The duke looked as if he would have argued.

‘It is my command,’ she said flatly.

He shrugged and bowed. ‘As you command then,’ he said. ‘Whatever the consequences.’

She looked over his head to me, her face quizzical, as if to ask what I thought. I made a little bow, I did not want her to know the sense of immense dread that I felt.

WINTER 1554

I came to wish that I had warned her in that moment. The Duke of Norfolk took the apprentice boys from London and the queen’s own guard, and marched them down to Kent to meet Wyatt’s force in a set-piece battle, which should have routed the men from Kent in a day. But the moment the royal army faced Wyatt’s men and saw their honest faces and their determination, our forces, who had sworn to protect the queen, threw their caps in the air and shouted ‘We are all Englishmen!’

Not a shot was fired. They embraced each other as brothers and turned against their commander, united against the queen. The duke, desperate to escape with his life, hared back to London, having done nothing but add a trained force to Wyatt’s raggle-taggle army who came onward, even more quickly, even more determined than they were before, right up to the gates of London.

The sailors on the warships on the Medway, always a powerful bellwether of opinion, deserted to Wyatt in a body, abandoning the queen’s cause, united by their hatred of Spain, and determined to have a Protestant English queen. They took the small arms from the ships, the stores, and their skill as fighting men. I remembered how the arrival of the ships’ companies from Yarmouth had changed everything for us at Framlingham. We had known then, when the sailors had joined us to fight on land, that it was a battle by the people, and that the people united could not be defeated. Now they were united once more, but this time against us. When she heard the news from the Medway, I thought that the queen must realise she had lost.

She sat down with a much diminished council in a room filled with the acrid smell of fear.

‘Half of them have fled to their homes in the country,’ she told Jane Dormer as she looked at the empty seats around the table. ‘And they will be writing letters to Elizabeth now, trying to balance their scales, trying to join the winning side.’

She was harassed by advice. Those who had stayed at court were divided between men who said that she should cancel the marriage, and promise to choose a Protestant prince for a husband, and those who were begging her to call in the Spanish to help put down the rebellion with exemplary savagery.

‘And thus prove to everyone that I cannot rule alone!’ the queen exclaimed.

Thomas Wyatt’s army, swelled by recruits from every village on the London road, reached the south bank of the Thames on a wave of enthusiasm, and found London Bridge raised against them, and the guns of the Tower trained on the southern bank ready for them.