by Jake Lynch
‘So poor old Martin Fletcher is the only one who’ll stand trial, after all that.’ He watched her carefully as she digested his news. The expression of dismay, as she heard about Settle’s manoeuvrings, soon passed, however.
‘They’ll never convict Martin, though, surely? After what his family have been through?’
‘I doubt it. He might get off with a warning. After all, Harbord’s name is mud. Any local jury would know all about that.’ They settled back in companionable silence, watching the steam from their coffee cups gradually subside.
‘I do love you, dear Cate,’ he finally declared, catching her eye.
‘I know, Luke. But it can never be.’ She took out a handkerchief, and discreetly dabbed her eyes, as her other hand briefly entwined in his, across the table.
‘I could leave Elizabeth,’ he began. But she cut him off.
‘Could you, Luke? Really? You’d miss her, after all these years. And what would become of her? You’re not that heartless, God knows – and I am not, anyway.’ She withdrew the hand and, for a tense moment, they held each other’s eye. She could see he felt thwarted, and her heart went out to him; he could see she was adamant, if regretful. Then they both subsided, and chuckled.
‘And there’s Father Morris, I presume?’ he said, taking a sip of coffee.
‘Aye – and there’s Father Morris. He wants to spirit me away to a convent, in France!’
‘Well, we can’t have that.’
‘Indeed we can’t. I love my home. No one can take me away from here.’
Luke thought of Settle’s document wallet, now locked safely in a strongbox at Magpie Lane. Somehow, he had never got round to reporting it. The Green Ribbon Club had left Oxford – for now. But events of the past week had shown the lengths to which men could be driven by political fervour and fanaticism. It felt right to keep the evidence as an insurance policy against any threat to Cate and her family in the future. If he could not embrace her as he would wish to, he could at least do something to keep her safe. Even so, Luke left The Mitre with a heavy tread, feeling that a door had, this time, decisively closed. Head throbbing, he turned towards Simon Gibson’s for solace. Perhaps he would get a phial of that new medicine the apothecary was so keen on. What was it called? ‘Laudanum’. What harm could it do, after all?
*
A week after that, the sun was streaming through the plain glass windows of St Andrew’s Church, at Marston. The pews set aside for the families from Magdalen Farm were full to bursting, and a goodly crowd of well-wishers had swollen the usual congregation. John Davies, the farrier, had recovered his twinkle, and even old Greening, the porter from Christ Church, who’d known Emily since childhood, twisted his features into what he fondly imagined was a beneficent smile.
‘…To have and to hold, as long as you both shall live?’ old Reverend Fairclough wheezed. Emily gazed at Richard adoringly.
‘I will.’
‘I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.’
Standing by the church door, Robshaw raised a flask to the couple, and took a deep draught. Luke recognised it from somewhere – didn’t it belong to Ed? The captain must have given it to him, as a souvenir from their exploits.
Richard and Emily stepped out into a perfect spring morning, as Farmer Pawling and Jacob held either end of a green bough that arched over the newlyweds. A little too loudly, Robshaw said:
‘Fertility symbol, that is. Mind, they don’t need one of them, this pair, do they?’ Emily’s cheeks flushed as she walked past, pretending she hadn’t heard. Liza beamed with a mixture of pride and relief that her youngest daughter was finally off her hands. Elizabeth squeezed Luke’s elbow, and he looked fondly down into her familiar face.
‘Emily’s a buxom bride, and no mistake,’ she said softly, with a knowing and slightly wistful smile.
‘Aye – that she is.’ And the couple walked arm in arm along the path out of the churchyard, to the carriage that was to take them to the wedding feast at the farmstead and, later, back to the quiet house on Magpie Lane.
