{"product_id":"after-elizabeth-isbn-9780345450463","title":"After Elizabeth","description":"\u003cb\u003e“[Leanda] De Lisle brilliantly captures the atmosphere of dangerous uncertainty and furtive intrigue that characterized the last years of Elizabeth’s reign.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Telegraph \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Exciting and exacting . . . No fictional characters, of film or novel, can match the reality of the participants in this fascinating historical drama.”—\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eDecember 1602. After forty-four years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth is in decline. The kingdom is also waning, weakened by the cost of war with Spain and the simmering discontent of both the rich and the poor. The stage has been set, at long last, for succession. But the Queen who famously never married has no heir.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eElizabeth’s senior relative is James VI of Scotland, Protestant son of Elizabeth’s cousin Mary Queen of Scots. But as a foreigner and a Stuart, he is excluded under English law from the throne. The road to and beyond his coronation will be filled with conspiracy and duplicity, personal betrayals, and political upheavals. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eBringing history vibrantly to life, Leanda de Lisle unfurls a rich tapestry of scenes and players: As the Queen nears the end, we witness the scheming of her courtiers for the candidates of their choice; blood-soaked infighting among the Catholic clergy as they struggle to survive in the face of persecution; the widespread fear that civil war, invasion, or revolution will follow the monarch’s death; and the signs, portents, and ghosts that seem to mark her end. Here, too, are the surprising and, to some, dismaying results of James’s ascension and the lasting historical implications of this crucial period in British history.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eLeanda de Lisle’s keenly modern view of this tumultuous time gives us intimate insights into the political power plays and psychological portraits relevant to our own era. \u003ci\u003eAfter Elizabeth\u003c\/i\u003e is a unique look at a pivotal year, and a dazzling debut by an exciting new historian.Advance praise for After Elizabeth\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Leanda de Lisle has done what historians, to date, have overlooked. She spots the story in the seemingly uneventful handover of power to James I after Elizabeth’s death and rediscovers its thrilling drama. James’s accession was far from inevitable–de Lisle vividly recounts the uncertainty, greed, intrigue, and hypocrisy that defined the new age. We enter a slippery, twilight world where legitimacy is debased and conspiracy and corruption thrive. This is an original, informative, absorbing account, written with verve and style.”\u003cbr\u003e–John Guy, author of Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A deep and fascinating account of this transformative year. Leanda de Lisle’s close focus draws us into palace corridors, country houses, and city streets where the excitement, intrigue, and danger are palpable.”\u003cbr\u003e–Jane Dunn, author of Elizabeth \u0026amp; Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This masterly account recaptures superbly the edgy, wary feel of court and country at the key moment when Tudor England was transformed into Stuart Britain. In emphasizing the faults of Queen Elizabeth I and the acuity of her successor, King James I, Leanda de Lisle has brilliantly subverted the traditional story.”\u003cbr\u003e–Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon and Wellington: The Long DuelLeanda de Lisle earned a master’s degree in history at Oxford University before embarking on a highly successful career as a journalist and writer. After having three sons, she went on to graduate school and received a master’s degree in business administration. She has since held positions as the first columnist for Country Life magazine and as a columnist for The Spectator magazine and The Guardian newspaper. She returned to her first love, history, to write After Elizabeth, her debut book.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “The World Waxed Old”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Twilight of the Tudor Dynasty\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      Sir John Harington arrived at Whitehall in December 1602 in time for the   twelve-day Christmas celebrations at court. The coming winter season   was expected to be a dull one, though the new Comptroller of the   Household, Sir Edward Wotton, was trying his best to inject fresh life   into it. Dressed from head to toe in white, he had laid on dances, bear   baiting, plays and gambling. The Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil,   lost up to £800 a night—an astonishing sum, even for one who, according   to popular verse, ruled “court and crown.” Behind the scenes, however,   courtiers gambled for still higher stakes. Harington observed that   Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, was sixty-nine and although she   appeared in sound health, “age itself is a sickness.” She could not   live forever, and after her reign of forty-four years the country was   on the eve of