The Soldier, the Gaoler, the Spy and her Lover

by Simon Parke

  And Oliver’s letter, read by candlelight in the guardhouse, proved no exhortation but a lament, as wearily the poor man faced war again. Hammond was aware of the dire situation facing the country: royalist uprisings in Wales, Kent, Colchester and Pontefract were coinciding with the Scots marching south. A second civil war was breaking out in England, and Hammond knew by whose invitation.

  In the face of so many enemies, the army had divided its strength. Cromwell went first to Wales and then marched north to face the Scots. There had been three days of prayer before the march began, but without the usual fervour and excitement. There was confusion in their hearts: why had God given them another war to fight, when they had won the last? Had they displeased God? Was he testing them?

  With the seal broken, Hammond read Cromwell’s words.

  Oliver Cromwell

  Lieutenant-General in the Lord’s Army

  Preston

  16 August 1648

  Dear Robin, [he was the only man to name him thus] I pray that God will teach this nation, and those that are over us, what the mind of God may be in all this and what our duty is now.

  Hammond knew Oliver to be a good man as long as he knew what his duty was; when he didn’t know his duty, he acquired a depressive spirit.

  Surely it is not that the poor godly people of this kingdom should still be made the object of wrath and anger? Nor that our God would have our necks under the yoke of bondage?

  And amid the lament was rage – rage at this second war, this unnecessary war, caused by the king’s busy letter-writing and smuggled agreements.

  This is a more prodigious treason than any that has been perfected before. The former quarrel was that Englishmen might rule over one another. But this despicable war is to vassalize us to a foreign nation! This is quite different.

  Yes, Scotland felt pretty foreign to Hammond as he read on:

  I must put down my pen, dear Robin. We will engage them near Preston. Hamilton has been providentially slow in his advance; otherwise he might have been laughing in London by now. God delights in the stupidity of arrogant men and Hamilton is thus. I wish Fairfax were here, truly; we have always fought together, never alone – and I am an unworthy commander. But it is a battle we must win, and by God’s grace we shall – we will not be ruled by the Scots! We will pray for rain and a dampening of the Scots powder, on which they rely greatly. Control and discipline, as you will remember, dear Robin – control and discipline.

  And while I am away, keep hold of the king for us all; he has much to answer for. And I trust Firebrace is gone. I am told he is the master of every plan to free this dishonest monarch from captivity.

  Remember me in the fight.

  For once, Hammond felt pity for Oliver. He knew the fear of battle. And yes, Firebrace was gone; he had not proved the friend Hammond imagined.

  *

  The king was playing bowls on the new bowling green. He would have preferred tennis at Hampton Court and often said this to Hammond.

  ‘I miss the tennis at Hampton Court.’

  ‘Then perhaps you should have stayed there,’ came the reply.

  ‘And be murdered in my bed by army plotters? I hardly think so.’

  ‘It is a bowling green scarce equalled in the kingdom, your majesty, yet you complain.’

  ‘It is so-so, no more than reasonable and a little mossy; but the tennis court at Hampton Court, that was most enjoyable – no moss, as I recall.’

  The green was placed, with some thought, beyond the castle’s curtain wall, that the king might not be oppressed by his captivity, yet inside the outer defences, that he might not be tempted to leave it. The king could not freely move around as once he did. His long walks around the island lay in the past, in innocent times now lost. And in truth, he greatly enjoyed his bowls, though he liked also to complain. So when the weather allowed, bowls became part of his daily round and this afternoon he threw with Colonel Hammond and two of his conservators, Thomas Herbert and Anthony Mildmay.

  ‘He seems well disposed to life,’ said Herbert.

  ‘He is writing his great literary work,’ replied Mildmay. ‘Hammond saw it on his desk.’

  ‘A royal Shakespeare? I did not imagine.’

  ‘He writes meditations rather than plays.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Spiritual meditations.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘They mainly concern death, I’m told.’

