Well, I don’t know. I don’t know. It was not for this that we prayed, when we longed for our Elizabeth. This is not the new world of peace and reconciliation that we thought the new princess would bring to us.

I mutter all this to myself as I go, sluggishly enough, in my own barge down the river to the Westminster steps, to alight from a rocking boat on a dark river and to walk up the damp steps and through the terrace of the palace towards the hall, never more downhearted than now, as Cecil’s great plan to make England safe from Papists, from the Spanish, from the Scots queen reaches its powerful final act. My fortune destroyed, in debt to my own wife, my own peace in wretched scraps, my wife spying on me, the woman that I love dishonored by her own lies, a traitor to my liege lord and queen, the other once-beloved queen my ruin. I lift my head and walk into the hall as a Talbot should walk, like a lord among his peers, as my father would have walked, and his father before him, all of us in a long line, and I think, Dear God, none of them can ever have felt as I do: so uncertain, so very uncertain, and so lost.

I have the highest seat, and on either side of me are the other lords who will try this miserable case with me, God forgive them for serving here. Cecil has picked this court well for his purposes. Hastings is here, the Scots queen’s inveterate enemy; Wentworth, Robert Dudley, and his brother Ambrose, every one of them Norfolk’s friend in the good times, not one of them ready to risk his reputation for him now; none would dare defend the Scots queen. All of us, who whispered against Cecil just three years ago, are huddled together now, like frightened schoolboys, to do whatever he says.

Cecil is here himself—Burghley, as I must remember to call him. The queen’s newest and freshest creation: Baron Burghley, in his bright new robes, his ermine collar all white and fluffy.

Below us lords are the judges of the Crown, and before us all, a draped stage where Howard will stand to answer the charges. Behind him, seats for the nobility, and behind them, standing room for the thousands of gentry and citizens who have come to London to enjoy the unique spectacle of a royal cousin on open trial for treason and rebellion. The royal family turning on itself once again. We find we are no further forward at all.