That October her favourite godson, Sir John Harington, was taken aback by the unhappy state in which he found the queen. ‘These troubles waste her much’, he told a trusted friend. She was eating very little, and ‘so disordered is all order’ that the mask of Gloriana was slipping: Elizabeth, he said, was rarely changing her clothes from day to day.

the Earl of Essex, who was sulking in a showy display of temper after an argument with the queen. At a meeting with her councillors that June, Elizabeth had refused to agree to Essex’s choice of a new Lord Deputy in rebellion-torn Ireland. In a rage, he had turned his back on her, at which insult Elizabeth had cuffed his ear, only for Essex, in the

Less than a month after that, he was dead, killed by a malarial fever at fifty-six. The man who had been her friend since she was eight years old (as he had once told a French diplomat), who had hoped for so long to be her husband, was gone. When the news came, Elizabeth shut herself in her chamber for days until Cecil ordered that the doors be

Little by little, the Catholic iconography of the queen of heaven was appropriated and brought down to earth in a secularized cult which made of Elizabeth something more than human, an incarnation of her kingdom’s God-given greatness.

‘privateering’ – an elegant euphemism for piracy. In response to protests from the kingdoms whose ships they seized, Elizabeth loudly slapped wrists and quietly took a share of the profits. Spain had been the foremost of their victims, and in 1585, following a proposal from Walsingham ‘for the annoying of the King of Spain’,4 the queen gave

By 1558 nothing was certain. Nothing, after all, was ever certain; but the dawning realization that Mary would never give birth to an heir was gradually transforming Elizabeth’s position. Over five threatening years, she had played a weak hand with skill and impressive sang-froid. Now, for the first time in her political life, she held aces.

The most elaborate and least subtle masque – a debate between Diana, goddess of chastity, and Juno, queen of the gods – was clear in its conclusion: ‘How necessary were for worthy queens to wed, that know you well …’18 This particular worthy queen, however, had vetted the script in advance and refused to sit through it. Instead, she left Kenilworth

The queen’s health was failing. In early November, Mary at last bowed to the inevitable, sending to Hatfield to acknowledge Elizabeth as her heir, and asking her sister to maintain the Catholic faith in England. But no monarch could control a kingdom from beyond the grave. Power was already slipping from Mary’s fading grasp, and Elizabeth, in the

This time, it was not only Elizabeth’s public mask that enabled her to hide in plain sight. Certainly she was mercurial and capricious, blowing hot and cold from moment to moment in her treatment of the suitors who surrounded her. But she was also simply not believed: ‘for that she should wish to remain a maid and never marry is inconceivable’, as