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Read an excerpt from Elizabeth & Leicester:

1. 'Some secret constellation' 1533-1536

The tales of Elizabeth's accession is a famous one. It makes a favourite 'scene from history'. We see the princess walking in the park at Hatfield when the councilors came tto tell her that her sister Mary was dead and she Queen of England; caught by surprise, overtaken by her destiny under a great oak tree…We all know the words she is supposed to have uttered, after catching her first startled breath: 'This is God's doing, and it is glorious in our eyes.' The words come, so appropriately, from the Psalms.

But in fact Elizabeth was far from surprised by the news that came to her that autumn day. When the cold light dawned on 17 November 1558, a loyal supporter of her own was waiting at the court in London, to make sure she got word early; and William Cecil, Elizabeth's future secretary, was waiting at Hatfield, ready to send out the letters that would get a new government underway. As for Elizabeth herself, she has been waiting all her life: more than twenty years since her mother was beheaded, during her own infancy; eleven years since her father's death plunged the country into uncertainty; five since another death, that of her brother Edward, brought English back under the Pope's sway, and Elizabeth herself felt closer to death than any twenty-year-old ought to be.

How many years had it been since she had realized Mary was unlikely to have a child, and that her own accession, could she but survive, was a real possibility? There, maybe — since Mary's first phantom pregnancy? A year — since Mary's husband, Philip of Spain, sailed away from a barren wife and a hostile country? It was hardly more than a month since Mary's ill-health had taken a turn that could only end one way; three weeks since Mary had added a codicil to her will, accepting that if God continued to give her 'no fruit nor heir of my body', then England would go to the one 'the laws of the realm' decreed (she could still not bear to name her heretic sister, Elizabeth, directly); ten days since one of Mary's most trusted ladies brought her jewels north to Hatfield, in token of everything else Elizabeth would inherit shortly. Mary begged only that Elizabeth would pay her debts and preserve that Catholic faith. To the Catholics and to the Protestants alike, Elizabeth seemed to promise everything, readily. It was a week since King Philip's ambassador had brought word to both sisters that Spain, with all its vested interests in England, would not oppose Elizabeth's accession; six days since the last Protestants of 'Bloody' Mary's reign had been burned, at Canterbury. In the final days of her life Mary had lapsed into a semi-coma, murmuring about the absence of her husband, and of England's loss of its French stronghold, Calais. She was given the last rites at midnight on 16 November and died before dawn the next day.

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