THE END
Historical Note
The English Parliament under King Charles II sat at Oxford in March 1681. Elected members reached the Convocation Room of the University by passing through the Bodleian Library courtyard and the medieval Divinity School. His Majesty was escorted from Windsor by the Horse Guards under their Colonel, Aubrey de Vere, the 20th Earl of Oxford, and his security upon arrival in the city was the responsibility of the Foot Guards under their commander, Colonel Russell. Officers in the latter of those illustrious regiments included a Captain Sutherland; and, in the former, Captains Thomas Lucy, Henry Slingsby and Edwin Sandys.
The Unicorn and Jacob’s Well opened on St Aldate’s – then called Fish Street – no doubt to capitalise on the influx of trade as MPs and their hangers-on came to town. One of the elected members of the House of Commons was William Harbord, of Thetford in Norfolk, who was notable for his record as an agitator on the subject of the so-called Popish Plot.
In general, I have tried to bring seventeenth-century Oxford to life by building into the novel, as settings, minor characters and asides, some of the notable figures and controversies of the time, drawn from the historical record. That record mentions no such person as Luke Sandys. Citizens were expected to take a turn on duty as one of twenty or so constables in Oxford, under the elected officials: the bailiffs and – above them – the councillors and the mayor. But the practice among freemen of paying a fine to avoid this inconvenient hiatus in craft or commerce was already well established; thus opening the possibility for other men to perform contiguous terms in their stead.
While there was no formal role of ‘detective’ in the law enforcement apparatus of the time, constables were expected to gather information and evidence to render to magistrates, judges and juries, who would determine the guilt or otherwise of an accused person. Rules of evidence were observed by the courts with varying degrees of fidelity, but the attitude I have attributed to my chief protagonist – of taking pains to avoid hanging the wrong man – was certainly shared by some of those involved in dispensing justice, if not all.
In Blood on the Stone, Luke is a graduate in his early forties. By early modern times, the sons of well-to-do merchants and successful craftsmen – people of the ‘middling sort’, as they were known – had begun to receive formal education, up to and including university study, if they could afford it. He would have entered Christ Church College as an undergraduate in his middle teens, so his student days would have spanned some of the 1650s, with Christopher Wren and Richard Jones among his illustrious contemporaries.
At that time, Oxford was a crucible of what later became known as the Scientific Revolution: a transformation of knowledge and ideas about the natural world bookended by publication of the ‘heliocentric’ theory of Nicolaus Copernicus (the earth orbiting the sun, not the other way round) in 1543, and Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica in 1687. John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College in the mid-seventeenth century, convened regular meetings of a ‘Natural Philosophy circle’, at which scientific breakthroughs were demonstrated, among them Boyle’s law of gases, and the cellular structure of living tissue. The latter was enabled by the development of powerful microscopes, such as those manufactured by Richard Reeve to specifications by Robert Hooke – a luminary of Wilkins’ meetings and prime mover in a group which then set up the Royal Society in London. (Its motto, nullius in verba – take no one’s word for it – is said to have been suggested by the King himself.)
The Mayors of Oxford were Robert Pawling in 1679-80 and John Bowell in 1680-81. Pawling ran a mercer’s shop at 126 High Street (where some of the ornate frontage he installed can still be seen to this day). He oversaw the granting of the Freedom of the City to Titus Oates, accuser-in-chief of the Popish Plot, and to James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, the latter of which occasions was satirised in a popular verse. Evidently a man of considerable energies, Pawling’s deeds i
n commercial and public life overlapped with his tenancy of Magdalen Farm, whose lands extended across the lower slopes of Headington at least as far as the old London road. John Fell was Bishop of Oxford from 1676 to his death, a decade later; under him, the Reverend Peter Birch was Vicar of St Thomas’s, in Osney. Sir Thomas Millington was both Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
The story incorporates several real episodes of the time – or, at least, episodes oft-recounted as real. Dr John Radcliffe – who in his will endowed the Radcliffe Library – was said to be reluctant ever to leave a convivial company, and on one occasion had to be forcibly removed from such a gathering by a military man under the false pretences of being wanted to render medical assistance to his colonel – who turned out, instead, to be his ‘comrade’, lodged in a narrow alleyway. I have taken minor liberties with the timeline of Radcliffe’s career. He qualified as a doctor a year after the events of Blood on the Stone, but to have him treating patients, and for that to play a part in the plot, was irresistible – especially given his enduring renown in Oxford, where the local hospital is named after him.
