‘The King!’ Scogman shouted.
‘The King!’ the troops roared back.
‘The drums!’ I yelled. ‘Where are the drummers?’
Richard checked his horse and put up his hand to stop his troops. They were about two hundred yards away.
‘Newmarket,’ the King said. ‘I will go to Newmarket.’
Beneath the romance, that was a calculation. Kentford Heath, Newmarket, was where it was rumoured General Fairfax had agreed to meet regiments about their grievances. It was a test of whether George would take him there, or was leading a rebel group.
George lifted his sword. ‘Newmarket!’
‘Newmarket!’ responded the troops.
The thud of the bass drum was followed by a rattle from the snare. The King urged his horse forward, the troops forming round him, lifting his standard above him. High-pitched above the tramp of the horse and the beat of the drums came the shrill skirl of a pipe. It came from a strange instrument that Joshua had carved from elm, somewhere between a fife and a flute. And it was a wild, strange tune he played, one called Freedom, which he had piped as a warning when the enclosure men from the lord and the parish were coming and it was time to move on. But few except the forest people, who grinned and whistled it, knew that, certainly not the King. He picked up the tune, and began to hum snatches of it as we moved towards the highway.
Montague had come out of the lodge. ‘I thought you were one of us,’ he said.
I laughed at the thought of how bitterly wounded I had been when I overheard him in the library. ‘An upstart young bastard like me?’ I said.
I rode on the outside of the jingling, whistling, drumming column, raising my sword to my father as we passed. After a moment, he lifted his.
Richard followed us, but before his reinforcements came another New Model regiment on its way to Newmarket joined us. People who hated the tramp of soldiers heard the call of the pipe and, sensing something strange and different, came from the fields and the villages to gape at us escorting the King and his retinue. They rang the church bells at Rothwell, picked up by bells at Kettering and Cranford St John, where the villagers threw green boughs and rushes before the King. He loved it. He raised his hands and smiled. Bonfires were lit. A beggar ran alongside, pointing his sore at him. Children joined the procession, stamping their bare feet to the rhythm. Scogman did tricks for them. A coin vanished from his hand to be taken from his nose. In a country desolated by war, depressed by a Puritan gloom which forbade maypoles, songs, dances and players, it was suddenly high summer.
George sent a message ahead to Fairfax, fearful of our reception, since our meeting had been with Cromwell, not him, and we had heard nothing from Cromwell. But I reassured him that it would have been a disaster if the King had been lost. Did not the swelling crowds vouch for that? We had done it! It was a story I would tell my son, Luke, a story every bit as fabulous as those Matthew had told me round the pitch fire in the docks, except this was true. I could picture Luke’s round eyes, his open mouth, as I told it.
It lasted until we approached Cambridge, where a hundred bonfires were being prepared to be lit for the King. They were never lit. The story vanished into hard reality.
Reality came in the shape of tough, authoritarian Colonel of the Horse, Edward Whalley, commanding two regiments. He had a commission, in writing. It was from General Fairfax whose anger had scarcely left him able to dictate it when he heard the King had been abducted.
Whalley knew what the pipe meant, and took it from Joshua and broke it. George and I were arrested and told we would be court-martialled.
26
Summer at its peak: blistering heat in London cracked the wood of the houses, dazzling the eyes, cooking the slurry of uncollected rubbish, excrement, decaying food and dead dogs into one unbearable stench. All this was mixed with swarms of flies, of kites feeding on the filth, and of rats swollen with it, baring their teeth at people who tried to kick them away. Furnace heat burned in the mouths of preachers at every corner, warning people that their deeds were even now being counted: the Beast was Without, crawling nearer and nearer, waiting to snatch them up and cast them in the pit of eternal fire.
The Beast was the New Model Army, a great loathsome toad with two swollen heads. One of these was Fairfax, but the voice that came out of his mouth was that of the other, Great Satan himself: Cromwell. So thundered the preacher in St Paul’s Churchyard at a growing crowd of militiamen, Presbyterians who had lost their jobs when the New Model was formed, watermen and apprentices. The preacher, long grey hair streaming from the sides of his bald head, on which blazed a livid red scar, urged them to go to Parliament before it was too late.