change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To Elizabeth, Harington was “that witty fellow my godson.” Courtiers   knew him for his invention of the water closet, his translations of   classical works, his scurrilous writings on court figures and his   mastery of the epigram, which was then the fashionable medium for   comment on court life. In the competition for Elizabeth’s favor,   however, courtiers were expected to reflect her greatness not only in   learning and wit but also in their visual magnificence. They did so by   dressing in clothes “more sumptuous than the proudest Persian.” A   miniature depicts Harington as a smiling man in a cut silk doublet and   ruff, his long hair brushed back to show off a jeweled earring that   hangs to his shoulder. Even a courtier’s plainest suits were worn with   beaver hats and the finest linen shirts, gilded daggers and swords,   silk garters and show roses, silk stockings and cloaks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This brilliant world was a small one, though riven by scheming and   distrust. “Those who live in courts, must mark what they say,” one of   Harington’s epigrams warned. “Who lives for ease had better live   away.” Harington, typically, knew everyone at Whitehall that   Christmas, either directly or through friends and relations. Elizabeth   herself was particularly close to the grandchildren of her aunt Mary   Boleyn, a group known enviously as “the tribe of Dan.” The eldest, Lord   Hunsdon, was the Lord Chamberlain, responsible for the conduct of the   court. His sisters, the Countess of Nottingham and Lady Scrope, were   Elizabeth’s most favored Ladies of the Privy Chamber. But Harington   also had royal connections, albeit at one remove. His estate at Kelston   in Somerset had been granted to his father’s first wife, Ethelreda, an   illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. When Ethelreda died childless the   land had passed to John Harington senior. He remained loyal to   Elizabeth when she was imprisoned following a Protestant-backed revolt   against her Catholic sister Mary I, named after one of its leaders as   Wyatt’s revolt, and when Elizabeth became Queen she rewarded him with   office and fortune, making his second wife, Harington’s mother,   Isabella Markham, a Lady of the Privy Chamber. It was the hope of   acquiring such wealth and honor that was the chief attraction of the   court.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Harington once described the court as “ambition’s puffball”—a toadstool   that fed on vanity and greed—but it was one that had been carefully   cultivated by the Tudor monarchy. With no standing army or paid   bureaucracy to enforce their will, the monarchy had to rely on   persuasion. They used Arthurian mythology and courtly displays to   capture hearts, while patronage appealed to the more down-to-earth   instincts of personal ambition. Elizabeth could grant her powerful   subjects the prestige that came with titles and orders, and the   influence conferred by office in the Church, the military, the   administration of government and the law; there were also posts at   court or in the royal household. She could bestow wealth with leases on   royal lands and palaces, offer special trading licenses and monopolies   or bequeath the ownership of estates confiscated from traitors.Those   who gained most from Elizabeth’s patronage were themselves patrons,   acting as conduits for the Queen’s munificence.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Harington and his friends worked hard to ingratiate themselves with the   great men at court, often spending years, as he complained, in   “grinning scoff, watching nights and fawning days.”When a great   patron fell from grace a decade of personal and financial investment   could be lost. The precise standing of all senior courtiers was   therefore tracked and discussed by gossips and intelligencers. Every   tiny fluctuation in their fortunes stoked what one observer described   as “the court fever of hope and fear that continuously torments those   that depend upon great men and their promises.” The “fever” reached a   pitch when the health of the monarch was a cause for concern since her   death could mean a complete revolution in government.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Harington arrived at court having completed, on 18 December, his Tract   on the Succession to the Crown—a subject on which the pulse of the   nation was now said to “beat extremely” but which was strictly   forbidden. As Harington had recorded in his tract, Elizabeth had   “utterly suppressed the talk of an heir apparent” in the year of his   birth, 1561, “saying she would not have her winding sheet set up before   her face.” Her concern, he explained, was “that if she should allow and   permit men to examine, discuss and publish whose was the best title   after her, some would be ready to affirm that title to be good afore   hers.