A fresh, thrilling portrait Guy s Elizabeth is deliciously human.
Stacy Schiff, TheNew York Times Book Review A groundbreaking
reconsideration of our favorite Tudor queen, Elizabeth is an intimate and
surprising biography that shows her at the height of her power. Elizabeth
was crowned at twenty-five after a tempestuous childhood as a bastard and an
outcast, but it was only when she reached fifty and all hopes of a royal
marriage were dashed that she began to wield real power in her own right. For
twenty-five years she had struggled to assert her authority over advisers who
pressed her to marry and settle the succession; now, she was determined not only
to reign but also to rule. In this magisterial biography of England's most
ambitious Tudor queen, John Guy introduces us to a woman who is refreshingly
unfamiliar: at once powerful and vulnerable, willful and afraid. In these
essential and misunderstood forgotten years, Elizabeth confronts challenges at
home and abroad: war against the Catholic powers of France and Spain, revolt in
Ireland, an economic crisis that triggered riots in the streets of London, and a
conspiracy to place her cousin Mary Queen of Scots on her throne. For a while
she was smitten by a much younger man, but could she allow herself to act on
that passion and still keep her throne? For the better part of a decade John Guy
mined long-overlooked archives, scouring court documents and handwritten letters
to sweep away myths and rumors. This prodigious historical detective work has
made it possible to reveal for the first time the woman behind the polished
veneer: wracked by insecurity, often too anxious to sleep alone, voicing 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. “Significant, forensic and myth-busting, John Guy inspires
total confidence in a narrative which is at once pacey and rich in
detail.”–Anna Whitelock, TLS“
Author Biography
John Guy is an award-winning historian of Tudor England. A Fellow
of Clare College, Cambridge, he is the author of Queen of Scots: The True
Life of Mary Stuart, a major international bestseller that won the Whitbread
Award and the Marsh Biography Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award
finalist. His other books includeA Daughter's Love: Thomas More and His
Dearest Meg;Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel; the biography of
Henry VIII for the Penguin Monarchs series and a landmark, bestselling history
of Tudor England.”
Shortlist, 2016 Costa Biography Award