The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Chapter 2

  In asking Parliament to vote him extra money for a bigger standing army, James hit a nerve for the first time.

  For one thing, the House of Commons had a traditional suspicion of kings who had their own, strong armies. Also it was full of gentlemen who were proud of the militia, who liked nothing better than putting on their breastplates at weekends and drilling their servants up and down the countryside.

  For another thing, during the emergency, the King had appointed army officers who were Roman Catholics. Under the Test Acts — those same laws which had forced James himself to resign as Lord Admiral when he was Duke of York — they held their posts illegally. Not only did James declare that he would not remove such men from their posts, but he wanted the Test Acts and other laws against Dissenters repealed.

  Parliament might have nodded at allowing Protestant Nonconformists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers and the like to worship as they pleased, but abolition would also give Roman Catholics freedom. Didn't the King know the country wouldn't stand for that?

  The fact that the country's Roman Catholics were well behaved, that there were barely enough of them to form a regiment let alone rule, and that the Pope himself had told his representatives in England to pursue only a moderate and constitutional policy, none of this mattered; no dread went quite so deep into the English psyche as fear of Popery.

  The appearance on the throne of the Prince of Darkness himself couldn't horrify the English more than the thought of Roman rule. Indeed, they couldn't distinguish between the two. The massacre of St Bartholomew, the numerous Catholic conspiracies against the life of Good Queen Bess, the Gunpowder Plot, now Louis XIV's assault on his French Protestants after the abrogation of the Treaty of Nantes - all these terrors were attributed to a faith which was seen to free its members from the rules of morality as long as they advanced their Church. It was why Titus Oates's fabrications of Jesuits-under- the-beds during the Popish Plot scare had spread such panic.

  Much depended on James recognizing that this deep-seated antipathy of English men and women, high and low, was not to be dispelled by reason nor force.

  It appeared that he couldn't. When Parliament proved evasive he showed his displeasure and dissolved it. He was, he said, 'resolved to give liberty of conscience to all Dissenters whatsoever, having ever been against persecution for conscience' sake'. It was a noble sentiment and he backed it up by issuing a general pardon which released 1,200 Quakers as well as Anabaptists from prison.

  But a darker strain showed in James's toleration. Protestant ministers, commissioners, administrators and army officers — especially army officers — were finding themselves dismissed and replaced by Roman Catholics.

  The alarm bells began to ring.

  For a while Society buzzed with the news that the former actress Peg Hughes, Rupert of the Rhine's mistress, had been cast off by the Viscount of Severn and Thames after a brief affair and that the Viscount had also quarrelled with the King and gone across the water to offer his services to Prince William of Orange. Then, other more important matters attracting its attention, Society forgot them both.

  Penitence spent the next three years on her Priory estate trying to attract as little attention as possible. While it could not be proved that she'd had a hand in helping Monmouth rebels escape justice, the events of the summer of 1685 had done her reputation no good and she needed to retrieve it if her daughter and foster-child were to be received into Society without the doubtful repute of their mother staining their chances.

  Mistress Palmer took the news of Dorinda's death with the philosophic detachment of the aged. 'Lord keep her. There's another Dog Yarder gone. Well, we all got to go some time.'

  Tongs, however, grieved more deeply for her mother and father than Penitence had expected, considering that in the last year or two she had seen them so little. It was no good promising her that MacGregor would return one day — he hadn't. No good, either, to put up a memorial to her mother in order to give the child a focus for her grief since Dorinda's body had gone into a quicklime pit along with other prisoners and, as she'd died a suspect rebel, was refused commemoration.

  It took two years, the intervention of Aphra Behn, the Earl of Craven and £300, for Penitence to receive permission to put up a tablet to her friend in the church at Athelzoy.

  The Reverend Boreman, who was becoming old and inflexible, wanted it inscribed with the words: 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.'

  Penitence's anger was remembered by all those who witnessed it: 'I won't have her judged. I won't have her judged. Do you hear me?' More and more it seemed to her that if their only choice was between starvation and sale, the lot of poor Englishwomen was no better than a slave's. 'Let anybody, anybody, fling a stone at her and it'll get flung back right in their bloody eye.'

  In the end Dorinda's tablet bore the legend: 'No greater love than this'.

  Penitence was becoming as short-tempered as she was short-staffed. The blood-letting of the Assizes, the transportations and deaths in prison had taken their toll of the young, male population, while feeding a billeted army was costing the West Country dear. There weren't enough labourers to keep the Levels well drained and that first winter after the rebellion saw the Parrett flood the moors as it hadn't for years, drowning cattle and winter crops. Penitence was only able to plant a few acres of teasels with the manpower available which meant that she was going to lose her markets in the North of England. She watched her yew chessmen become merely untidy bushes because there was nobody to topiary them.

  Worst of all, she had to watch Prue's young face set into intolerant and bitter lines as the girl found her only comfort in the Lord of vengeance who was being increasingly worshipped in the chapels around Sedgemoor.

