Hester moved forward to hush Johnnie but Lambert stopped her with a little gesture of his hand. ‘Let the lad speak,’ he said. ‘He has a right to know. We are making the country he is going to inherit, he should be able to ask why we made our choices.’

‘Would you have found him guilty and had him executed, sir?’

Lambert thought for a moment and then glanced at John. ‘May I talk with the boy?’

John nodded and Lambert slid an arm around Johnnie’s shoulders and the two of them fell into a stroll, down the little avenue under the resolute strong twigs of horse chestnut and then onwards into the orchard under the bobbing, budding boughs of apple, cherry, apricot and plum.

‘I wouldn’t have signed his death warrant on the evidence of the trial,’ Lambert said softly to Johnnie. ‘I thought the trial was mismanaged. But I would have worked with all my power to make him recognise that the king must accept some limits. The difficulty with him was that he was a man who would not recognise any limits.’

‘He was the king,’ Johnnie said stubbornly.

‘No-one’s denying it,’ the older man replied. ‘But look around you, Johnnie. The people of this country have starved while their lords and their kings have grown fat on their labour. There is no justice for them against any man greater than themselves. The profits of running the state, the taxes, all the trade, were in the gift of the king and scattered to the men who amused him, or who delighted the queen. A man could have his ears cropped for speaking out, his hand struck off for writing. Women could be strangled for witchcraft on the evidence of a village gossip. There are very great wrongs which can only be put right by a very real change. There has to be a parliament which is elected by the people. It has to sit by law, and not at the whim of the king. It has to protect the rights of the people and not those of the landlord. It has to protect the rights of the poorest, of the powerless. I had nothing against the king himself – except that he was untrustworthy both in power and out of it – but I have everything in the world against a king who rules alone.’

‘Are you a Leveller?’

Lambert smiled. ‘Certainly these are Leveller beliefs, yes. And I’m proud to call Levellers my comrades. They are some of the staunchest and truest men under my command. Yet I am a man of property too; and I want to keep my property. I don’t go as far as some of them who want everything to be held in common. But to seek justice and the chance to choose your own government – yes, that makes me a Leveller, I suppose.’

‘There has to be a leader,’ Johnnie said stubbornly. ‘Appointed by God.’