GREENWICH PALACE, LONDON, NOVEMBER 1487

I dress for my coronation and reflect that it is a different task preparing to be queen than it was preparing to be a bride. This time, laced into a gown of white and gold, with lacings of gold trimmed with royal ermine, I am not shivering with unhappiness. I know what to expect from my husband and we have found a way to be together which skirts the secrets of the past and shields our gaze from the uncertainty in our future. I have given him a son for us to love, he is giving me a crown. His mother’s preference for him above all other and her fierce enmity to my family is a feature of my life that I have come to accept. The mystery of my absent brother and Henry’s fear of my family is something that we live with daily.

I have learned to recognize his temper, his sudden rush into rage; I have learned that it is always caused by his fear that despite the victory, despite the support of his mother, despite her declaration that God Himself is on the side of the Tudors, he will fail her and God and be cut from the throne as cruelly and as unjustly as the king he saw killed at his feet.

But I have also learned his tenderness, his love of his son, his dutiful powerful obedient submission to his mother, and—growing every day—his warmth towards me. When I disappoint him, when he suspects me, it is as if his whole world is uncertain once again. More and more he wants to love and trust me; and more and more I find that I want him to.

There is much to give me joy today. I have a son in the nursery and a husband who is secure on his throne. My sisters are safe and I am no longer haunted by dreams or ill with grief. But still, I have much to regret. Although it is my coronation day, my family are defeated. My mother is missing, enclosed in Bermondsey Abbey, my cousin John de la Pole is dead. My uncle Edward is high in the king’s trust, but is far away in Granada on crusade against the Moors, and my half brother Thomas is so careful around the king that every day he performs a sort of relentless dance on tiptoe to ensure that he doesn’t alert Henry’s suspicions. Cecily is a girl of York no longer, married to a Tudor supporter, never speaking a word without her husband’s sanction, and all my other sisters will be earmarked by My Lady the King’s Mother for Tudor loyalists; she won’t risk any one of them being made a focus for rebellion. Worst of all, worse than everything, is that Teddy is still held in the Tower and the surge of confidence that Henry felt after the battle of East Stoke has not led him to release the boy, though I have asked for it, even asked for Teddy’s freedom as a coronation day gift. His sister Maggie’s white face among my ladies is a constant reproach to me. I said that she and Teddy could come to London and that they would be safe. I said that my mother could keep them safe. I said that I would be Teddy’s guardian but I was powerless, my mother herself is enclosed, My Lady the King’s Mother has Teddy as her ward and has taken his fortune into her keeping. I did not allow for Henry’s secret terror. I did not think that a king would persecute a boy.