Alison PlowdenReseñas

I liked it but had to look up a lot of words because it was in the old english without explanation - was a bit frustrating. There were a few new things I learned but the majority I already knew from other books I have read.

This slim book was a charity shop impulse purchase, which worked well as a book to read on the bus, mostly in 10-15 minute instalments. It charts the life of Mary and the Scottish situation before her and how Mary's position as Elizabeth's cousin and potential heir set them on a collision course.½

Alison Plowden is one of the “A” Team of historical biography authors, with Alison Weir and Antonia Fraser. I was inspired to pick up this book after reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy (currently being broken down into a nonagy to facilitate paperback sales). Elizabeth of Bohemia (“The Winter Queen”), her daughter Sophie of Hanover, and various other sisters and cousins and aunts all figure prominently in those novels so I thought to research further.

Elizabeth, who spent almost all her life in exile after her husband was unceremoniously deposed as King of Bohemia, figures prominently in this book, too. So prominently - almost half the book is devoted to her - that I suspect she was the original subject and the author later decided to pad things a little with accounts of the later Stuarts. Not that Elizabeth didn’t have an interesting enough life - reduced to transient lodging with various Protestant governments while trying to scrape up money and troops - not to retake Bohemia, but just to recover her husband’s ancestral home in the Rhineland. While finding time to have 14 children, many of whom went on to complicate European politics for years. (I suppose those were the Good Old Days, when what moved Europe was dynastic squabbling rather than having a good percentage of the population trying to burn out the remainder. Although that could describe the 30 Years War, too. I wonder when Gustavus Adolphus is going to show up.)

At any rate, after Elizabeth the rest of the Stuart princesses are a little anticlimactic. Even though two of them, Mary and Anne, were Queens of England, they get relatively brief treatment here. Some of Mary’s early (teenage) letters are quite spicy; she formed an attachment with an older woman and writes of being her “obedient wife” and of wanting to be her “dog on a leash”, “fish in a net” and “bird in a cage”. Mary was matched up with William of Orange, who appears to have had a thing for little Dutch boys. Perhaps that’s why they got along together so well. I always like a little kink with my history. Other than that, though, I don’t get as much of a feel for Mary as a person, and even less for her sister and eventual successor Anne. Anne’s major claim to fame (other than giving the name Queen Anne’s War to one of the French and Indian conflicts in North America - we colonials gather something was going on in the Old Country, too) was to get in a contest with Henry VIII over who could be the Fattest English Monarch. Anne, despite being handicapped by gender and body frame size, gave it a good run, eventually became unable to walk, and had to be carried everywhere in a litter. Oddly, she also gave her name to a lighter and less complicated furniture style that would have collapsed if she ever used it.

Although this is a well-written and readable book, I would have like a little more description of what life was like in the period. Some background on other things going on in the world, and a better background for the various conflicts - if you don’t know how the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire functioned or what was involved in keeping even a moderate army in supply in those days it’s hard to figure out what’s going on sometimes.½

I’d like to have a beer with Lady Jane Grey. This is, of course, problematical, since the small, sad, headless corpse of Lady Jane has been under the floor of Saint Peter-Ad-Vincula since 1554, and I don’t drink beer. Nevertheless, the “what historical figure would you like to meet” game is always popular. At our hypothetical encounter I think I’d like to ask why “The Smartest Girl In England” let her extraordinarily smarmy relatives talk her into accepting the English crown. It’s intriguing to speculate what William Shakespeare would have come up with if he had decided to add Queen Jane to the histories. Or maybe if Donizetti had gone with his original plan of basing an opera on her life instead of switching to Mary Queen of Scots. As it is, poor Jane has to be content with a couple of not very good movies.


She’s just one, although the most tragic one, of the Tudors in this work by Alison Plowden. The book dates from 1976, but I just stumbled across it for next to nothing in a used book store. There’s plenty of room for Operatic or Shakespearian or Hollywood tragedy, comedy, and/or just plain history here.


The founder of the dynasty, Henry VII, goes from a barely solvent and mostly friendless political refugee with an amazingly tenuous claim to the throne - based on his maternal great-great-grandmother being Edward III’s third son’s mistress and his paternal grandfather marrying Henry V’s widow - to King of England by virtue of Richard III going slightly nuts at Bosworth and the Stanley family keeping up their tradition of changing sides in the middle of every battle they were ever involved in. Fending off various attempts to restore the Plantagenet line, including Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel (who should get some sort of award for Strangest Names for a Pair of Royal Imposters) he manages to put England on sound financial footing and then conveniently dies young to set things up for his second son Henry (his first son, Arthur, has the luck of the Tudor males and dies young himself).


