‘Liberty and the king!’ John replied, and heard another voice at once echo the new slogan. The footman beside him flinched as someone spat. ‘Stay still, you fool, or they will drag you down,’ John muttered.

At any moment the mood of the crowd could change from boisterous protest to murder. John looked over the roof of the carriage to where the streets narrowed for the way out of town.

‘Make way for the rightful king!’ John shouted.

The crowd grew denser at the crossroads. ‘Keep going!’ John yelled at the coachman. He had an absolute certainty that if they stopped, even for a moment, the doors would be pulled open and the royal family dragged from the coach and torn apart on the very street. Once the mob learned that they could stop the king in his carriage, then they would know they could do whatever they wished. All that was holding them back was the old superstitious belief in the king’s power, the divinity of kingship that King James had preached and that Charles so passionately believed. The crowd kept reaching towards the coach as it crawled slowly past them but their hands would drop back as if they feared a burning from the gold paintwork. If they touched and snatched just once, then they would all know that the king was not a god, a vengeful god. If they found the courage to touch just once, they would snatch at everything.

‘Keep back,’ John shouted. ‘Make way for the king!’

Everything depended on the coach maintaining the painfully slow walking pace, and never checking, and never stopping, all the way westwards where the sun shone on the water in the open sewers, like a pointer to safety.

Someone pulled at his coat, nearly hauling him off balance. John grabbed tighter at the footman’s strap and looked down. It was a woman, her face contorted with rage. ‘Liberty!’ she cried. ‘Death to the Papists! Death to the Papist queen!’

‘Liberty and the king!’ John shouted back. He tried to smile at her and felt his lips stick on his dry teeth. As long as the queen kept her face hidden! ‘Liberty and the king.’

The carriage lurched over the cobbles. The crowd was thicker but the road further ahead was clear. Someone threw a handful of mud at the coach door but the crowd was too dense for them to start stoning, and though the pikes still jogged to the cry of ‘Liberty!’ they were not yet aimed towards the glass of the windows.

As the road went on, out of town, the crowd thinned, as John had hoped it would. Most of these people had homes or market stalls or even businesses in the City, there was nothing to be gained by following the coach out along the West Way. Besides, they were out of breath and tiring of the sport.