The Bear Pit
Page 32
When Thurloe stood up in Parliament on 19 January 1657, to inform the Commons of the conspiracy and its failure, he told them that interrogation of Cecil and Toope had revealed the name of the escaped plotter – ‘Boyes’. ‘This Boyes,’ he said, ‘is the chief agent. He is now in Flanders. It is likely that it is not his name, but he is a considerable person of the late King’s party.’* And so, into The Bear Pit enters Rupert of the Rhine. The adventures of Charles I’s dashing, six foot four devil-may-care nephew, son of the doomed Winter King and Queen of Bohemia, and fearless Royalist general, could fill, and has filled, many books. Those adventures are certainly too many to detail here, but a good flavour of them can be got from Charles Spencer’s highly readable Prince Rupert, the Last Cavalier (2007).
Despite his great height, and his fame throughout Europe, the idea that Rupert might have moved around London in disguise is perfectly feasible. The Stuarts, down to the hapless Charles Edward fleeing to Skye after the disaster of Culloden in the guise of ‘Betty Burke’, had a distinct flair for disguise, particularly in times of crisis. Charles II escaped England after the Battle of Worcester in a series of disguises, and rode for several days through the west of England masquerading as the servant of the courageous Jane Lane. A fourteen-year-old James, Duke of York, was sprung from Parliamentary clutches in St James’s Palace, in the guise of a young woman. In 1658, the Earl of Ormonde slipped into London from Bruges, disguised as a pedlar, his fair hair dyed black, and lodged with a Catholic surgeon on Drury Lane. Unfortunately, the dye eventually turned his hair a startling orange, but due to intelligence received from spies at the King’s court, Thurloe was already keeping an eye on his movements. As for Rupert, such was his reputation that he was mythologised as a master of disguise. It was said that he once dressed as an apple-seller, and went through the enemy camp, selling apples to Parliamentary soldiers. On another occasion, stopping for refreshment at an old woman’s cottage, he asked her opinion of Rupert of the Rhine. I don’t think it is too much to suggest that he might have moved, undetected, around London for three months or so, in 1656, by means of a series of disguises. If historical novelists are allowed to have favourites, Rupert, good Puritan though I am, is mine.
There is, of course, a vast literature around the period of the Protectorate and the prominent figures of the Civil War era. Key general texts are Trevor Royle’s Civil War (2004) and Antonia Fraser’s Cromwell (2008). Regarding intelligence activity, Julian Whitehead’s Cavalier and Roundhead Spies (2009) and Nadine Akkerman’s Invisible Agents (2018) make for fascinating reads. Amongst other things, the latter casts light on John Evelyn’s suspected clandestine correspondence with Royalists abroad in the period. References to bear-baiting and many other aspects of life under the Protectorate tend to be incidental and scattered through a wide range of books, but the shooting of the Bankside bears is specifically dealt with in Cromwell’s Buffoon, Robert Hodkinson’s 2017 biography of Colonel Pride. The Tradescants and their outstanding achievements are given worthy treatment in Jennifer Potter’s Strange Blooms (2006). John Aubrey in his near-contemporary Brief Lives tells us that Thomas Bushell (alias Mr Mulberry in my book), did indeed have a very chequered career and rather sinisterly decorated home on Lambeth Marsh. The enigmatic Andrew Marvell has inspired many studies, and the Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (2011) considers a wide range of aspects of his life and work, whilst leaving enough space for the infatuated writer to create her own version of this elusive genius. At the other end of the scale, eschewing enigma and not even attempting to elude us, is the wonderful Samuel Pepys, in whose diaries the realities of seventeenth-century life are sometimes movingly, sometimes riotously, but always colourfully laid bare. My own personal favourite rendering of them is in Kenneth Branagh’s brilliant reading of The Samuel Pepys Collection for Hodder & Stoughton Audiobooks.
Insight into the astonishing amount of work that passed across John Thurloe’s desk can be gained from the Thurloe Papers www.british-history.ac.uk/thurloe-papers
Shona MacLean, Conon Bridge, January 2019
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* Diary of Thomas Burton Esq., vol.1, July 1653-April 1657. Monday, January 19, 1656–7. www.british-history.ac.uk
s. G. maclean