But –
The birth of the child answers any buts and who is to say whose seed had the larger part in the creation of it? Besides, one cannot be blamed for taking the advice of one’s doctor, so long as there is no ungodly pleasure taken in the reinforcement.
Well, I said, my friend will be most surprised.
Was I always to be disappointed in matters of the heart? Was there ever to be some ulterior purpose, some hidden affection, which my lover would not discover to me? And what perversity that it should always be the husband who was the true apple of her eye. No printed romance ever contained such matter, it being too indecent to be spoken of that a woman should use a man for her own advantage without thought of his. To the old Duchess I was a plaything, to the young Duchess an auxiliary stallion, to Mrs Pepys – nothing. And I had no child of my own to comfort my old age that was fast approaching. Even had I a son, I could have taken little pleasure in him, nor he in me, for I had no land or title. Truly, as that cynic of Malmesbury has said, the lot of man is brutish, nasty, solitary, and, were I to be struck down in resisting the usurper, short too.
Burdened with such reflections, I rode out along the high road, to the West. Until my first post (for I was riding at my lord’s expense, it costing half-a-crown a stage) I was sunk in inspissated gloom. It seemed as though I had fallen into a well so deep that I could not see the sky and with sides so slippery that I could not climb out of the foul bog at the bottom of it. But then I came to a decent inn at the turnpike and had two mutton chops and a pint of cider, and by the next morning, which was as fair as it had been for weeks before, my spirits rose again and the brisk motion of the post-horse restored my vitality. And the day after that, when I rode out of the heathland and on to the undulant plains of Sarum, with the larks singing above me and the fragrance of the burnet roses in every hedge, I felt young again and scorned my earlier inner discourses as empty chop-logic.
In Salisbury, I met my master at an inn by the market cross and we embraced, for we felt ourselves to be on the verge of a high adventure.
This time I shall do it, Jem, he said. They’ll remember me after this as they remember my father. Old Monck and Young Monck – that’s how it will be in the histories and they’ll think of us in the same breath.
So they will, I said, and for an instant I too believed it.
We rode on to Exeter with destiny lending us wings and the hot sun in our faces.
By nightfall the next day we were in Devonshire and Kit was among his own people and with his own militia, and Feversham and Churchill under him, to resist the invader of whose forces we knew nothing: was he in one ship or many, with field-pieces or no, if so, large or small, and how many men?
The castle at Exeter was much broken down, and though the late King had left money for its repair, there was no time but to patch up the worst of the decay. And I thought of the piteous decay of Upnor Castle, when I had broken open the store to get the tools to repair the batteries against the Dutch. Was it always to be the fate of our unlucky nation to be unready? Were we by nature late wakers to the alarum?
Kit threw himself into the preparation, drilling the militia himself, overseeing the repairs to the castle, demanding reinforcement from the other towns of the county, and then sending officers out to see to it that the men were being brought in and properly armed. By dusk, he was as tired as a dog, for his intemperance had brought the jaundice upon him and though I was twenty years older than he, I could outlast him.
Read me the letters over, Jem, I have no patience left for reading.
And so it was that I read him the first letter his wife sent him from Clerkenwell, of which I have kept a copy, for it pierced my heart. I will not correct the grammar of it nor the spelling, for gentlewomen in those days were not taught as they are today.
It began:
My deare Lord – Ye confusion I am in you will eseylay emagin by Dayley ill nuses (she meant news). I have not sleped all yet last night my feares have incresed soe fast and with such Great reson. Dearist cretuare, you will wonder at this letter foloeing ye outher soe fast, excuses ye trouble I give you and when you consider ye danger that is round you, you will pardon me eseyat for being soe Tender; did you know my thoughts your love to me would mocion you to Greeve for my presnet Torment. I am to ignorant to advises and my Deare has so large share of Jugment in ware matters to feare anyting can goe amis for want of conduckt, nether doe I think you will be a rash ackter. God spare your life, you will be as Great as Good, I being for ever your affectionate Dutyfull wife.
E. Albemarle
Her untutored sentiments may give some modern ladies to smile, but they struck me deeply and I carried the letter in my vest and kept it under my pillow at night as though it had been written to me.
She’s a good little bitch after all, was all Kit grunted. Pour me another glass, Jem, be a good fellow.
I remember sitting at the table by the wine jug and looking at my master sprawled in his chair, corpulent now, his long greasy hair falling over the wing of the chair, his yellow face reddened in the firelight, and wondering what she could see in such a creature and thinking that I was beginning to love her only now that I knew she had no love for me but was employing me as one might employ a syringe. For a moment, I thought of crashing the jug down upon his greasy head, but then there came the noise of running footsteps upon the stair and a little bald man half-fell into the room.
Sir, Your Grace, he is landed.
And who are you?
Gregory Alfred, sir, the Mayor of Lyme. I was there to see him on the Cobb, sir. It was a terrible sight, there must have been a thousand of them. They ran up their flag in the market place . . . armed to the teeth . . . barely escaped with my life . . . the guns, oh the guns.
