by Ann Swinfen
‘Mistress?’ said Patience, disentangling Dorothea and lifting her up. ‘You look very tired. Won’t you rest a while on your bed? Hester’s making gingerbreads and the boys are going to help decorate them.’
‘And me!’ cried Dorothea, thumping Patience on the cheek. ‘I want to make gin’erbread!’
Anne closed her eyes and nodded.
‘Very well. Thank you, Patience. I think I will lie down for a time.’
She dragged herself up the stairs. Usually she bore pregnancy well, but the weeks of grey, discouraging weather, and the load of worries that John only partly shared with her, had brought on a constant sense of fatigue which she tried unsuccessfully to overcome. And all this day it had seemed as though the very city held its breath, trapped under its grim canopy of cloud. Like that moment of dread in the midst of a play, when you knew that an assassin was about to strike, everything seemed to be waiting. But this was no Bankside tragedy, where the slaughtered actors would spring to their feet to take their bows. What lurked in the wings now were sharpened swords, not wooden foils, and the blood they drew would be warm, and human, and fatal.
With a gasp at the pain in her back, she lay down on the big, carved bed that almost filled the small chamber. Already, on this dark afternoon, the room was draped in gloomy shadows. Shivering, she pulled the pieced quilt over her and spent some time restlessly turning until she could find a comfortable position. At last, she felt herself drifting into sleep and forced her eyes open. It was not her intention to sleep, just to rest a little. There was too much that needed doing about the house, after all the time she had spent preoccupied with the children’s quarrels. Yet she felt dizzy and filled with some inexplicable dread.
When she was a small child, a storm had once damaged the roof of Weeford church and rain had poured down the south wall of the nave. The next Sunday, as her attention wandered during the sermon, her eye had been caught by large flakes of loosened whitewash drifting down from the wall. No one else seemed to have noticed. Small patches of bright colour began to appear. There were pictures under the thin layer of wash. Anne watched, forgetting the preacher, leaning nearer as the hidden painting came to life. She reached across and picked off a fragment, which came away in a ribbon, clinging to her fingers. As more of the whitewash peeled away like ragged clothes from a beggar’s nakedness—dislodged, not only by her fingers, but by the warmth and draughts caused by the crowded congregation—she saw with terror that the pictures did not depict, as she had thought at first, some kindly saint or Mary holding the Christ Child. Huge scarlet monsters with teeth as long as her father’s dagger were gobbling up tiny black figures of men and women. Other people, white in their nakedness, were tumbling from a great height into an immense cauldron of flames. Then a large patch of whitewash fell away all at once and a devil with burning red eyes and scimitar claws like a hawk leaned out of the wall, ready to seize her. The church turned black and spun around her, and her ears were filled with a great confused roaring noise. She began to scream and scream, until her father wrapped her in his cloak and carried her home to Weeford Hall.
Shouting and the clatter of horses’ hoofs brought her shuddering awake. Bleary and confused, she lay terrified, her heart drumming. Thick darkness surrounded her and for a few moments she had no idea where she was. She felt herself still caught up in that spinning black void, in which the violent noises made no sense, but increased her terror by their very lack of meaning. Her own screams, echoing from her memory or from her dream, still seemed to sound in her ears. Now she did not scream, but pushed herself up against the pillows and strained to make out the faint shape of the window overlooking the lane. A violent pounding on the door below was followed by more shouts and what sounded like someone kicking the door panels. Anne put her hands to her head. Her brain was swimming. Why was it so dark? At night, when the householders lit their street torches, there was always a wash of light in the bedchamber. With a groan she levered herself up from the bed and stumbled across to the window.
