Heretic Queen: Elizabeth I and the Wars Of Religion by Susan Ronald

 3.5 Stars

I did enjoy this look in to my preferred Historical Period and the dissection of how interwoven Religion and Politics were.  It could be argues, and in some ways is in this book, that the greatest Political Power during this period was not England, France or Spain but actually The Vatican.  Certainly I had not realised just how much the Catholic Countries bent the knee to the whims of The Pope and followed his orders.  Whilst I knew that Catholicism has a stranglehold I did not realise just how pervasive it was.  Silly me!

It does seem to run in a loop at times though and we do go over some events several times from the same perspective in different parts of the book.  That made it a little bit of a tough read at times because it felt a little bit like Groundhog Day and I did nearly put it down a couple of times but I persevered with it.  Overall I am glad I did as it did give me some insights in to the period that I had not previously thought about and did go some way to explain some of the decisions that Elizabeth made, albeit at the behest and manipulation of her advisors.

Not a light read by any means and although the style of writing is accessible I would definitely think you need an interest in the period as a whole and not just in perhaps England's most charismatic Monarch.  Whilst it does spend a lot of time centering on Elizabeth there is also a lot of information about Holland and Spain and also the Religious persecutions in this period both domestically and abroad.  It certainly casts Elizabeth in a bit of a rosy light that I am not sure is entirely warranted but as there is only so much documentation available to base our "take" on this woman from this is only to be expected.

This review has been a long time coming.  I actually read this book between the 25th May to 10th June so my memory is a bit foggy about all the plot lines.  Fortunately, I have a notebook where I jot some initial thoughts on the book and an overall ranking so between the book blurb and that I did have a reasonable handle on what I thought at the time of reading.