ABSTRACT
By 1572, Wallace MacCaffrey once wrote, Elizabeth had served out her years of royal apprenticeship. She had by then been on the throne for 14 years and apparently securely so. She was well on the way to establishing her most familiar image as a queen of sartorial splendour and fabulous jewels, a long way from the demure, even plain, dress she is said to have favoured in her evangelical brother's reign. She was refining her strategies for keeping the competing religious groupings as well as her diverse Privy Councillors in some kind of balance. Her most potent rival for the throne, Mary Stuart, was in her keeping, and the English rival most frequently favoured as her heir, Katherine Grey, had died in 1568. She was developing new and important relationships with other monarchs in the shifting sphere of international relations, as well as confronting a range of older problems, and some new ones. For her subjects the two most important unresolved matters were still those concerning her marriage and the royal succession, but on neither of those matters, apparently, did Elizabeth share her subjects’ concerns.
