My father had company in the bookshop. Daniel Carpenter’s mother was perched on one of the stools at the counter, her son beside her. I knelt for my father’s blessing, and then made a little bow to Mrs Carpenter and to my husband-to-be. The two parents looked at Daniel and I, as prickly as cats on a garden wall, and tried, without success, to hide their worldly-wise amusement at the irritability of a young couple during courtship.

‘I waited to see you and hear the news from court,’ Mrs Carpenter said. ‘And Daniel wanted to see you, of course.’

The glance that Daniel shot at her made it clear that he did not wish her to explain his doings to me.

‘Is the queen’s marriage to go ahead?’ my father asked. He poured me a glass of good Spanish red wine and pulled up a stool for me at the counter of the shop. I noted with wry amusement that my work as fool had made me a personage worthy of respect, with a seat and my own glass of wine.

‘Without doubt,’ I said. ‘The queen is desperate for a helper and a companion, and it is natural she should want a Spanish prince.’

I said nothing about the portrait which she had hung in her privy chamber, on the opposite wall from the prie-dieu, and which she consulted with a glance at every difficult moment, turning her head from a statue of God to a picture of her husband-to-be and back again.

My father glanced at Mrs Carpenter. ‘Please God it makes no difference to us,’ he said. ‘Please God she does not bring in Spanish ways.’

She nodded, but she failed to cross herself as she should have done. Instead she leaned forward and patted my father’s hand. ‘Forget the past,’ she said reassuringly. ‘We have lived in England for three generations. Nobody can think that we are anything but good Christians and good Englishmen.’

‘I cannot stay if it is to become another Spain,’ my father said in a low voice. ‘You know, every Sunday, every saint’s day, they burned heretics, sometimes hundreds at a time. And those of us who had practised Christianity for years were put on trial alongside those who had hardly pretended to it. And no-one could prove their innocence! Old women who had missed Mass because they were sick, young women who had been seen to look away when they raised the Host, any excuse, any reason, and you could be informed against. And always, always, it was those who had made money, or those who had advanced in the world and made enemies. And with my books and my business and my reputation for scholarship, I knew they would come for me, and I started to prepare. But I did not think they would take my parents, my wife’s sister, my wife before me . . .’ He broke off. ‘I should have thought of it, we should have gone earlier.’