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Queen Elizabeth I was known to be an all-powerful monarch, a warrior who defeated the Spanish Armada, a leader loved by her subjects and a muse for Shakespeare. The late Queen of England and Ireland - who ruled from 1558 until her death in 1603 - was so legendary that her reign was officially crowned the Elizabethan era, its very own epoch of the famed Tudor period. But one rumour has threatened to crack her tenable legacy, leading doubters to ask whether the Virgin Queen was the fiercely independent leader that history claims her to be.

'The bones of Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess, lie mingled with those of her sister, Bloody Mary, in a single tomb at Westminster Abbey. But are they really royal remains — or evidence of the greatest conspiracy in English history?. If that is not the skeleton of Elizabeth Tudor, the past four centuries of British history have been founded on a lie.'

The bones of Elizabeth I, Good Queen Bess, lie mingled with those of her sister, Bloody Mary, in a single tomb at Westminster Abbey. But are they really royal remains — or evidence of the greatest conspiracy in English history? If that is not the skeleton of Elizabeth Tudor, the past four centuries of British history have been founded on a lie. And according to a controversial new book, the lie began on an autumn morning 470 years ago, when panic swept through a little group of courtiers in a manor house in the Cotswold village of Bisley in Gloucestershire.The...