Queen Marguerite and her seven-year-old son were in North Wales, where they had taken refuge after fleeing the Northampton defeat. I rushed to meet them there and guided them to the safety of Harlech Castle where a ship was found for them to sail to Scotland. Once there, Marguerite had acquired the sympathy of its Regent, the recently widowed Queen Marie of Guelders and obtained substantial financial and military support. As her part of the bargain Marguerite had betrothed Prince Édouard to a Scottish princess and promised to return the border town and castle of Berwick to Scotland, perhaps unaware that this was a move that would be as unpopular among the English people as the loss of France had been.

Meanwhile disaster had overwhelmed the Yorkist cause. While Marguerite was still marching her Scottish force south, an English Lancastrian army led by the Duke of Somerset had headed north and caught up with and confronted the Duke of York at Wakefield in Yorkshire. In the ensuing battle York had been killed, his second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, cut down while fleeing the field and the following day Warwick’s father, the Earl of Salisbury, had been captured and beheaded in Pontefract Castle.

While this twenty-four hours of bloodletting was going on in Yorkshire, Queen Marguerite’s uncontrollable army of Scottish mercenaries had been looting and committing acts of violence across the far north. Undaunted, the Duke of Somerset united with them and they marched on London together, jubilant at the destruction of York and determined to release King Henry from the Tower and return him to his throne. But accounts of the rampaging Scots had travelled before them to London and prompted its rich merchant-citizens to close the city down.

Warwick’s men defended London, while Edward of York combined forces with William Herbert to raise the white rose in the Marches. Bombarded by reports of armies wreaking havoc across the kingdom, in my worst dreams I pictured the crown of England being kicked around the realm like a football, with no telling on whose head it might finally land.

Committed to defending my own and Prince Édouard’s Welsh territories, I had recalled my men and artillery from Denbigh to my standard and hired a mercenary contingent from my cousin, King Charles of France. Unfortunately James Butler, Earl of Wiltshire, had been appointed to command it; the former favourite of Queen Marguerite and the man who had deserted me at St Albans. Whether I liked it or not, by rank he would be my second in command when we confronted Edward, now calling himself Duke of York, who was waiting on the Welsh border like a crouching lion, daring me to defy his right to be there.

‘Think of your son, Myfanwy,’ Jane told her friend sternly. ‘Davy is not yet a year old. He needs his mother.’