“I don’t know,” I say. “Let’s go up on the walls where we can see what’s happening.”

My Lady, my sisters, Maggie, Arthur and the younger children, and I all go up the narrow stone steps to the perimeter walls of the Tower. We look south and east, to where the river winds out of sight, and we know that, not far away, only seven miles, the Cornish rebels are triumphantly occupying Blackheath, outside our palace of Greenwich, and setting up camp.

“My mother once stood here,” I tell my children. “She was here under siege, just like this, and I was with her, just a little girl.”

“Were you frightened?” six-year-old Henry asks me.

I hug him, and smile to feel him pull away from me. He is eager to stand on his own two feet, he wants to look independent, ready for battle. “No,” I say. “I wasn’t frightened. For I knew that my uncle Anthony would protect us, and I knew that the people of England would never hurt us.”

“I will protect you now,” Arthur promises. “If they come, they will find us ready. I am not afraid.”

At my side, I feel My Lady shrink back. She has no such certainties.

We walk around the walls to the north side, so that we can look down into the streets of the City. The young apprentices are running from house to house, banging on doors and holloaing to summon men to defend the city gates, borrowing weapons from dusty old cupboards, calling for old pikes to be brought out of the cellars. The trained military bands are running down the streets, ready to defend the walls.

“See?” Arthur points them out.

“They’re for us,” I observe to My Lady the King’s Mother. “They’re arming against the rebels. They’re running to the city gates to close them.”

She looks doubtful. I know that she fears that they will throw open the gates as soon as they hear the rebels cry that they will abolish taxes. “Well, anyway, we’re safe in here,” I say. “The Tower gates are shut, the portcullis is down, and we have cannon.”

“And Henry will be coming with his army to rescue us,” My Lady asserts.

Margaret, my cousin, exchanges a quick skeptical look with me. “I am sure he will,” I reply.

In the end it is Lord Daubney, not Henry, who falls on the exhausted Cornishmen as they are resting after their long march from the west. The cavalry go through the sleeping men slashing and hacking as if they were practicing sword thrusts in a hayfield. Some of them carry a mace—a great swinging ball that can knock a man’s head clean from his shoulders, or smash his face into a pulp, even inside a metal helmet. Some of them carry lances and stab and thrust as they go, or battle-axes with a terrible spike at one end that can punch through metal. Henry has planned the battle and put cavalry and archers on the other side of the rebel army so there is no escape for them. The Cornishmen, armed with little more than staves and pitchforks, are like the sheep of their own thin-earth moorland, herded this way and that, rushing in terror trying to get out of the way, hearing the whistle of thousands of arrows, running from the cavalry only to find the infantry, armed with pikes and handguns, stolidly advancing towards them, deaf to all calls of brotherhood.