It really is not easy to be a shining light in Bradgate. It is a worldly house and we are a big household. It is a great building, a brick-built house as red as Hampton Court, with a gatehouse that looms as large as that palace and set among the huge forest of Charnwood. We have every right to royal magnificence. My mother is the daughter of Princess Mary, who was Queen of France, the favorite sister of King Henry VIII, so my mother is heir to the throne of England after the late king’s children, my cousins the princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, who are heirs to their younger brother, King Edward. This makes us the most important family in England, and we never forget it. We keep a houseful of retainers, more than three hundred, to serve the five of us; we own a stable filled with beautiful horses and the parkland all around the house, and farms and villages, rivers and lakes at the very heart of England. We have our own bear for baiting, kept caged in the stables, our own bear pit, our own cock-fighting ring. Our house is one of the biggest in the Middle Lands; we have a great hall with a musicians’ gallery at one end and a royal dais at the other. The most beautiful countryside in England is ours. I have been brought up to know that all this land belongs to me, just as we belong to England.

Of course, between my lady mother and the throne are the three royal children: Edward, the king, who is only twelve like me, and so he rules with a lord president, and then his older sisters Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth. Sometimes people don’t count the two princesses as heirs, since they were both named bastards and denied by their own father. They would not even be included in the royal family but for the Christian kindness of my teacher Kateryn Parr, who brought them to court and had them acknowledged. Even worse, Princess Mary (God forgive her) is a declared and open papist and heretic, and though I am bound to love her as a cousin, it is a horror to me to be in her house, where she keeps the hours of the liturgy as if she is living in a convent and not in a reformed kingdom, for all England is Protestant now under King Edward.