Plague Child

by Peter Ransley

  For herself, Kate wrote, her part was played now and she was at peace. But I know she was there, outside St Paul’s, watching, vanishing like a will o’ the wisp when I turned, for that wedding morning Jane, now ensconced at Drury Lane, had found a simnel cake on the doorstep.

  Strutting in silver buttons and scarlet stockings I faltered at the sight of an imperious figure wearing a head-dress of gilt and flowers.

  ‘Come on, Monkey,’ Anne whispered, as the bride-cup was held aloft and the fiddlers began to play.

  The wedding was marred for me only by Lord Stonehouse insisting that Anne wore the pendant. All the time we made our vows I felt the falcon’s ruby eyes glowering at me as if I was an impostor.

  ‘You should be grateful to it, Tom,’ said Mr Pym at the wedding feast in Queen Street. ‘The bird chose you.’

  ‘The wretched bird chose me? What kind of a riddle is this?’

  ‘In the sense that the bird is the great estate.’

  ‘Stop it, John,’ said Lucy. ‘Let Tom enjoy his day.’

  But we had drunk a good deal of wine, I had to crack the riddle, and they wanted to tell me. Like born conspirators, they moved me away from the throng in the reception room, into the shadows of the hall, near the statue of Minerva, behind which I had hidden the day when I had first coneyed myself into Queen Street. Mr Pym asked me why I thought Lord Stonehouse made his astonishing announcement at that meeting.

  ‘Why? Because I made a brilliant speech,’ I boasted. ‘And in searching for the pendant I found myself and showed him I was the man to inherit.’

  ‘All true,’ said Mr Pym. ‘All very true. It would not have happened without all that, certainly.’

  ‘But . . .?’

  He abruptly fell silent. Lord Stonehouse appeared at the entrance to the reception room. He had a glass in his hand, but still looked as if he had the affairs of state in his troubled face. Then he saw Anne talking to Warwick and a smile crossed his face as he went to join them.

  ‘Power is a fragile thing,’ Lucy said, suddenly sober.

  ‘Stonehouse’s loyalty to Parliament was being questioned. Rightly.’

  ‘Rightly?’ I said, staring across the hall at my grandfather, who, as Warwick slapped him on the back, was laughing, happier and more relaxed than I ever thought to see him.

  ‘He helped Richard get to France.’

  Not only that, I learned, he saw him off. Warwick controlled the sea and it was a hazardous passage. It was a ship in which Lord Stonehouse had a substantial share that took Richard. Warwick was informed of this by one of his commanders. It was also rumoured that Richard had been given funds by his father to pave his way in Paris.

  ‘Best you know this,’ Mr Pym said, lowering his voice still further. ‘He keeps a foot in both camps. What really matters to him is the estate – the name. But he went too far in helping Richard, and in that meeting he was forced to make a decision about you – and declare his loyalty.’

  Pym had engineered Cromwell’s speech. And mine. And, if you like, my inheritance. I was glad my grandfather had helped Richard, at considerable risk, whom he had harmed in the past as much as me. Yet I thought of him touching the scar on my leg, and his clumsy embrace. In his own way he loved us both. But he was driven as he had always been driven by the falcon, the estate, and was hedging his bets. Suitably chastened, I drew from my pocket the lucky half crown Matthew had returned to me, spun it in the air and caught it. ‘So in the end it all came down to this.’

  Lucy laughed. ‘Which way the coin falls.’ She took it. ‘Sixteen twenty-five. When Charles was crowned.’

  ‘When I was born.’ Something struck me. ‘You mean – I may not inherit!’

  ‘Of course you will!’ Mr Pym beamed. Then his beam was modulated. ‘So long as Parliament is in power.’

  I pocketed the coin. I raised my glass and my voice rang round the hall. ‘To Parliament!’

  There was a sudden silence. Faces turned – then everyone raised their glasses. ‘To Parliament!’

  I suppose, from their smiles, Warwick, my grandfather and the rest saw in my flushed face and outburst a burning, youthful, naive enthusiasm for the cause, of the kind that had moved me that night when I ran down the street clutching in my hand the words of the Grand Remonstrance. And that, as Mr Pym would say, was true. Very true.

  ‘What were you talking about so secretively?’ said Anne in the carriage home.

  ‘The falcon,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Anne said.

  ‘Not as beautiful as you.’ I kissed her, but could not kiss her properly until she had taken off the pendant, and locked it safely away, I hoped forever, and we drew the curtains round our marriage bed, and finally came together.

  Historical Note

  Tom and the Stonehouses are fiction, but that larger-than-life character, Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle is factually based. She was the mistress of the Earl of Strafford, the King’s most powerful counsellor, who became a hate figure for Pym and the Parliamentary oppos ition. Reluctantly, out of political expediency and in an act he regretted for the rest of his life, King Charles signed his death warrant.

  When Strafford was executed in May 1641, Lucy not only lost her lover, but her power base. Perhaps she loved power more than love. Perhaps it was a matter of survival; she was a woman on her own and felt the need to back both horses. At all events, while she kept the ear of the Queen she was revealing court secrets to John Pym in November 1641, when the Parliamentary opposition laid down its explosive demands to the King in the Grand Remonstrance.

