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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

But at just twenty, Elizabeth had already learned the value of dissimulation and procrastination, and now she deployed both to the best of her considerable skill. In September, knowing that Mary was increasingly unhappy with her failure to attend Mass, she sought a private audience with the queen. Weeping, she knelt at her sister’s feet and begged

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

She signalled her modesty and virtue by wearing such plain and sober gowns that the king approvingly called her his ‘sweet sister Temperance’.10 The effect was not only to distance herself from the scandal that had threatened to engulf her after the fall of Thomas Seymour, but also to distinguish herself from her elder half-sister Mary, whose

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:

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

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

But sovereignty did not bring safety, and those same instincts – to watch and wait, to choose her friends carefully and her enemies more carefully still – continued to guide the new queen as the threats to her person and her kingdom mutated and multiplied. The experience of insecurity, it turned out, would shape one of the most remarkable monarchs

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.