Henry VIII, of course, is well known for breaking with Catholicism and being responsible for the mnemonic Divorced-Beheaded-Died-Divorced-Beheaded-Survived, for remembering what happened to Catherine, Ann, Jane, Anne, Catherine, and Katherine. In the process he goes from “the handsomest Prince in Europe” to a huge tub of goo and checks out (relatively) young himself.


Edward VI, after providing material for a future Mark Twain novel, can’t shake the Tudor male curse and departs from TB, but only after dooming his cousin Lady Jane Grey by letting himself get talked into naming her heir, bypassing his sisters. I suppose you can’t expect a 16-year old who’s coughing himself to death to be very sharp about that sort of thing.


Jane goes to the scaffold and proves that while she might not have been wise, she was brave; only getting flustered at the end when, blindfolded, she had to grope around for the block. A kindly bystander eventually led her to it.


Mary, the rightful heir that Jane’s family attempted to bypass, is a sad case - all she wants is an ordinary life - to be happily married and have a family and be loved - and ends up with a loveless husband and a uterine tumor and the sobriquet “Bloody Mary”.



Elizabeth, the last Tudor, comes across as the most impressive of the lot - as she should be, even if the author has a soft spot for her. The 20-year-old Elizabeth manages to persuade her sister not to have her beheaded - a neat trick, because Mary is no longer the hopeful woman she was at the start of her reign, but a bitter wife estranged from her husband and not well disposed toward the daughter of the woman who seduced her father away from her mother. After this nerve-racking start Elizabeth goes on to goes on to be the greatest ruler England ever had.


So why is all this 500-year-old stuff interesting? It’s easy to fall into the Romance Novel Theory of History, where everyone is Lords and Ladies who have glamorous lives and, perhaps, tragic ends. Unfortunately that’s what we read because that’s all there is. There’s little or no record of how the lower and middle classes lived. Even with nobility the material is scanty; at least the Tudors have the benefit of the printing press and the revival of portraiture. But we still know orders of magnitude more about the life of Britney Spears than about the life of Henry VII or Jane Grey.


I’ve also just finished biographies of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Nefertiti. The total volume of written material on Nefertiti - every single inscription or ostracon or papyrus that mentions her name - would probably fill about two typewritten pages. There are a lot of fragmentary wall reliefs from Akhetaten, and the famous bust, but that’s all there is to document her life - all the rest is more-or-less educated speculation by Egyptologists. Eleanor is somewhat better documented but even with her there are huge gaps when there’s no written evidence - even though she’s Duchess of Aquitaine, ex-Queen of France, and Queen of England, there are periods of up to three years when she just vanishes. It’s not even clear what Eleanor looks like; there’s a stained glass window and a tomb effigy, but neither is especially reliable portraiture. The lives of ordinary people in 18th Dynasty Egypt or Plantagenet England would be fascinating, but they just didn’t get recorded.


Which leads me to speculate a little on historical changes in the idea of history. The Greeks and Romans had this history thing figured out, as did the Muslims and Byzantines. But throughout medieval and well into renaissance Europe, nobody caught on. I think there’s a couple of explanations; for one thing, literacy was low, but for another nobody really had the idea that things were different in the past and might be different in the future. Therefore, nobody kept diaries or wrote autobiographies, because nobody thought anybody in the future might be interested. (I was thinking about this when I posted elsewhere with an art history question, asking if anybody knew when people realized that there had been different modes of dress in the past: so many of the great Renaissance artists show Julius Caesar in plate armor or Kleopatra in a 16th century gown). Queen Victoria is reported to have written several thousand words a day in her diaries; what would we give to have one tenth that volume from Eleanor of Aquitaine or Elizabeth I? Or some random one of their subjects? Therefore, go forth and write down what you did today. Future historians will bless you.

