What can I do to satisfy you, Lord? Richard asked his Maker for the thousandth time, morbid thoughts returning, as they always did, to the scene in King Henry’s Tower chamber. Henry, Henry… Then all at once he knew what he must do to help salve his soul: He must re-inter Henry’s bones in a more appropriate site than insignificant Chertsey Abbey, Edward’s choice of resting place. He would pay for a royal reburial in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. The gentle Henry had seen many pilgrims come to pray at his grave over the years, and, after miracles were reported, there was even talk of sainthood. Perhaps Richard saw a chance to make amends, as well as placate those pilgrims.

“That chapel was his pride and joy until my brother won the crown and made it his own,” Richard told John Kendall as he dictated the order. “It is only fitting that Henry lie there. He was, after all, an anointed king and should be buried with all the respect due him.”

Although little Ned’s mother and father would never recover from losing him, they attempted to quarantine their grief in the privacy of their curtained tester bed. There, listening to the waves of the North Sea rhythmically rolling over the beach below them, they exchanged remembrances of their beloved child, alternately laughing and crying. Richard spent other nights drinking himself into a stupor, while Anne gave up eating all but what would minimally sustain her, the seamstresses toiling to alter her gowns. She would spend hours sitting on the grassy cliff edge staring out to sea, and when Richard became concerned she might throw herself off, he ordered that she be accompanied at all times by at least two of her ladies and a groom.

A king’s duty, however, could not be put aside, and first he needed to shore up his throne and name a new heir. The latter was an easy decision: he named his older sister Elizabeth of Suffolk’s son, John de la Pole, the young, vigorous and capable earl of Lincoln, and already Lord of the North; he was next in an unquestionable Yorkist line of descendants of English kings.