These are not better times for those of our religion in France. The king, dominated by his family—the Guise family—persecutes those of our faith until they rise up in a holy religious uprising. Of course, England, the primary Protestant power, should send the Huguenots arms and money, should send them an army to overthrow their papist rulers. But Elizabeth, as always, can go only halfway in any duty. She knows that she should prevent the papist rulers of France from murdering and destroying her coreligionists. But the Protestants of Scotland have overthrown her cousin the Guise French queen, and she cannot tolerate that threat to royal power. She knows she should be the enemy of the Pope who—it is said—will declare her anathema: a figure to be despised, who can be legally killed. But it is a Protestant leader in Scotland, John Knox, who calls her and Mary Queen of Scots a “monstrous regiment of women” unfit to rule, and urges all right-thinking men to rise up against them. Elizabeth is so piqued by this disrespect, so muddled in her thinking, that she hates John Knox worse than the Pope, and thinks that she should stand in sisterhood with Mary Queen of Scots as a fellow queen against him.

* * *

I send a note to my sister, carried by Richard Bertie’s most faithful man, hidden in the foot of his hose. I don’t doubt by the time it gets to Katherine it is smelling ripely of his sweat. I don’t know if she will be able to reply. I don’t even know if she will live to see it. I don’t know how she is.