James saw at once a difference between the man who sat so calmly before the staring judges and the man he had begged to escape from Newport. The king had aged. His thick dark hair had threads of silver, his face was rounder and weary, deeply grooved with lines. No longer was he lighthearted, like a man certain to outwit his enemies. Now he looked like a saint, priding himself on persecution. The king, who had delighted in double-dealing with his parliament, who had boasted of cheating them, had finished his careless play. Now he was relishing defeat. The comedy was over; he was anticipating a tragedy.

“God help us,” James said under his breath, recognizing the signs of a man longing for the morbid importance of martyrdom.

There was a rustle of alarm as the king suddenly got to his feet as if he would leave. James and everyone around him rose to their feet in habitual respect. James thought that if the king walked out as proudly as he had walked in, nobody would dare to stop him. The trial would be over before it had begun.

But the king turned his back on the bench, and looked all around the hall, at the people in the stands, at the judges, at the people who had paid for their seats, some who had risen at his entry and now stood again, looking awkward. He looked at them all, as if he were inspecting a guard of honor. James ducked his head as the mournful dark gaze raked the hall. He did not trust the king not to exclaim in recognition. He did not trust him at all.

The king turned back to the front and seated himself again, and everyone who had risen with him and taken off their hats also subsided again into their places.

A man rose to address the court.

“Who’s that?” James asked his neighbor, a well-to-do London merchant.

“John Cook,” came the muttered reply. “Prosecutor.”

Cook rose to his feet and started reading a list of charges, facing the Lord President and the table with the ornate tapestry, his back half turned to the king.

“Hold a little,” the king said. He had never sat behind anyone, since the death of his father, James, the previous king. Court etiquette demanded that everyone face the king to make their bow, and walk backwards, bowing once more at the door. He had not seen the back of a head for twenty-three years. James himself, humiliated and afraid, had awkwardly reversed out of the door at Newport. He flushed at the memory and realized that he must have looked ridiculous. Every time anyone left Charles’s presence, the king was reminded of their inferiority, and his own greatness. At this, the lowest point of his life, he was still insisting on deference.

“Hold a little,” the king said, raising his voice to Cook’s back.

Determinedly deaf to the greatest man in the world, Cook carried on reading the charges, a little breathless as if he were anxious to get through them all. James found he was gritting his teeth as the prosecutor steadfastly ignored his king, continuing to list that the king had traitorously and maliciously . . .