Take Courage

by Phyllis Bentley

  On a cold Monday morning, a fortnight after the writing of the letter to Lord Fairfax, our men set out to attack the Royalists in Leeds. It was a bitter day; a chilling wind stung the tips of the men’s ears, so that they looked red and swollen; there was a strong white frost on the ground, making it slippery, and whirling snow showers often veiled the country-side. I planned to give the officers who assembled at our house hot spiced sack as a stirrup cup, to warm them. While I was in the kitchen, ladling sack into our best pewter tankard, for Sir Thomas, my hand started so that the scalding fluid flew in all directions, for Lister was standing in full view on the staircase. The sight of his rough rusty hair and his freckles and his big raw-boned hands made me shudder deep down within me. John was confronting him, barring his passage.

  “The work of the Lord must not be done negligently,” John was saying sternly. “We need every able godly man in the West Riding to clear the country of these malignants. You are able, and on your own profession, well-affected. Why do you not take a musket and join us, Joseph Lister?”

  “I will never lay hands on a man again,” croaked Lister, his voice harsh and mournful.

  “Well—I will force no man’s conscience,” said John coldly, and he turned straight on his heel and left him.

  Sir Thomas was already on horseback, and John went out at once and mounted. The maids and I ran to them quickly with the sack; I served Sir Thomas, and wished then to serve John, but mere politeness compelled me to offer to our guests. I came to John last, and Sir Thomas was already gathering up his bridle and looking about him to give the signal for departure; John waved the tankard away without looking at me and moved forward. Then, with a great clattering of hoofs and jingling of spurs, and shouting of the word of the day: Emmanuel, they all rode off, Sir Thomas leading. Sir Thomas, I remember, wore on his head a kind of red cap with a scarf to it which he wound about his throat; it was the first time I had seen such a cap, he called it by a foreign name, I think montero.

  When they had gone I was very sad. This attack on Leeds was a dangerous enterprise, for Sir William Savile held the town very strongly with almost two thousand men and much ordnance, and he had fortified it very skilfully with many trenches. (We had heard this privately from Will, who was daily expecting to be pulled out of his pulpit at Adel, the Royalists being so close, but went on stubbornly preaching the true word, all the same.) To attack was much more hazardous than to defend; had I not often heard Sir Thomas say so? The Royalists were mostly soldiers of long standing, led by officers experienced in war, whereas the most of our men were what Sir Thomas called ‘‘fresh-water” men, peaceable clothiers and weavers from Bradford and Halifax, quite ignorant of fighting—some of them had seen a pike for the first time only on the previous Saturday. Yes, the enterprise was full of peril and John might never return from it, and if he did not, that we should part thus unfriendly was a poor ending to our married life, in which after all there had been moments of honest gladness. It had been blessed with issue, moreover, and my little sons were dear to me. So I felt sad, sorrowful, dreary.

  To drown these thoughts I set the maids about a great deal of laundry, of which there was certainly plenty to be done after all these visitors; and I helped them to carry the sheets and napkins and lay them out, partly on the frozen ground and partly on the tenters, and had Thomas and Sam to help me, weighting them down or helping me to fold them. Sam skipped about light-heartedly with stones for weighting, for without knowing it he despised this woman’s work and wished to evade it, but Thomas helped me very skilfully and soberly, chattering about thirds and quarters and angles as he folded, for he had something of his father’s mathematical ability.

  While we were busy thus, I saw a stranger coming up the lane, but as he was on foot and soberly clad, and walking slowly and quietly, I did not much regard him, but went on folding. But when I whipped the corners of one sheet together I found the other end was not being handled the same, and looking up I saw Thomas with the sheet quite forgotten, and his mouth open, staring. So I turned and the wind blew my hair back out of my eyes, and I looked at the stranger, and then Thomas and I called his name at the same moment, for it was David.

