Ringing the changes, from Tudor to Stuart

From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I by Susan Doran
Oxford University Press, £30, 646 pages

Over the last two years Britons have slowly adjusted to being Carolingians rather than Elizabethans. Challenging as that may have been in some ways – in 2022 few people remembered a time when Elizabeth II was not monarch – the accession of Charles III was orderly, dignified and (most importantly) expected. The same can’t be said of the succession of Elizabeth I by James I – or of the process by which the first Elizabethans metamorphosed into Jacobeans.