British writer and historian David Starkey has now produced the first installment of what will eventually become a two-volume biography of "The Virgin Queen." It covers in engrossing detail her first 25 years, up to the time of her coronation in 1558. Most biographers slide over those years fairly quickly in their haste to get Elizabeth onto the throne. Starkey will obviously plow that already well-plowed field in his second volume, but this one sets Elizabeth's reign in necessary perspective; the Queen she became was obviously an extension of the princess she was from birth.

Starkey ends his book with a fairly detailed discussion of Elizabeth's first year or two on the throne, perhaps as a means of setting the scene for his second volume. His final chapter is a curious one, a sort of "previews of coming attractions," in which the major events of Elizabeth's 45-year reign are briefly sketched.

Elizabeth was the child of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the second of his six wives. Starkey gives us a fully rounded and by no means entirely approving portrait of this complex and remarkable woman, whom he sees as a master manipulator of people, a crafty schemer adept at covering her tracks, and a brilliant woman who saw much more clearly than those around her where England was headed and what had to be done, by fair means or foul, to get it there safely.

For American readers, keeping track of the enormous cast of characters of the Elizabethan era can be confusing to no end. Starkey does as good a job as anyone of sorting all these people out and making the more important among them come alive as real human beings beneath their aristocratic finery.

One major issue of Elizabeth's time, of course, was the relationship between church and state. Starkey's book probes this central theme deeply. Elizabeth craftily steered a middle course between the conflicting demands of the deposed but still powerful Catholic faction and the uncompromising anti-Catholicism of what he calls the "hot Protestants" who surrounded Elizabeth. She was herself a Protestant, of course, but she saw the need to at least appear willing to accommodate the wishes of her Catholic subjects. For modern American readers, the book is a sobering cautionary tale of what can happen when church and state are allowed to collide in the quest for temporal power. The reader finds himself thinking, "This is madness --- may it never happen here!"

Starkey is an engaging and readable writer, not afraid to apply a modern context to the religious and political affairs of Elizabeth's time (there are delightful passing references to Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton). He is excellent at contrasting Elizabeth's secretive and subtle statecraft with the blunders of her predecessor, the Catholic Queen Mary, whose uncompromising zeal on behalf of Catholics provoked rebellion and endless crisis in England.

Elizabeth was also the unwilling object of a lifelong crusade by others to find her a husband, with the aim of producing a male heir to the throne. Starkey follows this thread in her early life with special care and concludes that she never intended to marry but was not averse to letting people think otherwise --- all for the purpose of keeping her reign secure. A clever underhanded operator, that lady!

There are a few heroes and lots of villains in the story Starkey here begins to tell. Elizabeth, he seems to think, was a little bit of each. One is reminded of the famous capsule summary of Machiavelli's ideas: a ruler should be "good when he can be, and bad when he must."