Legacy, for me, was historical fiction gold: a book I loved as a teenager which was just as wonderful second time around. It’s a cradle-to-grave retelling of the life of Elizabeth I, and it’s 647 pages of class.
The prologue introduces Elizabeth as a troubled young princess, imprisoned in the Tower of London by her sister Mary and facing possible execution as a traitor:
She sat on a low stone window-seat, wrapped in a cloak against the creeping cold and, like the solitary stone pillar that supported the roof, she might have been carved in that pose out of stone. She sat staring out of the window into the courtyard below, straining her eyes to see the yawning cavern that was the Tower’s main gateway.
The gate was her lodestone. Night and day it drew her to the stone-hooded window, and there was a starkly simple reason for her obsession. She had not entered beneath that archway and had even less hope of leaving by it. Through Traitor’s Gate she had come to this ‘very narrow place’, a grim fortress which had swallowed up so many lives – one of them, her mother’s.
The story then backtracks to the meeting of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, and follows Elizabeth through her turbulent childhood. If you know the story of these years, you know there’s enough material here for several books, and as a result, a good deal of the first hundred pages is narrative. But we get more of Elizabeth’s point of view (the book is multiple/omniscient third-person) as she gets old enough to start making her own decisions. The book really started moving for me at the point when she receives an anonymous warning that her brother Edward VI has died and has to decide whom to support as his heir: her Catholic sister Mary or the Protestant candidate, Lady Jane Grey:
She stared into the flickering candles, while her mind galloped forward into the blind night, seeking desperately for intuition to guide her through the pitfalls now gaping at her feet.
Everything depended on Mary, and Mary was a dark, untried horse. Would she give up at the first sign of danger in meek surrender; would she flee to the armed support of her uncle the Emperor Charles V, the mightiest power in the Christian world; or would she stand and fight doggedly to the death?
Elizabeth privately suspected the last course. Mary didn’t lack for courage, and when she believed she was in the right she could be as stubborn and mulish as ever her father had been. So – unquestionably Mary would fight. But would she win? Who in this largely Protestant land would now support a Catholic claimant? Northumberland controlled the Council, the soldiers and the ports; and on any purely logical assessment of the facts he must win with ease. Mary had no hope at all, save for the goodwill of the English people. Fickle as the toss of a coin, whose side would they come down upon now?
Constantly under pressure to declare her loyalties, frequently faced with the choice of sacrificing either her life or a future as Queen of England, Elizabeth develops the political skills of avoidance and prevarication which will serve her so well during her lengthy reign. Susan Kay weaves a compelling narrative out of a welter of political history while never losing sight of her theme. Anne Boleyn’s legacy to Elizabeth is twofold: the charisma which wins her followers and the dark past Elizabeth never truly escapes. Kay’s Elizabeth is flirtatious, wayward, feminine, intelligent, manipulative and imbued with the steeliest of determination. But we also see her more vulnerable side: her illnesses, doubts and fears, which get a stronger grip on her as her reign draws to its close. Her relationships with the men in her life (Thomas Seymour, Robert Dudley and the Earl of Essex) and her close political partnership with William Cecil are fully explored, and while Elizabeth is shown to be a deeply emotional woman, realism is blended with romanticism.
Legacy is the story of one of history’s most fascinating women, told with passion and authority – a true classic.
I bought my own copy of Legacy.
Tags: elizabeth i, legacy, susan kay
This is how books were supposed to be written.
I’ll say. What a book! I can’t imagine the amount of research which must have gone into it. But it never bogs the book down – it flows beautifully. There were dozens of bits I wanted to quote.
It’s on my list for December. I bought a lovely old copy that is just begging to be read.
Another one joins the growing backlog… and another one, and another one.
I need to get this one. I have wanted to read it since I first heard of it a few years ago.
Sounds good. I’ll be on the lookout for it in my browsing.
Terrific review as always! This too is one of my favourite fictional treatments of Elizabeth I, and so very readable. I have the new edition waiting for me on Mt. TBR., very glad to see that it hasn’t lost its punch over the years.
Legacy is really one of the best books I’ve ever read about Elizabeth…I loved it years ago, and I love it now…