In the King's Absence

by Josephine Bell

  So Rochester must have fled too, Alan thought, or he would not be here now, quite unrepentant, very cheerful, not exactly boasting of his escape, but ready to do so upon the slightest encouragement Which Alan was unwilling to give him.

  Lord Rochester may have been aware of this for he did not continue his story and did not revive the subject at any later time.

  In London they went at once to a house outside the City near the Strand, where Alan was introduced as the earl’s secretary and treated as of inferior rank, but a gentleman. The house belonged to gentlefolk called Harrington, related to landowners in Sussex, who had heard of Doctor George Ogilvy, the schoolmaster, Alan’s grandfather. From them he heard much about the state of the country parts in this fourth year of Cromwell’s reign as Protector. And of the growing unrest particularly in London.

  For a plot had been discovered to kill the Lord Protector, and not by a royalist group, this time, but by a Leveller, one Miles Sindercombe.

  These Levellers have been against Cromwell from the early dissolutions of the Commonwealth Parliaments,’ Alan was told. ‘This Sindercombe has been devising plots a long time. But Secretary Thurloe and his clever spies were too much for him. He was caught trying to set fire to the chapel of Whitehall. So now he is in the Tower, condemned for high treason.’

  Lord Rochester was much occupied with meetings and consultations with various friends and bodies of men, all unknown to Alan. Although he was supposed to be acting as the earl’s secretary he was never invited to join these meetings and so found much empty time on his hands, which he spent moving discreetly about the cities of London and Westminster, noting what the people were saying to one another and reading the news in the various broadsheets that appeared.

  There was a feeling of tension in the town, of suspense. The hated major-generals still prevailed, but the fear with which they were regarded was turning now into anger. They knew it and it made their rule more strict, more cruel than ever. While Cromwell himself still believed the people should have freedom of conscience, the Army, particularly the Presbyterian zealots who formed its most active part pursued a course of suppression, persecution, even destruction, wherever they met rebellious or obstinate minds. And still the people must suffer a joyless existence, which the quick-witted, cosmopolitan Londoner resented ever more bitterly, deprived as he was of his ale, his play, his masques, his gambling, his bear-baiting, his cock-fighting, his ribaldry in speech and action.

  To Alan it seemed that the time was drawing very near indeed when their patience would give place to open rebellion and he wondered how Lord Rochester could go on with his fruitless meetings, presumably plotting or trying to link up plots for action that never seemed to grow any clearer or promise any but repeated failure. He had joined the earl because he hoped for action, but now he wished he had not come or that he could do something for his own part to further the work of forcing away the iron hands that were holding down commoner and highborn alike, landowner and pauper, worker and idle rogue.

  At last he ventured to ask Lord Rochester if there was any work he could do for the Cause, since otherwise he thought he should make his way back to the King’s Court. Rochester explained that all was still in confusion, but preparations were always being planned.

  ‘Only for that vile Secretary fellow, Thurloe,’ he said, ‘whose spies frustrate our every move. I was about to tell you, Alan, when you came to me that I have news Lord Aldborough hath been placed in the Tower within this last month.’

  ‘My grandfather! Upon what charge, my lord!’

  ‘Not treason, so do not look so pale, lad! Some failure to pay his taxes upon his land. They’ll have it from him, as like as not.’

  ‘Should I not go to Banbury? My Lady Aldborough –’

  Lord Rochester screwed up his face, but said, ‘My Lady Aldborough has Villagers blood in her veins. That tribe have strong tenacity and a head for gain. Leave her to protect their wealth, boy. You had better not make your presence here known, though it may be so already.’

  But Alan was very upset by this news. He was fond of his grandfather, who had often been very generous to him. He was grieved to think of the old man shut up in that grim fortress, perhaps ill-attended, even denied reasonable food and comforts. So next day, unheeding possible danger to himself, he went through the City towards the entry from the west side.

