A SECRET letter from a loyal servant telling of his employer’s passion for marriage into Britain’s Royal Family is revealed in The Times today.

The royal go-between complains of a monarch’s anger at gossip of a possible love match and declares he would rather “drain a glass of poison” than upset her.

But the billet doux is not about Paul Burrell, the late Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Queen, but about a royal affair from half a millennium ago.

The letter is written in coded French to Elizabeth I from the envoy of a marriage suitor she nicknamed “My Little Frog”. It has been translated into English for the first time since she read it in 1581.

The note was written by Jean de Simier — whom Elizabeth called "Monkey" — a servant of Francis, Duke of Alençon, later Duke of Anjou.

Although bandy-legged, pock-marked and in his mid-20s to the Queen’s 48, Anjou rated his chances as one of Europe’s most eligible bachelors. He made serious attempts to court the Virgin Queen in 1579 and 1581. For Elizabeth, he was her last hope of marriage and an heir.

Simier, Anjou’s Master of the Wardrobe, concealed the letter’s contents from prying eyes by using a cipher resembling a Greek alphabet — although the initial E at the top of the page, with emblems and a heart shot through with an arrow, gives a strong clue.

In the four-page letter, Simier responds to the Queen's distress at discovering that Anjou had told the Spanish Ambassador that they were to marry. The news had spread and was the talk of the court.

Simier writes: “O my God, Madame, how is it possible that I, who have no other God in this world than your Majesty, can have been so careless to have done something which has displeased you . . . how your monkey is afflicted, and what could bring me greater sorrow than to see you angry with me.” He adds that he is so horrified at upsetting the Queen that he wants “to fall on the point of my sword . . . or drain a glass of poison”.

The letter has emerged from the historic archives at Hatfield House and will go on display for the first time next spring in an ambitious Elizabeth I exhibition at the National Maritime Museum.

Scholars working on the show realised from the heart emblem that they could decipher the coded letter by linking it to an unpublished French text in the British Library. That text was written in 1888 by a scholar at the Historical Manuscripts Commission who managed to break the code. But the original letter was hidden among tens of thousands of manuscripts at Hatfield. Its link with the British Library text has only now been established and the letter finally translated into English.

Scribbled above some of the lines of the letter itself are annotations which are believed to be the Queen’s attempt to decode the letter, although she appears to have given up the struggle.

However, even though the 19th-century version is accepted as correct, nobody can fully explain the code and the man who broke it does not reveal how he did it. “We challenge anyone to tell us how to break it,” Sian Flynn, one of the exhibition’s curators, said.

The historian David Starkey, guest curator of the exhibition, said: “This letter gives an extraordinarily clear insight into the mystery that Elizabeth herself created out of a deliberately spun web of intrigue.

“Elizabeth behaved, in a sense, like a schoolgirl. You have these secret codes and an immensely elaborate cipher, which the Queen began to decipher herself. This is clearly a personal cipher, which is common, but it is unbelievably unusual for a monarch to go to the trouble of translating it herself.”

Hatfield was built by Robert Cecil, who, with his father William, was among Elizabeth’s key ministers. How a private coded letter got into their hands is another mystery.

Dr Starkey said: “William Cecil kept an awful lot of dirt on Elizabeth. It makes you wonder whether there was more than one Paul Burrell of the day around."

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