Apparently, Elizabeth writes letters to Mary (the city is full of gossip): flirtatious letters, like those written from a lover to his mistress. She is going to send her a diamond ring, like a betrothal ring. She promises eternal love and friendship. She says that if Mary is ever in need or in danger, she shall summon her potent fellow queen and Elizabeth will come to her—without fail. Elizabeth is doing what she does best—encouraging lust for her political ends.

And then—just like her father, who favored one man over another, so that they would hate each other—Elizabeth now turns to Margaret Douglas, our disgraced cousin, and shows the world that she prefers her to me as an English-born heir. Lady Margaret never had to face her accusers like I did. The testimonies of those who said that she employed soothsayers and necromancers to foretell Elizabeth’s death have all been dismissed. She was released from prison without a stain on her character and now up she pops at court, received with favor, her son the pretty boy Henry Stuart, back from France, towed everywhere in her broad-beamed wake, like a dainty sailing ship after a barge. Margaret Douglas suggests to everyone that Henry Stuart would be a suitable husband for the Queen of Scots—the very idea that gave royal offense earlier!—but now it can be spoken, now it can be considered. Robert Dudley, for one, will favor such a misalliance, if only to spare himself.

It is madness to ask what a madwoman thinks. It is folly to interrogate a fool. But really—what is the queen thinking, that she would forgive a traitor, jeopardize her own throne, lose her lover, and name her enemy as an heir—just to prevent me coming to the throne after her death? I have always found her inexplicably vindictive; now I find her completely insane. Why would she risk everything to stop me being honored? Why is it so important to her to humiliate and punish me?

I can only think that she has fallen into the jealous mood of her childhood, when she lived in a constant state of anxiety as to who was favored by her father. First she queened it over her half sister, Mary Tudor, who was forced to wait on her when she was a little child, and then Elizabeth was mortified when the tables were turned and Mary was favored. She saw her despised half sister take the throne, acclaimed by everyone in the first months of her reign. Elizabeth has always been rivalrous of other women: I imagine she hated her stepmothers, then her half sister, then poor Amy Dudley, and now me. She must hate me with a really terrible vengeance if she will sacrifice Robert Dudley in marriage to another woman to keep me from a title. I begin to think that she is as mad as her father.