by Ann Swinfen
It was done. Nothing could bring back those lost fragments of his life. John stood gazing at the coals as they settled back to their steady, relentless burning, then shook himself impatiently. What to do with his valuables, should the next rabble of soldiers prove less persuadable than the last? They needed to be secured and concealed. Most of the family’s possessions were left behind in Swinfen, but they had brought some plate to London, and Anne had her jewels. For her birthday earlier this year he had bought her a three-strand necklace of pearls that had cost as much as two years’ wages for a skilled craftsman. On her marriage her father had given her matching ear-rings and necklace set with rubies and diamonds. She owned a few other valuable jewels. He was anxious not to worry her any further after last night’s terror, but these things must be made safe. In the court cupboard he also had an iron-bound strong box containing coin. All these must be locked away. There was a space below the floor-boards in the bedchamber where the two boxes might be concealed.
He found Anne in the parlour, listening to Jack reading aloud a pious text for children, suitable for a Sunday. For a time John sat and listened. How different were his two eldest sons! Dick had learned to read quickly, seemingly without effort, but he was indifferent towards his studies, happier on horseback or out after pheasants with a fowling piece and a couple of setting dogs. Jack, on the other hand, progressed slowly, but took enormous pains, anxiously hoping for praise at every step along the road to learning. He was reading now with all the pompous solemnity of a prelate in the pulpit. John concealed his smile, waiting until the reading was finished and Jack made his stately way upstairs to join the other children in quiet Sabbath play.
‘Have we reared a little churchman?’ John asked.
Anne gave him a quick smile. ‘He’s always so eager for you to notice him. Have you finished with your papers?’
‘As far as I may. Dear heart, I pray you, don’t let what I am going to say give you cause to worry.’
‘That’s enough to make me worried already,’ she said, her wan face belying her light-hearted tone. Their eyes met and a flash of understanding passed between them.
‘I’d like you to put your jewels in the strong box with the coin,’ said John. ‘I’ll give you a key to it, and also to my writing box. Whichever way the vote goes tomorrow, I fear Ireton and the army will act. If we lose the vote, they’ll sweep ahead with their plans to put the king on trial. In that case, it may be that I’ll need to absent myself from the House, for I will not countenance regicide.’
‘Surely they wouldn’t dare to kill the king! It would be treason. Sacrilege.’
‘They’ll wrap it up in the pretence of judicial process, but it will be judicial murder nonetheless.’
‘So you think we may have to leave London in a hurry?’
‘Aye.’
‘But if you win the vote, surely there will be no need?’
‘If we win the vote, they may simply continue to threaten and terrorise the members, in the hope of halting any dealings with His Majesty. No man of any party may count himself safe from his enemies. I’m not the only one to have been attacked.’
‘John, why didn’t you tell me this before?’
‘No need to concern you too soon. Now. . .well, now, matters are coming to a head. And I believe our enemies will no longer pursue such devious means, but will show their hand at last. They don’t want peace on the terms agreed with the king. Not on any terms!’
He pounded his fist on his palm in frustration.
‘All the hard work of these last weeks and months has at last secured terms which are far better than anything we might have dreamed of a year ago. But no, they have other plans—rule by the army and its self-appointed leaders. They will set up some form of despotism. So I believe they’ll attempt to dissolve Parliament by force. It cannot be done by legitimate means, without the consent of the members.’
Anne regarded him steadily, but her face had gone white.
‘And in that case we would also have to leave?’
‘That would be the safest course. Tomorrow you and Patience must oversee the packing of our goods, in case we need to escape in haste, before we are trapped inside an occupied city.’
Instinctively, Anne cradled the unborn child in her womb.
‘Yes,’ John said. ‘God knows I wouldn’t wish you to travel now, not for the world.’
He thought with anguish of the child coming, and the winter weather setting in, and the rains and floods of this year, which had mired some roads thigh deep, and washed others away altogether.
‘But I can’t see what else to do—I fear that you and the children may be in danger, on my account. I should never have brought you here from Staffordshire. I think we must prepare for the worst. I want you packed and ready by Tuesday morning.’
‘What of the servants?’
‘Peter and Bess and Hester return with us to Swinfen, of course. As the other three are Londoners, it’s my belief they will want to remain close to their families. We’ll hire a private carriage large enough for you and Patience and the children. Hester and Bess can ride with the driver and Peter and I will go on horseback.’
‘You’ve planned it all.’
‘I have lain awake nights thinking what’s best to do. Here are the keys, so you can lock away any valuables safely. It may be that we shan’t need to travel all the way home to Staffordshire. If we go first to Oxford, we can seek shelter with the Harcourts, at least until you’re delivered.’
‘That will be two days on the road,’ said Anne, threading the keys on a ribbon, and tying it around her neck, so they could lie concealed under her shift. ‘I’ll manage well enough. But what of Dick and Nan? Shall I send for them tomorrow? We can’t leave them behind in London.’
