Reviews for Memoirs Of The Court Of James The First V1

The average rating for Memoirs Of The Court Of James The First V1 based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-28 00:00:00 Hidenori Onabuchi This is not in Lytton Strachey's crafty and mordant biography but he would have seen this and smirked his head off. When Queen Victoria got married, the joke going round the gentlemen's clubs of Mayfair was about the honeymoon train. It would be setting out from Waterloo, passing through Virginia Water and Bushey until arriving at Maidenhead, leaving Staines behind. (For those unfamiliar with the geography of the Home Counties, these are all small towns in the south of England.) When the British throne is occupied by a female person, there is always a strange story behind it, because, obviously, that should never happen. For there to be a Queen, a lot of men have to have died. How Victoria got to be Queen was really most convoluted and unlikely but she did. She was the great transition between monarchs who actually did something to monarchs who just represented something. I prefer them when they don't do anything at all, like Charles I after he was decapitated. They're the best sort.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-19 00:00:00 Julie Oneill I'm not one of her most ardent admirers but as a conscientious Brit, aware of Her late lamented Majesty's 200th birthday last month, it seemed appropriate to reach for Strachey's volume which I had never managed to read. It is a little gem: highly readable and an excellent overview of the woman who was every inch (63 according to the Royal Archives) a Queen. She probably wouldn't thank me for it, but whenever I think of a Queen, in all the many guises of Queenship, I think easily of Victoria. No one could flounce like her. I loved Strachey's gentle, witty style. (He knew a Queen when he saw one). It is sympathetic but never sycophantic: he paints the royal warts and all. A smothering childhood at the hands of a single, rather insecure parent, probably ill prepared her for the life ahead; her education was lacking, certainly. Queen at 18, bride at 20, mother at 21. Albert, her adored and gifted husband, in effect educated her during their 21 year marriage. The country owes him a great deal. He did much to put the 'Great' into GB and probably killed himself in the process. His widow would not, of course, allow us to forget. There were other men in her life - on and off the national stage- here's a flavour of Strachey: "after the long gloom of her bereavement, after the chill of the Gladstonian discipline, she expanded to the rays of Disraeli's devotion like a flower in the sun." "The strain of charlatanism, which had unconsciously captivated her in Napoleon III, exercised the same enchanting effect in the case of Disraeli". He referred to her as "The Faery", quoting Spenser of course. Lytton Strachey gives outrageous examples of this flattery and the heights of campness their relationship reached. In old age she communicated tirelessly by letter with her vast family, "following with absorbed interest every detail in the lives of the ever-ramifying cousinhood." to quote Strachey again. Interestingly, she was left the bulk of the estate of John Neild, a Miser, who died in 1852. This amounted to £500,000 approx or around £65.5 million in today's money. So, a bit of a financial buffer for her I guess. Recommended. 4*