However, our good fortune had ended at Berwick where we discovered that England had made a truce with Scotland and King Henry was no longer welcome there. I tried to persuade my brother to take ship with me to France where his wife and son had fled but his fear of the sea overcame him and he chose instead to accept refuge in Lancashire with one of his loyal household servants. A sad mistake as it turned out, because the following year he was betrayed into Edward’s hands and confined in the Tower of London.

After the re-coronation ceremony, at the king’s request there was to be no grand banquet, with the result that the event I had devoted my life and soul to bringing about ended in a sad anti-climax and I found myself alone. I could have dined with Lady Margaret and Sir Henry at Coldharbour Inn but instead I thought of Mette, or more precisely Mette’s death, and I took the opportunity to fling off my court apparel, don some anonymous garb and ride to Tun Lane to see my Tudor sister and her family for the first time in many years.

As I approached The House of the Vine I reflected on the people who had lived there. Even my royal mother had stayed there once, on the occasion of Mette’s wedding to Geoffrey Vintner, back in the days when she had run away from the antipathy of the court and lived a secret life with my father. Unexpected emotions surged to the surface as I dismounted beneath the pargetted vine which trailed its bright colours along the plastered frontage of the house. I had experienced war and exile, happiness and despair, love and enmity, while my blood relations who presently inhabited the house, had known nothing of any of it. How different had been their experience of the past ten years. They had not lived like a gypsy as I had done, swapping palaces and castles for ships and mountain hideouts then, across the Channel, riding from one strange European court to another. They had remained in this house, alongside their close neighbours, directing their lives according to the dictates of the Church and the laws of England. Had it mattered to them who sat on the throne or won a particular battle? In short, would we now have anything in common and would they greet me as friend or foe?

In answer to my knock, the door was opened by a youth whose face was vaguely familiar to me but evidently mine was not known to him for he cocked his head on one side and said, ‘Give you good day, sir,’ with a quizzical look.