‘We’ll have enough to concern us, moving you and the five younger children to safety.’ John had foreseen this, and had his arguments ready. ‘They’ll be safe in their schools. No one will go seeking them there. It’s because of your closeness to me that you may be in danger here. My house in Westminster is known. You are known. That’s why we may need to move you away from here. Of course, all these plans may come to nothing, and in a week’s time we shall be laughing at our fears. Or we may go no further than Oxford, while Nan and Dick spend Christmas with Grace and Charles in Holborn. One step at a time, that’s how we must proceed.’
As the early dusk drew in, the entire family walked through the streets again to evening service. More soldiers were to be seen than before. Some gathered about the ale-houses, some marched in tight-knit groups like formal patrols, some who had been drinking all day shouted threats and obscenities as the family passed by. The two young maids were no longer so ready to flirt with the soldiers. Instead they clung to each other and scurried along behind Hester, with their eyes cast down.
During the service, Francis curled up on the pew with his head in his mother’s lap. Anne glanced about to see whether a church warden had noticed and was bearing down upon them to rap Francis sharply on the head with his heavy rod. Happily, they were seated in a dark corner where the candlelight barely reached, and no one noticed. She laid her hand on his forehead. It was damp and burning.
Coming out of the church, Francis stumbled like a drunkard and clung to Anne’s skirt. She stopped John when he turned to speak to friends and drew him aside.
‘Francis is ill, John. He shouldn’t be abroad in this cold wind. We must hasten home.’
John crouched down on his heels to look at the boy.
‘Francis? Son, are you ill?’
Francis nodded silently and put his arms around his father’s neck. With a sigh, he laid his head in the hollow under John’s chin and slumped forward so that John had to catch him to stop him sliding to the ground. He stood up, cradling the child against his chest and wrapped his cloak around him.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon have you home and abed with a honey posset and a warm brick for your feet.’
Chapter Six
During the night, Francis grew worse, tossing endlessly and throwing off the bed clothes. His face was flushed and his eyes were bright, though he seemed hardly to recognise anyone. He had begun to cough, a dry hacking sound that made Anne hurt as she listened to it. She sat beside the bed on a joint stool, wringing out a cloth in cool water and bathing the hot little face. Around midnight, John came quietly into the boys’ room and stood watching her.
‘Is he no better?’
Anne shook her head mutely, not trusting herself to speak.
‘If he’s still ill in the morning, we’ll send for a physician to bleed him.’
The thin white arm sticking out of the child’s night shift lay limply on the blanket. Anne laid a protective hand on it.
‘It may not come to bleeding,’ she pleaded, feeling the heart clench within her. ‘It did George no good.’
John pulled up another stool and sat beside her, taking her other hand in his. He stroked the back of it with his thumb.
‘George was but an infant,’ he said, with a doubtful air of confidence. ‘Francis is a strong, hearty boy of six. It isn’t the same case at all.’
Anne kept her head down, but could not take comfort from his words. She knew the death of a baby could never be the same for a man. Some children always died. A man would say that those who died so soon after birth must just be laid aside and forgotten, but she could never forget those terrible few days of watching her second son slip away, with nothing she could do to save him.
‘George,’ she whispered. Her mouth was dry and bitter. ‘And little John, the first John, our third son.’
John put his arms around her and laid his cheek against her hair, which fell loose about her shoulders.
‘I know, my love, I know.’
‘And the others,’ she said, her voice harsh with grief. ‘You never think of the others.’
‘The others?’
‘You see! To you they were never children, but they were to me. The four untimely born, before Nan.’
His face looked stricken, but he rocked her silently in his arms.
‘Francis is not going to die,’ he said at last, though his voice lacked conviction. ‘Come, now. You’ve watched long enough. Go and lie down for a while and I’ll stay with him.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll not leave him.’
‘Very well, lie on the bed next to him and keep him warm. I’ll bathe his face.’
He helped her onto the bed beside the child and tucked the blankets around her. She took Francis in her arms and before long her soft breathing mingled with the harsh sound of the air whistling in the child’s lungs.
The frost had locked the city in silence. In this high little room under the roof beams, as the midnight turned, John could not even hear the faint disturbance of fleeing citizens which had continued all evening. His wife, his child, and this small, bleak room formed his whole world.
To you they were never children, but they were to me. The four untimely born.
What could he have said to comfort her? It was true. He should have taken more account of what the miscarriages had meant to her. Had Anne been bearing that grief all these years, and he unknowing? When does the soul enter the body? Before birth? Tired as he was, he could not remember what the church taught on this difficult question. Those children were his as well as hers, had lived and moved within her, had possessed, surely, the first flowering of a soul, and some kind of simple knowing—pleasure and pain.
And they had died. One after the other they had lived and died, like so many other children in these bitter years of war. A terrible weeping anger swept over him. How could a just God allow it to happen? All those children who had never tasted more than the first sip of life. And now Francis, his quiet, clever little boy.
John laid his forehead on the bed and let the tight chains of his control go slack. His shoulders were wrenched with dry, soundless sobs.
Do not take this one from me!
