‘I shall never marry!’ the young Elizabeth declared, a vow she kept throughout her life in the frightening and brutal world of shilling fortunes that was Henry VIII’s heritage.
At the tender age of eight, the Lady Elizabeth has already learnt that the sanctity of marriage is a lie.
Her father, King Henry VIII, is notorious not only for his succession of wives, but his ways of divesting himself of them.
When she draws the name of Robert Dudley in St Valentine games as a child, Elizabeth hotly declares she will never marry — a proclamation that amuses her elders, who expect that in time she will come to desire husband, home, and children of her own, regardless of whether she succeeds her father’s throne or not.
The succession itself is a turbulent and ever-changing affair, one fraught with religious concerns and questions of legitimacy.
Like her older half-sister, Mary, Elizabeth is displaced from the line of succession by their younger half-brother Edward, who is destined for the crown…and whose will explicitly excludes both young women from succeeding him on the event of his death.
Yet it is Edward’s death that catapults Elizabeth’s story forward; her sufferings throughout her sister’s reign, and her observations of Mary’s dismal marriage, shape the decades that stretch before her.
Throughout the fraught years between childhood and being crowned queen, Robert Dudley stands fast at Elizabeth’s side, becoming an extension of herself that she cannot do without.
Drawn irresistibly to him and loving him as she has never loved anyone else, Elizabeth finds herself caught between desire and fear, wanting to love and refusing to fall victim to the agonies of marriage she has witnessed in every other married person she has known.
Robert hopes to one day sit at her side, her king as well as her confidante, but as the years march on, his hopes falter as Elizabeth resists the pressure put upon her by councillors and subjects alike to marry and produce an heir.
Seemingly unconcerned with securing the question of succession, she flirts and dodges the issue, clinging to the isolation of singledom and sovereignty as a protection against the heartbreak she views as inevitably imparted in married life.
England’s Virgin Queen, as Rhoda Edwards paints her, is not a woman of ice and diffidence, but of fire and passion to match her coppery hair — a true successor to her fiery father. As a child, the confusing world frightens her; as a woman, she refuses to compromise. Her path from childhood through sovereignty is fraught with danger and conflict and love, a struggle between Elizabeth the queen and Elizabeth the woman…
The only question is which woman prevails in the end…
‘Her interpretive flair and accurate descriptive detail…puts her head and shoulders above the rest of the country’ — Times Literary Supplement
Rhoda Edwards is the author of several other works of historical fiction, including Some Touch of Pity, which focuses on Richard of Gloucester and which in 1976 won the Yorkshire Post’s Best First Work Award.
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