Significantly, my father has ordered that I be taught rhetoric—a royal skill—and I choose to study Arabic and Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. If the call ever comes for me to take the crown, I will be ready. I lived with Queen Kateryn Parr: I know that a woman can be a scholar and a queen. Actually, I am better prepared than she was. But I will not fall into the sin of coveting the crown.

The king’s half sisters do not follow my example in either study or religious devotion. I wish that they did. They do all they can to maintain their positions at court and their places in the eyes of the world but not in the sight of the Lord. None of the royal cousins walks in the light as I do. Princess Mary is a determined papist, and only God knows what Elizabeth believes. The other direct heir, Mary of Scotland, is a papist, being raised in sinful luxury at the court of France, and Margaret Douglas, daughter of my great-aunt Margaret who married a Scotsman, tucked away in Yorkshire is said to be a papist too.

But Princess Mary is the closest heir to the throne and we have to show her every respect, whatever we think of her religious beliefs. My own mother and John Dudley’s wife ride in Princess Mary’s train as she enters London with a great show of force, as if to remind everyone that she is the king’s heir and that they are all the best of friends.

Alone, of our family, I refuse to wear ornate clothes and ride in Mary’s train. I will not peacock about in a richly embroidered hood. But she sends me gowns as if she hopes to buy my cousinly love, and I tell her lady-in-waiting Anne Wharton that I cannot endure to hear that a vain thing like Princess Elizabeth is praised for dressing more modestly than me. I shall wear nothing but the most sober garb. There shall be only one royal theologian in England, one heir to the reformer Queen Kateryn Parr, one maid to lead the reformed Church, and it shall be me. I won’t be seen to dress more gaily than Elizabeth, and I won’t riot along in a papist train.