I don’t speak of Princess Elizabeth. I never do. I saw more than enough of her when we both lived with Queen Kateryn and her young husband, Thomas Seymour. All I will say is that Elizabeth should be ashamed of herself and she will have to answer to God for what she did. I saw it. I was there during the chasing and the tickling and the romping with her own stepmother’s husband. She led Thomas Seymour—a great man—on to imprudence and then to his death. She was guilty of lust and adultery—in her heart if not in his bed. She is as guilty of his death as if she named him as a treasonous plotter and led him to the scaffold. She willed him to think of himself as her lover and her husband, and the two of them as heirs to the throne. She may not have said so much: she did not have to say so much. I saw how she was with him and I know what she made him do.

But—no—I do not judge. I will not judge. I never judge. That is for God. I have to retain a modest thought, an averted gaze, and compassion as from one sinner to another. And I am certain that God won’t think of her either, when she is in the fires of hell, praying too late for her unchastity, disloyalty, and ambition. God and I will pity her, and leave her to her infinite punishment.

At any rate, since Princess Mary and Elizabeth were both declared illegitimate, and are both clearly unsuited for the throne, these half sisters to King Edward have less of a legal claim than the daughter of King Henry’s favorite sister, Queen Mary, which is to say: my mother.

And this is the very reason, the very reason, why it is so important that she study the reformed faith and put aside brilliant adornment. She should avoid feasts and drinking, she should dance only with the most chaste ladies of her household and not ride around the country on that great horse of hers all day, hunting whatever is in season as if she were some sort of hungry beast of the field. The great woods around our house echo with her hunting horns, the meadows are flushed for game. Dogs die in the bear pit, heifers are slaughtered outside the flesh kitchen. I am so afraid that she is lustful (the Tudors are terribly lustful), I know that she is proud (all the Tudors are born tyrants), and anyone can see that she is extravagant and loves worldly show.