QUEEN ELIZABETH—Katherine Anthony—Knopf ($4). Chosen by the Literary Guild for October.
The Queen. In England a woman once bore a daughter and was later beheaded by the child's father. The woman: prim-mouthed Anne Boleyn. The husband: vain, red-bearded, argumentative Henry VIII. The daughter: Queen Elizabeth.
Small Elizabeth had "great pain with her great teeth," which served as an alibi for her earliest whims. She was greedy for meats, fruits, wines. Masculinity she soon exhibited, studying literary classics as might a boy, fencing with impetuous skill.
When Henry VIII died, Elizabeth, 13, continued living with his widow, Katherine Parr, even after the latter had married Sir Thomas Seymour. Katherine and Seymour tickled Elizabeth awake in the mornings, but the wife finally grew jealous and ousted her. Katherine died in childbirth. Seymour was executed, charged with proposing marriage to Princess Elizabeth without young King Edward's consent. Finding herself under suspicion, the 15-year-old Princess craftily sought to prove herself not pregnant by offering to go "to the court . . . that I may show myself there as I am." Intrigues threw her in jail whence she bombarded Queen Mary Tudor with letters demanding to be released.
Mary's death made Elizabeth queen at 25. The yellow-red ringlets of her hair framed a dead-white face accented by dark, steady eyes. Though she "spat and swore like a man . . . suitors sprang up like mushrooms." Elizabeth, it seems, was ''broadminded about her favorites, but snobbish about her suitors." With one favorite, the brown-skinned Leicester, she was intimate in public but denied that she made similar concessions in private. Ben Jonson opined that she was "incapable of man" and Brantome, always physiologically acute, offered a theory ex- plaining that theory. Elizabeth rejected King Philip of Spain but smiled on France's Alencon, her "Frog-Prince." She did not, however, make any marital history. Sad and jealous when her rival Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, bore a son, she saw to it that Mary was beheaded. Elizabeth wisely liked her pirates, Slaver Hawkins and Explorer Drake, and profited by their booty. When Spanish troop ships sailed toward England she shouted, "I have the heart and stomach of a king." She might have fought herself had not a storm and the English navy destroyed the Armada.
And so the years wore on, this strange, enigmatical woman shaping her plots and counterplots, bolstering all that was vigorous in British government and culture. The tall but awkward Essex, 25, took Leicester's place as Queen's favorite when the Queen was over 50, long nosed, toothless, petulant. A few years later, harassed by his insubordination, she signed his death warrant. Alternating between vicious whim and heroism, no admirer ever brought her a full, rich, personal love. When she died, no man's hand could, by her will, touch her body to embalm it.