A Corruptible Crown

by Gillian Bradshaw

  There was a single window set into the front of the building, and it was covered with an iron grate. Behind the grate a ragged prisoner sat intoning hoarsely, ‘Charity for a poor prisoner, for Jesus Christ’s sake, as you pray for God’s mercy, charity for a poor debtor . . .’ She put a ha’penny in the slot of the iron box set into the grating, but he continued his pleading without a glance. His face was glassy and his eyes were fixed a thousand miles away. He would have been begging all day, she knew. When dusk came he would be locked up again, and tomorrow a different prisoner would be given a chance to sit in the window. This poor wretch was undoubtedly contemplating how long he could subsist on the pittance he’d garnered this day. She turned into the archway just beyond the window, and rang the bell beside the heavy oak doors.

  A grated window in the main door opened, and the turnkey looked out. He grinned, showing blackened teeth. ‘For Major Wildman, aye?’ He unlocked the door, then opened it with a bow and stood aside.

  She set sixpence into his outstretched hand, and he grinned again – as he should, she thought sourly. Only a year before she’d been delighted to earn sixpence for a whole day’s work, and this man got it simply for opening a door! She drew the cloth off her wicker basket without being asked.

  ‘Strawberries!’ the turnkey exclaimed in delight. He picked up the little punnet of folded paper she’d set on top, then inspected the rest of the contents of the basket: more strawberries, two loaves of fresh wheat bread, a wheel of cheese, a cake, some spring onions and fresh herbs, three bottles of wine and a pouch of tobacco. He snagged one of the bottles of wine, lifted out the slice of cake she’d cut for him, and nodded cheerily.

  It always galled her to provide delicacies for the turnkeys, but she was resigned to it. If she hadn’t set some aside, the turnkey would have taken everything. She walked stiffly through into the courtyard of the prison. It was a cheerless place: a stretch of barren dirt, frowned upon by galleries of cells, and crowded with dirty, bedraggled men. A couple of pie-sellers who’d paid to be allowed in were hawking their wares. The stink of the Fleet River smothered the scent of the pies completely. Given their usual quality, that was no loss.

  A couple of the prisoners came over, leering. ‘Looking for someone, sweetheart?’ one asked.

  She ignored him and strode on into the yard, even though she didn’t know where she was going. Talking to whoremongers only encouraged them.

  She eventually spotted John Wildman on the north side of the courtyard. He was arguing with another prisoner in front of an attentive audience. She noticed as she came up that his coat was clean and that his long hair and small pointed beard were neatly trimmed; that was a relief. Of course, he had enough money to buy what comforts the prison could provide – he was infinitely better off than the poor beggars in the window! – but it was, still, always a relief to see him looking clean and neat. Prison broke men, reduced them to shuffling, filthy, red-eyed wrecks, but it hadn’t broken John Wildman yet.

  ‘But don’t you see?’ Wildman was demanding. ‘If he must swear in the coronation oath to grant laws for the people, then it follows that the people, not the King, are the source of law!’

  ‘The people have no right to meddle in law-giving!’ replied his opponent hotly. ‘That—’

  ‘Why not?’ Wildman interrupted. ‘All of us here have been obliged to receive the law, and, as scripture says, it is better to give than to receive.’

  There was an appreciative laugh. Wildman glanced around, acknowledging it, and spotted Lucy. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, with pleasure. ‘Mrs Hudson!’ He started toward her.

  His opponent grabbed Wildman’s arm. ‘See your whore later!’ he ordered.

  Wildman jerked his arm free. ‘You insult a godly gentlewoman!’ he declared angrily. ‘This is the wife of my good friend Mr James Hudson!’ That emphatic ‘Mister’ was to make it clear he was speaking of a gentleman, not a lowly tradesman.

