The Puritan Princess

by Miranda Malins

  ‘My dear, sweet girl, in love for the first time,’ she continues grandly. ‘I remember what that was like; the intensity, the desperation! I was fifteen when John first kissed me, though I had been kissed once before …’ She winks before floating away on her memories, and though I long to know more I force myself to pull her back to my predicament.

  ‘But Father approved of John, he will not agree to Robert. And, worse still, the government is plotting to marry me off in a treaty. Perhaps to Charles Stuart! I confess I did not want Father to become king as you do but now the tables have turned on me. At least if he takes Charles Stuart’s crown there can be no more talk of a marriage between us. You’re always talking to Father about his dilemma – speak to him for me too, please.’

  ‘Hush, hush,’ Elizabeth coos softly as she strokes my hair. ‘I will do my best for you, little one, I really will. And Father is kind and wants us to be happy. It may be all right yet.’

  Under her soothing hands, I close my eyes in silent prayer that she can work her practised charms on Father.

  I consider taking my anguish to Bridget next, but think better of it. She and I have never seen eye-to-eye in the matter of love and duty and she is bound to tell Charles, which would mortify me. But the choice is taken out of my hands when she drops Robert’s name casually into our next conversation, revealing that Elizabeth has spilled my secret to her. I round on Betty in fury but am calmed by Mary: ‘They too must have been confidantes once, dearest, just as we are, and you wouldn’t keep anything from me for long …’

  I write to Harry in my annoyance, finding it so much easier to confide in him on the page than I would to speak to Dick or my brothers-in-law in person. You and Elizabeth Russell were the last among us to marry, I write. And you married in love, did you not? And has that not served you well these last four years? Can you not urge Father to allow me the same? I will not have his reply for several weeks, but the mere act of sending these words across the sea to him calms me.

  The last advocate I approach requires the most courage. I am crippled by embarrassment as I creep towards Secretary Thurloe’s office one morning – the heavy slanting rain that thunders against the windows of the passageway helpfully drowning out my thoughts – but I know that nothing will happen to me, good or bad, without his say. Robert encouraged me to it the night before, reminding me in a furtive note secreted in Katherine’s pocket that nothing I could ever reveal to the ‘little secretary’ would be a surprise, such is his proximity to power and strange ability to coax confidences from all men. I wonder, as I wait after knocking at his door, whether he will have the same effect on me.

  The door is opened by a red-faced clerk and I see another two young men sitting on stools at high writing desks in the corner of the room, shirtsleeves bunched and hunched over their work like toads. Thurloe himself is sitting behind a large oak table which is covered in neat piles of paper, stacked and placed at exact right angles and weighted down with cubes of black stone. Coloured slips of dyed paper poke from each pile at random intervals betokening, I assume, some secret filing system of the secretary’s invention. The air is thick with paper dust and a heady smell assaults me which, after a few moments’ thought, I identify as a perfume of wax, ink and biscuits.

  Thurloe leaps lightly to his feet and ushers me to the large round-backed comfortable armchair that waits at the visitor’s side of his desk. It contrasts starkly, I note, with the uncomfortable, straight-backed spindled chair of his own. I make some brief remark to this effect and Thurloe smiles.

  ‘I like my visitors to feel comfortable, Highness, at ease. To feel they are welcome as they share their thoughts with me. I, on the other hand, have far too much to do to recline in soporific comfort. My chair keeps me alert and safe from complacency: it is an old friend from the days when I was myself but a humble clerk in the fens.’

  He makes a whisking gesture with his hands and the clerks scramble from the room, closing the door softly behind them. I wonder absently if he expects them to hover outside for the duration of our interview or if they are allowed to take a well-earned break in the kitchen.

  When we are alone, Thurloe moves over to a small cabinet and returns to me with a glass of blackcurrant cordial. I settle myself in the cushioned chair and examine him closely as he perches on his seat, his fingertips pressed together. Can I trust him? For all his attentiveness, is he really my ally? But I have no alternative and so I plunge in.

