queen elizabeth 1 biography book

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Nonfiction Books » History Books » British History

The best books on elizabeth i, recommended by helen hackett.

University College London professor Helen Hackett selects five books on the Virgin Queen, including one by the monarch herself. "You get a sense of her independence of mind. She does her own thing"

Elizabeth I by David Starkey and Susan Doran

The Faerie Queene by edited by Thomas P Roche Jr and C Patrick O’Donnell Jr & Edmund Spenser

Translations by Elizabeth I, 1592-98 by Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel

Rewriting the Renaissance by Margaret W Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers

Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England by John A Watkins

1 Elizabeth I by David Starkey and Susan Doran

2 the faerie queene by edited by thomas p roche jr and c patrick o’donnell jr & edmund spenser, 3 translations by elizabeth i, 1592-98 by janel mueller and joshua scodel, 4 rewriting the renaissance by margaret w ferguson, maureen quilligan and nancy vickers, 5 representing elizabeth in stuart england by john a watkins.

T ell me about your first choice, Elizabeth I: The Exhibition Catalogue , edited by David Starkey and Susan Doran.

There were lots of really unusual things like a locket ring that belonged to Elizabeth which contains two pictures. It has a jewel on the front that opens up and you see one picture of Elizabeth in profile and another which appears to be her mother Anne Boleyn. And that’s very interesting because Elizabeth never publicly mentioned or acknowledged her mother, for obvious reasons because she had been beheaded for adultery and incest by Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII. The ring suggests that in private she did like to maintain a memory of her mother.

“Elizabeth never publicly mentioned or acknowledged her mother”

Your next book is Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene .

I wanted to include an example of literature from Elizabeth’s reign because she inspired a fantastic richness and breadth of poetry, with lots of writers competing with each other to praise her in ever more elaborate ways. Probably the most powerful example of that is Spenser’s Faerie Queene which is a huge epic romance published in two parts in the 1590s.

It shows Elizabeth in lots of different guises. So we have her as Gloriana, Belphoebe, Britomart, Una and lots of other figures. I think that suggests, in a way, a problem underlying all this effort to praise Elizabeth, because as a female Queen ruling in her own right she was a very unusual figure. She was almost unprecedented in English history, and particularly as an unmarried Queen without a husband to support her or to give her guidance.

For Spenser and others that created a difficulty, and the only way they could deal with that was by splitting her up. So we have Gloriana who represents her majesty and her power, then we have Belphoebe who is her beauty and femininity, more like Elizabeth as a private person, and then all these other aspects of her representing her mercy or her piety or truthfulness and so on.

As a female ruler she was a contradiction in terms, because rulers were expected to have masculine qualities, so how do you represent this anomaly? Spenser said he needed to show her in ‘mirrors more than one’. What you also get as you read on through The Faerie Queene is an increasing sense that the praise is not simple. There is criticism embedded in it as Spenser and others became quite disillusioned with Elizabeth in this late stage in her reign.

“She inspired a fantastic richness and breadth of poetry, with lots of writers competing with each other to praise her in ever more elaborate ways”

Spenser was a militant Protestant, and he and others like him would have liked the Queen to have pursued a much more aggressive foreign policy in support of Protestants abroad, and a much more assertive policy at home of making the Church of England freer of Catholic practices. So there is a sort of disappointment in her. What you get is the idea that all these ideal images are being held up as a kind of perfection for her to aspire to. They are not representing how she is but how she might be, and as the poem goes on you get the idea that this is what she has failed to be.

There is a fragment of The Faerie Queene which wasn’t published in Spenser’s lifetime. The published book has six volumes and there is a fragment of the seventh book called ‘The Cantos of Mutability’ which is where he is most overtly critical of Elizabeth. It shows her in Ireland as the goddess Diana – the moon goddess. He shows her bathing naked, and a fawn catches sight of her and he laughs at her. This is like laughing at the whole cult of the Virgin Queen, because what makes him laugh is catching sight of her private parts.

It sounds like a good thing it wasn’t published before he died, but how were the other books received?

