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Blood & Theory. Not that she hesitated to be brutal when she deemed it necessary. Her favorites could never be quite sure whether to expect a caress or the ax. When Elizabeth fastened an earl's mantle on Leicester's shoulders, she could not resist tickling his neck; when Leicester's successor, the Earl of Essex, became a political embarrassment, she could not resist chopping his neck.
This is not surprising, since Elizabeth's rule was often tenuous; as Anne Boleyn's daughter, she had been dealt from the bottom of her father's well-stacked deck, and many of her noble subjects had more legitimate claims to rule than she. But Elizabeth was a realist. To her, the most important thing about the British throne, for which so much blood and theory had been squandered, was that she sat on it.
As Biographer Jenkins traces the fabulous complexities of Elizabeth's life and rule—loves, intrigues, wars patiently avoided, campaigns narrowly won—the reader clearly feels the mettle of a Queen who addressed her troops on the eve of an expected Spanish invasion: "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too."