And Nathaniel: fair like herself, gallant, only twenty-three. Even now, how nonchalant he looked, his golden hair falling past his shoulders, his elegant lace cuffs a contrast to the solemn plain cloth of both brothers; in his hand was the long clay pipe he loved to point casually at Obadiah whenever he swore one of his favourite blasphemous oaths, just to make sure the preacher did not miss it. Her own Nathaniel, her kindred spirit whom she loved even though he was often irresponsible.
She knew her brothers so well.
In the coming crisis she might have to protect Nathaniel. And she knew she must protect the child.
When she thought of the causes of this great storm that was about to engulf them, to Margaret at least it seemed that the whole matter was the fault of the king – the king and his terrible doctrine of divine right. That was why Sarum and half the country was up in arms; that was why her family was about to be torn apart; and in her heart, she cursed him.
When old Queen Elizabeth died childless at the turn of the century, the logical and proper choice as her successor had been her cousin James Stuart of Scotland, the sober-minded son of the beheaded Mary Queen of Scots.
At first it had seemed the new regime would bring happy times. England and Scotland, though each remained a separate kingdom with its own Parliament and Church, at last shared a single monarch. The king and both his peoples were mainly Protestant. There had been peace, at last, with Spain. And had not the start of the Stuart dynasty seen such glories as Shakespeare’s greatest plays performed in London, the opening up of the trade with the newly found continent of America, and the preparing of the noblest book in the English language – King James’s Authorised Bible? Why had it all turned sour?
Because James and his son Charles understood neither of the countries that they ruled.
They hated the Protestant Presbyters of Scotland who would have none of their bishops; they despised the proud Parliament of England.
Worse: the self-styled scholar James believed that kings ruled by divine right and that no one, even parliaments, should interfere with their actions.
Worse still: his son Charles I, governing through his hated favourites Buckingham and Strafford, had vigorously put his father’s ideas into practice.
It was Edmund, at last, who broke the uneasy silence, motioning his sister and brothers to sit at the old oak table. He himself sat in the chair at the head.
He looked unhappy. It was obvious that he had been steeling himself for this job for many hours. The other three waited silently as he opened the proceedings.
“The king’s commission of array is issued and he has raised his standard at Nottingham. Parliament has voted Lord Essex ten thousand men to oppose him.” He paused, looking from one to the other. He looked at young Nathaniel sternly. He knew where Obadiah stood.
“This family will fight,” he declared, “for the Parliament.” It was an order. If it was obeyed, the family might still come through together.
There was a long pause. Then young Nathaniel, very quietly:
“Brother Edmund, I cannot.”
A sound of disgust from Obadiah. Edmund winced. He had expected as much, yet hoped not to hear it.
He put a restraining hand on Obadiah, who was about to leave the table.
“Stay,” he commanded gently. “Let us not part like this. One last time, we shall discuss.”
Up and down the country, during those days, families were faced with the same terrible decisions. Great issues were at stake, fundamental to the constitution of State and Church, that would cause not only the kingdom to be riven, but brother to fight brother, to kill or die.
The final debate within the Shockley family was conducted in a calm and solemn manner. The arguments were familiar to them all, but now came the irrevocable taking of positions. The questions which must decide the issue came almost like a catechism.
EDMUND: Do you say that the king may rule without Parliament?
NATHANIEL: He has the right to do so.
EDMUND: But it is not the custom. Can the king tax illegally? What of ship-money?
No issue had been more furiously fought than the tax, owed only by ports, that Charles had tried to impose on inland towns as well. In Parliament, brave men like Hampden and Pym opposed him. At Sarum, the Sheriff in successive years was unable to collect even half of it.
NATHANIEL: If the king needs money for war, his loyal subjects should support him.
EDMUND: To any amount? Is that right?
NATHANIEL: The Parliament just called granted him nothing. Is that right?
EDMUND: May the king summon men before his prerogative courts and ignore ancient common law?
NATHANIEL: He has the right.
EDMUND: Do you approve?
NATHANIEL: No. But this is not cause to take up arms against him.
EDMUND: So – you believe then, that the king is not subject to the laws and customs of this realm but may do as he pleases?
Here was the heart of the matter. The privileges of Parliament, the ancient common laws, the liberties of Magna Carta, the custom, won centuries before, that the king cannot tax without the consent of Parliament: these were the rights that the parliamentary lawyers claimed that the king must observe. If a king is free to alter ancient privileges and customs, then, they claimed, the liberties of the people are left at the whim of tyrants.
NATHANIEL: The law derives from the king.
EDMUND: Not in England.
Indeed, part of the trouble between king and Parliament was that the constitution of England was not the Stuarts’ model. In Spain and France, Catholic rulers were building absolute, centralised monarchies beyond anything Charles I tried, that were to last another hundred and fifty years. But then they had not the combination of Puritan merchants and an ancient Parliament trained in dispute and conscious of its privileges to oppose them.
OBADIAH: Do you refuse the rights of Puritans to worship as they please?
NATHANIEL: I support the English Church – as does the king.
