileges. Well-read, intelligent, fluent in French and Italian, Elizabeth believed she was beloved, but all her subjects could see were unproductive harvests and widespread poverty and disease. Among other primary sources, William Camden's Annales, completed in Latin in 1617, is Guy's best target. The author takes apart Camden's statements as deeply biased and the English translation as pure bowdlerization. In 1584, the assassination of Prince William of Orange began the wars with Spain that would last the rest of Elizabeth's life. The defeat of the first Spanish Armada in 1588 was only a short reprieve from the constant depletion of her treasury, as she also supported Henry IV of France against Spain and the Catholic League. Manipulatedand at the same time, likely savedby Chief Minister Burghley and her spymaster, Francis Walsingham, she struggled to assert herself. It was Burghley's contrivance of Mary, Queen of Scots' death that brought Elizabeth to what the author calls her "Armada of the soul." Her responsibility for the execution of an anointed queen haunted her for the rest of her life. During her 45-year reign, she learned how to get around those who disagreed with her, but she never succeeded in controlling some of her favorites. Near the end, Guy's comparisons to Richard II, the usurped king, the usurper Bolingbroke, and Shakespeare's play take your breath away. One of the best biographies of Elizabeth ever. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
