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what the new queen, my wife-to-be, will make of it when she finally arrives, for I'll wager the Portuguese don't give their dogs such latitude. Probably eat the damn things. Christ's bones, you can be king of England, God's own anointed, but can you stop dogs shitting all over your palace? Eh, Jamie?'
    The young man nodded gravely but kept his counsel. Charles and I knew James Stuart, Duke of York and heir to the throne, well enough to know how uncomfortable his elder brother's easy combination of dog shit and divinity would have made him.
    As nervous attendants cleared the mess, the king poured himself another glass and said, 'Ah, yes, Charlie, you know our cousin well, of course, but I doubt if Matt and he have met?'
    I bowed to the third man in the room, who looked me up and down and frowned. 'Matthew Quinton. So. You look more like your father than the noble earl, your brother. Yes. I see him, when I look at you.'
    I bowed my head again in obeisance to Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the royal brothers' first cousin and once captain-general of the armies of King Charles the First in the great civil war. For one sudden moment, in my mind I was a child of five again, that day at Ravensden Abbey, barely four months after we had buried my grandfather. I saw my mother, cold, distant, pale as a shroud, as an aide to the king described her husband's death at Naseby fight. James Quinton, ninth Earl of Ravensden, my father, had ridden into battle alongside Prince Rupert on the right wing of the king's army. They drove all the cavalry on Parliament's left off the field before them. Then James Quinton, ninth Earl of Ravensden, alone of Prince Rupert's commanders, turned his company, and drove straight down on Parliament's infantry. And James Quinton, ninth Earl of Ravensden, was hacked to pieces, as Prince Rupert led the rest of his force off the field in pursuit of booty instead of following him in the manoeuvre that would surely have won the war for the king. James Quinton, poet, an earl for one hundred and eighteen days, the father that I barely knew, died a hero of the Royalist cause; but his death, and the damning reminder provided by his sons, ensured that Prince Rupert ever looked on the Quinton family as an uncomfortable indictment of what he had done, and failed to do, that day. In turn the Quinton family assuredly looked on Prince Rupert of the Rhine as the murderer of a beloved husband and father.
    I said, 'If I can serve the crown with just a fraction of my father's devotion to it, your highness, than I will die well content.'
    Rupert looked at me uncertainly, then nodded, dissembling as only the Stuarts could. 'So. You will have another chance to prove this to us, Matthew Quinton.'
    King Charles beckoned us to sit, and we all drank. 'You didn't tell him of our business here, Charlie?' asked the king at length.
    'Your Majesty commanded me not to,' my brother replied.
    'Quite. You were ever the most discreet man on this earth, my lord earl. Which is as well, for this is not an age when discretion is honoured. Well, then, Matt, here is our problem. What do you know of the affairs of Scotland?'
    The question flummoxed me. True, I had lived for some time at Veere, where for centuries the Scots had maintained their cloth staple. Despite this–and too like most of my English breed–what I knew of the affairs of Scotland could be inscribed on the nail of a swaddling babe's toe. But the Stuarts were not the only ones who could dissemble. 'Sire, to the best of my knowledge, Scotland is quiet and content under Your Majesty's rule.'
    The king sniffed. 'Quiet and content. Well, would that it were so. You'll know, for instance, that we executed that damned canting ferret-faced sanctimonious hypocrite Argyll last year?'
    'Of course, Your Majesty.'
    Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, had led the rebels called Covenanters against the first King Charles, whose attempts to impose English Church ways on those dour Presbyterians