The street below was swarming with soldiers, mounted troopers. Some were tying their horses to the tethering rings fixed beside the front doors of gentlemen’s houses here in this wealthy part of Westminster. Others were beating upon the doors with the butts of their muskets, demanding food and beds. There was not a light to be seen in any house. No one had lit the outside lanterns and torches. Anne clutched at the window transom, dizzy with confusion. Had everyone run away? Had her own household abandoned her, so that she was alone here to confront these dangerous men, with their dirty, unshaven faces, their swords and guns? She leaned forward, trying to see up the lane in the direction John would come on the way home from Parliament. Shouldn’t he be home by now? Had he been waylaid? She began to tremble violently. Perhaps Parliament itself had been attacked and John himself had fallen to those very swords.
One of the men, looking up as he finished tethering his horse directly below, caught sight of her in the window.
‘See, lads!’ he shouted, ‘some folks are at home and ready to welcome us. Hey, goody, let us in out of this stinking weather. The army has come a-visiting. We need food and drink, and what you won’t give, we’ll gladly take for ourselves.’
The others laughed at this fine piece of wit, and left off thumping the other doors in the street to gather around the Swynfens’ house. Anne fled across the room and down the stairs, not even pausing to slip her feet into her shoes. At the bottom of the stairs she found Peter with Ned, the London manservant, each of them armed with a poker and standing uncertainly behind the front door. They had bolted it and pushed a heavy oak chest across it. Both were elderly men. Though they wore an air of determined bravery, they were no more able than she was to withstand that rabble.
‘Where are the others?’ she whispered. She was not sure why she whispered, when there was so much noise outside.
Ned jerked his head towards the stairs.
‘Up in the attic, mistress. If the soldiers break in, Peter reckons ‘tis the kitchen and cellars they’ll be wanting first, and then the master’s study and the parlour, for anything they can loot. Mistress Wyatt thought they’d be safest in the attic. They’ll block the door.’
‘Why did no one wake me?’
Ned looked confused. He was somewhat slow-witted.
Peter said, ‘It happened so fast, mistress. They ha’n’t been here above ten minutes. I thought you was with Mistress Wyatt.’
Just then Patience leaned over the stairs. ‘Oh, Mistress Swynfen, I couldn’t find you. What shall we do? Will they kill us, do you think?’
‘Go back to the children and the maids,’ said Anne. ‘Shut yourselves in. But be ready to let us in if we come.’
Patience flew up the stairs to the attic again and Anne collapsed suddenly on to the bottom stair. The two men looked at her hopefully, glad to hand over responsibility. Her brain was still muddled with her unintended sleep. She felt sick and dizzy, and all her limbs weighed heavy. After a brief lull, the soldiers’ shouting started up again outside. There was a sudden crash against the door, which shook with the impact. Anne knew that sound. The soldiers had found an axe. She must act, but her limbs refused to move. Terror had frozen her into a crouching heap at the bottom of the stairs.
‘What, now, men! Is that any way to ask for meat and drink?’ John’s voice rose cheerfully above the noise outside. ‘When I’m from home, do you seek to fright the very wits out of a few maids and a rout of small children? The eldest but seven, and my wife near her time? Nay, you’d not have your own wives and children used so. I’ll gladly give you supper, but I beg you not to behave like a parcel of Dutchmen!’
Relief flooded through Anne like a warm wave. The men were laughing, some even apologising. There was a shuffling of feet on the cobbles outside.
‘Come now,’ said John. ‘My wife will scold me a month if I let you walk in the front door with your boots all mud. Come round this passage to the kitchen and I’ll fetch you ale and something to eat, then I
beg you find somewhere else to sleep. We can’t move in this house for falling over each other, and the youngest cries half the night with colic. There’s room for the cavalry at the Mews, I’m told.’
The sound of the voices dwindled as John led the men down the side of the house towards the back door, which opened into the kitchen.
‘Quick, Peter, Ned,’ said Anne, regaining command of herself. ‘Go and unbolt the back door for the master, and help him find food for them. Don’t mention his name in front of the soldiers, and don’t let them know he’s a Member of Parliament. They might hold him to ransom. And give me those pokers.’
