Cromwell's Blessing

by Peter Ransley

  The truth was I was only half-listening. I was still thinking of my father. Even though I smarted from the way he had tricked me again, even though he was devious, untrustworthy, dishonest, and my future depended on me taking him back to Cromwell, I could not help admiring his style, his charm, his courage. It was more than that. In those few minutes on the lawn, hadn’t he given me the childhood I never had?

  ‘Whatever happens, you belong here …’

  He had indicated the King, the court. I went over every look, every word, expanding a few minutes into a might-have-been childhood. And what is a childhood without a hero? And what hero is better than a mounted knight? It was not just me. At a time of signs and portents, for both court and troopers that flash of lightning, burning him briefly into vision on, of all things, a white horse, turned him into an omen.

  Holdenby played its part in this trance. It was built for a monarch. Its towers, gables and stately ascent from the vast hall to the great chamber were built by a knight in the hope that Queen Elizabeth would favour him with a visit. She never came. The first royal visitor, King Charles, entered as a prisoner. And Parliament granted him the kind of sumptuous court to which he was accustomed before the war.

  Holles, eager to strike a deal, ensured that the Parliamentary Commissioners were people he liked – the Earls of Pembroke and Denbigh and Lord Montague from the Lords, and Browne from the Commons. His gaolers were his most loyal subjects. They spared nothing in restoring the King’s household to what it had been.

  Even Scogman, who had a discerning eye for such things, was too stunned to put a value on the silver plate. It was all the more dazzling because most houses and palaces, including the King’s, had been denuded of it, melted down to pay for the war. Now Parliament had approved the melting down of Communion plate from the King’s chapel at Whitehall, so the King could eat from silver.

  He was served by cupbearers and waiters, who brought wine and dishes from stewards and cooks running a small army of carvers, turn-bouches, porters, scourers and knaves of the boiling house, larder, poultry, scalding house, pastry, wood-house and scullery. His every need was met by another army of gentleman ushers, pages, grooms, messengers, clerks, barbers, apothecaries and physicians.

  ‘What would have happened if he had won?’ said Scogman in awestruck tones.

  I marvelled not only at the stupendous luxury, but the King’s frugality in the midst of it all. He ate and drank little. A poached egg was brought to him every morning after he had prayed and studied. He walked the green, open terraces in good weather and, endlessly, through chamber after spacious chamber of the east wing in bad. Only then did prison bars become visible; then, and when he refused to attend the service of Presbyterian ministers in the chapel, and at meals insisted on saying his own Anglican blessing.

  The price of this relative freedom, and the restoration of his household, was that he had given his word not to escape.

  His word. As someone who had only found out who he was through a maze of lies, that to me was the most precious jewel in this glittering palace. I was entranced by this honesty, by the aristocratic code. A man of honour might refuse to swear an oath in court, or to sign a contract. His word was deemed sufficient. To break it was to lose his honour. To lose that was to lose his standing, his life as a gentleman. That was why there were no bars. No close guards. Why George and his troopers melted deferentially into the background. And that was why, on the second day at Holdenby, when I had been so seduced by the court, and the people who lived by this code, I was in a position to hear the word.

  Escape.

  I had put on my one fine shirt and doublet, somewhat travel-stained, but in that large court, where there were as many gentlemen as the crowd at the ’Change, I passed. On this second day, I sat in the library, not to read, but in the hope of seeing the King, in order to practise my diplomacy.

  I had seen the remains of his poached egg – he had left most of the white – on its way back to the kitchen. The wind had changed and there was more rain in the air. Shortly the King would pass the library on his way to the east wing. I was not there to catch a look, or even a favour. I burned with an idea. In the teeth of Presbyterian disapproval, the King read his blessing from the Book of Common Prayer. It was because I left that book out that Mr Tooley had been ejected from his church and, I believed, my daughter Liz had died as a result. Yet half the parish had turned out at night to hear Mr Tooley read from the book at her baptism and funeral. The people wanted it. Cromwell had it on his desk. He talked of nothing else but toleration for ‘tender consciences’. The King and Cromwell were closer than they thought. What held them apart was the suspicion of old wounds. If only they could be brought together! So I was musing when I heard voices.