  The one bright beam into their greyness came through the same grapevine which had informed Penitence of Mudge Ridge's escape. Now she received word that he, too, had reached Holland. Penitence sent back some of her fast- dwindling money and Benedick's address.

  After eighteen months she received another letter, this time from across the Atlantic. Once she had waded through the obligatory exhortations for her repentance and recommendations to the Lord for her unclean soul, Uncle Martin settled down into a surprisingly communicative, if unpunctuated, style.

  There was much about the rigours of the voyage and the resultant looseness of his bowels, a long description of eating turtle-meat, none at all of Africa itself, but a good deal about the slaves the Bonaventura had taken aboard there. He was indignant at the condition in which they travelled 'in that so many do perish' but only because it deprived him of potential converts. Uncle Martin Hughes, it appeared, had found a new vocation; 'to bring to the Lord the poor benighted creatures so that the trade can encompass good not evil'.

  His account of Jamaica covered one side of a page, mostly concerned with the number of black girls who adorned the houses of the plantation owners and managers and the sin thereof.

  Not until Penitence was nearly screaming as she read did he come to it:

  The law here being unobserved I did find little hindrance in discovering and after much haggling in purchasing the Scotchman we spoke of and procuring his passage on a Dutch ship which may arrive there afore this letter though his master was reluctant to let him go since he has proved trustworthy in business which is a rare occasion among so many miscreants.

  For a moment, Penitence sat down and held the letter against her cheek. MacGregor. One brand out of the burning.

  But there was another page of Uncle Martin's crabbed writing and, sewn into the one she was holding, a protuberance.

  She read on:

  After much enquiry I found no trace of thy Squakheag and no hope of it in that overseers here do despise Indian slaves for that they die too soon so I took ship for the Americas to find spiritual comfort in my brothers and sisters in the Lord and to look for thy people and mine but though at this moment I sit in the midst of mountain and
plain on the edge of the river called Pocumscut there is no sign of heathen habitation nor none else except burned grass as if it caught fire and only this bead which I do send thee.

  Penitence unstitched the paper where it had been sewn over at the edge and extracted a faded red and blue bead, a necklace bead, scorched on one side.

  For a moment she stood where her uncle had written his letter beneath the twisted mountain of Pemawachuatuck under which the lodges of Awashonks's people had rested beside the river. Through his eyes she looked out at a smokeless, blackened ring, soundless except for the call of the circling eagle, and knew not only that her Indians were dead but that their way of life would never be seen there again.

  Gently, she folded the letter around the bead and took it upstairs to put it in a silk fichu in her dressing-table drawer.

  Then she went downstairs to find Tongs and tell her that her father was alive and on his way to freedom.

  It was one of those periods of hiatus. In the pauses when Penitence had time to feel anything other than exhaustion it was a sense of suspension. Surprised, she discovered that her neighbours, those assured Tory men and women, were in a similar state. When they met together the topic of conversation that dominated even fatstock prices was the four Roman Catholic lords who'd been sworn into the Privy Council. Posts which Anglican churchmen could have expected to hold were going to members of the Church of Rome.

  Under Charles I, Somerset royalists had faced conflict but never a divided mind. In fighting for the royal cause they had known they were upholding King and Church in one symbolic body. Now, for the first time, their grandchildren stared at the prospect of a terrible choice. King or Church? What if James made it impossible to be true to both?

  'Ah tell ee' roared Sir Ostyn Edwards at her, 'he'll be loyal to the Church, iss fay.' But he was obviously shaken after a trip to London during which he'd seen friars walking its streets, openly fingering their rosaries.

  Pamphlets were being sold with royal approval which purported to prove that Charles II had lived and died a Roman Catholic.

  'Old Rowley whored like a Papist, we'n't deny ut,' said Sir Ostyn, stoutly, 'but we know he were a good Protestant.' His tiny, white-lashed eyes slid sideways at Penitence. 'Weren't he?'

  'I don't know,' she said. 'Did you see Aphra?'

  By introducing Sir Ostyn to the brief but dynamic influence of Aphra and Dorinda, Penitence had unleashed another devotee to the theatre. His yearly visits to London had become quarterly and this time he had spent four nights watching successive performances of Aphra's latest play, The Lucky Chance. 'Naughty,' he said, 'I never seen a naughty old play like ut.' He was the only person she knew who actually held his sides when he laughed.

  Yes, he'd gone round to Aphra's house and she'd entertained him and given him a copy of the play to bring back for Penitence to read. 'Poor old soul now, though, with her rheumatics.'

  Ostyn's conversation was combative and Penitence dismissed his remark as an attempt to provoke her. Aphra was her senior but had always retained the youth of a contemporary. Her letters were as sprightly as ever and gave her reasons for not accepting Penitence's invitations as having too many commissions to finish. Penitence, trying to keep her head and - often literally - her crops, above water, had sent back similar apologies.