  The other man was abashed. He muttered an apology – to Wildman, Lucy noted with annoyance, though she was the one who’d been called a whore. Wildman accepted the apology and extricated himself. He came over, his eyes fixed eagerly on her basket. His appearance of neatness was less convincing close up: his linen was stained, he was painfully thin, and his eyes were shadowed. He’d been in the Fleet five months now. He’d been arrested for promoting a petition for the reform of government, but he hadn’t been formally charged with any offence – which meant there was no knowing when he’d be released.

  ‘How do you do?’ she asked anxiously.

  He grimaced. ‘Well enough, in the circumstances.’ He glanced around. Quite a few of his erstwhile audience were also eyeing Lucy’s basket. There wasn’t much he could do about that. In the Fleet, the only privacy was in a locked cell – and men paid extortionately to be allowed out of them. Wildman did the best he could, however; he gestured his friends back and escorted Lucy over to the wall, where they at least had privacy on one side. ‘Do not stay long,’ he told her in a low voice. ‘There’s fever here. Two men died last night.’

  She winced. ‘Shall I bring you some of Dr Read’s water when next I come?’

  ‘I have little faith in it, but I suppose it’s better than nothing. Aye.’ He looked at the basket again.

  She handed it to him. ‘Find a good place to unpack it,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Strawberries.’

  His face lit. ‘Bless you!’

  Prisoners were expected to pay the jailers for their food, but what they got for their money was barely edible – and certainly never included strawberries. Wildman turned to one of his audience, a scrawny wretch who was still hanging about hopefully. ‘Hopkins,’ he said, ‘fetch the old basket from my room, and you may have a share from this one.’

  Hopkins at once dashed off. Lucy would take the old basket home and bring it back full in a week’s time. That saved unpacking the strawberries in public and drawing the attention of the yard-full of half-starved men.

  ‘Anything in the old basket?’ Lucy asked hopefully.

  Wildman shook his head. He was known as a pamphleteer, but for months now there had been nothing he wanted smuggled out. ‘Anything in here?’ he asked, hefting the basket.

  She shook her head. ‘There’s been nothing new since Tuesday.’ Tuesday was when another of Wildman’s friends visited the Fleet.

  Wildman sighed. ‘It seems an age since I held anything worth reading!’

  ‘You seemed to have found someone willing to argue with you, though,’ she said hesitantly.

  Wildman dismissed his erstwhile opponent with a contemptuous wave of the hand. ‘No one amusing. Ah well! You’re well? Have you heard from Jamie?’

  ‘Nay,’ she admitted. ‘Not since May.’

  ‘It means nought,’ he assured her. ‘I’m sure he has writ you, and the letter gone astray.’

  He said the same thing every time she had no letter to report. The repeated reassurance was beginning to grate. Did he think she didn’t know that letters went astray? Did he expect that knowledge to quell her uneasiness?

  ‘I saw Parliament Joan today,’ she said, to change the subject.

  ‘What, the spy? I would have thought she was dangerous company!’

  ‘I merely watched as she spoke to one of my mercury-women. She was asking about Pragmaticus.’

  Wildman frowned. ‘You should leave it.’

  ‘I’ll be safe enough, Major! Nedham has set down a description of her, boasting of the matter. There’s nothing so deadly to a spy as recognition. She’ll be in haste to find easier prey.’

  ‘Nedham’s a knave,’ Wildman said instantly. He scowled, as he always did when Nedham was mentioned. ‘A mercenary bawd. It frets me that my friend’s wife should work for him. I wish you had employment elsewhere.’

  ‘If I did,’ she replied at once, ‘I’d be too poor to visit you.’

  He frowned. ‘You’re an experienced printer. You should be able to . . .’

  ‘Experience means nothing, Major! Nor
skill! When first we met you yourself proclaimed there was no need to pay me a man’s wage, because it was my family’s task to support me.’

  That brought an irritated look. ‘I never will be permitted to forget that, will I?’

  ‘It’s not reproach!’ she objected, exasperated. ‘If you thought there was no need to pay a woman as much as a man, why should you suppose all your fellows think differently? Last month Mr White came asking if I wanted work, and said he could offer sixpence a day and my dinner. That’s a good wage, for a woman, and I might have accepted – if it left me with anything over after I paid the rent.’

