THE CHAINS OF FATE an utterly compelling and romantic historical saga (The Heron Quartet Book 2), page 26
‘He says he is well,’ Lucy told me at last, obviously realizing that some statement of the letter’s contents was called for. ‘And he is a major now, in Colonel Ingoldsby’s Foot, and it’s part of the Oxford garrison. So he has been to see the Widow again, and listen, he says, “She was no whit cast down by the siege and occupation of the city, and complained mightily to me, when she discovered my rank, of the Parliament soldiers we have quartered in that house, saying that it was hard at her time of life to be rid of one military burden only to be straightway inflicted with another (though as you can imagine she did not employ quite those words), and adding that she held neither with the drunkenness of the Royalists nor the robust and vigorous godliness of my own soldiers, each being as bad as the other!”’
We laughed reminiscently, and Lucy said, delighted, ‘I can just hear her saying it, can’t you! He says how “going to Pennyfarthing Street brings back such warm and happy memories of the brief weeks of hospitality and kindness which you and your cousins gave to me”, and that as soon as he can be free of army duties for a space, he’ll come here to visit us!’ Her great blue eyes glowed into mine, joyous and elated. ‘And that can’t be long, can it, with the war ended!’ I doubted it myself, since majors in garrison regiments commonly have, by the nature of their task, very little time to spare for going on private courtesy calls to Royalist households a hundred miles distant, but Lucy, of course, was ever the optimist. She turned again to the letter. ‘Oh, it doesn’t seem more than three years since I’ve seen him! And he signs himself, “Your affectionate and humble servant,” — does that seem like someone in love to you?’ she added dubiously.
‘We can’t all be as exuberant as you. At least he feels affection, and you must remember what he’s like, he’s not one to show his emotions readily.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Lucy. She peered again at the postscript, holding the paper, as was her myopic habit, some six inches from her nose. ‘Why, this is strange, listen to this. “I have some news of another mutual friend which may be welcome, should you be anxious to know if he be safe and well. I saw him last week, a trooper in Whalley’s horse, as they returned after the surrender of Worcester: and though much changed it was certainly he, though I know not by what means he has come to be in that regiment, which has the reputation of being a nest of sectaries and Independents. I had no chance to speak with him, but discovered by careful questioning of his captain (for I did not wish to reveal how I had known him at Ashcott), that he goes not under his own name, and joined the regiment when it was besieging Banbury, earlier this year. Apparently he was taken by them, and given the choice between imprisonment in London or service in the regiment: and not unnaturally chose the lesser evil. Why he was given that choice, I do not know, but the captain hinted at some ‘crime’ he had committed, and I believe he may have tried to aid some fleeing Royalists. But at any rate you can be assured that he is safe, and that for the moment his subterfuge remains undiscovered.”’ She looked at me, her round brow wrinkled in puzzlement. ‘Can he — can he mean Francis?’
‘Who else can he mean? Well, at least we know he’s safe,’ I said, hugely delighted. This development, while by no means welcome, was so much better than many of the awful possibilities that had tortured my mind for months that for the moment I cared nothing beyond the discovery that he was well, and safe. Lucy, still bewildered, said, ‘But why? Why did he join the army? Surely they wouldn’t force him to choose that, would they?’
‘Well, Dan seems to think they did. Pray God Simon doesn’t know. And if his real name is ever found out, and that he once fought for Montrose, and the King …’
‘They won’t, because only Dan can possibly know who he is, and Francis is much too clever to give himself away so easily,’ said Lucy. ‘But how terrible, he was coming to you, and then to be taken into the army … Still,’ she added, leaping up and hugging me, ‘at least they’re both safe and they can look after each other!’
‘If Dan’s a major and Francis a trooper, and in separate regiments, there’ll be small chance of that,’ I said. ‘Well, with any luck the army will be disbanded soon, and we might have them both here before too long. And Lucy, don’t, please don’t, tell anyone that Francis is in the Roundhead army, it might lead to all manner of complications if it was generally known.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t,’ Lucy said. ‘And let’s hope you’re right about the army being disbanded.’