  I ran to him, and we held each other close, and tears gushed from my eyes for joy and relief to have my own dear brother with me in my troubles, but even in that first moment of meeting I observed that he seemed very grave and quiet. Then there came a sudden peal of laughter from the children, and we looked, and saw that the damp sheet which I had dropped had blown against Thomas and wound itself about him, and Sam was hardly able to help him out of it for laughing. Just as we turned, however, Thomas disentangled himself, when the sheet blew off through the air, coiling and uncoiling itself. We all ran after it, David with the rest; like all things blown by the wind, it fell to earth and started into air again, just when least expected; we were all warm, and rosy with laughter, by the time we had caught it and weighted it down.

  “This is not work suited to the dignity of a Bachelor of Divinity,” I jested to David, as I took his arm to lead him to the house, for, knowing little of University terms and courses, I made sure he had taken his degree in divinity before coming home.

  “I fear I am not likely to become a Bachelor of Divinity, Pen,” said David.

  “Not likely!” I exclaimed, halting.

  “I have left Cambridge. An oath was being imposed on all Bachelors and Doctors of Divinity before they could receive their degree,” explained David: “an oath designed to prevent all innovations in Church government and doctrine. I was required to swear that I approved of the present government of the Church by Bishops and such dignitaries and would never strive to alter it. I could not take such an Arminian oath. My father’s son, and Will’s brother, not to mention David Clarkson himself, could not so forswear himself. To me, as to John Milton, Bishops are blind mouths, false shepherds, who for their bellies’ sake creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold. So here I am, turned up at The Breck again, like a bad penny. I am the bad penny and you are the good one, Penninah,” he concluded cheerfully, squeezing my arm.

  “So your life’s plan is broken,” I cried harshly.

  “So it seems,” agreed David in his quiet scholar’s tone.

  Then indeed the iron entered into my soul. “Whatever else is wrong in my life,” I had often comforted myself in the last wearying years: “At least David is fulfilling his true destiny”; and the thought of him turning the leaves of old volumes in lovely Cambridge had been balm to my bruised spirit. Now that too was gone.

  I looked at him. He reminded me much of my father, being very tall and slender and walking with a scholar’s stoop, but there was a kind of grace and finish about him now that none of us in Bradford ever had—nor indeed he himself, before he went to Cambridge; the only man I had seen then with something of the same gracious noble air was Sir Thomas Fairfax. Not that David was finely clad; for he wore a very plain dark suit, made as I saw of cloth from The Breck which John had sent him the previous Christmas as a present. His fair hair too was somewhat tumbled. But his features seemed cast in a very fine and delicate mould now, as if everything worldly had been thinned from them, leaving only what served to express a high intellectual purpose. His speech, too, had an austere beauty; his voice being very quiet and mellow and his words, though copious, never redundant or affected, but always precisely expressive and very simple. “But he will be wretched, he will be wretched here!” I thought to myself, and in my mind’s eye I saw him hanging about the house, quiet, subdued, useless as he would think, pushed into the background by our lustier Bradford men, cut off from the fount of learning which was the only nourishment he desired, his whole life broken.

  “David,” I said in a trembling voice: “I cannot bear it. You are thrice welcome at The Breck, but I cannot bear that your ambition should be thus disappointed.”

  “It is the will of God,” said David simply. “How goes it with John?”

  Then, to conceal my emotion, as we enter
ed the house I began to tell him of all the military happenings in Bradford and of this morning’s expedition. I sat him by the hearth and brought him some broth to set him on till it should be time for dinner, and the children seeing it clamoured for some too, and leaned up against him drinking, and they supplemented my tale with their childish additions, and so it was Sam who told him about Francis. David looked grave, and said soberly:

  “They who draw the sword shall perish by the sword.”

  I put the text away in my mind for consideration, for I felt it might have some deep application to Francis.

  After a time I left David to make arrangements for his food and sleeping, and while I was upstairs seeing to his bed I heard his voice in the loom-chamber, in talk with Lister. I felt a strong surprise and revulsion, and then I remembered the great fondness Lister had always shown David, and then I reminded myself, exaggerating in my anger, how neither of them had really loved Francis; and then on a sudden I heard Lister’s voice wailing:

  “I killed him, Mester David, I killed him!”