Well, we know she liked the first three books which were published in 1590, because she awarded Spenser a pension which was very unusual for her. She was known to be pretty abstemious when it came to handing out money to artists and writers. But there doesn’t seem to be any record of what she thought of the final three books.

Your next book is actually by Elizabeth herself – this is some of her translations from the 1590s. 

Yes, I wanted to give an example of some of her own writing because that is where we get closest to feeling that we know her and we get an insight into her own mind and attitude and ideas. I have been massively assisted in that because in the last ten years the University of Chicago has been publishing a series of volumes of Elizabeth’s collected works. From these you get a sense of her breadth and diversity as a writer: not just speeches and letters, but also prayers and poems, and all these translations.

I have chosen the volume from the later part of her reign in the 1590s. I suppose you could think that translations don’t much give us insight into her own mind because she is translating someone else but, actually, if you look at the choice of works that she makes, and the spin she puts on them, they tell us a lot about her as a person. There is a constant theme running through her translations of stoicism and endurance, and that is reflected in a big translation from the 1590s, ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ by Boethius, which she translated from Latin to English. What you get from this translation is her fantastic intellect and seriousness.

She did this translation over a period of a month and she spent no more than 30 hours on it, according to her secretary. It’s massive, more than 100 pages in the modern edition, and she just seems to have dashed it off. This is what she did for her leisure when she was taking a break from ruling the country! There is a real sense of it being done in haste, the grammar is a bit wonky and it is a very knotty muscular translation which has a rugged engaging quality.

So you get a sense of her intellect and her independence of mind, because, as the editors point out in all her translations, she seems to have done very little consulting of translations by other people or commentaries which had already been written on these texts. She does her own thing.

I came away from her translations feeling a contact with the seriousness of her mind. She engaged in translations all through her life right from when she was a young girl when she gave translations away as gift books for members of her family. But there is a real shift from those early translations, when they are almost schoolroom exercises written in that beautiful italic hand that we associate with her and she is showing off her accomplishments in all areas.

“I came away from her translations feeling a contact with the seriousness of her mind”

Tell me about Rewriting the Renaissance.

This is an essay collection from the mid 1980s and it exemplifies the movement known as new historicism, which was a new development which tried to bring together history and literary criticism in a new dynamic way, to show the way that literature is situated in history and history is made up of texts and always open to interpretation.

It is a school of criticism that is also very interested in how power circulates, and in gender and sexuality, and that is exemplified in this collection. It contains a particularly important essay by Louis Montrose called ‘Shaping Fantasies’ which is about A Midsummer Night’s Dream . This essay appeared in several different versions, but this is a place you can easily get hold of it.

What was new about it was the way that Montrose brought A Midsummer Night’s Dream into contact with Elizabeth I. There is a passage in the play called Oberon’s vision where Oberon is describing how the flower became the love charm, and this happens because there is ‘a fair vestal throned by the west’, who is obviously Elizabeth, and Cupid fires his bow at her but she is immune to his arrows. So his arrow falls on this flower that becomes the love charm.

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Oberon’s vision is often read as a passage of praise of Elizabeth, but Montrose shows that if you put it in context in relation to the rest of the play and other things that are being said and written about Elizabeth at the time, then it is really critical of Elizabeth. Once you start thinking about this it is quite obvious – you have Titania the Fairy Queen who is infatuated with an ass. Well, you can’t think about the Fairy Queen without thinking about Elizabeth because of Spenser. Titania is made to be a slave to lust, a comical figure, her powers are mocked and she is brought back under the authority of a husband. That is implied to be the norm.

Your final book is Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England.

I have chosen this one because, alongside the representation of Elizabeth in her own time, another huge and fascinating topic is the way she has been represented ever since. That is set in motion in the 17th century, the century after her death. John Watkins has written this wonderful study of it.

It draws out a couple of very interesting points: one is the way in which during the Stuart period and running up into the Civil War period you have the conflict developing between the Crown and Parliament. Elizabeth gets claimed by both sides. For the royalists she is the champion of monarchy and ideas on what it is to be a real monarch. But the parliamentarian side claim her as a democrat. They assert that she supported democracy and was on the side of the people.

