by Ann Swinfen
There was a murmur of approval from behind him.
‘I too,’ croaked Sir Robert Harley, whose cold had almost robbed him of his voice. ‘I will swear an oath to present myself at the House tomorrow morning.’
The others shouted their agreement.
‘Well said.’ Clotworthy clapped old Harley on the shoulder.
‘This man is ill,’ he said to the officer. ‘You have no right to confine us in the cold and the dark. We have not eaten all day. You would not stable your horses in such a place.’ Clotworthy, the great landowner, was accustomed to being obeyed, but his confident tone had no effect.
The young officer looked embarrassed, but began to climb back up the stairs, taking his candle with him.
‘I have no authority to move you, nor to send for food. My orders are merely to make you this offer. If you refuse, I regret you must all stay here.’
By the time he finished speaking, his head and shoulders had risen above the level of the trapdoor. As his elegant bucket boots disappeared from sight, it was dropped back into place.
The hours dragged slowly on. It soon became clear that they were to be given no food, nor even water. The cellar was large, and must have reached away under the houses on either side of the tavern. So large was it, indeed, that the natural heat of their bodies drained away into the damp stone. Perhaps, as matters grew worse, they would huddle together for warmth like poor fugitives from one of the towns sacked during the recent years of war, but for the moment it had not come to that; they kept their dignity and their distance. John roamed about for a time, examining the cellar, more for something to occupy himself than in any hope of finding a way out. The walls were built of finely dressed stone, a construction much more skilled than the later building above, which was perhaps no more than three or four centuries old. With apologies to his fellows, he unhooked one of the lanterns and carried it into the furthest corner.
‘Have you found a way of escape, Swynfen?’ asked Edward Massey, following him. He was one of the youngest prisoners, younger even than John, at the age of thirty an army colonel of formidable reputation, who probably resented this restraint more than any. He had been prowling restlessly all day, first in the courtyard and now in the cellar.
‘I’m afraid not. I was intrigued by this carving.’ John held up the light. Where it fell upon a projecting piece of the wall, a bull’s head leapt suddenly into sight as if come to life. John ran his fingers over the cut edges of the stone. It was as sharp as the day some man’s hand had first carved it with skill and reverence.
‘That’s no idle stonemason’s scratching,’ said Massey. ‘Look, there are letters below.’
They peered closely at the lower stone, part of which had been hacked away at some time.
‘MITHR,’ John read. ‘Then this broken piece. Then DEO, and another break. Then AVIT. Part of a verb, but who can say what?’
‘Not enough to make sense.’
‘No. But the soldiers in the Roman army worshipped a god called Mithras. And I believe bulls were held to be sacred to him. Some pagan practice. I recall reading about him during my student days in Cambridge.’
‘A kind of pagan altar, then?’
‘Perhaps.’ John shivered. ‘This place is fearful enough without that. Best not to mention it.’
The heavy blocks of stone curving over his head to form the vaulted roof seemed suddenly to have sunk nearer. He felt the weight of the earth and stone and buildings above, the weight of years pressing down on him. A thin trickle of dry mortar whispered down the wall. This was how it must feel to be buried alive. His lungs struggled to draw in air.
They moved back to the main part of the cellar, and John returned the lantern to its hook.
‘I cannot endure to be confined,’ said Massey, slapping the indifferent wall angrily with the flat of his hand. ‘If they mean to keep us imprisoned more than a few hours, I shall find some means to escape.’
‘Easily said.’
Massey shrugged. ‘I’d rather die escaping than rot in a dungeon.’
He went over to join other military men grouped at the foot of the steps and talking earnestly. Besides the colonels Massey and Birch, there were three generals: Sir William Waller, Sir John Clotworthy and Lionel Copley. John squatted down on the floor under the lantern, where Prynne, silent for once, was sitting on the damp stone reading his pocket Bible.
