“What is the matter now?” Bess says, coming to my side. She has thrown a shawl over her head and shoulders and she looks like a farmer’s wife run outside to feed the hens. “I was just in the garden and I saw you striding about and muttering to yourself like a man driven insane. Is it the queen? What has she done now?”

“No,” I say. “It is your great friend, Cecil.”

“Burghley.” She corrects me just to irritate me, I know. That nobody is now a baron and we must all call him “my lord.” And for what? For persecuting a queen of the blood until she is driven halfway to treason?

“Burghley,” I say mildly. “Of course, my lord Cecil. My lord Cecil the baron. How glad you must be for him. Your good friend. How grand he has become, what a pleasure for all who know and admire him. And he is building his grand house still? And he has substantial money from the queen, posts and preferments? He grows wealthier every day, does he not?”

“What’s the news? Why are you so angry?”

“He has pushed a bill through Parliament to disinherit the Queen of Scots,” I say. “Disinherit her. Now we see why he ordered us here where she could be so closely guarded. If ever the country would rise for her, you can see they might rise now. Declaring her invalid to inherit! As though Parliament can determine who is the heir to the throne. As though it does not go by blood. As though a bunch of commoners can say who is a king’s son! It makes no sense, apart from anything else.”

“Burghley has achieved this?”

“She must see this as false dealing to her. In the very month when she is due to go back to Scotland as queen, Cecil sends us here and pushes through a bill that says that no one of the Roman Catholic faith can ever be a monarch of England. Their faith is to disbar them as much as if they were...” For a moment I am speechless, I cannot think of an example. It has never been like this in England before. “A Jew...,” I manage. “If one can imagine such a thing as a Tudor Jew, a Stuart Jew. A Mussulman, a Hindoo pretender. They are treating her as if she were a Turk. She is a child of the Tudor line—Cecil is saying she is a foreigner to us.”

“It makes Elizabeth safe from a Papist assassin,” Bess says shrewdly. “There is no point in any hidden priest making a martyr of himself by killing her if it does not put a Papist on the throne.”