I respect the earl himself: no one could fail to admire him; and I like Bess well enough, she is a good-hearted woman, though very vulgar. But this will be the end of them, perhaps the death of them. Anyone who stands in my way, between me and my freedom, will have to die. October 6th is the day and they must be ready, as I am ready: for victory or for death.

I did not choose this road. I came to Elizabeth in need, as a kinswoman imploring her help. She treated me as an enemy and now she treats her own lords and her own cousin as enemies. Everyone who thinks she is a great queen should note this: in triumph she was suspicious and ungenerous. In danger she is filled with panic. She has driven me to despair and she has driven them into rebellion. She will have no one to blame but herself when they storm her castle and throw her into the Tower and put her on her mother’s scaffold. She and her archadvisor Cecil have such suspicious, embittered minds that they have imagined their own undoing and so brought it about. Like fearful, suspicious people always do, they have dreamed the worst and made it real.

I have a letter from my ambassador, the Bishop John Lesley of Ross, who is in London, watching the unraveling of Elizabeth’s power. I found it tucked into my saddle when we mounted helter-skelter for the ride to Tutbury. Even in the terrified rush to get from Wingfield Manor to Tutbury Castle there was time for a loyal man to serve me. The Shrewsburys’ own grooms are already turned to my side. Bess and her husband are betrayed in their own household. The place is full of spies, well paid with Spanish gold, waiting to serve me. Lesley’s note, scribbled in a mixture of French and code, tells me of panic in London, of Elizabeth in a frenzy of fear at hourly reports of an uprising which is breaking out all over the country.