Prynne looked up. ‘No secret smugglers’ passage down to the river, then?’ He grinned at John. When the man was neither preaching nor ranting, he wasn’t a bad fellow.
John shook his head. ‘All as solid built as the Tower. Here we stay until we go out through that trapdoor.’
He nodded towards the steps. Birch and Massey had climbed to the top and put their shoulders to the trap, but even with Birch’s great strength they could not shift it.
‘Bolted,’ someone called. ‘Or barrels moved on top to hold it fast.’
John’s own words reminded him of Prynne’s past. ‘You endured long imprisonment in the Tower—how did you pass the time without losing your wits?’
‘Anything that might take my mind off my plight. Prayer. Reading. Writing—when I could get paper and ink. Singing psalms.’
‘Now there’s an idea. Why don’t you lead us in singing?’
Prynne was never unwilling to be asked.
‘And you, Swynfen? Haven’t I heard you have an excellent voice?’
‘I sing sometimes with friends of an evening, after a good supper. Madrigals and motets. Still, the echoes of an empty stomach should lend our voices a fine resonance. Will you give us the note?’
A few of the men were trying to sleep, stretched out uncomfortably on the floor or on the barrel racks, so they sang softly.
Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my God, thou art very sweet; thou art clothed with honour and majesty.
Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretches out the heavens like a curtain:
Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind.
The stone walls cupped the music of their voices as sweetly as a wine goblet, like a great bell vibrating with the sound. One by one, other voices joined them. They were all devout men. The singing eased their hearts and the words of the psalm comforted them. The psalmist’s vision of a garment of light, the wings of the wind, thrust back for a time the reality of this dark and airless prison.
He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth;
And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart.
Their voices rang out more strongly, praising the joys of life denied to them in this cold and fearful place. Bread and oil and wine, thought John. It needs little enough to make glad the heart of man. And the fir trees, the high hills, the very rocks are a refuge for man as well as beast.
O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.
So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.
There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.
The walls of the prison seemed to John to fade from his sight, and instead he saw the world stretching out before him in all its diversity and beauty: men and beasts, birds of the air, mountains and seas, all moving in their appointed ways, the mighty leviathan, monarch of the roughest ocean, ploughing silent and swift towards the strange new world of the Americas.
I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.
As the last words whispered and faded amongst the dark corners of their prison, all voices, singing or speaking, fell silent. A few more of the men lay down upon the ground, or crouched with their foreheads resting on their up-drawn knees, trying to sleep. Some sat toget
her in groups. John recalled that he had his own small Bible in the pocket of his doublet. The print was difficult to read in the poor light, but Prynne was right. Best to occupy the mind, to keep it from dark thoughts. He turned over the pages. The story of Jonah in the belly of the leviathan seemed appropriate. Or of Daniel in the lion’s cave.
John woke. His chin had fallen forward on his chest, painfully stretching the muscles of his neck. The icy damp of the stone floor seeped through the flesh of his thighs and stiffened the very marrow of his legs. One by one he prised his fingers from his Bible, where they had locked in a deathlike rigour, as if he gripped it to save himself from drowning in the horror of his dream. His teeth had clenched on his tongue, drawing blood that seeped warm in his mouth. The recollection of the woman hung in the air. The woman in the sea-blue gown he had seen just before he was attacked on the doorstep of his home. The woman meant nothing, but the colour of her gown preyed on his mind, unlocking those memories he had, so long and so carefully, kept hidden away.
When he was a boy of ten, he had been sent to spend a month with cousins of his grandmother, who lived in Warwickshire. His grandmother had died before ever he was born, but the Swynfens had kept up the connection with the Lisle family and John’s father Richard wanted his eldest son to see a little more of the world than his native Staffordshire. In the household of Geoffrey Lisle, royal sheriff, John would meet men who held positions of power in the county of Warwick. In that year of 1623, there were already fine cracks appearing in the social fabric of England, but Richard Swynfen was not yet hostile to all those who held royal office.
