“And who would whisper such a thing? Who do you think, Bess Talbot? Who do you know who uses rumor and false accusation and terrible slanders to destroy another’s reputation? To finish them forever? When he cannot prove them guilty in an inquiry, but when he is determined to give them the reputation of guilt in the world? Who would do this? Who has the men already in his service and the power that he could do this?”

I see in her stricken face that she knows full well who runs the spies, and that it is the same man who runs the slander makers. “I don’t know,” she says stoutly. “I don’t know who would do such a thing.”

I let it rest. I have heard worse ballads than the one we have just burned on the fire, and seen worse portraits too. I let Bess cling to her denial rather than force her to name her friend Cecil as a spy and a pitcher of filth. “Well, well,” I say lightly. “If you do not know, having lived at court as you have done, having seen who rules and who has power, then I am sure that I do not know either.”

COLD HARBOR HOUSE, LONDON: GEORGE

JANUARY, 1572

As I get to London, after a bad journey in terrible weather, and open up a few rooms of my London house, I learn that Cecil, having kept the terrible letters of the Scots queen as a state secret on the command of Elizabeth for over three years, has now seen fit to publish this odd and obscene collection of poetry, threat, and evil.

Having refused to see them as a secret document, and insisted that they were presented as evidence in court or not shown at all, I now find these most secret papers, which we all agreed were too dreadful to be discussed by an official inquiry, are now available at the stationers as a little booklet, priced for sale, and the poor people are writing ballads and posting drawings based on this filth. The supposed author of these vile and lustful scribbles, the Queen of Scots, is unanimously reviled in London by everyone who has bought and read them, and even the common people throughout England seem to have learned of the letters and now claim to know, with the absolute certainty of the ignorant, that she is Bothwell’s lover and Darnley’s murderer, the poisoner of her first husband and the lover of her French father-in-law, and in league with the devil to boot. They are creating ballads and stories and more than one vile riddle. She, whom I first saw as a creature of fire and air, is now notorious; she is become a figure of fun.