Nell Gwynn, it is said, pacified an angry mob by looking out of her carriage window, whilst in Oxford to accompany the King for the parliament, and identifying herself as ‘the Protestant whore’ – rather than the Catholic one, the Duchess of Portsmouth – whereupon the crowd cheered and let her pass by. The Royal party was entertained by a performance of Charles Saunders’ play, Tamerlane the Great: a drama only distantly related, it seems, to the much better-known Tamburlaine the Great, written by Christopher Marlowe nearly a century earlier. The description at the start of Chapter Nine of the welcome laid on by the dignitaries of Oxford, for the formal entry of the Royal party into the city, draws on contemporary accounts. And Captain John Coy, who appears in the penultimate chapter, was one of the officers and men of Gerard’s Regiment of Horse (later renamed The Royal Dragoons) who went to reinforce the English garrison at Tangier in 1680.
Looming large in the political context for the novel are the Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot. England had gone so far as to execute a king and undergo nearly a decade of military dictatorship, all in the name of protecting the liberties of its people from the depredations of the Crown. So there was widespread alarm that a ‘Papist’ could once again sit on the English throne and re-impose absolute rule, after the manner of continental monarchs such as the reigning King Louis XIV of France. The House of Commons wanted to exclude King Charles II’s brother, the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York, from the line of succession, but its will was thwarted by the House of Lords.
The Country party, or Whigs, then seized on the Popish Plot, claimed to be a conspiracy by Jesuits to assassinate Charles, and used it as a pretext to persecute England’s remaining Catholic clergy and laity alike. Public opinion was inflamed through such means as the increased circulation of newsletters, or ‘mercuries’, and political pamphlets, including those quoted in Chapters Six and Eight; and weaponised by provoking or procuring political unrest on the streets, of which ‘rioting’ by City of London apprentices represented the iconic form. The decision by King Charles and his advisers to bring Parliament to Oxford was calculated to isolate political process from this fraught atmosphere. But of course the pamphleteers, propagandists and provocateurs – among them, the ‘Protestant Joiner’, Stephen College – then descended on the city themselves.
As for Emily: there was always some agricultural work for women in England, albeit reduced, by early modern times, due to the enclosures of the previous two centuries. So a young woman could well be a cowherd as a contribution to her family’s keep as sub-tenants on a big farm. March is early in the year, certainly, for cattle to be grazing out of doors, but in a warm spring the growth in some fields is just about sufficient – though the beasts would have to be taken in for the night. She could also be involved in such tasks as making cheese, and soap.
Neither was it all that uncommon for a courting couple to ‘get carried away’, as happened to Emily and Richard (and, before them, Luke and Elizabeth). The general response of the local clergy in such cases, it seems, was to read the banns of marriage as quickly as possible, to minimise the perceived offence to public decency. Above all, a child must be born into wedlock, or face the lifelong stigma of bastardy; and a father must do right by a woman he had impregnated. Parish officials would be charged with exacting maintenance payments for an illegitimate child, if in need of support – and if paternity could be established.
The real ‘hero’ of the novel is arguably Oxford itself. By 1681, major building work in the area of the city dominated by the University was largely completed. The interregnum proved but a temporary hiatus in the growth under the Stuart Kings. Notable additions of the seventeenth century include Wadham and Pembroke Colleges; the Ashmolean Museum; the Botanical Gardens; the Sheldonian Theatre; and Bishop Fell’s improvements to the Quadrangles of Christ Church. The building of Tom Tower, Christopher Wren’s neo-Gothic masterpiece which completed today’s college frontage on St Aldate’s, commenced a few months after the Parliament and would have been, at the time of the novel, one of only two significant missing elements from the classic Oxford skyline immortalised in Matthew Arnold’s later image of ‘dreaming spires’ (the other being the Radcliffe Camera, completed in 1749).