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She becomes this very politically contested figure, and what Watkins also shows is that as we move on into the later 17th century she becomes much more of a fictionalised figure. Towards the end of the century you have a whole genre of stories known as secret histories. These are like early historical novels which are really scandal novels claiming to tell the truth about Elizabeth’s love affairs, for example her affair with Essex. You also get she-tragedies showing Elizabeth as a passionate romantic figure. John Banks is the main author of these. He writes a play called The Island Queens which is the first play to bring Elizabeth face to face with Mary Queen of Scots. In real life they never actually met but he brings them together in a wonderful charged encounter which has been taken up by many fictional writers ever since.

Why do you think they were so popular at the time?

One reading of it could be that the monarchy was becoming rather dull. We are talking about the period of the Glorious Revolution and the beginning of the curtailment of the powers of the monarchy, moving into the constitutional monarchy which we see today. There is a real excitement to this monarch who can be a scandalous figure and, of course, there is the added dimension that she is a woman which makes her private life even more interesting. People always wanted to know what she was like privately, whether she was really a virgin.

Do you think that there is any hard evidence to show she wasn’t a virgin?

No, I don’t think so. I think it was just too important for her to remain the Virgin Queen, and if she really had ever slept with someone, given the nature of her household and endless servants being around, her secret would have got out.

“Of course she had flirtations but I think she never actually slept with anyone”

Even if she had bribed people not to tell they could always have been bribed by foreign spies. There were plenty of rumours, but if she had it would have been so damaging to her authority and she was too intelligent to give that up. Of course she had flirtations but I think she never actually slept with anyone.

August 11, 2010

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Helen Hackett

Helen Hackett of University College London has published books on images of Elizabeth I, on A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and on women as readers and writers of fiction in the English Renaissance. Her most recent book, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths , is about the afterlives of the playwright and the Queen as cultural icons, and the many ways in which their mythologies have intertwined.

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Elizabeth I books – my top picks

To mark the anniversary of the death of Queen Elizabeth I on this day in 1603, I thought I’d share my top 5 favourite Elizabeth I books, both fiction and non-fiction.

Elizabeth I Non-fiction

Elizabeth i: collected works, ed. leah s marcus, janel mueller, mary beth rose.

Amazon.com link: https://amzn.to/2OVHnB0

Elizabeth I by Anne Somerset

Amazon.com link: https://amzn.to/3cj9Rxr

Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne by David Starkey

From princess and heir-apparent to bastardized and disinherited royal, accused traitor to head of the princely household, Elizabeth experienced every vicissitude of fortune and extreme of condition—and rose above it all to reign during a watershed moment in history. A uniquely absorbing tale of one young woman’s turbulent, courageous, and seemingly impossible journey toward the throne, Elizabeth is the exhilarating story of the making of a queen.

Amazon.com link: https://amzn.to/3rbmzT2

Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years by John Guy

For the better part of a decade John Guy mined long-overlooked archives, scouring handwritten letters and court documents to sweep away myths and rumors. This prodigious historical detective work has enabled him to reveal, for the first time, the woman behind the polished veneer: determined, prone to fits of jealous rage, wracked by insecurity, often too anxious to sleep alone. At last we hear her in her own voice expressing her own distinctive and surprisingly resonant concerns. Guy writes like a dream, and this combination of groundbreaking research and propulsive narrative puts him in a class of his own.

Amazon link: https://amzn.to/3rqlIOB

Elizabeth I and her Circle by Susan Doran

It is a story replete with fascinating questions. What was the true nature of Elizabeth’s relationship with her father, Henry VIII, especially after his execution of her mother? What was the influence of her step-mothers on Elizabeth’s education and religious beliefs? How close was she really to her half-brother Edward VI–and were relations with her half-sister Mary really as poisonous as is popularly assumed? And what of her relationship with her Stewart cousins, most famously with Mary Queen of Scots, executed on Elizabeth’s orders in 1587, but also with Mary’s son James VI of Scotland, later to succeed Elizabeth as her chosen successor?

