Chapter Twenty-Two
They found the charred bodies of Sarah and George Leslie close together when the fire was out and the ashes cool enough to make a search for them possible. It was thought she must have overturned the candles in her frenzy when she realized the man was dead. Sarah was buried in the family vault, together with Thomas and their father. In due course all three names were cut in the stone slab that recorded the family deaths.
James stayed at Luscombe for several months. He showed little outward sign of grief, but the haggard look on his face did not lift and though he made obvious efforts to join in the life of the Leslie family circle, their interests and pursuits were so different from his own accustomed way of life that his appearance among them led more to awkwardness than pleasure.
However, matters in general were now fast coming to a head. General Monck was on his way from Scotland to London to make arrangements for the actual return of the exiled King. In principle Charles had been accepted throughout the country. The sad risings, so passionately meant, so feeble in execution, were no longer needed.
Not that the remains of the former government, after Richard Cromwell’s resignation, did nothing. It continued to work as if great uprisings might cast the country into confusion. Universal orders for mobilization went out to the army in all parts. All horses in private hands must be impounded, lodgers in country houses must be listed and notified. The navy continued to patrol the Flanders coast and the Channel ports. Important people everywhere continued to be gathered in and examined before being released. Even Sir Francis Leslie did not escape the net. It was well for James that he counted as a lodger at Luscombe and apart from being ordered to stay there was not troubled.
At The Hague Alan Ogilvy, nursed with grateful care by Mistress Cynthia, recovered quickly from his wound, which was neither wide nor deep. At first the surgeon spoke darkly of the dreaded gangrene and even hinted at amputation, but as the initial fever subsided almost at once and it was clear no vital organ in the leg, no major nerve or artery had been cut, these gloomy prognoses were no longer heard, a healthy suppuration led to a slow healing and though much weakened in his general health, the young man began to make steady progress.
All this time Susan, though constantly offering to help her mother, was forbidden the sick room. It was only when Alan, pale but no longer haggard, was allowed to put on a warm fur-lined robe and sit by a comfortable fire of logs that he saw her at last.
He did not know, for he had fainted at the time, that she had caught him in her arms to break his fall and held him, weeping bitterly for shame and shock and fear that he might be dying, while others stopped the flow of blood and bound up the wound before they took him from her to carry him to a bed.
So now, with their misunderstanding lying a dead corpse between them, she was tongue-tied, shame again overcoming her. And Alan, suffering from the natural depression of a convalescent, waited, equally at a loss.
It was not until Susan in a choking voice managed to say, ‘Forgive me! Oh, forgive!’ that Alan took both her hands in his and drew her into a shaky but fervent embrace. Whereupon they both wept and Alan clasped her again and then collapsed back into his chair by the fire and Susan fussed over the footstool for the wounded leg, that did not yet bend fully at the knee and had given him a sharp twinge as he struggled to do justice to his passion. The knee never did fully bend again but they were not to know this at that time.
The misunderstanding and the mutual despair it had caused them both, was forgotten. Alan explained the two missions he had fulfilled to Lucy Walter.
‘She died in Paris last year,’ he finished. ‘Poor woman, it was a sad fate, but her own doing, alas.’
‘You mean Charles Stuart’s doing,’ Susan cried, indignantly.
‘Nay, I do not,’ he answered. ‘A pair of innocents, maybe at the start, but poor Mistress Lucy must soon have understood the King’s nature. Indeed I found she had long accepted it. Alas, it was very like her own. But where His Majesty keeps these matters apart from affairs of State and inferior to them, as is right and proper –’
‘Lucy became a plain whore,’ said Susan, bluntly, ‘and suffered for it as women always must.’
Alan laughed at her rough speech but loved her the more for her honesty. Where his mother would have been shocked and his grandfather Aldborough surprised, his father would admire the merchant’s daughter for her sense of reality while deploring her puritan prejudice.
Alan’s mother had visited her son twice during the early days of his recovery. Finding him in such good shape she had suggested, but not insisted, upon taking him away to her own house. But the distance to travel was clearly too great for safety at that time. Now that the move back to England was almost certain to take place soon, it was very likely that the two families would find themselves in London and a move could then be made very easily by coach, even if Alan could not yet ride.
The tragedy at Oxford affected them all in varying degrees. It did much to reconcile Master Phillips to the Ogilvy family and particularly to the idea of allowing his eldest daughter Susan, now nineteen to marry Alan. He had had a good many grave talks with the young man and found him serious, intelligent, and set upon following a noble profession, with enough good contacts in high places to satisfy the cloth merchant that Alan’s commercial prospects were good.