This true to life book containing the experiences of a select number of women during the Seventeenth-Century English Civil War is thoroughly researched and imaginatively retold. As a Historian approaching my dissertation the said subject, it seemed only fitting to add a piece of my project into the challenge, it also meant completing a little research as well. This is most likely why this book took me so long to read, it cannot be taken as just another story, it is a gritty account of the lives of women during the Civil War between King and Parliament.
Upon reading this book, I really enjoyed that pull back into history which you don't always receive with History books, it was an immensely informative and interesting read of a time when chivalry still existed and women began to get a taste of liberty and power alongside men.

Tells the tale of Henrietta Maria, the French princess who married Charles I. Despite the wealth of historical documents, including a lot of her letters, no good idea of her personality comes across. She's a very lackluster sort of woman, apparently. And despite the revolutions, assasinations, and executions herein, this is a boring book.

FanTABulous. I haven’t read a history book that’s this much fun in years. This is a great introduction to or refresher in the Tudor monarchs. It’s focused on women—King Henry VIII’s death and his son Edward VI’s reign get only a few sentences each—which provides a nice, tight focus to a turbulent era. The title is only half right; no commoners are mentioned by name in the book, although their mob-like reactions to moral issues or political events are recorded. (The very last chapter is a fun, fast look at the basic mores and customs of women, whatever their social status, but it's an afterthought.) The book is instead about the highest ranking women in the land from Henry VII through Elizabeth I, starting with Margaret Beaufort. The writing style is taut, yet it leaves room for lots of judiciously chosen tidbits from the women’s personal lives. I've read at least a dozen of Plowden's English history books, and this read like the distillation of all that If anyone’s looking into getting into Tudor history, I would recommend this book.

This is a very short (160 pages) summary of the Tudor family, traced through the female family members from Margaret Beaufort to Elizabeth I. It's a good starting point for someone who doesn't know much about the Tudors, although it is not what I expected - I wanted descriptions of everyday life of women during that period. A very quick read, brief and to the point, very basic. Recommended for Tudor novices.

This relating of facts and events in the pre-reign years of Elizabeth I's life was so readable, I would've thought it fiction!

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1964864.html

actually four separate books inside a single cover - Young Elizabeth (1971), Danger to Elizabeth (1973), Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth I (1977) and Elizabeth Regina (1980), all slightly updated in 2004 (so references to the horrors of the twentieth century have been updated to the horrors of the twenty-first).

The standout book for me, with a lot of material I hadn't really considered before, was the second, Danger to Elizabeth, which looked mainly at the relationship between Elizabeth and English Catholics, and gives quite a substantial and detailed description of Catholic operations inside England - largely a matter of attempting to service the spiritual needs of the recusant community, though of course often tangled up with the high politics of attempted regime change and foreign sponsorship. Plowden makes what seems to me an honest effort to disentangle these strands and to tell it from the perspective of both Catholics and the government; it also of course is a very important element of the Elizabethan approach to Ireland, where religion became integral to the conflict during Elizabeth's reign in a way that had not been the case before.

The first and fourth books, Young Elizabeth and Elizabeth Regina, cover the start and end of Elizabeth's life; decent enough retellings, but I've read better elsewhere, and I was a bit shocked that Plowden assigns some blame to Elizabeth for the abuse she suffered from her stepfather as a teenager. I guess attitudes were different in 1970.

The third book, Marriage with My Kingdom, is an interesting example of writing about something that never happened, Elizabeth's marriage. Plowden takes a decently comprehensive approach to the various suitors proposed for her, starting from her childhood as a marriageable princess (or alternatively a bastard daughter of Henry VIII depending on the year) and going right through to the Duke of Alençon in her late 40s. As noted above, Plowden doesn't quite take on board the importance of Elizabeth's teenage experiences in shaping her attitude toward sexuality and relationships, preferring to concentrate on what had happened to her mother and sister (one executed, the other trapped into a loveless and unsuccessful dynastic match). Sexuality is a complex thing and one can hardly blame Elizabeth for rejecting the narrow options which were made available to her if they were not right for her.

I also found myself wondering was why no foreign Protestant suitors ever got a look-in - Eric XIV of Sweden seems to have been a serious contender at one point, but Plowden minimises this, and there were surely other eligible Scandinavian, German or Central European princes who were the right age and religion. Yet it seems to have been only Hapsburgs or French princes who were under consideration. (And Robert Dudley of course.)

