“My God, what is he going to do?” John whispered to himself.

Lambert halted immediately before their commander and looked up at the officer high above him on the big horse, his hand ready-tightened on his sword ready to draw and sweep down in the killing blow. It was a big horse. The man was sixteen hands above Lambert, the general had to look upward, his eyes screwed up against the evening sunlight.

“Dismount!” Lambert said easily, almost conversationally. There was a moment’s pause. Soldiers in both troops held their breath to see what the outcome would be. The officer looked down at the unarmed man before him, Lambert smiled up at him. Then the officer dropped his reins and jumped down from the saddle.

At once there was a roar of approval from Lambert’s men and the Parliament guards broke ranks and trotted toward Lambert’s regiment to be greeted with smiles and handshakes and laughter. Lambert shook hands with the officer, exchanged a few brief words and then strolled back to his horse, swung into the saddle and then turned to face the men.

“Fall in,” he said pleasantly as if for a routine parade. He nodded to his standard bearer. “Take my compliments to the Members of the House of Commons and advise them that I have the keys to the House and they must leave. They are no longer welcome. The country will be ruled by a Committee of Safety. We are going to have justice and freedom in this country. And it starts now.”


Lambert had not allowed for General George Monck, out of touch in Scotland, and jealous as a sick dog of his charismatic rival. As soon as he heard of the triumph at Whitehall he sent word to London that as commander of the Parliamentary army in Scotland he did not accept the Committee of Safety and that he was declaring war, and marching south to restore the banned MPs.

“War?” Hester demanded. “But why?”

“He says he’s going to restore Parliament,” John said, reading the latest news-sheet.

“Then why did he not do it before?” Hester asked. “Why did he not declare war on Cromwell?”

“Because this is a man who thinks he can be Cromwell,” John said astutely. “He thinks he can put himself at the head of the army and in a little while command Parliament as well.”

“Shall we box up the rarities?” Hester asked John wearily.

John thought for a moment. “Not yet,” he said. “But we may have to. General Monck’s troops learned their discipline burning out royalists in Scotland.”

“He’s for Parliament. He fought against Charles Stuart,” she said. “Why can he not allow Lambert and the Committee of Safety to bring in their reforms? Why cannot people in this country be given a chance to have the government and the justice they deserve?”

“He believes in nothing, he’s a professional soldier,” John said bitterly. “He fought for King Charles before he saw that Cromwell would win and so changed sides. Then he saw what Cromwell did. He saw one man come to power, nearly to kingship at the head of the army. He won’t trust John Lambert not to do the same. And he’ll be thinking there’s a chance for him.”

“John Lambert is the only man you could trust with that power,” Hester said. “He’s never broken his word, not once, not in all these difficult times.”

“And he paid us for the daffodils that I took to him that day,” John said. “I hope to God he is able to plant them.”


Lambert never did plant the daffodils that John brought him. In planting time in November, he obeyed his orders from the Committee of Safety to protect England against General Monck and marched north to meet him at the head of eight thousand men.

He would not attack at once. General Monck had been a comrade in arms, and they were both parliamentarians. Lambert believed, trustingly enough, that it must be a misunderstanding. He wrote to Monck to try to explain, to try to convince him of the plans of the Committee of Safety, to persuade him that at last England had a chance to make a free and just society.

Monck pretended to consider, wrote and argued by letter with Lambert, while the Committee in London scraped around trying to find money to pay the soldiers under Lambert’s command. They sent nothing. Lambert was caught between the deceit of General Monck and the incompetence of the Committee. He would not attack General Monck when they were still in debate, and by the time he realized that the general was spinning out the argument as a tactic, his army had melted away, and the general had won without a shot being fired.

When he should have been planting his orange-hearted narcissi in his orange garden at Wimbledon House he was watching his army disappear down the Great North Road, knowing that he had been tricked by Monck and betrayed by London.

“What will happen to him?” Hester asked John.

John scowled. “Monck has had him accused of treason,” he said miserably. “Treason against the old Parliament, who were so lazy and incompetent that no one cared when Lambert locked them out. Now they’ll call themselves martyrs, no doubt. And they’ll call him a traitor. Once he’s in the Tower it’s not a very long walk to the scaffold.”

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.”