  My flesh chilled and my scalp prickled, to hear him.

  Towards evening we were surprised by a visit from Mr. Hodgson, the Halifax captain, who rode up to our door plastered with mud and bareheaded, but smiling very cheerfully; he said he was going home to Coley, and John had asked him to call at The Breck on his way and tell the news. Our men had gained a tremendous victory—or it seemed tremendous to us at that time; for in spite of all Sir William Savile’s ordnance and dragoons and trenches, and a very insulting reply he had sent to Sir Thomas’s summons to deliver the town, calling his message a “frivolous ticket” and the like, the Parliament men had taken Leeds, and put the Royalists to flight and taken nigh on five hundred prisoners. Sir William himself had been obliged to swim the River Aire to escape, said Mr. Hodgson jubilantly, and was near drowned in the doing of it. He had been in the Aire too—they all had, one way or another.

  We had just finished dinner but I asked Mr. Hodgson, who seemed a hearty florid sort of man, to sit to table with us, and he did so, and seeing Sam’s eyes fixed on him so eagerly, he began to describe the fight to us in more detail, using trenchers and salt-cellars to mark the positions of bridges and sentries and so on, as men love to do. He told us how they had sung Psalm 68 in the rhymed way: Let God arise And then his foes Will turn themselves to flight, as they charged into the trenches, and how excellent were the dispositions of Sir Thomas Fairfax, and how one of the Halifax men had a bullet shot into the hilt of his sword, whereby the hilt was drawn out almost as small as wire; and at last he came to his true point, namely that John had received a bullet on one of his buttons, and his doublet had burst open and the bruised bullet had fallen down beneath his shirt, and he was not hurt at all—and the Royalists were all in flight towards Pontefract and the West Riding would be free of them, concluded Mr. Hodgson triumphantly.

  During all this David sat with his face in shadow, one fine hand resting on the table in the candle-light, listening very intently, smiling a little, as I judged by his voice, at Mr. Hodgson’s homeliness and eagerness, and sometimes asking some pertinent question which cleared up a doubtful matter. Once I thought I heard a movement in the shadow by the door, and started and looked quickly; and though I could see nothing, by the chill of my flesh I knew it was Lister.

  “And are you leaving your general in his hour of triumph?” David was asking quietly.

  Mr. Hodgson said: No, he was returning to Coley only for the night, and would then return again to Sir Thomas’s army, for he was resolved to stay by it.

  “Then may I beg as a favour that you will inform my brother-in-law of my return and its reason?” said David.

  Mr. Hodgson, kindly cheerful creature, buckled on his sword-belt and willingly agreed to do this errand.

  So it came about that when, a few days later, John returned to The Breck I had occasion to admire him, for he had hardly entered the house when he advanced to David, and strongly grasped his hand, and smiled very kindly, and said:

  “Welcome, lad, for your conscience’s sake.”

  I admired John for this, but yet I noted he did not welcome David for my sake. In my heart I noted all these things, and felt that one day, when I had time and my feelings were no longer numb and frozen, I should grieve very bitterly over them. At present I was too actively engaged in endurance, to grieve.

  It was a pleasure to me—and it seemed a great thing because at that time I had so few pleasures—to see how the friendship between David and my little Thomas renewed itself. They seemed always together, David reading aloud or talking in his quiet clear fashion, Thomas listening very eagerly; or sometimes David would request Thomas to tell him some mythical story of old times that he had learned at school, and then would mildly ask questions during the course of the story, so that Thomas, as I noticed, grew to think before he spoke and arrange his answers very clearly. Then one morning I found David sitting at the table with Sam and Thomas opposite, teaching them as though they were at school. They both showed him a great deal of respect, for though he was mild there was something in his manner which brooked no foolishness, and it was a great relief to me to see them receiving tuition, for the country was so disturbed I hardly dared let them go down to Bradford to school at that time, and besides, Mr. Worrall, the schoolmaster, was fled away to the Royalists. Yet when I thought of David’s great attainments, it seemed pitiful that he should be sitting in a clothier’s house teaching two little boys their hic haec hoc. I said as much to David, and hinted that John and I were proud to have such a scholar with us as our guest at The Breck. (This I said lest with his delicate integrity he should be feeling he ought to earn his keep.) At my stumbling words David smiled, and said in his quiet but certain tones:

  “My brother Will taught me when I was young and the times forbade him employment, and so will I teach your children, Penninah; that the lamp of learning shall not flicker out in the wind of tribulation, but be shielded in a quiet place till a better day.” He added: “Your Thomas has the makings of a scholar.”

