It wasn’t a perfect or tidy solution, but for Elizabeth it was the only one. She had been right to believe that in choosing an heir, the seeds of destruction would be sown. Where Tudor statecraft had raised England from little more than a tribal community in her grandfather’s time, Elizabeth’s talent, perseverance, and skill had honed England into the beginnings of the nation state we recognize today. Though not officially united for another hundred years, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland found its roots in her time. Much of our treasured English language and literature flourished—despite or perhaps because of censorship—in Elizabeth’s England. In James Stuart, an intelligent but untrustworthy pair of hands, Elizabeth had inadvertently sown the seeds of the English Civil War and a century of upheaval.Robert Cecil went on to become the great Jacobean statesman, elevated in James’s reign to the title of Marquis of Salisbury. Sir Francis Bacon’s betrayal of his good friend Essex was soon forgotten.
