In The Favourite, Mathew Lyons strips away the myth - and the self-mythologising - to find Sir Walter Ralegh in the one role in which his contemporaries knew him best: the courtier who could win the attention - and the heart - of Elizabeth I, while also being the 'most hated man in England'.
Using first-hand accounts, Lyons uncovers the maze of ambition, desire and amorality in which Ralegh lived before he rose to fame - a brutal Elizabethan world riven with crime and corruption and riddled with traitors and spies.
- ISBN10 1780336586
- ISBN13 9781780336589
- Publish Date 21 June 2012 (first published 3 March 2011)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 4 March 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
- Imprint Constable
- Format Paperback
- Pages 416
- Language English