He would observe and listen throughout an evening of speculation, but whenever the talk turned to politics he would rise up and leave the room. Most of John’s guests were men who thought, like John Milton, that the dead king had been an obstacle to the future of the country, that removing him was like cutting off a worm-eaten bud from a healthy stem. But Elias Ashmole, and some of the Oxford men of learning, continued to favour the king’s cause, though they spoke of it with caution. Ashmole’s own great work was researching the history of the Order of the Garter, which seemed to most of them at the table as a doomed piece of academia, given that there was now no king in England, and no Order of the Garter at all.

Ashmole would explain that whether the king was present or not, there was still a notion of kingship which could not be so easily dismissed. At moments like that, Johnnie’s face would flush and he would lean forwards to listen. But when the other men cried down the notion and said that the king was dead and kingship was finished forever, then Johnnie would silently slip away.

He still could not hear the king named without flinching. It was as if some picture of the king had taken possession of his heart, and the truth about the dead man, his fallibility, his unreliability, and at the end the arrogance of his downright dishonesty, was not enough to shift it.

‘This determined loyalty!’ John exclaimed to Hester as they sat on the terrace one evening and watched the sun set away to their right in strips of yellow- and peach-coloured clouds. ‘It’s such a curse to him, he cannot leave the past behind him and move on.’

She was sewing a collar for Frances and she looked up from her work and smiled. ‘He’s so like your father.’

‘Yes.’ John was struck. ‘Of course. I hadn’t thought of it. My father loved Robert Cecil in the old way – a man and his lord – and then the Duke of Buckingham too. When everyone in the country was shouting for the Duke’s head my father would still have done his bidding. He was ready to sail with him to France just as the Duke was struck down. Then he was grieving while everyone else in the country was blessing the assassin.’