  He listens to me quietly and I find that under his still and sympathetic gaze, I pour out a larger measure of my private feelings than I had intended. Throughout my confession he gives little nods and shakes of his head, tuts and coos; as smooth and comforting as silk sheets heated by a copper warming pan. When I have, at length, said my piece, Thurloe unpeels his fingers and spreads them wide as if he would embrace me across the table.

  ‘I will do my best for you, Your Highness,’ he says, ‘but you must understand that we are a new state – a fledgling Protectorate – beset by enemies at home and abroad. We are isolated and vulnerable, in need of all the allies and supporters we can muster. Your and your sister’s hands in marriage may just provide us with the means to the lasting peace and security we long for.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Master Thurloe.’ I reply, placing my empty glass on the carefully positioned coaster at my edge of his table. ‘I see too that my value on the marriage market depends a great deal on Father’s becoming king, which is something I believe you above all others desire.’

  Thurloe does not reply directly to my assertion but sits back in his chair, regarding me carefully. ‘You understand a great deal, Highness,’ he says with a measure of respect. ‘I do indeed wish it. It would be a popular course: men took up arms in ’42 not to effect a revolution in government but to restrain an overreaching king. Men say that in giving us victory, God testified against the man, but had he given witness against the office of king? Restoring the monarchy would bring swathes of the old political elite back into the fold; powerful families who baulked at the king’s execution, but were otherwise aligned in all else with our government. With their backing, government would at last be placed on a stable, secure and lasting footing. And with your father king and able to name his successor, the peace and security of the nation will no longer rest only on keeping him safe from assassins – a task which keeps me from my bed night after night.’

  I see the puffed bags under Thurloe’s eyes and cannot deny his great efforts for our safety. I feel the moment of guilt that he no doubt intends: when others have sacrificed their lives for the welfare of the nation, is it too much to ask one ordinary girl to marry a prince? But he will not convince me that my happiness must be the price paid for this peaceful future. Would it not be ironic if we fought a war for our freedoms only for me to be forced to serve the Good Old Cause by relinquishing my own? I know such an argument will hold little sway with Thurloe, however; his is the mercantile world of facts and figures, of ledgers and testimonies, of backroom deals and unedifying compromises. He accepts that there will always be a price to pay.

  ‘Robert belongs to a powerful family,’ I say instead, ‘a family who could be of use to us.’

  ‘He does, Highness.’ Thurloe picks up his own glass of cordial and swivels it between fine, thin fingers. ‘But the Earl of Warwick is already our staunch supporter and the Countess of Devonshire as fair-weather a friend as she will ever be. We have need of new friends now.’

  ‘Such as Charles Stuart,’ I say, twisting the bracelet at my wrist. ‘If Father does not agree to become king, you and Lord Broghill would restore the Stuart king with a new Cromwell bride in his bed to heal the breach.’

  ‘It is but a rumoured proposal, Your Highness,’ Thurloe says quickly, his tone soothing. ‘I doubt it will come to anything.’

  But I will not be soothed. ‘What of my love? My happiness?’ I blurt out the words driven by desperation even as I am aware of how selfish and childish I must sound.

  ‘As I say,
Highness,’ Thurloe purrs in reply, ‘I will do my best for you and for your interests, I give you my word.’

  Speaking with Thurloe is all very well but it is Father I must persuade. Yet he remains elusive. I have a few sightings of him in chapel and at dinner in the Great Hall and a handful of snatched words with him when he sups privately with us in our apartments, but otherwise he spends many hours shut up with his closest advisers – Bulstrode Whitelocke, Lord Broghill and the ubiquitous Secretary Thurloe among them, I notice. His birthday on 25 April draws him out into the daylight to receive the usual pageant of presents from the court: fine clothes and jewels, books, plate and paintings.

  He seems particularly pleased with the joint gift from Mary and me of a beautifully embroidered hawking glove of emerald green-dyed buckskin, which we urge him to use when, at last, Harry sends him his Irish goshawk. I seize the moment where none but Mary can hear us to slip Robert’s name to Father, like casting a fly from a fishing line onto still water: ‘May we speak of Robert Rich, Father?’

