“Yes,” she said. “But there must be no sieges of towns and no sacking of villages.”

“It cannot be done!” he protested. “In battle, one cannot protect the battle ground.”

“These are your orders,” she insisted icily. “I will not have a civil war fought over my wheat fields, especially in these starving times. These rebels must be put down like vermin. I won’t have innocent people hurt by the hunt.”

For a moment he looked as if he would argue. Then she leaned toward him. “Trust me in this,” she said persuasively. “I know. I am a virgin queen, my only children are my people. They have to see that I love them and care for them. I cannot get married on a tide of their innocent blood. This has to be gently done, and firmly done, and done only once. Can you do it for me?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. He was too afraid to waste time in flattery. “Nobody can do it. They are gathering in their hundreds, in their thousands. These people understand only one thing and that is force. They understand gibbets at the crossroads and heads on pikes. You cannot rule Englishmen and be merciful, Your Grace.”

“You are mistaken,” she said, going head to head with him, as determined as he was. “I came to this throne by a miracle and God does not change his mind. We will win these men back by the love of God. You have to do it as I command. It has to be done as God would have it, or His miracle cannot take place.”

The duke looked as if he would have argued.

“It is my command,” she said flatly.

He shrugged and bowed. “As you command then,” he said. “Whatever the consequences.”

She looked over his head to me, her face quizzical, as if to ask what I thought. I made a little bow, I did not want her to know the sense of immense dread that I felt.

Winter 1554

I came to wish that I had warned her in that moment. The Duke of Norfolk took the apprentice boys from London and the queen’s own guard, and marched them down to Kent to meet Wyatt’s force in a set-piece battle, which should have routed the men from Kent in a day. But the moment the royal army faced Wyatt’s men and saw their honest faces and their determination, our forces, who had sworn to protect the queen, threw their caps in the air and shouted, “We are all Englishmen!”

Not a shot was fired. They embraced each other as brothers and turned against their commander, united against the queen. The duke, desperate to escape with his life, hared back to London, having done nothing but add a trained force to Wyatt’s raggle-taggle army who came onward, even more quickly, even more determined than they were before, right up to the gates of London.

The sailors on the warships on the Medway, always a powerful bellwether of opinion, deserted to Wyatt in a body, abandoning the queen’s cause, united by their hatred of Spain, and determined to have a Protestant English queen. They took the small arms from the ships, the stores, and their skill as fighting men. I remembered how the arrival of the ships’ companies from Yarmouth had changed everything for us at Framlingham. We had known then, when the sailors had joined us to fight on land, that it was a battle by the people, and that the people united could not be defeated. Now they were united once more, but this time against us. When she heard the news from the Medway, I thought that the queen must realize she had lost.

She sat down with a much diminished council in a room filled with the acrid smell of fear.

“Half of them have fled to their homes in the country,” she told Jane Dormer as she looked at the empty seats around the table. “And they will be writing letters to Elizabeth now, trying to balance their scales, trying to join the winning side.”

She was harassed by advice. Those who had stayed at court were divided between men who said that she should cancel the marriage, and promise to choose a Protestant prince for a husband, and those who were begging her to call in the Spanish to help put down the rebellion with exemplary savagery.

“And thus prove to everyone that I cannot rule alone!” the queen exclaimed.

Thomas Wyatt’s army, swelled by recruits from every village on the London road, reached the south bank of the Thames on a wave of enthusiasm, and found London Bridge raised against them, and the guns of the Tower trained on the southern bank ready for them.

“They are not to open fire,” the queen ruled.

“Your Grace, for the love of God…”

She shook her head. “You want me to open fire on Southwark, a village that greeted me so kindly as queen? I will not fire on the people of London.”

“The rebels are encamped within range now. We could open fire and destroy them in one cannonade.”

“They will have to stay there until we can raise an army to drive them away.”

“Your Grace, you have no army. There are no men who will fight for you.”

She was pale but she did not waver for a moment. “I have no army yet,” she emphasized. “But I will raise one from the good men of London.”

Against her council’s advice, and with the enemy force growing stronger every day that they camped, unchallenged, on the south bank of the city, the queen put on her great gown of state and went to the Guildhall to meet the Mayor and the people. Jane Dormer, her other ladies and I went in her train, dressed as grandly as we could and looking confident, though we knew we were proceeding to disaster.

“I don’t know why you are coming,” one of the old men of the council said pointedly to me. “There are fools enough in her train already.”

“But I am a holy fool, an innocent fool,” I said pertly. “And there are few enough innocent here. You would not be one, I reckon.”

“I am a fool to be here at all,” he said sourly.

Of all of the queen’s council and certainly of all of her ladies in waiting, only Jane and I had any hopes of getting out of London alive; but Jane and I had seen her at Framlingham, and we knew that this was a queen to back against all odds. We saw the sharpness in her dark eyes and the pride in her carriage. We had seen her put her crown on her small dark head and smile at herself in the looking glass. We had seen a queen, not filled with fear of an unbeatable enemy, but playing for her life as if it were a game of quoits. She was at her very best when she and her God stood against disaster; with an enemy at the very gates of London you would want no other queen.

But despite all this, I was afraid. I had seen men and women put to violent death, I had smelled the smoke from the burnings of heretics. I knew, as few of her ladies knew, what death meant.

“Are you coming with me, Hannah?” she asked pleasantly as she mounted the steps to the Guildhall.

“Oh yes, Your Grace,” I said through cold lips.

They had set up a throne for her in the Guildhall and half of London came from sheer curiosity, crowding to hear the queen argue for her life. When she stood, a small figure under the weighty golden crown, draped in the heavy robes of state, I thought for a moment that she would not be able to convince them to keep their faith with her. She looked too frail, she looked too much like a woman who would indeed be ruled by her husband. She looked like a woman you could not trust.

She opened her mouth to speak and there was no sound. “Dear God, let her speak.” I thought she had lost her voice from fear itself, and Wyatt might as well march into the hall now and claim the throne for the Lady Elizabeth, for the queen could not defend herself. But then her voice boomed out, as loud as if she were shouting every word, but as clear and sweet as if she were singing like a chorister in the chapel on Christmas Day.

She told them everything, it was as simple as that. She told them the story of her inheritance: that she was a king’s daughter and she claimed her father’s power, and their fealty. She reminded them that she was a virgin without a child of her own and that she loved the people of the country as only a mother can love her child, that she loved them as a mistress, and that, loving them so intensely, she could not doubt but that they loved her in return.