Harry is much on my mind as I wander the corridors of the palace alone, and I pounce on his letters as a starving man on food whenever they arrive. You do fine work there, Fanny, he tells me. Dick writes he could not manage without you. John Russell brings this last to me, again from within the packet sent to his family, and I welcome him with the nearest I can now feel to warmth, so relieved am I to see the friendly face of one I can trust. I take him out to the avenor’s hut beside the stables and show him Venus, who nibbles the scraps of bacon I offer, her sleek head twitching from side to side.
‘Will you not fly her?’ John Russell asks gently after a few minutes.
‘No,’ I reply, keeping my eyes on my bird. ‘I have not since Robert died. I cannot bring myself to. But she is happy and well looked after.’ I stroke her silver feathers as she preens herself on my glove and wonder if I will ever again say the same about myself.
As the weather warms with spring’s tentative approach, one of my sisters returns to me, or at least a version of her. Master John Michael Wright, who painted my grieving portrait last year, has completed his latest commission: a posthumous painting of Elizabeth, which he unveils to us with much solemnity. It is a good likeness of Betty to be sure, though lacking her vitality and vivid spirit, showing that these can perhaps only be truly painted from life. But the image is so much more than a portrait of Elizabeth – rather it is a visual ode to Father’s rule. For Betty is portrayed as Minerva, daughter of the Roman god Jupiter: swathed in bright blue and red silks, her favourite pearls around her throat, a cameo of Father at her breastplate, a plinth depicting the muscled god under her elbow, a crown and olive tree behind her (an allusion to Father’s name, Master Wright points out smugly) and a sea battle in the background, darkened by a thunderous sky. The whole effect is dolorous and I glance nervously at John who frowns at the canvas beside me.
‘She is beautiful,’ I whisper to him, ignoring my misgivings. ‘Regal, eternal.’
‘Gone,’ he adds.
‘And yet here,’ I reply, slipping one hand into his and the other into my pocket to find Robert’s miniature.
Charles and Bridget do not join us to see the painting unveiled, neither have they dined with us since the argument over John’s payment of poor Betty’s medical bills. I see Charles often as he comes and goes from the Council, but each time he whisks away from me quickly, keeping his thoughts to himself. The Council meetings themselves are strained and when Dick emerges from them late in the evenings he is long-faced and weary and complains to me that he feels caught between Parliament and the army, who seem to have slipped into the comfort of their old conflicts; battles Father spent years fighting but which are new to Richard.
I am hardly surprised then when Master Thurloe takes the seat beside me at dinner in the Great Hall and moves his head close to mine as he waves away the wine.
‘The time has come, Highness, when I must ask for your help,’ he says, his voice low and melodic.
‘With Charles?’ I keep my eyes on the room.
‘My informers among the soldiery tell me the army is stirring itself to move against your brother.’
I cannot help a gasp, though I cover my shock quickly, smiling at Uncle Desborough who is glowering opposite me, and helping myself to a powdered sweetmeat.
‘They are fools,’ Thurloe replies. ‘Short-sighted idealists, gambling real coin in the purse for the dream of a fortune; cutting off the nose to spite the face. They do not see what I can see.’
I know Thurloe is not talking about his view from the high table in the Great Hall of Whitehall, but his place at the centre of the most sophisticated network of spies Europe has perhaps ever seen. The image of the spider twitching the threads of its web comes to me as I glance sideways at my black-suited companion, who is applying himself with great concentration to buttering a piece of bread. He waits until the coverage is completely smooth and even before laying down the knife and going on.
‘What my agents at the exiled court write to me is that the pretended king Charles and his advisers are hoping that the army does precisely that; that it brings down our Protectorate …’
‘… And with it, opens the door for Charles Stuart himself to return.’
He is gracious enough to grant me a small smile in appreciation of my understanding. ‘Precisely. We have had five years of peace and stable government thanks to your father and brother but if the regime falls then the floodgates open once more and who knows upon which new rock England will be shipwrecked. If these late years of trouble have taught us anything, it is how easily one change can lead to another.’
His words fill me with foreboding and as I look around the hall with frightened eyes I see the laughing courtiers vanish in clouds of smoke, the rampant lion of Father’s coat of arms stripped down from the walls, his and Elizabeth’s portraits cast onto a bonfire and their bodies into a pit; Richard’s blond head on a spike. My mind travels back to Bulstrode Whitelocke’s words of frustration when Father refused the crown: ‘It is far easier to pull something down than to set it up.’ The memory sends me looking for my friend and I see Bulstrode sitting at the end of one of the long tables running at an angle from ours, watching us as he sips his wine.
I turn back to Thurloe.
‘What can I do?’
The next evening, after supper, I wrap myself in my warmest cloak and slip out of the palace, making my way along the noisy street. Though Bridget’s home at Wallingford House is only a few hundred yards away, I take the precaution of having Katherine and two of the palace guards accompany me; with soldiers clustered on corners and spilling out of taverns, the streets of Westminster are no longer a place for Cromwell’s daughter to walk alone at night. I am admitted into the grand building by the steward who tells me that Mrs Fleetwood is in the withdrawing room, having lately emerged from seeing the children to bed. He ushers me quickly up the stairs, but not before I have seen the array of hats and cloaks on the hall table and spotted the figures of two soldiers leaning in a gloomy doorway, their muskets glinting in the candlelight. We pass a door behind which I can hear the low murmurs of men’s voices, before the steward shows me into the withdrawing room.
