Word: elizabeth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ELIZABETH THE GREAT (336 pp.)-Elizabeth Jenkins-Coward-McCann...
...Elizabeth I illegitimate? Was she capable of pregnancy? Was she bald? How did she stand with the Pope? These were some of the questions that obsessed the minds of Britons 400 years ago, a time when high policy revolved about the person of the monarch. The answers did much to determine the shape of the modern world, and they lend a womanly interest to Elizabeth Jenkins' sprightly new biography of Elizabeth...
...answers: Elizabeth was illegitimate in the sense that her father, Henry VIII, had his marriage with her mother, Anne Boleyn, declared invalid; 2) evidence is that Elizabeth was barren; 3) she had fine red-gold hair, and if she wore a wig, it was for reasons of fashion; 4) her relations with nine successive Popes were stormy, but she showed some signs of restraint. In the Prayer Book, designed for worship in the church of which she was the head, Protestant Elizabeth with her own hand struck out the words:"From the Bishop of Rome and his detestable enormities. Good...
...maintains that the Queen had a kind of magic ("a quality of incantation") about her by which she managed to unite state, nation and the reformed religion in one person. How else explain the almost mystical response by the London mob to her coronation progress through the streets? Elizabeth, crying "God 'a mercy" to her people from beneath a canopy held by knights, and keeping a sprig of rosemary thrown into her chariot, was a superb performer in the stagecraft of statecraft. She was also, according to Biographer Jenkins, a beautiful woman with golden-brown eyes of great brilliance...
...ballads rather than newspapers, and of myths rather than statistics. In London's squalid streets magnificence belonged alone to the church and state, and genius lived in the persons of the statesmen-Sir Philip Sidney, Cecil and Raleigh-as much as in Shakespeare, who celebrated the glory of Elizabeth's monarchy. It was also a time of all-embracing religious conflict; when religion then walked not only the hairline of individual faith but the tightrope of policy. Catholic and Protestant were "in a state of mind near insanity" over the tortures they inflicted on each other...