  Wildman frowned. ‘How much does Nedham . . .’

  ‘Ten shillings a week,’ she said, not waiting for him to finish.

  ‘Ten?’ asked Wildman in surprise.

  ‘It was six,’ she admitted, ‘but he raised it after The Levellers Levell’d.’

  The Levellers Levell’d ‘an Interlude’, was both clever and nasty. Nedham had published it in December, shortly after Lucy started working for him. She hadn’t known about it – his previous printer had had the manuscript – and when she saw it she’d tried to resign. Sometimes she wished she’d succeeded; she’d be poor, then, but at peace. Instead she had ten shillings a week and a guilty conscience.

  Wildman shook his head disapprovingly. ‘So he offered more to keep you by him? I like that even less!’

  Lucy bit her lip, wishing she hadn’t mentioned it. Wildman often seemed to feel that he ought to be keeping an eye on his friend’s wife while Jamie was away, and she hated that. ‘Why?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Do you think me dishonest?’

  ‘Nay, nay!’ Wildman said hastily. ‘But you should not depend for your support on a rogue like Nedham! Jamie should ask help for you from his kin.’

  Jamie had told her very little about his family. She hadn’t even known that he was the son of a landowner until after he’d proposed to her. There was clearly an estrangement of some sort, and she very much doubted that his hasty marriage had improved matters. Whenever there was a long gap between letters she wondered whether he regretted marrying her. ‘Oh, that would be a fine introduction to them!’ she said. ‘“Good day, sir, I am your new daughter-in-law, and please can you give me ten shillings a week!” That would make them love me!’

  Wildman looked mulish. ‘And does Nedham love you?’

  Nay, he lusts after me, she thought irritably. She couldn’t say so, of course. Wildman would insist that she quit at once – or worse, he might tell Jamie. Her husband, she was quite certain, would be absolutely furious if he knew about Nedham’s ‘salutations’, and never mind it was the sort of treatment working women put up with all over England. She gave Wildman a hard look, then – once again noticing his shadowed eyes – relented. ‘I do mean to leave Pragmaticus, Major, as soon as ever I can.’ The sooner the better, she added silently.

  Wildman, too, relaxed. ‘When you have your own press, you mean.’

  He knew she was saving up for one. ‘Aye,’ she agreed. ‘I’ve ten pounds already!’ Most of that, it was true, was from a legacy – but she was managing to save a couple of shillings a week. ‘Mr White said he might sell me an old press for eleven pounds ten.’

  He glanced down at the basket in his hands. ‘You’d have it sooner without buying strawberries for a poor prisoner in the Fleet, I think.’

  ‘If it helps keep your spirits up, Major, it’s money well spent.’

  Walking home from the Fleet she wondered why it annoyed her so much that Wildman was trying to keep an eye on her. He was only doing what a friend was supposed to do. After all, men were supposed to guard and guide their womenfolk as they did their children.

  Of course, it was ridiculous for John Wildman to try to play guardian when he was in the Fleet Prison, and she was looking after him. She wondered, though, if she’d feel any different if he were free. She didn’t like being regarded as a weak and wilful child.

  She sighed, silently admitting to herself that one reason Wildman’s attempts at guardianship annoyed her was guilt. Jamie would not like it if he knew what she endured from Nedham. If she were a good wife she would find other employment. Many of the other employers she’d worked for, though, had been just as bad. The only way she could be sure of avoiding lecherous employers was to be her own mistress. For that she needed a press – which she could buy with just another one pound ten.

  Three shillings sixpence a week rent – paid to her friends the Overtons, and gladly. She knew they were using it to pay off debts incurred and replace household goods lost because of their own time in prison. A shilling and a half to visit the Major and keep him supplied. A shilling a week to the Leveller common fund, to support printing for the cause, and the families of those in prison. Then there were the incidental expenses – she bought dinners as cheaply as she could, from cookshops and street-corner vendors, but it still added up, and every week there was always something: pins, a new pair of stockings, the latest pamphlet. Even at ten shillings a week it would take her until autumn to amass enough savings.

