by Ann Swinfen
I wander again in my thoughts.
Boethius, I believe, did not condemn his family to suffering.
The two days passed.
When Danvers came to me again, I refused his demands. God help me, I do not know if he immediately put into effect the orders against my family. I was trained in the law, and I know that as long as my father lives, I am but the heir to Swinfen, he is its lord. I pray, therefore, that—unless this new government overturns all laws—they cannot sequestrate my father’s property for my offences. I cling to this hope, for I can endure if others are spared.
This is arrogance. How can I believe that I will endure, when all men break in the end? God help me! God help me!
Danvers ordered that I be taken once more to the dungeons, but this time to another place, an ancient place of torture. My intention is not to dwell on what was done to me there, but to tell it in the briefest of words. At first, they bound me, arms and legs, to a chair, and left me in the dark. This seems a mild punishment, but as time passes, the pain begins. I do not know how long I was kept there; it may have been a day, it may have been two, and no food or drink. In such a length of time, a man must piss and foul himself, and this degradation is a part of the torment.
At the end I was asked, ‘Would I write?’
And I refused.
Then they unbound me, and the limbs unbound are almost more of a torture than the limbs bound. They heated irons, with which they burned the soles of my feet. And I was asked, ‘Would I write?’
And I refused.
Then they forced me to lie on a rack, my arms stretched above my head and bound, and my ankles bound, and they cranked it slowly, till the muscles in my shoulders cracked, and my knees and hips were strained near out of their sockets, but I do not think they racked me as far as many have been stretched. Perhaps Danvers was merciful. And I was asked, ‘Would I write?’
And I refused.
Then they left me alone in the dark with my tortured flesh to think.
And I sweated with pain and my mind screamed and would not hold my thoughts together.
And after some time (I know not how long), they took me up to my comfortable chamber again, although they must half carry me up the stairs, for my legs worked but poorly and the soles of my feet burned still. Then they gave me food and drink and left me alone. I was sickened at the thought of food, but I forced myself to eat, for I knew my body needed sustenance to mend itself. Then I lay on my bed and slept, I know not how long.
The next day, or it may have been the day after, Danvers came again and reasoned with me, using all the arguments he had put forward before, but I would not be moved. And so the cycle repeated itself.
I have now visited that hellish place of torture three times, and three times have been returned to this chamber. They stay their hand from the furthest extremes of torture, I know not why. Perhaps they think that, by so doing, they will make me more fearful of what yet lies in wait.
Today, I was brought a letter, the first I have received since I was taken from London. Samuel Gott writes in reply to a letter I wrote to him a month since. I cannot fathom Danvers with certainty, but I think he chooses not to send the letters to my family, in order to torment them with worry. The letters to my friends I am sure he reads, then sends on in the hope of provoking an incautious letter in response, a trap to catch me by, or to catch the writer.
Samuel tells me of a plan he has to write a treatise On the True Happiness of Man, and he seeks my advice. I think he speaks in code or riddles—for how can I judge such a question in my present state?—but my mind is blurred since my last time below ground, and I cannot make him out. He also seeks guidance on how men should behave in this new state of the nation. How should we regard the courts? He wants to know if I believe them to be legitimate, since they are constituted by an illegal authority. Can the dispensers of law be regarded as lawful when the very foundation of the courts is unlawful? He also raises the matter of tithes, and their rightful recipients. These are important and useful questions, but I cannot put my mind to them. My mind slips away from my governance and wanders, as on a rough ocean. Besides, I must have a care what I write to him, for it will, of a certainty, be used against me.
The true happiness of man.
In what does it lie? Until I came to this present pass, I believed that I was blessed in that I had been chosen to serve first my home county of Stafford and then the nation of England. Is there any higher ambition for a man than to serve his fellow citizens to the summit of his ability? I know some thought me over-eager, willing to undertake more tasks than most members, sitting late on many committees, working through the night to prepare reports for the Commons and the Lords, drafting parliamentary bills. (Oh, how puffed up with pride I was, to be chosen so often for that painstaking task!) Yet I truly thought this to be a privilege, and I felt humbled as well as proud.
