After her father’s death and her consumptive half-brother Edward VI’s brief reign, sister Mary became queen, reestablished Catholicism as the religion of the land, married an unpopular Spaniard, failed to deliver an heir, and died miserably. Elizabeth, Starkey demonstrates, was an “infant phenomenon,” mastering Latin, French, and Italian (her Greek was less impressive), while absorbing vital lessons from the political intrigues swirling around her. Starkey sprints through the life and loves of her father, Henry VIII, consigning poor Cardinal Wolsey to a mere prepositional phrase and gliding through the fates of wives four through six in barely a page. Unconventionally brief chapters (one consumes less than a page) explore Elizabeth’s family background and rise to the throne.

Starkey believes Elizabeth’s early life should read like “a historical thriller” and, at least until the final chapters (which focus on religion), succeeds admirably in breathing fresh life into one of England’s most overstudied monarchs. Starkey ( Henry VIII, not reviewed) develops the thesis that among the young queen’s principal virtues was “a sort of humanity” that distinguished her from most of her predecessors, including her own sister, “Bloody Mary” Tudor (who burned 300 religious opponents at the stake during her short reign). ISBN: 9780099286578 SKU: 1148152 Note: Any image shown is from a stock photo and is not the actual book.In brisk, bracing prose, a freelance historian follows England’s first Queen Elizabeth from birth to the early days of her reign. This 2001 Vintage Paperback is in Good condition.

This new approach to the enigma of the Queen's character is presented within a lively and readable retelling of her reign her love for Robert Dudley, the tragi-comedy of her favourites and suitors, her epic struggles with Mary Queen of Scots and Philip of Spain, and the final, humiliating debacle of her relationship with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. The result was a surprising contemporary approach to some very modern questions, like civil strife in Scotland and Ireland, and the risk of England's absorption into a European super-state. An abused child, yet confident of her destiny to reign, a woman in a man's world, passionately sexual yet, she said, a virgin, famed as England's most successful ruler yet actually doing very little, Elizabeth I is a bundle of contradictions.Starting with Elizabeth's own speeches and writings, Starkey lays novel emphasis on two things: her faith made her see religion as a purely personal relationship between the individual conscience and God, yet her sophisticated education led her to smoke-and-mirrors view of politics, in which clever image-making and speech-writing could solve or postpone real problems.

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