It was her duty to love Dogget, but also to help him, she told herself. The first night they spent together he had put his arm round her, which she thought proper; but when, the second night, his hands tentatively started to roam, she had gently though kindly reproved him. “Those things are done for the begetting of children,” she said. “But God gives us no cause for such things now.” And she had been glad to see that he meekly obeyed.
She had to confess though, she was glad of the presence of dear Mrs Wheeler who would take him off her hands for an hour or two. What a sensible and kindly woman the widow was. If she could not quite approve of her long-standing feud with Sir Julius Ducket – “You should not think of money so much,” she felt it her duty to tell her – she did not doubt that Sir Julius was at fault and deserved to be called to account. So she did not often reprove the widow and instead would say to Dogget, “Why don’t you go to see Mrs Wheeler for a while?”
If she had taken Meredith’s advice, Jane would have given the business up long ago. “Sooner or later it will come out that Barnikel was a blackamoor and a pirate,” he warned. “Then you lose your own reputation, and even the Roundheads would take Sir Julius’s word over a pirate’s.” But Jane knew Julius was lying; the businesswoman in her resented being made a fool of. “I don’t care,” she told Meredith. “I want my money.”
It was not easy to know what to do. She did not scruple to harass him every time she saw him in the street, and she would loudly call: “What have you done with my money?” Her lawyers continued to write him letters, but nothing much came of it, and he politely ignored her. Then, in December of that year, seeing the baronet’s wife buying meat in the market, Jane suddenly had an idea for a new and ingenious offensive. It was a long shot, but worth a try. She would also need help; but she knew where to get it. She went to see Martha.
It still surprised her that the earnest Puritan had never realized she was having an affair with her husband. Though, she thought with a smile, at their age she would hardly describe it in terms of illicit passion. It was, strictly speaking, a betrayal of their friendship of course, yet even on that count, Jane could not feel very guilty. For years they had lived three thousand miles apart. In her view, the affair was, as much as anything, an act of friendship for a lonely man. And since Martha’s return? Well, she had supposed it would end; but a few days after Martha and he were living together Dogget sadly informed her: “She says we’re too old for it. God wouldn’t approve.” And Jane, with a laugh, had given him a kiss. “What are we to do then?” she had smiled.
Sometimes she had even wondered if perhaps Martha did know and chose to ignore it. She clearly has no desire for him herself, she thought, and she seems glad enough to get him off her hands. But then, as she considered Martha’s earnest nature she decided: no, she does not know, but in truth she is hardly curious enough even to discover. So the affair continued. Dogget, she could see, was getting an old man now. I bring him life, she realized, and warmth. As for herself – why, the same, to be sure.
They used to meet on Sunday afternoon. Martha and the rest of the family would attend the afternoon service at St Lawrence Silversleeves or sometimes go further afield to hear a sermon. But Martha did not seem to mind if he remained behind; and then he would go round to the house of Jane Wheeler and spend an hour or two there. Even if he casually mentioned that he had called on her, Martha thought nothing of it.
When Jane outlined her plan to her friend Martha, therefore, Martha was receptive. “You are right,” she declared. “Something should be done. I shall speak to Gideon.”
On the 25 December in the year of Our Lord 1652, Sir Julius Ducket and members of his family sat down at table in the big panelled parlour, and smiled at each other conspiratorially, because they were about to commit a crime.
First however, as was his habit, before the meal began Sir Julius reverently brought out a small book. No important anniversary ever passed without his quietly reading from it and reminding his family of their duty, and he did so now.
It was an inspirational little volume. Its title, Eikon Basilike was taken from Greek and meant “The Image of the King”. The simple, moving text was said to be the prayers and reflections of the martyred king; and within three months of Charles’s death it had gone through thirty printings. The Roundheads had indignantly tried to censor it. Then they had engaged the great Puritan poet, John Milton, to write a pamphlet against it. But it was no good: even men who supported Parliament but had doubts about Cromwell’s new military regime might read the king’s book and, finding only sweetness and humble devotion there, begin to wonder if his execution had been just.
