The Queen of Scots was silent. She stood like a stone. "But the Queen of England is dead?" she asked at last.

"Oh, no. Her Majesty is much, much better – for which we all give grateful thanks."

The Queen of Scots murmured a prayer – she scarcely knew what. "But the pink carnations?" she said.

"Her Majesty was most disappointed in your present," said the Countess. "The embroidery came all unravelled." She cast a contemptuous look at the Queen of Scots' lady-in-waiting. "It is my belief that Mrs Seton did not knot and tie the threads properly."

Henceforth the Queen of Scots and the Countess of Shrewsbury were no longer friends.

That night in her chamber when the Queen lay in bed, it seemed to her that the curtains of her bed were parted by a breath of wind. In the light of the moon the bare winter branches appeared to her now like great, black stitches sewn across the window – like stitches sewn across the castle, across the Queen herself. In her terror she thought her eyes were stitched up, her throat was closed with black stitches; her fingers were sewn together so that her hands were become useless, ugly flaps.

She screamed and all her attendants came running. "Elle m'a cousue à mon lit! Elle m'a cousue à mon lit!"cried the Queen. (She has sewn me to the bed! She has sewn me to the bed!) They calmed her and showed her that the Countess had done no such thing.

But the Queen never again tried to steal the Earl's affections away from the Countess.

A year or so later the Earl moved the Queen from one of his own castles to the Countess's new house of Chatsworth. When they arrived the Earl smilingly showed her a new floor which his wife had caused to have laid in the hallway – a chequerboard of black and white marble.

The Queen shivered, remembering the boy who had died wailing that the black squares and the white were killing him.

"I will not walk across it," said the Queen.

The Earl looked as if he did not understand. When it was revealed that all the entrances to the house had black and white squares to their floors, the Queen said she would not go in. The poor Earl tore out his hair and beard (which was by this time completely white and rather wispy), and begged, but the Queen declined absolutely to walk across the chequering. They brought a chair for her in the porch and she went and sat upon it. The Derbyshire rain came down and the Queen waited until the Earl brought workmen to dig up the squares of black and white marble.

"But why?" the Earl asked the Queen's servants. They shrugged their French and Scottish shoulders and made him no answer.

The Queen had not known a life could be so blank. She passed the years in devising plans to gain this European throne or that, intriguing to marry this great nobleman or that, but nothing ever came of any of it; and all the while she thought she could hear the snip, snip, snip of Elizabeth and her advisers cutting the threads of all her actions and the stitch, stitch, stitch of the Countess sewing her into the fabric of England, her prison.

One evening she was staring vacantly at an embroidered hanging. It showed some catastrophe befalling a classical lady. Her eye was caught by one of the classical lady's attendants who was depicted running away from the dreadful scene in alarm. A breath of wind within the chamber kept bringing the hanging dangerously close to a candle that stood upon a coffer. It was almost as if the little embroidered figure desired to rush into the flames. "She is tired," thought the Queen. "Tired of being sewn into this picture of powerlessness and despair."

The Queen rose from her chair and, unseen by any of her attendants, moved the candlestick a fraction closer to the hanging. The next time the wind blew, the hanging caught the flame.

The moment they observed the fire the Queen's women all cried out in alarm and the gentlemen began to issue instructions to one another. They pleaded with the Queen to leave the apartment, to hurry from the danger. But the Queen stood like a statue of alabaster. She kept her eyes upon the embroidered figure and saw it consumed by the fire. "See!" she murmured to her women. "Now she is free."

The next day she said to her maid, "I have it now. Get me crimson velvet. Make it the reddest that ever there was. Get me silks as bloody as the dawn." In the weeks that followed, the Queen sat hour after hour at the window. In her lap was the crimson velvet and she sewed it in silks as bloody as the dawn.

And when her ladies asked her what she was doing, she replied with a smile that she was embroidering beautiful flames. "Beautiful flames," she said, "can destroy so many things -prison walls that hold you, stitches that bind you fast."

Two months later the Queen of Scots was arrested on a charge of treason. Some of her letters had been discovered in a keg of ale belonging to a brewer who had delivered beer to the house. She was tried and condemned to be beheaded. On the morning of her execution, she approached the scaffold where lay the axe and the block. She was dressed in a black gown with a floor-length veil of white linen. When her outer garments were removed there was the petticoat of crimson velvet with the bright embroidered flames dancing upon it. The Queen smiled.

The Countess of Shrewbury lived on for twenty years more. She built many beautiful houses and embroidered hangings for them with pictures of Penelope and Lucretia. She herself was as discreet as Penelope and as respected as Lucretia. In the centuries that followed, her children and her children's children became Earls and Dukes. They governed England and lived in the fairest houses in the most beautiful landscapes. Many of them are there still.

Antickes are grotesque figures. Frets are formal Renaissance devices. Both are used in sixteenth-century embroidery.

John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner

This retelling of a popular Northern English folk tale is taken from A Child's History of the Raven King by John Waterbury, Lord Portishead. It bears similarities to other old stories in which a great ruler is outwitted by one of his humblest subjects and, because of this, many scholars have argued that it has no historical basis.

Many summers ago in a clearing in a wood in Cumbria there lived a Charcoal Burner. He was a very poor man. His clothes were ragged and he was generally sooty and dirty. He had no wife or children, and his only companion was a small pig called Blakeman. Most of the time he stayed in the clearing which contained just two things: an earth-covered stack of smouldering charcoal and a hut built of sticks and pieces of turf. But in spite of all this he was a cheerful soul – unless crossed in any way.

One bright summer's morning a stag ran into the clearing. After the stag came a large pack of hunting dogs, and after the dogs came a crowd of horsemen with bows and arrows. For some moments nothing could be seen but a great confusion of baying dogs, sounding horns and thundering hooves. Then, as quickly as they had come, the huntsmen disappeared among the trees at the far end of the clearing – all but one man.

The Charcoal Burner looked around. His grass was churned to mud; not a stick of his hut remained standing; and his neat stack of charcoal was half-dismantled and fires were bursting forth from it. In a blaze of fury he turned upon the remaining huntsman and began to heap upon the man's head every insult he had ever heard.

But the huntsman had problems of his own. The reason that he had not ridden off with the others was that Blakeman was running, this way and that, beneath his horse's hooves, squealing all the while. Try as he might, the huntsman could not get free of him. The huntsman was very finely dressed in black, with boots of soft black leather and a jewelled harness. He was in fact John Uskglass (otherwise called the Raven King), King of Northern England and parts of Faerie, and the greatest magician that ever lived. But the Charcoal Burner (whose knowledge of events outside the woodland clearing was very imperfect) guessed nothing of this. He only knew that the man would not answer him and this infuriated him more than ever. "Say something!" he cried.