Motherless. Locked up. Sexually abused. Traumatic childhood that forged a most... formidable Queen

Young Elizabeth: Princess, Prisoner, Queen Nicola Tallis Michael O’Mara €30

In September 1533, Henry VIII was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the male heir he had long wanted. His second wife, Anne Boleyn, was about to give birth and the king, according to one contemporary account, had been assured ‘by the report of his physicians and astrologers that the Lady would bear a son.’ They were all wrong. The baby was a girl, who grew up to be one of the most famous and formidable monarchs in English history. Nicola Tallis’s colourful, fast-paced book tells the story of Elizabeth I’s life in the years before she became queen. It’s an extraordinary saga, filled with turns of fortune that could just as easily have ended with her execution as with her accession to the throne.

Despite his disappointment over her sex, Henry was initially a proud father. Elizabeth was made his heir, displacing her much older half-sister Mary, daughter of his discarded wife Katherine of Aragon. She was provided with an entourage of women to look after her. This included four ‘rockers’, whose main job was to take turns in rocking the royal baby’s cradle. Ironically, given her later views on the subject, there was even talk of a future marriage to one of the sons of Francois

I, the French king. All was to change with the downfall of her mother when Elizabeth was still a toddler. Anne Boleyn was accused of adultery and even incest with her own brother. She was almost certainly innocent of the worst charges but was executed in 1536.

In the wake of her mother’s death, Elizabeth was no longer to be styled a princess and was ‘declared bastard’. There were even rumours about her parent age, and whispers that she was the daughter not of the King but of one of her mother’s alleged lovers. The precocious child was aware of her change in status. ‘How haps it yesterday Lady Princess and today but Lady Elizabeth?’ she is said to have asked an attendant. She was now motherless and illegitimate. After her father’s swift marriage to Jane Seymour and the birth of her half-brother, the future Edward VI, Elizabeth fell even further down the royal pecking-order. As Tallis puts it, ‘in terms of precedence she was very much at the bottom of the hierarchy’. Even so, she was given a significant role to play in Edward’s christening. She carried the chrisom, a white robe to place on the baby as a symbol of the cleansing of its sins by baptism. Just four years old, Elizabeth had herself to be carried in the ceremony by the new queen’s brother.

Elizabeth proved a remarkable child. Her intellectual ability was undoubted. She excelled ‘in all manner of virtue and knowledge of learning’, according to one contemporary. By the time she reached her teens, she was mistress of several languages. She had a love of music and could ‘sing sweetly and play handsomely on the lute’.

Yet the way in which her father treated and disposed of his wives, and her own fluctuating fortunes, must have scarred her psychologically. As Tallis points out, she ‘gained and lost three stepmothers in less than six years’. It is as well that she formed a loving relationship with Katherine Parr, Henry’s last wife.

After the king’s death, Katherine remarried and, for a time, the teenage Elizabeth shared a home with her and her new husband, Thomas Seymour. Here she had to contend with Seymour’s inappropriate advances. He was seen to smack her ‘on the buttocks’ and ‘strove to have kissed her in her bed’. On one occasion, Katherine Parr ‘came suddenly upon them, where they were all alone (he having her in his arms)’.

After Katherine’s death in 1548, it was said Seymour planned to marry Elizabeth – and rumours circulated (‘highly improbable’, according to Tallis) that she had had a child by him. These manoeuvres were seen as an attempt to seize power and, therefore, treason against the boy king, Elizabeth’s half-brother, Edward VI. Seymour’s supposed involvement with Elizabeth put her at risk of being dragged into his treason, but she survived. Seymour didn’t. He was executed in March 1549.

During the reign of Mary, who came to the

‘In terms of precedence, Elizabeth was very much at the bottom of the hierarchy’

‘Katherine Parr came suddenly upon them, when they were alone, he having her in his arms’

throne when the sickly Edward died aged only 15, Elizabeth’s position continued to be perilous. The focus for Protestant hopes while Catholic Mary’s rule grew bloodier, she could not help but be a threat to her half-sister. In 1554, she was imprisoned in the Tower of London under suspicion of complicity in a failed coup against the regime. ‘If sufficient evidence to put her to death were not discovered,’ a supporter of Mary remarked, then he saw ‘no better means of keeping her quiet than to marry her to a foreigner’. Given what she had witnessed of her father’s marriage career, it is scarcely surprising that, then and later, Elizabeth showed little inclination to wed anyone, English or foreign.

Finally released from the Tower into house arrest at Woodstock, she survived the rest of Mary’s reign but continued to fear further persecution or even assassination. However, with her sister unable to give birth (two supposed pregnancies proved, humiliatingly, to be phantom ones), she was increasingly recognised as Mary’s heir. Mary died in November 1558 and Elizabeth, in what Tallis calls ‘a moment that had once seemed an impossibility’, came to the throne.

Jane Dormer, who knew her well, once wrote of the new queen that, ‘To write all that might be said of her would fill many volumes.’ In just one, Nicola Tallis has written a gripping account of Elizabeth’s journey to the crown.