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  Spring 1660

  In February Lambert turned the remnants of his army south and marched them home in tattered boots. There was no money to buy them provisions or proper clothes. Monck was far ahead of him and marched into Whitehall to be greeted by a stony silence.

  George Monck was not a man to be cast down by unpopularity. He put his troops throughout the streets of London, and they were accustomed to doing their duty among a resentful population. London was an easier billet than Edinburgh, and within days there was no-one shouting for a free parliament and John Lambert left on the streets. With a large free feast to celebrate the expulsion of Lambert’s Committee of Safety it was possible to generate an enthusiasm for Monck’s new council of state, run by himself.

  By the time John Lambert brought his exhausted army home it was all over. He was ordered to go to his house at Wimbledon and not approach Parliament.

  He wrote to John Tradescant from Wimbledon. The note arrived as the family and guests were eating dinner.

  Please send me, in pots, your finest specimen tulips of this season to the value of £300.

  ‘What does he say?’ Hester asked John, hovering over his shoulder to read the note.

  ‘He says that he wants my best tulips,’ John said. ‘What that means is something different.’

  ‘It means that he will have to confine himself to gardening and painting,’ Elias Ashmole said cheerfully. He helped himself to another slice of baked ham. ‘It means that the balance of power has swung to George Monck and he will decide who rules the country from now on. And if I read the predictions of the planets aright then he will want a king, or at the very least another Lord Protector.’

  Hester looked at Ashmole with dislike. ‘Then God help us,’ she said sharply. ‘For since of all the women in England he chose a foul-mouthed washerwoman to take as his wife, what on earth will he choose for a king?’

  Elias Ashmole was not in the least downcast. ‘I should think it a very good chance that he would choose the rightful heir,’ he said. ‘And then we shall see some changes.’

  ‘Then we shall see the same thing again,’ Hester said bitterly. ‘Only this time the battles will have to be fought without anyone’s heart in them.’

  ‘Peace, my wife,’ John said quietly from the end of the table. ‘Mr Ashmole is our guest.’

  ‘A most frequent guest,’ Frances observed sweetly, her head bowed demurely over her plate.

  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.’

  ‘Then he will rule more easily than his father,’ Hester pointed out. ‘A man with no principles will not be going to war. A man without principles doesn’t argue.’

  ‘No,’ John said. ‘I think the heroic days are over.’

  There was a little silence as they both thought of the son who could not wait to see this day, and that if he had lived to see it then even he might have thought that it lacked a little glory.

  ‘And what will happen to John Lambert?’ Hester asked. ‘Will they free him from the Tower before Charles Stuart arrives?’

  ‘They will execute him for certain,’ John said. ‘I should think General Monck can hardly wait to sign the order. Lambert is too much of a hero to the army and the people. And when the new king comes home they will be looking for scapegoats to offer him.’

  ‘It cannot be the end for him?’ Hester asked incredulously. ‘He has never done anything but fight for the freedom of Englishmen and women.’

  ‘I think it must be,’ John said. ‘It’s a bitter, bitter ending to all our hopes. A king such as Charles restored, and a man like Lambert on the scaffold.’

  But that very night, John Lambert climbed from his window in the Tower, slid down his knotted sheets, dropped into a waiting barge on the Thames, and disappeared into the April darkness.

  ‘I have to go to him,’ John said to Hester. He was saddling up Caesar in the stable. Hester stood in the doorway, blocking his path. ‘I have to go. This is the battle that tests everything I have finally come to believe, and I have to be there.’

  ‘How do you know it is not a story, some ridiculous rumour?’ she demanded. ‘How d’you know he has raised a standard, is summoning an army to fight for freedom? It could be nothing more than someone’s dream.’

  ‘Because only John Lambert would choose Edgehill to raise his standard. And besides, if I go there, and nothing is happening, I can always ride home again.’

  ‘And what about me? What about me if something is happening, if a battle is happening and you are in the midst of it and you are killed? Am I to be left here to keep the rarities and the gardens safe forever, with no son and no husband?’

  He turned from the horse and came to the door of the stable and took her cold hands in his. ‘Hester, my wife, my love,’ he said. ‘We have lived our lives in some of the wildest and strangest times that this country will ever see. Don’t deny me the chance to fight just once, on the side I believe in. That, in a way, I have always believed in. I have spent my life wavering from one view to another, from one country to another. Let me be wholehearted for this, just once. I know that Lambert is right. I know that what he wants for this country, a balance of power and justice for the poor, is what this country needs. Let me go and fight under his standard.’

  ‘Why is it always fighting?’ she cried passionately. ‘I can’t bear it, John. If you should be lost …’

  He shook his head. ‘I want to go back,’ he said simply. ‘I want to go back to Edgehill where the