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vestments to be used during the liturgy. She had to accept the title of Supreme Governor of the Church of England, rather than her
father’s more ostentatious ‘Supreme Head’, which many (in those unenlightened days) believed was unacceptable for a woman to bear. The religious changes were enshrined in the Act
of Supremacy 49 and the Act of Uniformity, 50 which made attendance at church compulsory for all. The
1552 Prayer Book in English became the only liturgy allowed in England and Wales.
    Unwittingly, the foundations had been laid for decades of religious turbulence. In Elizabeth’s name, more than two hundred Catholics and their priests were executed during the forty-four
years of her reign – not burnt at the stake, but butchered on the scaffold as traitors to her crown.
    The yawning schism with Rome also became the catalyst for a cripplingly expensive nineteen-year war with Spain that threatened invasion of her realm and day and night made her an
assassin’s target.

 
     
     
     
– 1 –
     
    THE ENEMY WITHIN
     
     
     
     
    We (poor wretches) . . . are reported . . . to be evilly affected towards your royal person . . . and that upon the vile action . . . of every lewd person, we all must
     be condemned to bear traitorous minds . . . We are most odiously termed ‘bloodsuckers’ . . . and it is published that your majesty is to fear so many deaths as there be papists in
     the land.
    An appeal to the queen from her loyal Catholic subjects, March 1585. 1
    A t seven o’clock on the evening of Sunday 16 May 1568, Elizabeth I’s personal nemesis entered her uncertain realm, stepping wearily
ashore on a remote windswept beach in north-west England.
    Her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots landed from a small fishing boat near Workington in Cumbria after fleeing Scotland across the treacherously shoaled waters of the Solway Firth. She was
dirty, penniless, and like other benighted refugees from civil war, possessed only the grubby clothes she stood up in. But despite her many hardships, the thrice-married, 2 twenty-five-year-old auburn-haired woman – at 5 feet 11 inches (1.80 metres) tall, towering over her handful of exhausted, dispirited attendants – still exuded
the dignity and deportment of a queen. Only the vivacity of her hazel-brown eyes was diminished, sapped by months of fear, heartbreak and privation.
    Three days before, it had taken just forty-five minutes for her army of six thousand men to be roundly defeated at Langside (now in south Glasgow), 3 by a smaller force fighting for the Scottish Protestant nobility led by her illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray. 4 She had earlier been forced to abdicate so that her babyson could ascend the Scottish throne as King James VI, with Moray as all-powerful regent. Now, as
dawn broke the following morning, Mary wrote plaintively to Elizabeth, craving an immediate private audience to seek English military assistance both to recover her crown and wreak bloody vengeance
on those who had rebelled against her.
    She was hardly a welcome visitor. Her personal heraldry proudly quartered the arms of England with those of France and Scotland, symbolising her claims to be the strongest heir presumptive to
the English throne through her direct descent from Henry VIII’s eldest sister, Margaret, one-time Queen of Scotland. 5
    Even though Elizabeth enjoyed less than harmonious relations with Mary and had resolutely rejected her as her successor, she sympathised with her sister queen’s unhappy fate, believing
that her Scottish neighbours had wickedly deposed a monarch anointed by God Himself. But she knew full well that her own Catholic subjects believed her a heretic, the bastard daughter of Anne
Boleyn who had bigamously married Henry before the death of his saintly wife, Katherine of Aragon. She was also conscious that many prayed earnestly that ere long, Mary would wear the crown of
England rather than her.
    Her chief minister,