Cromwell's Blessing

by Peter Ransley

  The sun went behind a dark-edged cloud. The air was still and oppressively heavy. Only on the hillside was there a sign of a breeze, fluttering the cavalry’s standard. From behind the tall hedges came the click of bowls, followed by a groan of disappointment.

  ‘My orders are that the King is not to be removed from Holdenby.’

  ‘Exactly what we’re here to prevent, sir. We had intelligence he was about to be removed.’

  Richard appeared at the entrance to the gardens, staring towards the cavalry, then at me. Before anyone could stop me, I darted between the soldiers and through the entrance. A path took me between more hedges. It was like a maze. Chatter on one side of the hedge was followed by an eerie silence, then a burst of laughter.

  At the opening to the green I stopped, bemused. It was as though the war had never happened, as though there had been no victory. The whole county had turned out to watch the King playing bowls. They watched him take a bowl, his thin fingers selecting the bias. They were being served iced drinks by a stream of servants. At one end of the green was a table laden with fruit. I could not see my father in the crowd. I went past an ostler holding a white horse being inspected by a man I recognised as Lord Montague, who was placing a bet with the Earl of Pembroke.

  ‘Your Arab horse, against any two in my stable, that the King beats Sir Richard,’ said Lord Montague.

  My father had discarded the buff jerkin of the soldier for the wine-red doublet of a courtier. The garters on his britches and his shoes were decorated with huge bows in the same colour. As he laughed and joked with the King, he seemed to have been nothing but a courtier all his life. He looked directly at me as he picked up a bowl, smiled and waved.

  Automatically, I found myself lifting my hand in return, then pulled it back. Richard smiled again. I cursed myself. Even in that small gesture, he seemed to have out-smarted me.

  Until that moment, in my drab uniform I had gone unnoticed, people looking through me, as they did the servants. Now Lord Montague turned to me.

  ‘Know Sir Richard, d’you?’

  Before I could answer, the Earl of Pembroke dug Montague in the ribs, tapped his nose and whispered, ‘Stonehouse beak.’

  My cheeks burned as people stared at me. The chatter died as Richard walked up to bowl. More bets were placed.

  A servant pressed an iced drink in my hand. It was laced with sweet white wine. After another glass I was convinced my father was going to win. The game took me over. Curiously, I found myself shouting for him. He had not been playing well and was behind in the last set, but had now caught up. It was neck and neck at the last jack and the King’s bowl was close, but my father’s looked better.

  ‘Rub, rub, rub!’ cried the crowd, the rub being the curve of the bowl towards the jack. It rolled confidently towards a point where it would squeeze snugly between the King’s bowl and the jack, but at the last moment the rub of the green, some uneven tussock in the lawn, caused it to roll abjectly away to groans, then an uproar of cheers for the King.

  I kept my eye on Richard but, far from slipping away, he beckoned me over. I felt for the comfort of my sword before remembering I had given it up. Then I saw George entering the garden with Sam and some other troopers. He gave me the thumbs-up. I walked across the lawn towards Richard. Browne was talking urgently to the King, who glanced towards the troopers entering the garden, then at me. Conversations began to die as people saw the troopers.

  ‘Had my eye on that damned horse since –’

  Lord Montague’s bray of triumph stopped abruptly as he realised he was shouting into a growing silence. I lifted my hand to George. It was working in a way I had not dreamed possible. It was Cromwell who had put his finger on the fact that, although the soldiers guarding the King were Presbyterian and George’s troopers Independents, they were all from the same regiment; with all their differences, they were comrades. Once again, it was Cromwell’s intimate knowledge of his soldiers that had been the deciding factor – not to win a battle this time, but to avoid one. Without fuss, I could draw my father away from the crowd. With some of the troopers, I could take him to Cromwell while George guarded the King.

  Richard smiled as I approached him. I felt a wave of cold anger. Anger not just because he had tricked me and made a fool of me, but by the way he had done it. He knew my weakness. It was only at that moment I fully admitted it to myself. Like anyone who does not know his parents, I had been searching not just for him, but for love. He had used that. He was still doing so. He took my breath away as his smile broadened and he opened his arms to me.

