Perfect for ages 7-10. In Charles River Editors’ History for Kids series, your children can learn about history’s most important people and events in an easy, entertaining, and educational way. The concise but comprehensive audiobook will keep your kid’s attention all the way to the end.

Elizabeth was the last Tudor sovereign, the daughter of the cruel and magnificent King Henry VIII and a granddaughter of the Tudor House’s founder, the shrewd Henry VII. Elizabeth, hailed as "Good Queen Bess", "Gloriana" ,and "The Virgin Queen" to this day in the public firmament, would improve upon Henry VIII’s successes and mitigate his failures, and despite her own failings would turn out to "have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too." Indeed, that was the phrase she would utter in describing herself while exhorting her troops to fight for England against the Spanish Armada.

Elizabeth inherited her grandfather’s political acumen and her father’s magnificence, thus creating not just one of the most colorful courts in Europe but also one of the most effective governments in English history. It was an age of Christopher Marlowe’s and William Shakespeare’s flourishing creativity that still enhances English as well as comparative literature. Elizabeth was also patroness of Sir Francis Drake, the pirate, thereby promoting English settlement of foreign colonies. The Jamestown Settlement in Virginia would come in 1607, four years after Elizabeth’s passing, and the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts would come in 1620.

Elizabeth had also fought for her life time and time again in an era that was already unsafe for female leader, and she probably had remembered the searing feeling of realizing that her mother Queen Anne (Anne Boleyn) had been executed by her father arguably on a trumped-up charge. Danger was pervasive; strategy was needed not just to thrive but to survive.

History for Kids: The Illustrated Life of Queen Elizabeth I chronicles the life and reign of England’s most famous queen, but it also humanizes the woman who ruled one of the world’s most powerful kingdoms in an age dominated by men.