For the Ducket family, of course, the issue was not even in question. The book was like a little Bible; the king a holy martyr; and having read a few pages, Sir Julius quietly laid it down and reminded them: “Charles II is our true king; should he die, he is succeeded by his brother James. Remember, we have promised.” Then, with happy faces, they set out their Christmas dinner.
They did not hear the soldiers approach the house and enter the courtyard; and they were completely taken by surprise when suddenly, with a bang, the door flew open and Gideon, together with four troopers, marched in and surrounded the table.
“Sir Julius,” he announced. “You will answer to the magistrates for this.” For the crime which the baronet had committed was not the reading of the little book, which he had just had time to slip into his pocket, nor even his words about the king; the crime of Sir Julius Ducket and his family was that they were having Christmas dinner.
For this was another of the improvements that the saints had wrought. “The great holy days should be like the Sabbath,” they declared: “times for solemn prayer, not heathen festivals.” The English people must be brought closer to God. Anyone caught having Christmas dinner, in the year of Our Lord 1652, was liable to appear on a charge in court. “You have profaned the Holy Day,” Gideon said in disgust, then ordered the troops: “Search the house.”
“Search the house?” Julius demanded. “Whatever for?”
“Superstitious images. Evidence of popery,” Gideon calmly announced.
There was nothing Julius could do about it. For half an hour the Roundheads went from room to room, opening cupboards, chests, turning over mattresses; they even searched the cellar, but they found nothing. Julius was not afraid. Even for a known Malignant, the penalty for eating Christmas dinner would only be a modest fine. Furious at the violation of his home, however, he followed them round, remarking contemptuously to Gideon: “I just want to make sure none of you steals anything.”
He was in an upper room when, glancing out of the window, he noticed the two women. Martha and Jane were waiting by the outer gate, looking in expectantly. Martha he could understand. But why Jane? Why should she be concerned about his business? Then he suddenly understood; turning upon Gideon he cried: “You aren’t looking for papist images, are you? You’re looking for the Wheeler widow’s money.” And Gideon, just for a second, blushed.
Seeing Julius’s wife buy such a large joint of beef in the market had given Jane the idea. They must be planning a Christmas dinner, she had thought. What a perfect excuse. Martha had organized the rest.
By the time Gideon finished, a short while later, Jane had slipped away; so as Julius, white with anger, accompanied him and his men to the gate, he found only Martha standing there. And it was then, enraged almost beyond endurance at what they had done, that he allowed himself to burst out with a cruelty he would never normally have used:
“What a good friend you are, Mistress Martha. You help your friend search for her treasure as well as letting her sleep with your husband.” After which, turning on his heel, he stalked back into the house.
Martha stared after him in astonishment. Then she frowned. Then she looked at Gideon. And saw that he was ghastly pale.
In the Puritan London of the Commonwealth, there were many sights to encourage and even inspire the faithful. But none, by the
year 1653, could equal the famous preaching universally known as Meredith’s Last Sermon.
The years had at last caught up with Edmund Meredith. He was in his eighties now, and he had begun to look it. A sharp illness the previous year had left him so thin and gaunt that people meeting him gave an involuntary gasp, as though they were seeing a ghost. Edmund Meredith walked with death, and rose to the occasion.
His method was simple. As the rule of the saints had produced all the moral bigotry he had feared, and about which he had tried to forewarn Jane, it had also produced a religious confusion so great that even he could not be certain upon which bandwagon he should jump: Presbyterian, Quaker or some other free congregation? Who knew? So he had done the simplest thing of all. He had risen above them. His age only lent conviction to the performance. His language took flight; his gaunt face turned heavenward. The more inspired, the more soul-searing his sermons became, the more absolutely impossible it was to say quite where he stood. Nor did anyone care. Even the most severe and homespun Puritan women, dressed in black and with bonnets tightly tied, felt free to faint. Their husbands in their tall black hats would weep as Meredith’s spirit took wing.