And what has come of it all? Those night-time, candle-lit hours? Those years of work that kept me from my family? That meant I did not watch the first steps my children took, nor hear with delight the first words they spoke? Above all, that kept me from the arms of my beloved? Dust and ashes, blown away on the wind. All gone, for nothing.
The true happiness of man.
I believe it lies in love. The love of God, and the love of a man’s family. All else is vanity.
Oh, my beloved, heart of my heart, can you hear me call to you in the darkness of this night? I will strive to endure, but cannot know when my frail and treacherous body will betray me or my tormented mind disintegrate. If I could but see you again, hold you in my arms once more—
They will come for me again tomorrow.
Written by my hand, on a date I know not, in the summer of the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and forty-nine.
John Swynfen
Chapter Twenty-Six
Richard was eager to ride over to friends in Barton-under-Needwood. Anne considered it wiser not to enquire too closely who these friends might be, for she had heard there were radical groups in that neighbourhood more extreme even than the Levellers. She did not wish to know if they were Diggers or one of the other more fanatical sects. After the thunderstorm, two days of cloudless hot weather had dried the hay. It was not too badly laid and Anne, after consulting Josiah, had decided to begin the haymaking before they should be visited by another storm.
‘I would entreat you, Richard,’ she said, ‘at least stay to help us get in the hay. Without it, I can’t feed the stock during the winter.’
They were standing at the edge of one of the two hay meadows, just beyond the damaged field of wheat. Richard turned to look at the great charred patches.
‘Of course I’ll help with the hay,’ he said sadly. ‘Having brought upon you the loss of so much of the wheat. We’ve always had the custom at Swinfen that everyone helps to cut and stack the hay, gentleman and servant and labourer and all. You know that.’
‘Aye,’ said Anne, somewhat bitterly. ‘We’ve long held to certain levelling practices here.’
‘Let us not quarrel, sister. I’ll ride up to the moor today and tell that shepherd of yours he must leave his flock to fend for themselves while he helps with the haysel. Dick says he’s a strong fellow, not above thirty-five. Not quite an old man yet.’
Anne laughed, for Richard knew her own age well enough.
‘Not quite. Away with you, then. Take one of the big geldings, and you may ride back two to a horse.’
After Richard had run off to the stable, his light brown hair aglint in the sun, she waded in amongst the hay, her skirts stirring up the sweet scent of it. It had always seemed to her one of the loveliest perfumes in the world, compared with which the false, contrived scents worn by the fashionable in London had always sickened her. Amongst the hay, the meadow flowers spangled the golden green with a riot of colours: the great yellow heads of goat’s beard and rose pink of ragged robin, the blue cornflower, meadowsweet with its creamy white like sea foam, and here and there th
e shy purple of meadow orchids. The sweet hay reminded her of childhood games, when she and John would slide down the growing haystacks, then scamper off laughing, before old William, Josiah’s father, could catch them. He had been known to spank them both, being no respecter of rank in naughty children.
Mercifully, the hay had been untouched by the torches of the troopers. Anne sank down amongst it, her skirts billowing, and buried her faces in the fragrant stems whilst her mind flew off in speculation. Had the soldiers truly been in pursuit of the fugitive Richard? Perhaps they had merely set the field alight and attacked the house from very devilment, like so many of their kind. Or perhaps there was some thread, invisible to her at the moment, which linked the attack on Swinfen with John’s imprisonment in Stafford Castle. Was she, not Richard, their intended quarry? Her injured shoulder throbbed in the hot sun. Even here there was nowhere to hide from the war.
