Until their half-brother Edward had children of his own, their place in the line of succession made their marriages a matter of intense political significance. There had never yet been a reigning queen of England, and the prospect was an alarming one: ‘man is the head of woman’, St Paul had declared,4 which meant that female rule was both

the enigma she presents in the historical record. Her intellect is clear in every surviving word she ever wrote or spoke. Infinitely less clear is the emotional burden or subtext of what she said, hidden as it always was behind the carapace of a carefully constructed public self. But this unreadability is not a trick of the historical light:

Until two days before she died, Anne Boleyn had been Queen of England. On 17 May the Archbishop of Canterbury had pronounced her three-year marriage to Henry VIII null and void. It was an annulment which made a legal nonsense of the trumped-up charges of adultery on which she had just been tried and convicted, but so clear was it that the king

Before she had caught the old king’s eye, Katherine Parr – who was already by then twice widowed – had hoped to marry Thomas Seymour, younger brother of Henry’s third wife, Jane, and of the new Lord Protector. Thomas was handsome, dashing and relentlessly ambitious. It now became clear that Katherine’s affection for him was undimmed. His attraction

… it is all the hurt that evil men can do to noble women and princes, to spread abroad lies and dishonourable tales of them, and that we of all princes that be women are subject to be slandered wrongfully of them that be our adversaries, other hurt they cannot do to us. Catherine de’ Medici, 1572

Northumberland’s chosen queen was in place; but, despite the duke’s best efforts, Edward’s sisters proved much harder to control. Mary had been waiting at Hunsdon, twenty miles north-east of London, where the paucity of officially sanctioned information about the king’s condition was matched only by the flow of rumour and speculation, along with

From the summer of 1543 a fourth stepmother, the kind and clever Katherine Parr, began to facilitate a more workable approximation of functional family life for the three royal siblings. But the violent riptides of politics at their father’s court were never far away, and Elizabeth had neither the unique status of her brother Edward as heir to the

What we know, for example, about her response to the loss of her mother is this. She never once, at least so far as the extant sources can tell us, uttered Anne’s name. She lionized the father who was responsible for her mother’s execution. Yet, when she secured the degree of control over her environment to make it possible, she chose to surround

Northumberland had miscalculated badly. Few of the dead king’s subjects were yet as devoted to the reformed religion as Edward himself – and even fewer, it turned out, devoted enough to overturn the succession of Henry VIII’s elder daughter in favour of an almost unknown teenage girl. Not only that, but control of the administrative levers of power