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    Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years
    Unavailable
    Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years
    Unavailable
    Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years
    Audiobook17 hours

    Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years

    Written by John Guy

    Narrated by Alex Jennings

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A groundbreaking reconsideration of our favorite Tudor queen, Elizabeth is an intimate and surprising biography that shows her at the height of her power.

    Elizabeth was crowned queen at twenty-five, but it was only when she reached fifty and all hopes of a royal marriage were behind her that she began to wield power in her own right. For twenty-five years she had struggled to assert her authority over advisers, who pressed her to marry and settle the succession; now, she was determined not only to reign but to rule. In this magisterial biography, John Guy introduces us to a woman who is refreshingly unfamiliar: at once powerful and vulnerable, willful and afraid. We see her confronting challenges at home and abroad: war against France and Spain, revolt in Ireland, an economic crisis that triggers riots in the streets of London, and a conspiracy to place her cousin Mary Queen of Scots on her throne. For a while she is smitten by a much younger man, but can she allow herself to act on that passion and still keep her throne?

    For the better part of a decade John Guy mined long-overlooked archives, scouring handwritten letters and court documents to sweep away myths and rumors. This prodigious historical detective work has enabled him to reveal, for the first time, the woman behind the polished veneer: determined, prone to fits of jealous rage, wracked by insecurity, often too anxious to sleep alone. At last we hear her in her own voice expressing her own distinctive and surprisingly resonant concerns. Guy writes like a dream, and this combination of groundbreaking research and propulsive narrative puts him in a class of his own.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMay 24, 2016
    ISBN9780399567407
    Unavailable
    Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years
    Author

    John Guy

    John Guy is an award-winning historian; an accomplished broadcaster; a fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge; and the author of Mary Queen of Scots, which won the Whitbread Award for Biography and the Marsh Biography Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Biography. He has contributed to numerous BBC programs and has written for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Mail on Sunday, the Economist, the Literary Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books.

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    Reviews for Elizabeth

    4/5

    14 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The forgotten years according to John Guy are from 1584 until the Tudor Queen’s death in 1603. He claims that during these years Elizabeth’s reputation as Good Queen Bess was cemented by the opinion makers, after all she repelled the Spanish Armadas and kept England at peace during this period. Guy says he wants to get closer to the truth about the ageing Elizabeth and so makes his book both a history and a character study of the Queen. He puts some popular beliefs to bed, especially those promulgated by the Tudor propagandists and their Victorian followers by looking more closely at Elizabeth’s letters and other original documents from the period: some of which have come to light only in more recent times. Elizabeth emerges as an avaricious, spiteful, proud, vain, autocratic woman who only thought of the welfare of her country in conjunction with her own prosperity, but of course she was hardly any different from the men and women who surrounded her at court. She overcame her personal vulnerability and fear to rule very much as she saw fit and compared with her predecessors Queen Mary and Henry VIII, then she was certainly no worse then them. She ruled for 44 years in a man’s world keeping her country united and free from invasions, which was an achievement in itself and despite not having an heir to the throne, anarchy and civil war were avoided at her death.Guy writes his history largely chronologically after having provided a brief introduction to the early part of Elizabeth’s reign. His writing style although rich in detail would appeal to the more casual reader; his explanations are clear and he provides additional detail where necessary and his use of letters and other personal documents provide the reader with a chance to see more rounded characters. Not only does he leave us with a vivid impression of the elderly queen, but also Robert Devereux the earl of Essex, William Cecil, and Francis Walsingham emerge from the shadows. He is able to give his readers an impression of how Elizabeth ran her government with some idea of the day to day workings of her court.Although this is mainly a political/biographical history, there are snapshots of social conditions as they affected the politics for example the soldiers returning to England from the continent, who Elizabeth refused to pay; they formed gangs and social disturbances that needed to be controlled to prevent insurrections. There is also references to the theatres of London none more so than when players and playmakers at the Globe theatre were suspected of aiding and abetting the Earl of Essex when he challenged Elizabeth and her government (Essex was executed for treason). In my opinion this is a lively and good historical account of the last Tudor government and its ageing Queen and it leaves me with the impression that I probably do not need to read another one and so a four star book.
    • 4/5
      I normally love John Guy but this was torturous to get through. When you don't have alot of facts it leaves too much room for filler words. If I had to hear "eyes" one more time. There were weird and random "facts" just thrown in the middle of a paragraph, Kate's jewels being one of them. It literally had nothing to do with the subject that was being talked about. Maybe my expectations were just too high after reading The Children of Henry Viii and The Wives of Henry Viii.
    • 4/5
      John Guy’s “Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years” is a dense biography about a very specific time period in Elizabeth’s reign—the post-menopausal war years when she reinvented herself as The Virgin Queen. As soon as I started reading the introduction, I immediately found myself taking notes in the margin, and I continued doing this throughout the book. It’s not necessarily a page-turner, but it is quite thought-provoking for anyone interested in this monarch and the politics of Europe during this time. I enjoyed it but, like I said before, it is rather dense with information. I would not recommend this to readers who are not already familiar with Tudor England. If you’re into this time period, then this is a great book for you.