In the court of Elizabeth I, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is favoured above all the noblemen of England. It is rumoured that the Queen may chose him for her husband, but Leicester has secretly married the beautiful Amy Robsart. Fearing ruin if this were known, he keeps his lovely young wife a virtual prisoner in an old country house. Meanwhile Leicester's manservant Varney has sinister designs on Amy, and enlists an alchemist to help him further his evil ambitions. Brilliantly recreating the splendour and pageantry of Elizabethan England, with Shakespeare, Walter Ralegh and Elizabeth...

Find Out What Scott Really WroteGoing back to the original manuscripts, a team of scholars has uncovered what Scott originally wrote and intended his public to read before errors, misreadings and expurgations crept in during production. Anne of Geierstein (1829) is set in Central Europe in the fifteenth century, but it is a remarkably modern novel, for the central issues are the political instability and violence that arise from the mix of peoples and the fluidity of European boundaries. With Anne of Geierstein, Scott concludes the unfinished historical business of Q uentin Durward, working...

Count Robert of Paris, condemned by Scott's printer as 'altogether a failure', was later prepared for publication by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, and his publisher Robert Cadell. What appeared was a bowdlerised, tamed and tidied version of what Scott had written and dictated. This edition, the first to have returned to the manuscript and to the many surviving proofs, realises Scott's original intentions. Scott's last full novel has many roughnesses, but it also challenges the susceptibilities of his readers more directly than any other and in that lay its fault in the eyes of the lesser...

Count Robert of Paris, condemned by Scott's printer as 'altogether a failure', was later prepared for publication by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, and his publisher Robert Cadell. What appeared was a bowdlerised, tamed and tidied version of what Scott had written and dictated. This edition, the first to have returned to the manuscript and to the many surviving proofs, realises Scott's original intentions. Scott's last full novel has many roughnesses, but it also challenges the susceptibilities of his readers more directly than any other and in that lay its fault in the eyes of the lesser...

An example of pre-professional history, the Tales of a Grandfather chronicles the French royalty's dynastic concerns and principal military-political engagements with foreign powers from 1412 to 1512. Scott's narrative opens with Henry V's preparations for war with France and an account of the persisting rivalry between the houses of Orleans and of Burgundy. Of particular interest is Scott's description of the murder of John the Fearless at Montereau in 1419 and his tracing of that event's disastrous effects through the fifteenth century. Scott drew on standard sources, but the interpretation...

The Siege of Malta and Bizarro are Scott's final works, written in Malta and Italy at the end of 1831 and the beginning of 1832. Although extracts from The Siege of Malta have been published, this is the first complete edition. Bizarro has not been available in print until now. The Siege of Malta begins as a novel but ends as a historical account of the extraordinary defence of Malta by the Order of St John of Jerusalem and their Maltese helpers against much larger Muslim forces. It is an epic tale of endurance, resulting in inevitable defeat for some of the Knights, and for the rest, in the...