Traitor's Field

by Robert Wilton

  Robert Wilton has held a variety of posts in the British Ministry of Defence, Foreign Office and Cabinet Office. He was advisor to the Prime Minister of Kosovo in the lead-up to the country’s independence, and has now returned there as a senior international official. He divides his time between Kosovo and Cornwall. His first book, Treason’s Tide, won the inaugural HWA/Goldsboro Crown for debut historical fiction in 2012.

  First published in Great Britain in 2013

  by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Robert Wilton 2013.

  The moral right of Robert Wilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 819 8

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 839 6

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 017 6

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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  Introduction

  As you may be realizing, I can’t resist stories of hidden hoards of documents and dirty work by anonymous agents of the state. An acquaintance who knew that I was researching the seventeenth century recently sent me a photocopy of the following letter. It was written more than three hundred years ago, by the Reverend Henry Minafer to a friend of his named Rowse. (There’s an enticing possibility that this could be Sir Francis Rowse, who would become one of the most notorious scoundrels in an age where there was some pretty stiff competition; he was reputed to have once quite literally sold his own grandmother.) We don’t know what happened to the letter between September 1701 and July 2010, when it was part of a bundle of correspondence bulking out a collection of autograph letters sold at auction in Exeter. Given Minafer’s insignificance, and the uncertain identification of Rowse, the letter has no intrinsic value.

  Lincoln’s Inn, Chamber XIII, the 9th of September 1701

  My dear Rowse,

  you may, I dare venture, have heard of the remarkable Discovery in my Lodgings. But I write to you of this, and of one yet more peculiar Aspect, because as well as finding the Story of interest you may, given your Acquaintance with the Lord Chancellor’s Circle and with such privy Matters, be able to offer me some wise Analysis or Counsel.

  I have lately taken these Lodgings in the Inn, from Mr Thomlinson – you may remember him from the University, altho’ I fancy that like myself he was a Year or two before your Time. He has suffered me to have some Improvements done, the Rooms having been untended for some little While. It was during these Works that one of the Joiners – with not the first of his Demonstrations of Clumsiness – accidentally thrust a Beam up through the Ceiling of a short Passageway at the top of the House. It was determined that a larger Portion of the Ceiling should be removed to assist tidy Restoration, and it was this that caused one of the Men to perceive, in the Roof Space thus attained, two small but sturdy Storage Chests.

  Of these Chests I should first say Something. They were of thick Wood, but stoutly cornered and banded with Iron, and, remarkably, lined with both Copper and then Leather – and thus Proof I fancy against every possible Assault of Nature.

  It is naturally the Contents that have drawn greater Attention. They were nothing other than many hundreds of Papers of an official Tone, all seemingly dating from the Middle of the last Century – most indeed from the Period of the second King Charles’s Exile. How they came to be gathered to the Chests, and thence secreted behind this false Ceiling, One may only speculate.

  I of course looked through the Documents with great Curiosity. I could remark no particular Theme nor Secret, but nor were they trivial: these were the work a day Correspondence, One might say, of the Government itself – the Orders, Responses, Judgements and Communications of the State, with every other Name a Minister, a Generalor a Prince. In my casual Perusal, I should say at this Juncture, I noticed a number of Documents marked with a rather curious official Seal, depicting a Device or heraldic Mark not familiar to me.

  My Mind at Last turned to the proper Ownership and Holding of these Papers. I fancied that Someone in Authority ought at least to be aware of their Rediscovery, and I thought it likely they might be considered confidential – or at the least official Property – even now. Thomlinson knew nothing of the Business but, with his Approval, I contacted my Friend Herrick, who as you know conducts a certain Amount of legal Business for the Treasury Ministers and for the Court. Through him I was subsequently contacted by one of the Secretaries to Sir John Somers, informing me that the Lord Chancellor’s Office would wish to secure the Papers.

  Yesterday, shortly before I was due to depart for Evening Service, I was visited by a Man named Isaac Jilkes – another Clergyman, as I immediately remarked –who said he was from the Lord Chancellor’s Office, and who repeated their Interest and asked if he might glance at the Papers. I naturally acquiesced, and hoped that my Servant could offer such Assistance and Hospitality as he should require, in my regrettable but unavoidable Absence. I believe that he departed a little While later, professing himself grateful and satisfied. This Morning, as heralded, two Clerksand a Secretary from the Lord Chancellor’s Office visited me and collected the Papers.

  The strangest Circumstance of all is this: in showing the Secretary through the Documents, and remarking as to their Variety and Interest, I looked instinctively for the official Device that had previously caught my Attention. I couldnot see it, which at first I reckoned little because there werein Truth not a great number of Documents that had carried it. But as I went through the Documents more intently, I could find this Morning not a single One with that uniqueand distinctive Marking.

  I immediately interrogated my Servant, who denied any Knowledge of such Papers or their Movement, and is in Truth so unlettered and so incurious a Fellow as to have paid them little Heed in any Case. I determined that, for some Reason, the Reverend Jilkes must have removed all of those Documents bearing that strange Seal.

