A Question of Loyalties

by Josephine Bell

  Charles noted the change of opinion in the country. He had waited for it and hoped it might come. Here it was at last, the light in the dawn sky, the first clearing of the storm clouds from the horizon.

  Though he had first prorogued and then dissolved that Parliament he had called to Oxford, he knew that Shaftesbury had made every attempt, even against the law of the land, to pursue his Bill of Exclusion from the succession of the Duke of York in favour of the Duke of Monmouth. It was presented, quite illegally, to the House of Lords. They threw it out.

  At once Charles acted, this time against Shaftesbury himself. In spite of difficulties he began the process of impeachment. The man spoke openly of his followers’ republican aims. Surely this was treason and would be found to be such? ‘Little Sincerity’, if the nickname had not now to be changed to ‘Little Fraud’, had put his own neck in the noose, or rather under the axe. The King intended that it should fall.

  This threat, though still secret, was enough. Shaftesbury’s intelligence system was better than the monarch’s. Without any outward sign at all the former Chancellor collected the papers, goods, friends and servants he trusted and very quietly left the country for Holland.

  He met with little welcome there, failing entirely with the Prince of Orange, who already had a good eye and nose for decaying statesmen. Shaftesbury could not endure both exile and neglect. Perhaps his excesses of the last few years were brought on by the advance of slow disease, never acknowledged, never diagnosed. At all events his exile was short for he died in January of the following year.

  Charles was told of it. He gave no outward sign of triumph, but he said to Godolphin, who was present, ‘Our early Chancellor, after that old schoolmaster, Clarendon, hath finally relieved us of his comparable lessons and scoldings and treasonable intrigues. ‘Little Sincerity’, so clever, so quick, so entirely unprincipled, so devoted to his own career. I shall miss watching his tricks and turns.’

  Then turning to the Earl of Sunderland who was never absent from any occasion of importance, he asked, ‘How think you, my lord; are we yet safe enough to free my Lord Danby, or must he yet suffer our supposed displeasure?’

  There were only four of his intimates present to hear the news of Shaftesbury’s death, the others being Laurence Hyde and John Churchill, both sent by James because he himself was suffering from a cold in the head.

  Sunderland shook his head, Hyde and Godolphin looked horrified. Charles laughed.

  ‘I frighten you all, my lords and gentlemen! Come, John, a game of tennis! My Lord Rochester, go bring my brother to the court. Tell him a game against such adversaries will make him sweat and cure his rheum.’

  He sent no other message to the Duke, being quite sure the news about Shaftesbury must have been given to him already. But he ordered that the full circumstances be announced to the Upper House of Parliament, and any request for a national memorial, a funeral at the dead man’s home and so on, should be debated and a report submitted to him in Council.

  There was little stir in the country, but among the more radical souls, the resurgent Cromwellians, the news of Shaftesbury’s end roused all the bitterness bred of the earl’s dismal failure and decline.

  There was a farmer called Rumbold who had been an ardent parliamentarian in former times. He was one of those who had taken the recent Protestant and Puritan revival as an incentive to campaign both in the country and in London on behalf of the new so-called Whigs. He did not like Oates, indeed he found the man’s coarse rantings and obvious brutality shocking. But he also discovered like minds, even aristocratic ones, in the capital. Among them was a certain Josiah Keeping, whose hatred of the King drove him to plan the monarch’s assassination. When Shaftesbury’s death came to be known, his sometime followers were drawn together by the event, by the need to continue the work the ex-Chancellor had begun. Keeping saw in Rumbold a willing collaborator. And so his basic wish began to develop into a plot.

  Rumbold lived at the Rye House farm, a homestead and buildings near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, at a corner of the main London Road to Newmarket. It was a place frequently passed by the King on his way to and from the races. An ideal place, Keeping and Rumbold urged, for their real purpose, the often postponed, now urgently needed, assassination of Charles.

