Elizabeth

Declared illegitimate aged 3. Tried for treason aged 21. Crowned Queen aged 25.

In 1558, the Roman Catholic Mary I of England dies of a cancerous tumor in her uterus, leaving her Protestant half sister Elizabeth as Queen. Elizabeth had previously been jailed for a supposed conspiracy to murder Mary, but has now been freed for her coronation. The film shows Elizabeth being courted by suitors and urged by William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley to marry, which, as he states, would secure her throne. Instead, she has a secret affair with her childhood sweetheart, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The affair is, however, no secret from Cecil - who makes clear that a Monarch has no private life.

Elizabeth deals with various threats to her reign, including The Duke of Norfolk, a Catholic in her court who conspires to have her murdered, and the effective ruler of Scotland, Mary of Guise, who allies with France to attack England's forces. At the end of the film, Norfolk is executed for his conspiracy and Mary is assassinated by Elizabeth's advisor, Francis Walsingham.

Elizabeth permanently banishes Dudley from her private presence when she finds out that he is married; as depicted in the sequel, Elizabeth then gives up ever having sex again, feeling that such relations could give a man too much power over her. Moreover, cutting off her relations with Dudley is part of the process by which she becomes increasingly tough and assertive - in one scene she carefully prepares and rehearses the speech she would deliver to a recalcitrant Parliament and force through her religious reforms.