Published by Secker & Warburg 1971

Book Condition: Very Good

A luxurious “”evocation”” of the personality and domestic life of Elizabeth I, celebrated in many paintings and details (some in colour), featuring Tudor art and artifice and the traitorous advances of age on the royal person. Contemporary accounts, some regal utterances (“”l have the body of a weak and feeble Woman, but I have the Heart and Stomach of a King””), and wardrobe and gift inventories complement the text. The sovereign’s day is outlined — from a breakfast of beef and ale to great Nature’s second Course between sheets “”worked all over with sundry fowls, beasts and worms in silks of divers colours.”” Elizabeth’s zest for clothes, music, hunting, dancing, and the sweets which ruined her teeth are reported on handsomely decorated pages of aristocratic paper. While Mr. Strong, Director of the National Portrait Gallery of London, evokes, Julia Trevelyan Oman provides the “”Spectacle”” and together they have produced (in the words of a sycophantic guff from Sir John Haywood of his Queen) “”a most delightful composition of majesty and modesty in equal measure.

Price £12.00

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