Free He Who Dares: Book Three by Rob Buckman

parliamentary consent, much as parliament was doing now without the people's consent. Many in parliament, including their leader, Oliver Cromwell, perceived his actions as those of a tyrannical, absolute monarchy, and so precipitated the civil war between the Royalists and the Roundheads, as Cromwell’s forces were called. By the end of 1648, Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army had consolidated its control over England and had Charles arrested, imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, tried, convicted, and executed on the trumped-up charge of high treason in January 1649. The monarchy was abolished, and a republic called the “Commonwealth of England” was declared. Cromwell died of natural causes nine years later in 1658, and was succeeded by his son, Richard Cromwell. He didn’t last long and was forced from power less than a year later, whereupon Charles II took the throne, turning the short-lived commonwealth into a monarchy once again by popular demand.
    Not, the King thought, that he was trying to emulate Charles the First, far from it. Like Cromwell, all evidence pointed to the Prime Minister and his cronies attempting to abolish the monarchy and recreate the Commonwealth of England with that misbegotten lardass as its first president. He remembered Mike Gray’s words, that he represented the voice of the people of England, and in good conscience, he’d be damned if he’d let the PM hand over the country, and possibly the world, to the Sirriens. It was a long running joke between himself and his loyal private secretary; John Cromwell would jokingly say, that if Richard didn’t do a good job as King, he might just do what his unlamented ancestor had done and take over and do the job himself.
    Therein lay the trust that started when they were both young boys at that horrible private school his parents had sent him to. Young John Cromwell had had no idea who he was at first, but they’d quickly formed a mutual protective alliance against the older boys who’d sought to bully them. Both had stepped up more than once to take the punishment the other should have received, thereby cementing their relationship into an unbreakable bond. Even with the signing of this year’s honor list, and promoting several key members of parliament to the Lords, and getting them, and their vote out of the Commons, there were still a few places he couldn’t reach, and he hoped the Lady Anne was having better luck in that department. Lord Seaford, the Duke of Cardiff, Lord Ross, and the others of the group made a clean sweep one night. With the help of a select group of Royal Marine commandos from the King’s bodyguard they arrested the top echelon of MI5 and Naval Intelligence, plus a baker’s dozen of Sirrien spies. The King promptly placed Lord Seaford in charge of the newly combined secret service and intelligence operations, and he in turn appointed Taffy as chief of operations. The raid was so well timed that none of the people they arrested had had time to destroy critical documents and data. Seaford already had an army of loyal supporters mining those documents and data to discover who else was involved. Sadly, so far, they’d been unable to find any link between the Sirrien spy network and the PM. Even as well hidden as the raids were, it didn’t take long for the information to get back to the PM.
    The Prime Minister stormed back and forth across his office at 10 Downing Street in a fury as reports of the coup came in, seeing all his carefully laid plans disappear, his power base eroded. In a calmer moment, he realized that he could still win. It all depended on the Sirrien Empire and what it did next. If they did what he expected, he would still be the first president of the Republic of Great Britain and Earth, the monarchy nothing but a fading memory. There wasn’t much he could do about Naval Intelligence, except indirectly, as their authority came from the Admiralty. With so many of the top people, his people, now gone, and