by Ann Swinfen
When the baby was laid back in her cradle, she sat before the mirror and brushed her hair, then put on a fresh lace cap, and wrapped her new silk shawl about her shoulders. It was time to confront the meeting she had been postponing with excuses all day. She must visit John’s ailing parents.
She went first to Mistress Swynfen’s small parlour, next to the best bedchamber, and tapped nervously on the door. In the morning and again at dinnertime she had sent Margit up to Joane Swynfen with a tray of the scarce food, but she had avoided asking whether her mother-in-law was still ‘mazed’, as Biddy had said. A shrinking reluctance had kept her away.
When she knocked a second time, a high voice, which she did not recognise as Mistress Swynfen’s, bade her come in. She opened the door cautiously, and found Joane Swynfen sitting in a chair beside the fire staring at her with wide eyes and an odd smile. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, tidily dressed, though in a plain gown without jewels. She rocked, very gently, back and forth in her chair.
‘Good evening, Mother,’ said Anne.
There was no response. She ventured nervously across the floor until she was standing directly in front of the other woman, well lit by the candles on the mantelpiece. Joane continued to smile at her in that disconcertingly vague way. She continued to rock. And, in time with the rocking, there came the faint sound of humming.
‘It’s Anne, Mother. John’s wife. I’ve come back from London with the children.’
Joane giggled. ‘Have you brought my breakfast?’ she asked in that high, childish voice.
‘It’s long past breakfast. You had that this morning. It will be supper soon.’
‘Where’s Bunny?’
‘Bunny?’ Anne was confused. Did her mother-in-law have a pet rabbit?
Joane stamped her foot. ‘My dog, Bunny. I want my dog. I don’t know who you are. Go away. Tell them to bring me my dog.’ Her face had grown suddenly red and twisted with fury. She seized a wooden cup from the table beside her chair and hurled it at Anne. Some sticky liquid flew in an arc across her skirt.
Anne started to back away towards the door. ‘Supper soon,’ she said soothingly. ‘I’ll ask them about Bunny.’
Outside the room, she closed the door and leaned on it, letting out a deep breath. She realised that she had been holding it in, suspended in horror at the sight of that imperious old woman transformed thus into a whining child. She passed a hand over her face and turned to go into the chamber next door, where Master Swynfen had lain in bed since his apoplexy. Biddy came puffing up the stairs, carrying a tray with some broth and a little of the bread broken small.
Anne opened the door for her, and they went in together. There were fewer candles here, but Peter had also built up this fire well. Richard Swynfen lay propped up on several bolsters watching them as they came in. The side of his face was dragged down, as if some beast had clawed it, distorting his mouth, which dribbled a little at the corner. His hair had gone completely grey since she had seen him last. One arm lay quite limp on the bed clothes, but the other hand seemed less affected. The fingers of this hand kept pluck, plucking at the coverlet.
Biddy sat down on a stool beside the bed and wiped the old man’s mouth quite gently with a cloth, then began trying to spoon the broth rapidly between his lips. Anne could see the muscles of his throat working in desperate spasms, but all the same the broth ran down from his half-open lips. Biddy pushed a bit of the bread into his mouth after soaking it in the broth, but he gagged and retched. It was almost unbearable to watch.
‘Let me,’ said Anne. ‘You’ve work to do in the kitchen. I’ll help him eat and then come down to supper.’
When Biddy was gone, looking relieved, Anne set the broth and bread aside and fetched a cloth, dampened at his water jug, to wash her father-in-law’s face and hands, then dried them on a towel she held before the fire to warm.
‘Now, Father,’ she said, ‘I’m going to give you this in very small spoonfuls, with time between each for you to swallow. No need to hasten.’
Could he hear her and understand? There was no reaction on that dreadfully twisted face. She put her arm around his shoulders to support him and spooned up a bit of broth no bigger than her thumbnail. She slipped the spoon between the slack lips and then tilted it very slowly. The broth went down his throat, and did not spill on to his chest.
Ever since she had come into the room, his eyes had followed her everywhere, and unlike his wife’s eyes, they were intelligent. She was sure he recognised her. She began to talk to him about the journey from London as she continued to feed him the drops of broth and then minute scraps of bread. And all the while he watched her.
The last of the broth was gone. It was cold by now, but at least he had eaten all of it. As she picked up the tray and stood looking down at him, he lifted his good hand an inch or so, and gave a kind of strangled grunt in his throat. She leaned forward and laid her hand over his.
‘You mustn’t worry, Father. Now I’m here, I’ll see that all’s well with the estate.’ She hoped fervently that she spoke the truth. ‘You must think only of becoming strong again. Why, you’re grown quite thin! When you’re a little heartier, I’ll bring the children to see you.’
He made another grunt, and something that might almost have been a smile flickered in his eyes. At the door she turned.
‘I’ll send Peter to help you prepare for the night. And I’ll visit you again tomorrow.’
