I watch them go as Charles puts his arm around me. ‘They will be all right,’ he says, squeezing my shoulder. ‘No one will think to question Viscount Fauconberg – a great favourite of the king – travelling up to his own estate.’
I laugh through my tears. ‘Thank you, Charles,’ I say, as I put my arm around his waist.
We stand together, shoulder to shoulder, skirt to skirt, like a chain of paper dolls, come to see our father’s execution. Our hoods are pulled low over our faces and a frosted blast of wind whips around my cloak to send the three nooses hanging from the gallows before me swinging.
When men come to write of this they will say how the people cheered to see Old Noll, the great usurper, strung up and cut down to size; how justice was done and how God smiled on this day.
But we will know the truth. We are here too.
I put my arms around my sisters, my tears now of triumph rather than grief. ‘We did it,’ I whisper. ‘We cheated them of their revenge.’
Bridget nods then looks at me, her eyes bright and shining. ‘Henry would have wanted us to save Father. He is looking down on us now and he understands.’
I hope so. I clutch her to me and feel a great surge of energy at our victory; a sense of release too. ‘We have taken Father back,’ I say. ‘Our lives are our own once more. Charles Stuart tried to steal my future from me but he won’t have it.’
‘And what of my future?’ Mary asks quietly. ‘I can’t have children, I am sure of it. More than three years have passed … and nothing.’
I kiss Mary’s head, a tear trickling down my cheek and onto her forehead. ‘You may yet, dearest, you may yet.’
My mind travels back to Mother and Father’s great bedchamber at Whitehall and I hear Mary offer to marry any man Father chose if he would allow me to have Robert. Something inside me softens and I know in that instant what lies ahead for me.
‘Listen to me, Mary,’ I say. ‘You married for me once. Now it is my turn to marry for you. If you cannot have children, I will have them for us and they will be yours and mine, I promise.’
EPILOGUE
It takes many minutes for us to climb up to the very top of the house. The casual visitor to Newburgh Priory would assume they had reached the highest point if they entered the attic rooms where the servants sleep. But this is not so. We pull aside a dull curtain in a cobwebbed corridor and climb another flight of steep stairs, emerging breathless into a narrow stone chamber built, it seems, into the very roof itself. I look around me as I place my hands on my hips, waiting for my breathing to slow. It is a bare, empty space, remarkable only in its construction: a vault among the rafters, a tomb in the sky.
‘He is here?’
I nod once in answer, unwilling to say the words aloud.
‘Good God.’
John Russell’s voice echoes off the stone and I watch his words bounce and bend around the chamber. After they have faded away, we stand together in silence while I listen to the new, heavy knowledge sink into John like lead through water.
In the silence my thoughts wander from him to Father. I feel him here with me, though there is no plaque or memorial, no sign or marker anywhere in the room to reveal his final resting place. Without such clues he may, perhaps, be left in peace. I see him even now in my mind, lying hollowed-out in the great state bed at Whitehall Palace, his rough hand in mine as he bade me live a long life, give a good account of him to my children, write my own history.
And so am I my father’s keeper? Do I live my life looking back on another’s, defending everything he chose to do? But what choice do I have? What the histories make of him, they will make of me, for what am I but a model carved from his clay, a brass rubbing made from his likeness, a postscript to his life’s story? I should not have to be the caretaker of his name, I think; I do not have to be. Yet I know what my answer is, what my heart says whatever my head objects: yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
But though I will carry him with me always, yet I must go my own way now.
From Father in his last resting place, my mind travels on to Robert, lying in the Essex earth, his beautiful face turned from me for ever; his body, so young and vivid, so eager to know my own, now cold and still. I slip my hand into my pocket and feel for the familiar shape of his miniature, tracing its frame with my thumb as I summon him to me one last time.
I feel John turn towards me; find my other hand in his.
‘Come,’ I say quietly, ‘let us go out into the fresh air. Thomas has promised us an afternoon hawking.’
‘Wait, Frances. Your telling me this, bringing me here. Can I hope … Does this mean yes?’ His voice is slow and soft, his large hand warm.
