James had spent quite a bit of time hanging about with his cousins, the offspring of his aunt Elizabeth (the Winter Queen), a fecund but hapless alternate branch of the family. When the Civil War had been lost, he'd gone back to St. James's and lived there as a pampered hostage, wandering about this park and mounting the occasional boyish escape attempt, complete with encyphered letters spirited out to loyal confederates. One of those letters had been intercepted, and John Wilkins had been called in to decypher it, and Parliament had threatened to send James off to live in the decidedly less hospitable Tower. Eventually he'd slipped out across this park, disguised himself as a girl, and fled down the river and across the sea to Holland. Therefore he'd been out of the country when his father had been marched across this park to have his head lopped off. As the English Civil War had slowly ground to a halt, James had grown into a man, bouncing around between Holland, the Island of Jersey, and St. Germain (a royal suburb of Paris) and busying himself with the princely pastimes of riding, shooting, and screwing high-born Frenchwomen. But as Cromwell had continued to crush the Royalists at every turn, not only in England but Ireland and France as well, James had finally run out of money and become a soldier – a rather good one – under Marshal Turenne, the incomparable French general.