sex. As Leah Marcus argues, Elizabeth was a ruler who often created an image of herself as androgynous. She acknowledged the capacities of her female body, but ‘raised’ her mind to that of a male’s. The adjective ‘rusty’ also implies that the speaker has experience with being questioned and undermined. A sword being rusty suggests that it has been previously used, hinting at Elizabeth’s experience in battles with those who seek to defy her. The provocative verse dares one to doubt the dominance of the realm. Moreover, the single syllable of the final word strengthens the message of the poem. This verse does not so much rely on ambiguities, and this, I argue, stems from the relationship between poet and audience. The earlier epigrams from Elizabeth’s imprisonments are similarly directed at an enemy, but when at Woodstock Castle the poet is not a monarch with ‘subjects’. She may have possessed royal blood, but the vulnerability of the earlier epigram establishes her lack of dominion in relation to her readership. I have suggested that this poem is more direct in its resistance because Elizabeth is now positioned much higher than her audience. Whilst I am confident in the truth of this – historically, it was written over a decade later – the debate of the ‘public versus the private’ must be considered in every analysis, with Herman even labelling the debate the ‘burden’ of his critical work. The first epigram was written on a window, with a diamond by a young woman not yet queen. Comparatively, this poem’s reception was a public one, of world leaders: ‘This poem […] was doubtless written by Elizabeth in response to the threat posed by the Catholic queen’s flight into Protestant England in 1568 […] this was the most frequently anthologised of all of Elizabeth’s verses’. I argue that this is why the resistance in this later poem is not so ambivalent. An audience of the world’s most powerful demands a confidence.>