  The scheme needed very careful planning if it was to have any chance of success. A king never goes about unattended. He has guards of various kinds for every hour of the day and night. So the first thing needed was a number of trustworthy plotters at Whitehall itself, in or about the Court, to assist in mapping the King’s known future engagements and more particularly his planned appearances at the races at Newmarket.

  Perhaps Rumbold and his friends took an unwise decision to manage their basic planning in London. They used several taverns in which to meet and varied the number and identity of those they called to their conferences. But they could not hide the fact that the same ringleaders were absent from their homes outside the city too often and for too many days together and known to be so. It might have been better if the number of conspirators had been smaller and their meetings confined to one, totally safe, meeting place. For they had been noticed, often by reason of their different ways of speech, the country voice heard in Cheapside, the London cockney in Hertfordshire.

  Besides, the grisly training of the Popish Plot had been well learned by the mean and spiteful, the greedy inquisitive. There had grown up a habit of eavesdropping that continued. Where a reward might be forthcoming, who cared how he bore witness, true or false?

  The King’s spies were always carefully chosen and usually successful. Their fresh reports were too universal to be neglected.

  ‘The warnings increase all the time,’ Godolphin told Churchill. ‘Nothing we can act upon, but everything to make us uneasy. With his Highness still in town—’

  ‘For the wedding,’ John said. ‘I would not think any violent act could be plotted to spoil that most popular union.’

  ‘Nor I. But it is fanatics we are dealing with.’

  ‘You know them? Their names, I mean?’

  ‘Some names. Some so high we must know far more of them before we dare to act.’

  ‘So we wait?’

  ‘Until after the wedding, we wait.’

  So the plotting continued, unhindered, until after the Princess Anne was married to Prince George, younger brother to the King of Denmark, and the couple combined their honeymoon with a round of visits in Europe. Sarah Churchill did not go with the Royal pair.

  This successful family affair and act of high policy over, Charles decided to relax with a prolonged series of visits to horse racing events in various parts of the country. His favourite course was at Newmarket and for that open, wind-swept country he set out very early one morning, intending to spend the afternoon at the races, sleep at Newmarket, spend the next day on the course and return that night. It was early summer, with longer evenings and a moon moving towards the full.

  The King travelled in a coach, attended by his gentlemen in waiting on horseback at either side. In front a platoon of Churchill’s Life Guards, in the rear a similar company of the Dragoons. John himself chose not to lead his troop but placed himself just ahead of the coach itself.

  He had been warned, he was alert, watching for any unusual sign in the fields and homesteads past which they moved.

  At Rumbold’s Rye House Farm he was rewarded. He drew his horse to the side of the road, then passed it in to move forward alongside the royal coach.

  Charles was lolling back in his cushions with closed eyes. But he had heard the scrape of hooves and rattle of harness and opened them at once, though he did not sit up.

  ‘Yes, Colonel?’ he asked, in a quick, low voice.

  ‘Permission to break ranks, sir, and take Ensign Merridew with me.’

  ‘Granted,’ said Charles, allowing his eyelids to fall again. But his voice came as before, ‘Report to me at the lodgings this evening.’

  ‘Your Majesty.’
<
br />   Colonel Churchill saluted and rode out of the way again, to halt his beast beside the hedge until young Merridew came alongside. Then he said, ‘Forward, at a walk, till they be all out of our sight.’

  He turned his horse’s head and they moved back slowly the way they had come until they reached a gate into a copse. Young Merridew leaped down from his mount to unfasten the gate and hold it for the colonel to pass in. He led his own horse through, fastening the gate again before he re-mounted.

  When they reached a small clearing among the taller trees of the copse Churchill halted and dismounted, followed by the ensign. All the orders had been given beforehand.

