I am a Protestant. I will live and die a Protestant. My enemies will think that is because it has been a religion to profit me; cynics will point to my gold candlesticks and my lead mines and my coal mines and my stone quarries, and even to these stolen painted saints in my gallery. But what the cynics don’t understand is that these are the goods that God has given to me as a reward for the purity of my faith. I am a Protestant through and through. I don’t acknowledge this Stuart Papist queen; I deny the wisdom of the priest of Rome; I deny the sanctity of the bread and wine. It is bread, it is wine. It is not body and blood of Christ. The Virgin Mary was a woman, like any of us; Jesus was a carpenter, a working man proud of his tables, as I am a working woman proud of my houses and lands. The kingdom of the saints will come when the world has earned purity, not when enough money has been poured into the collecting plate of the church. I believe in God—not in a wizard doled out at a price by the priests of the old church. I believe in the Bible, which I can read for myself in English. And more than anything else I believe in me, in my view of the world. I believe in my responsibility for my own destiny, guilt for my own sins, merit for my own good deeds, determination of my own life, and in my accounts books which tell me how well or ill I am doing. I don’t believe in miracles, I believe in hard work. And I don’t believe that Queen Mary is now Queen of England just because some old fool in Rome chooses to say so.

ON THE ROAD TO CHATSWORTH: MARY

MAY, 1570