The story of Prince Francis, his mother Elizabeth I and his tragic brother Robert Essex. Comyns Beaumont was the greatest iconoclast of his age and with the Private Life of the Virgin Queen he struck at the mighty Bard of Avon and the most revered of English Queens - Elizabeth the First. He takes up the cause of the Baconians - those that believe Francis Bacon wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare - and reveals that his reason he employed Shakespeare (an actor) to pretend authorship of his plays was that he was using them as a secret way of telling, in code, his own secret origin as the first child of Elizabeth Tudor! The book explains the biliteral cipher (a code in use in the Tudor age by means of which another, entirely different, message could be hidden in the type of a printed book) and then it tells the allegedly encoded life stories of the TWO sons of Elizabeth the First. A remarkable book in every way.