  Wanting no distraction, I hid myself in a book. I was in a high-backed chair and they did not see me. I recognised the penetrating bray of Lord Montague. He was talking to the Earl of Denbigh.

  ‘Upstart young bastard! Thought I was betting on him! My money’s on you, young fellow!’

  They choked with laughter. ‘The Pot!’

  ‘What and where on earth is it?’

  ‘Some stinking alehouse in the stews. He really believed we thought he was Sir Francis Drake.’

  They came into view, their backs towards me. I buried my hot face in the book, peering over the edge of it. Denbigh wiped his eyes. ‘Cost you a horse.’

  ‘Cost you your bet Richard wouldn’t get away. You owe me that Welsh border land.’

  ‘Damn close,’ Denbigh said. ‘Richard had to spin it out. Make a game of it. And you were lucky with the weather.’

  ‘Lucky? Part of the plan. Defeating the New Model Army by running not out of, but into the rain!’

  They mimicked running round in confusion, slapping each other’s backs in glee, before Montague put his arm confidentially round Denbigh’s shoulder. He dropped his voice, and steered Denbigh towards a door leading to the long gallery where the King walked. ‘I’ll show you where we’ll do it, old friend. Now we’ve managed Richard’s escape we must –’

  As he opened the door I craned forward, letting the book slip down. He must have heard the movement, for he whirled round as I put the book up. If my anger had surfaced then I would have confronted them. But it was drowned in humiliation.

  I heard them leaving. ‘That was him,’ Denbigh said.

  ‘No, no,’ Montague said. ‘Couldn’t possibly have been him. He was reading a book.’

  There could have been no greater contrast between the palace and our quarters, although they were but a stone’s throw away. They stank not only of the servants’ privy but of the huge pile of night soil that accumulated from the palace. I flung myself on my bed. What a dupe I was! Presented to the King! I writhed at the thought of the contempt, the laughter, of Montague and the rest.

  I must have fallen asleep. Scogman was shaking my shoulder. I heard the word ‘messenger’ and stumbled after him into the yard, thinking we had heard from Cromwell.

  A light rain was falling. George was helping one of his troopers from his horse. A nearby pool was threaded with blood. We took him to my bed as it was the nearest, and attended to his wound, a sabre cut in the arm. It had missed the bone, but he had lost a lot of blood. He was not the messenger from Cromwell we expected, but one of our scouts. Gradually we pieced his story together.

  He had lost his bearings in a stretch of forest. Emerging twenty, perhaps as much as thirty miles away, he had come to a large sheep farm, where he was berated by the farmer for stealing sheep. He managed to convince the farmer he was looking for directions, not sheep, and learned that a number of men had ‘requisitioned’ a dozen sheep ‘in the King’s name’. On his way back, the trooper had been attacked by a man who sounded like one of Richard’s mercenaries. George doubled the guard, complaining that the task, difficult enough because the house was huge and rambling, was made impossible by the troops having to keep their distance.

  They began meeting without me. It
was growing dark when, crossing the stable yard, I heard voices raised in argument coming from the tack room, which we had taken over as a staff room. Standing round a bench, where the ostler normally repaired harnesses and saddles, were George, Nehemiah and Scogman. There was an uneasy silence when I came in, eventually broken by George.

  ‘It’s the bloody sheep that worry me,’ he muttered.

  ‘Sheep?’

  ‘Why would Richard want a dozen sheep? It’s enough to feed a small army.’

  ‘He hasn’t got an army.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  It was never the facts, always few and mostly inadequate, that decided things. Decisions were made from beliefs, interpretations, stretched nerves. Poyntz’s northern army, which Holles controlled, was believed to be a hundred miles to the north, but the distance shrank in our imaginations.

  There was another awkward silence. Rain pattered on the roof of the musty tack room. George trimmed a candle.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ I said. ‘I got too close to my father.’