*
But my prediction proved an exceedingly naïve assumption. Lord Astley, sitting on his drum at Stow-on-the-Wold, with the King’s last army prisoner around him, had told his captors, ‘You have done your work, boys, and may go and play — unless you will fall out among yourselves.’ And his words had been prophetic: for a gulf was rapidly opening out between two sections of the victorious Roundheads. The New Model Army, led by Cromwell and Fairfax, was full of what their enemies, and Dan Ashley, called ‘sectaries’, men of every shade of extreme religious opinion (or none) — Anabaptists, Baptists, Brownists, Seekers, all generally lumped together under the name ‘Independents’. Against these were ranged the Presbyterians, altogether more narrowminded and intolerant of differing views. They were to be found to some extent in the Army, to a greater degree in Parliament, and were, of course, extremely thick upon the ground in Scotland. And the Presbyterians’ hatred and fear of the Independents, as is usual in these matters, created the very threat of which they had been so afraid. The growing trouble was fuelled by the irrepressible John Lilburne, stirrer of sedition before the war, who had published two pamphlets attacking halfhearted Parliament soldiers such as the Earl of Manchester, and the House of Lords. The Lords, in exasperation, committed him to the Tower, and failed entirely to silence him or to diminish his enormous popularity with ordinary Londoners. And his friends still at liberty continued the struggle for the rights of the people, who had endured or fought the war and now desired a greater share and say in the running of the country. Even in Suffolk there were repercussions. Arguments raged in alehouses, taverns and on street-corners, not all of them ignorant or stupid, on an enormous variety of subjects: freedom of religion, Presbyterianism, the Scots, the eventual fate of the King, the liberties of the people versus the rights of property owners and, closer to home, the recent witch-trials in Bury, or the iconoclast tours of Master William Dowsing. He had ordered the church at Bradfield Tye to be made as plain and bare as any barn, the Doom painting whitewashed over, the communion rails and the rood-screen hacked down and burnt, the carved angels in the roof defaced and the painted glass smashed. He had even wanted the monument to Sir Christopher Heron, founder of the family and more than a hundred years dead, abused because the marble effigy was clasping a Papist cross: but on that subject Richard Trevelyan had been adamant, and a good dinner (one of Monsieur Harcourt’s most inspired creations) had persuaded Master Dowsing that Sir Kit was best left in peace.
But even in Suffolk the Parliament supporters did not have it all their own way. Discontent among the apprentices and rougher elements in Bury was rife, and the harvest in 1646 failed disastrously. That December, there was a riot in Bury caused by resentment at shops opening on Christmas Day, treated by all good Puritans, here as in Scotland, as just another working day. The ’prentices, deprived of their holiday, attempted to ‘persuade’ the shopkeepers to close, and only prompt action by the local magistrates and constables prevented serious damage and injury. Nor did the New Year bring better times: prices rose, the poor began to go hungry, and anger flowered in the Army when it was discovered that the Presbyterians in the Parliament wanted to send some regiments to Ireland, and disband the rest without giving them their arrears of pay.
I would have liked nothing better than the disbanding of the Army, but even I could see that this unbelievably foolish action would set the spark to the bonfire with a vengeance. Knowing Francis to be amongst them, I had already been taking a covert interest in any news concerning the Army: and had rapidly come to the conclusion that this force was unique, bound together as no army before, not only by its un-English discipline and sinister ruthless efficiency, but also by loyalty to aims and ideals not generally shared by those in authority, and for which they considered they had been brought into existence to fight — peace, freedom for the people from tyranny, injustice and oppression, and the preservation of the laws and liberties of the land and the subjects of the King. And when it seemed that the Presbyterians in Parliament were conspiring to pervert and smother those aims, the Army reacted. I knew that Francis, whatever he felt about his enforced presence amongst them, would be wholeheartedly with the soldiers in that, perhaps even one of the ‘Agitators’, the representatives of each regiment chosen by the men to air their grievances: for the ideas now flying back and forth between Lilburne and his friends in London and the Army men were very similar to Francis’s own, the same concern for the poor and oppressed, the same desire to live in a country untrammelled by religious repression, where people could think and speak and write what they pleased without fear of reprisal. For too long, I guessed, Francis had suppressed this side of his character: now at last, for the first time in his life, he would be able to give free rein to his opinions, and to have the chance of acting on them. Once, I had been dubious of his ideals, seeing a threat to the stable little world of luxury that I had inhabited: but that had been before the war, and things were very different now, the King defeated and imprisoned, many of his supporters fled or impoverished, the country frothing like yeast with new ideas, the world, as old Royalists gloomily and disapprovingly put it, turned upside down. And I saw with my own eyes the poverty around me that I did not share, and knew that I was in a privileged position which I had done nothing to earn. And if I, with my strong will and hot temper, had been born into some squalid hovel with no hope of adequate sustenance for body or mind, no future save miserable unremitting unrewarded toil for all my days, which would most like be far shorter than my wealthy well-fed self could hope for, with none of the intellectual delights of music and books and poetry and plays — if I had lived in that environment, I knew full w’ell that I would be in rebellion too.
