“Why so?” grumbled Giles. “They killed Lord Strafford, they killed Archbishop Laud; since they have raised their eyes so high, they may raise them a little higher, and get as far as Royalty.”
“Killed Archbishop Laud!” I exclaimed. “Nonsense, Uncle!”
“It is not nonsense, Penninah,” said Giles peevishly, halting his full spoon in the air to argue with me, so that I watched his uncertain hand somewhat anxiously. “Your friends tried Archbishop Laud, and executed him, long ago. Now when was it? Well, as I remember it was some time before that accursed battle of Naseby, for which your Fairfax was paid a diamond locket.”
This silenced me and made me thoughtful; I had felt hatred enough for Laud, certainly, for all the miseries he had brought on my family, yet I could not fancy executing a minister of God in cold blood, even one so cruelly mistaken, and I was vexed to think I had missed this transaction, which once would have meant so much to me. When I asked John about the matter he confirmed Giles’s tale, and when I went further and enquired about the King, he spoke with an impatient irritation which betrayed his own trouble in the matter. The King, he said, would be deposed, for it was impossible to treat with him; while he negotiated with you, you could be sure he treated with your enemy; letters of his, captured on the battlefields, showed him so full of lies and double-dealing that even Lord Fairfax—“who is the last man in the world to believe evil of another,” said John—had now despaired of him.
“But it is not the King who troubles me,” concluded John.
“What troubles you then?” I asked quickly.
John hesitated. “Oh, this and that,” he said. “And the Army is twenty-six weeks in arrears with pay.”
I opened my lips for another question, but John went away abruptly.
I was so busy coaxing my little Abraham through his teething, and sewing for Thomas, and listening to Sam’s market tales, and helping Chris with his school-work—alas, he was no scholar; his large round straggling writing, much blotted and very ill spelled, brought a sad smile to my lips, ’twas so like his father’s—I was so busy with all this, and with re-stocking The Breck and clothing John very warmly against the cold, for he was subject to rheumatic aches since his campaigns, that in spite of old Giles I did not take much notice of public events at that time, or puzzle my head over King and Parliament and Army, thinking that now we had peace. I could see that John was a little uneasy, but I put it down to his absence from Lord Fairfax after so many years’ close association. But then one cold December day, a dreary dark still day, with the sky lowering sombrely over the hills, suddenly in the middle of the afternoon our door was thrown open and John strode rapidly in, and crossed the room without a word and made for the stairs. It was Leeds Market Day, and I did not expect him back till night; besides, there was a look on his face, dark and tormented, such as I had not seen there before since he came home. Alarmed, I ran to him.
“What is it, John? Tell me,” I begged, laying my hand urgently on his arm.
“There has been a purge of Parliament,” he said. “Forty-one members have been unlawfully excluded.”
“Have the Royalists started all over again?” I cried; for this was the same kind of meddling with our liberties which had started the war.
“It is not the Royalists,” said John gruffly, not looking at me. “It is our own fanatical Army men.”
He put my hand aside, though not unkindly, and went straight up to our chamber and closed the door.
I sat for a while, stunned, all my feelings suspended, and then I went upstairs and very quietly set back our chamber door. John was on his knees by the bed, deep in prayer. There was such an intensity of grief and disappointment in the very lines of his body, his bowed head, the strain of his doublet across his shoulders, the tight grip of his clasped hands, that I could not break in upon him; I stole away quietly, sick at heart.
“Are we to have no peace?” I asked myself. “Why cannot we have peace, after this misery of war?”
Well, I have lived through peace and war, and I know now how they go. In peace, because of some weakness or excess in the hearts of men, some grievance becomes intolerable, not to be borne—either old rights are withheld, or new and better rights are refused to be granted. There is argument, contention, dissension, division; at length it seems as though the matter cannot be settled peacefully, because of the unreasonableness of the enemy, which blocks the way to human betterment; then comes the bitter arbitrament of war. Then there comes victory; and then the hope of peace. But I believe the most difficult thing in all the world is to make a good peace.
For consider the conditions in which peace is made. There are the opponents whom you have just defeated, to whom it is necessary, if the peace is to be lasting—since after all you must needs go on living together—to be fair and kindly, within the limits of the change you have fought to accomplish; yet bitter feelings prevent you from offering justice, and they from receiving it. There are those within your own party who wish the change you have fought for to be far more sweeping, so that your late opponents cannot certainly, and you yourself can hardly, live within its frame. Against these latter it is very difficult to contend, for they can easily make you appear, even to yourself, as a traitor to the cause for which you fought. To steer a straight course between these two parties, your enemies and your fanatic friends, is a hard matter; insensibly you incline to one side or the other, and thus become one of the things you took up arms to fight. (For if you incline to the Royalists, then you become Royalist; but if you incline to their bitter opponents, then you become oppressors even as the Royalists were oppressors, though called by another name.) There is always the Army, too, which since it has done the fighting expects to do the governing, though fighting does not fit for governing, but rather the reverse. If the Army has a grudge as well, as of arrears unpaid or petitions unheard, it is a very potent source of mischief, for soldiers have the arms with which to enforce their claims. Thus the circumstances at the close of any war are so difficult that they require the continued exercise of the highest powers of man, while at the close of any war both these highest powers are out of practice from disuse, and men are very weary and therefore apt to be impatient at a long continuance of any exercise.
