Excellent for what it is, not quite so for what Guy intended it to be. His aim was to portray Elizabeth with fresh insights that changed more traditional ways of looking at her, particularly the way she has been represented in popular culture. It is undeniably true that movies like Elizabeth and Essex, The Virgin Queen, Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age have permanently shaped the way that Elizabeth I has been viewed (by the public at least), although somewhat oddly Guy focuses upon Fire Over England. He also mentions Glenda Jackson's towering performance in Elizabeth R. All of these represented the hagiography that grew up around her thanks to historians like Neale, although the elements of the legend were cemented within thirty years of her death by Camden's Annales.
I am not sure Guy has presented enough evidence to contradict the hagiography. If anything, his work reinforces the estimation in which Elizabeth can be held as a ruler, if not as a personality. She was essentially interested in two things, foreign policy and the Church. Guy is persuasive in debunking her fabled "marriage" to her average subjects as something that existed on anything but a theoretical level. The 1590s were excruciating in terms of harvests, and Elizabeth did nothing to alleviate the sufferings endured by commoners. Indeed, her taxation increased at the same time prices rose. Her view was strictly hierarchical, with herself at the top of the heap. This also caused her to be antipathetic to Puritans (not enough deference), Roman Catholics (ditto, with the allegiance to the Pope thrown in) and any attempt by ordinary citizens to limit the power of the Queen in terms of such things as granting ruinous monopolies to courtiers. However, in his epilogue, Guy admits that she was successful in (mostly) keeping England out of ruinous war. It is unpleasant, but not news, to read of her ingratitude to her soldiers and sailors after the Armada and sorties into France and Holland. Guy drily records again and again that the Queen did not stint herself on any significant level. At the very end of the book he uses Ralegh's phrase "she was a lady surprised by time" as a coda, then adds his explanation --- she ruled at a time when her concept of her authority's base had begun to be questioned. But surely most of her reign passed before this arose? It probably did gall Elizabeth Tudor that some of the hotheads who surrounded her --- Essex and Ralegh most prominently --- failed to take her seriously as a military leader because of course she could not take the field. Again, Guy gives numerous examples of the advice with which she peppered them, most of which they ignored. Guy has to admit that the majority of it was sound. Only a lunatic could have maintained that the English should have attempted to take and hold a coastal Spanish city as a port from which further attacks could have been launched. It is to Elizabeth's credit that she refused to play the role as arbiter of the Reformation and Keeper of the Military Flame for Protestants. She would have bankrupted England, as Philip II did Spain on the other side.
So Elizabeth pretty much stays the same figure. None of the material Guy has uncovered (to his credit) seriously alters her status as incredibly good at her job.
What The Forgotten Years does accomplish is provide a good look at the period of the reign most often ignored. Guy uses the end of her menstrual cycle as a liberating moment; she was no longer hostage to her council's insistence that she marry (although he fails to really confront the fact that she had ignored it when she might have had children) and could begin to really rule as herself. It would probably be more correct to date this from the execution of Mary Stuart and the following year's defeat of the Armada, when her personal stock was riding high. Guy relentlessly chronicles how stressful the last full decade of the reign was, with it effectively ending with the fall of Essex.
The writing is excellent, and the book is a pleasure to read. Recommended for anyone with an interest in her or the general period. (less)