  ‘Tom!’ he cried.

  He could make a bent coin ring true. But not for me. Not any more. Then he did the most obvious, most unexpected thing that took not only my breath away, but the power in my legs. It was, in what I could almost hear him saying in his impeccable French, a coup de théâtre.

  He gave a deep, sweeping bow and said, ‘Your Majesty … may I present my son.’

  23

  I had inked the King on woodblocks, seen him in the distance, in crowds, processions, in Parliament, in black armour in battle, in austere grief after Edgehill, with the weight of the dead bodies round his standard written into his countenance, seen him on paintings, coins and pamphlets; but I had never met him.

  When his eyes met mine, the first shock was that they were so human. The next was that he was amused. It was not just that one usher snatched off my hat and another put me at the correct distance, or that I almost overbalanced as I bowed and was caught by a third. In normal circumstances an upstart bastard like me would never be presented to the King. In fact I was not being presented. I was a turn, an amusement – a divertissement, I heard someone say, as I straightened up. My anger flooded back when I saw the smiles. Lord Montague was openly guffawing.

  With an act of simple graciousness that, in spite of all his faults, made me realise why people loved him and were prepared to die for him, the King quelled the laughter with a single look and spoke to me as if I was the only other person in the garden.

  ‘Your father plays well.’

  ‘But … but … not as well as you … Your Royal Majesty.’ I finished in stuttered confusion, feeling the suppressed mirth around me. I groped for something to say. ‘Your backhand draw in the last set was a master stroke.’

  His eyebrows went up. ‘You play?’

  ‘His reputation is such that few dare play with him at The Pot,’ Richard said, giving me the look of a proud father for his son.

  ‘The Pot?’

  ‘A fashionable bowling alley in London, Your Majesty. I have often wished to pit my poor skills against his,’ he said wistfully. ‘But … with the little differences between us …’

  ‘Then so you shall!’ the King said. ‘Unless this … changing of the guard …’ He looked towards George and the troopers, then at Browne.

  George bowed. I bowed. Browne bowed. ‘We are all at Your Majesty’s pleasure.’

  ‘Then more drinks. Set up the green.’

  Lord Montague slapped me on the back, called me a fine fellow, and said his money was on me. He always backed the outsider.

  A fine fellow! The wine sang in my head. Tom Neave may have walked across that lawn, but it was Thomas Stonehouse who had bowed to the King. Dizzily, I heard people placing bets. My reputation grew with the bets and the wine. So did that of The Pot, which, as no one wished to be ignorant of it, became the most fashionable bowling alley in London. Anything I said people seemed to find incredibly interesting or hilariously funny. Then I saw the troopers gazing at us: some awed, open-mouthed; others grinning, blank, brutalised, indifferent, waiting for the next order as they had done all their lives. But some faces, like George’s and Scogman’s, were different. They were not waiting for the next order. Their expressions were like a bucket of cold water. I grabbed my father and pulled him to one side.

  ‘Stop this foolery.’

  ‘Foolery!’ The smiling mask slipped from his face. He levelled his finger at the troop
ers. ‘That is foolery. You think you can take away the King with that rabble? The country will rise against you.’

  I preferred his venom to his charm. I could deal with that. ‘We are taking him back to Holdenby, where Parliament will negotiate with him.’

  ‘The King will never do a deal with Parliament.’

  I saw the King, smiling and laughing. I remembered the grace with which he had stopped people laughing at me. I suddenly felt, in a giddy surge of optimism, that he could be reached, and I might have a hand in it.

  ‘He will. Once he is away from people like you.’

  He smiled. ‘Now you have met him, you fancy yourself as a diplomat, do you? You are more like a common constable. What do you plan to do with me?’

  ‘Take you to London.’

  ‘To Cromwell.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He smiled and gestured towards the green. ‘In that case, you must grant me my dying wish.’

  ‘Save me the mock heroics –’

  He turned from the green and gave me a look, stripped of all mannerisms, that cut off my words and dried my mouth. Cromwell would kill him. He would have no compunction – after racking him to get what he could out of him.