Colonel Ogilvy had no objections either. If he had ever hoped that Alan too might eventually take to soldiering, this wound had put an end to the idea. As for himself, he foresaw an early retirement from his service and that of his wife to the House of Orange. King Charles had already offered him promotion and a title. He knew he had little time left for active military service. Gordon could continue the family tradition in the field.
So the colonel and Lady Anne set about making a permanent move from the Netherlands where they had spent so much of their lives. The actual move could not be made just yet, but Colonel Ogilvy was granted a very friendly audience by the King, who fully understood his position, confirmed the title, a barony, that he would bestow in honour of his coming Restoration, and gave him indefinite leave until that actual event.
In the meantime Captain Sir James Ogilvy arrived back at Court, ignoring the order against leaving Luscombe, which he rightly found to be ridiculous. He was anxious to lay his own plans before the King. He went first to his cousin with the full and accurate story of the disaster at his father’s house. He had recovered from his early despair, but his grief for his beloved brother Thomas would never be fully healed. He explained to the colonel that he could not bear even to visit the ruins of the house where his father, brother and sister had died. He had no need for remorse for slaying the villain who had brought about their tragic end. Only regret that he had not done so earlier.
‘There is no work for me here now,’ he said. ‘Certainly the wars in Europe are not yet over. But Englishmen will go back to England when the King comes into his own. I would not be a courtier, perhaps with some pretence of a command about the Royal Person.’
‘But you have a purpose, none the less,’ Colonel Ogilvy said, smiling kindly. ‘I see it in your face. Will you let me hear it?
‘Willingly, sir. I plan to join those forces in the north part of America that have made settlements along that coast of the great ocean. They need escorts for their pioneering, to guard them, to fight the treacherous native, to explore for the wealth that lies hidden there. A new life. Maybe a welcome but honourable death.’
‘A new life,’ said Lady Anne, ‘and a new hope, I pray to God for you, James. You well deserve it. Perhaps a time of reasonable peace, with a wife and family at last.’
Sir James shook his head vigorously.
‘No family for me, my lady,’ he said in a harsh voice. I have had enough, of family love, family loss, family death.’ He turned to Colonel Ogilvy. Those ashes, sir, those stones at Oxford, they shall be yours as head of the family now in England. I resign my whole right in them. Do with them what you will. It sha
ll be sealed legally before I leave this side of the world for ever.’
They argued with him off and on for some weeks, but nothing would alter his purpose. Only, since Colonel Ogilvy refused to take the property as a gift or by right of succession, Sir James consented to sell it to his cousin. The colonel had been thrifty all his mature years and the Lady Anne had brought him a good dowry, so James, with his knighthood, and a substantial sum assured him, was able to make much more definite arrangements for his future, even consenting to take Master Phillips‘s advice in these matters, since he was reconciled at last to his elder sister and her husband.
Master Phillips, interviewed by the shrewd Clarendon, had received a free pardon from the King, both on account of his unjust expulsion from Parliament and his forced exile from England. And more particularly on account of his undoubted future usefulness to the English economy when the throne was restored.
This great event took place in May 1660. A fleet from England came for Charles, filled with all manner of notables, army, navy, church, chapel, the law, the nobles. With documents for the King to sign, concessions, promises, rules to follow. To his particular joy, money to spend.
He sailed from The Hague with his Councillors, his chief friends and a guard chosen from his small army, including Colonel Ogilvy, now Lord Follior. The ship was the Naseby but later was re-christened The Royal Charles.
He was welcomed at Dover by General Monck amid great rejoicing among the people in general. He rode by way of Canterbury, Rochester, Blackheath and Southwark to the City of London and on to the City of Westminster and from there by Charing Cross, to Whitehall.
His long exile, his terrible penury, was over at last. He had enough to eat; he could indulge his fancy for rich, elaborate clothing, beautiful surroundings, gay courtiers. Though Cardinal Mazarin had still refused him the hand in marriage of his lovely niece, Hortense, he could now look forward to gaining a royal princess for wife. Meanwhile he could enjoy his mistresses and reward them suitably with fine jewels.
In all this easement of his condition he did not neglect the very important affairs of state that followed his restoration and preceded his full acceptance of the throne and subsequent coronation. He proved himself to be a king unlikely ever to become a tyrant. Lord Clarendon understood he was a king fully and competently determined never to lose his throne again, far less his head in defending it against a sternly, successful body of puritan rebels.
Moreover he showed himself ready to restore and reward all those who had supported him in his exile, particularly those who had engineered his escape from England after Worcester.