John had enjoyed his visit at first, hunting and hawking with his older cousins, patiently enduring Margaret Lisle’s instruction in courtly manners. Geoffrey Lisle was a busy man of affairs and considered it part of his responsibility to his young cousin to introduce him to such county duties as would one day fall to his lot. So it came about that John attended the assize over which Geoffrey presided. Afterwards, John had only a blurred recollection of the assize, except for the one case that branded itself on his memory for the rest of his life.
The man, a young fellow of about twenty called Edmund Watson, was one of Geoffrey’s own tenants, living with his wife Isabel and very young baby in a one-roomed cottage which stood on swampy ground near the river. John knew the family, for he had lost his hawk and tracked it down to a willow which thrust its naked roots out from the muddy bank close beside the Watsons’ cottage. Edmund had helped him catch the errant bird and afterwards John had played with the baby boy, who lay on a shawl in a patch of sun before the door. He could see that the Watsons were very poor and the roof of their cottage was falling in at one end. He was shamed by the sight of it, for he knew his own father and grandfather would not allow any of their own tenants to live so.
Now Edmund Watson was up before the assize charged with poaching a rabbit from the nearby royal warren. John understood that poaching was a terrible crime, but a magistrate might exercise some discretion and compassion in the matter. The game stolen was a rabbit, not a deer. Moreover, Edmund had taken the rabbit because his family was starving, not in order to sell it and earn coin. It lay with sheriff Geoffrey Lisle to determine the punishment—branding, perhaps, or ear-clipping.
He decreed hanging.
Geoffrey required John to attend the hanging with him, for he said that a man who held office from the king must see the king’s justice carried through to full satisfaction. One day it would fall to John himself to dispense the king’s justice in his own county. Edmund Watson was hanged in the grey, misty dawn following the trial. He had been permitted to speak no word at his trial. He chose to speak no word at his hanging. His hands were tied, his eyes bound with a kerchief.
Why were Edmund’s eyes covered? John watched it done, gripping his hands together to hold himself in check. Was it so that the condemned man might not see his executioners? Or was it to spare the crowd the guilt of looking into the eyes of a starving man whom the king’s justice had sentenced to death? There was no elaborate scaffold for this poor man’s hanging, no public gibbet erected. The sheriff’s officers threw a rope over the branch of a tree, ordered the blindfold man to climb onto a stool, then kicked the stool from beneath him.
John had tried to run away from the hanging, but Geoffrey kept his hand clamped on the boy’s shoulder like a carpenter’s vice. John closed his eyes, but he could not shut out the horror of Edmund’s rasping gurgle, nor the stink as the body evacuated itself. Afterwards, Geoffrey and his fellow officials took a glass of brandy at the inn, and he forced a little of the burning liquid between John’s chattering teeth.
As soon as his cousin’s back was turned, John slipped between the men who crowded the small private parlour and out through the door which led to the kitchen. Sweaty women ran to and fro carrying greasy dishes piled high with some indescribable mess. To one side of the open hearth a scrofulous small boy with vacant eyes sat on a stool, endlessly turning the jack, while the meat on the spit dripped and spat, and the red flesh began to char at the edges. John ran across the flagged floor, heedless of the women he pushed aside, and out into the yard at the back of the inn. There he crouched down behind an ale barrel, retching. His stomach heaved and strained, for he had eaten nothing all day, ever since he had learned that he was sentenced to attend the hanging. Nothing came from his mouth but a dribble of yellow bile.
Before dawn the next morning, John crept out of his bedchamber with his shoes in his hands, and felt his way to the storerooms beyond the kitchen. With wild disregard of discovery, he filled a basket with venison pie, cold beef, eggs, cheese, ale and apple tarts before pulling on his shoes and letting himself out into the cold morning air. He ran through the formal gardens which surrounded the house, then along the edge of a wheat field, sodden with the morning dew. The first rays of the sun were falling across the water meadow as he came down towards the Watsons’ cottage, so that the long grasses starred with shy flowers glowed with a pearly light. His shoes, stockings and breeches were soaked, his shirt clung to the sweat on his back, and his breath came in gasps, for something told him he must bring food to Isabel and the baby before they starved to death this very morning.