  In silence each drew from his pack a plain jacket and taking off his uniform put this on instead. The new coats were not absurd, as the Duke of York’s chosen garment had been on an earlier attempt at disguise. The two who remounted, their uniforms now stowed in their saddle rolls, might have been a couple of well-to-do country gentlemen; gentry, in fact, a cut above the yeoman farmer; prosperous, but not ambitious.

  ‘Now, show me your right of way across Rumbold’s land and particularly that large barn that stands apart from the homestead.’

  For young Merridew had been born and brought up in the neighbourhood. He knew it as well as John had known the surroundings of Ashe and it was for this reason he had been chosen for his present task, that of directing his colonel, though he had been given no reason for the movement.

  They dismounted again some distance from the barn.

  ‘You will stay here with the horses,’ John ordered. ‘Be very silent and keep them so. If any man appears to question you, say your master is gone forward and you are bid wait for him. Nothing more. No hint of our true station and purpose. Understood?’

  ‘Understood, sir,’ answered Merridew, with a half salute instantly brushed away by the colonel with a warning frown.

  It was a wait of no more than half an hour, but seemed three times as long to the boy. When Colonel Churchill reappeared, it was from behind him, for he had stood watching the barn, though he had seen no one approach it or near it, enter or emerge.

  ‘Mount and away,’ John said crisply. ‘Your part now, Ensign Merridew. A hidden track and short cut back to the Newmarket road as far along it as maybe.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the boy answered, confidently, as they moved gently off among the trees.

  In Newmarket that night, after a somewhat curtailed appearance on the course, Colonel Churchill was admitted to the King’s presence. The attendants closed the door upon him, excluding themselves by royal command.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ John began. ‘It is as I feared. At the Rye House Farm preparations are made for an ambushed attack. Conspirators are gathering. I have identified the livery of at least one great noble. There were scouts taking up positions in the woods.’

  ‘You discovered all this? How?’

  ‘By reasonable discretion. Such as I met I nodded to and passed on. Nobody knew me, nor did I speak to any. They were stowing gear in a great barn. They had none placed to question strangers.’

  ‘And the scouts?’

  ‘Merridew and I caught glimpses of them as we moved off through the woods.’

  Charles groaned aloud. He could endure the defection of common men but that any member of the aristocracy planned to harm him seemed to be treachery of the baser sort.

  John waited, but as the King did not speak he went on. ‘I feel sure they will have watched your Majesty pass the farm this morning. They will have noted the strength of your Majesty’s guard, they will have seen the coach and will remember its trappings, the four greys, the royal liveries.’

  ‘But they did not recognise you?’

  ‘As I said I was not questioned. There is no way of knowing. They did not interfere.’

  ‘So they intend to strike upon our return,’ Charles said, apparently unmoved, but speaking slowly. ‘Well, Colonel Churchill, how do you intend we shall meet them?’

  ‘With vigour, sir,’ John answered. ‘But with your Majesty’s permission at least four hours earlier than I expect them to attack.’

  Charles laughed. ‘You mean I should leave Newmarket early? Run for it, in fact?’

  ‘No, sir. Anticipate. With permission a different coach, a small escort in late afternoon. Then the royal equipage, but empty, at the time expected. With a guard ready and most willing to fight off and destroy the would-be assassins.’

  The King considered for a time. He got up and walked about the hotel room where he had stayed so often before without expecting danger from any quarter. When he came back to his chair at last his eyes were bright and he was smiling.

  ‘I admire your plan and your strategy, John,’ he said. ‘But we will play it more simply, more in character with our public image as we know it to be. We will give out the hour of our going as before arranged. All Newmarket will hear it and prepare to line the streets. Then without warning we will assemble at the race course itself, the coach with our servants and all our baggage. We will be off to the south before the landlord hath fully understood what we must have intended from the first hint of danger.’

  John shook his head. ‘The evil men will have their scouts in Newmarket, your Majesty. They will realise what is happening and make for the farm to report while your Majesty’s coach is going to the course. They will be at the Rye House before us.’

  ‘Us, colonel?’

