Reviews

• The conflicts and intrigues during Mary Tudor's reign sift in and out of Shakespeare's works. A fascinating look at the attitudes Shakespeare inherited from the generation that preceded him. Will Graham

• A good introduction to the reign of Mary I of England, very scholar and perhaps a bit dry to read (especially for the foreign reader that I am) but full of archives and well-documented. It really brings a new light on a woman was has been demonized by history. A must have for everyone interested in the Tudor era or by the life of queens.

• Difficult to read, it is overly verbose in a very peculiar way. The author details the struggle Queen Mary had to face since the traumatic divorce between her relatives and the delicate and sad situation of a princess bastardized who had to witness the split between the Church of Rome and the Church of England that stiffened her resolve, once miraculously succeeded to the throne, to erase it. Prescott deals with her controversial reign which has been unceremoniously and unhistorically dismissed as a terror one by the Protestant propaganda and anti-catholic myth. While Mary was not a "genius" in its true sense, I did not agree with Prescott calling her limited and unimaginative since this suffers from the constant comparison with Elizabeth I. Her unhappy and sterile, both politically and personally, choice to marry Philip II, a Spaniard, should be seen according to the political considerations that saw England as too weak to avoid remunerative alliances, or so it was thought by the Queen's inner circle, and the imperative for a female ruler to marry. Prescott acknowledges Mary' s personal considerations. However, she ends up seeing Queen Mary' s choice as her lack of "Englishness" which betrays a somewhat typical mistake made by many biographers who tend to reason and explain historical fact and characters according to their political and time "conditions". The concept of patriotism was not our kind, the one we intend today, but was a question of "family matters" in order to preserve or increase their royal privileges and claims. Prescott explains the Queen's lack of funds and poverty, no doubt a problem in terms of the effective rule. The religious policy, shifting from tolerant to strict, was typical of the monarchs of the time who by that used it as a way to build loyalty and the sense of community. This in the book is not properly explained, despite being set against the mounting and at times devious Protestant plots against the Queen. I would have liked more attention to all these issues but overall I enjoyed this biography.

• This book should be applauded for the sheer amount of research that has gone into it. That said, I found the writing style to be old fashioned (okay, it was written in the forties) and somewhat stuffy with a hint of Church of England sniffiness about it. Mary is portrayed as a flawed woman, not necessarily a cruel one, and to his credit the author doesn't make her out to be a blood thirsty monster, but rather a woman whose life was a very cruel and tragic one. I found this book in part to be very hard going, especially the descriptive parts about battles such as Calais and Wyatt's rebellion, and I could have done with a little more of a look at Mary. This book is not for everyone, and while it will stay in my collection, I don't think I will be reading it again.

• I was glad the author gave so much detail on Mary's life when she was young, so that we get a better understanding of all she endured when her parents' marriage broke up. All we've ever heard about are the executions for heresy during her lifetime, and there's so much more to learn about her than that. There are so many credits and bibliography notes after the biography itself that I thought there were no portraits added, but they are there. I do wish they would've been enlarged better, but as I said, it was a good bio on Queen Mary overall.

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