Politics has always been about personalities. Historians tried to persuade us that the key development of the sixteenth century was the triumph of institutions, and a move away from “medieval” informality. Geoffrey Elton detected a “Tudor revolution in government”; others charted the “rise of Parliament”. More recently, scholarship has realigned with common sense: real power lay in personal access to those with authority to make decisions. In the Tudor period, that meant, above all, the ability to cajole, persuade, flatter or frighten the royal person. When that person was a woman, the rules for doing so changed.Susan Doran, a distinguished historian of the politics and foreign policy of Elizabeth I’s reign, usefully explains semi-private ways of