Young Queens: The gripping, intertwined story of Catherine de' Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary, Queen of Scots

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While her mother, Anne Boleyn, fought to ensure that Elizabeth’s claim would be superior to her elder half-sister Mary’s, Anne’s fall made Elizabeth Tudor a bastard.

I am deeply touched by their kind words and tributes as I venture beyond the Palace gates, but look forward to staying in close contact in years ahead’.

Her majesty also attended Prince Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018, where she waved and beamed at the newlyweds as they drove past. Every time she goes out for a drive in the park,' reported the Belfast News Letter in the summer of 1932, people recognised the six-year-old. So it is hardly surprising that, more than a century later, the world should be in such admiration of the skills that Queen has deployed through her uniquely long and distinguished reign.

The French king kept up his wooing of the pope, hosting the wedding the following spring, on April 28, 1518, at his favorite château of Amboise. The First Buckingham Girl Guide Pack was instituted, with 20 girls invited to the palace on Wednesday afternoons. In a way, Catherine de’ Medici’s story begins not at her birth but rather on those waters, under those Mediterranean skies, the sails of her ship whipping against a late summer breeze. Elizabeth I had to cope with stabilising the realm after decades of religious and political turbulence under her father and siblings. The couple’s first two children arrived before the coronation, Charles in 1948, followed by Anne in 1950.This had been the path charted for Catherine’s mother, for countless girls of Catherine’s time and place. Even when the women do get involved in affairs of state, the propensity of the period for conveying the most important messages orally means that we never learn exactly how Catherine and Elisabeth managed their diplomatic talks, nor whether their tactics were substantially different from those a father and son might have deployed in a similar situation.

At the base in Aldershot she was initially kept away from the other trainees and taken to eat in the officers’ mess, before the papers found out and the regime was quickly adjusted. Born in 1966, Young was a boarder at Reading School, before working for Barclays Bank between 1985 and 1997, where he rose to the Head Office, becoming the bank's Deputy Head of Corporate Public Relations. King Francis hadn’t lost sight of the Medici orphan; through the years, he was kept apprised of her whereabouts and her health. In it she pledged her future: “I declare before you that my whole life, whether it shall be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.

That spring of 1929 the old king insisted that his beloved granddaughter, just three, be brought down to see him at Bognor Regis on the Sussex coast as one of two crucial ingredients to his recovery from a near-fatal lung operation (the second was that "he might be allowed to smoke a cigarette"). In 1938, Elizabeth began receiving lessons from the vice provost of Eton, Henry Marten, on constitutional history.

From all the signs and signals, it does seem likely that the future Elizabeth II had acquired a realistic idea of what lay ahead for her by the age of seven - at least three years before the abdication. Young has been given several honours to mark his service to the Palace, including a peerage, meaning that he is now Lord Young. When she was just 18, she became the first female member of the royal family to serve in the armed forces, training as a mechanic and military truck driver. Her experience as a young queen navigating power, along with that of her first mother-in-law, Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France, and Catherine’s daughter Elisabeth Valois, Queen of Spain, is the subject of Leah Redmond Chang’s book.No doubt the young Caterina learned of Madeleine’s wealth, of her vast, rolling estates in Auvergne. In February of that year, Charles V’s Imperial troops pummeled French battalions in the disastrous battle at Pavia, slaughtering the flower of French nobility and sending Francis himself into Spanish captivity. She met her final British prime minister, Liz Truss, at her Balmoral residence in Scotland in a landmark break from tradition, after it was recommended the monarch avoid travel. The most recent was her granddaughter Princess Beatrice’s in 2020, which took place amid the coronavirus pandemic, with the Queen and Philip having to stand socially distanced away from the happy couple. Like Charles, his father, William has voiced mixed feelings at being saddled with knowing his regal destiny from his earliest awareness.