  George trimmed the already trimmed candle. Scogman became intensely interested in some horse brasses, rubbing one up with his sleeve. Only Nehemiah looked directly at me, his arms folded, his face expressionless.

  ‘Sometimes … I don’t know where I am … which side I’m on,’ I went on.

  There was the sound of a horse. George went to the door and peered out into the gloom, more from habit now than hope. He returned to pick up the candle. ‘Guard change at the lodge.’

  Cromwell’s messenger was more than a day overdue. Something had happened to him or, worse, to Cromwell.

  I pulled the candle away from George, lit it from another and stuck it on the bench. ‘You’re better off without me,’ I said.

  I went to my room, half falling on to the bed, before remembering the wounded trooper. I walked round and round, like the King pacing the east wing. No. Not like him at all. He knew where he was. What he stood for. Which side he was on.

  I had woken the trooper, who groaned he was thirsty. I went across the yard to get some small beer. The moon was almost full, glittering in pools, etching the gables of the palace against the sky. I tried to put myself into my father’s mind. He might be raising an army, but he would not use it to snatch the King. He wanted to avoid a fight, in which the King might be harmed, as much as we did. He would use his elite band of mercenaries to assist the King’s escape, then take him to the army.

  It might be tonight. Or tomorrow at first light – somewhere like the east wing, where the King walked, the part most difficult to watch and guard.

  I got beer from the kitchens, where cooks, stripped to the waist from the heat of roasting a pig, swallowed great jugs of it. One swore at me as I stopped abruptly in his path.

  Was the King’s escape already arranged from the inside? Was that what Montague and Denbigh were about to discuss when they saw me in the library? I still believed the King would not break his word. But he might be persuaded to if he thought his life was in danger.

  I went back into the yard. Candles were still burning in the tack room. I watched George, Scogman and Nehemiah arguing, passing backwards and forwards before the lighted windows. You’re not one of them, my father had said. You belong here. With the nobles, the gentlemen, superior in every way, with their code of honour.

  Honour. Was it not the greatest of all confidence tricks? They persuaded everyone else they alone had it. People doffed their hats to it. Sat behind it in church, every man in his place. But was not honour merely a name they stuck on something everyone had? Ever since my printer’s runner days, when I had run from Parliament taking Mr Pym’s words from Mr Ink to Mr Black, I had been one small link in a chain of people who all had what they called honour. I only knew what it was when I saw from the faces of George and the others that I had lost it. Trust.

  My father was wrong. I did not belong to him and his gentlemen. But nor was I with the men in the tack room. I returned to the trooper, propping him up until he had drunk enough, and calming him until he fell into an uneasy, feverish sleep.

  I picked up my pack with the intention of placing it as a pillow on the floor, but the movement brought back to me so strongly the times when, with just a pack on my back, I had taken to the road, that I felt an intense urge to do so; an urge to become no one, or anyone I chose to be. I felt this so keenly, that when there was a sound at the door my hand flew to my knife as swiftly as when I was on the run.

  It was Scogman. He looked at the pack. Did he think I was going off to join my father? I could not bear that. I threw the pack down. I had walked enough. I would only find answers, if there were any answers, by staying where I was, facing up to what I had done.

  ‘I think they will try to take the King in the next forty-eight hours. They’re not going to wait to raise an army.’

  Scogman took a clay pipe and slowly filled it while I told him what I had heard in the library. Clattering and shouting floated across the yard from the kitchens. They were clearing the meal. Soon the King would be retiring. Scogman struck a flint. It took several attempts before he lit his clay to his satisfaction.

  ‘Tell the other two.’

  ‘They won’t believe me! They think I’m one of them.’

  ‘So you are.’ He puffed vigorously at his clay until the tobacco glowed.

  ‘You too,’ I said bitterly.

  Placidly he watched the sweet-smelling smoke drift up to the ceiling. ‘And you’re not.’

  ‘Thanks. That’s a great help.’

