She turned her face to the small fire in the hearth so I could not see her expression, but her voice was flat.

‘Yes. It is true that those men are charged.’

‘I want to ask you to show mercy,’ I said simply. ‘It is an awful thing to put a good man to death. And everyone says that these are good men. Just mistaken men . . . just disagreeing with the church’s teaching. But they were good bishops to your brother, Your Grace, and they are ordained bishops in the Church of England.’

She said nothing for a long time. I did not know whether to press the case or to leave it. The silence started to frighten me a little, I sat back on my heels and waited for her to speak and I could hear my own breathing coming too quickly, too lightly for an innocent person. I could feel my own danger coming towards me, like a dog on a scent, and the scent it was following was the sweat of my fear which was prickling me in the armpits and growing cold and damp down my spine.

When she turned to me, she was not like the Mary I loved at all. Her face was like a mask of snow. ‘They are not good men, for they deny the word of God and the rule of God, and they win others to their sin,’ she hissed at me. ‘They can repent their sins and be forgiven, or they can die. It is to them you should be speaking, Hannah, not me. This is the law: not a human law, not any law, not my law, but the law of the church. If they do not want to be punished by the church then they should not sin. I do not set myself up as judge here, it is the church that decides and they must obey it, as I do.’

She paused for a moment, but I could say nothing against her conviction.

‘It is men like them that have brought down the wrath of God on England,’ she said. ‘Not a good harvest, not a wealthy year since my father turned against the church and not a healthy child born into the cradle of England since he put my mother aside.’

I could see her hands trembling and her voice shook with her rising passion. ‘Do you not see it?’ she asked. ‘You of all people? Do you not see that he put my mother aside and never again got another healthy legitimate child?’

‘Princess Elizabeth?’ I breathed.

The queen laughed a loud harsh laugh. ‘She’s not his,’ she said derisively. ‘Look at her. She is a Smeaton, every inch of her. Her mother tried to pass off her bastard as the king’s own child, but now she is grown and behaves like the child of a lute-player and a whore, everyone can see her parentage. God gave my father only one healthy child: me; and then my poor father was turned against me and my mother. Since that day there has not been a moment’s good fortune for this country. They persuaded him to destroy the word of God, the abbeys and the nunneries, and then my brother took England deeper into sin. See the price we have paid? Hunger in the country and sickness in the towns.