Bridget springs to her feet as I enter, surprise evident in her pinched face.
‘Frances, I was not expecting you.’
‘Biddy.’ I cross to her and kiss her warmly. ‘You have been neglecting us of late so I thought I would come to you. I judged this a good time with the children lately gone to bed. You are well?’
‘Yes, perfectly well.’ Bridget steers me to a couch and fusses around the room before finding a bowl of sugared almonds to offer me. Her movements are jolting and I realise that she is nervous; a state in which I do not believe I have ever seen my sensible older sister before.
We talk of the children for a few minutes. She is saying something about the difficulties of forging a new family from two fractured ones – how her boy from her first marriage to Henry has been fighting with Charles’s son from his first marriage – but really I am listening to the muffled noises from the corridor outside. It is clear that some clandestine meeting is happening in the house and I am desperate to know who Charles is doing business with so late in the evening. When the sounds of men’s voices grow louder I make an instant decision, knowing what Thurloe would want me to do.
‘Excuse me, Biddy,’ I interrupt her before jumping up and hurrying to fling open the door.
And there they are. Furrowed faces caught in the sharp candlelight like one of Master Rembrandt’s pictures, hands catching sleeves, necks craned to make an anxious point in another’s ear: Charles, Uncle Desborough and a clutch of other leading officers of the army including, tall and imperious, hair moonlit silver, Major-General John Lambert himself.
They are an imposing sight and I shrink back into the doorway, fixing a polite smile on my lips as if nothing is amiss. ‘Gentlemen,’ I manage, and incline my head as, after a moment’s hesitation, they bow to me in a wave; Lambert the
first to do so, the others following him in a ripple. I wait for them to speak but they merely shuffle down the stairs, Charles casting an anxious glance over my head to Bridget before going to show them out. There is no time to make pretence of some errand which drew me from the room; I only have a few minutes before I expect Charles to join us. I move back into the room and close the door behind me.
‘Biddy – you must do something!’
‘What do you mean?’ she asks, returning to the couch and pausing to pick a protruding feather from the cushion beside her. I have to admire her control; she has found her cool, older sister self once more.
‘You must do something about Charles! I know you do not approve of the Protectorate – never have – but don’t you see the danger in what Charles is doing?’
‘He is my husband, sister.’
‘Christ’s blood!’ I cannot help the expletive and Bridget startles at my blasphemy, causing me to thrill a little at shocking her. ‘I know that. But you are a Cromwell first – you owe it to Mother, to Dick, to me, to Father above all, not to help to bring us in harm’s way and cast out everything he achieved.’
‘But I have two husbands to whom I owe loyalty, one dead and one living – husbands who showed me how the world truly is and how it could be. This is what my first husband would have wanted too.’
‘Henry?’ I look at her is disbelief. ‘I may have been but a girl when he died but I know he was devoted to Father, none more so. Do you really think he would want our family ruined, even if it is in pursuit of his precious godly republic? The peace and stability we have built shattered and the cracks appearing for Charles Stuart to crawl through?’
‘Oh, it is easy for you to say!’ Bridget is back on her feet now, pacing the room, her pretence at cool indifference abandoned. ‘You think only of remaining a princess, of keeping our family in power. You have always loved the attention, frolicking with Robert before you wed, dancing before the court as a pagan goddess with seashells in your hair.’
Her words slice through me like a hail of arrows. I feel tears come but they will not stop my words. ‘How can you say that after what I have suffered this last year? Do you think I would not swap all of my fine clothes, my position, my life at the palace, for one more hour with Robert? I would have lived with him in a haystack!’
Bridget has the grace to pause at that and I know she regrets the strength of her words. But her blood is up.
‘Perhaps that was unfair, but what I mean is that you have never been pulled in two, in three directions as I have! Your husband one way, your family another. Father betrayed Parliament’s godly cause! The cause I loved as dearly as any man. He should never have agreed to rule: no one man should, however virtuous he is. Charles knows that just as Lambert does. It was only his great love for Father that stopped him speaking out against the increasingly regal Protectorate as Lambert did, that kept him loyal. But now Father has gone …’
‘And Dick is left the sacrificial lamb?’
Bridget sighs, some of the fight leaking out of her. ‘Charles is a good man and so are the soldiers he leads. They know Dick will not defend them against a Parliament that loathes and mistrusts them. They have only ever fought for our freedoms and what will happen? Dick and his Parliament will dismantle the army, break any power and rightful influence they have earned and whittle away the religious freedoms they fought for. If it comes to that, we would be no better than under the Stuart king.’
‘You can’t mean that!’
‘No.’ Bridget slumps on the couch as if her feet will no longer bear her weight. ‘No, I don’t mean that.’
