Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen - Hardcover

"The compelling drama of Elizabeth’s life, the traumatic perils she faced as a young woman, the murder of her brothers by Richard III and the later mystery of Perkin Warbeck, are richly presented." (Iain Finlayson The Times)

"A meticulous scholar... Weir sincerely admires her subject, doing honor to an almost forgotten queen" (New York Times)

"The great asset of this book is the combination of the political and the personal... Weir is a fine writer with a wonderful gift for description." (Linda Porter Literary Review)

"Weir has a shrewd sense of what will seize the imagination of the keen historical amateur." (The Independent)

"Weir adheres to the conventional story without giving much weight to new theories, preferring instead to stick with the facts about daily life for a Plantagenet princess-turned-Tudor queen." (Lesley McDowell Herald)

"[Weir] has a good eye for period detail – and her re-creation of the late 15th century domestic and ceremonial world is terrific." (Dan Jones Sunday Times)

"A new perspective...underpinned by the same careful delineation between facts and speculation observed in her biographies." (Independent (Web))

Elizabeth of York would have ruled England, but for the fact that she was a woman. The eldest daughter of Edward IV, at seventeen she was relegated from pampered princess to bastard fugitive, but the probable murders of her brothers, the Princes in the Tower, left Elizabeth heiress to the royal House of York, and in 1486, Henry VII, first sovereign of the House of Tudor, married her, thus uniting the red and white roses of Lancaster and York.

Elizabeth is an enigma. She had schemed to marry Richard III, the man who had deposed and probably killed her brothers, and it is likely that she then intrigued to put Henry Tudor on the throne. Yet after marriage, a picture emerges of a model consort, mild, pious, generous and fruitful. It has been said that Elizabeth was distrusted and kept in subjection by Henry VII and her formidable mother-in-law, Margaret Beaufort, but contemporary evidence shows that Elizabeth was, in fact, influential, and may have been involved at the highest level in one of the most controversial mysteries of the age.

Alison Weir builds an intriguing portrait of this beloved queen, placing her in the context of the magnificent, ceremonious, often brutal, world she inhabited, and revealing the woman behind the myth, showing that differing historical perceptions of Elizabeth can be reconciled.