'Good Queen Bess'

Elizabeth I is one of England's greatest monarchs – perhaps the greatest. Her forces defeated the Spanish Armada and saved England from invasion, she reinstated Protestantism and forged an England that was a strong and independent nation.

But she had a very difficult childhood and was fortunate to make it to the throne at all. When she was young, her father Henry VIII executed her mother Anne Boleyn. She was stripped of her inheritance and was imprisoned in the Tower of London.