I came to with a start. Travers was talking about mutton. The land might be poor, but it produced the finest mutton in the country. And some of that very mutton was turning on the spit at his house. My mouth watered at the thought and I accepted his invitation to eat.
The mutton fell off the bone. As we washed it down with wine, the stone grew into a monument. I tried to keep it within bounds, but I could not resist Travers’s suggestion that it should bear the Pearce coat of arms, a wildcat with a raised paw and the motto Tantum Teneo. Only persist. My mother would have liked that. ‘I will have one of them,’ she had said, in her determination to marry one of the Stonehouses and take over their estate, as they had swallowed up her father’s. ‘I will have one of them …’ Tantum Teneo. Only persist.
I had never known her. All I knew about her was in Matthew and Kate’s stories. But, that afternoon, I felt I had known her all my life.
I told Travers I would definitely add the Pearce coat of arms for my mother. Then, thanking him for the mutton, I said I must be on my way. But, on leaving him, I found myself drawn to look again at the stone. It was late, the light going, but I was reluctant to leave. A north wind drove spatters of rain against me as I stared at the stone. Stories: that, in the end, was what we all became. Now I might need to earn an honest living again, perhaps I should write this one. The thought brought back Half Moon Court and my son Sam. If we had to flee, what would happen to him? After my early, secret visits, I had not seen him for years. I imagined him to be a real Neave, cocky and streetwise. I had given him his start in life. No one knew of his existence except Scogman and me. Sam, I thought, could take care of himself.
In spite of all the advantages lavished on him, I was more concerned about Luke. He was a Stonehouse from his beaked nose to his fashionable, baggy-topped boots. He displayed rather than shrank from his scarred face, which made him look much older than his sixteen years. We had an uneasy relationship – if you could even call it that. Since I was rarely at Highpoint, I scarcely knew him. He made no secret of his Royalist sympathies but he was all words: I felt – paradoxically with some regret – that he lacked the courage to do anything about them.
My two sons knew nothing of one another. It struck me that they were the two sides of my nature, sure of themselves in a way I never could be. For years, I had worn the ruling arrogance of the Stonehouses until I had almost become one. Almost. Now I could feel what I thought had been long dead and buried, the radical stirrings of Tom Neave, creeping back.
It was now quite dark. I had scarcely noticed the rain increasing and was soaked to the skin. It must have been a night like this that Matthew was told to pick up a plague child. I could hear his cart. See his whip lashing. No, it was not a cart but a carriage. Out of it came my mother.
I swear it. There she was as I had always pictured her, running through the driving rain between the gravestones, half-torn cloak billowing, held together by the glittering pendant, red hair flaring. Too petrified to move, it was only when she was in my arms that I saw the red had faded from her hair.
‘I thought something had happened,’ Anne cried.
‘Happened?’
‘There’s been a riot in Oxford.’
She told me REGICIDE, with a red plague cross, had been daubed on the Stonehouse Arms.
She was trembling. It was a long time since I had felt her heart beating next to mine. Perhaps it was fear, or need. I did not care. I no longer wanted to analyse our feelings. I just wanted to hold her – hold Anne, not Lady Stonehouse.
‘Anne … Anne …’
I whispered her name continuously as I pulled her cloak round her and fastened the clasp. On our way to the carriage we were silent, one of those old silences, when neither of us needed or wanted to speak.
It was only when the carriage forded the river, water splashing up to the windows, that she broke the silence.
‘You’re back.’
‘I’m back.’
We held each other tightly as the candle-lit windows of Highpoint swept into view. Luke joined us to tell us the riot in Oxford had been suppressed but was still simmering. With his Royalist sympathies, there was an air of subdued excitement about him but the crisis, for that evening at least, brought us closer together.
I pretended not to have eaten and joined for supper, and, after a bottle or two, dismissed my fears. Who was Charles Stuart? Few knew him. And even fewer wanted a King back on the throne of England.
