Elizabeth the Queen

About the Author

Alison Weir lives and works in Surrey. Her books include Britain’s Royal Families, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Children of England, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry VIII: King and Court, Mary, Queen of Scots, Isabella: She-Wolf of France, Queen of England, Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess and the novels, Innocent Traitor, The Lady Elizabeth and The Captive Queen.

ALSO BY ALISON WEIR

Fiction

Innocent Traitor

The Lady Elizabeth

The Captive Queen

Non-fiction

Britain’s Royal Families:

The Complete Genealogy

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

The Princes in the Tower

Lancaster and York:

The Wars of the Roses

Children of England:

The Heirs of King Henry VIII

1547–1558

Elizabeth the Queen

Eleanor of Aquitaine

Henry VIII: King and Court

Mary Queen of Scots and the
Murder of Lord Darnley

Isabella: She-Wolf of France,
Queen of England

Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of
Gaunt and his Scandalous Duchess

The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn

Quick Reads

Traitors of the Tower

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Epub ISBN: 9781446466353

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INTRODUCTION

In the late 1990s, whilst researching and writing a biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, I began to feel somewhat frustrated because, where women’s histories are concerned, there are often very few recorded facts, and these must be carefully pieced together, and made sense of, by the historian. There is sometimes no way of filling the gaps, and it occurred to me that the only way to do that, in the literary sense, would be to write a novel. It was that realisation which prompted me to try my hand at historical fiction, choosing as my subject a real historical figure, the feisty, tragic Lady Jane Grey. A few years, and some rewrites, later, what had started out as a diversion just for fun became my first published novel, Innocent Traitor (2006). This was followed, in 2008, by a second novel, The Lady Elizabeth.

I had, of course, written about Elizabeth I before, in no fewer than four books. Her childhood is documented in The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1991), her youth in Children of England: The Heirs of Henry VIII (1996), and her reign in Elizabeth the Queen (1998). It was this last book that first brought me real success in Britain and the USA, because, by a happy coincidence, it was published at the same time as the release of two acclaimed films: Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth. Suddenly, it seemed that people could not get enough of the Virgin Queen.

Elizabeth’s relations with Mary, Queen of Scots are covered extensively in Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (2003); more recently, in The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (2009), I have explored the impact that Anne’s fate had upon her daughter.

Elizabeth now seems like an old friend. She will appear again in the novel I am currently writing on Lady Catherine Grey, while a sequel to The Lady Elizabeth will appear in due course. Elizabeth is endlessly fascinating because she was a formidably intelligent woman who overcame insuperable difficulties and was one of history’s greatest survivors. She also lived in a colourful, dramatic period peopled by vivid, charismatic personalities, for which there survives a wealth of source material and a unique visual record. And, of course, Elizabeth, a mere female in contemporary eyes, who was regarded by many as a bastard, a heretic and a usurper, ultimately triumphed over all the odds in a male-dominated age that now bears her name. What a woman!

When it comes to historical fiction, it’s an advantage to be a historian and to have studied the subject in depth. I enjoy writing both historical novels and history books, although, of course, the process is very different for each. History can be viewed as a series of narratives with amazing stories and characters but with non-fiction you are constrained by the sources. Every fact must be checked and verified. With a historical novel you make use of the facts where they exist and get creative where they don’t. It is incredibly liberating to be able to fill in those gaps in our knowledge and get inside the heads of historical characters, and it’s also gripping to have the freedom to construct a tale from fragments of gossip or romantic legends, which a historian should be wary of doing; but at the same time, what you come up with as a novelist must be credible and convincing within the context of the known facts and the cultural, social and moral ethos of the period. Feedback from readers shows that they care very much that historical novels are accurate in terms of events and other details. If I write something controversial, it has been based on original sources, and I always justify what I have done in an author’s note.

It is my warm hope that readers will enjoy the new electronic editions of these two books, and that they, like many before them, will thrill to the incredible story of Elizabeth I, the greatest of queens.

‘The Most English Woman in England’