The Puritan Princess

by Miranda Malins

  I have lost my husband, and with him my future. Now Father too, and with him my past. But Dick is still here having to play the hand he has been dealt.

  And so am I.

  PART FOUR

  October 1658–July 1659

  CHAPTER TEN

  Life now seems to consist of the twinned and mirrored acts of birth and death. A new person, Richard, Lord Protector (or King Richard IV as I ever hear the pageboys call him between themselves), is fashioned before my eyes just as the old Protector, my dear father, is stripped back to his mortal remains: his body embalmed, a death mask taken, a painted wooden effigy built to take his place among us. Chaplain Hugh Peter preaches to us at Whitehall on the text ‘Moses my servant is dead’ and the cleric Samuel Slater replies from his pulpit that though this is true, we must rejoice to have a Joshua to succeed him: ‘What the other happily began, may this more happily finish.’ This is a new succession, he suggests – by appointment and merit, not by royal blood.

  Yet I dream of violence and can hardly bear to look from the palace windows in case an angry mob appears before me. It had always seemed to me that Father alone held up the world like the Titan Atlas and, without him, every moment I expect it to come crashing down about my ears. But, to my amazement, the transition from a world ruled by my father to a world ruled by my brother is seamless – or at least seems that way. The monarchs of Europe forget that we are rebel-born and stir themselves, their ambassadors crowding the great presence chamber, pressing their masters’ continued friendship upon the new young Protector. Richard is proclaimed by trumpet fanfare and herald in London, Edinburgh and Dublin and, from every corner of these nations, cities and corporations dispatch their loyal addresses to him in the saddlebags of their fastest riders. The army and the navy pledge their loyalty and all the Protectoral officers away from court, the ambassadors, governors and commanders, send their condolences and assurances – Harry’s letters blurred with tears.

  As the town criers pace the marketplaces and Richard’s proclamation is nailed to town hall and church door throughout the land, new histories of our own time pour from the presses, swirling into the gutters on the first autumn winds. Each day, in their inky pages, I see my father stare back at me. I find him too looking out at me from familiar portraits on the walls of the palace and nestled in my coin purse where, in time, he will be replaced by the new coinage bearing Richard’s profile that Master Simon of the Mint is even now working on alongside Father’s ceremonial death medals.

  Only, the man captured in oils, carved into metal or stamped in ink is never the father I knew. He is a colossus, an emperor, a new prophet; a traitor, a usurper, a devil. Moses on one page, Lucifer on another. I see at first hand how when a great person dies, they multiply like the Hydra, taking myriad forms they could never have imagined and meaning a thousand things to a thousand people. With each new version of my father, I find myself more and more determined to do what I can to preserve his legacy and protect our family name. I cling to the knowledge that I am one of a precious few who truly knew him, even as I begin to doubt if I ever really did. It seems no one can fathom that Father is dead and gone: those that hated him as much as those who loved him. Instead life itself turns upside down as if the world Oliver Cromwell did so much to fashion is simply unimaginable without him in it; without the great force of him driving events, an ear always cocked to catch God’s whispered commands that he alone could hear.

  As my shrunken family hunkers together in grief, we feel the fight for Father’s image rage around us. ‘We must wrest control of it from the masses, Your Highnesses,’ Thurloe explains to us as Mother, Mary and I walk solemnly through the privy gardens, our mourning clothes reflected in a thunderous sky, a straggle of ladies whispering behind us.

  ‘And how do you propose we do that, Councillor Thurloe?’ Mother asks wearily, her eyes never wavering from the horizon.

  ‘By planning a lying-in-state and funeral fit for a king,’ Thurloe replies gently. ‘I have discussed it with Sir Oliver Flemyng, the Lord Chamberlain and the Council, and we are all in agreement.’

  ‘But what will you take as your precedent?’ I ask him, thinking of how the last king was buried quietly at Windsor Castle once they had sewn his head back onto his body.

  ‘A good question, Lady Frances. We intend to follow the ceremony accorded to the late king’s father, King James. That was over thirty years ago, of course, but we have found the accounts of it in the archives and can update it as appropriate.’

  So Father is finally and irrevocably to be presented as the king he never was, I think, and I cannot help a bitter smile at the irony.

  A few weeks later, Father is taken to lie on a great black velvet-draped bed of state at Somerset House, as King James was before him, his embalmed body safe within a lead coffin enclosed in turn in a wooden coffin topped with his lifelike effigy: a body of wood, a face of wax and eyes of glass. I cannot bring myself to look upon this idol, particularly when word reaches me that, beneath the robes of purple velvet and ermine, the figure has been dressed in the grey velvet suit Father wore to my wedding – known to us all to be his favourite outfit. Most of the family stays away, preferring to remember Father as he was to us, but Charles goes to see him and describes the scene to us at supper.

  ‘They have placed a crown above the effigy, and the orb and sceptre in its hands,’ he begins, the word ‘crown’ sticking in his mouth.

  Bridget tuts besides him but says nothing and, with Mary on the edge of tears, I am grateful to her for that.

