The king’s guards surrounded his horse and galloped him away from the battle. Tradescant, his own horse snorting and pulling, looked wildly around him and then followed the king. His last view of the battlefield was a horse, its stomach blown open by a cannon shot from the walls of the city, and a lad, not much more than fourteen, trying to shelter behind the body.

‘This is the end,’ John found he was saying as his horse wearily found the road to York and followed in the train of the ragged retreat. ‘This is the end. This is the end. This is the end.’

August 1642

For the king it was the beginning. The second humiliation outside the walls of Hull had decided him. The queen’s continual demands that he confront and defeat his parliament drove him on. He issued a proclamation that every able-bodied man in the country should rally to his army, and on Eastcroft Common outside Nottingham he paraded three cavalry troops and a battalion of infantry while the herald read the proclamation of war. John, standing behind his master in the pouring rain, thought that never in the history of warfare did any campaign look less promising.

The rain dripped in a steady stream from his hat. No-one had thought to bring a spade and they could not get the royal standard to stand properly in the stony ground. John thought of his father and his last service to the Duke of Buckingham when he had followed him to Portsmouth and waited to take ship to the He de Rhé, knowing that the battle would be lost and that it was, in any case, a cause not worth fighting for. John thought of his father’s face when he had met him, riding home on the Duke’s cart, of the half-hidden look of relief in his eyes. And he understood at last what it was to follow a master unwillingly, when that master will lead you to death from pure folly.

John looked at the king, the feather in his hat drooping in the pouring rain, as he listened, nodding approval, to the herald shouting the proclamation into the wind which whipped his words away. John thought that his family had served the kings and their favourites for long enough, and that any debt owed, had surely by now been paid – by his father’s heartbreak in the Ile de Rhé, and now, a generation later, by his own fear and despair before the walls of Hull.

In the rain outside Nottingham John found his determination to leave the king, whatever might be the outcome of his desertion. When they turned away from Eastcroft Common and went back to their billets in Nottingham, John turned southwards and rode alone to London without asking permission, without giving notice.

The royal standard blew down that night.