  Jamie might be back by then. She often imagined what it would be like when Jamie came home and they set up house together. Usually her imaginings were happy daydreams: a little house, Jamie working at a forge, herself at her press. Sometimes, though – as now – they turned dark. Jamie was her master now, and everything she possessed was his. What if he took all the money she’d been saving for a printing press? He was entitled to, and if he spent it on his own business nobody would even disapprove – but it would, she was sure, destroy any chance of happiness for her, because she would hate him for it.

  She pictured Jamie to herself, as she always did when the fear struck. A big man, slow to speak but quick to defend his friends. A man with a strong and natural sense of fairness. He would not rob her, she told herself. A part of herself whispered, though, that she didn’t really know him very well. After all, she hadn’t even known he was a gentleman. What else might he have kept from her?

  She wished miserably that she could see him, and talk to him; that she could hold him close with her arms and let him kiss her fears away. Useless and pointless longing! She might as well wish the world at peace.

  Three

  Lieutenant Isaiah Barker did not improve on closer acquaintance.

  He took eight days to return from Pembroke, rather than the week he’d promised. When he did arrive back in the salvage camp on the Severn, he was cursing the Welsh: their ignorance and poverty, their incomprehensible language, bad inns, barren mountains and, above all else, their abominable roads.

  By then Robert Hudson was well on his way back to Lincolnshire. The great guns had all been salvaged from the mud, and were being dragged back to Bristol – three or four at a time, since the troop didn’t have the horses to move all of them at once. The latest news of the war was that the remnants of the Kentish uprising had been thwarted in an attempt to enter London, and had fled across the Thames into Essex. The New Model Army – including Commissary-General Ireton – was in pursuit. Barker was eager to rejoin his master; however, he still intended to take Jamie with him. ‘We’re short of blacksmiths,’ he informed Jamie. ‘We’ll travel light, and you’ll hold yourself subject to my orders on the road, or I’ll see you whipped.’ He smirked. ‘I have that authority!’

  Jamie nodded curtly. What couldn’t be avoided must be endured. ‘Am I to take my tools?’ he asked.

  Barker shook his head. ‘One saddlebag. I can requisition horses for you, but none for your baggage. You’ll have to find yourself new tools when you arrive.’

  Jamie was glad to get away from the inadequate forge – but after the first morning on the road with Barker, he wished himself back in the smoke. Sulphurous vapours were easier to cope with than the lieutenant’s taunts. ‘They say that when your famous chief John Lilburne was arrested last, he hid behind his wife to escape the soldiers. They say your bold lawman Wildman is now suing for a chance to sit in the window of the Fleet and beg.’


  Jamie considered correcting Barker, and decided that that was what the man wanted: an argument which would let him pull rank and assign punishment to a mutinous Leveller. He bore the taunts in silence and spurred his horse. The lieutenant was tired enough from his journey across Wales that he eventually shut his mouth and concentrated on riding.

  They made good time. Barker was authorised to requisition fresh horses from the garrisons along their way, and the long summer days meant they could start early and continue late. It rained on and off, but there was sun and wind enough to dry the mud. They reached Reading in the afternoon of the third day after leaving the Severn, and for once stopped before nightfall – to Jamie’s intense relief. He wasn’t used to spending so much time in the saddle. The local garrison commander informed them that the latest news had the royalist rebels in Colchester. Lord General Fairfax had tried to storm the town, but had been repulsed with heavy losses, and was now settling his army for a siege. Commissary-General Ireton was with him.

  The most direct route to Colchester lay through London. Jamie’s hopes had been rising with every mile they travelled toward the capital, and the next morning he was eager to set out, despite his weariness and aching muscles. About noon, however, Barker turned north off the main road.

  Alarmed, Jamie spurred his horse forward until he was riding knee to knee with the lieutenant. ‘Where are we going?’