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7 opere 563 membri 11 recensioni

Sull'Autore

Stephen Alford is the author of the acclaimed biography Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He taught for fifteen years at the University of Cambridge, where he was a senior lecturer in the Faculty of History and a fellow of King's mostra altro College. He is now a professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds. mostra meno

Opere di Stephen Alford

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Informazioni generali

Sesso
male
Breve biografia
Biography

I studied at the University of St Andrews, where I was taught by John Guy, before moving in 1997 to the University of Cambridge as a British Academy Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of History and a Junior Research Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. In 1999 I was elected Ehrman Senior Research Fellow in History at King’s College, Cambridge. I stayed at King’s as a Fellow when I joined the Cambridge Faculty of History as an Assistant Lecturer, a Lecturer and finally a Senior Lecturer. In 2000 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I left Cambridge to come to Leeds as Professor of Early Modern British History in September 2012.
Research interests

My principal interests lie in the history of politics, political thought and monarchy in sixteenth-century Britain. For a long time I have worked on the life and career of William Cecil, first Baron of Burghley (1520-98), the most powerful man in Elizabethan England. I am interested also in Tudor espionage, commerce, diplomacy and travel literature, Anglo-Russian relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Tudor and Jacobean London.
Current research projects

My main research interest at the moment is the history of the City of London in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I am also revisiting the life and reign of King Edward VI in a short study to be published by Penguin.
Publications

My doctoral dissertation at St Andrews was published in the series of Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558-1569 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Cambridge University Press also published my second book, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI, in 2002. Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (Yale University Press, 2008) was shortlisted for the Marsh Biography Award. My latest book, The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, which was published in 2012 by Allen Lane/Penguin Press in the United Kingdom and Bloomsbury Press in the United States, was one of the Books of the Year in both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/2...

Utenti

Recensioni

I didn't make it all the way through.
However, I did enjoy what I was reading - mainly I wasn't in the mood for this type of book.
Scholarly, drawing from primary sources (letters, ledgers, etc) but without quoting them in minute detail.
I felt almost out of my depth, like I needed to have read another history of Elizabeth I's reign shortly before reading this book so that I could catch all of the allusions to political events.
 
Segnalato
zizabeph | 9 altre recensioni | May 7, 2023 |
This is a well-written book so it deserves four stars. However, you may not wish to read it. If you are hoping for details on the craft of espionage you'll come away dissatisfied. This is maybe interesting reading for those with an interest in the Tudors or Elizabeth specifically. There's also a bit more here on the divide between Catholicism and the Church of England explained than maybe a standard biography might have had.

If you are hoping to learn about ciphers, decoys, double agents or the like, this isn't the place. Perhaps this book, instead of being called the Watchers should have been titled The Haters. The interest here is far less about how Elizabeth's detractors were defeated but why they existed in the first place. And you know, T Swizzle is rally hot right now so any tie in to her songs is going to really bring the money.… (altro)
 
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ednasilrak | 9 altre recensioni | Jun 17, 2021 |
Elizabeth I reigned for a total of 45 years in England, and the stability she gave as head of state gave us the Golden Age of wealth and greater self-assurance as a nation. The final Tudor monarch saw a cultural advances too, this being the time of Shakespeare and military confidence on the high seas. However, the Europeans saw her very differently; as daughter of Anne Boylen, Henry VIII's second wife, she was considered a bastard and Protestant heretic by catholic Europe. Following her denouncement by the Pope various European rulers prepared plans to dispose her, replacing her with Mary. The event that most people are aware of is the almost invasion by The Spanish Armada, but throughout her reign she was protected by a team of loyal subjects.

These men were a motley bunch of ambassadors, codebreakers, and confidence-men and spies who used all sort of covert and overt methods to counter the catholic threat. Infiltrators were sent to the continent to ingratiate themselves with the church, uncovering conspiracies both real and imagined, identified and followed gentlemen who were plotting the overthrow of their Queen. The network tracked priests entering the country under cover, intercepted and deciphered almost all correspondence between suspects in England and their contacts in France, Spain and Italy and neutered the threat that hung over the crown.

Drawing on documents from archive and collections, Alford shines a light into this dark and shadowy time of history. The narrative details tense searches across the countryside looking for specific people who were perceived to be a threat to the crown. Traitors who were convicted, sometimes only on hearsay and confessions uttered under torture on the rack, were condemned in horrific ways to die. It is an interesting account of those involved in keeping their monarch safe from all the assassination attempts and plots, but at times was fairly complicated as he details all the people involved in these plots. Worth reading though for those that like their Tudor history.
… (altro)
 
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PDCRead | 9 altre recensioni | Apr 6, 2020 |
In this book Stephen Alford gives a detailed account of the men who chose (or were occasionally *persuaded*) to protect Elizabeth's life and government during the tumultuous years of her reign; far from being the Golden Age we often associate with it, the years between Elizabeth's accession in 1558 to her death in 1603 were anything but stable, characterised by disease, famine and religious upheaval, set against a backdrop of a divided Europe.

Most of this history was, out of necessity, kept secret, and the author has extracted the details from a variety of documentary and other sources. The result is not entirely successful: the chronology and the prose aren't as clear as they should be in a book like this, which made keeping track of the multitude of characters even more difficult, although it didn't help that I took nearly four weeks to finish the book (not because it didn't hold my interest, but because I had to do a lot of overtime that month). While the first part is filled with interesting facts, the pace doesn't really pick up until Mary Queen of Scots appears on the scene, and even then the account often reads like a spy's travelogue and who did/said what when, a cohesive narrative it is not, and there are several questions that are left open (what was the significance of Francis Throckmorton's velvet-covered casket that was smuggled out of the house and handed to the Spanish ambassador?).

Though it is clear from the outset that the author intends to shine a spotlight on the men in the shadows and those in government who handled them, it still came as something of a surprise that some of the wider implications were not sufficiently dealt with in my opinion; we hear of the passing of the Act for the Queen's Surety that in the end made it possible to arrest and execute Mary Queen of Scots, and how the government approved of the use of torture to extract information, but I felt there was little else that explored the prevailing mood among England's general population (did the paranoia experienced by Elizabeth's closest advisers extend all the way to the common man and woman on the street?). Where the author is successful, though, is in conveying how dangerously close Elizabeth came to a premature and violent death by describing the numerous plots to invade England and attempts on her life; it's quite miraculous (and no doubt due to the vigilance of the loyal advisers around her) that they never amounted to anything, and Elizabeth died of natural causes in her bed at the age of 69.

An interesting but flawed book that will surely benefit from a second reading.
… (altro)
½
 
Segnalato
passion4reading | 9 altre recensioni | Jun 30, 2018 |

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Statistiche

Opere
7
Utenti
563
Popolarità
#44,421
Voto
½ 3.5
Recensioni
11
ISBN
28

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