Why Everyone Who Worked For Elizabeth I Hated Her

March 1603. Richmond Palace. They open a small casket beside the dead Queen's bed. Inside is one letter, written fifteen years earlier by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, asking how she was feeling. On the outside, in her own handwriting: "His last letter." This is the woman England calls the Virgin Queen — married to her kingdom, needing no one. Weeks after he died, she had his goods auctioned to collect a £25,000 debt. She kept the paper and sold the furniture. Every man who worked for her spent thirty years inside that contradiction. Most of them came to hate it.