‘I shall take my son and go.’ She rounds on him. ‘And I shall raise troops, loyal men, and arm. When Warwick lands he will find my army waiting for him. And this time we will beat him and he will pay for his crime.’

ON CAMPAIGN,

SUMMER–AUTUMN 1459

The queen is like a woman possessed by a vision. She takes the court with her to Coventry, the king in her train. He has no say in what happens now, he is startled by the failure of his truce and the sudden rush into war. She defies advice to be careful, she can smell victory and she is eager for it. She enters Coventry with all the ceremony of a reigning king, and they bow to her as if she were the acknowledged ruler of the country.

No-one has seen a Queen of England like this before. She is served on one knee, like a king. She sits under the royal canopy. She musters men, she demands a levy of every man from every county in England, ignoring the traditional way of raising an army which is that each lord calls out his own men. From Cheshire she recruits her own army, she calls it the prince’s army, and she distributes his own badge, the new livery of the swan. She calls his captains the Knights of the Swan and promises them a special place in the battle that is certain to come.

‘The swan children wore collars of gold and were hidden by their mother to appear like swans, and they all came back but one,’ I say, uneasy at her sudden love of this badge, at her invoking this old myth. ‘This is nothing to do with Prince Edward.’

The prince looks up at me and beams one of his sudden radiant smiles. ‘Swan,’ he repeats. She has taught him the word. She has sewn two swan badges of silver on his collar.

‘You said you had seen the crown of England taken by a swan,’ she reminds me.

I flush, thinking of the lie I told to hide the real vision, of my daughter Elizabeth laughing with a ring shaped like a crown on her finger. ‘It came to me like a daydream, Your Grace, and I warned you that it might mean nothing.’

‘I will take England, if I have to turn into a swan myself to do it.’

* * *

We move to Eccleshall Castle fifty north of Coventry in September, and we are less and less like a court, more like an army. Many of the ladies in waiting have gone back to their homes as their husbands have been summoned to march with the queen militant. Some of them stay away. The few ladies who travel with me and the queen all have husbands in her rapidly growing army; we are like a baggage train on the march, not a court. The king is with us, and the prince; both of them go out daily to attend the musters of men as Margaret brings in more and more recruits that she houses in the buildings inside the castle walls and in tents in the fields around. She calls on the loyal lords to come to her support, she parades the young prince before them. He is only six years old, he rides his little white pony around the ranks of the men, straight-backed and obedient to his mother’s commands. His father comes to the castle gate, and holds up his hand as if blessing the thousands of men who are under his standard.