I have become, despite myself, Queen Mary’s advisor. I have to: it is a duty of honor. She cannot be left without someone to talk to. She has no one that she can trust. Her betrothed, the Duke of Norfolk, is imprisoned and can only write to her in secret; her ambassador, the bishop John Lesley, has been silent since the arrests; and all the time Cecil is pressing her to come to an agreement about her return to Scotland, on terms that even I can see are relentless.

“You are too hasty,” I scold her. “You are too eager. You cannot agree to these terms.”

They want to impose on her Cecil’s old Treaty of Edinburgh, which makes Scotland a subject nation, subservient to England, incapable of making its own alliances, banned from having a foreign policy at all. They want her to agree to make Scotland a Protestant country, where she may worship only in private, almost in hiding. They even want her to surrender her claim to the English throne; they demand that she disinherit herself. And like a queen in very truth she is prepared to accept this humiliation, this martyrdom, to win again her throne of Scotland and return to her son.

“These are impossible demands; they are wicked demands,” I tell her. “Your own mother refused them for you, as she was dying. Cecil would have forced them on her; he should be ashamed to force them on you.”

“I have to agree,” she says. “I know they are onerous. But I will agree.”

“You should not.”

“I will, because once I am there...” She shrugs, a gesture so utterly French that if I saw only the movement of her shoulders among a crowd of other women, I would know her at once. “Once I am on my throne again I can do as I please.”

“You are joking. You cannot mean to sign an agreement and then renege?” I am genuinely shocked.

“No, non, jamais, no. Of course not. But who would blame me if I did? You yourself say these terms are wickedly unfair.”

“If they thought you would go back on your word, then they would never agree with you at all,” I point out. “They would know that you could not be trusted. And you would have made your own word, the word of a queen, utterly valueless.”

She flicks a smile at me like a naughty child. “I have nothing to put on the table,” she says simply. “I have nothing to barter but my word. I have to sell it to them.”

“They will make you keep your word,” I warn her.

“Ah, bah!” She laughs. “How can they? Once I am on my throne again?”

“Because of this last condition,” I say, pointing it out to her. The document is written in English; I fear that she has not fully understood it.