Sometimes, I am amazed at how Fate has brought me to my twenty-seventh year. I have seen the rise and fall of queens and the temper and fury of kings, and have been a whisper from both the throne of England and the executioner’s block . . .

As far back as I can remember, my Englishness was impressed upon me. My mother might have been queen of Scots and then the wife of a Scots nobleman, but she never forgot that she was first and foremost an English princess – and a Tudor one at that.

It was only chance that saw me born an English subject, just over the border in Northumberland, even though my father was Scots and a Douglas, which was almost as important as being royal. To Mother, though, our royal English blood was paramount. Born the eldest daughter of King Henry VII of England, she was thirteen when, to cement a peace, she was married to James IV, King of Scots. She had loved him, for all his lechery, and given him six children, though only my half-brother James survived infancy.

Mother liked to talk about her younger years but she could barely bring herself to speak of the great battle that changed everything. Two years before my birth, King James was slain on the battlefield of Flodden, alongside the flower of the Scottish nobility. It was a terrible defeat for Scotland and a great victory for the English, and it left Scotland under the rule of my brother James V, a toddler in leading reins. Though the great lords were all hungry for power, my mother was named regent of Scotland during the minority of her son and awarded the guardianship of the young King. Her rule began well, until she became entangled with the Douglas clan and, in particular, with the Earl of Angus, my father, and secretly married him. It was not a politic marriage, but one based on lust, which very quickly burned out, and the secret was not kept for long. Then there was a mighty outcry indeed!