‘There should be no penalties for not coming to the parish church …’
The soldiers had achieved this. No, no. The people. This was what we had argued, discussed, debated, in the heady march with the King from Holdenby to Cambridge. This was the music of the pipe.
There was a crack like thunder, followed by a hollow, reverberating boom. The building shook, dust drifting down from the gallery above the chamber. The old door had fallen. The mob, led by Gloomy George and Sir Lewis, poured into the lobby. We retreated into the chamber. Speaker Lenthall turned, peering over his spectacles, as if, up to that moment, he had heard nothing untoward. That movement, that peering, and the members as still as the benches they sat on, expressed the awe that place inspired. The mob stopped at the edge of the chamber, their shrieks and yells dwindling into silence.
‘Sergeant,’ said Speaker Lenthall to the old man, as if he might not have noticed. ‘There are strangers in the House. Please have them removed.’
The Speaker’s quiet indifference left Sir Lewis nonplussed. Perhaps for the first time he was struck by the enormity of what he had done. Perhaps he was remembering that even the King had suffered a defeat when he had invaded that chamber, one from which he was never to recover. The Sergeant turned to the crowd, flapping his hands at them as if he was shooing a flock of birds. The feeble absurdity of this gesture was dwarfed by his appearance, his bloodstained livery and bandaged head giving him the look of a martyred apparition. If anyone in that crowd moved, it was a nervous shuffling backwards. A few slunk off. I saw Scogman at the back. He had infiltrated himself among the men with pails and clubs. He gestured upwards, but I could not make out what he was trying to convey.
‘Sir Simon,’ said Speaker Lenthall.
Sir Simon swallowed and straightened out the papers he had crumpled up in his agitation. ‘Errmm … parish churches, no penalties for non-attendance thereof, and no penalties for attending other meetings of worship …’
No penalties for attending other meetings of worship! Eight words. A dry Parliamentary clause, but to me it was the treasure I had dreamed of when I first came to London. Now the chest was opened, I could see it was not gold, but words – not just words that might change the world, but words that were changing it. Tolerance. The freedom to say what you believed. Freedom of worship! I felt so uplifted, I was certain others must feel as I did. I turned to find Gloomy George. I would even have shaken hands again with him at that moment. But to George the very same words were poison.
He pushed his way to the front, crying, ‘Heresy! This is the Devil’s creed. A Babel of different religions? People will fall into error. Thence into the Pit – like this Devil’s child!’
He levelled his finger at me. Many believed the war presaged the Second Coming, and with his staring eyes and white streaming hair, George looked like the vengeful Old Testament prophet, predicting the Messiah. He gave authority to the crowd and enabled Sir Lewis to find his voice.
‘Mr Speaker, the proposals are not only in error, they are illegal! Forced on this House by the army.’
Lenthall struggled to keep his calm tone above the baying crowd. ‘Sir Lewis, you are illegal and in contempt –’
The Speaker’s face disappeared in a mass of filth. He jumped from his chair, clawing the evil-smelling stuff from his eyes, spitting it frantically from his mouth. Led by Sergeant Potter, Sir Lewis’s thugs scooped more of the night soil in their pails and flung it at the members who came to help Lenthall.
The thugs, like the shit they threw, could be found on any street corner. Gloomy George’s followers were different. They had the same burning eyes, the same fanaticism. They seized me and held me against the table where the mace was kept, while Sir Lewis conducted a mock Parliament. He wrenched the papers from Sir Simon and tore them up. Only Bill Stroud, the member who had stubbornly wanted to confront the King when he invaded Parliament, tried to stop them. He was clubbed senseless. There was no more resistance.
‘Repeal, repeal, repeal!’ the mob chanted.
Sir Lewis forced the members to vote to repeal the impeachments of himself, Holles and the others. With the frightening zeal of the Presbyterian soldiers who had smashed screens and images in Anglican churches, his men seized more papers and burned them. The acrid smell of smoke mingled with the stench of excrement, making me choke and gag. Gloomy George held a lighted taper to my face, burning my mouth and cheek. I jerked my head back, banging it on the mace.
