As a boy Daniel had been able to open an upper-storey window in back of Drake’s house on Holborn, and gaze across one mile of downs and swales to an irregular patch of turf called Clerkenwell Green: a bit of common ground separating St. James’s and St. John’s. Each of these was an ancient religious order, therefore, a jumbled compound of graveyards, houses, ancient Popish cloisters, and out-buildings. Like all other Roman churches in the realm, these had become Anglican, and perhaps been sacked a little bit, during Henry VIII’s time. And when Cromwell had come along to replace Anglicanism with a more radical creed, they had been sacked more thoroughly. Now what remained of them had been engulfed by London.