Elizabeth, merry as a blackbird in a rose hip hedge, rides early in the morning, and all her ladies have to go with her, merry or not, like it or not. I am high on a big hunter and I ride without fear as I have done since I was a tiny child at Bradgate. My father always put me on a full-sized horse and told me that if I held the reins firmly, and made sure that the horse knew who was in command, it would not matter if I sat a little askew in the saddle because of the twist in my spine, and if I spoke clearly and firmly, then it would not matter that I am light and small. He told me that I can have a great presence even though I am of little height.

While Jane, my oldest sister, wanted to stay indoors with her books, and Katherine always wanted to play with her menagerie of little animals in the garden or in her room, I was always in the stables, standing on an upturned pail to groom the big horses, or clambering up the mounting block to sit bareback on their warm broad backs.

“You can’t let something like being born small and a bit twisty stand in your way,” my father would say to me. “We’re none of us perfect, and you’re marred no worse than King Richard III, and he rode out in half a dozen battles and was killed in a cavalry charge—nobody ever told him he couldn’t ride.”

“But he was a very bad man,” I observe with the stern judgment of a seven-year-old.

“Very bad,” my father agrees. “But that was his soul, not his body. You can be a good woman with a body that is a little short and a spine that is out of true. You can learn to stand straight as a yeoman of the guard, and you can be a beautiful little woman. If you never marry, then you can be a good sister to Jane and Katherine, and a good aunt to their children. But I don’t see why you shouldn’t marry and make a good marriage when your time comes. Your birth is as good as any woman in the kingdom, better than everyone but the king’s children. Truth be told, it doesn’t matter if your spine is out of true, if your heart is not.”