Customer Reviews

The Queen's Bastard

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I loved this novel! Robin Maxwell is a master stroyteller and has triumphed with this book. I started reading the book on Thursday and finished it Sunday, as I could not put it down! I like her premise, the plot is intelligent, her characterizations of all the historical characters is right on--I was impressed. I agree with the other reviewer who would like another novel on the further adventures of Arthur Dudley. I have immersed myself in the history of Tudor England since age 8. I have read every intelligent historical novel I could get my hands on about the period. Plus, I have a master's degree in British history. So I consider myseslf an expert on the subject. This novel was hands-down one of the best I have ever read.

I love books that take history and suggest something that is not what the history books tell us, yet is presented in such a plausible manner that you cannot help but think, "What if?" "The Queen's Bastard" is such a book, suggesting as it does that a love child was born to the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I.

I found the story fascinating, moving as it does through so many historical settings and describing them as I might have seen them then. I adore the descriptions of people, fashions, customs, meals, all of which pull the book together and enmesh the reader in the world of Elizabethan England.

I confess, my favorite summer activity is going to Renaissance Faires, and I adore the Elizabethan period, so perhaps my viewpoint is skewed. But if you are the same, grab this book for a good read, though you may wish to start with its predecessor, and read the two straight through.

Happy reading!

What if Queen Elizabeth had had a child with her lover, Robert Dudley? Robin Maxwell draws upon this question as she creates the character Arthur Dudley, born a (...) to the Queen and switched at birth by a lady-in-waiting. Arthur grows up in the gentrified household of the Southern family, leading a life like that of any other English boy: riding horses, going to school, and having all kinds of troubles of his own. As an adult he participates in the wars in the Netherlands, fighting against the Spanish, witnessing years of bloody battle. It is not until he is an adult, however, that Arthur learns who his real parents were, and his "memoirs" tell us about his life leading up to that momentous occasion.

This realistic novel places the life and times of Queen Elizabeth into a clear, definitive, albeit fictional, focus. Many authors have tried to recreate Elizabeth as a person, and not many can do it as easily as Robin Maxwell did here. Life at court is visibly rendered, as are the scenes in battle that Arthur Dudley witnesses.

Tudor England is fascinating, and Elizabeth a worthy heroine. Whether Elizabeth was indeed the Virgin Queen is open for debate, but almost 500 years of speculation about her supposed affair with her horseman, Robin Dudley, lends a plausible air to this novel. Maxwell has done a deft job rendering Elizabeth as both majestic and at times ridiculous. Reading her interactions with her court, her relatives, and her supposed lover are an exercise in devouring truly brilliant prose. Maxwell has done well capturing Elizabeth's reign, including bits of Philip II's hatred and lust for the Virgin Queen, the troubles in the Netherlands, and the damnable Mary Queen of Scots.

The only false note here comes from the passages of Elizabeth's supposed son by Dudley, Arthur. There has been exploration and speculation regarding any illegitimate children the Queen may have had, so the idea of Arthur as her son allows a suspension of disbelief. However, the passages with Arthur as narrator are extremely dull and quite pointless. After the first few, I skipped over them entirely, and found that they were recapped almost in their entirety in the following chapters.

While "The Queen's Bastard" is a great read, and the subject has a distinct air of possibility, it is too long by almost 100 pages. Those pages from Arthur's journal are just unnecessary. Nevertheless, I did enjoy reading this novel, and am currently reading the concluding book in Maxwell's trilogy "Virgin." I heartily recommend this novel, but do take it with a grain of salt.

I have about fifty more pages until I am done with this book; it's taken me more than a month to get to this place! I love historical fiction and devour anything about English history, so after reading "The Secret Dairy of Anne Boleyn" I couldn't wait to get my hands on this sequel (the possibility of an illegitimate royal heir is intriguing). I'm having a hard time finding the desire to read on to the ending; at this point it has dragged on so long that I just don't care. I have to agree with other reviews when they state that the chapters devoted to Arthur Dudley's dairy entries are boring. The endless descriptions of war, spying and fighting (approximately the last quarter of the book)are monotonous and just plain uninteresting. I so eagerly look forward to the chapters devoted to Elizabeth, but there are few towards the end and they almost all have to do with war. And one chapter had something to do with a weird supernatural pagan ceremony encouraging Elizabeth and Robin Dudley to have "relations" for the sake of saving England in the war-bizarre and unnecessary!! It started out well enough, but has turned into a slow-moving war epic - not my cup of tea. On a positive note, as inaccurate as many say this story is, I have learned a great deal about English history during this time. And for good measure, I probably will finish those last 50 pages...and then sell the book to a secondhand bookstore!