  Lucy was the sex symbol of her day, a scintillating figure at the Caroline court, but it was probably power, not sex, that brought her and Pym together, although gossip painted a more lurid picture. She was ‘first charged in the fore-deck by Master Holles, in the Poop by Master Pym, while she clapped my Lord Holland under hatches,’ wrote Henry Neville in 1647.

  Pym and the other four members were all too aware of the threat the King would arrest them. The question was when. Most historians credit the warning given in a message from the French ambassador, but Diane Purkiss in the English Civil War makes a robust case for the warning coming from Lucy Hay (albeit in not quite the dramatic way described in this book). She argues that historians do not like the idea precisely because it sounds like something out of a novel. Yet she quotes several contemporary sources who believed it to be true: ‘Thomas Burton . . . in his diary of Cromwell’s Parliament, quotes Haselrig [one of the five members] as saying: “I shall never forget the kindness of that great lady, the Lady Carlisle, that gave timely notice.”’

  Although Tom passing Lucy’s letter to Speaker Lenthall is my fiction, the dialogue he hears is from contemporary sources, and the Serjeant’s suspicion that the letter contains a plague-sore dressing was all too credible. In what must have been one of the first biological assassination attempts, the previous month John Pym had received such a letter in the House, recorded in a pamphlet A damnable Treason by a Contagious Plaster of a plague sore.

  This was the age of the pamphlet, and I am indebted to Joad Raymond’s Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain for brilliantly bringing the age to life, just as the pamphlet brought politics not so much to life but into existence for the general public. It is difficult now, when government (theoretically) is accountable down to the very shopping lists of MPs, to imagine a time when it was accountable for nothing. The King either ruled by diktat or, when he ran out of money, called Parliament. Either way, it was a private affair. The public had nothing to do with it.

  The Long Parliament which met in 1640 was different. The division between Parliament and the King was so great London was hungry for news. Scriveners like Mr Ink wrote proceedings of both Houses, published every Monday. The King was unaware at first that politics had suddenly gone public.

  ‘Parliament was articulating a theory of responsible, representative government and public accountability,’ Raymond writes, ‘and this transcript of its pro
ceedings was electric.’

  It was the beginning of real news – but also the beginning of spin. MPs like Pym leaked transcripts or notes to promote or justify their actions. Since that heady month of November 1641, Britain has never been without newspapers. After war was declared in August 1642 the Royalists produced their own publications and an increasingly virulent, partisan press was born. In the following year, alarmed at having let the genie of freedom of speech out of the bottle, Parliament attempted to curb it, leading Milton to publish his famous pamphlet in defence of it, Areopagitica, having as its title epigram: ‘This is true Liberty when free born men/Having to advise the public may speak free.’

  So it is not specious when Tom thinks the words he is running with will change the world. Historians argue endlessly whether there was an English revolution, but no one can dispute that there was a revolution in public thought. Before the Civil War an average of 624 titles were published every year. In 1641 the number was 2042 and in 1642 this almost doubled to 4038 titles. The words opened up a new world not only for people like Tom, Will and Ben, but also for Anne.

  The germs of feminism sprang up during the war, although were largely stifled after it. Like Susannah, women mainly found independence through radical religious sects, but there was the beginning of political consciousness. In February 1642, four hundred working women, independently from fathers and husbands and desperate from financial hardship, petitioned Parliament in what Lawrence Stone calls the first independent political action by women in English history. When the outraged Duke of Richmond cried, ‘Away with these women, we were best have a Parliament of women,’ the petitioners attacked him physically and broke his staff of office.

  There is no written record of Cromwell being at Edgehill, but it is probable he was. In her biography, Antonia Fraser cites the Puritan MP Nathanial Fiennes who, in trying to check the Parliamentary rout, was joined by troops including those of Cromwell, and they rode together to Kineton. Denzil Holles, who later became a bitter enemy of Cromwell, made no mention of his absence in his report, written with other MPs, a week after the battle.

  The meeting in Westminster at which Tom claims to have seen Cromwell is fictional, but Cromwell’s speech is based on his actual words, spoken in different contexts. Like so many ideas thrown up in the Civil War, some of which would take root in the formation of the modern state, Cromwell’s approach was the germ of what would become the New Model Army, Britain’s first regular fighting force.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my agent, Felicity Rubinstein for her energy and encouragement, my editor, Clare Smith for her unerring capacity to put her finger on passages where rewriting made so much difference and to Deborah Rosario for her research and feeling for the seventeenth century. I’m grateful to all the friends who read the book and gave me feedback, particularly Eileen Horne, Libby Symon and Peter Smith. And thanks most of all to my wife Cynthia, for her support and her ability to be both encouraging and critical at the same time.

  BEHIND THE SCENES

  ‘A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.’

