In The Favourite, Mathew Lyons strips away the myth - and the self-mythologising - to find Sir Walter Ralegh in the one role in which his contemporaries knew him best: the courtier who could win the attention - and the heart - of Elizabeth I, while also being the 'most hated man in England'.

Using first-hand accounts, Lyons uncovers the maze of ambition, desire and amorality in which Ralegh lived before he rose to fame - a brutal Elizabethan world riven with crime and corruption and riddled with traitors and spies.