Elizabeth Renaissance prince

Review by New York Times Review

It's not easy being queen. Yet somehow, Elizabeth I held on to her crown for 44 years. How she consolidated and maintained her power, adroitly shaping her image as the serene, omnipotent Virgin Queen, is the focus of Hilton's ambitious re-examination of the intersection of gender and monarchy. Hilton faults earlier histories for emphasizing Elizabeth's "biological femininity"; in her view, "Elizabeth saw herself primarily as a prince, in the sense that royalty, in the perceptual model of her times, negated gender." She exploited the courtly conventions of her sex when it suited her and ignored them when it did not. Is it any wonder, then, that an old lady, glimpsing Elizabeth as her procession passed by, is reported to have cried out in astonishment: "What? The queen is a woman?" There is no direct evidence that Elizabeth the scholar-king actually owned or read "The Prince," but Hilton is convinced that Machiavelli's work profoundly influenced the evolution of her realpolitik as the fixed poles of medieval chivalry and the absolute power of the church lost their hold on the emergent modern state. Hilton has digested the latest Elizabethan scholarship and parsed the allegorical implications of contemporary paintings of the queen. The result is a comprehensive and generally lively retelling of Elizabeth's life that occasionally suffers from an overreaching use of modern slang: The young Elizabeth's matchmaking governess becomes a "kamikaze Emma," the Scottish theologian John Knox a "16th-century shock jock." Really? One wonders if Her Majesty would have approved.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2016]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

British novelist and historian Hilton (The Horror of Love) argues that Queen Elizabeth I's virginity is the least interesting fact about her, and that her intellect matters far more. According to Hilton, Elizabeth consciously melded both her feminine and masculine qualities into an enormously successful example of an effective-and often Machiavellian-Renaissance "prince." In Hilton's account, Elizabeth loses much of her famed temper; the Tudor royal's occasional tantrums are recast as part of a calculated and long-reaching plan. While Elizabeth certainly took the long view, it's still unlikely that her rages were actually all strategy. But as part statesman, part coquette, and sometime arms dealer to the East, Elizabeth ably channeled her assets of wise counsel, oratorical skill, strong will, and diplomatic nous to strengthen her contested claim to the throne. In addition to providing ample context for Elizabeth's high-stakes decisions, Hilton also describes the nuances of Protestant sects and the ever-shifting relationships between the contemporary European monarchs that required England's full attention. In this focused, well-researched biography, Hilton transforms an irreverent, centuries-old vision of a "bewigged farthingale with a mysterious sex life" into a resolute, steel-spined survivor who far surpassed Henry VII's wildest hopes for his new dynasty. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

In this readable and entertaining biography of Elizabeth I (1533-1603), Hilton (Athenais; Queens Consort) recounts the life of Anne Boleyn's daughter with Henry VIII, from childhood to old age in a series of thematic chapters, each one loosely centered on a facet of Elizabeth or her monarchy which, Hilton argues, defines her as a particularly "Renaissance" prince. While the author's discussion of Machiavelli in the opening chapters might lead readers to expect an argument based on the tenets of The Prince, this is not what she delivers. It is often difficult to tell what larger point Hilton is aiming to establish. While Hilton writes amusingly and has her facts in order, she provides no fresh analysis or recontextualization. In addition, she takes some poorly advised swipes at other historians of the period that add nothing to her narrative or scholastic credibility. VERDICT Those who enjoyed Hilton's previous books will most likely want to read this one, as will die-hard fans of Elizabeth. Readers seeking a more nuanced look at the queen and Tudor politics should turn instead to works by -Antonia Fraser or Alison Weir.-Hanna Clutterbuck, Harvard Univ. Lib., Cambridge, MA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

