It feels like the end of the world. If the common people rise against the king, if they are armed with weapons they have won from us, if they are commanded by a man who has been trained by us and embittered by losses in France, then there is no hope that the world we know can continue. Only a heroic king who could capture the love of the people could save us – and we have only King Henry, hiding at Kenilworth, his beautiful armour laid aside after its one and only outing.

A message comes from the rebel army. They want Lord Say, the man who was Lord of Kent, sent out for trial. ‘We cannot release him to them,’ my husband sys to the commander, Lord Scales. ‘They will kill him.’

‘We are holding him here under arrest for treason,’ the lord says reasonably enough. ‘He could well have been tried and found guilty and then he would have been executed anyway.’

‘The king sent him here for his safety, not to charge him with treason, as we both know, my lord. The king would have released him. You know the king would have forgiven him anything he has done.’

‘I shall release him to them, and if he is innocent of all they say, then he can tell them so,’ Lord Scales says.

My husband swears under his breath and then speaks clearly. ‘My lord, if we send Lord Say out to them, guilty or innocent, they will kill him. This is not a release, it is to push him out of safety to his death. If this doesn’t matter to you now, then I ask you what you will do if the rebels ask for me to be sent out to them. What would you like us to do when they ask for you?’

His lordship glowers. ‘I wasn’t the man who said I would make a deer park out of Kent. I didn’t say they were too good for hanging and should be pushed into the sea.’

‘You are advisor to the king, as are we all. They could name any one of us and ask for us to be sent out. Are we going to obey the servants? Are they our new masters?’

Lord Scales rises from his seat behind the great dark wooden table and goes to the arrowslit window that looks towards the City. ‘Woodville, my old friend, I know you are right; but if they attack us with the numbers they have now, they are likely to take the Tower, and then we will all be at their mercy, your wife as well as us.’

‘We can hold out,’ my husband says.

‘They have a full-size army at Southwark, and every day more men come from Essex and camp out there. There are hundreds now. Who knows how strong they may become? If they come from Essex, what’s to stop them coming from Hertfordshire? From Nottinghamshire? What if they can raise the whole country against us?’