To Parliament? Why, I did not know. Neither did Scogman. Two months in a Cambridge gaol had reduced everything to whether we would be hanged that day, or the next. Our gaolers had been blank as the walls about our fate, and just as blank about our being thrown out on to the streets. No charges. Why were we being released? The gaolers laughed uproariously. Did we want to go back there? And, look, there was something that had come with the instructions to discharge us. One of the men had thrust into my hand a tattered, sealed piece of paper, stinking of gaol-piss, but when I had opened it, it only increased my confusion. It was an army warrant for ten pounds, five shillings and threepence. It was signed Thos. Fairfax (General) and made out to Tom Neave. Scribbled across it was ‘Forre Services Rendered’.
Minds as rotted as our guts, we were so transfixed by the preacher we found ourselves raising our fists and roaring with the crowd.
‘Parliament! To Parliament!’
In truth, I was so dizzy with the heat and weary with travel, for a moment I thought myself transported to the time when I was an apprentice, called to protect Parliament from the King. Until the preacher fixed his eye on me and shouted: ‘There is one of the beasts. The Devil’s child! He put this mark on me.’ He pointed to the scar. Even then, it took me a moment to realise it was the wound I had given him when I had escaped from Mr Black’s all those years ago. I could scarcely believe it was Gloomy George. The scar glared at me like a third eye. After quoting the Old Testament all these years, he looked as if he had stepped out of it.
‘Seize him!’
Before anyone could move, Scogman pointed to a man in a butcher’s apron standing next to me.
‘I see it!’ he yelled, thrusting his finger at the butcher’s face. ‘I see the mark!’
It was astonishing how many others saw the mark on the unfortunate butcher’s face. The mob turned on him. In seconds he was the centre of a seething, fighting turmoil. Before George had howled their mistake at the crowd, we were running down Ludgate Hill. A group of young apprentices pursued us, crying ‘Devil’s child!’
They had the legs on us and yelled at another group being incited by a preacher outside St Bride’s. Both groups closed in on us like the jaws of a pair of pincers. We ran into a white market in Shoe Lane, selling poultry and the like. I cannoned into the stall of a trader, who was in the act of screwing off the head of a chicken. It wriggled from his hands, squawking and fluttering and diverting one group. The other had us trapped against the stall. I slipped on the cobbles, greasy with chicken guts spilling from a pail. The trader grabbed me, demanding payment for his chicken, already despatched by the crowd and disappearing towards someone’s pot. And Scogman was disappearing under the press of bodies. Soon I would follow his fate.
But from somewhere among the slimy feel of the cobbles and the putrid stench of the City came the apprentice I had once been, ‘living by my wits’, elbowing to one side the correct, slow-thinking gentleman I had become.
‘Cutpurse!’ I cried at the trader, slapping my hand on my belt.
Instinctively, the trader put his hand to his own belt. I pulled out the pail of entrails from under his chopping table and heaved the contents at the crowd. A slithering, disintegrating, evil-smelling yellow and red mess fell on them. Some, literally believing I was the Devil’s child and ha
d brought the mess to life, shrieked they were being eaten by the gizzards, craws, beaks, bladders and scraps of liver they clawed from their faces, the blood and scratches they drew only increasing that belief and their panic.
I dragged up Scogman by his belt. As we wriggled under the table some still tried to go after us, only to slip in the pool of grease and crash against the stall, where they were seized by the irate trader.
From another life, I knew the streets, all the short cuts. Wine Court, my feet remembered. Gough Square, Trinity Passage, Pissing Alley, where the sound of the mob faded. Even that alley smelt sweet as we leaned against the wall, holding our sides. Scogman scraped slime from his jerkin and removed a chicken foot. There was more than a trace of admiration in his voice.
‘A rogue could have done no better than you, sir.’
Panting for breath, I longed for home, for Anne. To feel her against me. Everything would be healed then. Nothing else mattered, and I forgot that we had parted on such miserable terms. But I was swept with Scogman down The Strand by the mob and, becoming part of that animal, we were forced to move with it. People carried Presbyterian banners and raised clenched fists. In Westminster Hall traders had shut up their stalls for fear of the riots. We were carried towards the Commons, just as it used to be when I was an apprentice, except then we were shouting for Pym and Parliament, and this mob shouted for Holles and the King.
