The man shuffles, passes his hat from one hand to another. “It was important not to insult the emperor. He is young, and hotheaded, and he is the emperor, after all. He loves and respects the boy. He tells everyone of his miraculous escape from death, he constantly speaks of his high birth, of his rights.”

“So what did you call him?” Henry asks quietly. “When you were all in the emperor’s hearing?”

“Mostly I didn’t speak to him. We all avoided him.”

“But when you did? On those rare occasions. Those very rare occasions. When you had to?”

“I called him ‘my lord.’ I thought it was the safest thing to say.”

“As if he was a duke?”

“Yes, a duke.”

“As if he was Richard, Earl of Shrewsbury and Duke of York?”

“I never said Duke of York.”

“Oh, who do you think he is?”

This question is a mistake. Nobody knows who he is. The ambassador is silent, twisting the brim of his hat. He has not yet been primed with the story which we have learned by rote.

“He is Warbeck, the son of a Tournai boatman,” Henry says bitterly. “A nobody. His father is a drunk, his mother is a fool. And yet you humbled yourself and bowed to him? Did you call him ‘Your Grace’?”

The ambassador, uncomfortably aware that he will have been spied on in his turn, that the reports piled facedown on Henry’s table will include accounts of his meetings and conversations, flushes slightly. “I may have done. It’s how I would address a foreign duke. It wouldn’t mean that I respect his title. It wouldn’t indicate that I accept his title.”

“Or a king. Because you would call a king ‘Your Grace’?”

“I did not address him as a king, Sire,” the man says with steady dignity. “I never forgot that he is a pretender.”

“But he’s a pretender now with a powerful backer,” Henry breaks out, suddenly furious. “A pretender living with an emperor and announced to the world as Richard, son of Edward, King of England.”

For a moment everyone is too frightened to speak. Henry’s bulging gaze holds his frightened ambassador. “Yes,” the man concurs into the long silence. “That’s what everybody calls him.”

“And you did not deny him!” Henry bellows.

The ambassador is frozen like a statue of fear.

Henry exhales a shuddering sigh, and stalks back to his seat, pauses with his hand on the high carved back, stands under the cloth of estate as if to indicate to everyone his greatness. “So if he is King of England,” Henry says with slow menace, “what do they call me?”

Again the ambassador looks at me for help. I keep my eyes down. There is nothing I can do to divert Henry’s rage from him; it is all I can do to avoid being its target myself.

The silence lasts, then Henry’s ambassador finds the courage to tell him the truth. “They call you Henry Tudor,” he says simply. “Henry Tudor, the pretender.”