Within an hour, John had shared out the family’s supper of meat stew amongst the soldiers, dispensed small ale liberally, and handed over every scrap of bread in the house. The men went away warmed, fed, and singing raucous songs, to join the other troopers in the Mews. When he had closed the back door on them and shot the bolts, he came looking for Anne. She was still crouched at the bottom of the stairs. He raised her gently to her feet and put his arms around her.
‘Hush, hush, my love,’ he said, for she was shaking uncontrollably with cold and fear, now the danger was averted. ‘What were you going to do with these pokers? Knock out my brains?’
Anne began to sob then, clinging to him, her teeth chattering. He picked her up and carried her into the parlour, where Ned was building up the fire.
‘Ned,’ said John, ‘go and tell the others it’s safe to come down now. And ask Hester if she can find some eggs or pickled meat, so that we don’t all go hungry to our beds.’
He sat down on a chair beside the fire and held his wife close in his arms.
‘Hush, now,’ he said again, stroking her hair. ‘They meant no real harm. They were cold and soaked to the skin and hungry, enough to make any man short-tempered.’
‘They took an axe to the door. If you hadn’t come when you did . . . Oh, John, what is to become of us?’
The weather was yet colder on Sunday, with a savage wind blowing, but John was strict in this: all the family must attend church twice every Sabbath day. Anne, still pale and shaken after the soldiers’ assault on the house the previous evening, clung to her husband’s arm with uncharacteristic dependence as they walked to St Margaret’s. Even more than the physical support, she needed the reassurance of his solid presence next to her. At least today she would not have to wait fearfully till evening for his return from the House.
The children were more excited than upset by the army’s arrival in the city.
‘I would have chased away those soldiers,’ Jack boasted, tilting his velvet hat rakishly over one ear, ‘if Father had not come home. I would have taken Father’s pistols down from the parlour wall and shot them through the window.’
Ralph nodded as he strutted along beside his brother, buttoned up in his best Sabbath day doublet of Lincoln green velvet with gold cording.
‘I’d have cared for Mama,’ he said, ‘and then she wouldn’t have been frightened and she wouldn’t have cried.’
Francis was silent as they made their way through the slush and grime of the streets, but he was always the most reserved of the boys. Skipping along hand in hand with Patience, Dorothea was chattering about the Christmas festival when Dick and Nan would come home from school, for she was too young to understand the danger so narrowly escaped the night before. Bess followed behind, carrying Mary, while the rest of the servants brought up the rear—Peter and Ned, Hester the cook, and the two London maids, Tabby and Kate, who stared boldly at the occasional small groups of soldiers loitering at street corners.
Anne grew very cold during the three-hour sermon. Something seemed to have caught hold of her the previous evening, an icy chill running in the blood, that she could not shake off. She took the drowsy Mary on her lap as much for her own warmth as for the child’s comfort, while the preacher thundered against the intemperance of the army and urged a Presbyterian settlement with the king. She studied John’s grave expression, but could not guess what he was thinking. He had not discussed with her yesterday’s course of events in the House, and she could not decide whether he was worried or merely tired.
After the service, John’s old friend and fellow moderate Samuel Gott took him aside and recounted what he had heard of the army’s latest activities. There had been looting of valuables from citizens’ homes and shops. Furniture and panelling had been smashed to provide wood for the soldiers’ bonfires.
‘Now we in London know what the rest of the country has endured from this rabble,’ said Gott dourly.
‘The sooner the army is disbanded, the better for the whole nation of England,’ said John. ‘Such men gathered together under licence as an army behave like a herd of ravening jackals. With as little concern for their victims. At home in their own counties they’d have better work for their hands, ploughing and reaping.’
‘If the weather continues next year to be as foul as it has this year past,’ said Gott, ‘there’ll be little enough ploughing and reaping, and more than enough hungry mouths crying out for bread. But it’s true these men behave like beasts—some of the cavalry have been turning the churches into stables, flinging their saddles over the altar and tethering their horses amongst the pews, the floor fouled with dung. ‘Tis monstrous! Have you heard the latest jest? Such is the power of this great reformation effected by the army that now—to the amazement of the world—it’s brought not only men but even horses into church!’