As she walked down the stairs towards the enticing smells of cooking, which set her empty stomach groaning, she shook her head forlornly at her dilemma. A household gnawed by hunger. A mother-in-law perfectly sound in body, but bereft of her wits. A father-in-law paralysed and speechless, gaunt as a skeleton, but, if the expression in those eyes were anything to go by, still fiercely alive within the iron prison of his body.
Chapter Seventeen
The remaining eleven prisoners held at the King’s Head had grown heartily tired of each other and of the inn’s limited spaces. A kind of melancholy lethargy had overtaken them. It was now almost two months since that morning in December when they had been seized, and no more of them had been released since Prynne argued his way to freedom on a point of law three weeks ago. They were trapped in a glass cage, for they could see from the windows of the inn the life of London continuing around them, yet they could neither speak to the passers-by, nor hear their voices. Very few letters reached them. They suspected many were confiscated, for they could not believe they had been wholly abandoned by their families and friends.
John had received no news of his family since Dick’s visit, nor any further word from Clotworthy, who must by now be imprisoned at Windsor, nor had any letter from Crewe reached him, although he was certain that his kindly older friend must have written, and was probably even now trying to secure his former companions’ release. Yet how could the prisoners, in their state of ignorance, understand the world out yonder, where patrols of the New Model Army marched back and forth from Whitehall, and troopers galloped past, scattering the impotent citizens from their path?
Into this glass cage, some fragmentary news of the outside world filtered, though they saw less of Jacob these days. His friendliness towards the prisoners had been noticed by the guards, who took the precaution of rarely leaving him alone with them, and sometimes barred him altogether from the room where they generally spent their time. One day he appeared with a bruised and bloodied face; it seemed the guards had discovered his part in smuggling the Solemn Protestation to the printer in St Paul’s churchyard.
‘What’s this?’ John asked, indicating the man’s eye, swollen almost shut and crusted with blood and puss.
Jacob shrugged.
‘The captain mislikes some of the errands I have run for you gentlemen.’
‘The printer?’
‘Aye. But I would do it again. Can we not speak our minds freely in this fine new country of ours? My face will heal, though the country may not. I suffered worse at Bristol.’
‘You must not run any risks, Jacob.’
‘It may be that I won’t be able to bring the newspapers any more.’
From time to time, however, he managed to whisper a few words in passing. So they knew something of the great and unprecedented events that were unfolding, in which the military junta had appointed themselves judge, prosecutor and jury of England’s anointed king. And they knew that the king had defended himself intelligently and courageously, but to no avail, because the outcome of the trial was determined before ever it began. The king’s fate was sealed, his death warrant signed, and on this very day, this thirtieth day of January, 1649, he was to die.
John stood again at the window of the common room, looking down the Strand to Charing Cross, where he had watched the coaches depart as one of them carried away Anne and the children. It was a bitterly cold morning, the road glazed with ice, the naked trees glittering with hoar frost. Crowds were flowing down the Strand, not rowdy, a quiet mass of people, their heads covered, moving relentlessly towards Whitehall Palace, where the scaffold had been erected on which, in half an hour’s time, an executioner would end the life of Charles Stuart, the only king of England to have been condemned to death by a pretence of legal process. Kings of England had died violently before this day—in battle or by an assassin’s hand. But never like this. John wished with all his heart that Charles could have died with honour in battle. Not like this. This hypocritical act brought shame to its perpetrators, far more than to its victim.
Drawn into this nameless crowd, the people lost their individuality, moving like a herd of beasts or a swarm of bees, compelled onwards by some kind of blind instinct. At first the crowds disappeared round the curve into Whitehall, lost from sight, but gradually the swarms began to back up, like flood water that rises too high to flow under a bridge and begins to pour back and outwards, drowning the surrounding land. Baulked of space beside the scaffold, the crowds packed into all the open area at the Cross. Boys were clambering on the roofs of coaches, the better to see; fathers hoisted their young children on to their shoulders; women stood on upturned crates, striving to look over the taller heads in front.
Then suddenly, all were still.
Although he could see no more than the backs of the back of the crowd, John knew from their stillness that the king had come out from his Palace of Whitehall, that elegant building, with its beautiful ceilings painted in the Italian style to commemorate the achievements of his father’s reign. And in stepping out of the tall window, Charles Stuart stepped from the riches and splendour of his royal life on to the lonely scaffold roughly erected in haste before the Palace, a bare wooden stage prepared for the last act in the drama. The moment was frozen in the stillness of the people. John closed his eyes and offered up a prayer. When he opened them again, he saw that anonymous body of citizens sway together, as though it had uttered a deep groan, and he knew the king was dead.
The execution of the king did not at first change the situation of the prisoners. Cromwell, Ireton and the Army Council were too much occupied with their affairs of state to concern themselves with the remaining men confined at the King’s Head. Five powerful opponents, former army officers like themselves, had been safely locked up in Windsor, most of the others released on varying conditions. The military commanders, John suspected, might well have forgotten about the rest, for they were busy setting up a new government for England. Nothing so radical as a citizen democracy, nor even the partial democracy advocated by Lilburne and the Levellers, who had been cast aside now their help was no longer needed. No, this was to be a despotic republic ruled by the group of army officers who had seized power by the sword, that very junta he had foretold to Anne on that long-ago evening by the parlour fire. On the sixth of February they abolished the ancient upper house, the House of Lords. The following day, they abolished the Monarchy. All this under the guise of legitimacy, by passing these acts through the obedient offices of their friends, the nervous and obsequious handful of members still permitted to take their seats in the Commons.
