He has one powerful memory that he relates like a fable, of going to the mad king’s court, when my father was the king in exile, and my mother and my sisters and I were trapped in the dark cold of sanctuary for the first time. He remembers it as the pinnacle of his childhood, when his mother was sure that they would all be restored and would be the royal family forever, and he suddenly believed her, and knew that God was guiding her to the Beaufort destiny and that she was right.

“Oh, we watched you go by on your barge,” I say, remembering. “I saw you on the sunlit river, sailing by to the court, while we were all locked up and sick of the darkness.”

He says that he knelt and was blessed by Henry VI and felt, at that brush of the royal hand on his head, that he had been touched by a saint. “He was more of a holy man than a king,” he says to me urgently, like a preacher who wants someone to believe. “You could feel it in him, he was a saint, he was like an angel.” Then he suddenly falls silent, as if remembering that this is the man who was murdered in his sleep by my own father, when the mad king was as foolish as a little child trusting to the unreliable honor of the House of York. “A saint and a martyr,” he says accusingly. “He died after he had said his prayers. He died in a state of grace. At the hand of those who were little more than heretics, traitors, regicides.”

“I suppose so,” I mutter.

Every time we speak we seem to remind each other of a conflict; our very touch smudges blood prints between us.

He is conscious that he has done a most vile thing by declaring his reign from the day before the battle that killed Richard. Everyone who fought on the side of the anointed king that day can now be named as a traitor and legally put to death. It is to set justice upside down and to start his reign as a tyrant.

“No one has ever done such a thing before,” I remark. “Even the York and Lancaster kings accepted that it was a rivalry between two houses and that a man might choose one side or the other with honor. What you have done is to name men who have done nothing worse than suffer as traitors. You make them traitors for doing nothing worse than losing. You are saying that whoever wins is in the right.”

“It looks harsh,” he concedes.

“It looks like double-dealing. How can they be named traitors when they were defending the ordained king against an invasion? It’s contrary to the law, and common sense. It must be against God’s will too.”

He smiles as if nothing matters more than that the Tudor reign is established, without question. “Oh no, it’s certainly not against the will of God. My mother is a most holy woman, and she doesn’t think so.”