Today’s visitors can still enjoy the view, through all points of the compass, from the top of Carfax Tower. At street level, they can wander down Magpie Lane and turn right on to Blue Boar Street; then, if they so wish, return to the High Street by way of either Wheatsheaf Yard or Alfred Street, which in those days was called Bear Lane. They can even still refresh themselves with a drink or a meal in The Mitre. The medieval Guildhall was replaced by a purpose-built Town Hall in 1752, then again by today’s imposing structure in the 1890s – but each has occupied the same site.
The influence of the Scientific Revolution was far reaching, and underpinned the European Enlightenment. For rigorously assembled evidence – available to all through sensory perception and processed by critical reasoning and debate – to be the basis for conclusions and judgement, not only in the laboratory but also in society at large, is a principle over which many have struggled. For that principle to be confronted by prejudice and bombast on behalf of sectional interests is, arguably, as familiar a syndrome in our own time as in that of the Popish Plot. Perhaps it is not too much of an exaggeration to identify the period of Blood on the Stone as a time when Oxford, through the power of its ideas and the experience of its people, began to move decisively towards one of those two modes of engagement with the wider world, and away from the other.
Jake Lynch
Oxford, 2019
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Annabel, Rosemary and Mark for gallantry in reading my first draft. Thanks to all friends at West Oxford Pantomime Association for good times and comradeship, and for unleashing my creative side. Thanks to Steve Jones, for sharp eyes and sound advice. Thanks to the Oxfordshire County Library Service, and its dedicated professional staff. And to students, staff and supporters of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, for inspiring my commitment to, and interest in the origins of, human rights as the organising principle for a good society.
Unbound is the world’s first crowdfunding publisher, established in 2011.
We believe that wonderful things can happen when you clear a path for people who share a passion. That’s why we’ve built a platform that brings together readers and authors to crowdfund books they believe in – and give fresh ideas that don’t fit the traditional mould the chance they deserve.
This book is in your hands because readers made it possible. Everyone who pledged their support is listed at the front of the book and below. Join them by visiting unbound.com and supporting a book today.
Daniel Abunales
Geoff Adams
Joseph Adebayo
Ashraf Al-Ouf
Clara Andrade
Rukhsana Aslam
Natalie Bachiri
Shamikh Badra
Gunawan Baharuddin
Jason Ballinger
Clementine Barnes
Valentina Baú
Berdak Bayimbetov
Alice Beauchamp
Juliet Bennett
Lynda Blanchard
Angela Bloss
Neven Bondokji
Chris Brown
Timothy Bryar
Megan Capriccio
Lesley Carnus
Claire Casey
Helena Cornelius
Susan Cowden
Helen Cushing
Nick Deane
Paul Duffill
Barry Featherston
Rosalind Fox
Fiona Fulford
Peter Griffin
Skaidy Gulbis
Robert Hackett
Derek Halawa
Guy Hallowes
Chris Hamer
George Hatoum
Elizabeth Ingrams
Mohd Nazari Ismail
Steve Jones
Kokila KC
Adrian Kendry
George Kent
Sveinung Kiplesund
Anne Kocek
Antony Loewenstein
Kathryn Logan
Kosta Lucas
Jason MacLeod
Ken Macnab
Melissa Martin
Grace Mathew
Ingrid Matthews
Eyal Mayroz
Helen McCue
Jad Melki
Lindsay Mell
Stewart Mills
Bonaventure Mkandawire
Kim Morris
Chris Nash
Carlo Navato
Anne Noonan
Ciarán O’Raighne
Sahar Okhovat