When we did return to court, however, it was not our clothes or my language which sparked a bout of teasing from our fellow squires but the tanned faces we had acquired after three months in field and saddle, weeks which we had both greatly enjoyed, no matter how much Edmund protested that he had stagnated in the ‘rural backwaters’ as he called West Wales.

But there was no prospect of a return to Wales. Memories of Jane were all I was ever likely to have, for now that Edmund and I had both reached our majority our brother the king often summoned us into his company, significantly more than the other household squires. I suspected that this was due to prompting by Queen Marguerite, who seemed to relish the notion that we were first cousins; her father’s sister, Marie of Anjou, was also our aunt by marriage, being queen to our late mother’s brother, King Charles VII of France.

‘But we cannot make anything of this in the court,’ she warned privately, in what I considered her rather charmingly broken English, ‘because King Henry is still le Roi de France, however successful are the armies of our Uncle Charles in Normandy and Maine.’

It was a moot point. According to the peace treaty that had married our mother to Henry’s father, he was officially king of France as well as England. But his commanders were gradually and ingloriously losing the vast swathes of French territory conquered by the fifth Henry and the peace of the realm was seriously threatened by hordes of displaced soldiers who, having settled in Normandy and Maine with their families, were now forced to flee the invading armies of King Charles and return to England, where many of them roamed the shires, homeless, penniless and desperate, stirring up trouble. This series of military setbacks had also drained the royal coffers and caused a dangerous split in the ranks of the English nobility. Earlier in the year the king’s distant cousin, Richard, Duke of York, who publicly lamented these failures, had been banished from court for bringing an army to London, demanding to be given command of the French wars and named as Henry’s heir.

It was Queen Marguerite who told us that she and the king were going on a Royal Progress and Henry desired that Edmund and I accompany them, not as his household squires but as his brothers. ‘Henry will dispense justice to all the poor people who have been robbed and attacked by these renegades from France,’ she explained.

This was undoubtedly an honour, intended to give us an intimate knowledge of our brother’s duties and beliefs. We were to lodge near the royal apartments and share the private solar.