The Puritan Princess

by Miranda Malins

  Father meets straight away with his Council but the rest of my family hurry back to our private rooms, where, away from prying eyes, we pull and unpick his words and thoughts, naming the implications of his choice, counting the costs. Mother is impassive, John downcast, Elizabeth appalled, Bridget righteous. Mary wants to know if Father will be made safer while, privately, I long to know if he will be made more receptive to my marriage to Robert. We are at least spared Charles’s pious gloating as he is in Council with Father, though John’s reckoning with his fellow brother-in-law can only be postponed.

  ‘It was their conversation in St James’s Park, I know it,’ he mutters darkly to me as he refills his wine glass for the third time.

  Richard is the last to join us and we fall silent for his thoughts, aware that Father’s answer may affect him more than any of us. Throughout the past weeks, he has been careful to keep his views to himself, cripplingly conscious, I suspect, that any opinion he gives could be twisted into an expression of self-interest as he is more likely than anyone to be nominated Father’s heir to succeed him as Lord Protector. And now, though Father has rejected the crown, he has accepted the rest of the powers the new constitution grants him. This is not what Parliament wants but if it agrees to his suggestion he both has his cake and eats it and Father will be able to choose his successor after all.

  Dick will not be drawn, even now, though the way he helps himself to a drink and slumps into a deep chair beside Bridget speaks volumes. Though he has never confirmed it, I guessed where his sympathies lie from the many hours he has spent talking, walking and playing billiards with his fellow MP advocates for kingship. At times, I have even wondered if the tight circle of Thurloe, Bulstrode Whitelocke, Lord Broghill, Edward Montagu, Nathaniel Fiennes, Charles Wolseley and the others proponents of Father’s kingship is bound together as much by friendship and loyalty to my brothers Richard and Harry as by their collective hero-worship of my father. This seems especially true to me of the younger men among them – after all the glamorous nobleman Broghill, dashing General-at-Sea Edward Montagu and boyish brothers-in-law Charles Wolseley and Nathaniel Fiennes are much nearer Dick’s age than Father’s; it is on him that they pin their future hopes.

  ‘It all depends on Parliament now’ Richard says gloomily. ‘The House began these negotiations by telling Father he could have all the new constitution – the title of king included – or none of it; a deal for it all or no deal at all. Now he has called their bluff, we must wait to see their response.’

  Parliament capitulates. After all the bluff and bluster, on 19 May they give Father exactly what he has asked for: the new constitution but with the single word ‘king’ scratched out and the two words ‘Lord Protector’ inked in. Almost no one is happy with the compromise. The kingship party mourns the loss of the symbol they consider the key to a more secure future; while the army leaders frown at the small print of the new constitution which, clause by clause, siphons power away from them and towards Father and Parliament.

  Yet the substitution of one word for another is not a simple change. Another committee is formed to consider exactly how the details of this are to be managed, how to transmit all that relates to the king in English common law and statute into this new constitution and this now permanent office of Lord Protector: the first of a dynasty of Lords Protector. More than this, the committee must consider how to circumscribe the title; how to constrain the powers of Father and his heirs with the same limiting effect that precedent has on the title of ‘king’ – the very feat the great orators and lawyers on the committee had said could not be done. As Bulstrode Whitelocke puts it to me in wry tones after chapel one morning: ‘We went to war to keep a king within the ancient limits of the law – what would we have done with the tyrant King Charles without them? But perhaps that was the easy part, though it little felt so at the time. If this sorry business shows us anything, my lady, it is that it is far easier to pull something down than to set it up.’

  ‘It is a fudge,’ I say to Mary as we powder our faces, taking the edge off the day’s shine before supper, ‘and everyone knows it. And where does it leave us?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Mary sighs, as her lady-in-waiting Anne, standing behind her, slides a pin into her hair. ‘Perhaps the viscount will give up on a match with me now I will not be a princess. We may find the pressure lifts from both of us.’

  ‘I pray so,’ I reply, staring at myself in the mirror and setting my mouth before reaching for my pot of pink lip stain. ‘But I have no time to wait for my fate. Father has told me Charles Stuart is out of the frame, thank the Lord. And now, I hope, our continuing lack of royal status will put off other suitors. I have a window – a small one – before Thurloe unearths another suitor for me and I must find a way to fly through it to Robert.’

  And that evening brings me encouragement from an unexpected source. We are joined for a private supper by Harry’s wife Elizabeth Russell’s family: her father Sir Francis Russell, his wife Catherine and eldest son John, now in his mid-twenties I would guess. Though the couple that unites us in kinship is far away in Ireland, still the Russells feel like part of our family now and we enjoy their visits. As Mary and I enter the antechamber to the dining room, John Russell breaks away from his parents and moves shyly over to us. He has a pleasant face, I think as he bows to us, and his greeting takes me home instantly with the East Anglian cadence of his voice. But his brown suit is a little big for him and at least two seasons out of fashion.

  ‘I am glad to see you, Lady Frances,’ John Russell says, dropping a hand into his pocket, ‘for I have something for you.’

  He passes me a creased square of folded paper, the smudged handwriting bringing a wide smile to my face. ‘Harry!’

