The boy in the bed was just fifteen years old. He had been handsome, perhaps even recently; but now his face was swollen and disfigured by disease, and by the treatments his doctors had prescribed in the attempt to ward off its ravages. Their failure could no longer be mistaken.

When Henry VIII's longed-for son, Edward VI, lay dying, all the contenders for his crown - for the first time in English history - were female. But female rule in England also had a past.

Four hundred years before Edward's death, Matilda, daughter of Henry I and granddaughter of William the Conqueror, came tantalisingly close to securing the crown for herself. And between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries three more exceptional women, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France and Margaret of Anjou, discovered how much was possible if presumptions of male rule were not confronted so explicitly - and just how quickly they might be vilified as 'she-wolves' for their pains.

The stories of these women, told here in all their vivid humanity, expose the paradox which the female heirs to the Tudor throne had no choice but to negotiate. Man was the head of woman, and the king was the head of all. How, then, could royal power lie in female hands?

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