Young Elizabeth: Princess. Prisoner. Queen
Nicola Tallis (Michael O’Mara Books, £25)
HERE we are, barely two months into a new year, and it’s apparently time for yet another 16th-century blockbuster. Clearly, there is no end to our appetite for books on the Tudors. This time, Nicola Tallis offers us an ‘immensely detailed biography’, but it is one with a difference. Her subject is not Elizabeth the Queen, but Elizabeth the child, the teenager and the determined young woman.
It was a contemporary of Elizabeth, Jane Dormer (d.1612), who noted: ‘To write all that might be said of her would fill many volumes.’ Well, generations of authors have certainly been trying to do just that. Here, the author covers the years 1533–58, telling us that it was David Starkey who last looked at Elizabeth’s youth, more than 20 years ago. Understandably, there is a degree of overlap with other works of popular Tudor history, such as those of Alison Weir and Tracy Borman.