  But the Lord Chancellor’s Officers disavow any knowledge of the Reverend Isaac Jilkes, and I can find no Record of sucha Man. I must then ask, what was He? What was his Interest in the Papers, and whither has he gone? And if he is truly not known to the Office of the Lord Chancellor, then how came he by Knowledge of these Papers?

  You, Rowse, who were always the Man for a Mystery, may with your wider Experience of State Habits have some Light to offer me on these Events. In any Case, I find my Mind much eased by having shared them. I beg you to accept my good Wishes, and remain,

  Your Friend and humble Servant,

  Henry Minafer

  The papers discovered by the Reverend Minafer above Mr Thomlinson’s ceiling are now acknowledged as one of the great documentary troves of British history. Given by John, Baron Somers, the Lord Chancellor, to Sir Joseph Jekyll, the Master of the Rolls, after whose death they were bought by the bookseller Fletcher Gyles and then, after his death, edited by Thomas Birch, they were finally published in 1742. We know them as the Thurloe State Papers (Briti
sh Library 195.h.2) and they remain a unique and essential source for historians of mid-seventeenth-century Britain, and in particular for that remarkable rootless period between the British Civil Wars and the Restoration of Charles II, during which a collection of soldiers, lawyers, radicals and visionaries tried to create a new kind of government and a new kind of world.

  What happened, though, to the strangely marked papers stolen from the collection in 1701, by the man calling himself Reverend Isaac Jilkes? We can’t know. But internal evidence raises an intriguing possibility: could they, perhaps, have found their way into the archives of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, rediscovered recently under the library of the UK Ministry of Defence? Was Jilkes a representative of that extraordinary organization, tasked with retrieving certain papers of particular sensitivity before they could become public? Again we can’t be sure. Perhaps only the Reverend Minafer could tell us whether his missing documents form part of the source material for the following narrative, recounting another phase of the strange history of the Comptrollerate-General.

  As before, the strategic framework of events for this account, between 1648 and 1651, is common knowledge. The detail is drawn directly from the archive of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, along with other relevant sources currently available (specific documents are referenced with the SS prefix, or equivalent; references are not given here for the many other documents that have contributed colour and background). The exact play of dialogue and emotion is of course my conjecture, consistent with the data and tending I hope to illuminate rather than distort what happened. If my fictionalization of these incidental elements inspires the reader to their own investigation of the facts, so much the better.

  R. J. W.

  February 2012

  Contents

  Prologue

  1648

  The Kingdom in Twilight

  1649

  The World New-Made

  1650

  The Islands of Blood

  1651

  The Fugitive Crown

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The Passing

  Dawn on the moor, the cold and wary light silvering the stagnant water, and glistening on the grass and the frosted heaps of dead.

  The river slips drowsily through the early morning, wide and flat between the flood plains and unexcited by the promise of the sea just a few miles ahead. It has hurried seventy miles in the darkness, south from the hidden dales of the Pennines, then turning to the west to elude the first forays of the sunlight. By the bridge, tiring, the water slides furtive around the obstacles in its flight, the boulders and the tangled, clutching lattice of reeds, looking for the shadows under the stonework. It creeps past the white face of a man slumped in the shallows, trying not to wake him with its sting against his skin, rummages in the sagging sodden jacket and through the breeches, washes over one bare foot and chuckles away into the gloom under the bridge.

  A hand plunges down and grabs the jacket, pulls the body over onto its back, and a dead arm splashes among the reeds. A musketeer, from the uniform; Scottish presumably. The face is already puffy after a night in the water, the eyes stare shocked into the morning light, and a black-toothed mouth gapes. Not a good face: born roughly, lived worse. A few bruises and rips, but there is no sign of a wound on the body, no bloody sword swipe, no punched hole from a musket ball. Drowned.

  Mustered in some god-forsaken slum with the promise of excitement and a penny a day, a month or two raping and foraging your way through northern England, and your warrior heritage splutters and chokes to death in a stream as your comrades clamber over you to get to safety.

  Still the glazed eyes gape.

  You’re not who I’m after, anyway.

  Above, dark against the morning light, a weary shake of the head. Then two great splashes as the man pulls away and tramps out of the water. Around him, the corpses sprawl. Tracks through the mud and reeds show where men have dragged themselves to safety or to collapse, and the bank is scattered with hunched brown forms. Some have the wild distortion of violence, thrown by a ball or ripped open by a flailing sword. Others, from wounds or exhaustion, have collapsed peacefully into the grass and never woken. They could be a herd of cows at rest, faces buried in this pasture; so battered and muddied in the dim morning, the brown shapes seem to be slumping back into the earth. Around them the debris of battle: swords and muskets; pikes held by dead men, and broken pikes abandoned by live ones; bandoliers, belts, hats and boots, purses and bags; dropped, flung, forgotten or wrenched off by the early scavengers. Death has come down the river like a tempest, and he has ripped this army out of the ground and whirled and torn and scattered it across the plain.

