This is mostly to satisfy those lords and commoners who demanded last year that she name a successor and insisted that it be a legitimate Protestant—my sister Katherine. Now Elizabeth, like a marketplace mountebank who charms coppers out of the pockets of the credulous, says that she has taken their advice that she must marry, that she is minded to marry a papist Habsburg, that the happy couple will (no doubt) conceive an autumn child, so she need name neither Mary Queen of Scots—trapped on her island—nor Katherine—locked up with Sir Owen. But Elizabeth can promise that she will have a baby, a beautiful son, who will be the nephew of the Holy Roman Emperor and the grandson of Henry VIII, and all the world can rejoice that love has found a way where hatred could not, to bring papistry and Protestantism into harmony once more and everyone can be happy—except, of course, Katherine and I, and Mary Queen of Scots. We will all three be left in imprisonment forever and (hopefully) forgotten.

* * *

In scraps and words, the gossip comes from London and goes on beyond us—all over the kingdom. Though Elizabeth the queen is apparently willing and prepared to marry for the sake of the country, though she has convinced the Holy Roman Emperor that she will take his brother, the council is divided and, using their uncertainty as her shield, Elizabeth hides her determination to live and die a single woman. Her cousin Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, says that there can be no danger to the kingdom but much benefit in marrying such a great prince, and his faith is no obstacle. The archduke has made such offers, and given such promises, that we can live with the queen’s husband as a papist who receives Mass in private. Not so, says the rest of the council: Francis Knollys, that staunch Protestant; Robert Dudley, that staunch Dudleyist. The Protestant lords Sir William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, and Sir William Parr, the Marquess of Northampton, join together to warn the queen that the country cannot tolerate a papist husband, will not drink the health of a half-papist baby in the cradle. Robert Dudley suggests that a foreign suitor is unattractive, too. Someone tells the queen that he is ugly, that all Habsburgs have terribly weak chins; does she want to marry a man who looks like a squirrel?