If there are more books written about Elizabeth I than any other ruler of Britain, there are more books and web sites devoted to the House of Tudor than any of its ruling dynasties, even though that house was the shortest-lived. After 500 years, the Tudors still enchant, infuriate, and appall. The current British royal family is descended from Henry VII (if by the female line) but its marital misadventures are dwarfed by those of its progenitors. The Tudors loom now as they did in their own time, somehow bigger than history, suitable subjects for novels and Hollywood, featuring greed, cunning, lust, brilliance, neurosis, megalomania, supreme violence and tragedy. Elizabeth was one of the best of them.

The Tudors marked the tumultuous and spasmodic transition from a medieval to a Renaissance England and from a Catholic to a Protestant nation severed from the rest of Christendom. Their achievements were spectacular. Henry VII (whom Elizabeth in many ways resembled more than her own father) reestablished the traumatized kingdom - to which he had the slenderest right - in stability and wealth. Henry VIII was a great king as well as the evil caricature currently in fashion. Edward VI wrenched his nation into the far reaches of Protestantism and laid a Puritan foundation for the century to come. Mary proved for all time that Catholic alliances and Catholic beliefs could no longer be enforced in England. Upon all of their strengths and weaknesses, their triumphs and mistakes, the last Tudor would build.

I intend eventually to complete detailed biographies of all the Tudors significant to Elizabeth's story. They will include biographies of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, a brief summary of Henry's other five wives (Katherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr), and Elizabeth's half-siblings, Edward VI and Mary I. Those currently available are shown by links.