From an upstairs window, Thomas Scot watched the procession with bright, exultant, calculating eyes.
‘Those trepidatious men in the Parliament shall not ignore us now,’ he said. ‘This land has seen its last King.’
The man beside him nodded fervently.
The crowd slithered on past them through the street. ‘Equal justice under God!’ rose thin and strong from somewhere ahead, and then thousands of voices gave the echo: ‘Justice!’
John Thurloe arrived in Doncaster more than a week after the death of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, but the death still hung humid in the air. He could feel its weight in the attentive performance of the guards at the gate; he could see it in the sullen faces; he caught it in the first glances of alarm whenever he entered a shop or a room.
Thurloe did not know soldiers. They were increasingly present in his life, standing inappropriate on the edge of discussions or disfiguring doorways, surprising rough colours and heavy boots and the embarrassed clatter of metal. But they remained alien and out of place, like wild creatures or coarse language in the chapels and chambers he inhabited, their brutal honesty and anonymity unsettling.
He did not know them, but he could sense the strains in the behaviour of these men: the melodramatic performances of routine with musket and gate; the over-loud interrogation of his name, his purpose, his hostel, his purpose again; and the sour black discontent in the faces. Uniforms and walls were becoming less reliable indicators of allegiance, and it discomfited these violent worshippers of order.
He found a room in an inn – he’d be sharing, but the landlord wanted to encourage quiet-seeming, thoughtful men who weren’t soldiers, and so he’d only have a preacher and a horse-dealer for company – and reported to the garrison commander.
The General looked tired and harassed: a large bright uniform at a small drab desk; a body and a face for joviality, now sagging. He stared into the order from the Council for half a minute, and Thurloe watched his thoughts: irritation at interference, suspicion at a civilian, unease at the break in routine, worry at the further impact on his disgruntled men of a stranger prodding around their lives, relief at being able to pass on to someone else the taint of this unhappy case.
Eventually he looked up, and just nodded. ‘Well, there it is then,’ he said. ‘Look, Master. . .’ He peered at the paper again.
‘Thurloe.’
‘Thurloe. There’s a war on, you know that?’ Thurloe just looked at him. ‘Damned difficult affair this. No need for more trouble, you understand? Men are unhappy.’ He waved a fist in a slow thoughtful circle, as if stirring a pot of his troubles. ‘Radical ideas. Hot tempers. Difficult business, a siege.’ He nodded to himself at this wise precept. ‘Sickness. Expectations.’ He looked up at Thurloe again. ‘London!’
Thurloe thanked him, hoped politely that God would add his sinews to a speedy victory, and left.
The reports began to creep towards Shay from the extremities of the country, hidden or crudely encyphered or anonymous. From Cornwall and the Highlands and all points between, men wrote of their loyalties and their fears, their strengths and their vulnerabilities. In his head, Shay began to draft a map of his own private kingdom, a kingdom with its resources and its strongpoints and its lines of communication. Then, at first cautiously, he began to feel his way around this kingdom, and to reckon its possibilities.
Thurloe walked one irregular loop of the town to absorb the layout and the atmosphere. He was here to enquire into a business among soldiers, which made him uncomfortable, and he invented suspicion and hostility in each crowd of uniforms that he passed in the street, every impassive sentry whose eyes followed him.
From fences and door-knockers across the town hung sodden sea-green ribbons: memorial tokens for Rainsborough; the badge of the Levellers. In a square, in front of an inn, a mane of the ribbons hung from a pole, and sprigs of rosemary had been stuck into the cracks and hinges of the inn gate. This, then, was where it had happened. The gate was closed, the inn nursing its shame. Thurloe walked on, out of Doncaster.
He had been given a rough outline of the raid, and followed its course: from the open fields, through the St Sepulchre gate in the west and so back into the town again. He watched the scattered clusters of soldiers in the fields, trying to understand why they were placed as they were, and they watched him in return. He observed the routines at the gate, trying to ignore the fidgeting sentries. He walked into the town, saw the street leading to the violated inn, saw the other streets, down which other Royalist horsemen had ridden in diversion. Some of the raiders who had sallied out of nearby Pontefract and raced back in triumph would have been local men; they would have known Doncaster’s streets.
There had been a plan here; this was more than an ale-fired frolic.
Sir Greville Marsh had fifteen trusted men, muskets to go round, and regular meetings of these loyal souls. In Lincolnshire, a network of local gentlemen could muster one hundred and fifty men, fifty of them mounted. Sir David Davis could raise all the Welshmen he wanted, but they would need paying and probably training and they wouldn’t come before spring. A group of London merchants would advance money for men and supplies, if they were promised certain commercial advantages by a victorious King.
Shay absorbed it all. The local groupings, the secret places, and the money; the outraged gentlemen and the stolid yeomen, the sportsmen and the chancers and the mercenaries; the man who would betray his castle for a price, the horse racing meetings where Royalists would gather, the friends in strange and useful places. Sometimes a little inspiration, and he’d store it for possible future use. Sometimes a frown, at the fragility of these scattered forces, with their mixed motives and their hesitations and their foolishnesses.
