I look down at my hands, I shuffle my papers. Surely, we cannot hound this man to the scaffold without giving him time to prepare a defense? Surely, we will allow him a lawyer?

“I stand here before you for my life, lands and goods, my children and my posterity, and for that which I esteem most of all, my honesty,” he says eagerly to me. “I forbear to speak of my honor. I am unlearned; let me have what the law would allow, let me have counsel.”

I am about to command the justices to withdraw and rule on his request. We were his friends; we cannot hear him ask us for something so reasonable and refuse it. The man has to have advice. Then a note from Cecil, farther down the table, is passed along and slid under my hand.

1. If he has a lawyer then the full detail of the Queen of Scots’ promises to him will be revealed. I assure you that her letters to him are not those that you would want read out in your court. They show her as a scandalous whore.

2. All this occurred under your guardianship, which must then be called into question. How could you have allowed such a thing to happen?

3. The trial will be prolonged and the Queen of Scots’ honor and reputation utterly destroyed.

4. Her Grace, our queen, will be held up for contempt before everyone, by what these two say of her. We will make a thousand traitors while prosecuting one.

5. Let us have the decency to get to judgment quickly and let Her Grace the queen deal mercifully with the sentence. She can always pardon him once this trial is over.

I read this and then I rule. “You must make your answer to the charge,” I say to Howard.

He looks at me with his dark honest eyes. One long look, and then he nods. “Then I must question the charge,” he says.

I consent, but we all know there is no avoiding a charge of treason. Cecil’s new laws have so enlarged the definition of treason that it is not possible to live in England today without being guilty almost daily, almost hourly. To speculate as to the queen’s health is treason, to suggest she might one day die is treason, to suggest that she might not be Queen of France is certain treason, though it is nothing but the most obvious truth: none of us will ever see an English Calais again. Even to think, in one’s innermost secret heart, any criticism of the queen is now treason. Thomas Howard must be guilty of treason, as indeed we all must be, every day of our lives, even Cecil.