‘Don’t fall in love with the cause just because it is losing,’ Alexander warned her. ‘He was a reckless and foolish king before he was doomed. John went away rather than serve him, and I’ve always admired your determination to survive this war and not to join it. Just because it is coming to an end is no reason to want to enlist. It is a foolish man who loves a lost cause only because it is lost.’

Hester nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But Basing House is like a fairy story.’

‘There will be no romance ending,’ Alexander said grimly. ‘Cromwell has brought up the heavy guns. There can be no ending but defeat. No walls could stand against them forever.’

Alexander was right, and the news came through the next day, before he and Frances left. Basing House had fallen and a hundred men and women had been killed. Even the engraved window panes were not allowed to survive. Cromwell ordered the house to be destroyed and nothing was left standing.

It was only one battle in the many which now seemed to go inexorably the way of Parliament. Hester’s greatest buyer of tulips, John Lambert, was praised in all the reports for being a quick and daring cavalry commander, the Parliament horse were unstoppable. The army under Cromwell had learned their business at last and combined soldierly discipline with an absolute dedication to their cause. They believed they were freeing the country of tyranny and bringing in a new rule of law and justice. They fought as men will fight when their hearts are in the fighting, and there were few underpaid, half-hearted, badly led royal armies that could stand against them.

The king retreated to the hard-drinking, rich-living city of Oxford and the comfort of court life and amused himself as well as he could. His only recognition of his continual defeats was to blame his generals. Prince Rupert had been dismissed for failing to hold Bristol and nothing he or his friends could say could gain him a fair hearing from the king he had served so faithfully.

It was a bitter winter, colder than any in living memory. Frances wrote to her stepmother that she had been skating on the Thames below the Tower and that if the freeze continued she would take a sledge and travel up the frozen river to visit. Hester, wrapped in John Tradescant’s old travelling cape and with a hat made from his Russian furs, went out every morning to brush the snow from the branches of the precious trees to prevent them from breaking under the weight of snow and ice, and sat every night over a fire made of fallen wood and little twigs, dined on potato soup and wondered when spring would come and if it would bring her husband home.

Winter 1646, Barbados