  He shrugged. ‘Helped me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be here if you weren’t both sir and Tom, would I? You wanted me hanged. Until you saw who was going to hang me. Then when the troopers thought you were on their side, you whipped the bloody daylights out of me and some sense into me.’ He contemplated the eddying smoke with deep satisfaction. ‘Wouldn’t be here, Tom, sir, if you’d been on anybody’s side, would I? You’re your own side. Your own man.’

  I stared at him for a long while as he drew contentedly on his clay. It was as if I had been trying key after key in a door, only to discover it had been open all the time. Ever since I had been taken up river from Poplar to Mr Black’s I had been searching. For who I was. For my father. Or someone to take his place. Matthew. Mr Black. Mr Pym. Cromwell. And, finally, Richard. Always seeking. Approval. Permission. Who was I? Whose side was I on? I was Tom Neave. I was on my own side.

  I went across the yard and into the kitchens. Eating their own meal, the bare-chested cooks turned to stare at me as I stood in front of the fire where the remains of the pig, cut in places to the bone, were still turning. I pulled off the signet ring with such force I scraped the flesh from my finger.

  One of the cooks got up as I dropped the ring into the fire. The falcon’s wings glowed, spreading as if it was about to fly out of the fire. It must have been a gobbet of fat falling from the pig, but as the ring disappeared into the flames there was a sudden hissing, a spitting of sparks which made the cook jump in fear, and cross himself.

  25

  They stood round the bench in the tack room staring at me in silence, Nehemiah’s and George’s faces furrowed in deep suspicion. Scogman pursed his lips, knocking out his pipe against his heel, although the bowl was long empty.

  ‘Take the King?’ George said. ‘Where?’

  ‘South,’ I said. ‘Towards a city garrisoned by the New Model. Oxford, possibly.’

  They all talked across one another.

  ‘Kidnap the King?’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘Take him by force?’

  ‘Cromwell would hang us.’

  ‘He’ll hang us if we lose him.’

  A dog on a nearby estate farm barked incessantly until someone shouted at it.

  ‘It’s just what they want,’ Nehemiah said. ‘If we take the King by force it gives them every e-excuse to attack us.’

  ‘The same applies to us,’ I said. ‘We fear for th
e King’s life. They have given us every excuse to take the King to a place of safety!’

  The dog began barking again. One of the soldiers on guard began barking back, which sent the dog into a frenzy. George rounded on me. ‘Cromwell told us we must not hurt a hair of his head. I will not lose my neck for another of your crazy ideas.’

  ‘Nobody will touch him. You will point out the danger. Say it’s urgent to move.’

  ‘And he’ll come. Just like that, will he?’ Nehemiah laughed.

  I hesitated. The King said he loved his people. He did not know his people, but he believed he did. He was good at small kindnesses: I still felt a warmth towards him for silencing the crowd when I did my clumsy bow. And there were stories that he treated laundresses and cooks’ wives with a concern and consideration he never showed to lords and ladies. He was obstinate. But the converse of that was that he was impulsive. It might work. It just might. It was how we presented it that mattered. It was all about belief, words, as it was at the beginning when I had run with Mr Pym’s speech, believing the words were magic that could change the world. They were. They could. Or so I still believed.

  ‘No. He won’t come like that,’ I said to Nehemiah. ‘We offer him advice.’

  ‘And the King is going to accept your advice?’ George said.

  ‘No. Yours.’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘I can’t do it. I’d be seen as Cromwell’s man. Or Lord Stonehouse’s. You are the people.’

  Nehemiah swept off his hat mockingly. ‘Bow the knee, Ch-Charles, to George Joyce, Cornet –’

  ‘Shut up, Nehemiah,’ George snapped. He gave me a look, half dismissive, half wanting me to go on.

  ‘You tell him he is in great danger. It’s true. He knows it. Let me guess. He knows about the plot to “rescue” him. His life for the past five years has been nothing but plots, with conflicting advice, mostly bad. Is Richard’s “rescue” any different? He must have doubts about it. Whereas you can speak from the heart, and you have the people with you.’