Take Courage

by Phyllis Bentley

  Poor John was quite distracted. He paced the house-room with his hands clasped behind him under his doublet, occasionally cocking an angry eye at the letter from Will, which lay on the table. I urged him to go to Adel immediately; the road lay up Church Bank, and he could call at Sarah Denton’s on his way and send her to me.

  “I hate to leave you now, Penninah,” said he gruffly.

  “We are young and have all our lives before us; Mrs. Thorpe is old and has little time left,” I said. And I continued to urge him, for I thought it his plain duty to go; since I had a son of my own, I understood better how Mrs. Thorpe felt to her son. Though I own I was frightened at the notion of his departure, because from some signs within me I believed my pains would soon begin.

  At last, though very unwillingly, he left me; and sure enough he had hardly turned the corner into the lane when I felt the onset of my labour. I sent David off in a hurry for the midwife, but my pains came on so rapidly that I feared the child would be born before she arrived. I made what preparations I could and went to bed; I was obliged to keep a calm demeanour to soothe the maid, who wept, and Lister, who was in a desperate taking—he flapped about the room like a bird of ill omen, waving his arms and calling on the Lord, the sweat standing in beads on his face as he wailed that Mester John would never forgive him. I could not but smile at his fluster, though somewhat wryly; certainly I echoed his fervent “Praise the Lord!” on the arrival of the midwife.

  And so my second son, Samuel, was born. Feeling low in spirit at the time, owing to John’s absence and the general commotion, I inclined to weep over him because he had such a poor welcome into the world; but I need not have distressed myself. Sam was not of the soft kind, who depend on other people’s welcome; he had a robust and stolid spirit, and was not easily disconcerted. It has ever been deeply interesting to me to see the traits of the fathers reappear, mingled and differently proportioned, in the children, and my own two eldest children as they grew furnished prime examples. Thomas had his father’s dark hair and eyes and a Thorpe name, but a courteous gracious manner, a fluent speech, and a generous disposition, like my father. Sam resembled the Clarksons, Will and David and my father, in body, being lanky as a child, with grey eyes and sandy hair; he had John’s habit of reserve but not his gravity, being given to sudden unexpected jokes, like those of his Grandfather Thorpe, though the wit in them was of a keener quality, and he had his Grandfather Thorpe’s shrewdness also about money and cloth. As a baby he was homely and cheerful, not beautiful like our little Thomas but very healthy and fresh-looking.

  I needed the comfort his shrewd little face and upstanding tuft of hair gave me, at the time of his birth, for his father was absent from home no less than three weeks, and I could see from the troubled faces of those about me that there was news from Adel which they dared not tell. At last one day I called in Lister and took a very high tone with him, threatening to weep myself sick if he did not at once tell me what he knew. I did not need to counterfeit tears, being sorely troubled; and Lister, writhing his knotty fingers and pulling at his carroty hair, cried out hurriedly that there was no bad news of the master or the Reverend and Mrs. Clarkson, but Mrs. Thorpe was dead of the plague.

  “The plague?” I whispered, terrified.

  “Aye,” said Lister gloomily. “It seems it is bad in Leeds this year.”

  I was still gaping at him in horror, leaning up on one elbow and breathing heavily, when the door opened and John came in. I cried out and stretched out my arms to him, and he came swiftly and fell on his knees beside the bed. As he put his arms round me tears suddenly flowed from his eyes down his cheeks; it moved me greatly to see a man, and one so strong and taciturn as John, thus weeping. Lister with his usual lack of manners stood grinning at us while I took John’s head on my breast and stroked his hair and showed him his second son, but I forgave Lister that time, for I knew his discourtesy sprang only from his love for John, and when he muttered: “O praise the Lord with me!” I accepted his admonition and gave thanks to God silently for His great goodness. Soon David coming home from school burst into the room, smiling all over his gentle face at John’s return; and Sarah came and gazed at us from the doorway, her arms akimbo; and we were all very happy together.

  It is idle to pretend that I was not happier at The Breck after the death of Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe than before. It is a strange thing to say, but all the rooms of the house suddenly seemed to me lighter. I am ashamed to remember this, but it is true. John being wealthier now that his mother’s jointure had not to be paid, he hired two stout serving-maids to do the work of the house, so that both I was more free to look after the children and we lived with a little more dignity than before. My house was now my own, and I took great pride and pleasure in making it a place of comfort and beauty; my children were my own, to care for and train as I would; my husband’s heart had perhaps always been my own, but it was now more plainly and clearly mine than before. We lived as we chose, and there was no one to scold us for doing so, and it was very pleasant to us.