When we saw there was no more to be got out of him, we thanked him for his pains and packed him off to bed with a glass of wine.
So there we sat in the Commandant’s lodging in Exeter Castle, the two of us, none other by, the local officers long gone to bed. The logs sputtered on the hearth. I heard the cathedral clock strike I know not what hour. Outside, it began to rain, not a storm but steady rain that soaks through to a man’s bones.
Yet for all that, I have never known such a silence. I fancied I could hear the pulse in my temple beating. It was a profound, chilling quiet, and when Kit spoke, there was no flush of wine in his voice, but only a quality of awe as of a man speaking in church when he knows not whether he may.
Well then, Jem, he said.
Well then.
Do we take him now? Or do we give him more rope?
Another dreadful silence, while I thought what was the right answer, and what he wished me to say, and whether these two answers were the same or not.
My commission is to Devonshire, he went on. I have no authority to cross into Dorset to take him. That is for the Dorsetshire Militia, but they are a dismal rabble.
So I’ve heard.
What would my father have done, Jem? You knew the old man. What would he have done?
He would have taken him, sir.
So he would, so he would.
For a moment, Kit looked encouraged, then again began to muse:
But you’re thinking of battle on the high seas, when the only argument is a broadside. In this matter, there are delicate threads embroidered, it may be a time for being politic. Remember how slow and patient my father came down from Scotland without telling a soul that he meant to bring the King back in? This may be such another time. Perhaps my wife is right to tell me not to be a rash actor.
We should strike now before he gathers more men to him (I did not disclose that this sage counsel came by courtesy of Colonel W. Symons).
But we don’t know how many men he already has. It would be fatal to let him win a cheap victory at the outset, then he might be irresistible.
Silence again. The rain was coming down harder now.
Kit got up, quite briskly, all his languor gone.
I shall ask the
King for reinforcements. Will you write a letter to Lord Sunderland to that effect?
And?
And what?
What are we to do here with the militia?
The militia will go down towards Lyme to seal off his escape to the West. Then we shall meet with the other militias and when we are ready, pin him down until he has nowhere to run but back to the sea.
But not take him now?
Not yet. He must hang himself first before we hang him. Good-night, Jem.
I did not sleep much that night, even with Eliza’s letter beneath my pillow, for the middle way between two extremes which Kit had proposed might bring us the worst of both, viz. that we would have given him enough time to recruit more Dorset and Devon men while our forces would not yet be strong enough to destroy him.
The next morning we set off for Axminster, where we were to meet Sir Edward Phillips and Colonel Luttrell with their men.
The rain still came down and the high banks of the lanes were streaming with red mud. The lanes were so narrow that our boots grazed the hedges. Our horses were like mudlarks before we had gone a mile and the bright uniforms of the militia turned to drab. We lost the way in the lanes and came back upon ourselves, which wasted I don’t know how much time.
We came over the brow of a hill and there was smoke and noise beyond the next hill. Then more noise of feet and hooves clattering towards us.
The breathless muddy wretches who burst over the brow of the hill looked like men fleeing from Bedlam rather than Luttrell’s militia. Monmouth has taken the town! We are all betrayed!
They pressed around us shouting that all was lost and half their comrades had gone over to Monmouth and he would be at Taunton by nightfall.
The more Kit tried to restore them to order, the more they wept and wailed.
It seems he got first to Axminister, Kit said.
My leg was beginning to ache and my martial enthusiasm was waning. But as I got off my horse, Kit roared:
Back in the saddle, that man!
For a leader who had just lost half his army, he seemed less downcast than he might have been.
On boys, on to Wellington! We’ll cut him off from the West.
I was sore from being so long in the saddle and my thighs itched like the fires of Hell, but Kit rode on like a Roman through the bedrabbled mass, telling them to take heart and reform their ranks, which they did after a fashion, though not with zest, for half of them were with Monmouth in spirit and dreaming of a hero’s welcome in Taunton and a hot supper.
Then as we trudged over the hills towards Wellington, a despatch rider came to meet us with the news: ‘He has proclaimed himself King, the whole town is for him.’
Thank God, Kit said, now we have him.
Or he us.
I told you, didn’t I? He needed more rope. He has no hope of pardon now.
I forbore to point out that it was not yet certain around whose necks this ‘more rope’ would be knotted. Yet I could not but marvel at the facility with which Great Persons represent the accidents of fortune as the outcome of their designs. If any general had deliberately brought it about that his enemy should slip through his fingers on the main high road taking half his militia with him to Taunton in order that the said enemy should thereby be emboldened to declare himself King and thus render his life forfeit, then such a general would be carted off to the mad-house.
Kit was less pleased by the letter which came from London the day after the non-Battle of Axminster in which Lord Sunderland said: ‘His Majesty commands me to tell you that the forces with the Duke of Monmouth are not near so great as the Mayor of Lyme has represented them to you’ – which, being interpreted, meant that a bolder commander might have annihilated Monmouth before he left the Cobb – but Kit skipped over that passage and saw only the place where His Majesty declared his ‘Entire Confidence in Your conduct and zeal for his service’, leaving it to Kit to decide when and where to march, though the next day Sunderland sent another letter telling him to forbear to attack ‘Except upon great advantages’, which was another example of the brilliance of Great Persons, viz. to issue contrary instructions, so that one or the other of them may be remembered as having been the right one for the times.