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Forty years earlier there had been those who had claimed that   Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, had a superior claim   to the English throne; others asserted that it belonged to her   Protestant cousin Catherine Grey. Both claimants had since died:   Catherine in a country house prison in 1568, Mary on the executioner’s   block in 1587. But their sons, James VI of Scotland and Lord Beauchamp,   had succeeded them as rivals to her throne, together with more recent   candidates such as James’s cousin Arbella Stuart and the Infanta   Isabella of Spain. The dangers to Elizabeth were such that the   publication of any discussion of the succession had been declared an   act of treason by Parliament only the previous winter. Her advancing   age meant, however, that an heir would soon have to be chosen, if not   by her, then by others.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Harington had dedicated his tract to his preferred choice, James VI,   the Protestant son of Mary, Queen of Scots. As the senior descendant of   Henry VIII’s elder sister, Margaret, and her first husband, James IV,   he was Elizabeth’s heir by the usual dynastic rules of primogeniture,   but James was far from being the straightforward choice that this   suggests.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Stuart line of the Kings of Scots was barred from the succession   under the will of Henry VIII, which was backed by Act of Parliament.   James was also personally excluded under a law dating back to the reign   of Edward III precluding those born outside “the allegiance of the   realm of England.” His hopes rested on the fact that the claims of his   rivals were equally problematic. Elizabeth had declared Catherine   Grey’s son, Lord Beauchamp, illegitimate, and, as men had delved ever   deeper into the complex question of the right to the throne, the   numbers of potential heirs had proliferated. By 1600 the sometime   writer, lawyer and spy Thomas Wilson had counted “twelve competitors   that gape for the death of that good old princess, the now queen.” Spain, France and the Pope all had their preferred candidates, while   the English were divided in their choice by religious belief and   contesting ambitions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Courtiers feared that the price of Elizabeth’s security during her life   would be civil war and foreign invasion on her death—but the future was   also replete with possibilities. A new monarch drawn from a weak field   would need to acquire widespread support to secure his or her position   against rivals. That meant opening up the royal purse: there would be   gifts of land, office and title. Harington’s tract was a private gift   to James made in the hope of future favor. The gamble was to invest in   the winning candidate—for as Thomas Wilson observed, “this crown is not   likely to fall for want of heads that claim to wear it, but upon whose   head it will fall is by many doubted.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    ===\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Palace of Whitehall, built by Cardinal Wolsey and extended by Henry   VIII, sprawled on either side of King Street, the road linking   Westminster and Charing Cross. On the western side were the buildings   designed for recreation: four covered tennis courts, two bowling   alleys, a cockpit, and a gallery for viewing tournaments in the great   tiltyard. Up to 12,000 spectators would come to watch Elizabeth’s   knights take part in the annual November jousts held to celebrate her   accession. When the jousts were over the contestants’ shields were hung   in a gallery, where that summer the visiting German Duke of   Stettin-Pomerania had been directed to admire the insignia of   Elizabeth’s last great favorite, Robert Devereux, the second Earl of   Essex. He had broken fifty-seven lances in the course of fighting   fifteen challengers during the Accession Tilts of 1594. There was,   however, much more to Essex than his prowess at the tilt. He had   represented the aspirations of Harington’s generation, born after   Elizabeth became Queen and kept from office by her stifling   conservatism.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Elizabeth is still remembered as the Queen who defied the Armada in   1588, and as the figure of Gloriana encapsulated in Edmund Spenser’s   The Faerie Queene the following year. But as one court servant warned,   this was to see her “like a painted face without a shadow to give it   life.”Elizabeth had reached the apogee of her reign in the 1580s.   Thereafter came a decline that lasted longer than the reigns of her   siblings, Mary I and Edward VI, put together. Her victory over the   Armada was tarnished by the costs of the continuing war with Spain and   the woman behind the divine image had grown old. To Essex’s vast   following of young courtiers Elizabeth was a dithering old woman,   dominated by her Treasurer, Lord Burghley, and his corrupt son, Sir   Robert Cecil. Her motto, “Semper eadem” (I never change), once   perceived as a promise of stability, came to be taken as a challenge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When Burghley died in August 1598, Essex hoped to become the new force   in Elizabeth’s government but within weeks a long-simmering rebellion   in Ireland turned into a war of liberation. Essex, as Elizabeth’s most   experienced commander, was made Lord Deputy of Ireland and sent to   confront the rebel leader, Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Instead, in   September 1599, in defiance of royal orders, Essex arranged a truce and   returned to court. Elizabeth was furious, and as Essex fell into   disgrace he turned his hopes to finding favor with the candidate