I wanted to know every single thing about her, to discover everything she did, and said, and thought. I wanted to know if she hemmed her own linen, I wanted to know who starched her ruff. I wanted to know how often she washed her great mane of red hair. As soon as I saw her, in her green gown at the head of such a troop of men and women on that huge white horse, I saw a woman that I could one day wish to be. A woman who was proud of her beauty and beautiful in her pride; and I longed to grow into a woman like that. The Lady Elizabeth seemed to me to be something that Hannah the Fool might become. I had been an unhappy girl for so long, and then a boy for so long, and a fool for so long that I had no idea how to be a woman—the very idea baffled me. But when I saw the Lady Elizabeth, high on her horse, blazing with beauty and confidence, I thought that this was the sort of woman that I might be. I had never seen such a thing in my life before. This was a woman who gave no quarter to a disabling maidenly modesty, this was a woman who looked as if she could claim the ground she walked on.

But she was not bold in a brazen way, for all of her red hair, and her smiling face, and the energy of her every movement. She deployed all the modesty of a young woman, with a sideways sliding smile at the man who lifted her back into the saddle, and a flirtatious turn of the head as she gathered up the reins. She looked like someone who knew all the pleasures of being a young woman and was not prepared to take the pains. She looked like a young woman who knew her mind.

I looked from her to the Lady Mary, the mistress that I had come to love, and I thought that it would be better for her if she made plans to marry off Lady Elizabeth at once, and send her far away. No household could be at peace with this firebrand in its midst, and no kingdom could settle with such an heir burning so brightly beside an ageing queen.

AUTUMN 1553

As Lady Mary became established in her new life as the next Queen of England I realised that I must speak to her about my own future. September came and I was paid my wage from the queen’s household accounts, just as if I were a musician or a pageboy in very truth, or one of her other servants. Clearly, I had exchanged one master for another, the king to whom I had been begged as a fool was dead, the lord who had sworn me as his vassal was in the Tower, and the Lady Mary on whom I had been battened all this summer was now my mistress. In a move contrary to the spirit of the times—since everyone else in the country seemed to be coming to court with their palm outstretched to assure her that their village would never have declared for her had it not been for their own heroic isolated efforts—I thought that perhaps the moment had come for me to excuse myself from royal service and go back to my father.