Historical Note
The Stonehouses are fictional, but what happened to them in 1647 is shaped by real events. The King surrendered not to the English, but to the Scots, from whom he hoped for a better deal. For coming to the aid of Parliament in the Civil War, the Scots presented a bill for £1,300,000, but were knocked down to £400,000, for which they returned to Scotland and gave up the King. Charles himself accused them of selling him.
Once Charles was in England, under house arrest, there was public pressure to reduce the size of the New Model Army. A fanatical Presbyterian divine, Thomas Edwards, produced three huge books called Gangraena, one of which accused the army of spreading not only false doctrine but dangerous radical views, such as that supreme authority belonged to the Commons.
In fact, all that most of the army wanted was to be paid (arrears ran to forty-three weeks in the cavalry), with indemnity against prosecution for acts committed during the war, and not to be compelled to go to Ireland. In short, unsurprisingly, most wanted to go home.
There is no greater example in history of unintended consequences in what happened next. Public opinion, whipped up by people like Edwards with Gangraena – the tabloid press of its day – and combined with overreacting, inept politicians, created the exact opposite of what they wanted. They politicised the army.
Presbyterians, led by Denzil Holles, were prepared to have the King back on minimal terms. Independents, a coalition led by Cromwell, wanted to bind Charles with strict limitations on his powers before the army was disbanded. At the critical time, Cromwell was ill.
When Holles forced through the Commons an immediate disbandment of the New Model foot soldiers, and was clearly building up his own forces, revolt began to spread through the New Model Army. Sir Lewis Challoner is a fiction, but there was a conviction in the army that the Presbyterians were plotting to transfer the King to Scotland.
This was the trigger for George Joyce, very much a real figure, to carry out one of the most stunningly audacious acts of this, or any other, war. He did meet Cromwell in his garden in Drury Lane on the night of 31st May when Mrs Cromwell served bread and butter and small beer. He outlined a plan to march to Holdenby and secure the King under guards loyal to Cromwell.
By this time Cromwell knew that his efforts to keep army and Parliament together were in tatters. He had to choose between one or the other. He gave George Joyce, tailor and cornet – the lowest rank in the army – his blessing. Exactly what that meant gave rise to bitter disputes.
The King was playing bowls at Althorp when Joyce arrived with his men. Holdenby House, where the King was held, was the largest private house in England and was much as described. Richard is fiction, but his escape mirrors that of Colonel Graves, who had been in charge of the Presbyterian guard on the King. Having had no word from Cromwell, Joyce feared Graves would return ‘with a party’ and snatch back the King. He entered the royal bedchamber at ten that night and warned the King to be ready to leave at first light.
Fairfax, the army commander, and senior officers swore that Joyce had acted ‘without their privity, knowledge or consent’. Cromwell called Joyce a rascal for saying he was only carrying out his instructions. On 10th July, Joyce was issued with a warrant in Fairfax’s name for £100 for ‘extraordinary services’.
There was another ‘Parliament’ in Reading – here the army proposed and framed impeachments on Holles and ten other MPs. By mid-July, Westminster was virtually under the control of the army which instigated the extraordinarily generous peace terms Tom hears rea
d out in the Commons: promising religious tolerance, and that the King would be restored to his regal powers, including his legislative veto.
The attempted Presbyterian counter-revolution which led to the riots in the Commons, when excrement was thrown, was incited by Presbyterian clergymen, prominent members of the City government and almost certainly by some of the MPs impeached with Holles, who, when it failed, went into exile and obscurity. When the mob left, the Speaker did flee to the army, taking the mace and fifty other MPs with him.
I have taken a large amount of liberties with Mr Ink, who is based on a real, rather more prosaic figure, William Clarke, a Londoner of poor origins who became secretary to the Army Council. He used the same shorthand system as Pepys, based on Shelton’s Tachygraphy, which broke letters into smaller units to be joined together. The notes he made of the Putney debates, which really did contain words which would change the world, with the beginning of what would become universal franchise, were buried for almost two and a half centuries.
