London in Chains

by Gillian Bradshaw

  ‘Nay,’ she said sharply, ‘any woman must work hard if she wishes to make an honest living, and if she’s pretty, she must work twice as hard or she’ll suffer ill-use by dishonest men.’

  Trebet merely grinned. ‘Use, certainly, but I certainly wouldn’t term it ill!’

  ‘If there’s aught you wish to know, you should ask of Mr Browne,’ she said pointedly. ‘For myself, I came to London only yesterday and I’m still learning the work.’

  ‘Aye, I can see you are a country rose,’ Trebet said gallantly. ‘I only came to make myself known to you and to say that I can give you dinner.’

  ‘I think Mr Browne meant me to go to his house,’ she replied at once. The cost of dinner in an ordinary inn would swallow up the whole of her day’s wage: if Trebet was expecting her to pay, she couldn’t afford it; if he was offering to feed her for free, she didn’t want the debt.

  Trebet, however, frowned. ‘It would be better if you didn’t parade up and down the street, so that any informer watching has the chance to notice something’s up. I’ll speak to Will about it. No sense wasting the time, either! We need these in Saffron Walden by the week’s end.’

  ‘Saffron Walden?’ she repeated, frowning.

  ‘Aye. Didn’t you know? They’re for the soldiers. Parliament’s commissioners are already on their way to the Army’s headquarters at Saffron Walden and they mean to persuade the men to disband or go to Ireland. If we lose the Army, we lose all hope of a just settlement.’

  The pamphlet’s point suddenly appeared very clear indeed: persuade the Army to mutiny. It was confirmation, if she’d needed it, that her uncle and his friends weren’t just playing: they really were engaged in sedition – and so, it seemed, was she. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said, feeling slightly sick.

  ‘This will make it clear to the soldiers what’s at stake!’ said Ned Trebet enthusiastically. ‘With you finishing it off so speedily, perhaps we should print more. I can work the press, once Will’s set the type.’

  Will, however, when he came to collect Lucy at noon, reckoned that there was not enough time to print more copies. Lucy wasn’t sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. Disappointed, she decided: if she was arrested, another hundred copies would be neither here nor there, and at least she would have seen the press working.

  Mr Browne did, however, accept Ned Trebet’s offer to supply Lucy with dinner – without consulting her. ‘Generous!’ he exclaimed warmly. ‘And, in truth, I think the less traffic there is between my shop and your tavern, the safer it will be for both of us. I’m obliged to you, Ned.’

  ‘It’s a small matter,’ replied Trebet modestly.

  Lucy was afraid that he meant to stay and flirt while she ate, but it seemed he was busy in his tavern at dinner-time. He brought her bread, small beer and a dish of stewed beef, then excused himself and hurried back across the yard, apron flapping. She was relieved: she wanted nothing to do with lusty young men, particularly ones named Ned. The food was good, but she still regretted Browne’s shop. It would have been pleasant to have some safe company, and she still wanted to look at the bookshop.

  She stitched until the sun was low, then stopped and put away the needles and thread: she did not want to walk back to her uncle’s in the dark. She was arranging the quires in stacks when Mr Browne came in to tell her she should get home before dark.

  ‘All of those?’ he cried delightedly. ‘You’re a fine needlewoman indeed!’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, feeling herself blush at the unaccustomed praise. She knew very well that she was not a fine needlewoman: she tended to hurry, and her stitches were uneven and too large. She was just lucky that that was exactly what was required to rush out a pamphlet.

  ‘Tomorrow you must trim these and finish them off,’ said Browne. ‘Do that before you stitch any more and we can send the first batch out. Can you come early tomorrow?’

  ‘As soon as there’s light, sir.’ She wondered if he’d pay her now.

  ‘Good girl!’

  ‘Sir, how do I trim them and finish them off?’

  ‘You . . . no, I’ll show you tomorrow. But I’ll give you another pamphlet tonight: have a care to study it, and use it as a guide tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you, sir!’

  They left the printworks separately, like poachers, and met again outside his bookshop; this time he showed her in. The shop was small and dark; it smelled of leather and dust. Liza wasn’t there. The books stood in locked cases all around the walls, their dark spines barely visible through an iron grille. Lucy stared at them in fascination. She had never seen so many in one place.

