Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) ruled England for 45 turbulent years, and her reign has come to be seen as a golden age. She exercised supreme authority in a man’s world, while remaining intensely feminine. She was Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, but is also held up as a role model for company executives in the twenty-first century. She is a near-legendary figure from a remote past who remains fascinatingly modern.

This handsome volume has been published to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Elizabeth I’s death in 1603. It illustrates in color and, where possible, in actual size, sixty manuscripts—either by Elizabeth or to her. Each one is accompanied by a running commentary, explaining the document and placing it in its historical context, and selected transcriptions or, where necessary, translations from the originals.

Elizabeth was a girl of extraordinary precocity and a brilliant linguist. Her early letters, written in a beautiful italic, are to her forbidding father, Henry VIII, and to her brother and sister, Edward VI and "Bloody" Mary. The very first letter dates from when she was a child of eleven. The last, written nearly 60 years later, is a barely-legible scrawl addressed to her successor, the future James I. The letters from her in-tray are no less extraordinary. Tsar Ivan the Terrible rounds on her in a blind fury after she refuses to marry him. The Earl of Essex, young enough to be her son, pours out declarations of love: a few pages further on is to be found her signed warrant for his execution. There are letters from ministers and galley slaves, spies and traitors, coded letters, warrants for torture, speeches to parliament, and the original—only recently identified—of the most famous of all her utterances: "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king."

Felix Pryor is a writer, art historian, and manuscripts expert. He has written on Shakespeare and is editor of The Faber Book of Letters (1988).

“The historian in me was delighted by Elizabeth I: Her Life in Letters.”—Scott Eyman, West Palm Beach Post

"This collection of letters from Elizabeth to her father, King Henry Vlll, and Mary, Queen of Scots, among others, forms a chronicle of her teenage years, into and throughout her reign. While the language is often flowery by our standards -- "me thinks I am more beholdinge to the hindar part of my hed" -- the letters reveal an introspective side to the woman who was forced to become what she dreaded: Queen. Particularly striking is the comparison of her signatures, growing in physical size as she strides further and further into monarchy."—Toronto Globe & Mail

"An inimitable collection of documents giving insight into one of the most public and yet most enigmatic of English monarchs, Elizabeth I peers behind the carefully fashioned veil with which Queen Elizabeth dissembled and cloaked her persona."—Thomas G. Barnes, author of Somerset 1625-1640

"A superb opportunity to examine the complex and multi-faceted life of Queen Elizabeth. Pryor has produced an excellent collection that is both informative and great fun to read."—Muriel C. McClendon, author of The Quiet Reformation