Frances declared that she was going early to bed and putting her head under her pillow, and Hester followed her example; but John prowled around the creaking house for half the night, feeling that his Ark was rocking in high seas and that the master should be awake.

In the morning there was less damage than they had feared. The Virginian creeper was stripped of its rosy leaves and would make no show to attract buyers, and there were fallen fruit and broken boughs all down the orchard. The chestnuts had been ripped from the trees too early and they might not ripen, and they had lost most of the apple and plum crop. But the house was still standing and the windows were unbroken, and only a few slates had gone missing from the roof.

‘I shall go into Lambeth and order the builder to come,’ John said. ‘He’ll be a busy man this day, I should think.’

He rode Caesar down the lane to Lambeth and thought that the crowd in the market was agog with news of the storm damage until he drew closer and heard what they were saying.

‘What was that?’ he asked, dropping from the saddle. ‘What did you say, sir?’

‘Don’t you know?’ A man turned to him, delighted to be first with the news. ‘Haven’t you heard? He’s dead!’

‘Who?’

‘The Lord Protector. Oliver Cromwell. Dead in his bed while the storm rattled the roof above him.’

‘It’s as if God himself was angry,’ a man piously asserted. ‘It was a sign.’

‘A very odd sign then, and rather late in the day,’ John said crossly. ‘If God didn’t like Oliver Cromwell he had plenty of time to demonstrate that before.’

An unfriendly face turned towards him. ‘Are you one of his old soldiers?’ someone asked unpleasantly. ‘Or a servant of the major generals? Or one of the damned tax collectors?’

‘I’m a man who thinks for himself,’ John said stoutly. ‘I serve no master and I owe nothing to any man. And I am absolutely certain that God didn’t blow the slates of my roof last night to show me that Oliver Cromwell was dying. If He is all-wise, then He might have found a way to tell me that didn’t let the rain in.’

Spring 1659

The storm which blew Oliver Cromwell up to his reward in heaven, or down to the devils in hell, did not helpfully indicate his successor. There were many who said that he nominated his son Richard on his deathbed, but John, recalling what his father had said about the succession of kings, remembered that courtiers were never very reliable about deathbed confessions and that the power of supreme government in England might go to whatever man had the courage to seize it.