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blustering up around his face, catching the words and swallowing them. ‘Come on, then!’
    But again the wrong hand on the Duke’s arm. ‘They won’t. . .’ The words caught. ‘They won’t allow us, your Grace. Too many of the officers have already fled.’
    ‘Aye, I wondered where Langdale had got to.’ The Duke’s heavy features dark and scornful.
    ‘The men. . . insist that they will keep us here at any hazard.’
    James, Duke of Hamilton: a low black cloud, hanging solitary on the little hill.

    In the final week of August, the stranger shifted base eastwards, from the districts around Preston to the districts around Leeds. It was unlikely that a reply would come yet – there was certainly no chance of anything from Amsterdam or Paris – but something was just possible from London or Edinburgh. He read news-sheets and pamphlets wherever he could find them, for they were all the information he could get for now. As he travelled, he sounded casually the opinions and loyalties and characters of innkeepers and farmers, shopkeepers and clergymen. Where they were promising, he probed – tested, challenged, encouraged, reached out. One never knew when one might need a good hand or a good heart.

    ‘George Astbury is dead. On the field at Preston.’
    ‘What cause had he for that? It was neither his inclination nor his duty! The man who holds that office is supposed to stand above the fray, to work outside the world. What did he think he was playing at?’
    ‘You must ask him when you see him. Until that time, we who are left must shift to survive as we can.’
    ‘We always thought him an uneasy choice. Who is to follow?’
    A pause.
    ‘Shay.’
    ‘Shay? Do you offer me an opinion or a decision?’
    ‘I offer you a fact. Shay is in possession of the field. He has the experience. He is reassuming control of the organization. He fulfils the office.’
    ‘Mortimer Shay is a living chaos. Shay is misrule; Shay is mayhem; Shay is blood.’
    ‘These are not settled or normal times. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.’

    Uttoxeter’s main street was slick with mud, dragged on a thousand boots and softened and smeared over the ground by the rain that still fell steady.
    In the middle of the street, face to another of the sky’s grim clouds and cloak gusting and whipping around him, James, Duke of Hamilton stood silent and defeated.
    In front of him, watching uneasily and trying to maintain his composure, was a Roundhead trumpeter: the most junior of soldiers, the most humiliating of conquerors.
    This, then, was the final illumination of the character of the men who had beaten and hunted him. This shaming was more ruthless than anything inflicted in the fields around Preston. The old world and the old ways were to be dismantled and trodden into the dust.
    The storm battered and soaked the two men, the Duke and the soldier, facing each other in the mud and unable to speak, watched by a thousand empty eyes in windows and gutters.
    The things I have suffered for Charles Stuart.

    Sir, these are the news from Colchester, this day the 27th August. The town is very like to fall tomorrow, so this may be my last despatch to you. If you have not already, please now consider this knot of the net broke. The besiegers cut our water three weeks past, fresh food as I told you is long become fable, and I doubt that there remains one solitary dog horse etc living and if it does so it must be the miserablest scrawny beast and still sold for a King’s ransom. We are become, all of us, from Lord Norwich down to the lowliest, miserable scrawny beasts, and I fear we would fetch no price, nor may we avail that King no ransom of hope or support. Lord Norwich and the aristocrats and Sir Charles Lucas and the soldiers are agreed that the routing of the Scotch army at Preston, which I learned privily four days past and which Sir Thomas Fairfax in the besieging lines around was blithe to let us know one day later with much cannonado of