Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter: The Life of Lady Raleigh, Wife to Sir Walter - Hardcover

From the start of her liaison with Sir Walter Ralegh, Beth Throckmorton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth I, was thrown into the dangerous and violent political world of Elizabethan England. Overlooked by the court and high society, dismissed with no rights as a woman in a fiercely male establishment, she was yet forced to play for high stakes. Her acute intelligence and commercial acumen ensured her survival. Indeed, so great was her success that two monarchs, Elizabeth I and her successor James I, felt threatened by her and sought to destroy her.

But her success in her pursuit of power and wealth, in her struggle for justice and to create a future for herself and her children did not come without its price: her own imprisonment and interrogation, banishment and destitution; the loss of her husband and two of her three children. Her ultimate triumph over adversity is an extraordinarily dramatic and compelling story, till now untold.

As the wife of Sir Walter Ralegh, the Elizabethan adventurer and scholar, Bess Ralegh was to become the driving force behind his spectacular public achievements and the focus of stability in his otherwise turbulent private life. Later, as his widow, she shrewdly ensured his heroic reputation. But Bess Ralegh was more than a foil for her husband. Her independence of spirit had led her to resist marriage at 17 and eight years later to embark upon the passionate and illicit affair with Ralegh.

Her remarkable emotional strength and resilience sustained her throughout successive personal tragedies and political disasters that could and did break others, her husband among them. Each time misfortune struck, she rallied. Twice from scratch, she rebuilt her fortune, taking on her enemies with a courage and resilience that make her a woman as remarkable today as she was in her own time. She is here brought brilliantly to life by Anna Beer in a perceptive and immensely enjoyable biography.