There was no gun salute, there was no band playing music, there was no applause. The Triumph, ill-named, undermanned and defeated, edged into the quayside, as if the ship itself felt shame.

John stood beside Buckingham by the steersman. Buckingham was dressed defiantly in red and gold, like a victorious leader, but when the people on the quayside saw him they let out a deep groan. Buckingham’s bright smile never wavered but he glanced slightly over his shoulder as if to assure himself that John was there.

They ran the gangplank ashore and Buckingham, with a generous gesture of his hand, indicated that the men should go before him. It was a fine gesture but it would have been better if the two of them had gone first, and got quickly on horses, and ridden away. For there was another deep groan and then a horrified silence from the dockers and the sailors’ and soldiers’ families waiting on shore, as the walking wounded struggled up the companionways from below.

Their faces were blanched white with sickness except where the sun had burned them brick red, their clothes were torn and tattered, their boots worn thin. They were half-starved, their legs and arms pocked with ulcers. There were only a few men brought out on stretchers, very few, and that was because the sick and injured had died in the low-lying marshes, or bled in agony on the voyage home.

As the men came ashore they were claimed by their families. Some stayed to watch the unloading, but most turned for home, wives sobbing over the wrecks of their husbands, mothers grieving over sons, children staring upwards, uncomprehending, into the newly aged face, into the head laid open with a livid new scar, or a weeping wound, a man they could not recognise as their father.

The crowd hardly diminished at all, and that was when John realised how many men they had left behind in the marshes of the Ile de Rhé, since more than half of the families waiting to welcome their men home were still waiting. The men would not come, they would never come. They had been left on a small island in a small river before a small French town, as he had warned. As many as four thousand families had lost a father.

If Buckingham had such thoughts he did not show them. He stood very still and straight beside the wheel of his ship, balancing his weight lightly on the balls of his feet like a dancer, his hand on his hips, his head up. When someone from the quayside shouted abuse at him, he turned and looked for them, as if he did not fear to meet their gaze, his smile as ready as ever.

‘He has not sent a herald for me,’ he said softly so that only Tradescant could hear. ‘Not soldiers to arrest me; but equally, not a herald to greet me. Am I to be ignored? Simply forgotten?’