Richard smiled for the first time in days, and he slapped Catesby on the back. “I am grateful for your legal mind, Will, and I think your idea may save the realm from further conflict. I will summon Buckingham to return and tell him in person. He must agree for his own good. It must be the same tale: the boys are somewhere secret and safe. I will even write to Brackenbury and thank him for allowing Harry to take the boys from the Tower on my behalf.”

Then he shook his head sadly. “Foolish Harry truly believed I would be pleased by what he had done and was confounded when I was not.” He nodded at Catesby. “’Tis a masterful solution, and I hope I can persuade Harry to share in it—and return to the fold.” He harrumphed. “That is when he has finished brooding in Brecknock.”

Richard could never have anticipated what happened next: Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, turned his coat.

Not two days later, Richard received the intelligence that Buckingham was the acknowledged leader of the rebellion that had interrupted Richard’s progress.

As though he had received the shock physically, Richard doubled over in pain as Jack Howard’s son relayed his father’s urgent message from London. Thomas, now earl of Surrey, quickly handed the king a cup of ale and suggested that Richard sit. “Allow me to tell you what we know, Your Grace,” he said, as the room began to fill up with advisors, stunned by the news. The young man could not guess that Richard already knew the real reason for Buckingham’s defection, and that his letter to Harry had been too late—or ignored.

Surrey’s father was holding London against Kentish and Sussex rebels, while in the west and Wales, Buckingham was at the head of the rebel force intent on combining forces with the eastern contingent. Jack Howard believed the Woodvilles and their allies were to blame for the rebellion. “Margaret Beaufort has been seen at the abbey visiting the queen, and we intercepted a message on its way to Wales for John Morton, bishop of Ely. The two have been in correspondence it would seem and, with the queen, are plotting to remove you.”