  ‘Not a matter for the summer, in my estimate,’ said Herbert, made uncomfortable by this news. ‘When our spirits should definitely lighten a little.’

  But despite his dark compositions, the king was well disposed to life. With the arrival of five hundred new troops and security much tightened, post in and out of the castle had initially become difficult. But praise God, July had brought improvement. Captain Titus had managed to get a letter from Jane through to him and the king was thrilled, replying immediately. ‘I know not whether my astonishment or joy were the greater!’ he wrote.

  The cause of the upturn in post was Sir William Hopkins, who lived in Newport. He had connections with an illiterate woman who emptied the king’s stool daily. The removal of the royal waste was hardly a task for the guards – it had no pleasant airs – but for a woman who could not read it was a considerable honour.

  ‘The new way of conveyance is safe and unsuspected,’ Charles wrote to Firebrace. ‘And not tied to particular days, for I shit every day. Wherefore I urge you to make much use of this woman.’

  A local uprising by royalists on the island was considered at this time. But reinforcements at the castle made this a risk to the king’s person, for they were proper soldiers now, rather than a gathering of the elderly and lame. And bold uprisings around the country had not delivered as the king had hoped. Cromwell had crushed the life out of South Wales while Fairfax dealt harshly with Colchester.

  But hope lived on: he still had his suitors, eager to please. The Scottish army had crossed the border on 8 July, and these soldiers were his liberty now, while parliament was also back in the game, bless them. Ignoring Cromwell – and quite unaware of the Scots – they’d offered him a new treaty, and sent three commissioners to negotiate. Charles had only to keep them talking and wait for the Scots to come south. The future was bright.

  ‘Ours is a most blessed nation!’ he declared to his bowls partners. ‘An army of twenty thousand resolute men in England, command of the high seas around us – why, we need fear no one, neither kingdoms abroad nor conspiracies at home! We shall live in the greatest peace and tranquillity of any nation in the world! I believe so.’

  ‘It is perhaps the Scottish conspiracies we have most reason to fear, sire,’ Hammond said.

  ‘Ah, the Scots. I do not have a good opinion of that n-n-nation,’ said Charles, in his gentle Scots voice.

  Hammond’s eyebrows rose by themselves and something stirred inside.

  ‘There you and Cromwell agree, your majesty. They march against his army now, invading our land.’

  ‘Do they?’ said Charles, casually, having read just that morning of their advance. ‘Perhaps they have simply heard the cry of the oppressed English, Mr Hammond. God knows, we need no more war.’

  Charles shook his head sorrowfully, like a helpless old man, but Hammond’s patience was stretched; for he was a soldier again at Naseby, alongside the lieutenant-general, shoulder to shoulder on the cavalry line, wading in the mud with his men, feeling the dull terror as battle lines were drawn and breakfast beer consumed, deadening beer, the knowledge of what lay ahead, of what was to come, bravado and fear, jokes and vomit, shouted commands, the grunt of engagement, gunshot and sword, exploding heads, the hollering of horses, severed limbs, skewered bodies, the shrieks of the wounded long into the night, the tempting flesh of the army whores . . .

  ‘Traitors and cowards, those Scots,’ said the king
jovially. ‘Expect no great fidelity from them, I think. Trust only the people of England who have risen on their own, I believe: South Wales, Colchester, Kent?’

  ‘I believe they miss Christmas more than they miss your majesty,’ said Hammond.

  Charles smiled. Parliament had attempted to suppress Christmas, something Charles would never do. Maypoles, St George’s Day, Christmas and other ‘heathen and seditious revels’ had all been banned by those parliamentary fools and with much outcry. They’d attempted amends, in their dull Presbyterian way. They now offered 5 November as a public holiday instead: the Day of Redemption from papist despotism. Hallelujah!

  But it was a weak Hallelujah! across the land, and forcing shopkeepers to work on Christmas Day had been a difficult task for the local constabularies. Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich were not alone in defiantly covering their towns in holly and ivy.

