The queen’s penchant for Pierre de Chastelard burgeoned; at the same time Master Knox thundered from his pulpit about the sins of the court, the dancing, the music, the lustfulness, the abomination of the mass. The queen, defiant, spent all the more hours with Chastelard, setting his poetry to music, dancing with him, resting her cheek on his shoulder. No one was surprised when he found the bean in his slice of cake on Twelfth Night and was crowned King of the Bean for the rest of the celebrations. People began to whisper that he had dreams of becoming king of Scots as well. That was perfectly ridiculous, of course. The queen was still negotiating with the king of Spain to marry his poor mad son; her Guise uncles in Paris were putting forward the twelve-year-old King Charles IX of France, with a suitable dispensation for the fact that he was her brother-in-law. Nicolas de Clerac had been abruptly sent off to Austria to negotiate with the emperor’s brother, Archduke Karl of Austria; the court did not seem the same without him.
