John had made him promise that he would not tell anyone of the agreement they had made, and Johnnie, who remembered well enough the danger of living as suspected royalists when the king’s army was on the march, was careful to make no direct reference as to which side he would be joining as soon as his father said he might go. He was as excited as a child, but he was no fool. Never again did he let slip to visitors or guests that he was only waiting for news from Yorkshire to saddle up his war horse and ride north to join the new, uncrowned king.

The family depended on Alexander Norman to tell them how the war was going. Living in the centre of the city and near the Tower he always had the first of the rumours anyway; but filling Cromwell’s orders for supplies of munitions he always knew the latest position of the Model Army, though it might be impossible to tell how they were faring.

‘But that’s not the point,’ Johnnie reminded his father anxiously, finding him in the rarities room, with a tray of recently purchased foreign coins.

‘We’re running out of space,’ John said. ‘We have to buy new items, and people like to see different things when they visit. But we cannot show everything we have now properly. We should think about building another room, perhaps.’

‘The point was not whether the Scots are winning or losing, it was how far they are advanced,’ Johnnie persisted. ‘That was our agreement, wasn’t it? Because Mother is saying that if they have advanced to York but been defeated then I shouldn’t go. But we didn’t say that, did we?’

John looked at his son’s eager face. ‘The letter of our agreement was certainly that you might go if they reached York,’ he said. ‘But surely, Johnnie, you wouldn’t want to join a defeated army. You wouldn’t want to volunteer for a lost cause?’

The young man did not hesitate for a moment. ‘Of course I would,’ he said simply. ‘This is not about calculating which side might win and joining that. This is not about trying to end up on the winning side like half the men now in Parliament. This is about serving the king, whether he is winning or losing. His father did not recant when he saw the scaffold. Neither will I.’

John pushed the tray of coins roughly into his son’s hands. ‘Find a little corner for these, and write out new labels for them,’ he said. ‘They need to be dusted and polished too. And don’t talk to me about scaffolds.’

‘But if they get to York, even if they are in retreat –’

‘Yes, yes,’ John said. ‘I remember what we agreed.’

Autumn 1650