“The Life of Elizabeth I”, by Alison Weir

 

532 pages, Ballantine Books, ISBN-13: 978-0345405333

Alison Weir is one of those authors (there are several now) whose books I buy before bothering to even learn what they are about. For the last couple of years she has segued into historical fiction (I may have to start in on those books one of these days), but before that she was an historian writing on British history, such as The Six Wives of Henry VIII (reviewed on April 7, 2015), The Princes in the Tower (reviewed on May 5, 2015) and The Children of Henry VIII (reviewed on October 14, 2015), amongst many others I have yet to get. And so we come to The Life of Elizabeth I, and it is, as is to be expected about any book by the divine Mrs. Weir, superb. Elizabeth was a most remarkable woman, very much her father’s daughter (for good and ill). Weir does a great job portraying how Elizabeth grew up around the intrigues of Henry VIII’s court, when she was in and out of favor, and her and the peoples’ great admiration of her father. She loved the processions and the admiration of the people and understood that, from this, came power. Elizabeth saw and learned from Henry’s mistakes, as well as those of her siblings, Edward VI and Mary I. In many ways I appreciated Weir’s book all the more after having read Lisa Hilton’s Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince (reviewed on September 10^th, 2019), for many of Hilton’s points were anticipated by Weir, 20 years before. Bravo, madam, bravo.

Weir’s biography is a standard history of her subject’s life, starting with her birth and ending with her death, tracing of the arc of her life and her reign and weaving together the trials and travails of Elizabeth’s personal life, her court life and the political context in which she operated. It’s all here, the relationships Elizabeth sustained with intriguing people such as Mary, Queen of Scots (how Mary could have survived so long given her perpetual scheming to overthrow Elizabeth is stunning), Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, his stepson Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, Lord Burghley and the rest. Also well done is the tale of her on and off again courtships with foreign leaders, as she moved to produce an heir (but not really), create useful political alliances and retain her hold on power (this last one always trumping the other two). To keep all of this straight, Weir has broken Elizabeth’s life into categories, with one chapter treating the religious conflict in Europe and how it affected various factions in England, another chapter describing the cast of characters in her life and how they affected her decisions, another one tackling the clothing, jewelry and crowns that Elizabeth wore, another the various castles of that era in both England and Scotland, and so on. There were many characters in her life, and it could have gotten confusing very quickly, but Weir does an excellent job of presenting them in such a way that it was easy to keep track of who was who.

The Life of Elizabeth I doesn’t offer much of a new perspective or new information, being a rather standard biography of the Virgin Queen, but Alison Weir is  one of my go-to historians (see my praise from above), which makes this as enjoyable a read as any.