Elizabeth’s relations with her family were crucial, but almost as crucial were her relations with her courtiers and her councillors. Here again, the story unravels a host of interesting questions.

Amazon link: https://amzn.to/3d0yPk5

Elizabeth I Fiction

Roses have thorns: a novel of elizabeth i by sandra byrd.

In 1565, seventeen-year-old Elin von Snakenborg leaves Sweden on a treacherous journey to England. Her fiance has fallen in love with her sister and her dowry money has been gambled away, but ahead of her lies an adventure that will take her to the dizzying heights of Tudor power. Transformed through marriage into Helena, the Marchioness of Northampton, she becomes the highest-ranking woman in Elizabeth’s circle. But in a court that is surrounded by Catholic enemies who plot the queen’s downfall, Helena is forced to choose between her unyielding monarch and the husband she’s not sure she can trust–a choice that will provoke catastrophic consequences.

Vividly conjuring the years leading up to the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots, Roses Have Thorns is a brilliant exploration of treason, both to the realm and to the heart.

Amazon.com link: https://amzn.to/3rj8MKf

His Last Letter: Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester by Jeane Westin

His Last Letter tells the story of this great love… and especially of the last three years Elizabeth and Dudley spent together, the most dangerous of her rule, when their passion was tempered by a bittersweet recognition of all that they shared-and all that would remain unfulfilled.

Amazon.com link: https://amzn.to/3d5T4wG

Elizabeth I by Margaret George

This is a story of two women of fierce intellect and desire, one trying to protect her country and throne, the other trying to regain power and position for her family. Their rivalry, and its ensuing drama, soon involves everyone close to Elizabeth, from the famed courtiers who enriched the crown to the legendary poets and playwrights who paid homage to it with their works.

Filled with intimate portraits of the personalities who made the Elizabethan age great—Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dudley, Raleigh, Drake—Elizabeth I provides an unforgettable glimpse of a woman who considered herself married to her people. A queen who ruled as much from the heart as from the head.

Amazon.com link: https://amzn.to/3rjJw6x

Legacy by Susan Kay

Beloved for its stunning storytelling, Legacy offers an exquisite portrait of the queen who defined an era. Tracing the unlikely path from her tragic childhood to her ruthless confrontations with Mary, Queen of Scots, and capturing in all its glory her brilliant reign as Europe’s most celebrated queen, Susan Kay peels back the layers of a mysterious monarch and satisfies the questions of history.

Winner of the Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize and the Betty Trask Award, Susan Kay gives us Elizabeth the woman: proud, passionate, and captivating in her intensity. The queen who inspired men to love her with bewitching devotion, no matter what the cost, but the depth of her love for England required a sacrifice that would haunt her to the grave.

Amazon.com link: https://amzn.to/3vP7EBz

The Tudor Secret by C W Gortner

Summer 1553: A time of danger and deceit. Brendan Prescott, an orphan, is reared in the household of the powerful Dudley family. Brought to court, Prescott finds himself sent on an illicit mission to the king’s brilliant but enigmatic sister, Princess Elizabeth. But Brendan is soon compelled to work as a double agent by Elizabeth’s protector, William Cecil, who promises in exchange to help him unravel the secret of his own mysterious past.

A dark plot swirls around Elizabeth’s quest to unravel the truth about the ominous disappearance of her seriously ill brother, King Edward VI. With only a bold stable boy and an audacious lady-in-waiting at his side, Brendan plunges into a ruthless gambit of half-truths, lies, and murder. Filled with the intrigue and pageantry of Tudor England, C. W. Gortner’s The Tudor Secret is the first book in The Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles.

Amazon.com link: https://amzn.to/3tOhHop

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QUEEN ELIZABETH I

Books: biographies.