  ‘No use looking there!’ Browne told her with a smile. ‘I don’t keep the pamphlets on the shelves, where any informing knave could see them! Here!’ He went to a case, opened it and then knelt and swung a whole shelf out of the way. He reached down into the concealed space behind it. ‘Now, what have we?’ He began pulling out stacks of pamphlets, printed on the soft, greyish, poor-quality paper Lucy had been stitching all day. ‘Regal Tyranny Discovered – that would do, but, mmm, this copy is most sluttishly put together. London’s Liberty in Chains, together with The Charters of London – too thick. Ah! An Arrow Against All Tyrants and The Oppressed Man’s Oppressions Declared – either of these would do; they’re both much the same length as the Stratagem. Which will you have?’

  ‘Uh, whichever you wish, sir!’ said Lucy, taken aback.

  Browne weighed a pamphlet in either hand, then put one aside. He stacked the rest back in their hiding place, replaced the shelf of books and closed and locked the case. ‘Here, then!’ he said, handing her the pamphlet he’d selected.

  It was An Arrow Against All Tyrants. Lucy took it gingerly and thanked Browne again.

  ‘Have a care not to study it on the street!’ Browne warned her. ‘Informers, remember! Keep it out of sight until you’re safely home.’ He got to his feet, then smiled at her. ‘Ah, but I almost forgot your wages!’ He dug two large pennies out of his purse and set them in her hand, one, two: the heavy cold rounds filled her palm. She wondered if the surge of pleasure she felt was sinful. Money was the root of all evil, said scripture, but she’d worked hard all day, and didn’t scripture also say that the labourer was worthy of his hire?

  ‘Thank you, sir!’ she said, smiling.

  She’d worried that she’d get lost going back to Southwark, but she discovered that the landmarks her uncle had pointed out that morning had stayed with her and she had no difficulty. It was just beginning to grow dark, and the streets were crowded again, this time with people hurrying home; jostling among them on the same errand, Lucy believed for the first time that perhaps she could get used to London, after all.

  Crossing London Bridge was slow, and by the time she arrived at her uncle’s house it was dark. She knocked on the door, out of breath from having hurried the last part of the way.

  The others were already at supper, eating by the light of a single tallow candle, but her uncle smiled and told Susan to fetch another bowl of soup. Lucy slid into place at the table. Mr Browne’s pamphlet, which she’d slipped into her apron pocket, caught against her leg, and she straightened it carefully.

  ‘You should have been home before dark!’ Agnes said disapprovingly. ‘No decent young woman should be on the street this time of night.’

  ‘I had to wait to cross the bridge,’ explained Lucy.

  ‘Don’t you talk back to me, girl!’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Aunt.’

  Susan brought the soup, and Lucy began to eat it, uncomfortable under her aunt’s glare.

  ‘Did he pay you?’ Agnes asked suddenly.

  ‘Aye, Aunt Agnes.’ Lucy dug the two pennies out from under the pamphlet and set them down on the table. ‘Here are my wages.’

  Agnes snatched both coins, examined them a moment, then slipped them in her own pocket with a sniff of contempt.

  Thomas frowned at her, cast an uneasy glance at Cousin Geoffrey, who was pretending not to notice,
then frowned at Agnes again. ‘I did not give you leave to take those,’ he pointed out at last.

  ‘It’s money for the girl’s keep!’ snapped Aunt Agnes, turning the glare on him.

  ‘We didn’t ask her father to provide for her keep when we offered to take her!’

  ‘Indeed!’ replied Agnes vehemently. ‘You wouldn’t ask, lest he learn you were not the great man he took you for! But you promised me that the girl would help me in the house, and now you’ve sent her to work for your trouble-making friends! You owe—’

  ‘Her keep doesn’t even cost tuppence!’ interrupted Thomas, his voice rising. ‘Will’s providing her dinner, and, as for bed and linen, we’d have to supply Susan whether Lucy were here or not! You lazy slut, give that money back!’

  ‘It’s my money!’ exclaimed Agnes, going red in the face and clutching her pocket.

  ‘Scolding shrew!’ cried Thomas, jumping to his feet. ‘Give it here!’