He did not know who or what he addressed. Surely not that cruel God who called upon Abraham to set the knife to his beloved son’s throat as proof of his faith.
‘Papa?’ The whisper was so soft he thought he had imagined it.
‘Francis?’ He lifted his head. The child was gazing at him with eyes that held some dark, adult knowledge.
‘Papa, am I going to die?’
‘No!’ He was shocked by his own fierceness. ‘No, son,’ he said more gently. ‘I’ll not let you die. I’m here to fight for you.’
The child sighed, turned over towards his mother, and slept again.
In the burned-out wealden village, the snow lay untouched by man. It had drifted over the charred remains of the cottages, had moulded the huddled bodies into the hummocks of the rough woodland beyond the clearing. The horse and donkey had wandered into the forest, searching vainly for fodder, but kept returning by instinct to the village, the only place they had ever known. The mound where the boy lay beside his mother was criss-crossed with the lace of bird tracks. As yet, however, the predatory beasts of the wild had not found the dead. For a time, they lay in peace.
Before the crucial matter of the Treaty could be debated on Monday, letters from the Isle of Wight reached Parliament with alarming news. The army had suddenly seized the king and moved him from the relative comfort of Carisbrooke to the grim fortress of Hurst Castle, acting illegally, without the authorisation of Parliament. The king’s attendants and servants had been dismissed, and he was now surrounded by army place-men. Parliament’s most valuable chess piece was now in the hands of the army.
‘Once again the army acts as if it were the government of this country,’ John said furiously to Crewe as they sat listening to this disastrous news. ‘Where will it end?’ He signalled frantically at Speaker Lenthall with his hat but was ignored.
‘We must show ourselves resolute,’ said Crewe. ‘At our first sign of weakness the army will force this Parliament to vote for dissolution. Then they will rule the country, as the king did, without the people’s elected representatives.’
‘Or else they’ll put in place a poodle Parliament to do their bidding.’ John swore under his breath. ‘Come, the clerks are calling us to vote on the motion—“that the army’s latest escapade is without the knowledge or consent of this House”. By God, that’s true!’ He sprang to his feet.
The members now turned to the real business of the day. The initial arguments centred on the exact wording of the motion which would be put to the most vital vote ever before this Parliament. Before the vote could be held, every man in the chamber must know what he was voting for or against, down to the least and smallest word. To the ordinary citizen, such quibbles probably would have seemed a waste of the members’ time, but John knew that sometimes the fate of the nation could depend on a handful of words carelessly framed. The first motion proposed was:
Whether the king’s answers to the Propositions of both Houses be satisfactory.
Skilled debaters in the army party tried hard and cynically to force this motion on the House. They knew that such a motion (which meant unquestioning acceptance of the king’s position without imposing further safeguards) could only be acceptable to a thorough-going Royalist. But after the expulsion during recent years of some members who had openly supported the king against Parliament, and the voluntary withdrawal of others, none but secret Royalists remained in the ranks of the Commons, and certainly none of them would show their hand by voting for such a motion. The republicans hoped that, by forcing the members to vote on this form of words, they could defeat the Treaty outright.
‘You’re our man, John,’ said Crewe, when the peace party cried out against this proposal. ‘Young you may be, but you’re our chosen man when it comes to the right wording for a motion or a bill.’
In his three years in the Commons, John had gained a reputation for shrewdness and subtlety in the use of Parliamentary language. As a rising man, he had been appointed to more committ
ees than almost any other member, including the important Derby House Committee, and he regularly acted as a spokesman on behalf of the Commons to the Lords. But at this crisis, when the wrong choice of words could destroy all they had achieved so far, he hesitated.
‘Nay, let us put this in the hands of one of the professional lawyers amongst us,’ he pleaded.
Fiennes shook him gently by the shoulder.
‘What we need is a man with a clear understanding of Parliament,’ he said. ‘We want no wordy lawyer’s ramblings. Come, John, you know you’re the one to find the way for us.’
So when a close committee of the peace party withdrew to another room to consider what should be done about this dangerously worded motion, it was John who led the discussion and who devised the appropriate form of words for a motion to replace it:
That the answers of the king to the Propositions of both Houses are a ground for the House to proceed upon for the settlement of the peace of the kingdom.
The wording was deliberately careful: ‘a ground to proceed upon’. This paved the way for further negotiations with the king, and would gain the support of every member of the House who did honestly desire ‘the settlement of the peace of the kingdom’ on honourable terms. And it was this form of words that the Commons chose to debate. If the Commons supported this motion, it meant peace.
As the day wore on, it became clear that this would be a debate like no other ever known in Parliament. Passions burned up fiercely, and speaker after speaker rose, first on one side and then on the other. There had been violent debates before in the House—when the king had imposed ship money, when decisions had been made about the conduct of the war. But now everyone knew that on the outcome of this day’s actions would depend the future of England as a constitutional monarchy, with an inherited crown and anointed king, a house of hereditary peers and a house of elected commoners. The future of the whole government of the realm hung in the balance.