  Charles swallows and lifts his chin. ‘Around the bed are symbols of Oliver’s rule: a suit of armour, a crest, a plaque inscribed with his lineage, achievements and all of your names.’ He takes a moment to look around the table at his wife’s family and I wonder if my name will be buried with Father when the time comes.

  ‘The bed itself is supported by great pillars carved with crowns and shields,’ Charles continues. ‘And after it has lain on the bed for a few weeks, the effigy will be stood up, its eyes opened, as if the Lord Protector lives once more among us.’

  ‘Idolatry,’ Bridget hisses suddenly, and at the head of the table Dick squirms in his chair.

  Though we stay away from the grotesque scene, the great and the good and a multitude of Father’s ordinary subjects flock to gawp at him and poor Father lies there, dead and yet above the ground, for weeks on end until Mother can bear it no longer. The date set for his state funeral is still several weeks away but all any of us can think of is returning Father to God as he would wish. The pomp and circus of his public journey to burial means nothing to us and neither, Dick explains privately to the Council, would it have meant anything to Father. He would want only for his family, his closest friends and his God to witness the interment of his earthly remains in an honest square of soil. And so the Council agrees to let us bury Father’s body quickly and quietly near Betty’s in the vault of Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey on 10 November. He has a beautiful plot, in the curve of the east end of the chapel, itself the very easternmost point of the abbey, so that the sun will lie first upon him each morning. Rows of carved stone angels watch over him from the walls on either side, crowns held between their linked hands: if Father was not a king in life, he is in death.

  With Father himself interred, the honours of the state funeral a few weeks later fall on his wooden substitute, staring unseeing in everlasting life from above the empty coffin. We women stay away as is traditional, though in truth we are grateful to do so. It takes seven hours for the funeral procession to make the short journey from Somerset House to Westminster Abbey, an exhausted John tells me later when I have gone to his family’s rooms to read bedtime stories to my motherless niece and nephews. John collapses onto a chair in the nursery and begins to unbuckle his shoes.

  ‘Seven hours,’ he repeats, rubbing the soles of his feet. ‘And all in front of a crowd of thousands. The people paid for places on great viewing scaffolds erected around Westminste
r and they thronged along the route. The army had to station men one arm’s length apart to control the crowds and keep the peace.’

  Little Cromwell’s head droops against my breast, heavy with sleep, and I close my eyes and picture the scene as John paints it. There are pedlars and salesmen doing a roaring trade in food, beer and souvenirs among the throng. Father’s effigy travels in a chariot drawn by six horses with nobles and peers, the Council of State, dignitaries of the court, Yeomen of the Guard, soldiers and MPs riding or walking in the pageant. Every servant of the Protectoral household accompanies the coffin resplendent in livery, from Father’s life guard and bargemen down to the falconers, grooms, cooks, bottle-washers and kitchen boys. Even the arts that Father patronised are represented with his court musicians and the poets and scholars Masters Marvell, Milton and Dryden marching together, doubtless forming lines of verse in their minds as they walk.

  Richard cannot attend, observing the ancient custom that the new ruler does not publicly mourn the old. Harry is absent too – commanded to stay at his post in Ireland, though Dick has sent Anthony Underwood to him to give a first-hand account of Father’s final illness. So, with neither of Oliver’s sons present, his sons-in-law command the stage: the role of chief mourner at the funeral falls to Charles in flowing state robes, whose train is borne by assistants including Thomas, Viscount Fauconberg. Behind him comes John himself as Master of Horse leading Father’s favourite stallion, riderless and decked in elaborate plumes; a visual reminder of the empty place where Father should be and an echo of all of the hundreds of times that Father rode into battle on behalf of Parliament in all corners of these nations. In this way all of our living husbands mourn their father-in-law together, while the dead – Henry Ireton and my darling Robert – welcome him into heaven.

  ‘I’ve got to hand it to the Council, the whole scene was magisterial,’ John concludes. ‘Apart from one moment,’ he chuckles, ‘when a pig broke through the crowd to wander among the chief mourners – that wasn’t part of Thurloe’s plan!’

  I chuckle too at this, despite my sadness, thinking it the one moment in all the long day that Father would have enjoyed.

  For the next few days we Cromwell women remain hidden away in the palace with Dick: none of the ritual matters to us. Instead, it is the remembrances of Father we share around the fire, our hugs and prayers alone that count. Master Marvell’s poem on Father’s death – a funeral ode he performs privately for us after supper the night following Father’s burial – is worth a thousand state funerals in my eyes and I listen transported as he weaves together myths and legends of Father’s heroic life. It is his words of Elizabeth that bring tears to Mother’s eyes, however, as Marvell speaks of her virtues and tells us that Father died not in battle but of love and grief for her. The father he restores to us with the images he paints in the air is the only one in all these weeks that I recognise as ours: the private man, father to his family before his country:

  ‘Straight does a slow and languishing disease

  Eliza, Nature’s and his darling, seize.