But then came the finest moment: a letter from James R. (alias Monmouth, alias Scott, alias Crofts) addressed:
‘To our Trusty and Well-beloved Cousin and Counsellor, Christopher, Lord Duke of Albemarle’.
In this absurd and vain screed, he spoke of troops raised up for James, Duke of York ‘in opposition to Us and Our Royal Authority’. King Monmouth signified ‘Our Royal resentment’, but said that it was no doubt through inadvertency and mistake. Albemarle would think differently when he had received ‘this information of Our being proclaimed King to succeed our Royal Father lately deceased’. If his well-beloved cousin would cease all hostilities and repair to ‘Our camp’, he would have a kind and hearty reception.
Etc., etc. Never was there a more imbecile piece of boastfulness.
I quickly composed a short and dignified reply to the effect that Albemarle ‘never was and never will be a rebel to my lawful king who is James the Second’ and that ‘James Scott, late Duke of Monmouth’ would have done better to let this rebellion alone and not put the nation to so much trouble.
We sent the letter by the same trumpeter that had brought Monmouth’s letter and we despatched copies of both to Lord Sunderland.
My reply answers him well, Kit said. It is a sharp and weighty reply, isn’t it, Jem?
It is indeed (Kit had already forgotten I had written it for him).
We soon heard that the whole Court was laughing at Monmouth and praising Albemarle’s reply – the whole Court bar one person, but that one not the least, namely the King.
It was there in the letters from Lord Sunderland if Kit had had eyes to read them. Though he praised the Duke of Albemarle for subduing the country and penning Monmouth in like a sheep for the shearing, yet each letter ended with a lament for the disloyalty and cowardice of the militia or a complaint that Albemarle was very slow to hang the rebels he had taken and that no man should live who had proclaimed Monmouth King and such like.
It was true that Kit was loath to see these simple miners and shoemakers hanged for being led astray by Monmouth and his plotters (often when half-fuddled with cider). But he thought his credit with the King was strong enough for him to be forgiven such clemencies.
Yet still Kit hankered for a great victory that would cement his fame. And it was his schoolboy friend and manhood rival who denied it him. If Monmouth had taken flight to the West, he would have met our Devonshire men who would have overwhelmed him, I do not doubt, for Monmouth’s straggling band was now tired and desperate. We would have harried them in the high lanes from which there was no escape and trampled them into the red mud.
But it was not to be. Monmouth turned northwards, with some crazy design to stir up his friends in Cheshire and march down to London through the Midlands where the girls had thrown him so many garlands five years before.
It was a foolish fancy but then Monmouth’s whole excursion was misbegotten from first to last. On the boggy moors of North Somerset, his evading army was caught as soundly as eels in a Sedgemoor trap. The whole county was a maze of ditches and mires and plungeons and rines.
Feversham had sixteen guns to Monmouth’s three and Feversham had the credit of the victory, though he was still tying his cravat-string when Churchill was already cutting Monmouth’s foot-soldiers to ribbons.
Sedgemoor. A famous victory, but even had Monmouth carried it off there, he would have lost the next engagement. His army was encircled and he was doomed. He himself escaped until they caught him forty miles to the east, asleep in a ditch in the New Forest under the bracken. His hands were trembling, he could not speak, his beard was grey.
Well, you could say that Kit’s strategy had worked. He had given Monmouth rope and the rope had tightened round the rebel’s neck. But our celebra
tions were muted. For just as we heard that Monmouth was taken, we heard also that Feversham had been put over all His Majesty’s forces and all Lords-Lieutenant were to obey him – when until that day Feversham had been under Kit’s command.
For a whole day Kit stayed in his bed and would not speak. Indeed, his rage was so terrible that his whole body was suffused with it and he could not speak. He came out once and waved an empty brandy bottle that I might fetch him another. Then retired again.
The next day, he came out and ate a venison pasty and drank some ale, but he would say nothing, except: It is finished, which he said several times.
Then the following day, a transformation, or so I thought. He came out into the court to drill his troops, make arrangements for their return, the safe stowage of arms and ammunition and all the other after-battle business. He was calm and sober but still spoke little.
When we returned to London at the end of the month (a fortnight after Monmouth had been beheaded), Kit still kept this calm and sober mien. He even said he would take his part in electing Feversham to the Garter.
It happened after the ceremony. Kit presented himself to the King in the Royal Bedchamber and they had private discourse for a quarter of an hour. Kit never revealed to us what had transpired, though Lord Lucas said the King had rebuked him till tears stood in Kit’s eyes.
That evening, he asked the King openly what employment he had, now that Feversham was Lieutenant-General.
Why, said the King, you are the first Colonel.
But, sir, I had a patent to command all the forces and I know not how to serve under these I have commanded (I had all this from Lucas who is an old tattler).
Jem (and Sam) Page 31