  ‘Your Majesty and your guards.’

  ‘But not all our guards. Not you, John. Beyond the Rye House corner you do not anticipate further trouble on our journey, do you?’

  ‘No, sir. I know of no other conspiracy.’

  ‘Then you must find a way to cut off those villians from their base. I leave it to your ingenuity. Deal with the problem and carry out your solution personally. That is an order.’

  ‘Your Majesty.’

  When he left Charles, John called together his fellow officers and laid before them the new plan he had instantly devised for securing the safety of the King. It was simple and it depended for success upon young Merridew’s local knowledge and the colonel’s former inspection of the country roads in the immediate neighbourhood of the farm.

  The assassins, waiting at Rumbold’s house, got no warning of any change of plan. Their scouts upon the main road saw no travellers of any note pass by, neither before nor after noon. But their agents in Newmarket, behaving exactly as John had foreseen, did realise the meaning of the King’s appearance at the races with his entire retinue. They did set off for the Rye House immediately. They ran into Colonel Churchill’s ambush three miles from the farm in that lonely, copse-lined stretch of the main road where it had been planned to attack the royal party that night.

  The spies from Newmarket made a brave attempt to escape. They were armed and two of them tried to fight while the third dodged into the wood. But the two were overwhelmed by the four dragoons in John’s trap while he and Ensign Merridew boxed up the rider they had chased through the trees. His occasional yells for help brought him no champion. In less than twenty minutes Colonel Churchill and his men were on the road again with three prisoners, gagged, shackled, fastened to their saddles, with their horses on leading reins. They avoided the Rye House Farm on a route led by Ensign Merridew, at a quiet canter along the grass verge of a lane. Then, back on the road again, they galloped away towards London.

  Meanwhile the King in his coach with the whole of his retinue retired from the races after a light noon meal and passed quietly by little used country roads to join the London route at Epping, well to the south-east of Hoddesdon.

  His Majesty suffered no inconvenience and met with no obstacle. He was half inclined to believe that his agents had exaggerated the danger, until Colonel Churchill came to him with an account of his action, in which three prisoners had been taken and were in custody in the Tower where their questioning had begun.

  ‘They know very little, your Majesty,’ John said, seeing a look of distaste cover the King’s face. ‘They were
given but one order, to follow your Majesty’s movements at the racecourse and if it differed from that announced, to ride back to Rumbold’s and report it. This they did – or rather attempted to do.’

  ‘And failed, of course. We have already heard from that captain of Dragoons who saw you ride off and trap your personal prisoner. He called it a miracle of precision and daring. We are deeply grateful.’

  He held out a hand for John to kiss, which he did as expected, kneeling. His heart was full; he had been allowed to perform a service of the kind he knew best how to manage.

  Reward followed swiftly. Within a few days John received the colonelcy of the King’s own Regiment of Dragoons, a very profitable command. At the same time, for his past services in Scotland and abroad on behalf of the Duke of York, he was created Baron of Aymouth in the Scottish peerage.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sarah was delighted with the change in their fortunes. After John brought her the news she put on her only court dress and ordered him his favourite dishes for their supper that evening.

  ‘So, my lady,’ he said, holding her at arm’s length before drawing her close to kiss her warmly, ‘I merit thy approval at last, do I?’

  ‘My lord, when have I ever not approved of all thou art and hast achieved?’

  He laughed. ‘Often. But I will not remember the occasions, now or ever again.’

  ‘Ungallant lord! But I forgive you!’

  They hugged and kissed again, then remembering little Henrietta ran away to her nursery to break the news to her and her nurse. Hariote, as they had now begun to call her, stared at them, for the words meant nothing whatever to her. However, she understood that her parents were in a state of excitement so she was stimulated into showing off her powers of walking, pushing her chair before her very hard, then taking her hands away to walk two steps without its support. Their applause made her reckless, so she overreached herself and fell full length on her stomach.