‘I’ve no time for hedgerow preachers,’ John said. ‘And every year there are more of them. I hear two sermons on a Sunday. I don’t need to seek one on Tuesday as well.’

She nodded, and slipped out of the door without arguing. She walked briskly down the street; a small crowd was at the centre of the village, gathered around the preacher.

He was warning them of hellfire, and of the sins of the great. Elizabeth stepped back a little way into a doorway to listen. John was right, this was probably heresy, and it might well turn into treason too. But there was something powerful in how he moved his arguments slowly forward.

‘Step by step we are going down the road to ruination,’ he said, so softly that his listeners craned forward and had the sense of being drawn into a conspiracy. ‘Today the plague walks the streets of London as freely as a favoured guest. Not a home is safe against it, not a person can be sure he will escape. Not a family in the city but loses one or two. And it is not only London – every village across the land must be wary of strangers, and fearful of sickly people. It is coming, it is coming to all of us – and there is only one escape: repentance and turning to Our Lord.’

There was a soft murmur of assent.

‘Why is it come to us?’ the preacher asked. ‘Why should it strike us down? Let us look at where it starts. It comes from London: the centre of wealth, the centre of the court. It comes in the time of a new king, when things should be new-made, not struggling against the old sickness of plague. It comes because the king is not new-made, he has his father’s Favourite forever at his shoulder, he has his father’s adviser forever ordering his ways. He is not a new king; he is the old king while he is ruled by the same man.’

There was a movement of the crowd away from the preacher. He saw it at once. ‘Oh, yes,’ he continued swiftly. ‘He pays your wages, I know, you live in his cottages, you grow your vegetables on his ground, but look up from your dungheaps and your crooked chimneys and see what this man does in the greater world. He it was who took the prince into mortal danger in Spain. He it was who brought home a Papist French queen. Every office in the land is his, or in his gift. Every great office has a Villiers sitting on the top of it, raking in wealth. When our king goes begging to the towns and to the corporations, why has he no money? Where has the wealth gone? Does the duke know – as he walks in his great house in his silk and diamonds – does the duke know where the money has gone?