‘He will burn. There is hope yet,’ he said.
God only knew where his mind had flown to. I had always suspected his beliefs a cloak for worldly gain. But now it seemed there was going to be no world left to gain. It was the end time. I was the task he had been given and he had failed. But there was still time to destroy me and all my brood, he cried in exulted tones. At last he had evidence I was the Devil’s child.
‘You saw him,’ he said to one of the men with him.
‘He turned a chicken’s entrails into serpents,’ the man said.
‘One bit me!’ cried another, pointing to a cut on his cheek.
I licked at my cracked, stinging mouth where the taper had burned me. ‘I saw it!’ screamed the man with the cut cheek. ‘I saw the snake slither from his mouth.’
The two men holding me slackened their grips in fear. I teetered groggily against the table, on the other side of which the MPs were being prodded into the Ayes lobby to repeal the impeachments.
‘Best form of argument,’ said one of the thugs, brandishing a club.
‘Business as usual,’ shrugged another. ‘Don’t they always do what they’re told?’
They laughed uproariously, shoving the terrified men forward. Among them, Mr Ink, who had been mistaken for a member, swam into my dazed vision.
‘Vida supra,’ he muttered.
His utterance seemed part of the general madness. Vida supra? It was scribe’s language for referring a reader to the text above. Vida supra – see above.
I looked up. Dizzy from the blows, the sudden movement sent a wave of sickness through me. I dipped my head back immediately, but not before I saw Scogman in the gallery above. He was carrying one of the pails the thugs had brought in. He lifted his hand and grinned.
Sir Lewis, who was acting as proposer of the motion, as well as teller, shouted, ‘For repealing the impeachments: one hundred and twenty-six against –’
‘On a point of order, Sir Lewis …’ Scogman shouted.
Sir Lewis looked round, then up. Everyone followed his gaze. There was a moment’s silence. Scogman’s grin had gone. I felt he was reliving that moment when Sir Lewis had ordered him to be dragged through the hedgerows and country lanes in chains. The shit seemed to hang in the air before descending on Sir Lewis’s upturned face in a thick, glutinous, stinking mass, invading his mouth and nose, sliding down his collar, turning him into a jumping, gasping, struggling heap of night soil.
Londoners called it the Sleeper’s Revenge, keeping full pots ready for men on night watch with particularly grating, penetrating voices. The thugs, who easily forgot what side they were on, cheered.
‘Vida supra,’ I yelled in triumph to Mr Ink.
‘He is calling up the Devil!’ cried one of the men holding me.
Like women whose only defence on being accused of witchcraft is to use the very fear they engendered, I poured out a meaningless gabble of Latin tags.
‘Vida supra,’ I jabbered, ‘per se ex libris emeritus etiam atque etiam cogito ergo sum …’ As they recoiled in alarm, I pulled away from them.
‘Stop his foul mouth!’ George shouted.
‘Vice versa,’ I chanted. ‘Ad infinitum ad infinit –’
The man with the cut cheek clamped his hand over my mouth. I bit it.
‘The snake bit me!’ the man shrieked.
‘The mace,’ Mr Ink said in my ear.
I picked it up. It was unexpectedly heavy. I lurched forward, almost dropping it. George grabbed me from behind by my hair. It was an old form of
cruelty of his, which he used to inflict on me when I was an apprentice. My hair had grown longer in prison and he yanked my head back. His supporters, gaining courage from him, surrounded me, raining blows on me. Two seized the mace. A shape flashed in front of me, knocking them to the ground. Scogman had jumped from the gallery.
‘Palm your pike!’ he yelled.
Mindless hours of numbly boring drill instructions have their reward when you are too battered and shocked to think. Long before it became a ceremonial symbol, the mace was a club, shattering breastplates and bones, only going out of fashion when heavy armour was developed. It must have been two centuries ago, around the time of Richard the Third, when that five foot silver club had last been used for its original purpose. I swung it round. Once I gained momentum it became a frightening weapon. The man with a cut cheek tried to duck under it to grab my arm. It caught his skull with a crack like rotten wood and swept on to shatter the thigh of another. He went down screaming. The others scattered.
