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Start giftingRival Queens
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreRandom House presents the audiobook edition of Rival Queens by Kate Williams, read by Emma Cunniffe.
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'Scintillating, provocative... An elegant synthesis of royal biography and political thriller.' Daily Telegraph
A Times History Book of the Year
Mary and Elizabeth: cousins, rivals, queens. They allied and fought and plotted - but could never escape their bond... A story which inspired the Hollywood film MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS.
At the end of the Tudor era, two queens ruled one island. But sixteenth-century Europe was a man’s world and powerful voices believed that no woman could govern. All around Mary and Elizabeth were sycophants, spies and detractors who wanted their dominion, their favour and their bodies.
Elizabeth and Mary shared the struggle to be both woman and queen. But the forces rising against the two regnants, and the conflicts of love and dynasty, drove them apart. For Mary, Elizabeth was a fellow queen with whom she dreamed of a lasting friendship. For Elizabeth, Mary was a threat. It was a schism that would end in secret assassination plots, devastating betrayal and, eventually, a terrible final act.
Mary is often seen as a defeated or tragic sovereign, but Rival Queens reveals instead how she attempted to reinvent queenship and the monarchy – in one of the hardest fights in royal history.
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'Brings us a fresh Mary, set in a gloriously rich context, a tragic heroine - irresistibly real and relevant... There isn’t a line wasted in this taut, dramatic and utterly beguiling biography.' Charles Spencer author of Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I
‘The perfect combination of scholarship and storytelling, meticulous research and emotional insight, Kate Williams brings Mary vividly to life in all her complexities and contradictions.’ Kate Mosse, author of The Burning Chambers
'It takes a special kind of historian to turn an old story on its head. Eye-opening, provocative, this is the great rivalry re-imagined for the #MeToo generation.' Lucy Worsley
Kate Williams is an author, social historian and broadcaster. She fell in love with history whilst studying for her BA and DPhil at the University of Oxford and has MAs from Queen Mary and Royal Holloway. She is a Professor of History and appears regularly on television – she recently presented The Stuarts, is the in-house historian and royal expert for CNN, and has appeared on programmes from The Great British Bake Off to election coverage and comedy panel shows. She has written five historical biographies and a series of historical novels, and loves nothing more than a spending her time in dusty archives.