‘But that is the risk!’ I run on, pressing my advantage as I crouch down before her, my hands on her knees, skirts puffed up around me. ‘What the exiled king fears most is for Richard to continue in power, for he knows this the most stable form of government we have found without him. If the army brings Dick down, restores the republic, it opens the door to all of the arguments we lived through before and the clamour of voices – royalists as loud as republicans – will deafen us. Charles will pave the way for the return of the king and never, in all our history, would there be a greater example of unintended consequences. Charles will see us all hanged before he is done: himself the first in line! Please, Biddy, please. For me.’
She takes my hands then, clasps them in hers, and I can feel the caps of her knees under the stiff silk of her dark green skirt. We look at each other for a long time, one pair of Cromwell eyes staring into another, before she speaks again.
‘Very well, I will talk to Charles, warn him of the risks. But I cannot promise anything, Fanny; events will unfold as God means them to.’
I return to the palace and go at once to Thurloe’s rooms. Again he flushes the clerks from the room and I take the comfortable armchair – feeling about a decade older and sadder than the last time I sat there. I tell him everything, while he, perched on his own spindled chair, nods gravely and stares into his glass of cordial, as if my report is no great surprise to him. I wonder suddenly if he has a spy in Charles’s household. Still, my mention of Lambert brings his eyes up to mine.
‘Lambert was there?’
‘Yes.’
His eyes return to his drink and we sit for some minutes, lost in thought, before Thurloe seems to remember I am still there. ‘Thank you, Highness, I am most grateful.’ He rises to his feet and I realise he means for me to leave; it is nearly midnight and we are both tired.
I pause at the door to look back at him. ‘Can you stop them?’ I ask while I still have the chance, the thought of what will happen to me if he cannot creeping through my veins like spreading ice.
Thurloe unfolds his hands in a gesture which I cannot read: it may indicate that the situation is hopeless or equally that he has it entirely within his control.
‘I will do my best, Lady Frances, but that may not be enough.’
It is not enough.
The first that I know anything is wrong is when a flushed footman brings me a hastily written note from Mother saying that large numbers of troops are massing around St James’s Palace. Dropping my book open on the couch behind me, I hurry down the privy gallery to Richard’s rooms, where I find him pacing around his inner presence chamber; Thurloe, Bulstrode Whitelocke, Lord Broghill and a number of his other closest advisers are huddled around him in whispering knots. Glancing at them, I slip across the room and fall into step beside Richard, my puppy trotting alongside us to keep up.
‘Dick, what’s happened? Mother writes that the army is gathering outside her windows.’
He does not answer at first, shaking his head, his hands clasped tightly behind his back as he paces. Walking alongside him I notice the slightest limp in his right leg and wonder absently if the bone he broke hunting shortly before my wedding set completely straight. How carefree he had seemed on my wedding day, I remember – his leg propped on a chair, laughing over his glass as he gifted us the case of Canary wine. The memory sends me chasing after other thoughts of the lost life Robert and I had begun to furnish for ourselves: what became of that case of wine and our other wedding gifts? When would I ever now use the huge silver candelabra Elizabeth and John gave us? And Betty – I catch the lump in my throat before it can escape.
Richard is speaking now, bringing my attention back to the present.
‘It is over.’ A short laugh escapes him, a strange, unnatural sound so unlike his usual laughter I have to check that it came from him. ‘And how did we get here, you ask? I’ll retrace my steps for you, Fanny. You know that, as a gesture of good faith, I agreed to Charles calling together the leading officers of the army. Thurloe told me the troublemakers were meeting with cloak and dagger at Wallingford House and I thought it better it were all out in the light of day. I met with them, brokered a peace between them and Parliament – the officers would agree only to assemble with the consent of myself and Parliament, and Parliament in turn would pay the soldiers’ arrears and move against the lingering royalists, as th
e army wishes it to. Well, so much for that: the Lords of the Other House – Charles and Uncle Desborough included – saw fit to reject the Commons’ resolutions …’
We have reached the end of the room now and Richard wheels around so we retread our footsteps, every eye in the room following our promenade. Dick continues speaking, oblivious to them.
‘… And so, on the advice of my Council of State, I ordered the army officers to disband. They agreed at first, pledged their loyalty to my face. But now the Commons is pressing on with its plans to reorganise the army, some of the MPs even saying they want to bring it back under their own control and … well, it’s the end. And here is Uncle Desborough to tell me so.’
I turn in shock to see our uncle bearing across the room towards us like a battleship, ignoring Thurloe and the other members of the Council of State as he barges past them. ‘Richard,’ he says, a note of warning in his gruff voice, and I am struck by his addressing the Lord Protector by his first name, even if he is family. Dick does not pull him up on it and that, more than anything, tells me he has lost his authority already.
‘Uncle,’ Dick replies coolly.
He is going to go down with dignity and I admire him for it. I move closer to my brother in support and nod my own greeting, though Desborough ignores me as he always does. Out of the corner of my eye I sense Richard’s advisers creeping towards us so that they can hear the final exchange now it has come.
The Puritan Princess Page 30