Speaking as Prime Minister at the start of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, Winston Churchill spoke of a “new Elizabethan Era.” Fifteen years before, on 30 April 1937, he had written about the first Queen Elizabeth in the Evening Standard.
The daughter of a Queen who died on the block, a girl whose childhood was hedged about with bitter memories, bastardized by her father, ignored by her sickly young brother, and feared by her Catholic sister, who kept her under the shadow of the Tower’s final horror—such was the pattern and frame of the childhood of Elizabeth Tudor. She had survived many hazards to become Queen upon the death of Mary in the bleak winter of 1558.
England was in full recoil from the grim fanatic Catholic rule of the unhappy Mary, and turned to the sunshine of the new reign. The younger sister knew how to charm. Comely rather than beautiful, with a glory of red hair and shapely hands, she looked a Queen indeed.
On 15 January, 1559, all London thronged to the Coronation. A
