INTRODUCTION -- The Elizabethan Deliverance is a narrative history of the first thirty years of Elizabeth I's reign that culminated in the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Prologue

ACCESSION TO A THRONE OF THORNS

'For Harry our King

Is gone hunting

To bring his deer to bay.'

Old Song

In the three centuries between the Norman Conquest and the Black Death England enjoyed a succession of great French-speaking kings -- Norman, Angevin and Plantagenet -- who made the emergent and formerly tribal Anglo-Saxon and Danish land of Alfred of Wessex and Canute the best-governed, most unified and powerful feudal kingdom in western Christendom.