* * *

I leave the crown in the water for a week, while the queen comes out of her confinement and is churched in a magnificent service where all the duchesses of the kingdom walk behind her, to honour her, as if their husbands are not locked in a struggle to decide how the prince shall be recognised and how the kingdom shall be commanded while the king sees nothing and commands nothing. Now that the queen is returned to the world the duke can come to her rooms and he tells her that the Earl of Salisbury, brother-in-law to the Duke of York, is saying publicly that the baby was not got by the king, and that there are many, dangerously many, who believe him. The queen lets it be known that anyone who listens to such slander need never come again to court, she tells her friends that no-one should even speak to the Earl of Salisbury or to his spiteful son, the Earl of Warwick. She tells me that Richard, Duke of York, their kinsman, and even his duchess Cecily, are her enemies, her enemies to death, and that I must never speak to any of them ever again. What she does not do is comment on what they are saying, what many people are saying: that the king is not man enough to make a son, and that the baby is not a prince.

The queen and Edmund Beaufort decide that they must redouble the efforts to waken the king, and they hire new physicians and experts. They change the laws against alchemy, and men of learning are allowed to study once again and asked to consider the causes and cures of unknown illnesses of the mind. Everyone reopens their forges, refires their ovens, starts to send for foreign herbs and spices; herbalism, even magic, is permitted if it can cure the king. They command the doctors to treat him more powerfully, but since nobody knows what is wrong with him, nobody knows what should be done. He has always been known to be melancholic so they try to change his humour. They feed him burning-hot drinks and spicy soups to make him hotter, they make him sleep under thick furs heaped up on the bed, with a hot brick at his feet and a warming pan on either side of him until he sweats and weeps in his sleep; but still never wakens. They lance his arms and bleed him to try to drain the watery humours, they poultice his back with paste of mustard seed till it is red and raw, they force boluses down his throat and purge him with enemas so that he vomits and voids in his sleep, burning waste that leaves his skin red and sore.

They try to make him angry by beating his feet, by shouting at him, by threatening him. They think it is their duty to taunt him with cowardice, with being a lesser man than his father. They abuse him terribly, God forgive them, they shout things in his face that would have broken his heart if he had heard them. But he hears nothing. They hurt him when they slap him – they can see his cheeks redden under the blows. But he does not rise up and leave them, he lies inert as they do what they want to him. I fear this is not treatment but torture.