  Lucy cringed and called, ‘Please, Uncle!’

  Thomas paused, casting a puzzled look at her. He was defending her, and she protested?

  She wasn’t sure what to say to him. He was within his rights to beat his wife for such open defiance; indeed, it was what was expected of him. She didn’t want to see or hear it, that was all. She remembered cowering at the table while her father beat her mother; remembered her mother’s sobs and her own helpless desperation. Her parents’ quarrels had been rare and all the more disturbing for it.

  She found she knew exactly how it would end: Agnes, red-faced and crying, yielding up the coins; Thomas, flushed with anger and guilt, taking them and perhaps handing them to Lucy. It would set a pattern: Thomas defending his niece, Agnes hating her. The quarrel would fill the house like a noxious vapour, poisoning all of them.

  ‘Don’t let me be the cause of a quarrel, please!’ she said desperately. ‘I’m sure I’d rather my aunt kept the money than we quarrelled about it!’

  Agnes glared at Lucy as though she’d struck her. Lucy swallowed and met her furious eyes directly. It was not that she didn’t want the money: she did. If freedom cost tuppence a day, though, she couldn’t complain, and if it purchased peace as well, it was a bargain.

  ‘You crawling lick-spittle hypocrite!’ Agnes exclaimed furiously. She dug the coins out of her pocket and threw them at Lucy, then stamped out, bursting into tears as she went.

  Lucy picked the two pennies off the floor, her hands shaking, then set them down on the table in front of her uncle. ‘Give them to my aunt, please! Give them to her with soft words, so she won’t be angry with me!’

  ‘You’re a good, sweet girl,’ said Thomas, picking them up and offering them back to her. ‘You keep them.’

  She shook her head: no amount of money was worth filling the house with poison. ‘Perhaps . . . perhaps you could give my aunt some of the money, sir?’ she asked. She remembered her excuse for putting herself forward and added, ‘I only took the work, sir, because I wanted not to be a burden on you and my aunt, and I fear my being here is a burden to her. It’s only fair that you should give her something extra for the housekeeping.’

  Thomas thought about it, then nodded. ‘Very well. I’ll give her these, but I’ll tell her that tomorrow you’ll keep half of what you earn.’

  ‘Thank you, Uncle,’ she said in relief.

  She hoped it would be enough. She could imagine Thomas being magnanimous and superior as he gave Agnes the money, and that would only fuel Agnes’s resentment. She hoped, though, that it would still be enough to keep the peace.

  After supper Thomas and Geoffrey sat down in the parlour to smoke a pipe and talk about Cousin Geoffrey’s day at Westminster. Lucy hesitated, wondering if she could take a candle upstairs to study the pamphlet Mr Browne had given her, or whether that would be regarded as a waste of a candle. She decided to give Agnes no cause to complain and crept into the parlour to look at the pamphlet there.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘A pamphlet, Uncle, that Mr Browne gave me to study, so that I could see how to put pamphlets together.’

  Thomas nodded and turned back to Cousin Geoffrey’s account of the laziness and greed of parliamentary clerks. Lucy turned the pamphlet in her hands, taking careful note of how the pages had been trimmed and the spine glued. The title letters stood out black in the flickering candlelight: An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny, and then, in smaller letters, shot from the prison of Newgate into the Prerogative Bowels of the arbitrary House of Lords and all other usurpers and tyrants whatsoever.

  She mouthed the words silently, as she had when confronted with particularly challenging words in the Bible – Melchizedek, for example, or recompense. What, she wondered, did ‘prerogative’ mean? She glanced up at Uncle Thomas, found him still listening to Geoffrey, and decided not to ask. She was not altogether sure, but she felt that Geoffrey wouldn’t like the pamphlet and that drawing attention to it would cause awkwardness between him and Uncle Thomas. She read over the title again and this time grasped that the author was calling the House of Lords ‘usurpers and tyrants’.

  She was shocked. The government of England had always consisted of King, Lords and Commons, and no one had gone into the war to change that. It was true that the Commons and many of the Lords had risen up against the king, but now that the war was over everyone expected King Charles to be restored to his throne, this time with defined limits to his power. Both sides of the conflict had claimed to be defending ancient and traditional rights.

