Just Finished Reading: The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir

England, 1536. At the age of three Princess Elizabeth hears herself referred to as ‘Lady’ and enquires: why? It transpires that her father – Henry VIII – has married again and that her mother has been executed for treason. As part of the legal process her parents marriage has been deemed illegitimate as has she herself. No longer in line for the throne her status has accordingly been downgraded. Struggling to come to terms with her mothers sudden death Elizabeth only slowly begins to realise that her once secure future has vanished and in its place is a world both more uncertain and dangerous. As she grows up her astute mind begins to mature into a formidable intellect powered by a deepening passion to rule and not be ruled by those – especially those men – around her. Navigating her way through palace intrigue, uprisings in her name, pressure to marry and even greater pressure to convert to Catholicism and the ever present fear of the executioners axe she knows that it is only her wits and the loyalty of those close to her that can guarantee her life and the throne she feels is her destiny to occupy.

This, my second Weir novel, covered similar ground to Innocent Traitor I read some time ago. Indeed both Lady Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey appear in both novels but with the focus reversed. Weir draws a very enticing picture of Elizabeth – arguably our greatest monarch – as a very bright, very astute and sometimes very lucky young woman. Of course setting up the novel as a ‘fight for survival’ has an inevitable problem – we know she survives to become queen (I’m really not giving anything away here). But the far more interesting part is exactly how she survives the intrigue going on all around her. If the fictionalisation of her early years – until she is crowned at age 25 – is as close to the truth as the author maintains (though admittedly with fictional additions, conflations and speculations) then it is a wonder that she made it that far. What a different world that would have been. Arguably without Elizabeth England may have become just another part of the growing Spanish Empire rather than the author of its downfall and after that…. Who knows!

Overall I didn’t enjoy this quite as much as Innocent Traitor. That is not to say that this is a poor book - far from it! I just thought that the author laboured rather too much on the detail and that some parts could have been shortened without detrimental effect on the rest of the novel. However this book most certainly reinforced my growing interest in the Tudor and Elizabethan period of our nation’s history, so inevitably there will be more novels and non-fiction books to come from that time. Recommended.