Elizabeth Darracott Wheeler

Although this book is marketed as history, on a cursory examination, I should say this is particularly saccharine and dewy-eyed romance. How very disappointing.
To be continued ... as I force myself to plough through the one chapter I really hoped would be useful.

Okay, I've finished the chapter on Dorothy Stafford, who has been a subject of my research for the last 20 years.

The author has NO CLUE. She also has very poor writing skills. The chapter is riddled with bad grammar and irrelevant material, much of which concerns matters that there is no record of, so how does she know? I'm not just talking about things that there might be a record I haven't found yet; but who would ever record that Dorothy Stafford whispered to the captain of the ship that took her across the Channel that her name was spelled Dorothée with an accent? And why would she bother? Later on, the writer describes her as "calling herself 'Dorothy' now." This demonstrates considerable ignorance of contemporary spelling habits; at that time, people would spell their own name five different ways in one document without turning a hair (viz. Walter Ralegh and William Shakespeare). I am puzzled as to why the writer would think this is important. She appears to imply that this is a disguise; a very thin one, methinks, even in modern times when how you spell your name makes a difference.

Then there is the matter of the Crown Jewels. The author is very impressed that Dorothy legally inherited the Crown Jewels from Anne Boleyn, via Anne's sister Mary, who was Dorothy's husband's first wife. This ignores two important issues: firstly, that when convicted of treason, all Anne Boleyn's possessions were forfeit to the Crown, so any will she made disposing of her property was irrelevant; and secondly, that these are the CROWN JEWELS, folks, so not Anne's to dispose of in the first place. They are the property of the Crown. And even if Anne could have willed her personal property to anyone, she didn't know of Dorothy's existance (she was aged about ten at the time), so anything she willed to Mary would have become the property of Sir William, not of his future wife.

The theme that links the ten subjects of this book together is their support of exploration and colonization of the New World. The tiny seed of this in the chapter on Dorothy Stafford is that she encouraged Bartholomew Gosnold to continue his explorations. The author also states that Dorothy invested in a French expedition to colonize the New World, but gives no supporting references for this, and it occurs during a period when she was financially strapped, so it seems unlikely to me. This does not really seem to be a very big contribution for the subject of the second chapter of the book; surely others did more? The Countess of Warwick comes to mind. Before I got my copy, I had some doubts about it, since I did not know of any such support; my principal fear was that the author might have conflated Dorothy Stafford with her daughter-in-law, Douglas (Sheffield) Stafford, who was a patron and supporter of Richard Hakluyt, who really was a major contributor to the exploration of the New World through his writings.

Most of the references to this chapter are very old; the writer has not apparently consulted any more recent publications. A pity; if she had read Dorothy's father's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, she would know that many of the Stafford family, whom she describes as strongly supporting the Reformation, were actually closet Catholics. Though she cites the Calendars of State Papers in the bibliography, she doesn't seem to have noticed a lot of very useful material there.

I hope that the other nine chapters are not as bad as this one.

P.S. The author has Jane Grey refusing to learn the waltz ... a dance that was not introduced into England until the early 19th century.… (mere)