There have been more biographies dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I than any other Tudor monarch. Every year at least one book relating to some aspect of the Queen's life or reign is published, and the number of books written over the centuries easily runs into hundreds. When reading any book about Elizabeth, or any other historical figure, it is important to bear in mind when the book was written. Although basic historical facts remain the same, interpretations of those facts change over time. The Victorians, for example, had a very different idea of what Elizabeth was like to what we do today. This is partly because there are more primary sources available now than there was then, but also because our values and beliefs are different. In the past, the way Queen Elizabeth was portrayed in a book would depend very much upon the religious views of the historian, as the Catholic/Protestant conflict still lingered. Catholics tended to be too critical of the Queen and her achievements, and Protestants tended to be too praiseworthy. Because of the sheer volume of books written, I have only listed the most recent publications, except where I feel that an older book is of especial interest and value. To find the titles of older books, use the online search facility of the The British Library which contains a copy of almost every book ever published in Britain.

Click on the book for more information.

OUT OF PRINT The Private Character of Queen Elizabeth - Frederick Chamberlin (1921) Elizabeth I - Richard L. Greaves (1974) Elizabeth I - John Guy (1996) Elizabeth I - Paul Johnson (1974) Gloriana: The years of Elizabeth I - Mary M. Luke (1843) Elizabeth Tudor: The Lonely Queen - Arthur MacNalty (1954) Elizabeth I - Jasper Ridley (1987) Behind The Mask: The Life of Queen Elizabeth I - Jane Resh Thomas (1998)

TUDOR TROPHY MYTHS: ELIZABETH I SHAKESPEARE QUIZ

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Queen Elizabeth I : a biography

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Queen Elizabeth I

There are many versions of Queen Elizabeth I of England; the beautiful young Tudor Queen courted by all the princes of Europe; a fearless virgin warrior in white velvet, rousing her troops on the battlefield; an irascible old woman in a powdered wig, surrounded by fawning young men. A formidable woman, Elizabeth I ruled alone at a time when Europe was a hotbed of conflict, dominated by empire-seeking Kings with opposing religious beliefs.

Inside you will read about...

✓ Early Years  ✓ Becoming Queen of England  ✓ The Matter of Succession  ✓ Mary Queen of Scots  ✓ The Last Suitor  ✓ Trouble in England  ✓ Mary's Execution  ✓ The Essex Affair  And much more!

A shrewd politician, Elizabeth manipulated these Kings using any means necessary, including her own hand in marriage, to transform what had been a small, relatively impoverished half- island nation into one of the greatest powers in the world. ‘Queen of the Seas’, ‘The Virgin Queen’, ‘Gloriana’ and ‘Good Old Bess’, Queen Elizabeth I inspired a cult following during her lifetime that endures to this day.

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Position under Edward VI and Mary

• The woman ruler in a patriarchal world
• Religious questions and the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots
• The queen’s image

How did Elizabeth I come to be queen of England?

What were the biggest issues facing england during queen elizabeth i’s reign, what was queen elizabeth i’s relationship to religion in england, what was queen elizabeth i’s personal life like, was elizabeth i a popular queen.

Elizabeth I

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Queen Elizabeth I’s right to the throne wasn’t always guaranteed. Her father, King Henry VIII , had Parliament annul his marriage to Elizabeth’s mother—his second wife, Anne Boleyn —thus making Elizabeth an illegitimate child and removing her from the line of succession (although a later parliamentary act would return her to it). After Henry’s death in 1547, two of Elizabeth’s half-siblings would sit on the throne: first the young Edward VI , who reigned for six years, and then Mary I (“Bloody Mary”), who reigned for five years. Suspicious that her half-sister would try to seize power, Mary placed Elizabeth under what amounted to constant surveillance, even jailing her in the Tower of London for a short period of time. Elizabeth skillfully avoided doing anything that Mary might have used as grounds for her execution and, upon Mary’s death in 1558, went on to become one of England’s most illustrious monarchs.

