Frances paused in her work and looked at him with love. ‘I don’t think you’re a bad father,’ she said. ‘It’s as you say – you have seen too much to have one simple view and one simple belief. Nobody could have lived as you did, so far from your own people, and not come home feeling a little uneasy.’

‘My father travelled further and saw stranger sights but he loved his masters till the day of his death,’ John said. ‘I never saw him have a single doubt.’

She shook her head. ‘Those were different times,’ she said. ‘He went far as a traveller. But you lived with the people in Virginia. You ate their bread. Of course you see two ways to live. You have lived two ways. And in this country everything changed the moment that the king took up arms against his people. Before then there were no choices to be made. Now you, and many others, see a dozen ways because there are a dozen ways. Your father had only one way: and that was to follow his master. Now you could follow the king, or follow Cromwell, or follow Parliament, or follow the army, or become a Leveller and call for a new earth for us all, or a Clubman and fight only to defend your own village, or turn your back on them all and emigrate, or shut the door of your garden and have nothing more to do with any of them.’

‘And what would you do?’ John asked, secretly rather impressed by his daughter’s political acumen.

‘I don’t have to choose,’ she said smugly with a sly little sideways smile. ‘That’s why I married Alexander.’

‘And which side does he serve?’

She laughed outright. ‘He serves the master who pays the bills,’ she said. ‘As do most people. You know that.’

Thursday 25 January 1649

The High Court was sitting in the Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster. John knew the room from his days in royal service and guided Alexander through the maze of lobbies and waiting rooms and retiring rooms until they could slip in by a side door. The day was given over to reading out the signed depositions of witnesses who had spoken before the commissioners the previous day. There was little of interest – the halting accounts of the king on horseback riding through the wounded without caring for their condition. Accusations that royalist officers had permitted the looting of dead men’s weapons, and rifling the pockets of wounded men.

‘That’s very bad,’ Alexander said softly to John. ‘That’s one thing Cromwell’s very strict on. He won’t have looting. That’ll count against the king.’

‘Hardly matters,’ John said dourly. ‘Not when you think that he’s accused of tyranny and treason.’