Yes, peace is more difficult than war; for war allows the excesses of the human heart full play, while peace requires us to control them. And before we have managed to do so, the time for making peace has slipped away.
So it was with us, at least. Without, there were the Royalists; within, the fanatics; looming always in the background, the Army. All of these, and the moderate party too, were mortal, all subject to the imperfections of the human heart; some so impatient to secure their own desires, as to become too careless of the means adopted to secure them. After the fanatics on our side took the same unlawful means to their ends as our enemies did to theirs, after this purge of Parliament, when Colonels of the Army stood at the door of the House and kept representatives of the people from entering to do the task for which the people had elected them, after this we never had any real peace—nor did we deserve it. John, I think, saw it then; I only perceived it slowly, as the consequences of the act emerged, and, in default of repentance and reform, drove our affairs continually from bad to worse.
The Army had thus purged the Parliament because it desired the trial of King Charles, and knew there was a majority at Westminster determined against such severe courses. Lord Fairfax knew nothing of the purge till it was over; he had long been uneasy at the Army’s actions and wanting to lay down his commission as Lord General, but was as constantly urged to retain it, lest the Army’s excesses should grow worse without his care. The soldiers had a great respect for his person, and could at least, he thought, be kept from actual violence while he was at their head. So he stayed on, and perhaps by this very love of peace and order lent their deeds more countenance than he should.
A Commission was appointed by the Parliament to bring the King to trial; Lord Fairfax, ag
ain, accepted nomination upon it, hoping to moderate its course. But after the first two or three sittings he perceived that the most of its members meant, not merely to try, but to execute the King; as soon as he found this, he stayed away.
All this I heard many years later, when we visited Lord Fairfax in his old age. We heard then too of the King’s trial, of how when Lord Fairfax’s name was called in court as one of the Commissioners, a voice cried out:
“He has more wit than to be here!”
And of how, when the King was required to answer to the charge in the name of the Parliament and good people of England, the same voice cried out:
“No, nor half the people!”
There was a stir in the court, and an officer went up into the gallery whence the voice came, to demand silence. But he stuttered and blushed and backed away when he got there, for the voice was the voice of Lady Fairfax.
I always smile to myself, in spite of the sadness of the occasion, when I think of this; the action is so in keeping with the character of Lady Fairfax—I can see her, hear her, in the performing of it.
But if Lord Fairfax stayed away, Cromwell pushed the trial on, and so Charles Stuart, the Chief Delinquent, the Man of Blood, was tried and condemned and executed.
John, in later days, talked much of this matter to Lord Fairfax, who said he had deeply considered an armed attempt to stop the execution—his own regiment would have followed him anywhere on any errand—but then he saw such an attempt would merely cause useless bloodshed, and desisted. He exerted himself to get the execution postponed, hoping that time would calm the fanatics’ passions, but his attempts were fruitless; the act which he abhorred took place.
Well, I have read and heard much of Charles’s execution. I have read paeans of joy, from the fanatics of our party; I have read, later, howls of execration, exaltation of the King into a blessed martyr, from the party of the King’s son. I have read about Charles’s blue silk shirt, and his princely demeanour, and his Bishop, and his Bible; I have seen the place of his execution; I have heard how Lord Fairfax, going to transact Army business in Whitehall that day, met the King’s coffin covered with a black pall, and started and stammered at the sight. But to me, mention of the King’s execution brings to my mind first of all this picture: old Giles sobbing with his head down on the kitchen table, and then lifting his faded old face to me with the tears thick on it, and wailing:
“I will never cut hair or beard again! They have killed my King. I will never cut my beard again, Penninah!” wept the old man bitterly, over and over, and would not be comforted.
A few months later, Parliament enacted that England should henceforth be a Commonwealth, a Free State, governed by Parliament alone, without any King or House of Lords. This act should have been the crown of all our hopes, a noble triumph of freedom, the beginning of a better life; but for me it was spoiled—it seemed drenched in the King’s unnecessary blood and old Giles’s tears.
2
LORD FAIRFAX RESIGNS HIS
COMMISSION
Violence breeds violence; set an example, and it will be followed.
