Bloodstock and Other Stories

by Margaret Irwin

  “Our dear dad is unlucky with royalty,” Betty had said in her wicked way—“perhaps it is no wonder.”

  No one else in the family circle would dare or care to say such a thing, but Betty knew neither fear nor reverence; and perhaps that was why her father, stern, deeply, even wildly, religious man, adored his second daughter above all his children: for not only was she the prettiest and the wittiest and the one that he loved best, but she gave him continual anxiety for her spiritual welfare. He was always telling his wife to counsel “poor Betty” “against worldly vanities and worldly company, which I doubt she is too subject to.”

  She undoubtedly was. She had married a Royalist rake (“a debauched unworthy cavalier,” Lucy Hutchinson, the family friend and unfailing critic, had called him), and then discovered that he was stupid as well; but it cannot be said that her disappointment preyed on her. Her dresses were the talk of London, who had plenty of opportunity to observe them when the sisters drove about the streets in state—,Biddy, the eldest, in yellow silk petticoats, and Betty, the next in age, in gorgeous green gowns. The two younger girls had both married last year into the old Royalist nobility, and there had been something of the old Royalist festivity again over the ceremonies, with mixed dancing all night in Whitehall Palace to a band of forty-eight violins.

  That had been Betty’s doing again, and shocked many of the faithful terribly. This splendid court was not only, like all courts, “a court of sin and vanity,” but “the more abominable because they had not quite cast away the name of God but profaned it by taking it in vain among them.” Very thoroughly they profaned it, for three hours on end when John Howe preached his sermons, and however gay were the supper-tables with music and fine dresses and great foreign figures, there was always a psalm at the beginning. It was hard that this should make only an added reproach from the godly.

  Nor was it their only complaint. Oliver had always inveighed against class distinctions and titles, and declared openly in council that “we shall do no good until we have done away with lords,” but now he was accepting one title after another, roystering it in the King’s own palaces, and it was observed that though some of the old comrades whom he had raised from being draymen or cobblers to the rank of major-generals were present at his daughters” weddings, their wives were not.

  “Where are the wives of the major-generals?” Betty was asked, with no kind intention.

  “Washing their dishes at home, I expect, as they used to do!” she tossed back, with the malicious laughter glinting out of her eyes and jerking up her defiant little chin, and away she danced, with the curls dancing on her white neck as soft as little blown clouds, and the old men who watched her said to each other, “There goes Elizabeth Cromwell. Did you ever see Elizabeth Stuart?” and fell silent, thinking of the wild gaiety and loveliness of the dead King Charles” sister, the luckless Queen of Bohemia, of whom this girl had reminded them.

  But proud, pious Lucy Hutchinson, who never went out if she could help it, except to church, widow of that strict and noble Puritan Colonel Hutchinson who had died in Oliver’s service, called Oliver’s daughters “insolent fools.” And kind friends thought it their duty to report it to Oliver’s wife, with sundry other such comments, and tell her that her daughters were good girls doubtless, but careless and giddy as girls were apt to be when they had had their heads a little turned, and could not realize the offence and scandal they caused—yes, scandal, it was really necessary to say that harsh word, for just think of all the talk there had been about poor Bridget and the wicked Duke of Buckingham, when of course there was not a word of truth in the report that he had come over to England in disguise for the last Royalist plot and employed his spare time in seducing Bridget Ireton, the daughter of the Lord Protector and wife of his right-hand man.

  “There wasn’t a word of truth in it. There might have been a faint shadow of it if they had substituted the name Betty for Biddy,” said Elizabeth, when her horrified mother had told her the gossip as an awful warning; and then actually went on to say quite coolly and casually that it was she who had encountered the Duke of Buckingham in his very thin disguise (“He’s too vain of his looks to give himself a proper one’) and had flirted with him in front of her foolishly gaping husband, Mr. Claypole. That had been quite enough to make the fatuous duke boast in his cups of the conquest he had made of old Noll’s daughter, and, since it was more piquant to have made a conquest of the daughter who was married to a pious Puritan leader rather than the one who was married to “a debauched unworthy cavalier,” to transfer the fame of his favours from Betty Claypole to Biddy Ireton.