  It was a cold day in February in the year 1657, with icy sleet falling from clouds blown in by an east wind. Yet the streets were full of men wrapped in every kind of dark garment with black hats on their heads, and women in dark cloaks with the hoods drawn forward and even black scarves across their faces. These crowds grew thicker the nearer he approached the Tower, until, in sight of it, he could not move any farther forward, for the mass which he saw, being taller than most of those in front of him, had been halted at the gates,

  ‘What means this crowd?’ he asked of his nearest neighbour.

  ‘You do not know?’ the man asked, suspiciously. ‘Why are you here then?’

  ‘I came to speak to one at the gate,’ Alan answered. ‘To inquire of the welfare of a certain prisoner.’

  ‘We are here for a like purpose,’ the man said. ‘But the word came earlier that our man is dead. Dead by his own hand, by poison to escape his persecutor’s sentence. Ask me no more. Rather pray for his soul.’

  ‘The man eased himself away from Alan and was soon lost in the crowd. But he had heard enough, for the name was soon on all lips about him, a name called in the high-ringing voice of a self-appointed preacher of their sect, the Levellers. Miles Sindercombe, the would-be assassin of the Protector, but here called martyr, blessed martyr, victim of oppression. This multitude was demanding his body that had escaped a more fearful, more prolonged death on the scaffold. The poison that had been conveyed to him had been very merciful, Alan heard voices about him explaining. Not a word of blame for the man’s criminal intention. England had come to a pretty pass, Alan thought, when cold-blooded murder of their ruler was condoned in this way. But had not a like murder been condoned and actually accomplished nine years before? The laws of God and man flouted then as Sindercombe had intended now? He shuddered. This was anarchy once again.

  A movement at the head of the crowd seat its stir back through the ranks. Alan could see the pikes of the guards and understood their meaning. He turned towards his right, where he saw an opening between two houses only about ten paces away, beyond a group of twenty people in a close knot. He eased himself gently between them and past them, only to find that though the house walls were separate they were joined at ground level by a six-foot wall of brick that seemed to lead through a wooden door into a shared yard. He paused at the wall, waiting for the expected diversion to make his leap to freedom.

  It came very soon. There was turmoil at the front of the crowd, made worse by those behind trying to press forward to see what was happening. Shouts broke out, a clash of steel, screams of terror and pain.

  ‘They are dispersing the crowd!’ Alan yelled. ‘Turn back! Turn back! Back, you fools! Back!’

  As those directly beside him did so, trying to force those directly behind them, Alan caught at the top of the wall, which was a couple of inches below his own height. He put one foot on the ringed clasp of the lock halfway down the wooden door and leaped to the top. It was a stout wall some eight inches wide. He stood there for a few seconds. Below him the space he had left was filled with a straggling mass. His good sense told him to leap down into the yard and run away, but his eye was caught by a youthful pair, a young woman and a youth with her, who both looked too frail to survive the pressures and brutalities of this mob-dispersal. He could not abandon them in their obviously great danger.

  Throwing himself down across the wall, Alan yelled to the young man, ‘Hand her up to me! Quick, fellow!’

  His thrashing legs had found a place on the top of the door in the wall which on the inner side jutted out a little from the bricks.

  The young man grasped
the situation with praiseworthy speed. He wrapped her cloak about his terrified companion and thrust her up in a tight parcel into Alan’s receiving, arms, who swung her over the wall and lowered her carefully by one strong hand clutching the clothes at the small of her back like the loose skin on a puppy, while he held on to the top of the wall with his other hand. The girl staggered a little as she landed on the ground, chiefly because her arms were not free to balance her, but Alan had turned at once to help the young man struggle up, and when both joined her she was firm on her feet, her gown and cloak neatly disposed, her hood covering her hair and the sides of her face.

  They all leaned back against the wall to recover their breath while on the other side the mob, few of whom had noticed their action, continued to run and shout and scream as the soldiers of the Tower drove them back the way they had come marching.

  ‘Can we leave this yard by the other side?’ Alan asked. ‘It is plain we must not join that riotous mob again.’

  The girl shuddered but said nothing. The man looked about him and nodded.