John gave a grim bark of laughter.
In the afternoon, with dinner finished by three o’clock, John shut himself in the small dark chamber which served as his study. It was time to deal with his private papers. If all went well the next day in Parliament, the members would vote to accept the Treaty with the king and take the first steps towards peace. But would Parliament be allowed to continue governing? The war party had moved on from verbal and written threats; now the army of occupation had brought the very stench of blood and gunpowder into the streets of Westminster. John stirred up the fire in his study, and began to sort through his papers, setting aside for burning those he no longer needed. He gathered together in one pile the correspondence he had held with Crewe while he had been absent from London during the negotiations in Newport. John himself had acted as spokesman for the commissioners here in Westminster, a go-between relaying their progress to the members, while in turn keeping Crewe informed about the mood in Parliament. Some time in the future, this correspondence might provide valuable witness to the events of the last three months. He caught sight of one of Crewe’s letters:
‘We shall use our utmost endeavours here,’ Crewe had written, ‘to bring the king nearer the Houses, and you will do good service at London in persuading the House to come nearer the king . . . No man knows what will become of religion and the Parliament if we have not peace.’
John rested his head on his folded arms and closed his eyes. His wound ached and his head throbbed from working in the light of the single candle he had carried into his study. All his muscles were tense with anxiety. For the last hour his sight had been attacked by the jagged lightning flashes which forewarned him of the onset of an acute megrim. Already the sight in his left eye was blurred; soon it would darken completely. There was no cure for these attacks, which had occurred more frequently in recent months, other than rest in a darkened room, a luxury of time he could not afford.
For a moment he felt too tired to face the struggle which still lay ahead. Well, they would know soon enough whether their endeavours in both the Isle of Wight and Westminster would indeed bring peace. For a long time it had seemed that the disputes over episcopacy and its abuses would be the immovable barrier to success. Nat’s father, Lord Say and Sele, had even gone down on his knees, begging the king to accept Parliament’s terms for curbing the powers of the bishops. Unless the king agreed to this condition it would mean the triumph of the war party and descent into the army’s rule by force of arms. John himself was adamant that the
corrupt and overweening bishops must go, but it must be brought about by legitimate means. In reply to Crewe’s letter, he had written that, if the king could not be persuaded to abandon his intransigence, ‘all our earlier discussions were but a fight off the shore, which makes the ensuing rough ocean the more terrible.’
This rough ocean lay now within sight.
Yet in rereading his own words, John smiled grimly at the irony: the blame for the gathering tempest could not, for once, be laid at the king’s door. No, it was those gathered about Cromwell and Ireton who were bent on destroying not only the bishops and the king and the House of Lords, but the people’s own elected Parliament. It was bitter enough that a man might weep.
He lifted his head and sighed at the sight of the piles of documents confronting him. He must not allow weakness to cause him to falter in these final stages. Outside the window the sound of footsteps continued, as it had done all day. And all making for the river. People passed in small groups, one or two families together, hurrying, quiet except for the crying of children or the occasional bark of a dog following, puzzled at the abandonment of its home. The very silence of the fleeing citizens made it more menacing.
When he had finished sorting his papers and determined which of them he must keep, he locked these in his writing box and stored it in the court cupboard. The rest went on the fire. For a few moments the papers lay rigid on the coals, like some early martyr enduring torment on the gridiron. Drafts of speeches before the Commons, copies of letters, private writings in which he had tried to explore and set out his own thoughts, his beliefs, his dreams of how this sorry nation might be healed. At last the thick paper began to writhe, the ink turned the reddish brown of dried blood, all those words, those desperate attempts at thought crumpled in upon themselves. The words blurred and vanished, floating in soft ashy dust up the chimney to scatter on the wind.