  And Betty could not be made to see that it mattered what they said.

  “Think if your father had heard of it! He would sooner see his daughters dead at his feet. Indeed’—with a sudden hushed sinking from high drama into shocked reality—“I think he might have killed you.”

  “I think he might,” murmured Betty with rather oddly shining eyes. Her mother looked at her sharply. The girl seemed positively to delight in thinking how far she could anger her father. She knew that she alone had the power to anger him so far, and her mother, knowing it, felt a deep insurgent wave of jealousy rise up within her, and at once translated it into indignation that Elizabeth should wish to torment her father, who was already tormented past endurance by the cares and responsibilities of the State. “Poor Betty” indeed! It was “Poor Oliver” rather, bewitched and plagued and hoodwinked by his unruly daughter.

  But before she could collect her reasons for righteous wrath, and the words to clothe them in, Betty was fleeting on, shaking off all this preaching, telling her mother that the world was changing and that it was of no use to try to hold it back, that nobody now took themselves seriously as Father and his kind had done: “they went to war for their principles, they said; well, that was very pleasant for them, they had their war and their principles, and out of them Father has won his principality and power—but he can’t expect all of us to feel the same as he did. He’s done it all, and all we can do is to enjoy it, so let us enjoy it all we can and not mind about sour old cats like Lucy Hutchinson, who will say horrible things of us however virtuous we are. Do you know what she said of you, yes, you, my sweet Mammy, you perfect-wife-and-mother—not that you were an insolent fool, nor anything against your character, but worse, oh much worse: she said that “grandeur sat as ill on you as scarlet on an ape’!”

  Silence fell between the two women like a stone. The daughter’s chatter had stopped as sharply as if it were snapped off, as indeed it was, for she had never meant to punish her mother’s mild scolding so far; she stooped, unable for all her bravado to meet her mother’s eyes, and busied herself with her shoe-string, while over her bright head the older woman’s face looked blankly at the opposite wall, the candid eyes a little duller, the full, rather heavy cheeks sagging a little more, and that the only sign of recognition she gave of the blow that had been dealt her.

  Yes, Betty was right, and her mother knew it; what had been said of her mother was far worse than anything anyone could say of herself.

  Even their enemies had had to admit that the Lord Protector bore himself nobly in the midst of state and splendour; but the Lord Protector’s wife would never look nor be anything more than the plain Mrs. Oliver Cromwell who had mended her husband’s shirts and tried to get him to change his collar more often, and not to offend people by speaking his mind so freely or so coarsely, or by neglecting to answer their letters.

  Indeed, looking back on those long quiet days which had then seemed so anxious and busy, and now seemed so carefree, she wondered if she were now not only no more than the Mrs. Oliver Cromwell of those days, but had become much less. For though she had never attempted to meddle with Oliver’s politics and other activities, or even to understand them,—her rare questions in the middle of his discussions with his friends being generally interrupted by his mother’s gentle reminder, “Hush, my dear, the men are talking,’—yet she had been of m
uch more use to him then as his wife than she could be now. She had borne his children and shared his delight in them—though he had always liked the girls best and been more severe and impatient with the boys; and she had comforted him as best she could when two of the boys had died, and his bereaved affection, aggravated by remorse for his intolerance, had driven him nearly out of his mind with his agony of stormy grief.

  Their local doctor, Dr. Simcott, had told her that but for her, Oliver would most certainly have gone mad, not only then, but when everything was going most smoothly and happily—and he would suddenly turn and rend it all up by the roots in a frantic access of religious terrors. In the middle of the night he would wake her up, convinced that he was dying and in danger of hell fire, and off she would send one of the sleepy herd-boys with a lantern for Dr. Simcott, whose language nearly matched the patient’s own when he had got out of bed and come and examined him and told him there was nothing the matter with him.

  “Most splenetic,” that was Dr. Simcott’s professional opinion, and he advised Oliver to go up to London and consult some fashionable physician who made a speciality of these new-fangled nerve cases. So Oliver saw the King’s own doctor, Sir Theodore Mayerne, who said it was a bad case of melancholia, and could do nothing for it.