  Maybe, she thought, the author – this man John Lilburne? – was referring to the Lords who’d supported the king during the war. Then it would make sense to call them tyrants. She looked at the bottom of the page for a date, and found it.

  1646.

  Only last year! The year the king surrendered and the Royalist Lords fled to the Continent, or else submitted to Parliament. Lucy came reluctantly to the conclusion that the author really did mean the present House of Lords. Troubled, she read the title again, this time continuing on:

  . . . usurpers and tyrants whatsoever. Wherein the original, rise, extent, and end of magisterial power, the natural and national rights, freedoms and properties of mankind are discovered and undeniably maintained . . .

  By Richard Overton

  She felt a moment of relief: so the author wasn’t Uncle Thomas’s friend. The name Overton was familiar, though, and after a moment she remembered why: it was a Mary Overton who’d been dragged through the street to Bridewell with her baby screaming in her arms.

  For stitching this pamphlet? Her husband or father’s pamphlet? Lucy felt a surge of indignation: why did women and children always suffer for the misdeeds of their menfolk? She was not entirely sure that the pamphlet was a misdeed, but she could certainly understand why the House of Lords thought it was.

  Natural and national rights. There was a concept she’d never encountered before. What on earth was a natural right?

  She thought again about levelling hedges: her father and her brothers had broken down the lord’s new enclosure because it fenced off common land where village cows had been accustomed to graze for time out of mind. The lord said it was his, that he had a legal right to enclose it, and apparently the law courts agreed with him. If he had a legal right, then maybe what the villagers had was a natural one.

  Lucy’s heart gave a sudden fierce leap of agreement. She put the pamphlet away, disturbed by her own reaction. She did not want to agree with Richard Overton: she could see that his ideas were trouble. All she wanted, she repeated to herself, was honest work and an honest independence. She curtsied to her uncle and went upstairs to bed.

  Three

  All the printed sheets of A New-found Stratagem had been turned into pamphlets by Friday afternoon. When the last copy was finished, Lucy went to inform Mr Browne with a flutter in her stomach. She’d believed that her place would be more than temporary, but it struck her now that this had never been discussed, let alone promised. Her two and a half day
s of work might be all she could hope for, and, while Aunt Agnes had grudgingly agreed that two-thirds of Lucy’s earnings would pay for her keep, the truce between them was at best an uneasy one.

  Lucy set her teeth and told herself that as long as she had other work sometimes she would manage to keep her independence. Agnes couldn’t rely on Lucy as a serving-maid if she was going to be off earning money even occasionally,, and surely she’d done well enough that Browne would hire her again the next time he needed a pamphlet stitched?

  She needn’t have worried. ‘Well done!’ Browne told her warmly. ‘Now we can start typesetting the next one!’

  ‘The next one, sir?’ asked Lucy, scarcely daring to believe it.

  Browne glanced about, then picked up his cash-box and showed her a stack of paper beneath it. The pages were covered with large, scrawled, uneven letters.

  ‘Freeborn John’s latest,’ Browne told her, with a proud smile. ‘The Resolved Man’s Resolution. His wife gave it to me only yesterday.’ He looked at her speculatively and went on, ‘You’ve nimble fingers, girl, and quick wits. I’ve no doubt you can learn typesetting as easily as you learned to stitch a pamphlet.’

  Lucy goggled wordlessly. Typesetting? It was a skill so exotic to Leicestershire that he might as well have said, ‘You can as easily learn to fly’.

  ‘It’s nothing but setting out the letters you see on a page,’ Browne told her cheerfully. ‘I’ll do most of it, but any help would speed the matter, and the more you learn, the more you’ll be of help.’ He considered a moment, then went to the door of his shop and looked judiciously at the sun. ‘Too late to start now,’ he concluded. ‘Tomorrow morning, then.’

  Lucy walked slowly back to Southwark. It was a grey, damp day, and cold for April, but she had glorious sunshine in her heart. She had been worried that she would lose her job, and instead . . . typesetting! However casually it had been offered, she was sure this was an opportunity she must seize eagerly. Typesetting wasn’t like sewing or cooking, a woman’s skill, domestic and cheap. Men learned it: it was real work.