The Child Who Would Be Queen

With The Lady Elizabeth (Ballantine, 496 pp., $25), Alison Weir takes on, yet again, the story of England’s first Queen Elizabeth. This time, however, unlike the biography she published in 1998, she’s enriching her tale with fiction. American readers may be excused for believing that Weir’s characterization of the young Elizabeth’s formidable intelligence is one of the fictional elements in this book. But in fact, the future Queen was demonstrably a precocious child, as Weir, the author of 10 books of nonfiction about English royals, well knows.

This literary freedom is something Weir certainly does exercise—for nearly 500 pages, in fact. Opening the book with 3-year-old Elizabeth—unaware that her mother, Anne Boleyn, has been stripped of her title, accused of treason and subsequently beheaded—Weir continues onward at a pace that is not so much leisurely as highly detailed (Anne Boleyn had a sixth finger) and thoroughly imagined (it’s not until a third of the way through the book that Elizabeth reaches the age of 13).

Weir takes the point of view of an omniscient narrator and employs dialogue stylized for the period. She attempts to give the reader a complete portrait of the times, showing Elizabeth spending most of her days in the care of her governess, Kat, visiting her father at court only occasionally, and quickly learning that she, too, would like to be king one day. At the age of 4, “she had already decided that, when she grew up, she was going to do whatever she pleased and not let anyone order her about.”

But as Elizabeth ages, so too does the court intrigue, and political maneuverings increase in degree and complication. Brought to bear on her childhood declarations that she will never marry are newfound sexual stirrings. Her father dies, the throne passes to her younger brother, and the jockeying for power among the late king’s advisers begins anew. Religion intrudes, and questions about the importance of duty over desire are raised. The history here is never soft. Accurate yet affecting, it is the structure upon which Weir lays her novel, the means by which she tells the story of a child grown into a young woman, a woman determined to be queen.