  Even Oliver’s mother, who had influenced him as his wife could never do, who had lived with him and his family until she died a few years ago, and to whom he had gone for a good-night talk every evening of his life when he was at home, however crowded his day had been with public cares, even she had not been able to do anything for him when those dreadful fits of dull despair had surged up over him. Only Oliver’s wife could do anything, by doing nothing, by being there, acquiescent, adoring, as tender of him as of her youngest baby at her breast, knowing that his need of her was as deep and helpless, as utterly dependent.

  He had hoped that in escaping from England he might escape himself; that they might all emigrate to America, that unexplored land of freedom and promise where everything was new and untouched as at the beginning of the world, and he could make what he would of it, instead of having to put up with what other men had made of England. His cousin, John Hampden, had bought a grant of land in Massachusetts as a speculation, and the two had often discussed the possibility of shaking off the unjust laws and taxes of England and moving there with their families.

  “Your mother would be too old for such a change,” murmured Oliver’s wife hopefully; but Oliver told her in his crude fashion that his mother had guts enough for anything. She had, but they were not required for America, for England gave enough employment for Oliver’s discontented energies instead; when Parliament decided to raise arms against the King, he raised his own troop of horse from Cambridgeshire and became in turn Captain, Colonel, General, General-in-Chief and Lord Protector, and there was neither need nor time nor thought left for America.

  Yes, there was still some thought of it, but it was in Mrs. Oliver’s mind, not his. What difference would it have made if they had carried out their plan and gone to Massachusetts? Presumably the Civil War in England would have ended quite soon in a Royalist victory, King Charles would have still been alive and on the throne, still ruling as much as possible without a Parliament, just as poor Oliver found it necessary to do, for he was continually having to turn out Parliament for not voting as he wished. They were even making trouble over his proposal to sell as building property that royal hunting-park of Hyde Park, which King Charles had been such a fool as to give gratis to his people for every Tom, Dick and Harry to disport himself in. It was sheer democracy, and “Democracy,” said Oliver, “is the creed of all poor men and all bad men.”

  “And poor men are as bad as bad men,” Betty had supplemented in a solemn voice, but her father did not rebuke her sarcasm, for he knew it to be true. His family had been exceedingly rich ever since his great-great-great-uncle Thomas Cromwell had given it some very wealthy Church lands in Henry VIII’s time, and they had been all the better for it. It was solid wealth that made fine men, not old families and grand titles.

  He himself had to take the title of Lord Protector because he had to take something, but he would not take that of King, nor the yet more grandiloquent offer of Emperor of the West. Somehow, thought Mrs Oliver, if they had only gone to America, he might still have won that last title, and it would not have been so hard for her to bear in a brand new country as the title of Lord Protector in this old, subtle, smiling, sneering land of England.

  Oliver soared from strength to strength, he had burst his swaddling-bands and his desperate need of her in the old quiet days; but she could not grow with him, she could not supply the further needs that now beset him as he changed from the wealthy but simple country gentleman to the great prince. He needed a queen now for his wife, brilliant and gay, a match for him in wits and fearlessness. Grandeur sat on Betty as easily as on a queen. And thinking of Betty in her emerald gown, and the blow she had so lightly struck her, and thinking back to the old quiet days when Oliver’s mother had been always with them, she thought that perhaps, after all, she had never really been all that Oliver had wanted as a wife, had never been much more than a sort of secondary mother, who could comfort and satisfy but never excite him or stir him to the depths or heights of his nature.

  But had he ever allowed her to do so? There were times when his strength and the suggestion of hidden, uncontrollable forces in his nature had made her long to let go of all the self-restraint she had been taught to think the noblest duty of woman—times when she had forgotten all their anxious perpetual care of the soul, and thought it enough at that moment to live only in and for the body. He had checked her and made her feel ashamed; she was his virtuous wife and the mother of his children, training herself to be the worthy successor of his mother who slept under their roof; she must not forget this nor tempt him to forget it.