  CHARLES DICKENS

  CONSTRUCTION AND CREATION

  ‘The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.’ So said Charles Dickens on the creative process. And yet the precise nature of the writer’s craft is a mysterious one. What is it that inspires authors to put pen to paper: curiosity, sympathy, passion, obsession? In his own words, Peter Ransley reveals what inspired him to write Plague Child…

  The origins of Plague Child go back to the 1980s, when I spent chilly nights on the Wiltshire Downs during lambing season.

  I was adapting a book for the BBC called A Shepherd’s Life. Written in 1910 by W. H. Hudson, it was described as ‘a poignant portrait of country-life’ – but there was disquiet beneath the surface. Hudson writes: ‘It is a pity that the history of the rising of the agricultural labourer, the most patient and submissive of men, has never been written…’ The rising was in the 1830s when labourers, half-starved amidst rural plenty, their patience and submission at breaking point, smashed threshing machines and burned ricks. They had their own mythical figure, Captain Swing, who would come out of the fog of the burning ricks, right all wrongs and return common land to the villagers.

  At Salisbury thirty-four men were sentenced to death, thirty-three transported and ten got fourteen years imprisonment.

  For the BBC programme, I went to the village Hudson wrote about, near Salisbury and, amazingly, there were still handed-down memories of this terrible time in circulation. I interviewed a seventy-year-old shepherd, Tom, who told me many of the stories and this was substantiated by research I did. There were records of shepherds, blacksmiths, labourers – the records of protest; pamphlets, prison documents, Home Office papers of food riots, court evidence of informers’ reports and intercepted letters: material largely ignored by conventional history.

  It was years later, when I read Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War: A People’s History that I had the idea for Plague Child. I named my hero Tom, after the shepherd. I wanted to make it not just a thriller about an illegitimate boy searching for who he is, but have him searching also for ‘something that will change the world’. In 1642 it might have been the philosopher’s stone. Or the Second Coming. In Tom’s case, it is words.

  In 1642, politics was the preserve of peers and gentlemen in parliament; ultimately of the king, who could dissolve it at will. There was no reporting of parliament, and it was people like Tom who helped to change that. That’s why I made Tom a printer’s runner, then a pamphleteer.

  Pamphlets had as great an effect then as the Web today – arguably greater, for they took politics out of parliament and began to give people a voice. In 1639, 624 pamphlets, mostly religious, were printed. In 1642, when the king raised his standard at Nottingham, there were 4,038 titles printed that year, mostly political.

  What happens to Tom in Plague Child and the following books takes him through key events – not as history, but as something that is happening, that he believes will change the world – and did.

  ‘We owe our state of government to it,’ writes Purkiss, of the Civil War, but most of us have little idea who fought whom, or why. In a cry from the heart she says: ‘Nor do most of us care…yet it made us the country we are, the people we are.’

  Everyone knows a king was executed, but few realise that, proportionally, more English people were killed in the Civil War than in the First or the Second World War. It was the beginning of the modern age. From its pamphlets newspapers were born. There were visionaries, spies, women preachers – the first seeds of feminism. The war changed not only this country but the world: it spawned the American Revolution, and influenced the French revolutionaries.

  Plague Child is a thriller. But I hope also that it may convey, as it did to me, how we have been formed by what happened in that tumultuous period – and possibly even more by what didn’t.

  AN IDEA, LIKE A GHOST

  ‘An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.’

  CHARLES DICKENS

  From Socrates to the salons of pre-Revolutionary France, the great minds of every age have debated the merits of literary offerings alongside questions of politics, social order and morality. Whether you love a book or loathe it, one of the pleasures of reading is the discussion books regularly inspire. Below are a few suggestions for topics of discussion about Plague Child…

  Peter Ransley sets the tale predominantly in Oxford and London in the seventeenth century. How successfully do you think he captures this era? In what ways does he do this?

  Plague Child is a work of historical fiction. What other genres do you think this novel falls under and why?

  The English Civil War acts as the backdrop to Plague Child. In what ways to you think this political crisis affects each of the charact
ers? In your view, do you think politics divides characters that would otherwise get on with one another?

  Tom is taken advantage of by many of the novel’s characters, but he also shows signs of strength. How would you characterise Tom? Is he a natural leader or an underdog?

  Throughout the novel Tom states how he felt loved by Susannah and Mathew. In what ways do they show parental love?

  Plague Child contains far more male characters than female ones. What impact, if any, did this have on you as a reader? How successfully do you think the female characters are portrayed by the author?

  Tom’s opinion of Eaton changes throughout the novel. What were your views on Eaton and at what point did they change, if at all?

  In chapter thirteen, Tom manages to secure the clothing of a gentleman for himself, and it isn’t too long before attitudes towards him change. How important do you think appearance was in seventeenth-century England and in what ways does the author illustrate its relationship to social class?

  The title Plague Child refers to Tom. Do you think this is a powerful title? Who in the novel do you think perceives Tom as merely a ‘plague child’?

  UNOPENED ON A SHELF

  ‘No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.’

  CHARLES DICKENS

  If you enjoyed Plague Child you might be interested in these other titles from Harper Press…