“If I could tell him that!”

“I can’t get a letter to my own brother, just down the river in the Tower of London. How could we ever get a letter to yours?”

THE TOWER OF LONDON, SUMMER 1497

The Cornishmen start by grumbling that the king is taxing them too hard, and then that he has stolen their rights to the tin that they mine. They are a hardworking, bitter set of men who face danger daily, in the tiny cramped conditions underground, speaking their own strange language, living more like barbarians than Christian men. Far away from London, in the utmost west of the country, they are easily persuaded by dreams or rumors. They believe in kings and angels, in appearances and miracles. My father always said that they were Englishmen like no others, Cornishmen, not of English stock at all, and that they had to be ruled with kindness, as if they were the mischievous elves that live alongside them.

In days, in moments, they are agreed and furious; they go through the west like a summer fire, blazing up, jumping a field or two, raging on faster than a galloping horse. Soon they have the whole of Cornwall up in arms, and then the other western counties join with them, equally angry. They form separate armies led by men from Somerset, Wiltshire, and Cornwall under the command of a Cornish blacksmith, Michael Joseph, An Gof, a man said to be ten feet high who has sworn that he will not be ruined by a king whose father was no king, who is trying new ways, Tudor ways, Welsh ways against good Cornishmen.

But it is not just a rebellion of ignorant men: yeomen turn out for them, fishermen, farmers, miners, and then, worst of all, a nobleman, Lord Audley, offers to lead them.

“I’ll leave you and my mother and the children here,” Henry says tersely to me, his horse waiting at the head of his yeomen of the guard, who are arrayed in battle order outside the White Tower, the gates closed, the cannons rolled up to the walls, everything ready for a war. “You’ll be safe here, you can hold out against a siege for weeks.”

“A siege?” I hold Mary on my hip, as if I were a peasant woman seeing a husband off to battle, her own future desperately uncertain. “Why, how close are they going to get to London? They’re coming all the way from Cornwall! They should have been contained in the West Country! Are you leaving us with enough troops? Is London going to stay loyal?”

“Woodstock, I’m going to Woodstock. I can muster troops there and cut off the rebels as they come up the Great West Way. I have to get my troops back from Scotland, as soon as I can. I sent them all north to face the boy and the Scots, I wasn’t expecting this from the southwest. I’m recalling Lord Daubney and his force, I’ve sent orders for them to turn back south at once. I’ll get them back here, if the messenger finds them in time.”