There was no one in the cottage. The cooking hearth was cold. He put down his basket on the earth floor and ran along the river bank, calling for Isabel. At first he paid no heed to the dark clump caught in the trailing branches of the willow, then he stopped. The gown was a curious, particular shade of blue, a blue with the green of the sea in it. John had never seen Isabel wear any other, yet it was a fine gown, too fine for a pauper girl, though stained and mended now. It must once have belonged to Margaret Lisle, and found its way from her to waiting gentlewoman, to servant, to pauper. Isabel floated amongst the yellow-green leaves of the willow, the baby held fast in her arms, and even in death she was not at rest, for her face wore a look of infinite despair.
And from that time John could never see that colour, the blue of the ocean, without tasting the bile in his mouth and remembering the circle of bitter ripples which flow outwards and outwards from the infliction of royal justice.
When his theft of food was discovered, and its purpose, he was beaten, for defying the judgement of Geoffrey Lisle. He endured it in silence. His shame was worse punishment than the beating, for he had failed in his attempt to help Isabel and her child. His greater shame—that he had not spoken out against the judgement during the trial—had remained with him lifelong. For the remainder of his time in the Lisles’ household he withdrew into sullen silence. Once home again he said nothing to his parents or his grandfather, but at last, sitting on a ridge in Packington moor, the horses cropping the grass nearby, he told the story, halting and brief, to Anne.
She said nothing for long minutes, then finally took his hand.
‘You cannot blame yourself,’ she said hesitantly. ‘It was not your fault Edmund Watson died, or his wife and babe.’
John was comforted some
what by her small warm hand in his, but he screwed up his mouth bitterly.
‘I can’t forget that they were starving. Why should my cousin condemn a man to hang because he sought merely to keep his life? To feed his wife and child? I know Geoffrey Lisle acted within the law. I know it. But can the law be right? What kind of justice is that? Is that God’s justice? I think not.’
‘When you are a man grown, and a magistrate, you can dispense the law kindly,’ she said. ‘That is some kind of justice.’
‘It’s not enough,’ he said, and fell to brooding again.
Later, at Cambridge, he launched headlong into many a heated debate, cautiously with his tutors, more wildly with his fellow students in taverns, on evenings when tongues were loosened with ale. There were many who abused him for presuming to question the rights of their families to ancient privileges of land and law, but there were also a few who agreed tentatively that England was ripe for change, certainly that something must be done to curb the powers of the king and the lords of the church. From then his way was clearly laid out before him, to Grey’s Inn and Parliament.
John leaned his head back now against the rough stone of the cellar wall and closed his eyes. The memory of Edmund and Isabel had started him along the course which had brought him to this dark prison, but what had it profited the men like Edmund? Or the women like Isabel, watching their children grow grey and hollow-eyed with starvation? Were they any better in a kingdom torn and bloodied by civil war? A kingdom where land lay fallow for want of seed, and harvests rotted or burned? It seemed now that the one gift he might have given them, the gift of peace, was torn from his hands and trampled under foot.
He remembered fragments of the dream which had driven him awake, sitting in this cold prison in no better case than Edmund. A black dream, filled with confused images and terror for his family. He was a man now himself, with a wife and children to cherish. The killing of Edmund Watson had set his feet on this path, but that was long ago, a quarter of a century. Now he had his own stake in the future, those precious lives which were in danger, as he was in danger. He must somehow send word to Anne to escape from London before his enemies turned their attention to his family. Furious at his impotence, he slammed his head back against the stones of the wall, as if he could beat his way out into the light.