Act of Oblivion, page 7
‘No such warrant had been issued when we left England,’ said Will. ‘In any case, it wasn’t murder.’
‘And since then?’
‘Now, John,’ warned Norton, ‘these men are guests in my house.’
‘True, and of course you must entertain whom you please. But I wouldn’t have been present had I known of the accusation.’
A silence had once again fallen on the room as people turned to witness the exchange.
Ned said pleasantly, ‘How old are you, Mr Crowne?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘Nineteen! I thought as much – a babe in arms when the King was tried. You know nothing of the circumstances.’
‘I know the fifth commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.”’
‘And we know Exodus,’ said Will. ‘“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot . . .” Charles Stuart was no innocent. He killed thousands.’
‘But still he was your king – our king.’
‘Crowne by name,’ said Ned, with a grin, turning to the others in the room, ‘and Crowne by nature, I see!’
There was laughter. Crowne flushed. ‘Forgive me, Reverend Norton.’ He bowed to his host. ‘I cannot remain under this roof any longer.’
‘John!’
‘Let him speak as he wishes,’ said Ned. ‘He has a right to his opinion.’
A loud knock came at the door.
Endecott said, ‘That will be Michelson. Let him in, Mr Norton.’
But when Norton unlocked the door, it was a very different figure who was standing on the threshold – tall, well dressed, erect and confident. Behind him was the Scotsman from earlier in the afternoon, along with his companions. Norton tried to shut the door, but the stranger stuck out his boot to keep it open. Ned drew his sword, and this time Will did the same.
‘Mr Norton,’ said the stranger politely. ‘Good day to you.’ He touched his hat. ‘I am Captain Thomas Breedon.’
‘I know who you are,’ replied Norton. ‘This is a private meeting.’
Breedon craned his neck to peer around him. ‘And there is Mr Endecott – good day to you, Governor – and there, if I am not mistaken, are Colonel Edward Whalley and Colonel William Goffe.’
‘Move aside, Mr Norton,’ commanded Endecott. He stepped in front of him. ‘State your business, Captain Breedon.’
‘My business, Governor? Your business, surely? Those men are wanted for the murder of the King.’
‘So you say. I have received no warrant to that effect.’
‘Then allow me to read you the latest London newsletter.’ Breedon reached inside his coat and pulled out a printed sheet. ‘It came upon the Scottish ship this very day and reports the following vote of Parliament: “Resolved, upon the Question, by the Commons assembled in Parliament on the 17th day of May 1660, that all the Persons who sat in Judgment upon the late King’s Majesty, when Sentence of Death was pronounced against him, and the Estates both real and personal, of all and every of the said Persons, whether in their own Hands, or in the Hands of any other, who are fled, be forthwith seized and secured: And the respective Sheriffs, and other Officers, whom this may concern, are to take effectual Order accordingly.” And here is the list of names of those who are to be seized, along with all their property. Do you see, sir?’ He put his finger on the paper and thrust it in the governor’s face. ‘Those of Whalley and Goffe are quite plainly printed.’
‘Be that as it may,’ said Endecott, with a defiant upward tilt of his chin, ‘that is a newsletter, not a warrant.’
‘Then I insist that at least they should be arrested and held in custody until the warrant arrives.’
‘You insist, sir?’ The governor’s voice was edged high with indignation. ‘You may insist all you wish, Captain Breedon, but you have no standing in this matter. I have the authority in this colony.’
‘You are still a servant of the Crown . . .’
As the argument continued, Ned whispered to Norton, ‘Tell me, who is this Captain Breedon?’
‘A merchant of some means. A shipowner. A Royalist. An enemy of the Puritan faith.’
He looked around. ‘Is there a back way out of your property?’
‘Of course.’
‘What do you say, Will? Should we withdraw?’
Will took note of their position: the governor on the doorstep; the church members clustered at his back to give him support; Breedon at the head of his rabble, but so intent upon his heated dispute with Endecott he seemed temporarily to have forgotten the presence of his quarry.