On the fourteenth day of February, the country’s new rulers created for this new Republic of England a Council of State to be the executive body, which effectively took away any last dregs of power from the dismembered House of Commons. From now on, Cromwell would rule the country as dictator and head of state, lurking behind a screen of generals and using his stooges in the Council to carry out his policies.
‘According to a rumour Jacob has heard,’ John said to Edward Leigh and John Birch, ‘Cromwell has hinted that he would like to be regarded as the “protector” of this land. As soon set the lion to be protector of the kid, or the wolf protector of the lamb.’
He filled his pipe with a few pinches from the tobacco jar. Their supply was running short, and they each allowed themselves but one pipe a day.
Edward Leigh smiled grimly.
‘I wonder how long it will be before we discover what has been gained by the killing of one tyrant in order to set up another? On his present record, little enough. Cromwell and Ireton have exercised far greater tyranny towards our elected Parliament than even Charles Stuart himself ever did.’
John nodded agreement, drawing gently on his pipe to set it alight without burning away all the tobacco in one furious burst of heat.
‘A curious day to choose,’ he said, ‘to set up this republican Council.’
‘How so?’ Birch asked.
‘The fourteenth of February. The feast of St Valentine. The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge,’ said John.
‘A gardyn saw I ful of blosmy bowes
Upon a ryver, in a grene mede,
Thereas swetnesse everemore inow is,
With floures white, blewe, yelewe, and rede,
And colde welle-stremes, nothyng dede,
That swymmen ful of smale fishes lighte,
With fynnes rede and skales sylver bryghte.
On every bow the bryddes herde I synge,
With voys of aungel in here armonye . . .
‘The very day when the birds choose their mates and spring whispers that it will soon make its entrance on the stage.’
Leigh laughed.
‘I scarce think these hardened Puritans are aware of such a thing as St Valentine’s Day. And if they were, they would condemn it as a blasphemous papist celebration.’
‘It is difficult,’ said John, ‘to disentangle the pagan from the papist, and both from the simple country practices of our youth. I’d have no truck with the Whore of Babylon, but I cannot think the pairing of turtledoves and blackbirds is a danger to this fine new Republic of ours.’ He paused, then added quietly, ‘Or perhaps it is.’
‘If ever I win free of this damnable place,’ said Birch thoughtfully, stretching out his legs to the fire, ‘I shall take myself off back to Herefordshire. Safe beyond the Malvern Hills. Ever since the days when I took Hereford and Goodrich we’ve been as peaceful there as fat cows in a water meadow. Nothing ever happens. Cromwell and his fellows have little interest in our backward counties along the Welsh border. There the blackbird and the turtledove may woo and nest in peace, and a man may farm his acres and breed fine horseflesh quite out of sight of these London grandees.’
He took out his own pipe, then, perhaps remembering the shortage of tobacco, put it back in his pocket.
‘I think there may be some good investments to be made in land, too,’ he said. ‘All those properties of the Laudian bishops which are now held in trust—they’ll come on to the market. Yes, I think I shall purchase more property and plough my quiet furrow. I have my eye on a manor near Weobley.’
‘I should be glad to plough my own sweet acres at Swinfen,’ said John. He smiled inwardly at the Bristol merchant’s dreams of land-owning. ‘We have land enough. I’ve no desire for more. Staffordshire may not be as quiet and remote as Herefordshire, but a man could do worse than plough and sow and improve his land. I have a boggy piece besid
e the lake that could be drained to make good grazing meadow land for my cattle.’
He drew quietly on his pipe, which was nearly burnt away. ‘Aye, turtledove and blackbird may mate in peace on my land also. And if my people want to exchange love tokens on St Valentine’s Day, or the maidens go out at sunrise on the first of May to wash their faces in the dew, I for one shall wink my eye and pay no heed.’
Some weeks later, perhaps because they felt secure in their impregnable fortress of power, the men who now controlled the country must have remembered the small group of prisoners still languishing at the King’s Head. One day an extra detachment of musketeers arrived in addition to their normal guards. Half the prisoners were told to fetch their belongings, and were then marched off to Whitehall through driving rain. It had rained constantly since the death of the king, an unremitting, freezing, penetrating rain, as though the very skies wept for that unjudicial murder the country had perpetrated. One of those left behind, John watched from his accustomed window as the five taken away disappeared into the grey deluge. It must, he thought, be good to breathe the air outside this confounded inn, even if you were drenched. Leigh was gone now, and Birch also. The half dozen who were left looked at each other and shrugged. They had used up all their words. John even found himself missing Prynne, who would have livened things up for them.