Best biography of queen elizabeth 1

ELIZABETH I
Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Alfred A Knopf 1991; Phoenix Press 1997; St Martin’s Press 1992; Anchor Books 2003

Elizabeth I ruled England in defiance of convention, exercising supreme authority in a man’s world.

With courage, brilliance and style, she reigned for nearly forty-five years, preserving her kingdom from the worst of the horrors that engulfed so many countries in late sixteenth-century Europe. Anne Somerset’s penetrating biography of this complex and uniquely gifted woman is unrivalled in its analysis of both Elizabeth’s personal life and her career as leader.

Throughout her reign, Elizabeth was an object of extravagant adulation.

She was likened by contemporaries to the sun, the moon and the stars, and acclaimed by an admiring french prince as ‘the rarest creature that was in Europe these five hundred years’. Even her enemy Pope Sixtus V was moved to exclaim, ‘She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, b