‘I think it would be prudent.’
The officers put away their swords and followed Norton through the kitchen, past a maidservant standing pressed to the table with her mouth agape, and out into a yard. The minister opened a gate in the wall, stepped into the street, looked up and down, and returned a moment later. ‘The way is clear. If you go left and then right, you will reach the Cambridge road.’
Ned said, ‘We are sorry to have brought our troubles to your house, Mr Norton.’
‘It is no matter. The fault is ours. We should not have issued the invitation.’
‘We shall gladly come again if you ask us.’
‘Indeed. Indeed we shall.’ But the hesitancy in his voice, in contrast to the urgency with which he ushered them out into the street, suggested to Will that they might well have seen the last of the Reverend Norton and the Boston First Church.
They moved quickly – not running, as that would have attracted suspicion, but walking with long and rapid strides – until very soon they were out of the town and back on the road beside the Charles. Only then did they risk glancing over their shoulders. No one seemed to be following.
It started to rain – big, heavy late-summer drops, surprisingly cold, that raked the river and the leaves of the trees beside the track like musket shot. They hunched their sodden shoulders and trudged on without speaking, each contemplating what had just occurred. It was no more than either had expected. Yet to see it published in the language of Parliament and flourished in public made their predicament seem much more real. And their property confiscated as well! That they had not foreseen. The Estates both real and personal . . . whether in their own Hands, or in the Hands of any other . . . What did it mean? The seizure not only of the houses that sheltered their wives and children, but of the very chairs they sat upon, and the knives and spoons they used to eat with? The property and lands whose rents provided their only income? It was utter ruination.
Ned could sense his son-in-law’s resentment. Will’s instinct had been right: they should never have ventured into Boston without making sure it was safe.
‘Well,’ he said eventually, to break the tension between them, ‘at least we now know the true situation.’
Will gave him a bitter sideways look. His face was white, clenched, dripping rainwater. ‘And in what way does that help us?’
‘It shows us we must be more careful in the future.’
‘You say that now?’
The younger man had never spoken to him in such a tone before. They both lapsed back into silence.
It took them an hour to reach the crossing point. It was late afternoon by then, gloomy in the rain. The ferry was on the Cambridge side and the ferryman plainly had decided to finish for the day. His hood was up, his back turned. He pretended not to hear them at first. They had to cup their hands to their mouths and holler and wave their arms to persuade him to come and fetch them.
Ned stood alone with his feet planted apart as they were hauled across the river. He wiped his sleeve across his eyes.
Behind him, he heard Will approach. ‘Forgive my rough words earlier. As to my personal situation, you know I care nothing for either life or property. Yet I could not help but think of Frances and the little ones. It must be hard for them now. Harder than for us.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘We’d be wise to confine ourselves to Cambridge from now on, I think.’ Will laid his hand upon Ned’s shoulder. Together they contemplated the approaching settlement. It looked dark and dismal in the murk. ‘We must have faith. “Be without covetousness and be content with such things as ye have. For he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake.”’
The ferry ran aground into the shallows of the riverbank causing both men to stumble slightly.
‘Amen to that,’ said Ned.
Chapter Six
ALITTLE OVER TWO weeks later, on the final Saturday in August – as sweet an end-of-summer’s day as one might ever hope to find in England – Mr Richard Nayler stood in the courtyard of Lambeth House, just across the Thames from Parliament, a pencil in one hand, a warrant from the House of Commons in the other ordering the transfer into his custody of all those prisoners presently held in Lambeth.
He knew each one by sight. Nevertheless, as the prisoners were brought up from the cellars, shackled at the wrists and ankles, he politely asked their names and marked them off on his list. Of the seventeen who passed before him, fourteen had signed the King’s death warrant; the others had been judges at his trial. They had surrendered themselves to Parliament in the expectation of royal mercy, and as they emerged, one after another, maggot white after months underground, their eyes screwed up against the sudden sunshine, several among them, still not accustomed to their loss of status, demanded to know what was to happen to them now.
