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nobles in Elizabeth's own realm, threaten her rule repeatedly. We learn of Elizabeth's agonizing decision to execute Mary. We witness a growing ruthlessness in purging her enemies. We also note her reluctance to kill another monarch, Mary, who has been captured. Elizabeth's dilemma also reminds us of the fate her own mother met, but Elizabeth, nevertheless signs Mary's death warrant.

Elizabeth's relationship with men, especially her beloved Robert Devereux, Lord of Essex, is another consistent theme of the novel. In her early days as queen, she adroitly balances alliances and international politics by intimating vague promises of marriage to one foreign prince or another. However, "Elizabeth's true marriage partner" was England. She writes:

"England, my England - how I love this land! Her rivers pour their courses through my veins, her loam makes up my flesh, her soul - my soul, her proud spirit my hope, my inspiration my first, last, greatest love."

She did love Essex, though. Even when Essex runs out of control with the power she gives him and "commits increasingly outrageous offenses to Elizabeth as both woman and Queen, she fails to curb this Wild Horse." She apparently sees much of herself in this preening, conceited noble and cannot bring herself to harm him.

As we trace Elizabeth's progress "from a naive, openhearted 13-year-old to a powerful, money-hungry, imperious old woman," it is hard to judge whether she becomes more or less "likable" as her story unfolds. Elizabeth does become increasingly more human, however, and in the author's words:

"Elizabeth was a woman of exceptional gifts, who in the modern world might have been a Nobel prize-winning intellectual or the first woman president of the U.S. But her greatest virtues were those available to everyone: courage, endurance, and common sense. Growing up in tears for her life, she quite literally never lost her head. In times of greatest terror, she mastered her feelings and hung on I believe we can learn a lot from this in an era when we are encouraged to let all our emotions out and allow ourselves to be driven by whatever we feel."

I agree with Margaret Forester, that Rosalind Miles has written a novel that is "gutsy, marvelously lively, and yet entirely authentic, with a tremendously convincing evocation of time, place, and most of all, personality."

Learn more about this author, Jerry Curtis.
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