New book argues Elizabeth died as a child, was replaced by a boy

Jun 8, 2013 10:11 GMT  ·  By

Elizabeth I of England, whom many know best as The Virgin Queen, was no royalty. In fact, she was not even a woman, but an impostor in drag, a new book by Steve Berry says.

By the looks of it, historic manuscripts hint at the idea the Elizabeth died when she was just 10 years old in a manor house in the Cotswold village of Bisley in Gloucestershire, where she had been sent to be kept safe from a plague outbreak.

Her caretakers feared that, should her father, King Henry VIII, learn of Elizabeth's passing, he would order that they be killed in a gruesome way.

To save their lives, Elizabeth's governess and guardian presumably decided to trick Henry VIII into thinking that Elizabeth was alive and well.

Steve Berry writes in his book that the two forced one of Elizabeth's friends, a boy who was about the same age as she was, to put on the princess' clothes and pretend that he were the King's daughter.

Henry VIII allegedly fell for this trick, and things soon started snowballing: the governess and the guardian agreed that, since the King himself did not realize that his Elizabeth was actually a boy, others were less likely to realize that something was seriously off.

Daily Mail says that, from this moment on, Elizabeth's caretakers did their best in teaching the young boy talk and act just as if he were a princess.

The rest is history: the boy whom everybody believed was Henri VIII's daughter became a queen, and left his mark on England's history as Elizabeth I.

Evidence in support of this theory are the alleged discovery of the body of a girl wearing Tudor finery inside a coffin a clergyman living in the 1800s stumbled upon, and the fact that the so-called Elizabeth I never married.

Granted, the discovery of said body is just a story and can be argued against, yet the fact that Elizabeth did not marry while she was Queen of England is not up for debate.

“I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too,” the Queen told her troops as they were getting ready to confront the Spanish armada on the battlefield, and Steve Berry believes that these words were uttered in their literal sense.

Just for the record: Steve Berry's book, “The King's Deception,” is a thriller similar to Dan Brown's “The Da Vinci Code,” so it would perhaps be best to take these assumptions concerning Queen Elizabeth I's identity with a grain of salt.