  ‘And your own plans?’ asked Hammond.

  ‘My own plans?’ said Charles, contemplating the bowl in his hand.

  ‘Should the Scottish army come south, I mean.’

  ‘Should the Scottish army defeat the army of Cromwell?’

  ‘I wondered if you had made any particular plans . . . in that eventuality?’

  ‘My plan is to throw this bowl and win the game,’ said Charles with a smile.

  *

  The battle of Preston was blood and mud in August; Hammond heard immediately from Cromwell’s own hand. The victory was his, crushing and complete, aided by hour upon hour of a heavenly deluge which soaked the powder of the Scottish infantry. Two thousand Scots were killed and nine thousand captured, these were the bare facts . . . after which Oliver set off north. He marched towards the wasps’ nest that was Edinburgh – though less waspish now for their lack of an army. Cromwell had long had the perfidious Scots in his thoughts.

  But the victor was neither well nor happy, this was clear. Despite a remarkable campaign – and Hammond understood its efficient power – Cromwell appeared more despairing, more depressive . . . and more religious.

  ‘He suffers a paralysed spirit,’ noted Ireton after receiving a letter from his commander. Cromwell did not say this; he could not see it himself. But he wandered the north unsure of a great deal, clinging to the outworking of providence as his guiding light, and victory in battle was the clearest guide of all. He had won battles, so God was on his side – but what follows the battle? What government should then appear? The Lord must declare himself on the matter! In a letter to Fairfax, with the Book of Isaiah open before him, he celebrated ‘the wonderful works of God, breaking the rod of the oppressor as in the day of Midian – not with garments much rolled in blood, but by the terror of the Lord who will yet save his people and confound his enemies as in that day’.

  But when? It was not enough for God to confound them in war; he must confound them in peace as well . . . or what meant anything?

  And it was to Gideon he returned most often. Of all the Old Testament figures, he admired Gideon the most: the farmer called from the plough, just as Oliver himself had been; a man called to train, choose and lead the army of Israel. Gideon crushed the Midianites, executed their kings and then returned to his farm. Was Cromwell a latter-day Gideon? Was this who he was on earth?

  He had held this scripture in his mind as the Scottish army crossed the border on 8 July to march on London, and it remained his scripture now: the only story that made sense of these difficult days.

  Gideon crushed the Midianites; and he executed their kings.

  *

  ‘It was I, my lord.’

  ‘You name yourself as the culprit, Miss Osborne?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘You wrote those words?’

  ‘I am a most foolish maid. You must forgive me.’

  Hammond played along, for she was an honourable woman, one with spirit – and handsome. She was the sort of woman he might marry one day; he thought this as they spoke.

  ‘A foolish maid with the writing hand of a child,’ he noted. ‘Such as your young brother might possess, perhaps?’

  ‘Robin? Robin would never write such a thing!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He thinks only of his father, who we’re on the way to visit.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘In Saint-Malo.’

  ‘Then you have some travelling to do. And perhaps some rough water.’

  Hammond sat behind his large desk, an experience that tasted good this morning. There was an authority about a desk, particularly a large one, that bestowed the like on its owner; this is what he felt. But with authority comes responsibility and he must now sort out the unfortunate wall-writing incident in Newport. On the wall of a Newport inn were words from the Old Testament Book of Esther: ‘Haman was hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordechai.’ And if one wished to understand its relevance, for ‘Haman’ read ‘Hammond’ and for ‘Mordechai’ read ‘the king’.

  He was familiar with the verse. Royalist pamphleteers – whose recent epithets for him included ‘the baboon’ and ‘the ape-faced blood-mongerer’ – had often aimed this particular line at him. And now here it was again, scrawled in chalk on the wall of a nearby inn. The soldiers had acted as best they could, accusing Robin Osborne, aged eleven, of the crime; and they had two eyewitnesses to support them. Hammond knew one thing for sure: the words had clearly not been written by the elegant Dorothy Osborne, who, one felt, would be kind to a wasp.