• Queen Elizabeth I inherited several issues from the reign of her predecessor, Queen Mary I , including an unpopular war with France and the religious divisions that Mary’s campaign against Protestantism had left behind.
• The threat posed by the former subsided with the 1562 outbreak of the War of Religion in France, and Elizabeth responded to the latter by returning England to Protestantism and having Parliament formalize certain aspects of the Church of England ’s doctrine.
• An issue that troubled her reign for its entirety was her lack of a husband and heir, a situation which she and others realized could potentially ignite a successional crisis upon her death. Still, she never married, perhaps because she preferred to keep power to herself.
• One of her biggest trials—at least in the foreign policy realm—came when Spain tried to invade England in 1588. The ensuing naval battle would go down as one of the most famous ones ever and ended with England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada , which had until then been supposed invincible.

Upon assuming the throne, Queen Elizabeth I restored England to Protestantism . This broke with the policy of her predecessor and half-sister, Queen Mary I , a Catholic monarch who ruthlessly tried to eliminate Protestantism from English society. Elizabeth undertook her own campaign to suppress Catholicism in England, although hers was more moderate and less bloody than the one enacted by Mary. In fact, Elizabeth’s religious moderateness earned her the ire of some of the more radical Protestants, who were convinced that her reforms were inadequate for cleansing English society of what they saw as the vestiges of Catholicism. In reality, Elizabeth wasn’t interested in catering to either Protestantism or Catholicism, the zeal of both having the potential to disrupt the kind of law and order she was trying to establish. Her religious policies, such as the Act of Supremacy and the Act of Uniformity, went a lot further to consolidate the power of the church under her and to regularize the practice of the faith.

Queen Elizabeth I was the daughter of King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn . When Elizabeth was three years old, Henry had Anne beheaded and their marriage declared invalid, thus rendering Elizabeth an illegitimate child and removing her from the line of succession (to which Parliament would later restore her). Two of Elizabeth’s half-siblings sat on the throne after Henry’s death in 1547: Edward VI , who acceded at the age of nine and died six years later; and Mary I , who operated under the belief that Elizabeth was trying to seize power from her for the entirety of her own five-year reign. When Elizabeth was crowned monarch in 1558, her lack of a husband and heir became one of the defining issues for the remainder of her rule. As the end of her life approached, she forestalled the successional crisis that might otherwise have arisen by designating King James VI of Scotland as the next in line to the throne. The rule of the Tudor dynasty ended with the death of Elizabeth.

For the most part, Elizabeth I was a popular queen, both during and after her lifetime. This is evident from the affectionate monikers she earned, her often (although not always) cordial relationship with Parliament , and the celebratory representations made of her in the art of her contemporaries—the character Gloriana in Edmund Spenser ’s The Faerie Queene being best known of these. The admiration Elizabeth I garnered had a lot to do with her skills as a rhetorician and an image-maker, which she used to style herself as a magnificent female authority figure devoted to the well-being of England and its subjects above all else. She wasn’t popular with everyone, however. Catholics weren’t happy that she restored England to Protestantism , while some Protestants felt she didn’t go far enough in purging Catholic elements from the Church of England ’s doctrine. Her public image also suffered in the last decade of her reign, when England was pressed by issues including scant harvests , unemployment , and economic inflation .

Elizabeth I (born September 7, 1533, Greenwich , near London, England—died March 24, 1603, Richmond, Surrey) was the queen of England (1558–1603) during a period, often called the Elizabethan Age , when England asserted itself vigorously as a major European power in politics, commerce, and the arts.

Although her small kingdom was threatened by grave internal divisions, Elizabeth’s blend of shrewdness, courage, and majestic self-display inspired ardent expressions of loyalty and helped unify the nation against foreign enemies. The adulation bestowed upon her both in her lifetime and in the ensuing centuries was not altogether a spontaneous effusion. It was the result of a carefully crafted, brilliantly executed campaign in which the queen fashioned herself as the glittering symbol of the nation’s destiny. This political symbolism , common to monarchies, had more substance than usual, for the queen was by no means a mere figurehead. While she did not wield the absolute power of which Renaissance rulers dreamed, she tenaciously upheld her authority to make critical decisions and to set the central policies of both state and church. The latter half of the 16th century in England is justly called the Elizabethan Age: rarely has the collective life of a whole era been given so distinctively personal a stamp.

