I clap my hand over her trembling mouth. “Hush, Maggie. Hush. You know better than to talk like this.”

She drops a curtsey and goes from my rooms and I don’t detain her. I know she speaks nothing but the truth and that these battles, between these ill-armed desperate men from the west, the war in the North between the Scots and the English, the mustering rebels in Ireland, and the conflict to come between the boy and the king, will give us a summer of bloodshed and an autumn of reckoning, and nobody can tell what the count will be, or who will be the judge or the victor.

The panic starts at dawn. I can hear the shouted commands and the noise of running feet as the commander of the watch calls out the troops. The tocsin starts to sound a warning and then all the bells through the City of London and beyond, all the bells of England, start to sound as the alarm is given that the Cornishmen have come and now they are not demanding that taxes be forgiven and the king’s false advisors dismissed, now they are demanding that the king be thrown down.

Lady Margaret, the king’s mother, comes out of the chapel, blinking like a frightened owl at the dawn light, and at the uproar inside the Tower. She sees me at the entrance to the White Tower and hurries across the green towards me. “You stay here,” she says harshly. “You’re commanded to stay here for your own safety. Henry said that you were not to leave. You and the children are to stay here.”

She turns towards one of the commanders of the guard, and I realize that she will give the order for my arrest if she thinks for a moment that I am hoping to escape.

“Are you mad?” I suddenly demand bitterly. “I am Queen of England, I am the king’s wife and mother of the Prince of Wales! Of course I am staying here in this, my home city, among my people. Whatever happens I would not leave. Where do you think I would go? I am not the one that spent my life in exile! I did not come in at the head of an army, speaking a foreign language! I am English born and English bred. Of course I am going to stay in London. These are my people, this is my country. Even if they carry arms against me they are still my people and this is still where I belong!”

She wavers in the face of my unexpected fury. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she says. “Don’t be angry, Elizabeth. I am only trying to keep us all safe. I don’t know anything, anymore. Where are the rebels?”

“Blackheath,” I say shortly. “But they have lost a lot of men. They went into Kent and there was a skirmish.”

“Are they opening the city gates to them?” she asks. We can both hear the uproar in the streets. She clutches hold of my arm. “Are the citizens and their militia going to let them into London? Are they going to betray us?”