Cecil is afraid, I would stake my honor on it. He does not say so, but he writes from Windsor, which means they have surrendered London in order to arm the only castle they can hope to defend. This is worse than anything in living memory. King Henry never abandoned London. Nor did his father. Even Queen Mary, facing Wyatt and a mighty Protestant rebellion, never surrendered London. Little Queen Jane bolted herself into the Tower. But Queen Elizabeth has abandoned her capital city and is readying for a siege, with no hope of any relief from abroad. Worse: she has foreign armies massing against her. No king in Christendom will come to the aid of Elizabeth; they will let her fall and be glad to see her die. This is the harvest that Cecil reaps from his policy of suspicion. He and his queen have made enemies of the French; they hate the Spanish; they are divided from their own people; they are strangers in their own kingdom. She has aligned herself with pirates, with merchants, with Puritans, and with their paid informers, and now she declares war on the nobility of her kingdom, who should advise her.

I should be there at Windsor Castle. I should be there with my equals, with my queen. She should have the advice of her peers, men who have served the throne for generations, men who have taken arms for the safety of the English king for centuries. She should not be dependent on that clerk Cecil, who comes from nowhere and was a nobody until yesterday. How can he counsel caution and good sense when he himself is filled with terror? How can he bring the people together when it is his fears and his spies who have driven us apart and made us enemies to each other? How can the lords advise her when she has accused most of them of treason? The best men in England are in the Tower or under house arrest.

God knows, I want to serve her now, at the time of her terror. God knows, I would tell her not to arm, not to raise the troops; I would tell her to send in friendship to the Scots queen and parley with her, promise to return her to Scotland, to treat her like a good cousin and not an enemy. More than anything else, I would advise her to listen no more to Cecil, who sees enemies everywhere and, in so seeing, makes enemies everywhere.