Among them Captain Tettersal and his crew came into prominence and won great rewards. The ship Surprise was honoured, to Tettersal’s great gratification, by having her name changed to King’s Escape and to being used as one of His Majesty’s yachts. Charles also kept his promise to the mate of the vessel, Richard Carver. The imprisoned Quakers were freed and Carver himself was given a sum of money to help him and his body of co-religionists to emigrate to the newly established colonies on the eastern seaboard of America. As Carver told Alan Ogilvy, ‘The King was pleased to inquire of me why I would leave my native land so soon after it was made good to live in again. So I told His Majesty, ‘It is good just now, sire, seeing Thy Majesty’s heart is overflowing with gratitude and goodwill and will remain so, God willing. But lesser men may well change again towards us for our way of life and I think we have suffered enough of late to wish to be done with persecution.” So the King smiled and said, “You speak boldly, my man. But you do not offend us, for we know your worth. Go and prosper.” So he gave me his hand to kiss. And later there was a fair sum at my disposal. And so we go hence when we shall find a vessel to take us.’
‘God be with you,’ Alan said, almost envious of the man’s simple purpose and great faith in the complete rightness of his beliefs.
Lord Aldborough, with many others, was released promptly from the Tower and rejoined his wife in his home near Banbury, where he continued his vague existence in harmless country pursuits, to the satisfaction of his neighbours and the peasantry of the district. He had no wish whatever to attend the new King’s Court. He had sufficient news of it from his sons, who had survived the war, chiefly by using very loyal inaction in one or other of the gentler plotting, wholly inefficient, secret societies.
Colonel Ogilvy, Lord Folliot, decided to rebuild the Ogilvy mansion at Oxford. While the work was going forward he and his family lived in the dower house on the Aldborough estate. This freed the house in Paternoster Row for Alan, who, after his marriage to Susan, lived there while he continued to study for his profession at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, following in the footsteps of Sir William Harvey.
King Charles did not forget him, but since there were so many of greater social importance than himself, and many who had risked their lives both in England and abroad to serve him during his exile, it was nearly a year before the call came from Whitehall, by which time Alan was married, and Susan was expecting their first child.
Lord Clarendon greeted him warmly. This in itself was an honour Alan did not fail to appreciate, for the great man had no need now to arrange nor attend the King’s audiences. His Court was fully organized, with a plethora of eager men and women seeking to establish themselves there either as representatives or descendants of the former aristocracy or as members of a new one. Charles was very careful to preserve a certain power for the always argumentative and critical Commons, while surrounding himself with men and women of culture, wit, beauty and even learning, all of which qualities he had missed sadly for so long.
Alan found His Majesty changed in appearance but not after a few overwhelming minutes, in his behaviour. The King’s dress was magnificent, rich in design and material, elaborately decorated with bows and ribbons, the jewelled orders blazing. His hair, black, curled, hung lower than ever, well below his shoulders. Between the two dark rippling falls his face with a quite new expression of content and well-being, was Charles the Second at his most kingly, Alan thought. Time would never fill the hungry furrows in each cheek, nor remove the cynical set of the wide mouth. But as the young man rose from his obeisance the eyes that could wither a liar or a villain were gazing at him with all the old friendly interest.
‘So we have come to you at last, my page,’ Charles said. ‘Did you think we had forgotten you?’
‘I never did think Your Majesty had any reason to remember the small missions I was graciously entrusted with.’ Alan managed to say, stumbling a little over the words, for he found the occasion very moving.
The King spoke a little of their very first encounter on Surprise.
‘Poor Wilmot,’ he said. ‘He was no sailor, was he? He suffered for me, then, and many times before that. I would he had seen the outcome of his service.’
He went on in his old familiar strain, recalling incidents at the Court in Paris or with his sister at Spa, in Brussels and The Hague and Calais; But he did not once speak the name of Lucy Walter nor of the young Duke of Monmouth. He demanded to know how Alan was faring in his profession; he suggested a pension. But it was plain his attention was wandering and the young man was relieved when the audience came to an end with fresh regal condescension and formal grand manners.
The pension did not materialize. But Alan did not hold its non-appearance against the King. He continued to admire him, though he no longer actively loved him now as he had done as a boy.
In this he copied the general mood of the country. Released from the iron hand of the bigots, the people rejoiced in their long-lost freedom. Even Master Phillips saw the advantage of a moderate indulgence in the pleasures of life, so that the long quarrel in the two parts of the Ogilvy family was completely healed.
‘Just as the wars are now over for ever, my love,’ Susan said to Alan, on the occasion of the christening of their son in Saint Paul’s church.
‘In England for ever, I pray God,’ answered Alan. ‘But it was the strife in our
land brought war into our two families and brought you to me, at least, my dearest. But that war, I hope and trust, is well and truly over.’
So they kissed across the cradle of Arthur George Francis Ogilvy and turned to welcome the guests they had invited to celebrate the occasion.
Copyright
First published in 1973 by Geoffrey Bles
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Josephine Bell, 1973
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