  This made me glad, and thenceforward as often as I could I sat with my needle and listened to Thomas’s lessons, and rejoiced to hear him prove himself of a clear quick mind, and open to all lofty and generous sentiments. Thomas indeed was a comfort to me, in more ways than this, during that sad winter. His gracious sensitive spirit felt my hidden distress, though he did not understand it, and often he came up to me unexpectedly and threw his arms round my neck and kissed me as though he sorrowed for me.

  I needed comfort. I loved David for teaching my sons, but all the same it was a grief to me. Lister crept about the house, sometimes truculent, sometimes mournful, sometimes wailing out to David: “I killed him!” which always made me shudder. John was much away—Sir Thomas, now his work here was done, having removed himself to the east parts of Yorkshire to join his father—and not much my friend, and not at all my husband, when he came home. In any case he had no time for me, being always busy with Parliament accounts and papers. Holroyd Hall was closed and empty, with all the livestock sold, Mr. Ferrand having gone away to join the Earl of Newcastle, which I was very sorry for. Yes, I thought I needed all the comfort I could get that winter, and then, as the winter turned towards our chilly northern spring, which David said was so slow and sparse compared with spring in Cambridge, a blow fell on me which made all other strokes seem light by comparison. One day David was upstairs with Lister, soothing him as usual, and Lister’s harsh voice croaking texts rose and rose as usual till it reached his customary climax:

  “I killed him, Mester David!”

  As usual, I gave a strong shudder; and in that moment I knew for certain what I had guessed before and had tried not to believe: I was with child, and the child’s father was Francis.

  5

  WOOLPACKS HANG ON

  BRADFORD STEEPLE

  Before i had gathered my courage to meet this private trouble, we were plunged into a public misfortune.

  King
Charles’s Popish Queen landed on the coast of Yorkshire, at Bridlington, and at once there began to be stirrings of treason in those parts. I could see that John was troubled and uneasy, but as I was not now in his confidence, I did not know whether this came from distress over Sir Thomas, who was ill of the stone, or from some political anxiety. Then suddenly the governor of Hull went over to the Royalists, and all the East Riding by the coast rose to join him. This was a disaster, and some said it would be the end of the Parliament’s cause in the north, for Lord Fairfax’s men, along the Ouse by Selby, were like to be caught between two fires and totally destroyed, unless he surrendered.

  “Surrender!” exclaimed John when he heard this. “Black Tom will not let him surrender.”

  Doubtless he was right, for Lord Fairfax did not surrender, but decided to retreat towards us in the West, where the people were always faithful to him. All the way from Tadcaster to Leeds, Sir Thomas had to fight a rearguard action to protect his father’s army, and a terrible time he had of it. Hundreds of his men were taken prisoner, among them Sarah’s husband, Denton, while poor Mr. Hodgson of Coley—whom I always liked because of his severity to Lister over refusing quarter—was so sorely wounded, shot in two places and cut in several, that he barely escaped with his life, and lay ill in Leeds for many weeks before he recovered. However, Lord Fairfax got safe to Leeds, covered by Sir Thomas, whom the people loved more and more, for however difficult a task he was set, without much ado or fine talk—which our Yorkshire folk do not care for—he always somehow managed to get through with it, just when everyone said it was impossible. “He never knows when he’s beat,” said Isaac Baume to me once, gazing on Sir Thomas from a distance admiringly, and the Parliament was lucky to have that quality in its general’s son, for without it the struggle in Yorkshire would have been lost and done with, long ago.