There is not one of us, not one of the twenty-six of us peers called to judge him, who does not imagine himself in his place. So many of us have lost friends or kin to the scaffold in these last few years. I think of Westmorland and Northumberland—both gone from me, both driven from me and from England, the wife of one in exile, a widow to a dead traitor, and the wife of the other in hiding on her lands, swearing she wants to know nothing of anything. How can this have happened in England, in my England? How can we have fallen so quickly into such suspicion and fear? God knows we are more fearful and more faithless to each other now, while Philip of Spain threatens our coast, than we were when he was married to our old queen and sitting on our throne. When we had a Spaniard as our king consort, ruling over us, we were less fearful than we are now. Now we are terrified of him and his religion. How should that be? A man who does not know who his friends are, does not know what the world is, a man who does not know his servants, his allies, is a man utterly alone.

I shall have to sit in judgment on my friend and fellow peer Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, and I shall have to listen to some dirty stuff. I don’t trust evidence which has been racked out of prisoners screaming with pain. When did torture become something that happens as a matter of course in the prisons, with the silent complicity of the judge? We are not in France, where torture is a legal practice; we are not Spanish with an artistry of cruelty; we became Protestant so that religion should be a private matter, not imposed by fire and the stake. We are Englishmen, and such savagery is illegal except at the specific request of the monarch in the gravest of times. This is how it is in England.

Or at any rate, it should be.

Or at any rate, it once was.

But since the queen is advised by men who do not flinch from a little barbarism, I find all sorts of evidence is now presented to me and I am expected to wink at it. Men I have counted as my friends for years can be declared treasonous and led to the scaffold, their road lined with confessions from their broken servants. This is the new justice of England, where stories are crushed out of men by piling stones on their bellies, and the judge is told beforehand what verdict to bring in. Where we break the spirits of page boys so that we can break the neck of their master.