  But Father bats it away brusquely. ‘Not today, Fanny. Your mother had me up half the night pleading your case and we quite fell out over it. Run along now, I won’t be moved.’

  My cheeks smart as if he has struck me and I back away from him, almost stumbling down the step at the dais. Luckily, Mary has my elbow and we keep our dignity before the intense gaze of the court. But this is a very public day and so I have little privacy to nurse my hurt feelings. We celebrate Father’s birthday with the court at a fine dinner in the Great Hall at midday and privately with a family supper in the evening. Mother fusses over the preparations for the meal, sending down her own recipe for Father’s favourite eel pie to the kitchens, which she tells us mistily she has baked for him on every one of his birthdays since they were married – even sending it to him when he was away fighting.

  ‘I hope they remember to rub nutmeg into the pastry,’ she says nervously and I see her hands twitching for the feel of the dough. ‘Perhaps I should go down and speak to them.’

  ‘Heavens no, Mother!’ Elizabeth exclaims. ‘We are laughed at enough for our rustic domesticity. Do not add fuel to the fire by being seen below stairs.’

  Mother sighs and it strikes me, not for the first time, that for all our luxury, she misses the simple pleasures of cooking; the immediate satisfaction of perfecting a recipe and watching the delight on the faces of her husband and children. In my childhood she was renowned among our neighbours for her skills in the kitchen and with the medicine chest. I see her even now standing on the chequered floor of our kitchen in Ely, pounding dough on the table and gossiping with the kitchen maid while I shelled a bowl of peas, the scent of honeysuckle and the sound of St Mary’s bells drifting over the churchyard and through the low windows. If even I find the adjustment to our life as the foremost family of the nation hard at times, how must Mother find it after a half-century as an ordinary woman?

  The pie is too bitter for me but Father, of course, loves it – each bite transporting him ‘straight home to the fens and to our own hearth’ – and is careful to credit Mother with the recipe and the kind thought.

  I hear nothing further from him on the question of my marriage that evening. Nor the next week, when we ride together in the carriage to Blackheath where Father is to inspect the troops we are sending to Flanders to fight with the French against the Spanish; his forehead instead pressed to the shutters, the bright May sunshine shut out. He turns from darkness to light for his men of course, riding along their lines calling out to them and speaking rousing words of the glory they go to, Major-General John Lambert watching from his grey horse. They, in turn, cheer and whistle, waving their hats and helmets and roaring his name, their massed ranks, bristling with silver pikes and the tips of muskets like a vast pin cushion, stretching as far as my eyes can see. I watch, transfixed as I always am when I am granted a glimpse of the battlefield father I hardly know.

  Later that day, we travel down to Hampton Court and Father’s mood deepens once more until the news that arrives after supper that Denmark has declared war against Sweden plunges him into a dark thunderstorm of flashing rage and sadness, his plans for a Protestant peace in the Baltic in tatters. Our new ambassador Meadowes, not yet sailed for Denmark, is summoned upriver in haste and sits up late with Father and Secretary Thurloe, the smell of pipe smoke and the strip of candlelight visible under Father’s study door remaining until dawn. I wonder, as I pray with Mary, whether the news is an omen that Father will not be crowned the Protestant Charlemagne Thurloe and his allies wish him to become.

  I spend the next day trying to forget my worries with constant activity: a singing lesson with Master Hingston, some more language tuition from Master Marvell, a walk in the privy gardens with Mary. At supper I am forced to suffer the exquisite torture of watching Robert as he eats and talks on the far side of the Great Hall, his beautiful head turned away from me as we listen to the musicians sing for us after the meal. My feet, desperate in their desire to take me over to him, tap frantically under the table, only stilling when Mary moves her hand across from her lap to mine and presses firmly on my thigh. Out of the corner of my eye I notice Master Thurloe watching me and I bite my lip and lift my gaze away into the rafters above.

