Chapter 4 Summary

Elizabeth is twenty-five years of age, tall, slender and straight. She loves to ride horses fast, dance and watch other people dance. She is young and appears fragile, with glowing white skin, red to gold hair and a long oval face. Elizabeth has inherited her father's abilities and physical magnetism and her mother's strain of hysteria and moments of paralyzing dread. She is remarkably intelligent and a political genius. Three days after her accession, she appoints the incorruptible William Cecil as her chief Secretary of State and primary adviser. Cecil, thirty-eight, is a quiet and formidable genius with "clear, pale eyes in a forehead oppressed by care," and a devoted Protestant. He and Elizabeth see England's future bound up with the Reformation. Both hate war as a waste of men, equipment and money and want to re-establish the national economy.

Lord Robert Dudley...