I look back at him now, taking him in properly perhaps only for the first time: his eyes the blue of the fens, his russet hair just a few shades darker than Robert’s, his kind, shy smile. I see myself too, a future self – a Cromwell living and loving.
I pause and gather Robert and Father to me like children, pressing them deep into my skin …
‘Yes.’
HISTORICAL NOTE
Frances and John Russell married in 1663, a year before John inherited his father’s estate at Chippenham, becoming Baron Russell. They had five children: one daughter and four sons, the second of whom they called Rich in memory of Robert. Writing to Harry when Robert died, Frances said that ‘nothing in the world can repair my loss’. Yet she did find happiness again with John, as their spirited love letters show. Frances still enjoyed the lively company of other men (and Venetian ambassadors in particular): Thomas Fauconberg once teased his brother-in-law John Russell in a postscript to a letter by saying he should hurry back to his wife because Frances was being ‘so courted by the Venetian ambassador’ (not, sadly, Signor Giavarina but one of his successors in the office). Frances also remained friends with Jeremiah White, who later became chaplain to the Russell family.
When Robert left her a widow, Frances told Harry she ‘hoped to get him for my husband that will never die’. Sadly, Providence had other plans and her second husband John died in 1670 after only seven years of marriage. Frances did not remarry but spent the next fifty years a widow, dying in old age in 1720 – the last survivor among her siblings and the only one to live to see the Stuart dynasty end for good with the succession of King George I of Hanover in 1714. One of Frances’s descendants acquired Chequers Court, which later became the country house of the prime minister, and a substantial collection of Cromwellian portraits and personal items remains there today. (Another quirk of history is that the ‘Cockpit’ where the Cromwells lived when they first moved into Whitehall Palace was on the site of modern-day Downing Street.)
Frances spent much of her long widowhood with Mary and Thomas who, in contrast to her, enjoyed another forty years of marriage but never had children. Frances and Mary remained very close: Mary doted on and promoted the interests of Frances’s children, helped Frances when she was in financial difficulty and left her a substantial legacy when she died. The marriage of Frances’s daughter Betty to Thomas’s nephew brought the two families even closer. Frances and Mary’s love lasted to the end and they are buried together in Chiswick. Mary and Thomas were a devoted couple and flourished under the Restoration (the only Cromwells to do so), even receiving the Duke and Duchess of York at Newburgh in 1665 – we can only assume they did not climb up to the secret vault in the roof. Thomas became Ambassador Extraordinary to Venice and later a Privy Councillor, finally being made an earl by William III. He died in 1700, Mary in 1713 – a great curiosity at the court of the last Stuart Queen Anne, in part because she looked so much like her famous father.
By contrast, Bridget died only a couple of years after the Restoration, living long enough to see her and Charles’s baby dug up from her burial place in the Henry VII chapel in Westminster Abbey and thrown into a pit in neighbouring St Margaret’s graveyard. Oliver Cromwell’s mother Elizabeth, his sister Jane Desborough, General-at-Sea Robert Blake and the other prestigious figures w
ho had been buried in the Abbey during the Commonwealth also suffered the same fate. Elizabeth Claypole is the only member of the family to remain undisturbed, possibly because she was overlooked by mistake. She still lies among the Tudor kings and queens. Charles Fleetwood outlived Bridget by many decades, marrying a third wife and living a quiet life at Stoke Newington until his death in 1692. His fellow army leader John Lambert was not so fortunate, however, suffering twenty years of imprisonment in various island fortresses around Britain until his death in 1684, by which point he was reputedly mad.
Overall, Charles II’s treatment of the Cromwell family at his Restoration was lenient. Frances’s mother, the Lady Protectoress, was allowed to live in peace with her son-in-law John Claypole, though a hostile press accused her of stealing and selling off valuable items from the royal collection, forcing her to petition the king for protection. She died at Northborough in 1665 and was buried in the village church. John Claypole married again in 1670, though he appears to have left his second wife later to live with a laundress. He died in 1688, sadly having outlived all of his and Elizabeth’s children, none of whom had any children of their own.