They were left to an Oxford College by Clarke’s son, and their importance was only recognised in the 1890s.
John Wildman, who adroitly presented An Agreement of the People before Cromwell and Ireton at Putney, was described by Disraeli as one of the most remarkable men nobody had ever heard of. His goal was the establishment of a democratic English republic. For fifty years he conspired to achieve it, plotting (as his biographer Maurice Ashley puts it) with admirable lack of discrimination the murders of both Cromwell and Charles II. After spending much of his political life in prison, he ended up as Postmaster General and one of the richest Aldermen in London.
Nehemiah’s attempt to assassinate the King is fiction, but it is based on a plot among some Leveller agents to seize him at Hampton Court. They may have intended to abduct him rather than kill him, but he feared for his life after receiving an anonymous letter warning him that ‘eight or nine agitators were resolved to kill him’. He escaped for the last time on 11th November and was recaptured on the Isle of Wight.
From Queen Street, Tom would have reported to John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State, who established an intelligence system unrivalled in Europe. Pepys wrote: ‘Cromwell carried the secrets of all the princes of Europe at his girdle.’
If history is nothing more than the story of unintended consequences, then 1647 ought to be ranked with iconic years like 1066 and 1815.
The army had no intention of revolting. It had little political consciousness at the year’s beginning. Cromwell had no desire for political power. Like Tom with the Stonehouses, he saw it as a burden. The army grandees bent over backwards to reach agreement with the King. Originally, they had said he could not have control of the army for twenty years. They cut that down to ten. Charles treated the army generals with disdain. With each concession he expected more. When Charles made his final escape attempt towards the end of 1647, Cromwell washed his hands of him. He would have to go on trial. Abdication was the expected outcome; but the unintended consequence was execution.
The final unintended consequence was that while Cromwell’s domestic policy ended in failure (after 1647 he never felt he could disband the army and trust Parliament), he came to be held in awe by Europe, where he increased Britain’s power and status; and his foreign policies, far ahead of their time, laid the seeds of the British Empire.
PART THREE OF THE TOM NEAVE TRILOGY
THE KING’S LIST
Available in paperback and eBook January 2015
Prologue
August 1659
On a bright, summer day I rode alone from London to Oxford, getting fresh horses by showing the ring that told the world I was Sir Thomas Stonehouse, Second Secretary of State and a mix of other titles and honours. These, not to put too fine a point on it, meant I was – or had been – Oliver Cromwell’s spymaster.
Cromwell had been dead for eighteen months. His son Richard had succeeded him but had nowhere near the iron grip of his father on the country. Outside London, Oliver Cromwell’s spectre still hung over the country. Some people could not believe he was dead. Others said his spirit had been seen at the great battlefields of Marston Moor and Naseby. Few wanted to rekindle that war except members of the Sealed Knot, Royalists who believed the executed King had died a martyr. They wanted revenge and the return of the King’s son, who had done little for his country, except sire fifteen bastards at my spies’ latest count. Some in the Sealed Knot were sincere. Most wanted their lands and power back.
My son, Luke, was sincere. When my steward, Scogman, told me Luke was a member of the Sealed Knot my first instinct was to confront him – not about being a Royalist, for he scarcely made that a secret, but about joining a hopeless, ramshackle conspiracy like the Knot. I dismissed this approach. Luke would not believe me. It would make things worse between us, and they were bad enough. I determined to let him find out for himself. The Knot leaked like a sieve. Simultaneous uprisings were planned in the north, the West Country and even in East Anglia, Cromwell’s old heartland. Luke was part of a group planning to take over an armoury in Oxford. I could have told him who would let him down, the county gentlemen who would promise money which would not be paid, or troops who would not arrive. Instead I would let him find out for himself. He would be arrested. Scogman would see he was not charged or gaoled but brought straight back to me.