Elizabeth’s early years were not auspicious . She was born at Greenwich Palace, the daughter of the Tudor king Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn . Henry had defied the pope and broken England from the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in order to dissolve his marriage with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon , who had borne him a daughter, Mary. Since the king ardently hoped that Anne Boleyn would give birth to a male heir, regarded as key to stable dynastic succession, the birth of a second daughter was a bitter disappointment that dangerously weakened the new queen’s position. Before Elizabeth reached her third birthday, her father had her mother beheaded on charges of adultery and treason. Moreover, at Henry’s instigation, an act of Parliament declared his marriage with Anne Boleyn invalid from the beginning, thus making their daughter Elizabeth illegitimate , as Roman Catholics had all along claimed her to be. (Apparently, the king was undeterred by the logical inconsistency of simultaneously invalidating the marriage and accusing his wife of adultery.) The emotional impact of these events on the little girl, who had been brought up from infancy in a separate household at Hatfield, is not known; presumably, no one thought it worth recording. What was noted was her precocious seriousness; at six years old, it was admiringly observed, she had as much gravity as if she had been 40.

When in 1537 Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour , gave birth to a son, Edward, Elizabeth receded still further into relative obscurity, but she was not neglected. Despite his capacity for monstrous cruelty, Henry VIII treated all his children with what contemporaries regarded as affection; Elizabeth was present at ceremonial occasions and was declared third in line to the throne. She spent much of the time with her half brother Edward and, from her 10th year onward, profited from the loving attention of her stepmother, Catherine Parr , the king’s sixth and last wife. Under a series of distinguished tutors, of whom the best known is the Cambridge humanist Roger Ascham , Elizabeth received the rigorous education normally reserved for male heirs, consisting of a course of studies centring on classical languages, history, rhetoric , and moral philosophy . “Her mind has no womanly weakness,” Ascham wrote with the unselfconscious sexism of the age, “her perseverance is equal to that of a man, and her memory long keeps what it quickly picks up.” In addition to Greek and Latin, she became fluent in French and Italian, attainments of which she was proud and which were in later years to serve her well in the conduct of diplomacy. Thus steeped in the secular learning of the Renaissance, the quick-witted and intellectually serious princess also studied theology, imbibing the tenets of English Protestantism in its formative period. Her association with the Reformation is critically important, for it shaped the future course of the nation, but it does not appear to have been a personal passion: observers noted the young princess’s fascination more with languages than with religious dogma .

With her father’s death in 1547 and the accession to the throne of her frail 10-year-old brother Edward, Elizabeth’s life took a perilous turn. Her guardian, the dowager queen Catherine Parr, almost immediately married Thomas Seymour , the lord high admiral. Handsome, ambitious, and discontented, Seymour began to scheme against his powerful older brother, Edward Seymour, protector of the realm during Edward VI’s minority. In January 1549, shortly after the death of Catherine Parr, Thomas Seymour was arrested for treason and accused of plotting to marry Elizabeth in order to rule the kingdom. Repeated interrogations of Elizabeth and her servants led to the charge that even when his wife was alive Seymour had on several occasions behaved in a flirtatious and overly familiar manner toward the young princess. Under humiliating close questioning and in some danger, Elizabeth was extraordinarily circumspect and poised. When she was told that Seymour had been beheaded, she betrayed no emotion.