  John returns my smile. ‘Yes, his letter to you was in our family’s packet and, as we were coming to court, I thought I would deliver it personally.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’ I press his hand in gratitude and return my fingers to the letter where they dance over it in anticipation. I look down at it greedily.

  Mary, seeing my desire, reminds me of my manners. ‘You can read it later, Fanny, we have guests to attend to now.’

  ‘Oh no,’ John says hastily, ‘don’t mind me. You must open it of course.’

  I look between them. ‘I will just skim it; see what it’s about. I can read it properly later.’ I break the seal and open the paper with just enough time to flick my eyes down the page before Sir Oliver Flemyng summons us in to dine. The last lines leap from the page and straight into my heart: You ask me how marriage is for me, little wench? Well, my Eliza is the sun and moon to me, my daily companion and my nightly comfort. You must marry where you love, Fanny, if it is in any way possible. I have written to Father to say as much. PS. I have sent out inquiries for a little hawk for you – what a busy brother I have been!

  Beaming, I slip the letter into my purse and take John Russell’s proffered arm into supper.

  ‘Your brother’s letter pleases you, Lady Frances?’ he asks. ‘Does it bear good news?’

  ‘The best of news,’ I reply happily, ‘a brother’s wisdom and support.’

  ‘That is the best of news indeed,’ he answers, as we take our seats together.

  It is a lively meal, the tone, as always, defined by Father who is in excellent spirits, reliving the campaign he and Sir Francis Russell fought together in East Anglia in the early years of the war. They are not granted long to enjoy their war stories however, as midway through the meal, Thurloe sidles in with a whisper and a letter, and Father follows him from the room. I am sorry to see him leave his supper half finished but at least his absence allows the rest of the family to gossip about him.

  ‘This must have been a difficult time for you, Lady Frances,’ John Russell says quietly and I am taken aback by his kindness, that he should have thought of my uncertain position in all this.

  ‘It has been,’ I confide. ‘At times it seems as if my future is suspended from a thread that dangles
from the throne itself.’

  ‘It has been a trying time for us all,’ Bridget interrupts from John Russell’s other side. ‘With Father wrestling and wrangling with his conscience night and day.’

  ‘There are some who doubt his sincerity though, Biddy,’ Dick says. ‘We watched his struggle, but others didn’t. I have heard it said there are men who think that this compromise was actually the outcome Father always wanted: that he has, in fact, played a blinding hand, getting more power for himself without taking the crown and losing the army’s support.

  This statement is met with a nervous silence before Sir Francis Russell laughs heartily and the tension breaks. ‘I have known your father these long years, my dear boy. And I can safely say that if that’s true, he has turned more wise men into fools than ever before!’

  Over the next few day and weeks, as the groundwork is laid for the enactment of the new constitution with its centrepiece ceremony of Father’s new ‘investiture’ as Lord Protector, it becomes clear to all of us that Father is going to become king in everything but the name. As the realisation dawns on the court, reactions harden once more and any hope our new constitution might unify the warring voices on the Council dwindles. And if we can see the true nature of Father’s new powers at court, the point is not lost on the people of London, where the streets are soon littered in pamphlets, newsbooks and sermons adding wildly opposing voices to the wall of sound that deafens us. I try not to take the hundreds of stamped inky pages to heart, try to rise above or below them, but it is hard to read both of Father’s sainthood and of his black hypocrisy, and of my and my family’s wanton greed and assumed airs and graces. Temperate voices are few when their sales are dwarfed by the extremist writers; and when the two most extraordinary examples of these publish within weeks of each other, I begin to wonder if we are living in a truly mad and dangerous time.

  The first is a panegyric penned by an ecstatic Welshman who claims Father to be descended from the ancient princes of Britain. Our descent from the Williams family – the name my forebear replaced with Cromwell in honour of his uncle Thomas Cromwell – is known well enough but the elaborate genealogy drawn for us in these pages brings a blush even to Master Marvell’s cheeks, he who writes odes to Father’s greatness. Father, it claims, is Britain’s long-prophesied conqueror and, once more, the image of Julius Caesar’s triumph into Rome plays before my eyes. We dismiss it as foolishness of course, though after the horror of what followed it through the printing presses, I looked back on it to find comfort.

  The second pamphlet was hidden from Mary and me for days. Even the pageboys, I later discovered, were paid off by Mother not to bring it to us. But still, news of it trickled through the court and into my earshot like the dirty stream that runs from the common jakes of the palace into the River Thames. When three hundred copies are seized in London on the same day that Father accepts Parliament’s revised constitution, Mother can shield us from hearing of it no more and Richard, worn down by my insistence, brings me a copy. Titled ‘Killing No Murder’, the sheets I hold in trembling fingers urge the people of England to do no less than assassinate my father. This, it claims, would be ‘no murder’ but a lawfully sanctioned killing of a tyrant which God and man would forgive. I think immediately of the Pope’s instruction, nearly a hundred years before, for good true English Catholics to kill Queen Elizabeth. Her spymaster Walsingham alone had saved her; would Master Thurloe keep Father as safe from this?

