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.

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

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

Over the last five years Elizabeth had outwardly conformed, more or less, to the Catholicism her sister had restored in England. But her personal history – and, in the weeks since her accession, the use of English in parts of the coronation Mass, the queen’s withdrawal from that service during the elevation of the host, and the fact that only the

‘Rob, I am afraid you will suppose by my wandering writings that a midsummer moon hath taken large possession of my brains this month,’ she wrote.

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

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.

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 bludgeoning familiarity of the narrative of Henry and his six wives tends, now, to numb our imaginative response to the terrors of an age when the toxic combination of a king’s monstrous ego and profound religious division made politics a blood sport, on a scale previously unknown in England outside the havoc of civil war.