Lily Cole slips into the red wig for a portrait of Elizabeth I that trades divine glamour for something closer to panic. Across three hour-long episodes the series, also known as Elizabeth & Her Enemies, follows the young princess from bastard sibling to embattled monarch who never stops looking over her shoulder. Dramatised scenes, shot in damp stone corridors and draughty great halls, alternate with on-camera walk-and-talks by historians Dan Jones and Suzannah Lipscomb, who stride through castle keeps spelling out the assassination plots, foreign invasions and cousinly rebellions that kept the queen's council up at night.
The pacing is blunt and chronological: episode one ends with Mary's death and Elizabeth's accession, episode two dissects the Northern Rising and Mary Queen of Scots' arrival in England, episode three barrels through the Armada, the Babington plot and Essex's tantrums before a quiet coda in Richmond Palace. Jones and Lipscomb deliver their pieces to camera with the crisp certainty of people who have read every dispatch in the state papers, while the drama segments favour whispered corridors and flickering candlelight over courtly pageantry.
Cole's performance is all watchful stillness, her voice low and deliberate, the camera lingering on the strain behind the porcelain mask. The budget shows whenever more than a dozen extras are required, yet the claustrophobia works in the story's favour: England feels small, its throne precarious, its queen permanently exhausted. The result is less a royal icon than a woman who survives by refusing to sleep.
Production Details
5 / 1 Season / 3 Episodes / 2017
Created by: Chris Holt, Dan Jones and Suzannah Lipscombe
Writer(s): Chris Holt, Dan Jones, Suzannah Lipscomb
Producer(s): Susan Jones, Nicolas Kent
Cinematography: Brendan McGinty
Main Cast
Dan Jones as Self - Presenter
Suzannah Lipscomb as Self - Presenter
Lily Cole as Elizabeth I
Audrey L'Ebrellec as Mary, Queen of Scots
Darren Bransford as Earl of Bothwell