‘A short trip downriver,’ responded Nayler pleasantly, and gestured across the courtyard to the pier where the barge was waiting.
After the men had been loaded and he had signed the Serjeant-at-Arms’ receipt confirming their delivery, he settled himself into the stern of the barge and pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes. Once the boat had pushed off from the pier, he allowed his hand to brush the surface of the water. A second boat followed, filled with soldiers. As Hyde had predicted, the production of the death warrant had sparked a new frenzy for vengeance in Parliament. There seemed to be no limit to it. But it would all be ended well enough once they caught the thirteen who were on the run. He knew the rough whereabouts of most of them on the Continent. It was only Whalley and Goffe who eluded him entirely. The thought of that pair still enjoying freedom rankled almost enough to spoil his good mood.
The barge went under the centre of London Bridge and then swung left towards the Tower. As it passed beneath Traitor’s Gate, a moan arose from some of the prisoners. By the time they had moored, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Robinson, was on the quayside with a dozen guards. Nayler did not care for him – a stupid, boastful merchant from the city. He climbed out of the boat, and Robinson signed immediately for the receipt of the prisoners, resting the paper on his thigh and marking it with a careless hand.
Nayler said, ‘You do not wish to count them, Sir John?’ Such sloppiness offended him.
‘Your word is good enough for me, Mr Nayler.’
Robinson returned the receipt. The prisoners were hauled roughly out of the barge and shoved along the quayside. Colonel Scroope stumbled past with blood pouring from his head. Robinson said, ‘Our new garrison are an Irish Catholic regiment. They remember Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford. It will be a hard home for a regicide, I fear.’
Nayler waited until the last of the traitors had stumbled up the steps and been herded into the darkness of the interior, then boarded the empty barge for the voyage back to Whitehall. And for the first time in many years, as the oars dipped and he was pulled away from that grim grey-stone fortress, with its narrow slit windows and the gulls crying over the green-slimed rocks, he experienced an emotion he had almost forgotten: a twinge of human sympathy.
Over the next three days, Nayler was in perpetual motion, sleeping little, scurrying with his scuffed brown leather case of interrogation reports and compromising documents between his apartment in Essex House, his office off the Privy Council corridor in Whitehall Palace, the chambers of the Crown lawyers near Fleet Street, and the committee rooms of Parliament in Westminster. On Tuesday 28 August, the Act of Oblivion was approved by Parliament, and the following day, as a reward for his efforts, Nayler was invited to accompany Sir Edward Hyde in his carriage from Worcester House to the House of Lords to witness His Majesty sign it into law.
The Lord Chancellor, in his heavy velvet robes of black and gold, sat opposite Nayler, his fleshy face pouring sweat, his page boy beside him, his damp hands resting on the head of his walking stick. As they passed the Banqueting House, he glanced up at the window from which the martyred King had stepped on the day of his execution. ‘The streets will run with blood for a week or two,’ he muttered, ‘and then let’s hope we can make an end of it.’ He didn’t speak again until they were at Westminster, pulling up outside the peers’ entrance. ‘Well then,’ he sighed, ‘let’s get this business over with.’
Nayler stood at the bar of the Lords’ chamber and viewed the pageantry with detachment. The vividness of the colours, the roar of conversation of the peers and MPs assembled, the piercing note of the heralds’ trumpets, the abrupt silence, the opening of the door beside the throne at the far end of the chamber that signalled the assembly should rise, even the appearance of the King himself, crowned and magnificently robed in red velvet trimmed with ermine – none of it moved him. It should have been a moment of triumph, but ever since the loss of Sarah, he had lost the capacity to feel content.
Hyde struggled up from his seat on the Woolsack and invited the King to speak.
Charles II was a big man, a foot or so taller than his father, and every inch the image of a king – virile, handsome, dark-haired, dark-eyed: ‘the Black Boy’, they’d called him when he was younger. In a voice of regal authority he read out the speech that Hyde had written for him and Nayler had checked.
