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Dear Father,

Thank you for your blessing in your letter to me. I am glad that you are well and that the shop in Calais is doing so well. I should have been glad to obey your command and come to you at once but when I went to the queen for permission to leave her service I found her so ill that I cannot leave her, at least for this month. The king has set sail for the Lowlands, and she cannot be happy without him, she is quite desolate. We have come to Greenwich and it is like a court in mourning. I will stay with her until he returns which he has promised, on his word of honour, will be very soon. When he comes back I shall come to you without delay. I hope this is agreeable to you, Father, and that you will explain to Daniel and to his mother that I would prefer to be with them, but that I feel it is my duty to stay with the queen at this time of her great unhappiness.

I send you my love and duty and hope to see you soon—

Your Hannah

Dear Daniel,

Forgive me, I cannot come yet. The queen is in a despair so great that I dare not leave her. The king has left and she is clinging to all her other friends. She is so bereft that I fear for her mind. Forgive me, love, I will come as soon as I can. He has sworn it is a brief absence, merely to protect his interests in the Low Countries and so we expect him back within the month. September or October at the latest, I will be able to come to you. I want to be your wife, indeed I do.

Hannah

AUTUMN 1555

The queen retreated into a private world of silent misery in the palace that had been the happiest of them all: Greenwich. Parting with the king had been an agony for her. Like a man, he had hidden from her despair in the elaborate formality of leave-taking, he had made sure they were always attended so she could not cry over him in private. He engineered it so that she said goodbye to him like a doll queen: one whose hands and feet and mouth were worked by an indifferent puppet-master. When he was finally gone it was as if the strings were cut and she dropped to the floor, all disjointed.

Elizabeth had slid away from him with a smile which suggested to some that she had a better idea of when he would come back to England than his own wife, and was reassured by his plans. He had the decency not to hold her close on parting, but when he boarded ship and leaned over the side and waved, he kissed his hand and it was a gesture directed ambiguously: towards the princess, and the heartbroken queen.