he   hoped would succeed her. In February 1601 he led 300 soldiers and   courtiers in a palace revolt to force her to name James VI of Scotland   her heir and overthrow Robert Cecil together with his principal allies,   Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Ralegh. The revolt quickly   failed and the Earl was executed, but Essex remained a popular figure   in national memory. Stettin’s journal records that ballads dedicated to   Essex were being “sung and played on musical instruments all over the   country, even in our presence at the royal court though his memory is   condemned as that of a man having committed high treason.” They   mourned England’s “jewel . . . The valiant knight of chivalry,”   destroyed, it was said, by the malevolence of the Cecil faction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Brave honour graced him still,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gallantly, gallantly,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He ne’er did deed of ill,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Well it is known\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But Envy, that foul fiend,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Whose malice ne’er did end\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hath brought true virtue’s friend\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Unto his thrall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Beneath the smiles of the courtiers as they played cards that Christmas   lay the deep bitterness of old enemies: those who had admired Essex and   those who had rejoiced in his downfall.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The gallery above the tiltyard where Essex had jousted was linked to   the second group of buildings through a gatehouse over King Street.   Here, in the Privy Gardens, thirty-four mythical beasts sat on   thirty-four brightly colored poles overlooking the low-railed pathways.   The buildings had a similar fairy-tale quality. They were decorated in   elaborate paintwork, the Great Hall in checkerwork and the Privy   Gallery in black and white grotesques. The theme of these distorted   animal, plant and human forms extended into the interior, where they   were highlighted with gold on the wood pillars and paneling. The   visiting Duke of Stettin thought the ceilings rather low and the rooms   gloomy. Elizabeth’s bedroom, which overlooked the Thames, “was very   dark” with “but little air.” Nearby in Elizabeth’s cabinet, where she   wrote her letters, Stettin observed a marvelous silver inkstand and   “also a Latin prayer book that the queen had written nicely with her   own hand, and, in a beautiful preface, had dedicated to her father.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Harington had been granted an audience with the Queen soon after his   arrival at Whitehall. As usual, he was escorted from the Presence   Chamber, where courtiers waited bareheaded to present their petitions,   along a dark passage and into the Privy Chamber, where his godmother   awaited him. A mural by Hans Holbein the Younger dominated the room.   The massive figure of Henry VIII stood, hands on hips, gazing   unflinchingly at the viewer. His third wife, Jane Seymour, the mother   of his son, Edward VI, was depicted on his left; above him was his   mother, Elizabeth of York, with his father, Henry VII. The mural   boasted the continuity of the Tudor dynasty, a silent reproach to the   childless spinster Harington now saw before him. Contemporaries   remarked often on Elizabeth’s similarity to her grandfather. When she   was young they saw it in her narrow face and the beautiful long hands   of which she was so proud. As she grew older she developed her   grandfather’s wattle, a “great goggle throat” that hung from her chin.But she did not now look merely old. She appeared seriously ill.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Harington was shocked by what he saw and frightened for the future.   Elizabeth had been increasingly melancholic since the Essex revolt, but   he was now convinced that she was dying. He confided his thoughts in a   letter to the one person he trusted: his wife, Mary Rogers, who was at   home in Somerset caring for their nine children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Sweet Mall,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I herewith send thee what I would God none did know, some ill bodings   of the realm and its welfare. Our dear Queen, my royal godmother, and   this state’s natural mother, doth now bear signs of human infirmity,   too fast for that evil which we will get by her death, and too slow for   that good which she shall get by her releasement from pains and misery.   Dear Mall, How shall I speak what I have seen, or what I have felt?—Thy   good silence in these matters emboldens my pen . . . Now I will trust   thee with great assurance, and whilst thou dost brood over thy young   ones in the chamber, thou shalt read the doings of thy grieving mate in   the court.[quote]--The Wall Street Journal","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305393574117,"sku":"NP9780345450463","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345450463.jpg?v=1767721098","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/after-elizabeth-isbn-9780345450463","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}