Elizabeth kept her eyes straight ahead, she limped slightly on her stockinged foot and it made her walk slowly. She gave me plenty of time to deliver the message that she had said she could not hear without permission.

“Lord Robert asks you to summon John Dee as your tutor,” I said quietly. “He said, ‘without fail.’”

Still, she did not look at me.

“Can I tell him you will do so?”

“You can tell him that I will not do anything that would displease my sister the queen,” she said easily. “But I have long wanted to study with Mr. Dee and I was going to ask him to read with me. I am particularly interested in reading the teaching of the early fathers of the Holy Church.”

She shot one veiled glance at me.

“I am trying to learn about the Roman Catholic church,” she said. “My education has been much neglected until now.”

We were at the door of her rooms. A guard stood to attention as we approached and swung the door open. Elizabeth released me. “Thank you for your help,” she said coolly, and went inside. As the door shut behind her I saw her bend down and put her shoe back on. The heel was, of course, perfectly sound.

John Dee’s prediction that the men of England would rise up to prevent the queen marrying a Spaniard was proved every day in dozens of incidents. There were ballads sung against the marriage, the braver preachers thundered against a match so dangerous to the independence of the country. Crude drawings appeared on every lime-washed wall in the city, chap books were handed out slandering the Spanish prince, abusing the queen for even considering him. It was no help that the Spanish ambassador assured every nobleman at court that his prince had no interest in taking power in England, that the prince had been persuaded to the match by his father, that indeed Prince Philip, a desirable man of under thirty years might well have sought a bride to bring him more pleasure and profit than the Queen of England, eleven years his senior. Any suggestion that he wanted the match was proof of Spanish greed, any hint that he might have looked elsewhere was an insult.

The queen herself nearly collapsed under the weight of conflicting advice, under her great fear that she would lose the love of the people of England without gaining the support of Spain.

“Why did you say my heart would break?” she feverishly demanded of me, one day. “Was it because you could foresee it would be like this? With all my councillors telling me to refuse the match, and yet all of them telling me to marry and have a child without delay? With all the country dancing at my coronation and then, minutes later, all of them cursing the news of my wedding?”

“No,” I said. “I could not have foretold this. I think no one could have foretold such a turnaround in such a little time.”

“I have to guard against them,” she said, more to herself than to me. “At every turn I have to keep them at my beck and call. The great lords, and every man under them, have to be my loyal servants; but all the time they whisper in corners and set themselves up to judge me.”

She rose from her chair and walked the eight steps to the window, turned and walked back again. I remembered the first time I had seen her at Hunsdon, in the little court where she rarely laughed, where she was little more than a prisoner. Now she was Queen of England and still she was imprisoned by the will of the people, and still she did not laugh.

“And the council are worse than the ladies of my chamber!” she exclaimed. “They argue ceaselessly in my very presence, there are dozens of them but I cannot get a single sensible word of advice, they all desire something different, and they all – all of them! – lie to me. My spies bring me one set of stories, and the Spanish ambassador tells me others. And all the time I know that they are massing against me. They will pull me down from the throne and push Elizabeth on to it out of sheer madness. They will snatch themselves from the certainty of heaven and throw themselves into hell because they have studied heresy, and now they cannot hear the true word when it is given to them.”

“People like to think for themselves…” I suggested.

She rounded on me. “No, they don’t. They like to follow a man who is prepared to think for them. And now they think they have found him. They have found Thomas Wyatt. Oh yes, I know of him. The son of Anne Boleyn’s lover, whose side d’you think he is on? They have men like Robert Dudley, waiting on his chance in the Tower, and they have a princess like Elizabeth: a foolish girl, too young to know her own mind, too vain to take care, and too greedy to wait, as I had to wait, as I had to wait honorably, for all those long testing years. I waited in a wilderness, Hannah. But she will not wait at all.”

“You need not fear Robert Dudley,” I said quickly. “D’you not remember that he declared for you? Against his own father? But who is this Wyatt?”

She walked to the wall and back to the window again. “He has sworn he will be faithful to me but deny me my husband,” she said. “As if such a thing could be done! He says he will pull me from the throne, and then put me back again.”

“Does he have many on his side?”

“Half of Kent,” she whispered. “And that sly devil Edward Courtenay as king in waiting, if I know him, and Elizabeth hoping to be his queen. And there will be money coming from somewhere to pay him for his crime, I don’t doubt.”

“Money?”

Her voice was bitter. “Francs. The enemies of England are always paid in francs.”

“Can’t you arrest him?”

“When I find him, I can,” she said. “He’s a traitor ten times over. But I don’t know where he is nor when he plans to make his move.” She walked to the window and looked out, as if she would see beyond the garden at the foot of the palace walls, over the silver Thames, cold in the winter sunlight, all the way to Kent and the men who kept their plans hidden.

I was struck by the contrast between our hopes on the road to London and how it was, now that she was queen crowned. “D’you know, I thought when we rode into London that all your struggles would be over.”

The look she turned to me was haunted, her eyes shadowed with brown, her skin as thick as candle wax. She looked years older than she had done that day when we had ridden in to cheering crowds at the head of a cheering army. “I thought so too,” she said. “I thought that my unhappiness was over. The fear that I felt all through my childhood: the nightmares at night, and the terrible waking every day to find that they were true. I thought that if I was proclaimed queen and crowned queen then I would feel safe. But now it is worse than before. Every day I hear of another plot against me, every day I see someone look askance when I go to Mass, every day I hear someone admire Lady Elizabeth’s learning or her dignity or her grace. Every day I know that another man has whispered with the French ambassador, spread a little gossip, told a little lie, suggested that I would throw my kingdom into the lap of Spain; as if I had not spent my life, my whole life, waiting for the throne! As if my mother did not sacrifice herself, refuse any agreement with the king so that she might keep me as the heir! She died without me at her side, without a kind word from him, in a cold damp ruin, far away from her friends, so that I might one day be queen. As though I would throw away her inheritance for a mere fancy for a portrait! Are they mad that they think I might so forget myself?

“There is nothing, nothing, more precious to me than this throne. There is nothing more precious to me than these people; and yet they cannot see it and they will not trust me!”

She was shaking, I had never seen her so distressed. “Your Grace,” I said. “You must be calm. You have to seem serene, even when you are not.”