My Weekly Book

Elizabeth the Great - Elizabeth Jenkins

This book was a journey back in time for me in more than one sense. Apart from the obvious one taken by the reader of any history book, I was making a personal trip back over the 30 or so years that I have spent reading accounts of the life of this remarkable woman – an investment of time that saw me doing a part-time master’s degree in Renaissance history and literature and writing a dissertation on the subject of representations of the Virgin Queen.

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So you could say I came to this book with a bit of background knowledge. As to actually coming upon it, I did that in a very small second-hand bookshop over a café in the lovely far-western Cornish town of St Just. I looked at the cover, which has a fairly famous coronation portrait of the queen on it, and had a moment’s nostalgia that led to me picking it up and adding it to the increasingly large pile of books I was carrying towards the till.

It is, it turns out, a classic. Not one I had come across before – I was too busy reading up on the representational side of the subject to be concerned as much as I might with a straight general biography. But this, published in 1958, appears to have been one of the first to try something that is now standard to the point of being banal. It attempts to portray its subject as a person and to inquire (by means of letters and contemporary documents that describe people interacting with Queen Elizabeth) into her style of government, her relations with other members of her family (including the many and various Boleyn cousins), what it was like for one of her inner circle of ministers to work with her and how she might have appeared to the people thronging the streets of London in 1558 to welcome her to her coronation.

The reason this book scored so highly with me is that it achieved all this without resorting to the commonplaces and assumptions of outright ‘popular’ history. It also achieved the right balance of relating the personal to the great events of the reign, so the reader can see how the mortal threats from Spain, France and Scotland never really go away and the effects that living with their constant presence have on the woman trying to steer her tiny realm of around four million people through the troubled waters of European politics. We are able to put into context Elizabeth’s treatment of Mary Queen of Scots (refusing to execute her for as long as it was politically possible) and her protracted marriage negotiations with the French (which, essentially, were designed to stop them invading Scotland and going to war with her). It also throws a revealing light onto some of the men, such as William Cecil and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who she chose to help her govern, and on her personal relationships with them.

As anyone with even a passing interest in history knows, Henry VIII went to extraordinary lengths to gain a son who would secure the future of his dynasty. I always find it an amusing and very poignant irony that the daughter who would achieve exactly this for him was under his nose from 1533 onwards. As well as stressing Elizabeth’s similarities with her father, this book also traces some of the characteristics she shared with her grandfather, Henry VII, the man who founded the Tudor dynasty and put an end to the Wars of the Roses in 1485 – most notably a genius for financial management that kept the books balanced and gave her a degree of freedom that she would not otherwise have enjoyed. An excellent survey of its subject that combines accessibility and empathy with a comfortingly rigorous approach to historical sources.

Some links:

• Memoir of 100 years as a literary lion
• Orion books: Elizabeth Jenkins
• Librarything: Elizabeth Jenkins
• E-notes: Elizabeth the Great

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 8:43 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.