She blindly turned towards me. I put my arms round her. Her breath came in great gulping swallows. ‘You signed the death warrant but it was my signature. As good as. I could not bear the thought of –’
‘If you had told me something …’
‘You would have stopped me. I know you. You would have –’
She pulled away, spent. People were staring and we moved further down the deck. Sailors were shouting, unfurling the top sails. She began to breathe more easily, spoke almost matter-of-factly, watching sailors scramble up the rigging. The King promised her the pardon if they became lovers. She wanted the pardon first. He wanted the proof of her feelings for him first. The more she refused, the more he wanted her. It was a game he was good at. He had the pardon prepared, with the seal. But he did not sign it. So still she refused. He left the pardon with her to reflect on it.
The ship was cast off, tilting, juddering uncertainly for a moment before the wind caught the sails. A small smile played round her lips. ‘Barbara Villiers, the King’s mistress, hated me. She wanted to get rid of me. I wanted to leave him. We were the perfect combination. I feared she would never entice him away to the country before it was too late, but …’
There was a sudden swirl of activity at the gate and distant shouting. The tide was quickening, spray flying as we pulled out into the mouth of the estuary, and it was difficult to see but I thought I glimpsed Richard dismounting and arguing with officials.
She remained motionless, gripping the rail, watching the sketchy grey lines of the land disappear until the wind freshened, the rigging sang, and the sails snapped and tautened, and we were out in the open sea.
‘I forged the King’s signature,’ she said.
Epilogue
Boston, Mass., April 1775
That was the story she told, and Tom never contradicted it. The truth, however, was rather different – but first things first.
My name is Joseph Thomas Black, although in these tumultuous times, when another name is handy, people know me as Joe Neave. I am the great-grandson of Anne and Thomas Black, as they were first registered when they landed in Boston in late November 1660. Not a good month to land in Boston, with the worst of the winter storms to come, particularly when you are sick. I know how ill she was because it was one thing they both agreed on.
I take my information from a jumbled mass of papers in an old tin chest which had remained untouched for years, but which, when it did not reduce me to despair, turned out to be the treasure trove Tom talked about as a boy.
The winter of 1660 was a cruel one and she was sick for most of it. All his doubts and recriminations vanished. He rarely left her side. He even lost his doubts in God and prayed for her. He willed her to live. In despair he wrote: It is as if she wants to die.
It was not until he realised that the prolongation of her illness was because she was pregnant that their normal relationship – if I may put it that way – was resumed. In the tin chest, together with the manuscript were daily notes, scribbles that he might put in the story later, a habit that he may have caught from Pepys. A page of calculations suggested that if the baby was very early it might be his. The boy was early, but not that early. She was adamant it was his. Nevertheless, when he saw the child he left her.
He set up a business, Thos. Black Printer, which is the firm I now own. A year or two later, how I do not know – one of the curses of that chaotic tin box lies in the gaps you can never hope to fill – he met the child. Tom loved children. Perhaps the best evidence of this is that in his hand on the scaffold he had not a prayer but a child’s first attempt at forming words. It is my guess that the child brought them back together, whether or not he believed Joseph – my grandfather – was his child.
Anne built a large manor house near Boston. She called it Pearce Hall, after Tom’s mother, whom he never saw, and with whom the whole story began. Gradually, over the years, apart from the pictures, she reassembled nearly all the treasures from Highpoint that she had sold or stored. He spent most of his time in Boston, helping other regicides, or building up the business as a radical printer and publisher: it was almost as before – almost – because they now seemed to accept that they could not live together, but could not live without one another.
He died first, in 1675, Anne much later, in 1704. Several times she determined to destroy the papers – what remains of the American section are charred fragments – but in the end could not bear to. Instead she scored through passages or made virulent comments in her increasingly shaky hand – when he described himself as a compulsive writer, she wrote compulsive lier! – and in this way continued to argue bitterly with him right up to the end. She did not destroy the papers because she missed him more than she could bear to say, even to herself. But that is my conjecture, and you must take it or leave it.
I have nearly done. The book is set up in type. I will proof it and print it if I see this present business through. I decided to publish it not just as a family history but as the story of Tom’s dream of liberty, which was imported here along with the money and treasures of Highpoint – necessary power and influence, if you like.
Never more necessary than this April night. It has bought guns and powder to fight the King’s redcoats. I am a member of the Sons of Liberty and one of the minutemen – very like Tom’s Trained Bands which drove the King out of the City of London. Just as he ran through the streets with speeches against ship money, he would have been there, dumping tea in the harbour. No taxation without representation!
I can hear the sound of their horse, the tramp of the redcoats’ boots as they march to Lexington where – they think – our armoury is.
I must go – but I almost forgot. I said she did not tell the whole truth when they left the country. Nor did she move an iota from her story while Tom was alive. But when she was near the end she confessed the truth to Tom, at least in the sense that she wrote it next to the neat Italianate script of which he was so proud. She dated it 10th November 1704, a few days before she died at the age of seventy-eight. She did not intend to go quietly. Her writing, which had become increasingly shaky and erratic, found a sudden strength. She wrote with a bitterness that almost drove the pen through the paper:
The King cheated me. He showed me the pardon and said he would sign it. He would do anything for me. So I laye with him a number of times. I thought you would go free & I would have my place in the land but once he had me he left me to go to that bitche in Hampton Court. He did not even trouble to take that piece of paper away … I lookt at it & lookt at it and I had done it so often with you and so –
The entry ends with a splatter of ink across the page, as if in writing it she had rekindled the rage that had consumed her then. Perhaps it was rage as much as anything that fuelled her to forge the King’s signature on the pardon. The contempt for her he showed: ‘He did not even trouble …’ No wonder she kept on looking behind her on the road to Gravesend and evaded Tom’s questions. He wrote that she was anxious. Anxious! She must have been appalled as it gradually sank in what she had done. They would have been hanged together if they had been caught.
