“But if your honor knew this man?”

“I neither know nor wish to know him. Provided Charles is dead, it is the axe, not the man, we must thank.”

“And yet, without the man, the king would have been rescued.”

Cromwell smiled.

“They would have carried him to Greenwich,” he said, “and put him on board a felucca with five barrels of powder in the hold. Once out to sea, you are too good a politician not to understand the rest, Mordaunt.”

“Yes, they would have all been blown up.”

“Just so. The explosion would have done what the axe had failed to do. Men would have said that the king had escaped human justice and been overtaken by God’s.