King Henry and Queen Marguerite occupied a prominent position at the front of the church. Beside them was the Lord Chancellor, the venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal John Kemp who, in due course, was to give a sermon on the responsibilities and duties of knighthood, a singular honour and one that could only have been commissioned on our behalf by King Henry himself. A significant absentee was the Duke of Somerset, for reasons that became clear as the day wore on. After the Mass we made confession and then followed the king and queen in solemn procession to the great hall. There our knighting and investiture would take place on the royal dais, with a crowd of invited courtiers gathered on the floor below.

We made our solemn vows of loyalty, honour and religious observance kneeling before the king who then officially dubbed each of us with a blow to the shoulder, requesting us to rise as Knights of the Realm and of his Household. His words were the signal for an ear-splitting fanfare of trumpets, to which we rose. As gleaming spurs, symbols of our knightly status, were attached to our shoes I felt a surging sense of duty, as if in one bound I had leapt from youth to manhood, a feeling that was immediately and doubly reinforced moments later when we were invested as earls. Richmond Herald announced our new titles, whereupon the earls of Warwick and Wiltshire stepped forward to buckle ceremonial sword-belts around our hips, and the king slid our gleaming swords of office into their scabbards. The two powerful earls, both stony-faced, then completed the ceremony by displaying the new shields painted with our crests, which were based on the royal arms and proof of our precedence over all other nobles, including them, with only the dukes our equals. The leopards and lilies of England and France brought the enormous significance of our elevation into sharp focus and receiving the shield from the hands of the king I felt tears spring to my eyes. I planted a fervent kiss of loyalty and gratitude on his coronation ring.

Heraldry is a precise science and I had chosen the golden martlet as my differencing device because it was one that had been used by previous earls of Pembroke. The martlet also signified a younger son; one who stood to inherit no estates but had achieved honour through merit and service; for that reason Edmund had also chosen it, alternated with fleurs de lys to indicate his seniority in our French mother’s second family. Heraldic limners depicted the bird as a swift without feet to signify its habit of apparently constant flight, seeming never to land, an appropriate metaphor for our quasi-royal status as brothers of the king but not contenders for the throne. Years later I was to see that this constantly airborne emblem was a personal augury, indicating a restless future of which I was, as yet, blissfully unaware.