The Elizabethans
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
England under Elizabeth I.
A time of war and plague, politics and rebellion, personal heroism and religious fanaticism. When if you were born poor you stayed poor, and the thumbscrews and the rack could be the grim prelude to the executioner's block.
But it was also an age that encouraged literary genius, global exploration, and timeless beauty. When the lowly privateer Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe with no reliable navigational instruments and only a drunken, mutinous crew for company. When the Queen's favourite, the wealthy and handsome Robert Dudley, was widely suspected of having killed his wife. And when only the machinations of ruthless intriguers like William Cecil and Francis Walsingham prevented Elizabeth's kingdom from descending into anarchy and political chaos.
The Elizabethans is a panoramic, exhilarating depiction of an intensely colourful period by master-historian, A N Wilson. This is what life under Elizabeth I was really like.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The highly prolific author of The Victorians trains his gaze on the resplendent Elizabethan Age. British explorers like Sir Francis Drake, the first commander to sail round the earth, and return home (Magellan was killed in the Philippines), and the Elizabethan navy with its new streamlined, technologically superior galleons defeated the once-mighty Spanish Armada. The reign saw a prodigious artistic flowering with the dramas and poems of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe, the music of William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, and great houses like Longleat and Hardwick. The era's dazzling sun was the Queen a flirtatious, formidably clever, devious political animal. She was a consummate actress capable of manipulating crowds and of also flying into volcanic rages. Elizabeth's two mainstays were her ultra-Protestant secretary William Cecil, the cunning, humorless lynchpin of Elizabeth's administration, and her favorite, the stunningly attractive, extravagantly dressed nobleman Robert Dudley. The Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots was the greatest threat to Elizabeth's throne but also taught Elizabeth a priceless lesson on the dangers of marriage for a female head of state. Wilson acknowledges that the glorious era had a heinous side: the colonization and subjugation of Ireland and the African slave trade. Wilson's ruminations are cerebral, incisive, witty, and well informed. Illus.