‘Mr Pym’s passage,’ said Mr Ink. ‘Mr Scogman is getting a boat.’
It was the way Mr Ink had escaped with Mr Pym and the other members after the King’s invasion of Parliament. The cellars of Parliament were supposed to have been made more secure since the Gunpowder Plot, but it was still a rabbit warren with a passage to the river.
I was staggering, head still spinning from wielding the mace. Mr Ink found the Speaker and led us both to the river end of the chamber. A nightmare figure stopped us. His stink almost asphyxiated us. Sir Lewis would have been comical but for his eyes glaring venomously from his darkened skin, and the knife in his hand. At close quarters the mace was useless. The knife flashed towards me, but before it struck home Bill Stroud brought a volume of Hansard down on Sir Lewis’s head. The MPs were fighting back.
We threaded our way, as Mr Pym had done five years earlier, through cellars of mouldering papers and stacked furniture, the Speaker protesting that it was useless; members had ordered the passage to be blocked during the Civil War. At first it looked as though he was right, but then, guided by a draught carrying the smell of the river, Mr Ink shifted some crates and there it was. I wrapped the mace in some old sacking and followed the others into the passage. It was narrow and low, forcing us to bend our heads and scrape our backs as the damp, mildewed passage rose closer to the river. At the top of a flight of stairs was a heavy door, barred and locked. The Speaker’s despair was alleviated with the gloomy satisfaction of being right after all: the security of the House had not been compromised.
Silently, Mr Ink ran his fingers down the wall until he found a brick looser than its fellows. From the cavity behind it he took a key, one which spoke to me of years of smuggling out banned speeches in ways known only to scribes and runners. The Speaker said nothing more.
Scogman was standing by Westminster Stairs, a shadowy blur wavering against the bright sun. The tide was running strongly upstream. The Speaker got into the boat, followed by Mr Ink, who confessed he had rarely left Parliament, let alone London, but he must follow and record the speeches wherever they were made. He stared at the old building, where the clamour was beginning to die down, and I realised that, for him, it was like leaving home.
With the water lapping round my feet on the steps, I gingerly passed down the sack-wrapped mace.
‘What have you got there?’ the waterman said. ‘I charges extra for corpses.’
Hoping he would show every care, I said, ‘The mace Richard the Third used.’
‘And I’m Oliver Cromwell,’ he said. ‘Where to, guv?’
‘Parliament,’ the Speaker said.
The waterman closed his eyes in disbelief before stabbing a finger towards the building. ‘You’re there. That’s Parliament.’
‘Reading,’ Speaker Lenthall said.
The waterman cast off, the sun behind him glinting on the waves thrown up by the boat and, as the sacking slipped from it, on the silver mace.
27
Evening. Bread could have been baked on the cobbles. The crowds were thinning out, cramming into the nearest alehouses.
I was walking rapidly, so deep in thoughts of Anne and Luke, that when I turned up St Martin’s Lane it was a moment before I realised Scogman was continuing down The Strand.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home.’
‘Where’s that?’
He smiled, and waved vaguely in the direction of the City. I told him not to be a fool. He was coming home with me. He smiled again and said he could see I was already at home. I put my arm round him and practically dragged him through Covent Garden where he grew more and more uneasy. He broke away in Long Acre, stopped, shook his head, and said it was all too neat for him. It was like the enclosures, pruned and controlled. He felt at home only in the deep forest of Without, where the buildings were squashed together, gables almost touching and streets as winding and narrow as forest tracks. These buildings were as severe and straight as hanging judges. They brought home to him, not to mince any more meat to make a pie, that he was a rogue and I was a gentleman.
‘What nonsense!’ I cried.
I forgot I had ever had similar thoughts myself. I told him the days of rogues and gentlemen were over. We had been together, we had seen great things and done great things, and we would stay together. Holles’s mobs might have control of the City and Westminster, but Parliament was being carried up river towards the army. And the army was the people.
‘Oh, Tom,’ he said, very quietly.
