Sublime

Henry enshrined the ambiguities of his daughters’ histories in statute law. The Act of Succession of 1544 named Mary and Elizabeth as royal heirs to their half-brother Edward, while at the same time Henry continued to insist, in all other contexts, on their bastardy.

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

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

… 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