There was another difference. We would have threatened and abused the guards, but would never have breached the lobby. For us, the chamber of the House had the sanctity of a church. But, now, some made an attempt to break through, and were stopped only by the pikes of the guards.
Scogman yelled in my ear. ‘Never seen that before. An MP rioting against Parliament.’
I twisted round in the heaving crowd. At first all I could see was Gloomy George. It was as if, with the crowd around him, he had been dropped from Ludgate Hill to that spot outside the Commons. With him, his arm round him, was the Right Honourable Member for Dutton’s End, Sir Lewis Challoner. Near them was a small group who had none of the chaotic frenzy of the crowd. They had the trademark bent noses and squashed ears of men who earned a living with their fists. Two were laughing over pails they carried. Each took a drink from a flask before passing it to the next. All had clubs. They nodded to a man giving them instructions, whom I recognised from my army unit in Essex.
‘Sergeant Potter,’ Scogman said. ‘Permission to speak to my old comrade in arms, sir?’
‘Don’t be a fool.’
But the next moment, as Gloomy George began to incite the crowd, Scogman disappeared into it. My feet left the ground as people surged forward. I was buffeted towards the pikemen who fought to guard the entrance. Among them was my old enemy, the Sergeant-at-Arms, so frail now he could scarce hold his pike. He staggered before a blow from one of the rioters, his pike slipping from him. Another aimed a kick at him. I grabbed the man’s leg, upended him, snatched up the pike and drove rioters away with the flat of it. Someone grabbed my arm from behind. I whirled round with my pike, almost driving the butt into a familiar figure.
His fine clothes were torn, his linen stained, his hands splashed with blood. He had reverted from being assistant clerk to the army, who talked loftily of progress and shorthand, and whose name I could never remember, to the old, wild-eyed Mr Ink of my boyhood memory.
In my state of confusion, it seemed that the ink that always streaked his hands had turned into blood, until I saw it came from the forehead of the Sergeant, who had been struck by a stone. The crowd was beginning to draw back, less from our efforts than from the sound that turned their heads: the beat of militia drums coming from Whitehall.
‘Thank God,’ Mr Ink said. ‘The Lord Mayor has sent the Trained Bands.’
The drums had no effect on George, but the rioters around the door slipped away. I could see no sign of Scogman, nor of Sir Lewis and the thugs. We helped the Sergeant into the lobby, where his head was bound by two of the guards. There was one of those sudden, inexplicable silences that fall on a mass of people. The animal was pausing for breath.
The guard who had let us in half opened the door to stare out. Gloomy George had dropped his hectoring tone. He had his audience. He had found his voice. What made it chilling was its note of certainty, its quietness. It forced people to remain still, frightened to miss a word. For he had the Word. The Word was not in there. He pointed towards Parliament, and his finger seemed directed at me.
‘It has cast out its true believers who would fully reform the Church. But I tell you – they themselves will be cast out!’
As his voice rose, the murmuring of the crowd rose with it. The guard closed the door. The lobby had the dimness, the gravity of a church, an impression deepened by the mild, unflappable voice of Speaker Lenthall calling for order, followed by the droning of someone, on a point of order, that the question of tithes and the general inequality of taxation had already been discussed and passed to another place. Amidst all the chaos outside, the House was in session, debating, as they seemed to have been doing ever since my childhood, the interminable negotiations with the King.
Outside, there were no hesitations, no uncertainties, no sub-clauses or equivocations in Gloomy George’s venomous tones. ‘I will prove to you that the devil has taken root in that place – not the Mother but the Whore of Parliaments!’
‘What is going on?’ I cried at Mr Ink. ‘What is happening?’
Two months in gaol had made me as ignorant as the child I was when I first smuggled out speeches from him. Mr Ink shook his head in despair. ‘Once there was a King and no Parliament. Then there was a Parliament and no King. Now we have half a King –’
‘Where?’
