Elizabeth the Great

Elizabeth Jenkins published Elizabeth the Great in 1958. It is a biography of Elizabeth I rather than a study of her politics, and it works hard to keep the woman herself in view.

The book begins with the dangers of her childhood. She was two years old when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed, and by the age of eight she was saying that she would never marry. A letter from her brother Edward, written after the two children had been separated, shows how early both of them understood the risk they were in; he hoped to visit her soon, he wrote, provided nothing happened to them in the meantime.

Her position stayed uncertain for years. The advisers of her Catholic sister, Mary Tudor, argued that she should be put to death, and one of them described her as greatly to be feared and full of incantations. She outlived Mary and came to the throne all the same, and at her coronation, as the book notes, no bishop could be found to perform the crowning.