  ‘Choose your woods, gentlemen!’

  Browne, the jack in his hand, the bowls at his feet, was standing at one end of the green. The guests were jostling into position in a semi-circle round it, their high-pitched chatter dwindling into a buzz of speculation, crowned by the King staring expectantly at us.

  That was what finally drew me into the game. Not Richard, nor the wine, the stifling heat, nor the applause, although it was all of those. It was the realisation, as we bowed to the King, that Parliament had to do more than secure the King. It had to secure his goodwill, his mind, his agreement. It was the feeling I might play a tiny part in this which led to me picking up a bowl, weighing it in my hand and feeling the bias with my fingers. I was drawn into, not playing bowls, simply, but one of the oldest sports in the world: winning the King’s favour.

  ‘You’re limping,’ my father said.

  ‘It doesn’t affect my grip.’ I had bound up my ankle, so my limp was now slight.

  Lowering clouds were edged with black when my father put down the first jack. The game was the best of seven sets. We had three bowls each, and in each set the winner was the one whose bowl came closest to the jack. As soon as the first bowl left my fingers I knew it was bad. So did the audience.

  ‘Short, short, short!’

  My next bowl, to great groans, was long and ended in the ditch. My eye had gone, and rust had eaten into my fingers, whereas I could see my father was much better than he had pretended to be with the King. His long fingers seemed to stay with the bowl, curving it, magically slowing it as it approached the jack. He won the first set easily. And the second. I burned with shame when I saw the King, eyebrows lifting, say something to Lord Montague. What a fool I was still to be so full of dreams! Get the King’s favour! An agreement for Parliament! From being restless, the audience went to outright derision. I wanted to disappear into the ground.

  I had taken off my jerkin and my shirt clung to my back. The low sun came out, heat bouncing from the strip of green grass, blurring my vision.

  ‘Make a show of it,’ Richard murmured in my ear.

  He had given me an easy shot. Out of sheer pique I would not take it, flinging down the bowl anywhere, just wanting this ridiculous game to be over.

  ‘Come on, sir! Come on, Tom!’

  Scogman. Through the sweat dribbling from my eyebrows, I saw that the troopers had moved closer, to form part of the audience behind me. They had been given some beer. The green seemed to vanish, and become the London clay of The Pot. I could almost smell the beer and the Virginia of the pipes as I measured up for my final bowl of the third set. Richard had two bowls close to the jack and one, the easy lay, two feet from it, giving me a safe curve in. But I was unlikely to beat one of his bowls, almost touching the jack. Instead I drove my bowl straight at the pair. I gave it too much. It hit my father’s bowls with a resounding thwack, sending them into the ditch. My bowl and the jack teetered on the edge.

  ‘Stop, stop, stop …’ yelled the troopers.

  My bowl fell back on to the green, taking the jack with it to nestle against it. There was a huge, collective sigh from the crowd. The troopers flung their hats in the air.

  ‘Lucky,’ said Richard, but not without the tinge of admiration of the inveterate gambler for someone who takes an outlandish risk which comes off.

  ‘Two sets to one,’ said Browne.

  In that magical way life has, from having felt an abject failure, I now believed I could do nothing wrong. My head cleared. My eyes were connected to my fingers. The bowls seemed part of me. Richard rose to it. We were evenly matched. Every time one of us picked up a bowl there was complete silence, to be followed, at the finish of a set, by an explosion of sound.

  I won the next to level the score, which rattled him. Beyond the hills there was a brief flicker of lightning, followed by a low mutter of thunder. The shadows were lengthening. Deep patches of light and shade crept across the grass, making it difficult to judge some throws. My eye was younger and keener than his. He made up for this with the cunning of his shots, but the concentration was beginning to tell. More and more, he took the handkerchief from his sleeve to wipe his brow and sticky hands. When I went ahead at three-two, the crowd sensed that Richard was beaten. His whole posture suggested it. So did his position in the next set, with his first two bowls wide and my three clustered close, hiding the jack from any direct strike. So did his third bowl, which he sent impossibly wide, to sighs of finality and the beginning babble of conversation, which, however, was abruptly silenced. The bowl was curving in, almost describing a half circle, drawn to the jack like an iron filing to a magnet.

