Alison Plowden

Who was Alison Plowden?

Alison Margaret Chichele Plowden was an English historian and biographer well known for her popular non-fiction about the Tudor period.

She was born at Quetta in India, a descendant of both Edmund Plowden and Henry Chichele. Privately educated, she worked for the BBC as a script editor. She produced the script for the television series Mistress of Hardwick, which won her a Writers' Guild Award for the best educational television series, and several television plays, including Sweet England's Pride, and The Case of Eliza Armstrong.

She later recalled: "A secretary writing scripts was a little like a performing monkey at the BBC - there was a sort of 'Fancy, what a clever little girl' attitude."

In 1970 she decided to leave the BBC to go freelance. Her first book, ‘The Young Elizabeth’, was followed by ‘Danger to Elizabeth’, ‘Marriage With My Kingdom’, about Elizabeth's courtships, and ‘Elizabeth Regina’, which presented the Queen at the height of her powers. Collectively these books became known as Alison Plowden's "Elizabethan Quartet". While working on this series she also published ‘Tudor Women’. After the quartet she wrote ‘Elizabethan England: life in an age of adventure’.