  But what was he to do?

  Let not these awkward times kiss farewell to chivalry, thought Hammond, for she was quite charming. He saw mainly men or women of the brutalized sort, so she was a pleasing sight.

  ‘Then you must be on your way,’ he said. ‘To Saint-Malo.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. We shall not be charged?’

  ‘You shall not be charged, no.’

  She claimed to have written the words herself, but one could hardly punish such a woman, even if one did believe her; and Hammond did not, for one moment.

  ‘And do tell Robin to clean the chalk from his hands before leaving,’ he said, rising from his seat.

  *

  Charles was told of Cromwell’s victory at Preston, while playing bowls.

  ‘I have good news, your majesty,’ said Hammond, heartily.

  ‘My release?’

  ‘The Scots – they were defeated.’ He spoke as the king was about to throw; the royal hand went limp and the bowl dropped to the ground. ‘Our nation is safe from the untrustworthy Scots. Good news for us all!’

  Charles sagged and was silent for a while. ‘This is so, is it?’ he asked, straightening a little.

  ‘Soundly defeated at Preston, yes . . . grave losses in torrential rain. They’ll not be visiting England again soon.’

  Hammond did not spare him and Charles twitched a little.

  ‘This is the worst news that ever came to England,’ he said. ‘Quite the worst news.’

  Hammond disagreed. ‘If the Scots had won, your majesty, they’d now control the thrones of both Scotland and England.’

  ‘You are mistaken, Mr Hammond. I could have commanded them back with the motion of my hand.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Hammond was sneering. ‘Oh, that the healing of this nation were so simple! And that your hand could be so trusted.’

  But Charles was in despair and left the game shortly after. Without Scotland for the king there was no France for the king. The French foreign minister Mazarin had placed all hopes on the Scottish adventure, he’d made this plain. There would be no alliance now, which left Charles lonely.

  He looked out to sea, aware he had only ingenuity and God on his side . . . and Jane.

  September 1648

  ‘My dear Jane says I must escape! Always she says it!’

  ‘This is so, my lord,’ she replied, stroking his nose. ‘You must escape
. Your dear seven-one-five is quite right – as always.’

  ‘And I will escape, Jane, I will.’

  ‘You say this – yet you stay.’

  ‘I say it because I will! But at least kiss me first.’

  They were alone again in his chamber, Jane having gained the trust of the stool lady. She’d arrived in his room while he took supper, and he’d returned with excitement upon her discovery.

  ‘I hear Cromwell and Ireton conspire,’ she said, pulling away a little. She did not at this moment wish to kiss the king. She was not angry with him, how could she be angry? But she had on occasion been disappointed with him of late. He’d become indecisive these past weeks and no one warmed to that in a man. He was no longer the sickly boy, after all; he was the king, and Jane did like to get things done. She’d worked hard to get things done.

  ‘We are talking with parliament,’ said Charles.

  ‘And who are they now?’

  ‘Who are they, Jane? Well, I believe they are the rulers of this land!’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Or at least imagine themselves so.’

  ‘And is that how Cromwell imagines them? He rages against you in parliament.’

  ‘Cromwell?’ He smirked. ‘Cromwell is a farmer who speaks without thought! I don’t think anyone in parliament listens to his rustic ranting. No, he will calm himself, he always does, and then he will knock on my door again with tears of contrition.’

  But he was frustrated by Cromwell, by the constant reappearance of this man, this wart-nosed oik. Charles had believed his business with the upstart was over, having played him well and easily in the gardens at Hampton Court. Oliver was a man from the shires, a minor country gentleman temporarily lifted from obscurity, nothing more; and awed by a king. And that should have been that, and indeed would have been, if the Scots had proved trustworthy, and if the rain had not soaked their shot.

  ‘I have spoken with him before,’ said Charles cheerfully. ‘We will negotiate. He likes a king. I will charm Oliver a little, now come and kiss—’