Shay discounted none of it. This was the terrain on which he would fight his battle.
Back at the garrison headquarters, Thurloe found the General’s Adjutant, a man of his own age, tall and pale. The man’s ready assistance had been promised by the General, but when Thurloe caught up with him on the stairs of the town house that the Army had commandeered, arms full of papers, he saw hesitation and discomfort worsening the man’s apparently habitual frown.
He found a room for Thurloe on the ground floor – undecorated, spare, just a table and chair; found more chairs elsewhere. Thurloe wondered what the room was used for, either by the Army or the normal inhabitants of the place. Having passed on the summons for those Thurloe had asked to see, the Adjutant returned to find Thurloe slouched on a chair at the table, and hesitated in the doorway.
‘I shall sit with you,’ he said after a moment. It wasn’t a question. He took a chair a short distance behind Thurloe’s shoulder; it would be an appropriate position once the interviews started, but for now the two men stared off in the same direction, the Adjutant gazing at Thurloe’s shoulder and Thurloe gazing at the room and confirming where in the house he must be.
After thirty seconds like this, Thurloe scraped his chair round to face the Adjutant.
‘Difficult time, I presume,’ he said.
The Adjutant waited.
‘Must be difficult to control and sustain men in a drawn-out siege. Then to have this business.’
A pause, and then the Adjutant nodded. His eyes were watchful.
Eventually Thurloe smiled, shook his head. ‘Cheap tricks. I’m sorry. No more parlour conversation.’
Slowly, the Adjutant smiled. The eyes were still narrow and thoughtful.
Thurloe’s words stayed low, but quickened. ‘Colonel Rainsborough was known for a leader of the radical interest in the Army. The so-called Levellers.’
Another pause. Another nod.
‘Ribbons and rosemary all over town. A powerful force in these regiments, I think.’
Nod.
‘Isn’t it strange that a movement of equality and new freedoms should flourish in an organization more hierarchical and more rigid than any?’
The Adjutant’s face opened; the eyes moved instinctively in
thought. ‘Or perhaps it’s very natural.’ Then he shook his head. ‘No; that’s facile.’ He thought again. ‘The levelling men are happy enough to be led. But they desire to be led on their terms, by men of their own timber. And as for the freedoms. . . men must sometimes ask themselves for what they fight, and freedom is a goodly cause.’
‘Thousands of men – armed and trained men – determined to change society.’
‘This land has known a decade of blood, Master Thurloe. If nothing changed, would that not be futility indeed? May we not hope for something good at the end of it?’
The first of Thurloe’s soldiers knocked and entered. Over three hours he saw them, singly or in twos and threes, hostile or obliging, taciturn or garrulous, disrespectful or oddly afraid. All of them, through some element of mood or phrase or posture or expression, demonstrated their concern that a civilian should be talking to soldiers about soldiers’ business. Thurloe wrote it all down – the impressions, the phrases, the facts. And always, over his shoulder, the Adjutant sat silent, and Thurloe could read his expressions from the reacting expressions on the faces of the soldiers when their eyes flicked over to him.
The advance pickets – the squads posted out in the fields, utterly surprised by the horsemen who had exploded out of the dawn – told of the speed, the sheer unstoppable number of horsemen, their desperate resistance against the horde, the eventual weight of numbers. One older man explained to the civilian in earnest detail the role of the skirmisher, required to give only limited resistance before withdrawing. Thurloe listened politely to it all. Trying to avoid too obvious a challenge to their battered pride – No doubt a man on a charging horse must by weight alone be able to scatter a number of dismounted men, so I assume it natural that a relatively small number of riders must always in military affairs be able to displace a larger number of foot-soldiers – uneasy shiftings in seats, hasty glances at the Adjutant – Thurloe tried to get a more accurate estimate of the number of raiders. Wondering at the dawn – Since, as you say, you’ d been awake and alert for some time, you presumably had some idea where the sun was – eye-freezing confusion – he tried to establish the direction from which the assault had come, and some idea of the time.
The extremely rough idea suggested that there had been a gap between the charge through the pickets and the forcing of the gate. The soldiers had dispersed into the undergrowth, only to emerge once all was obviously clear. They had been simply ridden over rather than defeated, as the absence of wounds suggested: surprised, removed as a factor, and forgotten as the raiders continued towards the town.
The story from the St Sepulchre gate was similar, told with the same hesitations and inconsistencies and exaggerations. But here there had been a fight at least: there were wounds, and men he could not interview. This west entrance to the town was really gateway rather than gate, the contest determined by surprise against sleep, and by the presumably considerable advantage of charging horses. Thurloe tried to scrabble for clear details among the broken recollections: again an idea of time; again an idea of numbers; any suggestion of structure among the raiders – commands, leadership. No, there was not, and little frowns and glances told him that this was something only a civilian might ask.
‘For the riders in the town, are there witnesses?’ They were alone again for a moment.
The Adjutant shook his head. ‘We asked around, of course. A few people glimpsed them as they passed. I can give you one or two liars who will tell of their encounters. And I can show you the routes the riders took. I also have two townswomen who saw definite portents for the raid in the days before: one during that night. We should not discount such things.’