That evening was spent preparing food for the following days, since the entire household, save for the nurse Bess and the youngest children, and the two invalids, would be out in the hay meadows from dawn to dusk. Anne and Bridget baked bread, while the other women shaped and baked raised pies to be stored in the cold dairy, and young Margit churned the butter, which would usually have been left till the next day. Dick and Jack had gone with Peter out to the barn with the farm labourers, sharpening and mending the tools. As dusk was setting in, Richard rode down with the shepherd from the moor. All went to their beds early, for the coming labour would be hard.
The weather continued hot the next day, with no relief from a breeze. Starting at the top end of the meadow, the men formed a line with their scythes and began to move forward, swinging the razor-sharp curved blades in a steady, slow rhythm that they could keep up for the whole of the day. Anne tried to avoid looking at Dick, who had never wielded a scythe before, but was determined to show himself man enough this summer to do so. A careless stroke could take off a man’s foot.
The big scythes could not reach to cut the hay close to the hedge, so Anne and Patience followed along behind with their small hand-sickles, to cut the narrow strip the scythes had missed. The rest of the women raked the hay into neat piles, even Bridget with her twisted leg. She had merely looked scornful when Anne had suggested she should stay at home with Bess and the children.
‘I’ve helped with haymaking since I was a child, Anne. I’ll not play the lady today. I’ll go indoors to tend my parents at dinner time, but otherwise I will work with the rest of you.’ In the unshadowed sun of the hay meadow her fragile pallor warmed to a healthy glow. She wore her bark-brown hair in a single heavy plait down her back and she looked young and free from pain.
Even the younger boys helped, fetching water and ale for the thirsty. Nan was proudly wielding a rake amongst the women, much to Jack’s disgust, for he was certain he was old enough to join the men and use a scythe. Here, however, Anne had stood firm in saying him nay.
It was hot, sticky, tiring work. Insects, disturbed by all their activity, rose up and stung them on every exposed bit of skin. Sharp fragments of the hay worked their way inside clothing, and clung to their arms and faces, whilst fine powdery dust and pollen settled on their hair and tickled their noses. The wound in Anne’s shoulder ached with the heat and the heavy work, but she bit her lip, determined to endure it. By mid-day all the women had loosened their collars, and some looked enviously at the men, who had stripped to the waist to cool themselves. When they stopped for dinner, the boys—even Richard, who was no more than a boy, after all—ran yelling down to the stream which fed the lake and jumped in, breeches and all. Anne walked down to the edge of the stream and scooped up the cool water to pour over her burning face and neck. As she blinked through lashes starred with drops, she saw delicate gilded dragonflies dancing amongst the reeds.
Hester and Biddy fetched down the food which they had tied in cloths and hung in an elder tree, to be out of the sun and away from ants. Anne sat eating cold pie with her fingers and taking deep draughts of buttermilk, which she liked better than ale in the hot weather. While she was working, she had been pondering the news that Richard had given her three days before, that John was imprisoned in Stafford. She turned to him now, where he sat, dripping, in the shade of the hedge.
‘Richard, do you think I might persuade the governor at Stafford to free John on bail?’
He finished chewing, then shook his head.
‘There’s been no legal process. And so there’s no court to arrange bail. If a man be held illegally, how can you use the machinery of law to free him?’
‘I don’t know. But I received a letter from John Crewe last week. He asked whether John was yet freed, and said that William Prynne escaped imprisonment on a writ of habeas corpus. I don’t understand the legal term, but if it served for Will, why should it not serve for John?’
‘I know that no better than you,’ said Richard, ‘but John trained as a lawyer. Wouldn’t he have used the same device, if it were possible?’
‘Perhaps it’s not so easy from a dungeon in Stafford Castle as from an inn in London. But when Crewe’s letter came, we didn’t know where John was being held. Now that we know, perhaps his friends can contrive to have him freed.’
‘It’s worth the attempt, but I fear I can’t help. I mustn’t show my face, for I’m a wanted fugitive.’