‘I have been here sometimes before with you, but never with more willingness than I am at this time. And there can be few men in the Kingdom who have longed more impatiently to have this Bill passed than I . . .’
Nayler looked across the chamber, picking out a few faces he knew – his patron, the Marquess of Hertford, now elevated to the dukedom of Somerset, looking old and frail; the Duke of York, the King’s younger brother, sitting beside the throne with a bored expression; Sir Orlando Bridgeman, the Chief Justice, who would both help the prosecuting lawyers draft the charges against the regicides and then preside over their trial – so much for a fair hearing.
‘. . . the same discretion and conscience which disposed me to that clemency which is most agreeable to my nature, will oblige me to rigour and severity. And I must conjure you all, my lords and gentlemen, to concur with me in this just and necessary severity . . .’
At the repetition of ‘severity’, a deep-throated masculine murmur of approval rose to the coffered roof.
It was soon over. The King finished his address with a plaintive appeal for money that he must have inserted himself at the last minute (‘I have not been able to give my brothers one shilling since I came to England’), the Oblivion bill was presented to him by the clerks, he bent over the table, signed it, acknowledged the applause, then exited by the door through which he had entered, bowing to a few he recognised. Hyde tottered after him on his swollen legs. He beckoned Nayler to follow him into the crowded chamber behind the throne.
Half a dozen women – bejewelled, their hair piled fashionably high, their dresses cut fashionably low – were standing together, watching the King. One attendant at his back removed His Majesty’s ermine robes; another, in front, on tiptoe, lifted off his crown. How ordinary he looked suddenly, Nayler thought. You would pass him in the street and think him just some Italian merchant on his way to meet his tailor.
The King was in profile, smiling and winking at the ladies. Hyde said, ‘Your Majesty, may I present Mr Richard Nayler, who has been most diligent in the matter of bringing to justice the murderers of your late father?’
Reluctantly the King turned away from the women and held out his hand. Nayler bowed and kissed it. ‘Your Majesty.’ He had been presented twice before, but it was plain his sovereign had no memory of him.
‘We are most grateful for your efforts . . .’ The King looked at Hyde.
‘Nayler,’ said Hyde.
‘Mr Nayler.’ He smiled and nodded and turned back to Hyde. ‘That went well enough, I think, Sir Edward.’
‘Your presence was commanding, Your Majesty.’
The tallest of the women stepped in front of the Lord Chancellor. She took the King’s arm. ‘Enough politics for one day, Sir Edward, surely? I think His Majesty needs an hour or two of rest.’
The King laughed, showing large white teeth, and allowed himself to be led away.
Hyde tapped his stick against the floor. ‘Rest – is that what she calls it?’
‘She is a great beauty,’ Nayler said carefully. ‘Who is she?’
‘She,’ said Hyde with distaste, ‘is Mrs Palmer. Don’t tell me that you, with all your spies, have never heard of her? The King has just installed her in a house next to his palace.’
Nayler was on alert at once.
‘And which house would that be, Sir Edward?’
‘The closest one, of course – Whalley’s old place.’
As soon as he could escape, which took about an hour, Nayler hurried out of the precincts of Westminster, past the taverns and the narrow little yards, up King Street towards Whitehall Palace.
A stream ran down the middle of the road. The houses nearest to the palace were all built in the Flemish style: three or four storeys, terraced and gabled, with diamond-paned bay windows jutting out over the street, their timbers gilded and brightly painted to match their occupants’ coats of arms, which were fixed above the doors.
He knew exactly which had been Whalley’s: he had had it watched since the end of May. On his instructions, Katherine Whalley, together with her stepdaughter, Frances Goffe, and Goffe’s brood of children, had been allowed to remain long after they should have been evicted. Unfortunately, the women had been careful; no clue as to the whereabouts of their menfolk had been discovered. Still, he preferred to have them where he could keep an eye on them, and he had believed he had an understanding with the Commissioner of Works. But now they had been moved out in favour of the King’s mistress, and the Whalley family crest of three spouting whales’ heads had been torn down, leaving marks in the brickwork.