They were never hunted, unlike other regicides. Two colonels, Goffe and Whalley, were forced to hide in caves for three years in Connecticut, supported by republican well-wishers. But Tom and Anne were never pursued or even identified. As the King reflected on it, he must have thought that the last thing he wanted was the truth to come out.
Whatever Tom felt about it, he would have appreciated the irony that, as I pick up my gun to combat the King’s redcoats, I have royal blood in my veins.
Historical Note
The Restoration was set in motion when General Monck marched over the Scottish border. ‘Honest George’ – as his soldiers called him – kept his cards close to his chest. Probably he himself was far from certain how he was going to play them. He wrote to the Rump Parliament in Westminster on 29th December 1659 that he ‘awaited their further commands’, but three days later, without any
such commands or warning, he marched.
His trump card was that he had the only fully functioning army in the country. His soldiers were well equipped and paid. He purged his officers so he could rely on their loyalty. His march turned into a coup, but that may not have been his intention when he crossed the border. On his way to London he consulted both the Rump Parliament and the King (through an obscure cousin of his, Sir Richard Grenville).
When Monck arrived in London on 3rd February, civil government was in total confusion – there had been seven changes of government in the previous year. The leader of the Rump, Sir Arthur Haselrig, had a single-chamber Parliament of only forty-seven members and threadbare legitimacy. The City was threatening not to pay taxes. Monck knew that if he supported Haselrig his soldiers would not be paid. If he backed the City they would insist on a ‘free Parliament’ – elections that would mean a majority of Royalists and bring back the King. On 11th February, after much agonising, he threw in his lot with the City.
One of Haselrig’s many self-inflicted wounds was getting rid of John Thurloe as Secretary of State. Monck had him reinstated. Like Monck, Thurloe was a pragmatist. Both men knew that the key obstacle to a successful return of the King was a violent, unbridled Royalist reaction. On the night when Monck made his decision, London’s actual response was a celebration – ‘the burning of the rump’. Pepys, who began writing his diary the previous month, thought it spontaneous ‘past imagination, both the greatness and the suddenness of it’. From one view, at Strand Bridge, he counted thirty-one fires alone. It is difficult to believe it was not orchestrated and that is how I have portrayed it – Londoners had their fill of rump steaks (the fireworks were my dramatic addition).
When the King returned, Thurloe was accused of high treason and imprisoned in the Tower. However, his knowledge of foreign affairs was too valuable to lose and many Royalists were apprehensive of accusations he might make against them. A deal was struck and he was released. He never held office again but was consulted (in secret) by the new administration.
I have sadly maligned William Clarke who, in reality, was secretary to the Army Council and who recorded the Putney debates. Three books is a long journey and during it he was transformed from a fictional Mr Ink to the real-life Clarke. In the writing, as some characters do, he went his own way, became Mr Ink again and betrayed Tom, but I have no evidence that the solid, worthy Mr Clarke would do this. That being said, Clarke (described as a ‘mysterious figure’ by one historian) was one of nature’s survivors, a bureaucrat who slipped from one regime to another. He worked under General Monck, became Charles II’s Secretary at War and was knighted. He was killed on Monck’s flagship in 1666 during war with the Dutch.
Lead crystal glass was first successfully produced in England in the 1670s by George Ravenscroft. It would have been perfectly possible for Sam to produce a form of it using Christopher Merrett’s translation of the Italian book. In fact Merrett commented wistfully in 1662: ‘glass of lead, ’tis a thing unpractised in our furnaces … because of the exceeding brittleness … could this glass be made as tough as that of crystalline, ’twould far surpass it in the glory and beauty of its colours’.
Tom’s vision of transplanting the seeds of republicanism with a written Constitution was no pipe dream. New England was not only a safer place for regicides because of its distance from London. Such regicides were more likely to be welcomed and sheltered by exiles of similar views. In 1660, when Tom and Anne landed, Boston was a thriving city, the key trading centre in Britain’s Atlantic Empire. Cromwell, who had once thought of emigrating to Massachusetts, had a particular sympathy for it during his Protectorate, allowing it to produce its own currency. Three regicides, Whalley, Goffe and Dixwell, were hidden and helped by New Englanders in Massachusetts and Connecticut for almost thirty years.
The Civil War not only shaped the country that Britain became, a state without a written Constitution, headed by a monarch without power, but it seeded more permanent revolutions. Like Tom’s grandson, many of the soldiers who fought in the American War of Independence would have been descended from men who fought with Cromwell.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Katy Whitehead who, with her perceptive editorial comments helped steer the trilogy to its conclusion; to Georgia Mason and Morwenna Loughman for producing it so smoothly and efficently; to my copy editor, Helen Gray for picking up my inconsistencies; my researcher, Deborah Rosario, for answering so many questions; and, not least, my wife Cynthia for keeping me (more or less) sane and reminding me, from time to time, that I was living in the twenty-first century, not the seventeenth. Finally, it might seem odd to thank my main characters, but without them where would I be? A very long story, however one may plan it, will always go its own way and Tom and Anne kept surprising me, right up to the very end.
About the Author
PETER RANSLEY has written extensively for television. His BBC adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith was a BAFTA nomination for best series. His book The Hawk was filmed with Helen Mirren and he is a winner of the Royal Television Society’s Writer’s Award. His first novel in the Tom Neave trilogy, Plague Child, was published in 2011. The King’s List is the final instalment.
Also by Peter Ransley
Plague Child
Cromwell’s Blessing
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