‘Nor do I. There was no suggestion of contact with anyone in the town during the raid?’
‘None. They were noticed by few. It was early, of course. I believe that those riders who did not carry out the assassination itself were intended to distract and delay only if necessary. They do not appear to have sought attention.’
And so to the killing itself. The Adjutant had a score of reports of screams and curses, second-hand retellings of heroic last stands against impossible odds, and one substantial and detailed description of the movements of the ghost of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough in the hours after and before the death, but only two witnesses.
The first was the inn-owner, a dapper, prudent man, and Thurloe felt something in himself uncoil at the first non-soldier he’d seen in hours. But the man, words kept as carefully as clothes, had nothing useful to say: awoken by the sound of an argument, as so many mornings would be in this military town, and then shortly afterwards from the street the noises of anger and then violence and then death. He left, feet soft on the boards and Thurloe disappointed that the civilian had offered nothing more than the military.
The Adjutant’s other witness had seen more than the rest of Doncaster taken together. He had been sentry on duty outside the inn that morning. Some riders – How many riders? – three or four – Think! Think of the faces – four then, four riders had stopped at the inn. How did they come? Charging? Trotting? – a gentle walk, nothing to remark. They claimed to bring letters from General Cromwell for the Colonel – Was such a thing normal? – normal enough. The sentry had fetched the Colonel’s Lieutenant to the door, and the riders had repeated their mission. The Lieutenant had authorized the opening of the gate. Three of the riders had gone into the inn yard with the Lieutenant, and one of those had stayed in the yard with the horses – And the fourth? – had walked off with his horse. The sentry had to keep an eye outwards, but as he’d said one of the men had stayed in the yard – they’d exchanged a few words while they waited – and the other two had gone up to the Colonel’s room with the Lieutenant. Then, a few – How long? – a few minutes only, and they’d all come down again with the Colonel – How come down? In what order? How disposed? – it was difficult to be clear, it all got very confused very quick, but probably the Lieutenant and the Colonel and then the two men behind, and he wasn’t sure but there’d been something about the Colonel that looked angry – Colonel was often angry but he’d looked sort of uncomfortable angry – and then it was chaos because someone had grabbed him by the shoulders and yanked him back into the yard and then the Colonel and the Lieutenant were hurried out and the riders with them with their horses and then he went to get up but someone had lamped him properly in the face and he was sort of stunned, and they’d pulled the gate to behind them and he was still coming round properly when through the gate he heard shouting and then fighting – Fighting? – fighting: swords and pistols and shouting, and by the time he was up and out the riders were gone and the Colonel was lying dead in the gutter.
The man’s face had reddened in his own breathless retelling, and he ran out of words unexpectedly and sat blinking and gulping for them for a moment, and then subsided. The Colonel had meant something to him. Thurloe wondered whether Leveller soldiers distinguished themselves in any way by badge or sign. He said, ‘And the Lieutenant?’
The Adjutant’s voice came low over his shoulder: ‘Died in the street with his Colonel.’
‘That was him. Of course.’ Thurloe sat still for a moment, wrote a few lines, sat silent again. It didn’t seem much. Was there something else he should ask the sentry? He tried for descriptions, but the sentry could only give generalities. Had any of the riders been obviously in command? The sentry wasn’t sure, but maybe one had told the man to stay with the horses, before going upstairs himself. Thurloe nodded, and murmured distracted thanks. The sentry checked with the Adjutant, and stood and walked away. Catching himself, Thurloe called a fuller thank you after him.
Finally the escape from the town. A soldier in indeterminate uniform had sauntered up to the men guarding the northern bridge out of town, and started a conversation. There had been no sign or sound of alarm from inside the town. Suddenly a large party – Fifty? A hundred? It was impossible to say – That seems a lot of horsemen to have made no sound in the town, surely – had charged
them from the unexpected direction, scattering the guard and escaping to open country and to Pontefract. Only later did they realize that the mysterious soldier had gone with the raiders. With the exception of some immediately discounted scars and disfigurements, Thurloe got no useful information about him.
Again, there was a plan here: great nerve, and a plan.
‘Not a very impressive picture, I fear.’ With the door closed behind the last relieved witness, the Adjutant was watching for the reaction.
Thurloe shrugged slightly. ‘I wouldn’t know. That’s for their General and their God.’
He was feeling uncomfortable. He had nothing to report but the obvious, nothing to add to facts already known, no comment to make more legitimate than the speculations of the dozen pamphlets that had already covered the story exhaustively. Nothing to take back to London, and nothing to justify the faith in him of St John and Cromwell.
‘What did you think of Colonel Rainsborough yourself?’
The Adjutant watched him carefully for a moment.
‘His men adored him. He was their own particular hero.’ He caught Thurloe’s eye, and smiled. ‘Soldiers are boys, in truth. Simple values; simple pleasures. Licensed irresponsibility.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
‘No, Thurloe. I haven’t.’
‘You didn’t like him, yourself, I think.’ Something furtive and shocked crossed the Adjutant’s face. ‘Pardon me: that’s not a fair question.’
‘The Colonel was a brave man, and bold. An attractive character.’
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