“Isn’t this rather ridiculous?” I ask the king, as we sit beside the fire in his room after dinner. “Surely Hereward the Wake had no coat of arms to leave to the Howards, even if they are descended from him, which nobody can prove. Does this matter at all?”

Around us the court murmurs and plays cards. I can hear the rattle of dice. Soon the king will assemble his cronies, and my ladies and I will withdraw.

Henry’s face is mean, his eyes squinting. “It matters,” he says shortly. “It matters to me.”

“But for him to claim descent from Hereward the Wake... this is like a fairy story.”

“It’s a very dangerous story,” he says. “No one has royal descent in this country but me.” He pauses. He will be thinking of the former royal family, the Plantagenets. One by one he has sent them to their deaths for nothing worse than their fathers’ name. “There is only one family that can trace themselves back to Arthur of England, and that is ours. Any challenge is going to be met with extreme punishment.”

“But why?” I ask, as gently as I can. “If it is an old shield that he has shown many times before. If it is the silly pride of a young man. If the college of heralds saw it years ago, and you have not objected before?”

He raises one fat finger and instantly I am silent. “Do you remember what the dog master does?” he asks me quietly.

I nod.

“Tell me.”

“He sets one dog against another.”

“He does. And when any single dog becomes big and strong, what does he do with it?

He snaps his fingers when I don’t answer.

“He lets the others pull it down,” I say, unwillingly.

“Of course.”

I am silent for a moment. “It means that you will never have great men about you,” I remark. “No thoughtful advisors, no one that you can respect. No one can stay with you and grow great in your service. No one can be rewarded for loyalty. You can have no tried and tested friends.”

“That’s true,” he agrees with me. “Because I don’t want anyone like that. I’ve had men like that before, when I was a young man, friends whom I loved and men who were brilliant thinkers, who could solve a problem the moment they heard it. If you had seen Thomas Wolsey in his prime! If you had known Thomas More! Thomas Cromwell would work all night, every night—nothing ever stopped him. He never failed at anything he set his hand to. I could set him a problem at dinner and he would bring me a warrant of arrest at chapel before breakfast.”

He breaks off, his little eyes under the pink swollen eyelids look towards the door as if his friend Thomas More might come in at any moment, his thoughtful face warm with laughter, his cap under his arm, his love for the king and for his family the greatest influence in his life, but nothing in the world greater than his love of God.