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high brows, a small vivid red mouth. A golden wisp of moustache brushing the lips. An elegant angel of a face. 
    Colonel Thomas Rainsborough at prayer: the eyes lightly closed, the face even more uniformly pale, the lips flickering with devotion, nibbling at the words and whispering them intimately to the infinite.
    Colonel Thomas Rainsborough at the siege of Colchester. On 21st August the defenders sent out five hundred of their womenfolk to beg for food. For there might – even after the frenzied skirmishes, after the starvation and the barrage, the endless mad explosions of stone as the balls shattered the fabric of the old town, shattered history itself, after the bitter heckling and the nasty violences, after the poisoned bullets and the thumbscrews and the matches lit under fingernails, the violation of the tombs, the desecration of the bodies – even after all this there might still be pity and charity and a gentleman in the besieging force.
    Uneasy, frightened, ashamed at their weakness as beggars and their implied weakness as women, the crowd drifted towards the besiegers’ lines. There was an uncomfortable shifting among the encircling forces as they realized what was happening, shouts and gallops and hasty consultations. Colonel Rainsborough, roused from prayer by an orderly who knew that of all things one never roused the Colonel from prayer, ordered a volley of musket fire over the heads of the women.
    Still the herd shuffled forwards, leaderless and random and faces down, towards the Parliamentarian lines. Four of the women were grabbed – a shifting, a murmuring of alarm, a nascent moaning among the others – and Colonel Rainsborough had them stripped naked. Laughter across the field, the unbeautiful animal laughter of men as men, and fear: nakedness is what comes before violence; nakedness is what comes before violation; nakedness is what comes before death. After nakedness, anything is possible.
    Then he sent the women back. Lost between worlds, dumb and hungry and stripped of humanity and hope, the herd drifted back into the besieged town.

    The things I have suffered for Charles Stuart
.
    James, Duke of Hamilton sat heavy on his horse. The compact body was slumped, the clothes battered. A hard freakish wind threw gusts of rain at man and horse, blustering and dropping, roaring in the ears then vanishing, and as suddenly launching the deluge from some new quarter. The road east from Uttoxeter rises gently, and the Duke found himself at the top of a shallow hill, surrounded by the incessant, exhausting storm and the surly remnant of his army.
    There was some further obstacle, some new delay. His mind was numb to it all now.
    Another flurry of wind and rain at his back, and his neck hunched instinctively. The large eyes flicked around. It had been a long time since he’d really looked at his army. Too much mutual resentment. Too much shame. Now that he glimpsed it, he realized how small and straggled it had become. The regiments empty-ranked and intermingled. The few horses hang-necked. The riders slumped like their commander. The weapons carried careless and awry. A musket dropped at the roadside, a ribbon trodden in the mud, a blanket wrapped around a shivering head, the wordless squelching trudge, and the faces that would not look back at him: drowned faces, sullen, beaten. The unearthly force that was Cromwell, the long meandering flight across the country, the sudden alarms and the sleepless nights, and the eternal furnace of wind and rain, had eaten and shrivelled the army like some vicious plague.
    ‘The men’ll go no further, your Grace.’ A voice at his side.
    Head up suddenly with the anger and the pride, and damn the rain. ‘The hell they won’t! I’ll talk—’
    ‘Your Grace!’ The hand white on the Duke’s arm – uncontrolled, improper. An uneasy release. ‘That would be. . . perhaps a risk. And beneath your dignity.’
    ‘Then they can rot here. We’ll away!’ The wind