  Her when an infant, taken with her charms,

  He oft would flourish in his mighty arms,

  And, lest their force the tender burden wrong,

  Slacken the vigour of his muscles strong …

  Nature, it seemed with him would Nature vie;

  He with Eliza. It with him would die,

  He without noise still travelled to his end,

  As silent suns to meet the night descend.

  The stars that for him fought had only power

  Left to determine now his final hour,

  Which, since they might not hinder, yet they cast

  To choose it worthy of his glories past …

  If he Eliza loved to that degree,

  (Though who more worthy to be loved than she?)

  If so indulgent to his own, how dear

  To him the children of the highest were?

  For her he once did Nature’s tribute pay:

  For these his life adventured every day:

  And ’twould be found, could we his thoughts have cast,

  Their griefs struck deepest, if Eliza’s last …’

  As Marvell goes on, his black curls fringed with firelight, I feel the tears I have been waiting to shed for Father come springing to my eyes to mingle with those that always hover there for Betty; their cool dampness almost a relief on my flushed cheeks.

  We struggle on together, each of us knowing we have lost the two brightest stars from our night sky while I, in Robert, have lost the very air itself. Throughout these terrible weeks, Mother is a wonder to me, seeming to grow in stoicism and steadfastness, as always pouring the balm of herself into the gaps and cracks in us all, even though it is she now who has lost the other half of her very self. It is she who picks up the pieces of our family and tries to fit us back together as a restorer does a fractured pane of glass. I spend much of my time helping her to sort through Father’s personal possessions and to pack her things for her forthcoming move into St James’s Palace, leaving her private apartments at Whitehall Palace free for the new Lord Protector and his family. Dorothy, the new Lady Protectoress, and her children will spend most of their time in the palaces now, leaving behind the quieter, quaint life in their Hampshire estate to assume their position as the first family in the land.

  Richard himself is reluctant to put Mother to the trouble but the Council insists on the move: it was customary for Father, and the kings who came before him, to conduct certain audiences in the state bedchamber and Richard’s previous set of rooms will not do, having no suitable set of antechambers in which guests could wait to be received into his presence. Mother herself is happy to move, feeling the change will do her good. Her one concern is that the arrangement will take her further away from John and the children who, more than anyone else, have come to rely on Mother’s care.

  ‘But I will be with them as much as I can,’ Mother tells me as we wrap her furs in layers of paper. ‘It is all I can do for dear Betty now. The little ones deserve to have her here to care for them but, as she cannot be, I will do my best in her stead.’

  And what of me? I want to ask her. Don’t I deserve my mother to care for me? But I know it a selfish thought; their need is far greater than mine. She can do so much good in Betty’s family, for the children dote on her and, of late, I have noticed John too seek her out, drifting absently into her company in his new solitary state. And Mother bends towards him in turn, taking the place next to him at the supper table, sharing a parent’s quiet observation about one or other of the children as they pass in and out of eyesight. In this way, it is as if Mother and John have been bound by their care for the children into an ill-assorted marriage of their own where each mourns the place beside them: a living mirror image of Elizabeth and Father’s devoted closeness which has extended now even into death, where they lie together in Westminster Abbey.

  Mother’s effective absorption into the Claypole household is just one part of her gradual withdrawal from her public role. She provides us all with what she has always done: with love, with gentle guidance when asked, with a place to bring our grief. But she is careful to watch Dick’s rule from afar, to smile in encouragement, not whisper in his ear. Not for her a dowager role, a brittle queen ruling by proxy as widow and mother. She was born to run a merchant household, not to command a room, still less a kingdom – she is no Queen Marie of Medici, no Eleanor of Aquitaine. The mantle has been well and truly passed on to our generation, just as Signor Giavarina predicted on my wedding day, though so much sooner and more sadly than I had expected, and without Robert to take his portion by my side. His loss always finds new ways to pain me: what good could my darling have done working alongside Richard, his close friend? How many golden opportunities would there now have been for him in this youthful second age of the House of Cromwell?

  But if Mother expends her energy on the Claypoles, I am determined to use mine to support Richard, now the custo
dian of Father’s legacy and our good name. I find some new meaning in bolstering his confidence and safeguarding his interests as my husband would have done and as my father bade me do; and Dick certainly has the weight of the world on his shoulders. While the rest of us can lose ourselves in mourning if we choose, Richard has to enter into the day-to-day business of government – though it is several weeks after Father’s distressing death before he can bring himself to attend Council meetings and apply himself fully to his new office.

  Often after the Council has risen, he comes to see me just as he used to when Robert and I were newly married. Comfortable together, we share a glass of wine and discuss the business set before him that day: the dispatches from our generals on the front lines of our war with Spain; the regime’s accumulated debts and annual deficit. ‘Two million pounds,’ he tells me one evening, his eyes wide in the firelight, ‘and the army owed nine hundred thousand pounds’ wages.’

  I sip my mulled wine to cover my shock. ‘Can it really be that much?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. It seems Father just ignored the numbers in his final months, and there are a hundred decisions of diplomacy he ignored too.’