The king keeps all England informed as the rebellion disappears, and then melts away, before his carefully slow advance. The Cornishmen slip away every night as they realize that not one, not two, but three armies are mustered and slowly marching on them, and one night the boy goes too, taking a wild ride with only two companions, escaping the teeth of the trap that Henry has set for him, gaining the coast, learning of the ships waiting offshore to capture him, and plunging into the sanctuary of Beaulieu Abbey.

But England is not as it was. The king’s writ runs up to the high altar now, his mother and her friend the archbishop have made sure of that. There is no sanctuary for the boy though he claims it as a king ordained by God to rule. The abbey breaks its own time-honored traditions, and hands over the boy. Unwillingly, he has to come out to make his surrender to a king who rules England and the Church too.

He came out wearing cloth of gold, and answering to the name of Richard IV—a hastily scribbled note which I guess is from my half brother, Thomas Grey, is tucked under my stirrup when I am taking the children out on their ponies. I did not see the hand that tied it to the stirrup leathers and I can be sure that no one will ever say that I saw it and read it. But when the king questioned him, he denied himself. So be it. Mark it well. If he himself denies it, we can deny him.

I scrunch the paper into a tiny ball and tuck it in my pocket to burn later. It is good of Thomas to let me know, and I am glad that the boy saw one friendly face in a room full of enemies, before he denied himself.

The rest of the news I have, as the court has it, as England has it, in long triumphant dispatches from Henry that are written by him personally, to be read aloud, throughout the country. He sends verbose announcements to the kings of Christendom. I imagine Henry’s words bawled out at every village marketplace, at every town cross, on the steps of country churches, at the entrance to staple halls. He writes as if he were creating a story, and I read it almost smiling, as if my husband were setting up to be a Chaucer, to give the people of England a tale of their beginnings, an entertainment and an explanation. He becomes the historian of his own triumph, and I cannot be the only person who thinks that he has imagined a victory that he did not experience in the windswept fields of Devon. This is Henry the romancer, not Henry a true king.

Henry’s story is that there was once a poor man, a man who kept the watergate at Tournai in Flanders. He was a weak man, a bit of a drunkard, married to a common woman, a bit of a fool, and they had a son, a silly boy who ran away from home and fell into bad company, serving as a page to someone (it doesn’t matter much who or why) and went to the court of Portugal and for some reason (for who knows what silly lads will say?) passed himself off as a prince of England and everyone believed him. Then, suddenly he became a servant for a silk merchant. He learned to speak English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese (which is a little surprising but presumably not impossible). Dressed in his master’s clothes, showing off the goods for sale, parading himself like a May Day pageant in Ireland, he was again mistaken for a prince (don’t pause to ask if such a thing is likely) and was persuaded to take on the pretense all across Christendom—to what end and why is never discussed.