Anyway, good background reading, particularly the second book.½

An interesting account of the Tudor period, because it focuses on different aspects of the history than usual. I hadn't realized how important the Grey sisters were in the continuing discussion of the succesion - or why. There seem to be two titles: Lady Jane Grey and the House of Suffolk and Lady Jane Grey: Nine days Queen. The first is a better description of the contents.½

More text about queens than commoners, but this is where I learned the backstory of Anne Askew, how she had run away from her husband and drawn unwelcome attention as a strong minded and quarrelsome woman. How interesting that she became entangled in the plotting against Henry's sixth queen, Catherine Parr.

"Anne Askew is an interesting example of an educated, highly-intelligent, passionate woman destined to become the victim of the society in which she lived - a woman who could not accept her circumstances but fought an angry, hopeless battle against them."

This book is a brief biography of some of the important women in the Tudor period, such as Elizabeth Woodville, Henry VIII’s wives, Lady Jane Grey, Mary and Elizabeth. It also talks about marriage, education and attitudes towards women. I felt that the title was a little misleading as there wasn’t much coverage of ‘commoners’ as the title suggested; the life of Elizabethan women is given a brief overview in an epilogue at the end (it’s not even a numbered chapter).

While this is a good introductory book to significant women of the period, I didn’t feel that it told me anything new (but then, I am a history student and the Tudors are one of my favourite periods to study, so perhaps that’s why). It wasn’t particularly indepth, but is a quick read, making a good starting point for those wishing to know more about the women of this period.

While a lot of it is speculation (we can’t know for sure how they felt) the author does portray them all in a sympathetic light and it seemed reasonably historically accurate with lots of quotes from contemporary sources, and, after all, a lot of the situations women faced in the 1400 and 1500s are much the same as women do now – I’m sure many can relate to Catherine of Aragon seeing her husband being ‘taken’ from her by a younger, ‘newer’ model (Anne Boleyn), and Mary’s resentment of Henry’s treatment of her mother during this time.

Elizabeth I is one the most famous woman in history, and yet history books concentrate on the accomplishments of her reign without paying much attention to the woman behind them. This book is a wonderful introduction to Elizabeth the woman- well researched and detailed, it is never-the-less an enjoyable read for the non-historian. By reviewing the early incidents which shaped Elizabeth and her view of the world, Plowden lays the groundwork for explaining her actions thoughout her long reign. I haven't read the rest of the series yet, but I am looking forward to doing so in the near future.

A straightforward, easily read account of the brief, tragic life of Lady Jane Grey, the "nine days Queen". Alison Plowden's book is a good starting point for anyone interested in the Tudor era but not too much fresh insight here.½

This is a good book but it didn't tell me anything new about Tudor women. Also, it did not focus on the commoners, mainly Henry VIII's wives and his daughters. It is interesting and very easy to read but doesn't have any new information in it.

An interesting account of the lives, work and fates of Catholics in Elizabeth's reign. Not just the standard story of Mary Queen of Scots, but accounts also of those Catholic priests trained abroad and who infiltrated into England to support domestic Catholics, continue to spread the Word and, latterly, also to support indirectly at least the efforts of Catholic powers to overthrow Elizabeth. Undoubtedly many of these priests were personally brave, and no doubt many ordinary Catholics in England wanted to be loyal to their country while still resenting the fines and loss of property or liberty for attending Mass. Equally one can see why Elizabeth's government regarded them with suspicion, considering the priests traitors and the ordinary Catholic Englishmen a potential fifth column, especially following the Papal Bull Regnans in Excelsis, which excommunicated Elizabeth and not only absolved English Catholics from their duty of allegiance to the Queen, but even specifically required them not to be loyal to her - a serious misjudgement by the Vatican in that it put English Catholics into an intolerable dilemma and enabled them to be portrayed as potentially disloyal purely by virtue of their faith.

Plowden is impartial throughout, though her use of anachronisms grates, especially her use of the term “left wing” to describe Protestants and “right wing” to describe Catholics, and one description of a place of not particularly bad imprisonment of Catholics as a concentration camp. In sum, a good read.½

Much of the heart of this book reads like a fairly brisk account of the mid-Tudor period, rather than a biography of the subject, who is barely mentioned for long periods in the book, though I accept relatively few details of her early life are known. The author's style is rather sparse and there could be a little more analysis rather than just straightforward description, especially in the first half of the book. Finally, I was a little annoyed by the author's anachronistic use of terms like "left wing" and "right wing" to describe the religious views of various figures.½