  She enjoyed reading The Lucky Chance, a fast-moving comedy in which penurious heroines decided to marry wealthy old men. Where most plays dealt with the rich, this one drew on Aphra's experience of being hard up. Its glory, however, was her portrait of the impotent old lechers her girls had chosen to marry — not the usual run-of-the-mill creations but endowed from Aphra's experience with a dreadful vitality. Mr Behn, thought Penitence.

  With the play Sir Ostyn had also brought back some of Aphra's other work, among them her fighting defence of The Lucky Chance:

  They charge it with the old never-failing scandal — that 'tis not fit for the ladies. As if the ladies were obliged to hear indecencies only from their pens. Had it been owned by a man, though the most dull, unthinking, rascally scribbler in town, it had been a most admirable play.

  'Poor old soul?' demanded Penitence of Sir Ostyn. 'You tell 'em, Affie.'

  There was also Aphra's long Pindaric for James and his Queen on 'The Happy Coronation of His Most Sacred Majesty' which Penitence didn't bother to read. What she did read in bed one night, what transfixed her, was Aphra's poem to John Hoyle, 'To Mr J.H.'

  All Heaven is mine, I have it in my arms,

  Nor can ill fortune reach me any more. Fate, I defy thee, and dull world, adieu. In love's kind fever, ever let me lie, Drunk with desire, and raving mad with joy.

  Damn you, Affie. She too had held Heaven in her arms in this very room, this very bed, and let it go.

  The laws against Popery were still unrepealed but the King took matters into his own hands. Without waiting for a Parliament that would repeal the Test Acts — one would never have been elected in any case — James made his own Declaration of Liberty of Conscience.

  The reaction was extraordinary. One by one the Protestant Dissenting churches, groups that had faced prison for their faith, preachers who'd lost their livings by refusing to follow the Articles of the Church of England, men who'd been driven out of their homes by the Five Mile Act, all these people told James that they didn't want his permission to worship legally if it meant that Roman Catholics were to receive the same indulgence.

  It made no difference. James ordered that his Declaration be read from every pulpit on successive Sundays.

  Six bishops went to Whitehall carrying with them a petition signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, assuring James of their loyalty but most courteously pointing out that he couldn't do it; the King couldn't dispense with statutes - that was the privilege of Parliament. They must therefore refuse, if the King would graciously forgive them, to allow his Declaration to be read in any Anglican church.

  The King didn't forgive them: 'This is the standard of rebellion.'

  On their knees the bishops swore it was not. 'Sir,' said Bishop Ken of Bath and Wells, 'I hope that you will grant to us that liberty of conscience which you grant to all mankind.'

  James persisted furiously: 'This is rebellion. This is the standard of rebellion.'

  'We have two duties to perform,' answered Ken. 'Our duty to God and our duty to Your Majesty. We honour you, but we fear God.'

  The bishops were sent to the Tower.

  And the Queen was pregnant.

  The five-aisled church of St Mary Magdalene took some filling but on a Sunday in June 1688, the population of practically the entire Taunton Vale formed its congregation, including Dissenters who wouldn't have been seen dead in an Anglican church at any other time and wouldn't have been tolerated if they had. By being sent to the Tower, Bishop Ken of Bath and Wells and Bishop Trelawney of Bristol had become everybody's bishops, even anti-episcopates'.

  The congregation's eyes were on the preacher as he climbed the steps to the carved pulpit. In almost all the churches in the land the eyes of the congregation concentrated on the preachers at that moment climbing into a thousand pulpits. Would he? Wouldn't he?

  In St Mary Magdalene he didn't. Some two thousand Somerset men and women sat back in satisfaction to listen to the usual sermon.

  In a hundred City parish churches Londoners too folded their arms and settled down to the accustomed hour's nodding and or dozing. Even in St James's Palace chapel the Anglican priest refused to read out its present royal owner's Declaration of Indulgence.

  In Westminster Abbey, however, as a more obedient preacher began to read what his King commanded, his voice was drowned by the sound of his vast congregation walking out.

  Outside St Mary Magdalene's, under the budding lime trees, Penitence's neighbours gathered about their carriages.

  'That'll show un,' said Sir Roger Pascoe.

  Sir Ostyn nodded. 'Teach un to gaol our bishops. By God, Ah've a good mind . . .'

  'Can we go home now?' asked Peniten
ce. She'd already been waiting for the half-hour since the service ended while her fellow-worshippers congratulated each other as if they had personally defeated the forces of Rome single-handed. She had her teasels to see to.

  'Teach un to pass off any old Papist babby on us,' said Sir Roger.

  Lady Portman and Lady Pascoe both nodded with the authority of parturient women. 'Her's too old and lost too many babbies to have un now. Smuggling the poor little mite into the bed in a warming pan, wicked.'

  Penitence sighed; if they got on to the royal birth she'd never get home. At thirty Mary of Modena was younger than both Mesdames Portman and Pascoe and, as queens usually gave birth in a room filled with at least forty weighty witnesses and as those witnesses on this occasion had included the entire Privy Council, Lord Chancellor Jeffreys among them, she herself was inclined to believe that James had at last been vouchsafed his much-longed-for legitimate son and heir.