It would be a salutary lesson, better than any I could give him. He would be contrite, realising how false his friends were, how hopeless the Royalist cause was. England would never see a King on the throne again, least of all the self-proclaimed Charles II, who begged his way from one European court to another. I would be magnanimous. Because of the war I had rarely seen Luke as a child. This would bring us closer together, giving me the father–son relationship I had always wanted.
So I imagined until the rebellion grew closer and Scogman set out for Oxford. He wore bucket boots with a jump jacket of oiled leather, and carried an old-fashioned broadsword and a pistol. I not only felt a flood of nostalgia for the war, but the weapons brought me to my senses with a jolt. Years at my desk had given me the mind of a planner, not a soldier. I began to think like a soldier again and a soldier – unlike a politician – knew that nothing went according to plan. My intelligence might be wrong. It could be a full-scale rebellion. Luke might be killed.
When I reached Highpoint, my estate in Oxfordshire, I learned the intelligence was right. One of the leading Royalists in the county, Sir Simon Barber, had been bought with land he had lost during the war. The others would not move a finger without him. From information Barber gave us some were arrested.
‘Including Luke?’ I said with relief.
Scogman shook his head. Luke had disappeared. From that moment the plan I had carefully constructed to bring my son to his senses, and the two of us closer together, fell to pieces.
Although the uprising was a dismal failure everywhere else, Sir George Booth, an excellent soldier and well-liked in his county, managed to raise 4,000 men and hold Cheshire and part of Lancashire for several weeks. This inspired Luke and a group of hotheads to try and take over an armoury. It was a foolhardy project; the sort Cromwell used to dismiss with contempt as going for glory, not results. Scarcely more than boys, they were too young to have fought in the war and were dying to distinguish themselves for their King. Two did. Several were wounded, including Luke. I made sure he was kept in a separate cell. I hired a coach and removed my ring so only the gaoler knew who I was and, with Scogman, went there late one evening.
It was hot and muggy. The stench of the gaol hit us through the windows of the coach. We clamped nosegays of herbs tightly to our faces.
‘You’ll need those, sir,’ the gaoler said. ‘Time of the year for gaol fever. Found one of them dead in his cell this morning.’ He spat reflectively as he selected a key. ‘Unless it was the plague.’
I silently cursed my stupidity. A fine lesson if Luke died from it! He had never been very well ever since he had suffered a bad
burn to his face in the riots in London at the end of the war. Although she never said anything, I knew my wife Anne blamed me for not allowing them to shelter with her friend Lucy Hay, the Countess of Carlisle, because I suspected she was a Royalist.
‘Hurry, man!’ I said, almost snatching the key from the gaoler. Then, when he was about to insert it in the lock I stopped him, putting a finger to my lips.
Luke had a beautiful voice, which rang out like a church bell. What he was saying was the last thing I expected to hear.
‘When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates;
And my divine Sarah whispers
At the prison Grates …’
There was more. It was a poem by the Royalist poet Richard Lovelace, written in his cell. After lying ‘entangled in Sarah’s hair’, the poet says, the very gods ‘know no such Liberty’.
A hollow knocking came from the cell next door, and one of Luke’s fellow prisoners joined in. His voice was much more feeble but its import just as determined as they chanted that when they sang about the glories of the King, ‘the winds that curl the Floodes know no such liberty’.
I signalled to the gaoler. Far from stopping them, the sound of the key redoubled their defiant chanting of the final line. There was so little light from the barred window, I could see only a shape sprawled on a stone bench. As the gaoler opened the door further, the candles in a corridor sconce lit up his face. Few would have thought us father and son without the hook of the Stonehouse nose. There the resemblance ended. At seventeen, the fresh, tight curves of his good cheek held the lofty arrogance that only a privileged upbringing on an estate like Highpoint gives a man. The raw, rippled skin of his burned cheek, which at first had made him a withdrawn child, now only emphasised that absolute assurance, as he realised people often took it as a badge of the war he had never fought in.
Cromwell's Blessing Page 34