  The text of the work is framed in such a way as to make sick rise into my mouth: it begins with a mocking preface addressed to Father himself and ends with a homily to the dead plotter Sindercome. ‘To Your Highness justly belongs the honour of dying for the people’, it opens, and Mary – always so frightened for Father’s safety – hardly gets any further before collapsing in a storm of tears. I manage to read it through to the end, but only by pretending that the pages do not prick my fingers, and fling it away from me as soon as my eyes reach the last word as if it is written in poisoned ink. Immediately, I am taken back to the night of Sindercome’s bomb and, trembling, I scuttle to my room and send Katherine at once in search of Robert, caring little for the rashness of this. He comes to me within a quarter of the hour, finding me hiding in an arrow-slit alcove half way up the back staircase to the stone gallery, which I know to be deserted at this hour and beyond the earshot of the nearest guards.

  This time I have no words and I tear into him roughly as a starving man would into a banquet, slipping my hands under his shirt to the warm skin beneath and pushing my tongue into his mouth. I feel him stiffen with surprise under my fingers before his body relaxes and he matches my heat with his own. His arms are around my back now, up in my hair, then running down over my skirts to pull my hips fiercely to his. When Robert drops his lips onto my collarbone and down over the skin above my bodice, I feel my breasts leap and tingle under his breath. His hat falls and tumbles down the staircase as I thread my fingers into his hair and lean back until I feel the cool evening air from the narrow window on my face. He is lifting me backwards into the depth of the stone now, his hands moving under my skirts so quickly that I hardly realise they are there until I feel his fingers slipping into me.

  I am in oblivion, my mind whisked out of my body and flying through the night air just as my skin and my bones push against his. I hear nothing, see nothing. Every thing, every sensation is deep inside me where warm waves wash through me as we kiss and kiss and kiss. And then, suddenly, I feel as if I am falling from the window and in the sheer terror of this I pull apart from him, pushing him back so his hands come away from me, even as my fingertips continue to cling to his shoulders.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I gasp when I can speak.

  ‘It is all right, my darling,’ Robert says softly, his breath quick and shallow as he regains himself. ‘I’m afraid I was rather carried away.’

  ‘So was I.’ I smile at him now, grinning in desperate relief that I have not upset him, have not done the wrong thing.

  Robert matches my smile for an instant before it drops from his lips as he takes my face in his hands. ‘Frances, we must, must marry.’

  PART TWO

  June–December 1657

  CHAPTER SIX

  Summer comes quickly and feverishly. Robert and I grasp every perspiring moment we can together while the heat dulls everyone’s senses and Father and the government are distracted by the ratification of the new constitution. But then, to my despair, Robert is called home to his estate in Essex to help his father oversee the summer collection of rents and to amuse his half-sisters while his stepmother is in the final stage of another confinement. He is gone before we have a chance to say goodbye, but my disappointment turns to joy when I find a parcel in my room: an emerald ring, nestled in the pages of a copy of St Augustine’s City of God – the passage on the search for eudaimonia, or true happiness and fulfilment, underlined in the faintest ink. I dare not display the ring in public, nor even take it outside my room, but hang it from a chain about my neck and wear it under my nightgown every night.

  Like Robert’s stepmother, Betty too has withdrawn into her confinement as she waits anxiously for the baby. Bored without Robert, I follow her, spending the hot afternoons in the cool darkness upon which the physicians insist, lying beside her on the bed reading and gossiping lazily. Beyond our sanctuary, the warm scented days are well matched to the almost unhinged carnival atmosphere of the court as everyone counts the days until the great ceremony of Father’s investiture. No one voices the word ‘coronation’ – as after all there will be no crown placed upon Father’s head – yet it is behind everyone’s lips as the elaborate preparations are made. New coins are minted from last year’s captured Spanish bullion and tensions are further released when the news reaches us that General-at-Sea Robert Blake has won a great victory against the Spanish by capturing their Plate Fleet off Santa Cruz. London and later the whole nation celebrate with a day of thanksgiving and Parliament votes the victorious Blake a jewel wor
th five hundred pounds as a reward. Father, almost bursting with pride, summons him to return to England in glory, though in part this is motivated too by reports of his ill health. Mary and I thrill at the news, conjuring as it does the ghosts of our childhood heroes Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. I imagine receiving the General-at-Sea on his return just as Queen Elizabeth had her favourite adventurers and unearth a copy of Raleigh’s great History to remind me of the rhythm of his voice.

  There is one at court who does not join in the celebrations, however. General John Lambert and his supporters have always pressed friendship with Spain over France, as much from the commercial interests of the wool traders in his native Yorkshire as from any other motive. But now, the air of triumph Lambert carried after he persuaded Father away from the crown, and which has drooped a little week on week as the true civilian colours of Father’s new parliamentary regime have appeared, falls entirely from his soldier’s frame. Now he lives in a world where England is at war with Spain and the army has lost its influence, and he stalks the palace with a heavy frown, his grey eyes flashing beneath his brow like the new silver coins minted for Father’s investiture. Mary and I add him to our prayer list and I find myself hoping that General Monck has sent him the Scottish falcons he wanted and that Harry will find my bird soon.