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  ‘And we have a white dog rose,’ Johnnie volunteered. ‘Since you’re a Yorkshireman, sir.’

  Lambert laughed. ‘That’s a pretty thought, I thank you.’ He glanced at Johnnie and then looked again. ‘Hey now, young man, have you been sick? You’re not as bright as when I last saw you.’

  There was an awkward silence. ‘He was in the war,’ Hester said honestly.

  Lambert took in the slope of Johnnie’s shoulders and the droop of his fair head. ‘Where was that, lad?’

  ‘At Colchester.’

  The general nodded. ‘A bad business,’ he said shortly. ‘You must be sorry for how it all ended; but thank God we should have peace now, at last.’

  Johnnie shot a swift look at him. ‘You weren’t there for his trial,’ he remarked.

  Lambert shook his head. ‘I was doing my duty elsewhere.’

  ‘Would you have tried him?’

  Hester moved forward to hush Johnnie but Lambert stopped her with a little gesture of his hand. ‘Let the lad speak,’ he said. ‘He has a right to know. We are making the country he is going to inherit, he should be able to ask why we made our choices.’

  ‘Would you have found him guilty and had him executed, sir?’

  Lambert thought for a moment and then glanced at John. ‘May I talk with the boy?’

  John nodded and Lambert slid an arm around Johnnie’s shoulders and the two of them fell into a stroll, down the little avenue under the resolute strong twigs of horse chestnut and then onwards into the orchard under the bobbing, budding boughs of apple, cherry, apricot and plum.

  ‘I wouldn’t have signed his death warrant on the evidence of the trial,’ Lambert said softly to Johnnie. ‘I thought the trial was mismanaged. But I would have worked with all my power to make him recognise that the king must accept some limits. The difficulty with him was that he was a man who would not recognise any limits.’

  ‘He was the king,’ Johnnie said stubbornly.

  ‘No-one’s denying it,’ the older man replied. ‘But look around you, Johnnie. The people of this country have starved while their lords and their kings have grown fat on their labour. There is no justice for them against any man greater than themselves. The profits of running the state, the taxes, all the trade, were in the gift of the king and scattered to the men who amused him, or who delighted the queen. A man could have his ears cropped for speaking out, his hand struck off for writing. Women could be strangled for witchcraft on the evidence of a village gossip. There are very great wrongs which can only be put right by a very real change. There has to be a parliament which is elected by the people. It has to sit by law, and not at the whim of the king. It has to protect the rights of the people and not those of the landlord. It has to protect the rights of the poorest, of the powerless. I had nothing against the king himself – except that he was untrustworthy both in power and out of it – but I have everything in the world against a king who rules alone.’

  ‘Are you a Leveller?’

  Lambert smiled. ‘Certainly these are Leveller beliefs, yes. And I’m proud to call Levellers my comrades. They are some of the staunchest and truest men under my command. Yet I am a man of property too; and I want to keep my property. I don’t go as far as some of them who want everything to be held in common. But to seek justice and the chance to choose your own government – yes, that makes me a Leveller, I suppose.’

  ‘There has to be a leader,’ Johnnie said stubbornly. ‘Appointed by God.’

  Lambert shook his head. ‘There has to be a commander, just like in the army. But we don’t believe that God appoints a man to tell us what to do. If that were so, we might as well still obey the Pope and have done with it. We know what to do, we know what is right, we know that the hard-working men of this country need to be sure that their lands are safe, and that their landlord will not sell them to another, like a herd of cow, or suddenly take it into his head that their village is in his way and drive them out like coneys from a warren.’

  Johnnie hesitated.

  ‘When you marched to Colchester were you quartered on poor farms with nothing to spare?’ Lambert asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’ve seen how badly some men live in the middle of plenty. The rents they have to pay are greater than the yield of their crops. We cannot have people forever struggling to make that gap meet. There has to be a balance. People must be paid a fair wage for their work.’ He paused. ‘When you were quartered on a poor farmstead did you take your feed for your horses and a chicken for your dinner and leave them no recompense?’

  Johnnie flushed scarlet and shamefacedly nodded.

  ‘Aye, that’s the royal way,’ Lambert said bitterly. ‘That’s the kingly way to behave.’

  Johnnie flushed. ‘I didn’t want to,’ he said. ‘But I had no wages.’

  Lambert gripped his arm. ‘That’s how it happens,’ he said. ‘If all the wealth is concentrated on the king, on the court, then there must be poverty everywhere else. The king raised an army but had no funds so he didn’t pay you, so you had to take forage without paying, so at the end of the line there is some poor widow with one hen and the king’s man comes by and takes all the eggs.’

  Hester watched her stepson and Lambert walk to the end of the orchard and then turn towards the lake.

  ‘I hope he can say something that will reconcile Johnnie,’ she said. ‘I’ve been afraid that he will never be happy again.’

  ‘He might,’ John agreed. ‘He’s had the command of many men. He’ll have come across lads like Johnnie before.’

  ‘It’s kind of him to take the trouble,’ she said.

  John gave a wry smile. ‘I imagine he’ll take away a pot of my best tulips as his payment, won’t he?’

  Hester gave a little laugh. ‘Not the Semper Augustus, at any rate,’ she promised.

  Summer 1649

  With the coming of the summer the numbers of visitors increased at the Ark and the social life of London was restored. There was an explosion of debate as to how the new society should be built, what should be allowed and what should be forbidden. Pamphlets, sermons, diatribes, and journals poured off the little presses which had sprung up everywhere during the war years, new plays were written, new poems commissioned. There was a sense of excitement, of being at the very heart of change, a new world which no-one had ever experienced before. Kings had been killed before in England and elsewhere – but only on the battlefield, or in secret, and their thrones snatched by other claimants. Never before had the whole system of kingship been questioned and found so badly wanting that the people chose to destroy it and put no-one in its place.

  Oliver Cromwell was to be known as Chairman of the Council of State, and there would never be another king of England. Even then the new state did not go far enough for many. There was no opening of the electorate: poor men still had no voice in the planning of the nation. There was no abolition of tithes, which many had fought for. There was no reform of the law, nor the ownership of land. The Houses of Parliament were still one House of Lords and a House of Commons packed with landed gentlemen, still serving their own needs before any other; so that the justice that John Lambert had hoped for so passionately was still far away.

  But there was a sense of excitement and optimism as palpable as the warmer weather of May and June. There was a sense of changes coming, of hope, of a chance to make England into a country which could be prosperous for the many instead of the few. Families who had been estranged for years, siding with the opposing armies, were able to make friends again. Churches which had been emptied because of doctrinal arguments were now re-established with a new, freer, informal style of preaching. Men wanted to be done with ceremony, with artifice. Men wanted to speak freely to their God, and to speak freely to each other.

  An informal association of philosophers, botanists, mathematicians, physicians and astronomers met regularly to debate, Dr Thomas Wharton among them, and John Tradescant too. John Lambert was in London from March and ra