So, I began to sympathize with the Levellers, as they were later called, in London, and the Independent faction in the Army, and thus found myself at odds with the rest of the family. Lucy, of course, cared nothing for politics, though her soft heart was always touched to generosity by a beggar: even less could be said of her mother. Jamie was at one with Simon in his support for the established order of things: and as deep thought was rather alien to his nature, I doubted he had considered the matter very thoroughly. Meraud supported her uncle and he, whatever his ideas had been before the war, when he had consorted with Prynne and Pym and written seditious pamphlets, was now in possession of Goldhayes and unequivocally on the side of authority and the status quo. The people in the villages around grew used to seeing me riding up to their doors and hearing me enquire after their welfare: and where I could, offering medicines, advice, food, even money borrowed from John Sewell or Grainne, who were both sympathetic, and doing what I could to alleviate any suffering. I also tried to act as a mediator between them and Richard Trevelyan, since John had already failed in this task. I attempted to persuade him to raise wages, to take on unemployed villagers, to help improve the worst of the village houses, to increase his contribution to the Poor Fund, and found him distantly, implacably, courteously declining. The crisis came when, in the spring of 1647, he decided to raise the rents of the Goldhayes tenants. For many small husbandmen, after the disastrous harvest of the previous year, it was the final straw. A deputation, led by Holly Greenwood, whose reputation as the local Jeremiah made him the natural choice for this role, trooped self-conscious but determined up to Goldhayes to put their case. Unfortunately, the question of tithes somehow arose as well, and all their simmering grievance at having to pay these not even to maintain a minister of God, but to keep Richard Trevelyan in luxury (for Goldhayes and Bradfield Tye had once been Church land and the tithes had since the Reformation gone to the Herons), rose abundantly to the surface. There was a fine exchange of words, and Holly’s little band were ignominiously ejected with the threat of arraignment by the Justices hanging over them. Holly, whose resentment was entirely heaped on Master Trevelyan and who bore no grudge against any Heron, told me that feelings ran very high in the village. ‘They be a-saying now in the Sun-rising that Master Trevelyan hev stolen the land away from Master Heron, and some on ’em be a-talking suffen wild, like.’
‘What sort of things are they saying, Holly?’ And then, as he went red and shuffled his feet, I added, ‘Oh, Holly, surely you can tell me? Aren’t I to be trusted?’
‘I’m sorry, Mistress,’ said poor Holly. ‘Thass suffen okkard, like, for you, I can see that … Some on ’em be saying as how they’d like to set the ricks afire, or even the Hall, unless Master Trevelyan goo back on what he said.’ He looked unhappily at me, and I said, ‘I’ll talk to Master Trevelyan about it.’
In the end, John and I both went to see him. We put the villagers’ case logically and compassionately, and when Richard frowned and began to speak of all the extra drains and taxes and expenses on the estate that the increased rents would pay for, I said, ‘I am sure Simon would not agree to it, were he here. He always had a care for the wishes of his tenants, and I know Master Blagge feels the same: he hasn’t raised his rents, though of course he has always been very careful of his money.’ I gazed sternly into Richard’s face, hoping that he could read the tacit message I was sending him. Stop this, my look said, or we shall warn Ambrose Blagge and Simon of what we suspect is going on.
