He meant to call out, ‘Goodbye! God bless!’, but he felt the words stick in his throat. He meant to smile and wave his hat so that the last sight they had of him was that of a cheery smile and a man going willingly. But Elizabeth’s white face pierced him like a knife and he could only pull his hat from his head as a mark of respect for her and let the wagon pull out, and away from her.

He turned in his seat and watched them grow smaller and smaller, obscured by the dust of the luggage train, until the wagon turned the corner into the great avenue and he could see them no more. He could not even hear the bees above the rumble of wheels, and he had never smelled the heady perfume of the limes.

Buckingham was not at Portsmouth, as he had said he would be. The fleet was ready, the sailors on board, every day that he did not come the murmurings grew worse and the officers resorted to harsher and longer whippings to keep the men in order. The army melted away daily, the officers scouring the towns and the roads to the north of the city to arrest ploughboys and shepherd boys and apprentices who were running for their lives away from the ships that waited, bobbing at the harbour wall, for the commander who did not come.

John saw the duke’s coach loaded aboard but kept the purse of diamonds on a string about his neck. The cows and the hens he penned up on Southsea Common and he took himself a lodging nearby. The landlord was surly and unhelpful, he had had soldiers billeted on him for months and his bills were never paid. John paid him directly from his own money, even though he knew that Buckingham would not remember to reimburse him, and then the man served him a little better.

On 19 July the king came riding down to inspect the fleet. The winds were blowing off shore, the ships were straining at their ropes as if they were willing to go, even if the men aboard had sulky faces. The king looked the ships over, but this time there was no handsome dinner on board the Triumph. All of them, even the king himself, waited for the Lord High Admiral.

He did not come.

John thought of his wife’s prediction that they would not sail until autumn and went out to the hills beyond the city and bought a wagon-load of hay for the cows.