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The Watchers: A Secret History Of The Reign Of Elizabeth I (2012)

by Stephen Alford(Favorite Author)

3.48 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1608190099 (ISBN13: 9781608190096)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Bloomsbury Press

review 1: Alford, an expert on the Elizabethan Cecils, begins this book with an alternate history that terrified the Queen's courtiers--one of the many assassination plots worked, Elizabeth fell to an ambush and the Spanish invaded. That this *didn't* happen was the result of an extraordinary effort by William Cecil, Sir Francis Walsingham and Cecil's son Sir Robert, who (mostly on their own dimes) built a formidable intelligence service across western Europe, from port watchers to double agents at the Vatican. Through these men, some of them animated by religious fervor, some working for cash, the English headed off the Spanish Armada, Mary Stuart and a potential coup by the Earl of Essex via often intricate, frequently brutal means. The really rage-inducing thing about this oth... moreerwise excellent book is that the massive documentation of archival work is at the end in the form of chapter notes, making it all but impossible to connect the juicy tidbits to their sources.
review 2: Look, I realize that history can be a bit dry and that those that are attracted to it can be a bit... um.. staid. Yeah, I'll stick with "staid" that is way less harsh then dull and boring. At any rate, She is one of my favorite topics, couple that with the fact that it is all about the plots against her and this should have been a good, dare i say fun, read. It was not. I enjoyed it, because there was just no way I was not going to with this subject matter. However, I would have like to have liked it more. Alford makes attempted murder kind of mundane. So yeah... unless you will read anything and everything about Good Queen Bess, you should skip this one. less

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