  A too-practised glance around the bank. At least forty men in this immediate stretch – fifty, say. And all King’s men. By this point it had been a rout.

  A sigh. The man stiffens. The sigh again, harsh and hoarse, rasping through the grass at his feet. Another musketeer, huddled up like a baby in the mud. The man crouches, an instinctive hand on the body’s woollen cap, then another on the shoulder – he can feel how thin the man is through his sleeve – and he carefully rolls the body onto its back. A stomach wound, and it’s savage. A pike in his gut many hours ago, and nothing will save him now. The face is ghostly, the eyes closed, but still the hissing comes from the throat.

  The man stands, checks around him, pulls the jackets off two nearby corpses and lays them both over the faintly shivering body beneath him. Go quickly, boy. Nothing left for you in this world.

  A clean face, untouched by sickness or years. A thin, terribly young face. A face drawn in charcoal on paper: the boy is white, and his stomach, two hands frozen feebly at it, is ghastly red.

  Stralsund. Breitenfeld. Lützen. Memories of three decades of conflict; a continent of death. I have been here too often. The man pulls up his gaze. More of them had died on the north side of the river, hesitating to splash into it or trying to get to the bridge, cut down by a final cavalry charge when all their powder had gone. The water’s clean now: the blood has long ceased to flow, and the current has carried it away to the Irish Sea. But the boulders and the grasses around are rusty in the dawn. Above them, the carcases have formed a breakwater on the bank, piled two and three deep, a mess of uniforms stuck with swords and musket barrels and pikes and arms and legs.

  Movement beyond them, against the distant shadow of Preston town. The man drops to a crouch, eyes narrow, face gnarled around them, watching for the movement again. I’ve come on too fast. This battle is not yet over. Horsemen: a patrol out from the town, perhaps. This is still contested ground. The horsemen coming on towards the bridge. Drop among the corpses? But his richer, cleaner clothes will stand out. The bridge.

  Hawk’s eyes on the distant movement, the man scurries low over the bank again, against the side of the bridge and down into the shallows. This time his boots slide silent through the water; no splashing, no clumsy movement. Under the bridge, crouching against the curve of the arch. Eyes adjust to the gloom: a body in the shallow water, and he heaves the torso up onto his knees.

  The horses are nearer now; he can hear voices, echoing weirdly off the water and through the arch. Even if anyone glances under the bridge and sees a shape, they will see the legs and slumped body of a corpse before they see anything else.

  I had no choice. I cannot wait. I have to know where he is.

  The thump and rattle of horses on the bridge, then over his head. The patrol is heading south – for Wigan, perhaps.

  The man spends twenty minutes crouched in the gloom and the chill water, a dead pikeman on his lap.

  He was refighting the battle in reverse. From its scattered fringes of debris, men who’d crawled to die under hedges or lay shivering of wounds and fear in peasant kitchens, he was tracking the chaos inward through the channels of panic to the heart of the slaughter, back to the first shock of contact, the first ugly rattle of sword against pike, the
first gasp of understanding that death is really loose and hunting you in this place. He knew that gasp.

  He’d come through Wigan in the middle of the night, and fugitives had still been staggering into it gibbering of Cromwell’s horsemen behind them. Every bedroom held a wounded Royalist officer, every corner of alley and ditch a soldier. The Roundheads would be on them by now – he’d glimpsed the rearguard as he’d skirted the line of flight, knew it wouldn’t stay to guard anything for more than an hour – and the town would be under military law. That meant door-kick searches, and looting. It meant arrest at best for those wounded officers, and herding and robbing and nasty acts of vindictiveness for the rest. By now the Royalist fugitives would be fleeing south again, with the local villagers starting to pick off the stragglers.

  But not the man he was looking for. His man should have been with the command party, but was not. He’d caught up with the command party in a churchyard outside Wigan, wide-eyed and leery of Roundhead ghosts in the darkness, and they had shaken their heads and shrugged and waved thumbs over shoulders and hurried away to the south.

  So he had continued north, working his way up parallel to the road, through a witches’ night of moans and cries and half-glimpsed shiftings in the blackness. Shouts of orders and of self-reassurance emerging from the void, then explosions of thunder and vicious metal rasping and the crackle of muskets as the Roundhead pursuit threw itself once again on the dwindling rearguard. He’d moved among riderless bewildered horses, suddenly pale in the gloom, among gasping fugitives, half-man and half-beast and scurrying away into the hedges as he passed, and among the dead.

  Nearer the river, the sun’s first tentative advance coming across the plain, he’d come on another devastation: a graveyard of wagons, empty or overturned, smashed boxes thrown around them in the dirt. Hamilton had lost his baggage train as well. Happy pickings for the Roundhead infantry: a Duke’s household on the move, gold plate and silver and rich cloths, and. . . and papers. The first breeze teased a few scattered pages among the boxes, and they fluttered at him. A hissed, vicious expletive into the dawn.