Elizabeth I /

Queen Elizabeth (1533-1609) ruled England for more than 40 years, marking an age and establishing her country as a significant power. MacCaffrey, a professor emeritus of history at Harvard, concentrates on the queen as a politician and analyzes her successes and failures in this scholarly study of her statecraft. He highlights such historical events as the Spanish Armada (1585) and the establishment of the Church of England (1599). The queen's decision to send an army to fight Spanish rule in the Netherlands plunged her country into war; she was, however, able to supplant Catholicism and establish Protestantism as the state religion without causing a civil revolt at home. As potrayed by MacCaffrey, the strength of Elizabeth's reign rested on her great popularity; but she was frequently plagued by indecision, one of her few weaknesses. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

She claimed to have the heart and stomach of a king, though in the frail body of a weak woman. Elizabeth I of England inspired the love of her people, encouraged arts and learning, longed for peace while waging war--and with her vacillation and dithering could drive her privy counselors mad. MacCaffrey, fellow of the Royal Historical Society and author of two previous works on Elizabeth, focuses on the politician behind the Virgin Queen, her vision shaped by years of court intrigue and fear, and her fallibility as well as statecraft. This well-researched, scholarly work lacks the personal color of Mary Luke's Gloriana ( LJ 10/1/73) and Anne Somerset's Elizabeth I ( LJ 10/1/91), but as a secondary source it sheds new light on a complex, contradictory queen. Recommended for larger history collections.-- Nancy L. Whitfield, Meriden P.L., Ct. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A mildly revisionist political biography of the last Tudor monarch. As presented by MacCaffrey (History/Harvard), the resolutely unsentimental Elizabeth I is less the indomitable, manifestly destined virago of English national myth than a wary practitioner of royal Realpolitik, gingerly testing the waters before plotting any course in the unpredictable seas of late Renaissance statecraft. In fact, given the conventional heroic picture of the Elizabethan Age, the Virgin Queen proves a surprisingly cautious, even timid, helmsperson here, loath to commit her authority to a consistent path in domestic politics or to expend her nation's slim human and material resources on overseas adventures. She appears as a compulsive consensus-builder always conscious of the fragility of her constituency and the challenges to her authority posed by her sex, the religious schisms still racking the English polity, and the constant intrigues of her Scottish cousin and rival, Mary Stuart. MacCaffrey organizes his study well, defining and dealing with each of the major political issues of Elizabeth's reign in turn--notably, the domestic religious situation, its international repercussions, and Elizabeth's interactions with Mary and the monarch's other rivals, suitors, and aspiring successors. In the author's convincing portrait, we see a political establishment in the throes of a sometimes uncertain transition between a waning feudalism and a nascent, still very uncertain, modernity. But the almost exclusively political focus here threatens to engulf its human subject in the sometimes bewildering machinations of Tudor diplomacy: MacCaffrey's speculations, for instance, that the spectacular theatricality of the Elizabethan court ``probably helped to fulfil the emotional needs of a lonely and isolated human being'' are an exception to his strict reliance on the documentary record. A solid, scholarly study that will please historians--but leave latter-day monarchists still searching for the human essence of the fascinating Elizabeth I. (Illustrations)