That was all. He turned away, back towards The Strand, but almost immediately spun back, clutching at my arm. Still full of dreams, I thought he had changed his mind, until I followed his pointing finger. People were running up Drury Lane. Some were carrying red pails. Even as I ran, I prayed it would not be our house. Please God not my house. Not my wife and child. But I knew it was. I knew it. I should have foreseen it. But I was so full of my wretched dreams! Why, oh why, did I not foresee it? Why had I not been there to protect them?
All this while Scogman and I were running, smelling first the fire that I feared, then seeing the thick smoke billowing from our house. We collided into people filling pails from a pump, then into others walking aimlessly up the street to stare. The houses were brick and stone, but might have been wood with all the smoke that was pouring out. Servants from surrounding houses had given up trying to stop the fire in mine and were throwing water on their own. It was being sucked up by the heat as soon as it was thrown. I gabbled to one I recognised, a serving-maid from Cromwell’s house.
‘My wife … son …’
Her frightened face was stained with smoke. ‘They were here … I don’t know, sir …’
I snatched the pail from her, upended it over my head and kicked open the door. The explosion was like a cannon going off. Flames shot upwards, driving me back. The fire had been slumbering. Now it began hungrily to eat the timber of the floor, the beams of the ceiling.
‘Anne!’ I kept crying. ‘Luke!’
I grabbed another pail and flung it into the room. It hissed almost instantly into steam, but momentarily doused a narrow pathway through the flames. Before the flames leapt back, I ran through. The yelling of people was snuffed out by the roar of the fire in my ears. It followed me into the hall, consuming my papers, my Bible.
‘Anne – Lu –’
They were choking screams, not words. It was the hot acrid smoke that was engulfing me now, charring my lungs, stopping my breath. I put a foot on the stairs but there was a crash above me and a burning piece of timber narrowly missed me, driving me through the hall towards the back of the house. Here the walls were of stone and there was less wood for the fire to feed on. I almost fell over the body. Scarcely able to see, I recognised Jed more from his wooden arm, which was beginning to smoulder. I dragged him over on his back, seeing the blood soaking his chest. He had died not from the smoke, but from a knife wound. I tried to pull him away but the smoke defeated me.
Coughing and retching, stumbli
ng down the stairs leading to the kitchen I saw Anne’s shoe. Or what was left of it. A tiny brocaded fragment whose pattern I recognised. Somehow that pattern, bleached like bone, was Anne. I could see her foot in it, as small as mine was gross; see her movement, as delicate as mine was clumsy. I had always loved watching her. I could not believe I would never see those movements again. And, as my hand reached out towards it, I saw something else – the wooden horse that the old ostler had made for Luke. The shape was perfect, even down to the curls of the mane, but it crumbled into ash as I touched it, leaving only the piece of chain that Jed had put on it as a bridle.
A piece of timber hit me. I almost welcomed it. I wanted to die with them, wanted the house to fall on me, to be consumed with them. From being a choking enemy, the smoke became a friend, filling my nose, stopping my lungs, sending me into a deep pit, not the plague pit I had always been destined for but a kinder pit where there was no lime, only silence and blackness.
But, for some reason, I was being pulled out of that pit of silence. There was a stabbing pain in my head. I was destined for the pit after all, the eternal pit of fire. There was a voice in my head telling me so. I began to struggle. The pain in my head increased. There was a draught of air. Air? It was too strong for me, sending me into a paroxysm of coughing. I was going back up the stairs. Up? No. Not going up – being dragged up. The heat was increasing.
I heard his muttering. Saw above me his white hair and beard. Only his cruelty kept me alive: he was dragging me up the steps by my hair. The pain brought me reluctantly back to life, to hear his ravings. Even then I was curiously detached, interested not in living any more but in how my life was coming to an end. It began – I saw this with a strange clarity – with jealousy. Gloomy George was Mr Black’s successor. I supplanted him. When I married the woman he had chosen, jealousy became hatred. Hatred found an explanation, a meaning, authority, in his religion of violence and intolerance, which made me into a devil.
Cromwell's Blessing Page 21