‘He is held by Cromwell’s men, at Hampton Court. So we have half a King and two Parliaments. This one, and the one in Reading.’
‘Reading?’ I really thought he was mad then, if he believed the nation was ruled, or half-ruled from a downtrodden little town on the road west.
But some of the mist cleared from my mind when he told me that was where the New Model was camped. Holles’s attempt to break up the army had failed. The regiments had come together under Fairfax and Cromwell. Cromwell had fled from London the day after I met him in the garden, for fear of being impeached by Holles. Now, wearing his MP’s hat, from a tent in Reading, Cromwell had instigated impeachment of Holles and eleven other MPs, including Sir Lewis Challoner. Cromwell’s Independents at Westminster duly impeached them and agreed to settle the soldiers’ grievances on their terms.
There might be two Parliaments and half a King, but the army was in power.
‘Then we succeeded!’ I cried. ‘We got the King. Saved the army. Not Cromwell. Nor Fairfax. But his soldiers – the people.’
He waved his hands dismissively, as he used to when I was young and bold and passionate, and full of dreams. ‘Tom, Tom, this is not a pamphlet.’
‘No,’ I said bitterly. ‘It is not a pamphlet. It is true. What happened to George Joyce?’
‘Cromwell denied having anything to do with the army revolt. George Joyce was severely reprimanded. And received a hundred pounds in payment.’
‘A hundred pounds!’
‘Ssshh.’ He put his finger to his lips. ‘For extraordinary services.’
‘And I only got ten!’
Mr Ink looked increasingly uncomfortable. ‘You – er – are an accounting error. Thomas Stonehouse is still in gaol for not fulfilling his mission and bringing back his father. You gave your name as Tom Neave to the gaoler and I … er, failed to remember that was your original name … and, er, gave a release notice for General Fairfax to sign, with back pay due from the early days of the war and –’
Fists and boots drummed on the door. ‘Repeal, repeal, repeal! Repeal the impeachment of Holles. Repeal the army agreement. Repeal, repeal, repeal!’
Guards rushed in and slid a heavy bolt in place. I knew that door. I had stood outside it long enough when I was a runner, waitin
g for an opportunity to sneak past it. Its thick, gnarled oak panels looked as if they had grown there. But it began to shiver, to creak and groan at its massive, rusting hinges, as the crowd battered at it. The Sergeant-at-Arms appeared like a ghost, wavering in from the Painted Chamber, where he had been bandaged. Blood was spreading around the dressing on his wound. He had a curious, dazed air of forced calm, his fragile voice quavering with disbelief.
‘They have invaded … the Lords … Forced their lordships … to repeal … impeachments.’
‘The militia –’ I began.
‘Gone over to Holles … They are all Presbyterians now … we must take the mace …’
More blows rained on the door. I thought it touchingly absurd that all he could worry about was the mace, his piece of pomp and ceremony, but Mr Ink knew his Parliament better than I did.
‘No legislation is lawful without the mace. And the Speaker. Quick!’
There were glimpses of yelling mouths in twisted faces outside as the door bulged inwards, then sank back. Splinters flew from the area around the bolt. The guards fled. Mr Ink took one arm of the Sergeant-at-Arms and I the other. Half lifting him from the floor, we reached the chamber, where the members, despite some looking apprehensive and a few terrified, loudly expressed indignation and outrage. All were held in their seats by the fear of cowardice, the hypnotic atmosphere of that place and, most of all, by the archaic rules of debate and the bonds of tradition.
Even the member leading the debate, Sir Simon D’Ewes, usually absent in the shires at the least sign of trouble, continued speaking, although the papers in his hand shook like leaves in a gale.
‘Proposals to make peace with the King. Item: the use of the Book of Common Prayer to be permitted, but not imposed …’
In spite of the tumult outside, tears of joy sprang to my eyes. The use of that book had caused Mr Tooley to be thrown out of his church. He could have his living back!
The Sergeant, shackled by the formality of his role, was making curious genuflections to try to catch the Speaker’s attention. I was about to push past him but stopped in amazement when I heard what Sir Simon said next.
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