‘I thought of asking Captain Henry Stone. He’s long been a friend of John’s, and being an army man, may know best how to proceed. Also, he was governor of Stafford himself a few years ago.’
‘An army man, but where does he stand? Is he for Cromwell, or against?’
‘That I don’t know. But as soon as we’re done haymaking, I think I shall write to him.’
The weather held fine—the hay was cut, raked and turned. By the end of the week, they were loading it into the great haywain, which lumbered back and forth between the meadows and the farmyard, where the most skilled men, Josiah and Christopher, built the haystacks.
The last load was hauled and piled loose in the haybarn not long before midnight on the eve of the Sabbath, for which all heaved a sigh of relief. In the old days, the curate would not have blamed any man overmuch if his haymaking had strayed into Sunday. The animals must be fed over the winter, and it would have seemed like a scorning of God’s bountiful gifts to have risked the hay falling victim to a storm of rain. But these new Puritans directed everything by the strict rules of their interpretation of Holy Writ. When they said, ‘Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy,’ they meant no work: no lighting of fires or cooking of food, no hauling of water or gathering of the harvest. If God sent a storm to ruin your crops, why, then, he meant you to starve. Anne wondered what was the Puritan view of a woman great with child who went into labour on the Sabbath. Would she be condemned out of hand as ungodly?
As soon as haysel was over, Richard spoke again of his plan to visit his radical friends in Barton. He believed that fugitives from the mutiny at Burford had fled there, and he was on fire to hear the full story of that uprising of Levellers and Diggers in the ranks of the army. The church at Burford had been turned into a prison, and men had been shot in cold blood, but others had escaped. If there were plans afoot for a further uprising, he longed to be a part of it.
Anne was against his going. No good could come of it, and possibly a great deal of evil. He was not her son, however, although he was little older than Dick. He was but her brother-in-law, and she governed here by default, not through any right to authority. She had no power to forbid him. All she could do was refuse him a horse, but when it became clear that, if he could not borrow a horse, he would walk to Barton, thus exposing himself even more to danger, she conceded the point.
‘You may borrow a horse for two days only,’ she said grimly, ‘for we’ll soon begin the rest of the harvest and every horse is needed. One day to ride there and spend the night, one day to ride back. And keep to the lanes, away from the roads that the military use.’
Although he tried to argue for a
longer allowance of time, she was determined in this, and he had to be content.
That same day she despatched Peter to ride over to Captain Stone’s house at the village of Walsall, with a letter explaining John’s present whereabouts and her hope of ransoming him or securing bail. She begged that he might send a letter of advice back with her servant.
Peter left in the early morning. By dinnertime, two men rode up to Swinfen Hall. Henry Stone had ridden over directly with Peter, eager to help. Anne took him to dine with her alone in the parlour, while she told him all she knew, omitting only the source of her information that John was in Stafford. The fewer people who knew of Richard’s presence at Swinfen, the better.
Henry was a big bluff man, who tucked in heartily to his dinner, but his looks belied the shrewdness of his mind. He had worked with John on many county matters, even before the war had begun. In the army he had shown himself a brilliant officer. So high had been Sir William Brereton’s opinion of Henry Stone’s abilities that he had fetched him away from his position as governor of Stafford to assist in the final siege of Lichfield Cathedral. Stone was no longer serving in the army, but he had contrived to remain on good terms with some who were, and to avoid attracting the notice of those who belonged to Ireton’s faction.
‘You did right to come to me, Mistress Anne,’ he said, when he had heard her out. He took a long draught of ale and smacked his lips. ‘The product of your own brewhouse? Excellent, excellent.’
‘My woman Biddy is a fine alewife. She swears it’s the quality of the water in one of the springs here at Swinfen. She’ll use no other.’
‘She has the right of it. When you know your best tools, then you must employ them, as I am the best tool in this matter. I knew John had been taken up, but heard no more. I thought he was free again, in London, but had sent his family home.’