OBADIAH: So he says. Do you support Laud and his bishops then?
Nathaniel laughed. He had hardly ever met a man that did, certainly not in Sarum.
The High Church Laud, whose authoritarian ways had driven numbers of Puritans across the dangerous ocean to America, was scarcely popular even with Charles’s supporters, and least of all his attempts to summon laymen to answer charges before his ecclesiastical courts. In Sarum, such ideas were especially unpopular.
For early that century, after over three centuries of dispute, the townspeople of Salisbury had at last persuaded the king to grant them a charter of their own. The town was no longer subject to the bishop’s court: now the bishop only ruled the close. The interfering churchmen were being driven back.
NATHANIEL: Laud has improved the discipline and church services. I support the rule of bishops.
OBADIAH: And papists? Do you want England papist? With a foreign papist army in the hands of the king to impose his will upon us?
NATHANIEL: I trust the papists will not rule the king.
OBADIAH: They already do. We may expect an army of Irish papists here any day.
And now Nathaniel blushed. For the subject of Charles’s sympathies for the papists was one that made many of his fervent supporters uncomfortable. His queen, Henrietta Maria of France, was Catholic. Her priests were at court. The increasingly Puritan people of England had not forgotten Mary Tudor – Bloody Mary – and her terrible burnings; nor the wily Jesuits who urged treason and supported Spain in the reign of good Queen Bess. They had not forgotten the plots, real or supposed, of that other Frenchified Catholic, Mary Queen of Scots, nor, most terrible of all, the plot of Guy Fawkes and other Catholic extremist to blow up the houses of Parliament – King, Lords, Commons and all – one fifth of November, early in James’s reign.
As for the threat of an avenging army of Irish papists being brought over, that had been terrifying Englishmen for the last two years.
EDMUND: It
seems to me, Nathaniel, that you disapprove what the king does, yet you defend his rule. What have we seen recently that makes you think the king will change his ways?
Indeed, the series of events that started the Civil War, the spark that lit the conflagration, had shown Charles I at his worst – and most foolish.
First, he had insulted the Scots. For in 1638, Laud contemptuously told the formidable Presbyterians of Scotland, whose church effectively controlled the northern land, that they must abandon their Puritan ways, submit to rule by his bishops and follow the Anglican rites of the English Prayer Book – which did not, after all, vary so greatly from the original Roman Use of Sarum from which Cranmer had derived it. Scotland had risen, signed the Covenant to preserve its own Presbyterian rule and marched into England.
Charles was helpless. Like the medieval kings before him, each time he overreached himself, he found he had no money.
He tried every means to raise it, and failed. The troops he called for did not materialise. In Wiltshire, when they found they were not to be paid, they rioted and it was all Lord Pembroke could do to quieten them.
Since he needed money, Charles had to call a Parliament.
He was in a trap. Parliament voted him no funds; its Presbyterian members sympathised with the Scots anyway; the Scots, cannily, stayed camped in the north.
Then the great Parliament of 1640, known in British history as the Long Parliament, struck. It demanded the impeachment of the king’s most trusted councillors. Soon Strafford had been executed at the Tower of London in front of a cheering crowd and Archbishop Laud was in prison. It was humiliation for the king. The Irish rose in revolt. Still Parliament voted no money but passed the Grand Remonstrance – a massive indictment of his rule.
The proud Stuart king then made the mistake that ended medieval monarchy in England for ever.
He came to the House of Commons in person, to arrest Pym, Hampden and three other members. It was the final provocation. To cries of “Privilege and Parliament”, London went into revolt, Charles was forced to flee: and the country was ready for civil war.
Was there still hope of reconciliation now? Some said there was. The eminent lawyer Hyde had been writing brilliant pamphlets for his royal master, showing that a settlement was possible. In return, Parliament had set conditions that would put the king entirely under their control. They no longer trusted him.
MARGARET: So why, Nathaniel, do you support the king? Is not Parliament a better ruler than a tyrant king with a papist army under his control?
How could he explain? For many, the ties to the king were simple – the personal ties of a great nobleman whose family had been advanced by the Stuarts, or the natural conservatism of a country peasant who supported the old ways.
And a young man with no great noble connections, from Sarum?
Nathaniel’s feelings for the monarchy ran deep. Of course, there was the style of the king’s court. He had caught some of the flavour of it when, two years before, he had spent six months at the Inns of Court while he was trying, without much application, to make himself a lawyer. Charles I, great collector of art, patron of men like Inigo Jones the architect and great painters like Van Dyck; Charles, with his cosmopolitan court; Charles, whose wife was half a Medici; Charles who had already erected small but brilliant classical buildings in London. How could an imaginative, light-hearted young student from Sarum not be dazzled by the outward trappings of these sophisticated European wonders?
But more important, the monarchy had always been there. Whether or not the notion of divine right was a Stuart invention, kingship was certainly sacred: it was part of the natural order, the divine hierarchy. It went back into the mists of time. Why, was not the English king descended from the old Anglo-Saxon royal house that produced Edward the Confessor? Did not, even nowadays, the king touch men and cure them of the King’s Evil – scrofula?