  ‘Rub, rub, rub, rub!’ the crowd cried – then held its breath as the bowl wobbled to a stop, before gently completing its journey to kiss the jack.

  ‘Three sets all,’ said Browne, in his methodical, pedantic voice.

  The crowd roared as my father flung up his arms in an ecstasy of relief and triumph.

  I stared at the bowl, still trembling against the jack, with awe and disbelief. ‘Not bad for an old man.’

  ‘Better than you can do, you young bastard.’

  There was no venom in the word. Quite the opposite. He was grinning all over his flushed face, looking almost boyish as he suddenly laughed. It was infectious. I laughed with him. The applause seemed to die away; the crowd vanished. It was as if we had always been there, in this sort of English garden, on this kind of evening in summer. A note I had never heard before, or expected to hear, crept into his voice: awkwardness, the embarrassment of parental concern.

  ‘Tom … whatever happens … you belong here …’ He gestured towards the King and his favourites, who were taking drinks during the break.

  Scogman, who, with others, was sitting on the lip of a fountain, where they could dip their heads in the cooling spray, raised his pot to me.

  ‘Not,’ I said, ‘with those mean fellows.’

  ‘Listen –’

  ‘I’m listening no more to your lies! Tricks –’

  ‘Tricks?’

  I laughed with incredulity at his look of injured innocence. ‘You tricked me in London to raise an army!’

  ‘Of course I did.’ His tone was heated. ‘D’you think I would tell you what I was doing and betray my King? Tom –’

  ‘Don’t Tom me. You told Challoner to kill me –’

  ‘I wish I had,’ he burst out with sudden savagery. ‘I told him if he touched you I would kill him. You blundered in there, spying. You heard what you wanted to hear, as you always do. His men were throwing you in a cart to take you away and kill you.’

  The night when Challoner had drugged me came back to me. What I thought had been the nightmare of the plague cart had been no nightmare.

  ‘I stopped him.’ He looked bitterly towa
rds the troopers. ‘More fool me.’

  ‘Three sets all,’ said Browne, in a flat, neutral tone, as if he had seen or heard none of this. ‘Final set.’

  We both became abruptly aware that everyone had fallen silent, watching the violent argument as avidly as they followed the game. My father would not meet my eyes. He looked disorientated, hangdog, as if he had confessed to some shameful crime. He had. He had failed in his duty to his King.

  ‘Play,’ Browne said.

  I felt the first spot of rain on my cheek as my father bowed to the King, then went up to the mark, put down the jack and selected his first bowl. His knee bent, he drew back the bowl, but he never released it. He released himself. I was a second after him. Only a second, but it was enough. He was over the ditch, turning, flinging the bowl over the grass. It caught me between my legs. Somehow I kept my balance on the lawn but tripped over the ditch. My ankle gave way again and I crashed into the table of fruit, which the servants were running to clear as the rain hammered down, pulping a bowl of peaches. My hands were sticky with the crushed fruit as I prised myself up.

  My father was untethering the Arab horse. George sent troopers after him but they were impeded by Browne and the courtiers, running across the lawn for shelter. A vivid flash of lightning arrested everyone’s movements and lit up my father, already halfway across the park, vaulting across a stream before disappearing into the growing darkness.

  ‘Three all,’ Browne said, hair plastered to his inscrutable face. ‘Game postponed.’

  24

  Recriminations began as soon as we took the King back to Holdenby. I was blamed for Richard’s escape. A game of bowls! How stupid was that? I had put the whole project at risk! We held the King, but for how long? Nehemiah was open about it. George said nothing, but his silences were just as eloquent. At first I dismissed their fears. We had a considerable force. Richard had only his mercenaries. It would take days for him to put extra Royalist forces together. George’s messenger was already halfway to London, telling Cromwell we had the King, and we were awaiting instructions.