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 rumor?” 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 king was first defeated in the first war. I was never there. I ran from it, just as I ran from the war of the Powhatan in Virginia.”

She would have interrupted him, sworn that it was not a war, sworn that he was not a man who ran from conflict, but he stopped her.

“It was not that I was afraid, I’m not saying that I ran like a coward. But there was nothing that I saw clearly enough to die for. I knew the king was in the wrong, but I pitied him. I knew the queen was a fool, but she was a charming fool. I didn’t want to see her driven into exile. I think of her now sometimes, and I can’t believe that she has been brought so low. Many women are featherbrained and yet they don’t pay for their folly as she has had to pay. The cause didn’t seem wholly right to me. It didn’t seem wholly clear to me. Right up to the scaffold when they took him out and beheaded him, it didn’t seem quite right to me.”

Hester would have pulled her hands away from him but he held her fast. “You’re talking like a royalist,” she said hotly.

He smiled ruefully. “I know it. That’s what I’m saying. I have always been able to see both sides at once. But this time – for the first time in my life – the first time, Hester! – I have a cause I can truly believe in. I don’t think that Charles Stuart should come back. I do think that the people of this country should govern themselves without a king or bishops or lords. I do believe – my God, at last I believe – that we are a people who have earned our freedom and deserve to be free. And I want to go and fight for that freedom. Lambert has raised his standard, for freedom, for the good old cause. I want to be there. I want to fight for it. If I have to die for it I will.”

For a moment it looked as if she would cry out against him, then she stepped to one side and opened the stable door. Caesar the war horse stepped out, raising his big hoofs delicately over the threshold, and walked at once to the mounting block and stood still, his neck arched, as if he too wanted to go into battle for the rights of freeborn Englishmen.

John smiled to see the horse and then looked at Hester. “Are you angry with me?”

“No,” she said unwillingly. “I’m proud of you, even though this goes against my own interests. I’m glad to see you at last knowing what you believe and going to fight for it. I shall pray that you win. I have always thought that nothing mattered but that we survived these days and it is a change for me to think, like you, that there is something worth fighting for.”

“You think it’s worth fighting for?” he asked. “To keep the king out, to keep Parliament free? To get justice for everyone in this country?”

Unwillingly she nodded. “Yes,” she said. “And if any man can do it then Lambert is that man. I know it.”