There is no shortage of biographies of Britain's Elizabeth I (1533-1603), but readers should pay attention to this thoughtful, often ingenious account. British novelist and historian Hilton (Wolves in Winter, 2012, etc.) agrees that Elizabeth stood out because she was a woman, but she claims that biographers often focus on her femininity to the exclusion of qualities shared by fellow rulers. Elizabeth's intellectual upbringing "gave her a princely self-image not in the least circumscribed by femininity." She referred to herself as " a prince from a line of princes,' even when those princes were not necessarily male." Hilton emphasizes that the 16th century marked the end of the medieval concept of "chivalric kingship," which taught that rulers governed according to Christian tenets. When they lied, cheated, or murdered, this was shameful. A Renaissance prince, besides being more educated, understood that in the service of preserving the state, immoral actions were not only essential, but ethical. This was reflected, of course, in Machiavelli's The Prince (first distributed in 1513 but not published until 1532), which was universally read, denounced, and heeded, most skillfully by Elizabeth. With regular nods to Machiavelli, Hilton delivers an enthralling account of a life and reign during which Elizabeth dealt with murderous rival claimants and fended off superpower Spain, a fiercely hostile Papacy, and an increasingly intolerant, stingy Parliament. She was lucky and charismatic, chose competent advisers, never forgot the limitations of her power, and left England far more united and self-confident. Despite this, it took 20 years of experience of her successor, James I, before Britons wistfully realized that Elizabeth had presided over a golden age, an opinion Hilton does not reject. Mildly revisionist, well-argued, and thoroughly satisfying. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1   When the infant Princess Elizabeth awoke in her nursery on 20 May 1536, the landscape of her childhood was imperceptibly but irrevocably changed. Her mother, Queen Anne, had died the previous morning in the Tower precincts, her head struck from her body by the dancing blade of a French swordsman imported from Calais for the task. So many corpses, so many ghosts. Elizabeth's path to the throne was littered with 150 years' worth of bodies. Since 1400, when the two strands of the great Plantagenet dynasty which had ruled England since 1154 divided and turned against one another, the preoccupation of the English crown had been heirs. The childless Richard II (with whom Elizabeth was later to identify herself) lost his throne to Henry Bolingbroke, subsequently Henry IV. The death of his son Henry V, the second Lancastrian king, in 1422, left the nation under the nominal leadership of a tiny baby, inaugurating the second phase of the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic conflict which dominated English politics until Henry Tudor seized the throne from Richard III in 1485. With Henry's accession and celebrated reunion of the two strands of the dynasty in his marriage to Elizabeth of York, the succession seemed assured, though it passed to another Duke of York, Henry VIII, rather than his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales. It was hardly surprising, given this legacy of treachery, death, and devastating insecurity that when Henry married his brother's widow, Katherine of Aragon, he should have been even more concerned than his ancestors with the getting of a male heir, yet this was the one thing which, in his view, God denied him. Henry's struggles to release himself from his first marriage and wed Elizabeth's mother, Anne, precipitated the greatest confessional schism Europe had yet seen and set England on the course to Protestant isolation which became such a self-declared part of the emerging nationalist identity of his daughter's state. Elizabeth was the product of that schism, and for two years, officially at least, she was his petted darling, the first child of that godly marriage which would people the courts of Europe with Tudor blood. Yet on 20 May 1536, all the small certainties of her world were severed. Historians have been arguing ever since about the effect this had on Elizabeth, but we cannot know how and when the two-year-old girl was informed of her mother's death or what her reaction was. This has not prevented generations of writers from imaginatively constructing the consequences of Elizabeth's loss, but statements such as "Unresolved grief continued through Elizabeth's childhood .?.?. for Anne Boleyn's name could not be mentioned without provoking a fearful reaction from Henry VIII. Such a situation often leads to excessive mourning reactions on occasions of loss and later melancholia," are merely speculative and without authority, though not uninteresting. That Elizabeth was nurturing a secret guilt at having fulfilled the desire of her Electra complex (the killing of her mother), that she was traumatized into evading marriage in later life, that she promoted a cult of her virginity in order to compensate for her inadequacy as a woman, that she needed to dominate and control those around her, have all been confidently and speciously attributed to the scars left by her mother's execution. That Anne's death had some effect on her daughter is reasonable; we simply do not know what that effect was, even if Elizabeth herself did. This is not to say that Anne was not influential in her daughter's life. Her trial, her execution, and the dissolution of her marriage invested her absence with a form of negative capability -- an absence which has been understood as haunting her daughter's life ever after. Two weeks before her death, the queen had written to Henry, begging him not to punish their daughter in his resentment against her, a plea which, given the declared illegality of their marriage, Henry had no choice but to ignore: the most significant aspect of Anne's legacy to Elizabeth was the ambiguous status of her birth, the stain of illegitimacy which was to dog her well beyond her eventual accession to the throne. The comment of Elizabeth's governess, Lady Bryan, on the sudden alteration in Elizabeth's status --"As my lady Elizabeth is put from the degree she was in, and what degree she is at now I know not but by hearsay, I know not how to order her or myself"-- summed up a confusion which spread from the royal nursery across the courts of Europe. There was not one moment of Elizabeth's entire life during which her status was unequivocally accepted. So while we can only surmise Elizabeth's feelings towards Anne from a (very) limited record of her actions, Elizabeth's refusal to accept her bastard status did at times invoke her mother, though in a symbolic or legalistic, rather than an emotional, fashion. The very circumstances of Elizabeth's birth have proved cause for debate. Was she "the most unwelcome royal daughter in English history" or the confirmation of God's blessing on a controversial marriage which both parents nevertheless confidently believed, in 1533, would go on to produce sons? On 26 August of that year, Anne had formally "taken to her chamber" at Greenwich to await the birth of her child, in a ceremony which closely followed that set out in the Ryalle Book for the delivery of Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York. Elizabeth's room had been decorated in blue arras cloth and gold fleur-de-lis, because any more complex decorative scheme was considered, according to the protocol, as "not convenient about Women in such case." Anne selected tapestries featuring the story of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, a prescient choice, while her bed, fitted with feather pillows and a crimson cover finished with ermine and gold edging, followed the model of her late mother-in-law. The bed was ceremonial as much as practical, functioning as a semi-throne, surmounted with a canopy of state embroidered with the crowns and arms of the royal couple. A pallet at the foot of the bed served for daytime use, and for the labor itself when the time came. Again following the precedent of fifteenth-century queens, the birthing chamber was furnished with two cradles, one upholstered and gilded to match the state bed, the second more simply carved in wood. The chamber also contained an altar and closet for Anne's devotions. After hearing Mass, Anne entertained the court (though not the king) in her Great Chamber, where she was served with wine and spices as she had been at her coronation. Then she retired with her women to remain enclosed until the birth. The birthing chamber was a powerful feminine space, a reliquary of sacred mystery. This still entirely feminine world, where all the roles of the queen's household were taken by women, became the tense, beating heart of the court. As Anne waited out the long weeks in those dim, stifling rooms, she at least seemed serene as to the ritual's end. Anne had every intention of bringing forth a prince. The court doctors and astrologers had assured the royal couple that their child would be male, and letters (later hastily amended) had been prepared to announce the birth of Henry's true heir. Excerpted from Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince by Lisa Hilton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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