If he had been innocent, I knew, he would have clung to his plans: but he backed down with alacrity. ‘I am sorry, Thomazine, John, I had no idea of how matters stood … this has all been a very sorry misunderstanding, and I am glad you have made matters clear to me. You may tell the villagers, John, that I will not after all raise the rents this year.’
So we left him, victorious, and the breach between Hall and village was healed: on the surface at any rate. After that episode, Richard seemed to realize his danger, and in his serpentine manner slithered on to safer ground. He did not again attempt to go against John’s advice, and although he did not go out of his way to help the poorer labourers and cotters, he did nothing more to antagonize any of the tenantry. But John and Grainne and I knew now that our suspicions were confirmed: the intent to cheat the Herons was there, surely, but the methods and present position remained obscure. I hoped that we had discouraged him, but was cynical about our chances of permanent success.
*
Two or three months before this, the King had been handed over to the Parliament by his Scottish captors, in exchange for large amounts of back pay for the Scottish army. They were now free to go home, to a Scotland relieved from war, for the King had, in the summer of 1646, persuaded Montrose to abandon the struggle and go into exile, taking with him a few loyal friends. I wondered if Malise Graham was amongst them, and if he would ever be reunited with Grainne. The Royalist dream was ended for good: there remained only the squabbles of Army and Parliament over the governing of the Kingdom, and the perennial question of what was to be done with the King?
Parliament had him in their custody, but when the Independents virtually seized power in the Army, in May of 1647, they took care to seize the person of the King as well. After all, whatever one’s political views, it was obvious that his fate would be a key factor in any decision that was reached: to the Presbyterians, someone to be negotiated with, and eventually replaced on the throne to restore equilibrium to the wildly rocking boat of the traditional order: and to the more extreme of the Independents a particularly noxious example of that despised breed, monarchs, who should be brought to account for his tyranny and misgovernment. All that summer and autumn the battle of words continued: the Army leaders, Cromwell, Fairfax, Ireton, supporting their soldiers in their demands for radical reform for just so long as it suited them to do so. There was a Council of War at Bury, and soldiers quartered throughout Suffolk: and, so it was said, that the regiment guarding the King after his seizure by the Army was Whalley’s. And still there was no word from Francis, no sign that he remembered me or, indeed, was still on this earth to love me: and the old sharp, wild pain of despair had dulled long since to a resigned acceptance. As in my childhood, I must make the best of things: and hope.
The country watched and waited as, with the Presbyterians routed, the Agitators of each regiment and their chief officers, known rather derisively as the Grandees, struggled for supremacy. Then, in November, the King escaped — it was rumoured with Cromwell’s connivance — and the debates in Putney church that had argued over the governing of the kingdom with passionate belief on both sides had to be broken up. Cromwell had to defeat the Agitators and their supporters in the regiments, for only the Army stood between England and the anarchy of further war, and it could only be in that position while he and the officers remained in control of it. The Levellers were outmanoeuvred: the Army was ordered to rendezvous in three different places, and with the Agitators divided and disunited, it was easy for the Grandees to reassert their authority. Mutiny died: the King at Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight negotiated with Parliament on the one hand and for a Scottish rising on the other. The threat of the Levellers and their plans for democracy was in temporary eclipse as civil war loomed again on the horizon.
*
Fascinated as I was by all this political ferment, I could not ignore what was happening at Goldhayes. For during that year it became more and more obvious to me that what I suspected, and dreaded, was the truth. Meraud no longer pursued Charles Lawrence: his letters went unanswered, possibly unopened, as she continued gently, oh so subtly and insinuatingly, to bind Jamie to her for ever. Not a difficult task in itself, since Jamie’s open-mouthed adoration had never diminished during all the time she had ignored him, and now increased daily: but it must be done carefully so as not to draw the attention of the rest of the family to the abrupt volte-face in her affections, and hence to the probable reason for it. I was able, with a detached, sardonic and prejudiced eye, to watch the gradual steps in her seduction: the speaking glance, the rapt attention on his every word and gesture no matter how foolish, the artless linking of her arm in his, the brilliant smile for him alone. All these were employed in full measure, and I could not believe anyone could be ensnared by artifice that, to me, seemed so blindingly obvious.