For his last sermon Meredith would climb up the steps to the pulpit with such difficulty that, even before he started, the congregation was leaning forward anxiously. With his white hair hanging down to his shoulders – he had grown it long again now – and his hollowed eyes, the very sight of him produced an awed hush. His subject, always, was that of death.
There were many occasions for it: if the season was Lent, a meditation upon Christ’s death and resurrection; if Advent, upon the death of the heathen world and the birth of the Christian era. There was nothing in which the seed of death could not be discovered. And, since Sunday afternoon sermons were so greatly in vogue, upon any Sunday when he was in the dying mood, Meredith would refer to the traditional text of evensong:
“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” Gazing out over the congregation, he would stare towards the west window as though, at that very instant, he saw the host of angels coming for him, and cry out: “For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
He was ready. The congregation could see it. Ready and willing. Indeed, it was clear that he might actually go, at any second, before their eyes. That very possibility made his sermons wildly popular. He was constantly in demand. In the autumn of last year he had preached at St Bride’s, St Clement Danes, St Margaret’s, Westminster, even St Paul’s. Nor did he ever fail to add that dose of humiliation without which no Puritan sermon of the day would be complete. Looking earnestly down at them he would enquire: “And tell me, dearly beloved, if with me now, you were to depart . . . are you ready?” He would pause sadly then, accusingly, point his long finger. “Are you ready?” And a great groan would arise from the congregation. For they never were. Which would lead him straight to his electrifying conclusion as, raising up on his toes as if he verily meant to fly, raising his arms up, straining his gaunt face heavenwards in what must, surely, be his final, heroic convulsion, he would cry out in a tremendous voice: “Yet the time is now, even now, I see him coming with all his angels; He is upon us. He has us. He clutches my heart, and yours. He is here. Now. Now!”
At which, with a crash, he would fall back, before staggering down from the pulpit again and being supported to his seat by two helpers. Meredith’s last sermon was the best thing he had ever done.
He was a little surprised therefore, just as he was beginning this sermon in St Lawrence Silversleeves, one January afternoon, to observe that two of his congregation, Martha and Gideon, were slipping out.
Jane and Dogget were lying on her bed together when the door suddenly opened and they found themselves face to face with Martha.
Martha had been thorough. It had not taken her long to get the truth from Gideon. Once directly challenged, he had not felt he could lie. “I do not know,” he had said defensively, “but I think it is so.”
“Even now?”
“Perhaps.”
Now, as well as Gideon, she had another neighbour with her. “There must be proof,” she had told Gideon. And the proof was there. The neighbour looked shocked, Gideon embarrassed. Martha’s face was taut and white. Having seen, she left.
An hour later, having heard Jane’s account, Meredith looked grim. “It’s the very thing I always feared. I could see the way the wind was blowing even before they killed the king. Now the Puritans have changed all the laws . . .” He shook his grey old head sadly. “Curse these saints with their moralizing and their witch-hunts,” he muttered. “And now you are taken in adultery.”
“At my age,” Jane shrugged, “it sounds absurd.”
“But you forget,” Meredith warned her urgently. “The penalty for adultery nowadays is death.”
Young O Be Joyful sat on the edge of his seat. It was strange to see Mrs Wheeler and Uncle Dogget, as he called him, standing together like criminals. But then of course they were. Everyone knew it now. Even Dogget’s children understood that their father was wicked. Martha had seen to that.
The trial of Jane and Dogget took place in the Guildhall. The courtroom was packed. There was, even amongst the good Puritans and the crowd, some wry amusement at the age of the accused. Yet there was no sense, it seemed, of the deeper irony of the event.