  Later, my restlessness keeps me from sleep and, feeling the need to walk my way out of the maze of my thoughts, I take up a candle and shawl and slip from my room into the long gallery. It is a crisp, cool night, an alabaster moon throwing shafts of snow-coloured light through the shutters to form stepping stones down the length of the corridor. Leaving the ghostly figures of the guards behind me, my bare feet follow the stones to the end of the grand passage, my nightgown billowing about my ankles whenever I pass an open window. Reaching the end at the south-east corner of the wing, I turn into the shorter gallery that borders my parents’ rooms and stop abruptly. Ahead, I see the flickering flame of another candle casting the heavy face beside it into the sharpest contrasts of light and shade.

  Father.

  He too is in his nightshirt and is standing motionless, holding his candle aloft as he peers at Mantegna’s magnificent paintings that march down the length of the gallery.

  I approach him slowly, anxious not to startle him from his reverie. ‘Father?’

  ‘You awake too, my little wench?’ he asks, his voice hoarse with sleep as he keeps his eyes on the canvas.

  I come to a stop beside him and turn to the paintings, letting my eyes travel from the start of the procession along the nine huge panels to its end; the earthy reds and browns golden where candlelight touches the paint. Looking at them now, in the still quietness of the night, I can almost hear the noises of ancient Rome on a hot day: trumpet fanfares blasting through the sun-filled sky, the rumble of carriages, the restless stamping of horses as they flick their tails at flies, the chatter and laughter of the crowd.

  ‘They speak to me, these paintings,’ Father says, his voice low and quiet as if we are in church. ‘Of all the late king’s collection, these are the finest. These were the ones I had to save from sale.’

  It is plain to see why. Here – immortalised in the richest pigments by an Italian master – is Caesar: the greatest military leader of all, loved by his men and driven from the glories of the battlefield up to the heights of political power. A general, not a king; not invading but invited to pass through the gates of the Roman republic in triumph. He sits atop a chariot, captured in the moment a page crowns his head with a wreath of laurel – the same ring of leaves that encircles Father’s head on his new coin.

  ‘What message lies here for me?’ Father asks, though it is not clear if he puts the question to himself, to me or to God.

  I steal my smooth hand into his rough one just as I used to when I was little. I must speak to him in his own language. ‘We have much to learn from the past deeds of men, Father,’ I find myself saying. ‘I know you urge the Lord’s guidance and the Word of the Bible above all other teachers but I think that if we look carefull
y we may find His lessons written in our own history. For didn’t God make Caesar and lay out his path even though Caesar did not know it? Was He not there on that day just as He is on this?’

  I do not have much hope of persuading Father to my way of thinking; we have always been at odds in the set of our minds. For him, all strength, all guidance and support, all wisdom, sympathy and comfort is to be found in communion with God. But though I believe in God I do not find him of day-to-day help. Instead, if I seek such succour beyond the immediate love and kindness of my family, I look for it in the pages of the past. For what companionship is there greater than that of every man, woman and child who has trod the earth before us? What problem can we face that none has ever faced before? For me, history has the same capacity as faith to teach, to inspire, but also to tempt, to mislead. It produces in me the same sense of wonder that Father finds in the Word of the Lord, brings me the same comfort and greater perspective that comes when you see your own life merely as one stitch in a great tapestry of others.

  ‘Perhaps.’ Father nods then turns to me, his eyes wide as they search mine. I search his in turn, seeing not my sovereign but my father before me, battling, as he so often does, with himself. If he is truly lost then so are we all.

  ‘You are my scholar, Fanny,’ he says at last. ‘You know my dilemmas, what should I think on?’

  I bask in his warm regard even while I struggle to arrange my own thoughts under his gaze. How can I advise him when my own ideas and wants are as tangled as his? Do I wish him to refuse the crown whereby my chances now of being married to Charles Stuart must increase? Unless it happens, perhaps, that Father does not approve the scheme and then, with my marriage value reduced on his refusing the crown, he may in time come around to my marrying Robert. Or … do I want him to take the crown, a thing which would surely end any question of my marrying the exiled king, but which would make me a princess, destined perhaps to marry in the highest ranks of the nobility or even a foreign prince? Each choice forces uncertain outcomes upon me and I am as much at a loss as Father.