Henry Cromwell too was left in peace to live quietly at Spinney Abbey in Cambridgeshire, close to Frances and John’s home at Chippenham. There are stories of Charles II visiting him there when he went to Newmarket races, although we cannot be certain these are true. Letters between Frances and John also speak of a possible visit by the king to them at Chippenham – if he did go we must wonder what he and Frances made of each other, given their once intended marriage. Henry died in 1674, leaving six Cromwell children behind him. Richard, on the other hand, did not feel able to return to England until after twenty years of wandering exile in Europe – ‘my solitary life’ as he called it. His wife Dorothy had died without him ever seeing her again and, even when he returned to England, he was careful to see his children only occasionally. He did not return to his estate at Hursley but lived as a lodger in various modest houses, always under a false name. He died in 1712 as an ordinary, unnoticed, modest gentleman, having paid a heavy price of over half a century of lonely exile for a mere nine months as Head of State.
Richard never felt able to reclaim his Cromwell name, such was the power and fascination it exerted then and continued to do for many generations. Even in more recent times the name has provoked strong reactions from the powerful. In 1911 King George V blocked the request of his First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to name a battleship Oliver Cromwell and half a century later, our present queen vetoed Tony Benn’s plans as Postmaster General to include Cromwell in a new set of stamps depicting all British heads of state from James I onwards, and the whole set was scrapped. Today, if you visit Cromwell’s old Cambridge college, Sidney Sussex, meanwhile, you will find curtains on either side of his portrait in the hall; a precautionary measure designed to avoid embarrassment should a member of the royal family visit.
And if we do draw back the curtains, who is the Cromwell we find? Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell haunted the reign of Charles II as surely as the ghost of Hamlet’s father did that of Claudius, providing an uncomfortable yardstick by which men of all political views measured the pleasure-loving king, whether it was in ‘Old Noll’s’ ostensible successes in foreign policy or the energised industry of his court. Samuel Pepys – himself not immune to the pleasures of fine wine and women – bemoaned the ‘ill condition’ of the new king’s court, its ‘vices of swearing, drinking and whoring’, reflecting on the ‘bad management of things now compared with what it was in the late rebellious times, when men, some for fear and some for religion, minded their business; which none now do, by being void of both.’
But if Cromwell’s regime was held up as a moral rebuke to the merry monarch’s, it was not because it was the joyless, repressive military dictatorship of common myth. In fact Cromwell took pains to keep the army at a distance, particularly after the experimental rule of the Major-Generals was abandoned, and ruled conscientiously in constant collaboration with a strong Council and under the eye of Parliament (the first and last time in fact that a British head of state governed under a written constitution). The Protectorate became more traditional and monarchical with each passing year, attempting a return to the comfort of the ancient constitution while taking it in a new and modern direction. The regime, especially in its final years, represented the beginning of a softening culture after the fervour of the kingless Commonwealth: a court full of poets and musicians; the return of masques and the first English operas; and marriages between former parliamentarian and royalist foes. In character, it was less stiff and formal than the court of King Charles I but more disciplined and competent than that of Charles II. At Cromwell’s court there was drinking but not excessive drunkenness, sports but no gambling, romance without licentiousness. Life was luxurious but not decadent. Moderation and virtuosity were prized above all.
Women were central to this more relaxed and civilian court and not merely as ornaments but as people of agency. The upheaval of the Civil Wars had given women new opportunities to show strength and Cromwell’s daughters were widely admired for their staunch characters. As one contemporary historian assessed Cromwell’s sons and daughters: ‘those who wore the breeches deserved the petticoats better; but if those in petticoats had been in breeches, they would have held faster.’ Cromwell himself was devoted to his bold daughters and is known to have relied on their advice, particularly that of Elizabeth, with whom he was especially close. Although he held out against Frances’s marriage to Robert, largely because of his concerns about the young man’s character (and possibly his ill health), he took great care in all of his children’s marriages to ensure there was emerging love and not merely the opportunity of a useful alliance: that was the Puritan way.
