A Crowning Mercy by Bernard Cornwell

Civil War, and if Sir George changed sides now, then there were many men who would say he did it out of fear, deserting Parliament in a cowardly attempt to join the winning side, and that was not true.
    Sir George wanted to change sides, but his reasons had nothing to do with the fall of Bristol.
    War had begun the previous year and Sir George, as a loyal Parliamentarian, had no doubts then. He had been offended, deeply so, by King Charles's use of illegal taxation, and the offence had become personal when the King had forced loans out of his richer subjects. The loans, Sir George knew, would never be repaid and he was among the men who had been robbed by his monarch.
    The argument between King and Parliament had drifted almost imperceptibly into war. Sir George continued to support Parliament for its cause was his cause; that the kingdom should be ruled by law and that no man, not even the King of England, was above that law. That doctrine pleased Sir George, made his support of the rebellion firm, yet now he knew that he was changing sides. He would support the King against Parliament.
    He moved to one of the great buttresses of the medieval cathedral and leaned against the sun-warmed stone. It was not, he thought, that he had changed, it was the cause that had changed. He had entered the rebellion convinced that it was a political fight, a war to decide how the country should be governed, but in opening the gates of battle Parliament had released a plague of monsters. The monsters took religious shapes.
    Sir George Lazender was a Protestant, stout in the defence of his faith, but he had little time for the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchy Men, the Anabaptists, the Familists, the Mortalists, or any of the other strange sects that had suddenly emerged to preach their own brand of revolutionary religion. Fanaticism had swamped London. Only two days before he had seen a stark naked woman parading in the Strand, preaching the Rantist sect, and the extraordinary thing was that people took such nonsense seriously! And with the religious nonsense, that might be harmless, came more insidious political demands.
    Parliament claimed that it fought only against the King's advisers. That, Sir George knew, was a nonsense, but it gave Parliament a shred of legality in its revolt. The aim of Parliament was to restore the King to his throne in Whitehall, a throne that was meticulously maintained for his return, and then to force him to rule England with the consent and help of his Parliament. There would, of course, be great changes. The bishops would have to go, and the archbishops, so that the Church of England would appear a more Protestant church and, though Sir George was not personally offended by bishops, he would sacrifice them willingly if it meant a king ruling a kingdom according to law and not whim. Yet Sir George no longer trusted that Parliament, if it defeated the King, could control the victory.
    The fanatics were fuelling the rebellion, changing it. They spoke now not just of abolishing the bishops, but of abolishing the King as well. Men preached an end to property and privilege and Sir George remembered with horror a popular verse of the previous year:
     
Wee'l teach the nobles how to crouch,
And keep the gentry downe.
     
    Well, Sir George was a gentleman, and his eldest child, Anne, had married the Earl of Fleet who was a noble. The Earl of Fleet, a good Puritan, believed that the fanatics could be contained, but Sir George no longer did. He could not support a cause that would, in the end, destroy him and his children, and so he had decided, reluctantly, to fight against that cause. He would leave London. He would pack his precious books, his silver, his pewter and his furniture, and he would abandon London and Parliament, to return to Lazen Castle.
    He would miss London. He looked up from the Harington and stared fondly at the cathedral precinct. This was the place where unemployed house servants came to look for new