That here, before a stern judge and a jury of twelve solid citizens, was a woman, entering old age, absent from her husband for over a decade, who was prosecuting another woman older than she, for doing something with her husband which, if truth were told, she did not even wish to do herself. Why? Because she had been made a fool of; because she was jealous of both for loving each other; because her God was a vengeful God.
The judge was grave. He knew what the verdict would be.
The evidence was irrefutable. The crime had been seen; the witnesses were reliable. The accused, upon the advice of a lawyer found by Meredith, pleaded not guilty. The witnesses, they said, had misunderstood what they had seen. No carnal act had taken place. But there was not a single soul in that courtroom who believed this manifest lie. The business did not take long. Everyone knew what the penalty for their crime must be. There was no needless mercy, no extenuation in the London of the saints. Their justice was a great, dark rock. The court became quiet as the judge instructed the jury. Nor did the twelve good men take long to consider their verdict. After only minutes they signalled that they were ready. Solemnly the jury foreman stood before the judge, to answer the awful question: “How do you find?” And clearly his voice rang out. “Not guilty, my lord.”
“Not guilty?” Martha was standing, trembling with rage. “Not guilty? Of course they are guilty.”
“Silence!” the judge thundered. “The jury has spoken.” He nodded to Jane and to Dogget. “You are free to go.”
“This is an outrage,” Martha cried. But no one was listening.
The judge sighed. The verdict had been exactly as he expected. For if, in their zeal, the saints had passed stern, Old Testament laws, they had overlooked one thing: the trials resulting still had to go before an English jury. And the ordinary citizens had not entirely lost their humanity. The idea of hanging a man and a woman for adultery, however much they disapproved of the culprits’ conduct, offended their sense of fairness. So they refused to find them guilty. Of the twenty-three known cases brought to court in the London area, only one secured a conviction. “So does this mean they are innocent?” O Be Joyful asked Martha. “No,” she replied irritably, “it does not.” Nor, she saw to it, did the weakness of the jury mean that the guilty couple escaped all punishment. There was still the community to deal with. As minister at the church, Meredith had to explain the situation to them. “You can’t stay in the parish,” he told them both. “They won’t have you.” And the truth of this was quickly seen.
Dogget’s life was made simply unendurable. His two children hardly knew him, and out of sheer force of habit followed Martha’s lead. No one would speak to him
. As for Jane, it was worse. If she stepped out of her house into the street, she was greeted with cries of “Whore!” The man down the street stopped bringing her firewood. The water carrier did not stop for her. People in the nearby Cheapside stalls would ignore her if she tried to buy anything. One day she returned to find ‘HARLOT’ painted on her door. By the end of the month she said sadly to Meredith: “You’re right, we must go.”
The snow was falling on the late January day when, Dogget having previously conveyed all her possessions away by cart, he and Jane stepped into a wherry down by the Vintry and were rowed away upstream. Their destination was a little settlement beside Westminster. A century ago some French merchants had for a time formed an enclave there, convenient for doing business with the royal palaces of Westminster and Whitehall, and ever since these streets had been known as Little, or Petty France. Petty France was regarded as a place for misfits; though more recently some literary folk, including John Milton, had taken lodgings there. “At least,” Meredith had advised, “Martha and her friends won’t bother you in Petty France. You can live quietly there.”
1660
During the decade of the 1650s no man in England was more loyal to the exiled House of Stuart than Sir Julius Ducket. But while Oliver Cromwell and the saints were masters of England, there was little that any Royalist could do. And so he read, and he pondered. He read the Bible, in its entirety, twice, and realized that it is the greatest book of history ever written. He read the classics; he studied English history and made notes upon the development of England’s constitution. And he waited.
Superficially, Cromwell’s rule was strong. His great, round wart-marked face seemed to Julius to hang over the land like a grim mask from the pagan age. He had executed the king, and chased his son away to France. The Scots were cowed, the Irish massacred and bloodily crushed. All this he did in only a few short years so that even Julius grudgingly admitted: “His sword is mighty indeed.”
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