  But he had starved for her to do so, she knew that, now when it was too late, now when she was no longer Mrs. Oliver Cromwell, but only the clumsy awkward out-of-place wife of the magnificent Lord Protector, on whom her borrowed finery sat as ill as scarlet on an ape.

  That phrase would not let her alone, it stung her into walking up and down the splendid panelled galleries at Hampton Court where huge King Harry had walked, and Queen Elizabeth, and the slight figure of King Charles, gazing at the many lovely pictures he had collected; it echoed in her ear, whispering, “Here you are, poor ape, where your betters have trod, and do you hope to fashion yourself in their image?”

  She did not, though she did try to collect pictures, hoping to replace a few of the many beauties of King Charles” collection which Oliver had sold. He was passionately fond of music, relaxing under it and losing himself in a kind of dream, and had installed two organs at Hampton Court, though Betty declared that organs gave only the mush of music. But, for the other arts, he read nothing but the Bible, and of pictures he asked only that they should represent something he knew, even if it were his own face and his own warts, for he told his portrait-painter Lely on no account to leave them out. So his wife had little encouragement in her attempt to carry on the work of King Charles, though she did her best by making conscientious enquiries of the foreign ambassadors as to the leading painters in their countries.

  To what purpose? King Charles was dead, beheaded by her husband’s orders. Her husband reigned in his stead, and they lived in the palaces that had been his home. She could have nothing else to do with King Charles or his work. It began to oppress her unbearably that they should walk and talk and sleep and eat in the royal palaces where King Charles had lived. There at Whitehall was the room where he had taken leave of his children and stepped out through a window to walk briskly to the scaffold. When the axe fell on him, the watching crowd had sent up a groan that had echoed to the ends of the world. Far away in India a king had forbidden any of his subjects, on pain of death by torture, even to mention the horror of that deed done on a cold January day in England. All Europe was aghast. Yet now all
Europe acclaimed Oliver in terms of rapturous compliment, because he had shown that he could master her with his army as he had mastered England. Did that, then, prove that Oliver had been right to do that thing?

  She dared not ask that of Oliver, who had once answered all her questions. But his answers to this one were too various. At one time he wrote publicly that Charles” death would be “honoured by Christians and feared by tyrants,” but at another, to a private friend, that “perhaps there is no other way out.”

  How could the way out matter, if it were not the right way? Then the individual soul, their dearest concern, was no longer of first account; right and wrong had become mere quibbles; it was, Oliver had said, a matter of stern necessity.

  Once upon a time, no necessity could have been sterner than the dividing line between right and wrong.

  And looking back to the old quiet days when this had been so, as she heard the psalm rise in full-throated unction round her at the beginning of a rich banquet in King Charles” palace, while the soberly sumptuous pages stood with piously bowed heads over the gold dishes containing the first pineapples ever brought to England, she found her clasped hands grown strangely cold and felt as though the ground beneath her gave her no foothold, and the strong voices round her were more hollow than the mocking wind, for where was it that they stood and praised God? Here in King Charles” palace, on his grave that they had dug, and on the grave of their old simple belief in right and wrong.

  Oliver must be right. If only he himself were sure of it. But she remembered his hysterical horseplay at the time of the King’s death-sentence—how he had forced one man down into his chair with shouts of laughter and held him there until he signed it, and spattered the face of another with ink—and knew it was because he was desperately at variance with himself. Never had she put the confidence in Oliver’s heartiness that other people had done, exclaiming what a great boy he was when he flung cushions at their heads or chased them round the room to pommel them. His horseplay, like his foul language (never blasphemy, but plain dirt), was the momentary relief of a spirit pent up with perilous matter. She could not resolve his doubts, nor her own. She could only hide them, and herself, and she hid them whenever she could in a pleasant country house near Amersham which she had bought two years ago as a retreat for herself and her daughters from the bustle of London and royal palaces, if only for a few days at a time. It was not more than half a day’s ride on a good horse from London; Oliver himself might jog down at times and snatch more rest than he could in his Saturday-to-Monday visits to Hampton Court.