I enjoyed Robin Maxwell's first book "The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn" and I was excited to learn that a sequel was in the works. However, upon reading this book I was sorely disappointed. The first thing that made my feelings towards this book sour was not the fact that the author stretched and challenged Elizabethan history, but that she did so without considering the character of Elizabeth she had made in her first novel. Elizabeth in "The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn" is headstrong, thoughtful and deep. The Elizabeth you are shown is this book is quarrelsome, selfish and annoying. "Robin" Dudley is also a detestable character once you get down to it. If the whole concept of this book is supposed to be their love the reader should at least like one of the two lovers. But these two characters give you nothing to latch onto from the very start of "The Queen's Bastard." Then we must meet this "bastard" in the form of Arthur who does very little to make you interested in the direction any of the three take in life. The diary entries are assigned to Arthur in this book with interjections of the story of Elizabeth and Robin. These entries are boring and go on endlessly without any reason to enjoy reading them. The plot of Elizabeth and Robin is so cheaply written it belongs in a grocery store aisle. If this wasn't bad enough you can't follow the plot well enough to build any kind of motivation or characterization for Elizabeth, Robin or Arthur. I could not and would not finish this book after I read a passage of several pages about Arthur's butt being sore. The gross and strangely worded sex scenes didn't hurt this book; it was already beyond all measures of a novel gone wrong. I cannot guarantee that you will not like this book but don't expect it to measure up in any way to "The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn" and do not look to this book for anything other than a romance novel of a slightly (and I must stress slightly) historic kind. Robin Maxwell can and has done much, much better than "The Queen's Bastard."

I read this book before i read any others in the series. I could not put it down from the moment i opened it! in fact, once finished, i went and bought every other book i could find by Robin Maxwell. She had me believing that this bastard child existed through the whole thing. I highly recommend it to anyone whether they have a specific interest in the period or not, it is an excellent book.

"The Queen's Bastard" proposes a truly surprising theory - that Elizabeth I and Robin Dudley had an illegitimate son. It's clear from the beginning that an exhaustive amount of research has been done, especially since Maxwell manages to make the secret pregnancy and birth of said illegitimate son actually seem plausible. The book alternates between first-person diary entries written by Arthur, the son, and omniscient third-person sections about Elizabeth and Robin. It's surprising, interesting, and original.

The problem is Elizabeth. Maxwell's version of the queen has none of the charisma, the talent, or in fact, the brains that we know Elizabeth possessed. Instead, we get a queen who is stupidly capricious, ridiculously volatile, and just plain irritating. She doesn't change, either. From start to finish, she has not learned a thing from her early days of indiscretion. It's all well and good for her to throw some tantrums - Elizabeth did have the redhead's temper. But by the twentieth hissy fit in a hundred pages, it's neither effective nor interesting.

Robin comes off well in the beginning, but he just gets more annoying as the book progresses. By the end, when he finally accepts that Elizabeth will never marry him, he does manage to salvage what remains of his dignity, but you hardly care anymore.

Arthur is the real center of the book, probably because his entire life, except for a brief interview with the king of Spain, is fictional. He's the real mystery, the one we know nothing about. About halfway through, I found myself practically skipping over the Elizabeth/Robin sections to get to the Arthur parts. Maxwell does an excellent job with him, creating a life that, while improbable, is believable within the book's world. (He also gets a star moment during the Armada's invasion of England that had me in stitches!)

This book left me feeling torn. On the one hand, I would love to believe that Arthur Dudley was who he claimed to be - on the other hand, to do that, and buy into the book's proposition, I would have to believe in Maxwell's Elizabeth and Dudley - and they are so unappealing by the end that it is impossible.

I realize this book is fiction, but that it MAY have some basis in fact (due to some slight mentionings of Arthur Dudley in other biographical information). However, I thought this book was very well written, a good sequel to "the Secret Diary," as it mentions the diary throughout the book.

I did think that the battles at the end just drug on & on...I just wanted to get to the meat of the story. The author did leave the ending open enough (I thought) to write another follow up book on the rest of Arthur's life.

All in all, a good read & I would highly recommend it

Many "serious" biographies would make you believe that only they tell the truth and that there are no holes in history. Well there are holes, and this novel uses them. It tells the story of Arthur Dudley, bastard of Elizabeth 1st and Leicester.

The author has done an excellent job of this in this novel to make a very interesting alternative history story. She also provides what 'facts' she was able to dig up on the real Arthur Dudley....because this man really existed, even if some of the details of the story are a fabrication.