In spring, when John Lambert should have been enjoying the daffodils bobbing and the yellow aconite carpeting the beds of his orange garden, he could see only a small square of blue sky from his window in the Tower and George Monck was the undisputed new man of power in London. Lambert was on trial for nothing, sentenced for nothing. They had imposed on him a fine of such a huge amount that not even a man of his fortune and with friends such as his could meet it. It was essential to George Monck that his great rival be safely out of the way while he discovered, for the last and greatest leap of his life, which would be the winning side this time.

Monck had fought as a mercenary for anyone who was prepared to hire an unprincipled sword. He had fought for King Charles before being recruited by Cromwell to fight for Parliament in Ireland. Thereafter he had fought for Parliament. Unlike John Lambert, who had spent his life in pursuit of a written constitution to protect the rights of Englishmen, Monck had spent his life merely trying to be on the winning side.

In April he decided that the winning side was, after all, the Stuarts and, with a packed house of Parliament men who agreed with him, he sent terms to Charles Stuart at Breda.

‘It is over then,’ John said to Hester, who was seated on the terrace and looking out over the garden where the trees were showing fresh and green and the air was smelling sweet. ‘It’s over. They are bringing Charles Stuart back, and all of our struggle for all of these years counts for nothing. When they write the histories our lifetime will be nothing more than an intermission between the Stuarts, they won’t even remember that for a while we thought there might have been another way.’

‘As long as we have peace,’ Hester suggested. ‘Perhaps the only way to find peace in this country is with a king on the throne?’

‘We must be better men than that!’ John exclaimed. ‘We must want more than a comedy of ceremony and handsome faces. What have we been doing for all these years but asking questions about how men should live in England? The answer cannot be “as easily as possible”.’

‘The people want the diversion of a new coronation,’ Hester said. ‘Ask them in Lambeth market. They want a king. They want the amusements and the entertainments, they want the corrupt tax collectors that you can bribe to look the other way.’

‘But what a king!’ John remarked disdainfully. ‘Half a dozen bastards scattered around Europe already, his tastes formed in Papist courts, and no knowledge of English people at all except what he learned when he was a fugitive. His father ruined us by his devotion to his principles, his son will ruin us by having none.’