By the standards of the age the burnings were not so terrible. By the time of the later Middle Ages, although there was nothing in the scriptures to support such a thing, the Christian community had developed an extraordinary appetite for burning human beings alive and it was a fashion that lasted for several centuries. Nor did it seem, in England, to make much difference which side of the denominational divide you were on. Catholics burned Protestants and Protestants burned Catholics. The Protestant Bishop Latimer had personally presided over what can only be described as the sadistic ritual murder of an elderly Catholic priest - a burning carried out in so disgusting a manner that even the crowd who had come to watch it broke down the barriers and intervened. Now, under Mary, it was Latimer's turn to be burned, although with less sadism, thereby to earn the reputation of a martyr for his faith.

But there were others - simple townsmen, innocent of political connivance but humbly seeking God - who were burned; and there were too many of them. Before long, the English were calling their Catholic queen 'Bloody Mary'.

The King of Spain came and went, and there was no child; the burnings continued. Then Mary tried to fight a little war and lost Calais, the last English possession in France. And by the time the poor woman died, after five miserable years upon the throne, the English were sick of her and welcomed good Queen Bess.

Clement Albion stared at his mother in horror.

Did she deceive herself or was she really so fearless? Perhaps she herself did not know. One thing he was sure of: she had woven herself so closely into the part she played, and for so long, that she had become as stiff as the brocade of her dress.

Old King Harry had still been alive when she had married Albion. She was a Pitts - a notable family in the county of Southampton, as Hampshire was often called - and due, from a cousin, to receive a great inheritance. It was a marriage that had seemed to promise Albion great advancement. Nor, at first, had it seemed a difficulty that, like all her Pitts family, she was devout.