  Indeed I do not know how John would have managed if his father and mother had been still with us, for old people have a dislike to irregularities in the hours of rising and eating and sleeping, and these John was now forced into on account of the ulnage suit. This was now opened in the Court of Exchequer, and commissioners were sent down from London to Halifax and Leeds to sit and hear evidence. John himself gave evidence at Leeds, but this was the smallest part of the business for him; he was forever riding about the county, finding suitable witnesses and stirring them up to come before the commissioners. About this time the Ship-money suit was decided against John Hampden, the judges having been corrupted by the King. A very dark look came over my John’s face when he heard this, and he set his jaw in a way he had; from that time onward he worked harder than ever about the ulnage, barely giving himself time to eat and sleep. Thanks to his zeal, merchants from York and customs officers from Hull as well as all manner of clothiers and chapmen from the West Riding came forward and gave testimony, and eventually Metcalfe, after he had spent a great deal of money on the case, desisted from it and accepted the penny seal as of old. John was overjoyed by this result and proud of it, as he had every right to be, for he felt that a blow had been struck for the rights of Englishmen, the oppressor had been shown that the free spirit of England was alive and strong.

  On account of this suit, the clothiers of the neighbourhood began to regard John as a very rising young man, and consult him often, in which also he could not but take pride. Meanwhile he never ceased to give the most careful attention to his own cloth, while he was at home, and Lister obeyed his orders regarding it with the utmost strictness, when he was away, so that our cloth grew to be renowned for its steady good quality, and trade was very brisk at The Breck, and money plentiful. I never cared much for money, having been brought up by my father to value the things of the spirit more highly than material comforts, but it was good to be able to put by sums so that our children might go to the University, and to give abundantly where charity was required.

  It was now that I discovered that John was more parsimoniously inclined than I. Hitherto I had believed his care in money matters due to the strictness of his parents, but I found that now their authority was removed, he still was apt to frown a little sometimes over my charities, and to ask me, not as jokingly as I could wish, to account strictly for some few pence he had given me the week before. I must confess I found this irksome, and tending to diminish a little the respect I had for my husband; but I told myself that we all have faults, I myself being by no means deficient in them, and I learned to accommodate myself to John’s wishes on this point. He did not press it over far, for in truth I was not extravagant; and this was the only disagreement between us.

  We should have been happy indeed if the times had been peaceful.

  As it was, often in my sweetest moments, when I played on the grass before the house with Thomas and Sam, the keen wind tossing our hair, or sat
with John at night by our own fireside, or watched David bending his gentle face serenely over his books in the candlelight, suddenly a cold shadow chilled my heart, and I asked myself what it was, and remembered the King and his instruments of tyranny. Thomas would run to show me a fine daisy he had found, or Sam from his high chair stretch out his hand and call imperiously “Mummummum,” as children do when they are learning to say Mother (a very sweet word to any woman), and I would think: “Why is it not right for me to be happy? I should be happy.” And then I would remember the persecution of the faithful and the injustice and cruelty stalking the land, and I would catch my children to my breast in fear for them, and suffer. For now that John’s time and money were at his own disposal, he bought books and pamphlets and diurnals, and read them to me at night, so that we both kept well informed of all that was going on in the country, and it was very grievous.

  The results of all the oppression and evil-doing were beginning, as they say, to come home to roost. The Scots were so enraged by Laud’s forcing the Prayer-Book and Bishops and all his Arminian paraphernalia on them that they revolted, and took an oath they called the Covenant, to be true to the Church of Scotland, and when the King would not give in to them, they appointed a commander-in-chief and began to drill, and presently set out to invade England.

  Yorkshire being a northern county, our Trained-Bands were all called out to go against the Scots, and there were such grumblings about this as I never heard before. The gentry were reluctant to pay the Coat and Conduct money for the Train-Bands, as people called them for short, for they had already contributed overmuch to the King; whereupon Strafford, who was at York managing the business, shouted at them that they were mutinous, and must learn to obey orders. This was very ill taken, for Yorkshire folk, whether gentle or simple, do not like to be ordered about; they are a stiff-necked, self-opinionated people, very warmhearted, and ready to follow to the death when their own loyalty, freely given, leads them, but stubborn as a rock if you try to drive them against their will. Strafford’s insolence vexed the gentry, so that they took a delight in provoking him—his own kinsman, that Sir William Savile who was partly Mr. Ferrand’s landlord, refused to take a troop of horse he had raised to York to be trained, merely because Strafford had ordered it so. Amongst the Train-Band men themselves the grumbling was even louder. Sarah’s husband, Denton, was one of them, and as Lister now regularly frequented their house, having taken a great fancy to Sarah’s little daughter when she visited at The Breck, we heard often what was said amongst the Train-Bands. They called this war against Scotland a “Bishops’ War,” and as the greater part of them detested Bishops heartily, they did not see why they should go to war to force something on Scotland which they hated themselves. There was some talk in the West Riding of the Train-Band men refusing to go at all, but when they found that old Lord Fairfax’s son Ferdinando was to command them, and his grandson Thomas Fairfax was raising a special troop of horse, they obeyed the summons, though very reluctantly. These Train-Band men were away six months, during which time poor Sarah was hard put to it to make ends meet for herself and her children, and we had to help them, the Train-Bands being so greatly behind in their pay. Only their loyalty to the Fairfaxes and a natural disinclination to desert kept the men together, Denton said when at last he got home; and as far as he could see they might just as well not have gone at all, for they did nothing but march backwards and forwards on the Border, under confused instructions, half-starved and without proper tents, and the moment the Scots appeared they all ran away. The only good, indeed the only thing at all, which came out of it as far as he could see, said Denton, was a knighthood for young Thomas Fairfax, and he wished him joy of it.

