She was born Elizabeth Tudor. She was not England's greatest queen. Most people who know that name do not know that she ever existed.

She arrived at Sheen Palace on the second of July, 1492, the fourth child and second daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, into a nursery that already held her sister Margaret and her brother Henry, born thirteen months before her. Cecily Burbage took her from her mother's arms in the first hours and nursed her at Eltham Palace, where the three children grew up within calling distance of each other's cradles. Henry was not yet four years old when the calling distance closed for good.

Before she could climb the nursery stairs without a hand to steady her, her father had already put her name forward for a marriage. The prince was a French infant who would grow up to become Francis I. Two courts exchanged letters over a girl who could not yet dress herself. She was measured, in the way princesses were measured, not for who she was but for what a marriage to her might secure. The letters kept moving between London and the French court for a while. Then they stopped, because there was no longer a bride to discuss.

She died at Eltham Palace on the fourteenth of September, 1495, three years, two months, and twelve days old. Her parents were on progress between Northampton and Banbury when the message found them on the road. Henry VII spent £318 sending his daughter into Westminster Abbey with the ceremony of a queen, and had her laid under a tomb of Purbeck and black marble, a gilt copper effigy stretched above her, a Latin inscription carved into the stone beneath. The effigy went first. Then the inscription. The stone base is still there, and so is she. Her brother Edmund was carried into the same corner of the Abbey five years later, fifteen months old. Her sister Katherine followed him three years after that, dead within days of her own birth. Three children of Henry VII, none of them old enough to remember the palace they were born in, waiting together in the dark under Westminster.

In 1533, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn had a daughter. He named her Elizabeth too. That one lived to see the throne. The first one is still under the stone, and almost no one who walks past it knows her name was there first.