London, scudding rainclouds, a cold breeze from the Thames; it smelled of fish gasping on mudflats. Sydney and Hampden in the Old Palace Yard near Westminster Hall, facing the Court of Requests and the House of Lords. Fawkes and the his gunpowder conspirators had been executed here in 1606, in the shadow of the institution they had meant to blow up. Pikemen everywhere — the Yard’s corners, marching in pairs up St Margaret’s Lane, through the Churchyard, around Westminster Abbey.  Sydney and Hampden were waiting for the Earl of Essex, Captain-General of Parliament’s armies, to emerge from a meeting with Committee of Safety.

“Yes, I’ve heard the same,” Hampden said. He looked tired: arriving from Northampton and midnight, three hours’ sleep at Sydney’s house in the City, up before dawn for meetings at with Commons committees. “Men flocking to the King; those who fear they’ll be declared malignant, their estates seized. So, finally, he’s raising an army: not from love of his person, or ‘Thorough,’ God knows, but from fear of losing their wealth.”

“Perhaps,” Sydney said, “It should have been guaranteed that property would not be violated.”