  ‘This way,’ he said, moving boldly across the yard, Alan saw when they came to the corner of the right-hand house an extension of the yard and at the end of it another door in the strip of wall that formed the boundary at that spot.

  ‘Is it not locked?’ Alan asked.

  ‘I think they may open if we knock,’ the girl said, speaking for the first time.

  ‘You know these people then?’

  ‘They watched us from an upper window. They saw you pull us over.’

  Alan repeated his question. This time the young man avoided the answer, but knocked three times on the door, whereupon almost at once it was opened by an elderly woman to whom the girl spoke in what seemed to Alan a foreign tongue or else a very unfamiliar dialect of English. She turned and said to Alan, ‘You may pass through this house and leave by the side door by which you can find your way to Blackfriars and thence wherever you will.’ He realized then that the English she used for him had a foreign sound about it.

  ‘I am much beholden to you, mistress,’ he answered, bowing politely to the girl, ‘and to you, madam,’ he added, bowing in turn to the woman who had admitted him.

  They thanked him earnestly for rescuing them from the crush in front of the Tower entrance and from the charge of the soldiery, but it was plain they wished him gone, so he simply bowed a last time to all three and followed the elderly woman to the side door of the house. She let him out, repeated their collective thanks and shut the door upon him before he was down the four steps into the street. He heard the lock turn and a chain rattle into place.

  There was a brass plate fastened to the iron rail beside the steps. It gave a name that dispersed his puzzlement ‘Julius Ritter. London and Amsterdam.’

  A Jew! No wonder they had been so reticent! These were some of the foreigners, the sectaries, anti-Christians, allowed into the country by Cromwell’s rule of liberty of conscience! Well, why not? Discreet, intelligent, respectable people, Alan decided, wondering why they had let themselves be exposed to a Leveller mob, bigoted at any time and rendered furious by the death of Sindercombe. They had been told it was self-inflicted, but in the shock of hearing this news, the crowd had decided he was murdered most foully. In any case they were ready to look in all likely places for a scapegoat. What better than a nest of Jews? What group more likely to murder by poison, more quick to strike, than Jews?

  Alan reached the house near the Strand without any trouble. He found Lord Rochester at home and told him what had happened that day at the Tower. The earl was not much impressed; he had no regard for Levellers or any other sect. It was the army and the major-generals that mattered more. They had the power. While Cromwell could control them and did so, they need not be feared, but rather regarded as an asset, for they promoted hatred of the regime and of Oliver without being able to bring anarchy to supplant him.

  ‘But we fail to join together for our part,’ Lord Rochester said sadly. ‘ “Sealed Knot”, Trust”. I have been meeting with their leaders, but to no purpose. You were wise, boy, not to pursue your intention to see Aldborough in the Tower.’

  ‘Hardly my own decision, my lord.’

  ‘Never mind. You were not embroiled and you made a most judicious escape. Alan, I have it in mind to leave this land again. I am not well. It is an old distemper; it saps my strength. The King is in Flanders, recruiting for his future invasion. Spain favours him now he is rejected by France and Holland. He is in Brussels. I can give him no encouragement, but I would be with him for such time as is left to me.’

  Alan was both alarmed and depressed by this interview. He had noticed the changed appearance of the earl, but had decided it was due to his great discouragement. Now he understood the deeper, more dangerous cause and was at once anxious to go back immediately to Charles’s Court.

  All this time he had avoided trying to trace the present whereabouts of the Phillips family, chiefly to avoid the inevitable pain of another repulse. He had not visited Paternoster Row either, for fear of bringing trouble to good old Mistress Leslie. But now, about to leave England again for a testing, further exile, he could not bear to face the grinding loneliness, the loss of a love he knew to be true for his own part, no passing infatuation. He could not go without some real knowledge of Susan’s present fate.

