It was hard to find a way to speak with the Lady Elizabeth without half the court remarking on it. Although she had no friends at court and only a small circle of her own household, she seemed to be continually surrounded by apparently casual passers-by, half of whom were paid to spy on her. The French king had his spies in England, the Spanish emperor had his network. All the great men had maids and men in other households to keep watch for any signs of change or of treason, and the queen herself was creating and paying a network of informers. For all I knew, someone was paid to report on me, and the very thought of it made me sick with fear. It was a tense world of continual suspicion and pretend friendship. I was reminded of John Dee’s model of the earth with all the planets going around it. This princess was like the earth, at the very centre of everything, except all the stars in her firmament watched her with envious eyes and wished her ill. I thought it no wonder that she was paler and paler and the shadows under her eyes were turning from the blue to the dark violet of bruises, as the Christmas feast approached and there was no goodwill from anyone for her.

The queen’s enmity grew every day that Elizabeth walked through the court with her head high, and her nose in the air, every time she turned away from the statue of Our Lady in the chapel, every time she left off her rosary and wore instead a miniature prayer book on a chain at her waist. Everyone knew that the prayer book contained her brother’s dying prayer: ‘Oh my lord God, defend this realm from Papistry and maintain thy true religion’. To wear this, in preference to the coral rosary that the queen had given her, was more than a public act of defiance, it was a living tableau of disobedience.

To Elizabeth, it was perhaps little more than a showy rebellion; but to our queen it was an insult that went straight to her heart. When Elizabeth rode out dressed in rich colours and smiling and waving, people would cheer her and doff their hats for her; when she stayed home in plain black and white people came to Whitehall Palace to see her dine at the queen’s table and remark on her fragile beauty and the plain Protestant piety of her dress.

The queen could see that although Elizabeth never openly defied her, she continually gave the gossip mongers material to take outside the court and to spread among those who kept to their Protestant ways:

‘The Protestant princess was pale today, and did not touch the stoop of holy water.’

‘The Protestant princess begged to be excused from evening Mass because she was unwell again.’

‘The Protestant princess, all but prisoner in the Papist court, is keeping to her faith as best as she can, and biding her time in the very jaws of the Antichrist.’