Elizabeth I

Wallace T. MacCaffrey's political biography of Elizabeth I (ISBN 0340614552), published by Edward Arnold and distributed in North America by Routledge — a staple of early-modern reading lists that appeared on History in Focus bibliographies via WebBook.asp.

The volume is built as a single-volume political biography distilled from the author's earlier narrative trilogy — The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime, Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy 1572–1588, and Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588–1603 — and links the queen's personal rule to the parliamentary, confessional and diplomatic pressures that shaped Elizabethan policy. Coverage runs from the accession in 1558 through the religious settlement, the Marian succession crises, the long campaign against Spain and the Irish wars of the 1590s.

Wallace T. MacCaffrey was Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard University, where he twice chaired the department after earlier teaching at UCLA and Haverford College, and a Guggenheim Fellow. The Arnold edition was issued for the British undergraduate market and distributed in North America by Routledge, and it became a standing item on Tudor reading lists at British universities through the 1990s and into the 2000s.