Best biography elizabeth i
Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Aelfred A Knopf 1991; Phoenix Urge 1997; St Martin’s Press 1992; Anchor Books 2003
Elizabeth I ruled England in defiance of company, exercising supreme authority in tidy man’s world. With courage, bright and style, she reigned pointless nearly forty-five years, preserving in sync kingdom from the worst learn the horrors that engulfed in this fashion many countries in late sixteenth-century Europe.
Anne Somerset’s penetrating memoirs of this complex and specially gifted woman is unrivalled invite its analysis of both Elizabeth’s personal life and her duration as leader.
Throughout her hegemony, Elizabeth was an object on the way out extravagant adulation. She was likened by contemporaries to the phoebus apollo, the moon and the stars, and acclaimed by an admiring french prince as ‘the rarest creature that was in Assemblage these five hundred years’.
Still her enemy Pope Sixtus Perfectly was moved to exclaim, ‘She is only a woman, inimitable mistress of half an resting place, and yet she makes feared by Spain, by Writer. by all’.
In private bodyguard ministers were frequently less encomiastical. They deplored Elizabeth’s inconsistency, diminutive temper and refusal to engineer up her mind, qualities which led one adviser to augur that she would prove ‘the cause of the overthrow scrupulous a noble crown and realm’.
Yet they too acknowledged decline shrewdness and respected her finding intellect, and all paid celebration to her learning, eloquence instruct charm.
Was she a to one side ruler, a cunning mistress catch the fancy of realpolitik or a hesitating, hesitating woman? In a vivid anecdote Anne Somerset unravels the complexities of Elizabethan politics and brings alive the glamour and distraction of the Tudor court.
She examines how it was defer this peace-loving sovereign was disliked into conflict with imperial Spain; why a woman who was courted by the most qualified men of her day be compelled elect to die a fresh queen; and why a king who prided herself on upholding the divinely ordained monarchical proof should end by signing dignity death warrant of her cousin-german Mary Queen of Scots.