  The King made a very humiliating peace with Scotland, so that John was divided between irritation as an Englishman, and rejoicing as a Puritan. But very soon happenings both in London and Bradford threw him entirely on the Scottish side. For at that time things constantly happened so; there was an event in the distance, which roused your wondering anger that such things could be, and before you had ceased to wonder the same kind of event took place right on your doorstep. Or there was an oppression in Bradford, and then you read of the same kind of oppression in Norfolk or in London, far away. It was a sign of the times: England was slowly and with anguish as it were tearing herself into halves, and this division was taking place all over the kingdom, till at last it was not possible for any village, however tiny, to remain at one with itself, or for any man, however wavering, not to know his mind and take his side.

  The King, short of money after his campaign against the Scots—it was said that getting the Train-Bands together and disbanding them again cost him upwards of three hundred thousand pounds—called a Parliament, and one of the members made a grand speech in which he said that the Parliament was to the nation what the soul is to the body; but before we had time to begin to feel hopeful again, the King dissolved the Parliament because it did not behave as he wished, and almost at once fresh rulings came out from Archbishop Laud. Every minister was commanded to read aloud at morning prayer, every so often, an announcement about the Divine Right of Kings, and teach their congregations to honour and obey the King as the representative of God; all ministers and schoolmasters were ordered to take an oath that they would never try to alter the government of the Church as at present established; as for congregations, there were so many bowings and scrapings and observances commanded to them, that they would not have time to think of God or their soul in church, but only of when to be bowing next.

  Our ministers in Yorkshire would not yield to all this, and some of them were silenced and lost their place. Indeed many godly men and women, fearing the light of the gospel would be totally put out, went away across the sea to New England, where they would be free to worship as they chose; the elder of Lister’s two minister uncles was one of these. I feared for Will again, but under Lord Fairfax he stayed safe.

  In Bradford we had been unlucky enough to lose our good old Mr. Okell a few months before, and a creature of Laud’s was appointed to the church, Corker by name. This man roused a profound disgust in me the first time I saw him, and nothing I knew of him afterwards ever mitigated my distaste. He was a lisping, hectoring man, with curled hair that looked as though it rarely knew the comb, and a huge sprawling collar of dirty lace. His nose was red and spongy-looking and much swollen; when I innocently enquired of John whether this was due to disease he laughed, and mimed a man drinking deep from a bottle. That such a man should presume to instruct decent and sober people in religion, prescribe what we were to think and how we were to move, was an offence before God and an insult to his congregation. I was amazed that such a man could be an ordained minister, for we had not been used to such men, even among Arminians. But it is ever so when there is a persecution; only evil men will lend themselves to it, so the good men are forced out of office, and the persecution is by so much the worse.

  It was indeed a time of mourning both in politics and religion, and our people kept it so, humbling themselves before Almighty God in prayer that His anger should pass from them. I remember, with much respect for their ardour and sincerity, though they appear old-fashioned nowadays, the wrestlings with God which took place in the West Riding at that time. Godly ministers appointed many fasts, and kept them with prayer and preaching, either in their own churches, or sometimes in private houses; the minister at Pudsey, and our Will, were very notable in these. Will would sometimes come to The Breck at John’s request to keep a day of humiliation with us. I have known him spend six or seven hours in praying and preaching, without any cessation; or sometimes he would intermit for one quarter of an hour, while a few verses of a psalm were sung, and then pray and preach again; all this time fasting.

  John and I and Lister kept these fasts with strictness; David too did not spare himself. I was sorry for this, as I thought a young growing lad ought not to fast, and for this reason, as well as because of David’s long expectation, I was glad that t
he time had now come for him to go to Cambridge.

  It was needful to make preparations for his going, and, mindful of my husband’s carefulness with money, so that there should be no discontents in the matter I asked John what sum he was prepared to lend David, for repayment when the lad should have found a place. At this John coloured and exclaimed, and told me, speaking hotly, that he had not deserved this of me, he regarded David as his dear brother and all that he had was his, and he wished the boy to be well furnished, so that he should labour under no disadvantage among his fellows at the University. I saw that he was wounded, and was sorry, and laid my hand on his arm and told him so and expressed my grateful sense of his generosity.