It was a bad year for sickness, as everyone had predicted, and the town was full of soothsayers and prophesiers and men and women who were prepared to stand up and give witness on street corners that while the king was with the Scots, who had taken him away to Newcastle, the nation could not be at peace. The king must come to London and explain himself, the king must come before the widows and fatherless children and beg their pardons, the king must come before Parliament and agree how to live in peace with them. What the king should not do was to continue debating, sending arguments to Parliament in favour of himself, discussing theology with the covenanting Scots and generally enjoying his life as blithely and as happily as if the country had not battled for years and got nowhere.

‘He can’t be happy.’ John disagreed with Johnnie, who brought back this news from Lambeth market. ‘He can’t be happy without the queen and without the court.’

‘He only has to wait and Montrose will rescue him!’ Johnnie declared. ‘The Scots are his enemy, he has played a clever game by going to them. They shield him from his enemies, the English Parliament, and all the time he is waiting for Montrose. Montrose will fight his way across the Highlands for the king.’

‘Johnnie has a new hero,’ Hester told her husband with a smile. She was checking the purchases off the back of the wagon and Cook was taking them into the kitchen. ‘He was all for Prince Rupert but now it is Montrose.’

‘They say no-one will ever catch him, that he runs around the Highlands like a deer,’ Johnnie said. ‘The Covenanters will never catch him, he’s too quick and too clever. He knows all the passes through the mountains, when they wait for him at one place he melts away over the hills and then attacks them in another.’

‘It always sounds so easy when it is told like a ballad,’ John said soberly. ‘But real battles are not so quick. And real defeats can make a man sick to the heart.’

Johnnie shook his head and would not be persuaded then; but later in the summer he tasted a little of the bitterness of defeat. He spent the day of 25 June at the little lake, rowing his boat around in aimless circles. The king’s town of Oxford had surrendered and Prince Rupert – the darling of the court, the hope of the royalists, the most dashing, the most glamorous, the most beautiful general that the war had seen – was sent out of the country into exile and would never be allowed to return.