The king was a brilliant man. A good man – he was even faithful to his wife.
It must be wrong, therefore, for Parliament men, mere factions, to set themselves up against the ancient and lawful authority of kings. Destroy the sanctity of kingly rule and you are on the road to chaos.
He could not express all these feeligns. They would hardly have impressed dour Obadiah anyway. But he must try.
NATHANIEL: But can you not see – once you destroy kingship, you destroy the natural order. Even if the king be wrong, he is the anointed monarch: our ancient privileges are bound up with his. Take away the king, and who governs?
OBADIAH: Men of God.
NATHANIEL: Presbyters. Why, their tyranny would be worse than the king’s. I have heard it said: new Presbyter is but old priest writ large.
EDMUND: The king may rule, but only by consent of Parliament.
NATHANIEL: Then Parliament usurps the king – steals his ancient rights. Tell me this, by whose authority do they then rule instead? Who calls them to govern? I say, if the old order is gone, then there’s no authority in England. The Parliament might as well be summoned by the people themselves.
EDMUND: That is a foolish charge.
NATHANIEL: It is not. If you destroy the authority of the king, Brother Edmund, then it will one day be the mob, the people themselves who will rule. And that would be chaos and tyranny combined.
EDMUND: I see we shall never agree.
The debate of the Shockley family was over. There was nothing more to say.
Nathaniel looked at his eldest brother with affection. Though only a few years separated them from the two older brothers, he and Margaret had grown up like a second family of old William. The stern side of their father’s nature was reserved for his two older sons and the youngest boy and girl, though they were not spoiled, led a more free and easy existence, creating their own little world apart. In a way, it seemed to Nathaniel, they had been children longer. He was sometimes sorry for Edmund who, he knew, always laboured hard under the burden of being the next head of the family. He remembered the times, as a child, when his serious older brother used to come and play with him gazing almost wistfully at his childish pranks. Edmund was a good scholar. He had studied the law with stern application. One day he might even have gone into Parliament.
But all that must be set aside now. They were children no longer.
“You mean to fight for the king?” Edmund asked gloomily.
“I do.”
It was a serious business, yet, having made his decision, he felt almost cheerful.
There was a long pause, while Edmund looked grave.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said with sadness. “You must leave this house.”
Nathaniel smiled. How like his eldest brother: the melancholy voice of authority. He could see that it was said almost against Edmund’s own will.
“I have no wish to do so,” he replied blandly.
“I am sorry for it. But I am head of the family now.”
Obadiah nodded in support.
Poor Obadiah. Their father never liked him, and though William had tried to disguise the fact, Obadiah certainly always knew it.
He had not been kind to Obadiah himself: in fact, he had teased him ever since he could talk. He had always hurt his brother’s morbid vanity by refusing to take him seriously. Once, when he was ten, he had taunted him into such a frenzy that the thin, dark adolescent, who then was suffering from painful face acne, had rushed at him in an uncontrollable rage and bitten him on the hand. He had never forgotten it. Obadiah would not be sorry to see him go.
He gazed at his brothers mildly.
“I run the farm.” It was Margaret. They had almost forgotten her. Now the three brothers turned.
She had taken little part in their arguments. She had no wish to. Besides, an instinct for self-preservation had told her that she must keep clear of the conflict. She had the child to think of. But now she knew she must be firm.
“Our father left me in charge of it: you heard him. And I shall never close the doors to any of my brot
hers, whichever side they take.”
The will of William Shockley was very clear. Each of the three brothers was left a sum of money: Margaret, because she alone of his children properly understood them, was left half the water meadows together with the tenancy of the whole farm until her marriage or death, when they were to pass to young Samuel. “Though naturally,” William had added, “if you do not marry, I shall expect you to leave the water meadows back to Samuel, who is less provided for than his brothers.”
It was not said as a challenge to Edmund, just as a statement, and she shrewdly noticed that Edmund looked almost relieved.
“It is true that the farm is in your care,” he conceded.
Obadiah scowled.
“And which side do you take, sister?” Nathaniel enquired, with a glint of amusement in his eye.
“I am neuter.” This was the term the neutrals used.
“And Samuel?” Again, that faintly mocking tone. “Is he not a good Royalist?”
“I thank God he is too young to understand this folly,” she answered hotly.
Samuel. At the mention of the baby’s name, Edmund and Obadiah had looked at each other. Why did Nathaniel have to remind them of the child? Now the moment she had dreaded had come.
“Samuel.” Edmund looked thoughtful. “We must decide what is to be done with him.”
She knew there had been words spoken behind her back, but she was ready.
“He stays here with me.” She spoke with finality. “You heard our father tell me to care for him, too.”
Nathaniel said nothing. Edmund seemed to be turning the idea over in his mind. But Obadiah was looking at her coldly. She knew he suspected that she was not a true Puritan at heart.
It irked Obadiah that he had never gained any influence in the family while his father was alive. He meant to correct that now.
Sarum Page 104