The need for circumspection, self-control, and political acumen became even greater after the death of the Protestant Edward in 1553 and the accession of Elizabeth’s older half sister Mary , a religious zealot set on returning England, by force if necessary, to the Roman Catholic faith. This attempt, along with her unpopular marriage to the ardently Catholic king Philip II of Spain , aroused bitter Protestant opposition. In a charged atmosphere of treasonous rebellion and inquisitorial repression, Elizabeth’s life was in grave danger. For though, as her sister demanded, she conformed outwardly to official Catholic observance, she inevitably became the focus and the obvious beneficiary of plots to overthrow the government and restore Protestantism . Arrested and sent to the Tower of London after Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion in January 1554, Elizabeth narrowly escaped her mother’s fate. Two months later, after extensive interrogation and spying had revealed no conclusive evidence of treason on her part, she was released from the Tower and placed in close custody for a year at Woodstock. The difficulty of her situation eased somewhat, though she was never far from suspicious scrutiny. Throughout the unhappy years of Mary’s childless reign, with its burning of Protestants and its military disasters, Elizabeth had continually to protest her innocence, affirm her unwavering loyalty, and proclaim her pious abhorrence of heresy . It was a sustained lesson in survival through self-discipline and the tactful manipulation of appearances.

Many Protestants and Roman Catholics alike assumed that her self-presentation was deceptive, but Elizabeth managed to keep her inward convictions to herself, and in religion as in much else they have remained something of a mystery. There is with Elizabeth a continual gap between a dazzling surface and an interior that she kept carefully concealed. Observers were repeatedly tantalized with what they thought was a glimpse of the interior, only to find that they had been shown another facet of the surface. Everything in Elizabeth’s early life taught her to pay careful attention to how she represented herself and how she was represented by others. She learned her lesson well.

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The Queen: Her Life Hardcover – November 15, 2022

• Print length 448 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date November 15, 2022
• Dimensions 6.35 x 1.75 x 9.45 inches
• ISBN-10 1538700433
• ISBN-13 978-1538700433
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grand Central Publishing (November 15, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1538700433
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1538700433
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.6 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.35 x 1.75 x 9.45 inches
• #149 in England History
• #154 in Historical British Biographies
• #237 in Royalty Biographies

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HONEST Review of The Queen: Her Life

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About the author

Andrew morton.

ANDREW MORTON is one of the world's best-known biographers and a leading authority on modern celebrity. His groundbreaking 1992 biography revealed the secret world of Princess Diana, prompting Tina Brown to declare in The Diana Chronicles, "The journalist Morton most reminds me of is Bob Woodward." Diana: Her True Story became a #1 New York Times bestseller, as did Monica's Story, Morton's portrait of the young woman behind the blue dress in the Clinton White House.

The winner of numerous awards, including Author of the Year by the British Book Awards and Scoop of the Year by the London Press Club, he lives in London and has traveled extensively in the U.S., Canada, and Europe in his research for this biography.

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Customers find the visual presentation engaging and the research profoundly interesting. They also describe the book as a great read.

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Customers find the book a great, well-written account of Elizabeth II's life. They also describe it as a heartwarming read.

"...The book is so enjoyable , the pages just keep turning and before you know it you’ve finished...." Read more

"...Many of the anecdotes are familiar but they're worthy of being read again , and there is much new here...." Read more

"A very complete and well written account of Elizabeth II’ s life. It includes her death and funeral that was not so long ago." Read more

"I really enjoyed reading this book . Andrew captures the importance that our late Queen had in over 70 years on the throne...." Read more

Customers find the research profoundly interesting, filled with details about the Queen's life, and wonderful. They also say the book captures the importance that the late Queen had in over 70 years.

"...We will never see her like again. Many of the anecdotes are familiar but they're worthy of being read again, and there is much new here...." Read more

"I really enjoyed reading this book. Andrew captures the importance that our late Queen had in over 70 years on the throne...." Read more

"...The book is filled with details about the Queen's life if somewhat light on insights into what she was like as a person...." Read more

"Wonderfully written and a very good history ,biography of the Queen . I knew a great deal of Her Majesty story as my mother adored her...." Read more

Customers find the visual presentation of the book engaging and outstanding. They also say the author did an outstanding job portraying HM Queen Elizabeth II's long life.

"Andrew Morton did an outstanding job of portraying HM Queen Elizabeth II’s long life of duty and service to her country and the Commonwealth...." Read more

"This book was a truly engaging look into the Queen’s life, both before and during her 70-year reign...." Read more

"...As far as the book itself goes, it is an interesting look at a fascinating woman ...." Read more

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