This Cromwell was not the dour, black-coated Puritan of popular imagination who killed a king and cancelled Christmas (neither of which charges can solely or truly be laid at his door); if in doubt, a cursory glance at the splendid portraits of him and his elegantly dressed wife and daughters is enough to dislodge the image largely created by the Victorians. Cromwell was a Puritan certainly, for whom his relationship with God was the guiding force of his life. But he believed passionately in toleration, hated persecution of any kind, and never sought to impose the way he lived a Christian life on others. If he loved God with an ardent intimacy, he also loved his family, his friends, fine conversation and lively debate, music (not performed in church where it was a distraction), thoroughbred horses, hunting, hawking, drinking and practical jokes. He was magnetic and charming with a ready, almost schoolboy, sense of humour and a remarkable talent for cultivating friends across social, political and religious groups; always the first to spot talent and to overlook a man’s past if he could see his potential. ‘No man knew more of Men,’ said Cromwell’s physician Dr Bate, and it was this quality, among many others, that made him such a phenomenally successful soldier and politician and inspired those around him to follow him with devotion.
So if it is time to revisit the Protectorate with fresh eyes, where are we to search for the remains of the Lord Protector himself? Does he lie in the secret vault in the roof at Newburgh Priory? While there is no contemporary evidence to support the claim, the legend that Cromwell’s daughters rescued his body (either the intact body through a substitution on the night it lay at the Red Lion pub or merely the headless trunk retrieved from under the gallows) and buried it in the secret chamber at Newburgh persists. The vault exists and the family have never allowed it to be opened: not even at the request of King Edward VII. But this story is one of many competing theories surrounding Cromwell’s final resting place, the strongest of which suggests that his body lies at the site of Tyburn near today’s Marble Arch, and that his head, having passed through many hands after it was blown down from its spike above Westminster Hall, is buried beneath the chapel of Sidney Sussex College.
We will probably never know the full truth. Whatever that
is, however, one thing is certain: that Oliver Cromwell in death is as extraordinary as he was in life.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I was first captivated by the extraordinary Oliver Cromwell and his equally extraordinary times as a teenager and have been studying the Civil Wars and Interregnum ever since. For my introduction to the man whose life would shape my own, I must thank my parents: my father Julian for being an avowed roundhead and avid reader of military history and historical fiction and my mother Joanna, another history lover, for spotting the first seeds of my interest and nurturing them with love and encouragement – even taking me on research trips. Without their support of my academic career, I would never have been in the position to write this book.
At university I was immensely fortunate to study under Dr David Smith and Professor John Morrill and wish to thank them and my mentor Dr Gabriel Glickman for their brilliance and their belief in me. The Cromwell Association has provided me with another source of wonderful colleagues and fellow enthusiasts and I am particularly grateful to those experts who read and commented on early copies of the book. Any unintentional inaccuracies are of course all my own.
This book would not exist without my fantastic agent Giles Milburn who pulled me from the slush pile and told me I could do this. He has shepherded me here and I am more grateful than I can say for his encouragement, good humour and brilliant advice and the efforts of his team at MMLA. My lovely publisher Victoria Oundjian and the whole team at Orion Fiction have been fabulous and I have loved every moment working with them. Special thanks must also go to my team at NRF – Ian Giles and Susanna Rogers in particular – for their support and enthusiasm for my writing endeavours.
I am very lucky to have a large, loving family and wonderful friends who have encouraged me for many years and shared in my delight at seeing The Puritan Princess come to life. Thank you all for your love and friendship. Finally, my deepest thanks are reserved for my two special boys. My little boy Theodore for being such a joy (and, crucially, a terrific sleeper!) and my wonderful husband Charlie for being my companion on every step of this journey: encouraging me, brainstorming and plotting with me, researching and editing my work, helping with author admin and looking after Teddy so I can write. Each day he explores the seventeenth century with me and leads me into historical worlds of his own.
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