Cromwell and his friends beheaded King Charles for not being a republican; barely a quarter of the year had passed before some parts of the army violently mutinied against Cromwell and his friends for not being republican enough. These men, “Levellers” they called them, desired to have perfect freedom, not only in politics but in goods; they wished the fruits of the earth to be shared freely by all men, thus putting all men on a common level. I own I had a kindly feeling for them, for it has ever seemed to me a bitter injustice that some of us should lie soft and others so uneasily; nay, I have even at times been hard put to it to reconcile these earthly inequalities with the excellent goodness of God. Besides, since we had taken up arms to free ourselves from persecution, we could hardly blame these men for taking up arms in a similar cause. To me it has always seemed that a man’s beliefs are between himself and God, and he hath a right to live after those beliefs if he chooses, provided always that he does not break the peace. But John did not see these Levellers so; he knew the men and disliked them as contentious, brawling, fanatical peace-breakers ; moreover, I have noticed that mutiny in an army is regarded by all men, though not by women, as inexcusable, deserving only to be put down instantly and punished with death. (Few women, I think, believe in their hearts that any crime short of murder deserves death.) At this time the Royalists had stirred up the Irish to revolt, and Cromwell was to take an army into Ireland to crush them; the men being tired of service, lots were drawn to decide which regiments were to go there, and some of those drawn were not very contented; then the doctrines of these Levellers, and pamphlets circulated amongst them called England’s New Chains Discovered, hitting at the Parliament, worked on their discontent and struck it into flame. The opponents you have defeated, the friends you cannot satisfy, the Army looming, ready to either hand—the forces preventing peace after victory are ever the same.
This mutiny blew up in London first, and a trooper was shot for it in Paul’s Churchyard; then it broke out again somewhere in the southern parts of England, Oxfordshire I think. Fairfax and Cromwell hurried thither, and caught the mutineers resting, their horses out to grass, in a little village with a church and a bridge, sloping up a steep hill. The mutineers were tried by court-martial and condemned to be shot, and three of them were shot to death, the others being placed on the leads of the church to see. Two of them, as I remember, expressed repentance, but the third made not the least acknowledgement of error; he pulled off his doublet himself, and himself bade the soldiers appointed to shoot, to do their duty, looking them in the face till they gave fire, without any show of fear. The next one brought out expressed his penitence, and Lord Fairfax pardoned him, and no more were shot, but only scolded and reduced. But this pardon did not help our poor Sarah, indeed it made her more bitter, I believe; for her Denton was the last of the three Corporals shot, the one who stripped his own doublet and stared unwinkingly at the soldiers as they fired.
“Black Tom shot him to death!” wailed Sarah to me, when she had heard the sad story from one of the husband’s friends who returned wounded to Bradford later that year. “Why didn’t he begin pardoning ’em one sooner? Why did he shoot my lad? Him that’s fought all these seven years—Black Tom knew him well enough! Why pardon the next man and shoot my lad?”
I could find nothing to say to this; for it seemed to me that very likely that next man owed his pardon and his life to Sarah’s husband. I imagined Lord Fairfax standing by with a stern set face, hating the executions but setting a check on the natural workings of his heart. And then one of the doomed Corporals is Denton, a Yorkshireman, a man of Bradford, who had fought for the cause, as Sarah said, for seven long years. John had often told me how tender-hearted the Lord General was to those of Yorkshire birth; when he went over the General’s accounts, he said, with him each week, he was often moved to smile at the many entries of charities to Yorkshire folk he found there. To an old Yorkshire man, four pence, John would read out: to a poor woman from Yorkshire, two shillings. The General would sit through this with his colour a little raised and his eyelids down; and at the end, sometimes he would pass these entries stiffly by without a word, sometimes he would laugh and say: “Shouldst s-s-sew up my pockets, Jack, when thou hear’st a voice from Yorksh-sh-ire.” And this same General saw Denton brought out and shot; his hearty Yorkshire voice would sound no more. Yes, I think the next Corporal owed his life to Denton. But I did not say this to Sarah; it could bring her no lightening of her pain, but rather make it a heavier burden.
I remember as I left her cottage, where I had been to console her when we heard the news, it was just the time when the Grammar School loosed, and as I walked down Church Bank and crossed the beck I saw my Chris at play. He was running along the top of a somewhat dilapidated wall, five or six feet high, which bounded the school; when he reached the space of the gateway he sprang in the air, so that my heart turned over t
o see him; however, he came down nimbly on the wall the other side. His head was up, his red-gold hair tossing, he was laughing and somehow sparkling all over his face, and a dozen or so other lads were running along below him, shouting up admiringly. One or two tried to imitate him, climbed up the wall and ran along bravely enough, and even hurled themselves across the gateway, but they wavered and scrambled, none was so sure-footed, so full of grace and fire, as he. Chris saw me from afar, for his eyes were as keen as a hawk’s; he waved with a gallant air but he did not come to me, continuing along the wall round the corner of the school, instead.
I was half-way up Little Holroyd Lane when he overtook me, coming springing up the hill with his straight slender body poised on a light and daring foot. He thrust his hand into the crook of my arm and then took it away again, which was very like my Chris, for he was always something wild in his ways and liked not to be chained down. He could not endure caresses, save from me, and withdrew himself courteously but decidedly if any dared to lay a hand—and many did, for its rich gold drew them—on his head. For this reason he was at odds with Sarah, who would have doted on him if he would have let her. He walked along beside me contentedly now, however, kicking up the fallen leaves in a manner very detrimental to his shoes—for which I did not rebuke him—and whistling in a very clear pure tone.
“What hast learned at school to-day, Chris?” said I playing the mother.
“Oh—well—I don’t know. Arithmetic, I think,” said Chris. “No—’twas some kind of Latin.”
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