  He went first to the Phillips’s house, near Aldersgate, where he was deeply grieved, but not surprised, to find it empty, shutters closed over the windows, the doors bolted and barred, the stables empty. There was an official seal upon the main door and a sentry posted outside. Putting on a foolish smile and manner and a countryfied voice Alan got into conversation with the man, but found he knew very little about the people of the house, except that the master had fled to Holland for some kind of treason and the rest of the family had left London some weeks back.

  This was what he had expected to hear all along. He could not be sure the whole family had not been together in Amsterdam when he himself was there with his cousins, though surely these two would have told him of it if their sister was indeed in the town. There was, however, one source of reliable knowledge, Mistress Leslie. He must not bring trouble upon her, but he must discover from any available friend of the Phillips family their true existing circumstances.

  So he beat down his misgivings and went the next day to Paternoster Row, moving carefully, not approaching the house direct, but passing it in the other side of the road, glancing carelessly across as he drew near to note the familiar appearance of curtains and shutters and furniture at the windows.

  There was so much change that he had passed it by before he realized he had done so. All the windows were shrouded: the front door was varnished black and carried a new large, brass knocker of ugly elaborate design. The yard door was open wide, disclosing a new coach, standing at the middle of it, shafts facing outward, into which a pair of plump grey geldings was being harnessed. The grooms were strange, as was a kind of guard or sentry. All were in the same livery, all looked expectant, as well they might, for their master was bidden to the Lord Protector in Whitehall to receive thanks and a reward for his services, at the recommendation of Master Secretary Thurloe.

  All this Alan learned from a man in the little crowd that had gathered to see the notable set forth. Alan had kept his wide-brimmed hat pulled down while the man spoke, but glancing up he saw a face he recognized as that of Mistress Leslie’s stable lad grown into a man.

  Their eyes met, they recognized each other and each grew wary.

  ‘I have kept away as I half feared something of this sort,’ Alan told him, in a low voice. ‘When?’

  ‘It is not safe to speak here,’ the man answered. ‘Nor to be seen together. ’Tis George Leslie, who hath now prevailed, may he rot in hell!’

  ‘He will,’ Alan assured him. ‘Mistress Leslie?’

  ‘At Luscombe, these three months since.’

  ‘Thank heaven for that. You prosper?’

  ‘Well enough, s
ir. And yourself?’

  ‘You have not seen me. Nor recognized. ’Tis safer so.’

  There was a stir in the courtyard The coach was ready. Alan turned his back and moved away, bending his knees a little and stooping his back to disguise his height. He heard the horses’ hooves slide and grind on the cobblestones of the yard and the coach pull out into the street and move away in the opposite direction.

  Dear Mistress Leslie was safe with her daughter and her good, quiet, hard-working son-in-law. But still no news of Susan. He must have some certainty before he left the country, must know she was neither suffering for her father’s supposed misdeeds, in hiding or worse still in prison. But perhaps they were really all together in Amsterdam.

  Amsterdam! Master Ritter! The Dutch Jew, the jeweller near the Tower! Alan stood still as the name and the house and tile well-spoken, slightly foreign people he had helped, came again into his mind’s eye with a quickening hope. A vague hope, for he did not remember the name of the street where the side door of their house opened.

  But he did remember the name-plate and the appearance of one or two other houses nearby. He dared not ask for help but he had plenty of time to spend on his search and he found his way in the end, went boldly up the steps to the door and knocked.

  The same elderly woman opened to him. He smiled at her, not ashamed to greet her since she owed him much. But she was still very cautious, very disinclined to greet him and when he asked her if she knew a certain Master Hugh Phillips, who was in Amsterdam, she called out for help and tried to push the door against him.

  ‘Madam, madam!’ cried poor Alan, who found this behaviour confirmed his guess. ‘I am his friend though he suspects otherwise. Only tell me –’

  He was interrupted by a cry from the darkness of the passage behind Mistress Ritter. It was Susan herself, calling in turn for help to drive him away.

  ‘Hear me!’ he cried. ‘Only hear me! Susan, you must hear me! Madam, I beseech you, I am their kinsman! I am here to help them as I helped your own kin the other day –’