It’s agony for her, of course, because she is madly in love with King Philip and he is as polite and as patient as a man can be with an older wife who imagined herself pregnant and made them both look like fools; but actually it’s very embarrassing for all of us: all the English courtiers who made so much of our queen’s fertility, all of us maids who bustled around making ourselves important. Worst of all is Elizabeth, dripping with sympathy but walking into dinner behind the queen, right on her heels, as if Philip’s attention to her proves that she is heir, and everyone quite forgets about my mother’s claims, and about me.

In these circumstances—ridiculous and unpredictable, and just typical of the stupidity of everyone—I find that I have had the misfortune to inherit my mother’s ambition. Really, I would have expected to despise it, seeing where it has got us so far. But I can’t help myself, I resent anyone suggesting that I am not the heir and I am starting to struggle in the nightly squabble for precedence.

It’s not so much that I think I should be queen—I wouldn’t want to displace Queen Mary—but I do want to be her heir. I just can’t see that anyone else is fit for the crown. I can’t be happy at the thought of Elizabeth being queen; I can’t imagine her in Jane’s place; nobody could. She’s so unworthy! In every way, from her terrible yellow hair—it’s not golden at all like mine—to her skin, as sallow as a Spaniard’s, she is unfit to be Queen of England. I would have stepped back willingly for a little prince who was the heir to Spain and to England, born in wedlock to two ruling monarchs. But I will never step back for my great-uncle’s bastard—especially as nobody knows if Elizabeth is even that. Her mother was taken in adultery with five men! Elizabeth could well be the daughter of the king’s lute player—who knows?