‘Oh!’ said Seeker. ‘Got himself a lady friend then?’
‘Stablemaster’s bitch, from the mews.’
‘They’ll be fine pups then.’
‘I’m keeping one of them, and one of the gentleman here has offered me a good bit of money for the other two.’
‘Well, you see and charge him double what he offers.’ Seeker knew Nathaniel wouldn’t, but it made him feel better to say it all the same. ‘I suppose I’d better be getting on then.’
‘I suppose you’d better, Captain. It’s a long way to Massachusetts,’ he repeated.
Seeker bent down to tousle the head of each puppy. ‘You mind your master now.’ Then he started to walk. ‘Come on, boy,’ he said to his own dog, who turned once to look at Nathaniel before trotting after him.
He was almost at the gate when Nathaniel’s voice stopped him.
‘Captain? Will you ever be back?’
Seeker took a moment to look around him, to breathe in the air of the city, take in the sounds of its night. ‘I don’t know, lad,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t know.’
Author’s Note
At the foot of Spanjaardstraat in the city of Bruges, just across the Augustinians’ Bridge from the site of the former Augustinian priory, is a building known as Huis Den Noodt Gods. Alternative names have been the Phantom House (Spookhuis) or the House of Lamentations. Once a convent, this house is said to be the most haunted building in the city. Legend tells of a monk of the priory who used a secret tunnel going under the canal to visit one of the nuns of the religious house. When she fled from his declaration of love, he murdered her. The spirit of this young woman is said to haunt the House of Lamentations, giving the place its name. This is what gave me the idea for the entirely fictional events I portray as taking place there in the year 1658. The House of Lamentations should not be confused with the Engels Klooster, or English convent, which still exists on Carmersstraat and is still dedicated to the religious life. The events I portray as taking place in the Engels Klooster are also entirely fictional.
While Sint-Donatian’s cathedral and the Augustinian priory are both gone, the vast majority of the locations mentioned in The House of Lamentations are still to be found in Bruges. At the end of Carmersstraat, not far from the Engels Klooster, the Schuttersgilde Sint-Sebastiaan survives to the present day. Sint-Walburgakerk is still a living place of worship. The activities ascribed to the fictional Father Felipe are entirely of my invention. The Bouchoute house remains on the corner of the Markt, a restaurant now taking up its ground floor. The Huis van de Zeven Torens has been incorporated into an hotel. The Gruuthuse is a magnificent museum, open to the public, and incorporating the oratory from which I have Seeker spy upon the Cavaliers and Charles II as they meet in Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk. Also open to the public is the Hospital of Sint-Jans, one of Bruges’s most iconic buildings and now a hospital museum. The basement of the Oude Steen, one of Europe’s oldest prisons, with its grim displays of implements of torture, can also be visited. The exceptional Jeruzalemkapel founded six centuries ago by the Adornes family on the Adornesdomein – their private estate within the city – remains in the family’s ownership, and is open to the public. You can still have a beer at De Garre, or, like Seeker and the Cavaliers, take your supper at ’t Oud Handbogenhof or De Vlissinghe. A short canal-side cycle from Bruges is the small town of Damme, known today as Belgium’s Book Town. On one side of the square is De Grote Sterre, home to the Spanish military governor in the seventeenth century, now housing the information centre and a folklore museum. I would like to thank the custodians, past and present, of all these places for their dedication in preserving their heritage.
But why send Damian Seeker to Bruges? Because of Charles II. Aside from his disastrous adventure with the Scottish Covenanters (June 1650–September 1651) the young king spent the years between his father’s death in 1649 and his own Restoration in 1660 in exile in Europe. Initial sympathy for his plight was eroded over time, partly because of the behaviour of some of his followers, but in the main due to political expediency, as the increasing power and international profile of Oliver Cromwell forced foreign powers to recognise the Protectorate. Charles’s mother, Henrietta-Maria, had found sanctuary in her native France and his sister, the Princess of Orange, was resident in the United Provinces, yet both the United Provinces (1654) and France (1655) would come to terms with Cromwell’s government, and Charles found himself unwelcome in both. Having left Paris in 1654, he spent much of his time in Germany, particularly Cologne, but the outbreak of hostilities between England and Spain encouraged him to sign a treaty with Spain in 1656. He moved his small court from Cologne to Bruges, with a view to being near to hand should the Spaniards launch an invasion across the Channel. Such an invasion never happened, the King’s plans perpetually caught in the irreconcilable difficulty that a sufficient number of supporters in England could only be persuaded to rise on his behalf if they were assured of Spanish military support, while Spain would only agree to embark on an invasion attempt if there was sufficient evidence of support in England.
Added to this was the problem of money. Charles and his followers in exile were in desperate financial straits and he himself almost irretrievably caught up in labyrinthine Spanish bureaucratic protocols in attempts to extract from them his promised pension. The Spanish crown itself was at the time experiencing great financial difficulty and used their inability to host Charles appropriately as an excuse to keep him in relative obscurity, away from the centres of royal power in Madrid and Brussels. From around the summer of 1656 the exiled King was mainly resident in Bruges, long a popular place of Royalist resort and intrigue. It had been in Flanders that the plot to assassinate Oliver Cromwell (treated in Seeker book 4, The Bear Pit) had originated, hence my decision to send Damian Seeker to the city in early 1657 to keep an eye on potential plotters.
By the summer of 1658, Royalist hopes of Spanish help were utterly in tatters. With an eye to acquiring Dunkirk from the French and better controlling the Channel, Cromwell in 1657 had agreed to send six thousand troops to aid the French campaign against Spain in Flanders. This alliance heavily defeated Spanish and Stuart forces at the Battle of the Dunes in June 1658. Charles, desperate to lead his forces, which included Irish and Scots as well as English regiments, had not been allowed to fight. His brother, James, Duke of York, who had learned his craft in the armies of France and was hugely popular with soldiers on both sides, was forced to serve with the Spaniards, who lost twice the number of men as their opponents. Spanish forces then had to muster themselves for the march to protect Brussels from the advancing French forces. I would like to thank Doug Kemp of the Historical Novels Society for alerting me to Eva Scott’s The Travels of the King: Charles II in Germany and Flanders, 1654–1660 (1907), which was particularly useful in outlining the difficulties faced by Charles Stuart in Flanders in this period.
To military dejection on the continent was added the crushing of Royalists at home. Thurloe’s intelligence operatives were now so far embedded in Charles’s circle abroad and amongst supporters at home that their every plan reached the ears of Whitehall before it could be put into action. The discovery of plots by ‘The Great Trust’ – which had replaced ‘The Sealed Knot’ as the main clandestine Royalist network – was met on the Protectorate side by the re-establishment of the High Court of Justice, previously used to try Charles I. Public revulsion at the brutality of resultant executions of relatively minor figures, as well as the Protectorate’s understanding that its point had been made, eventually led to the High Court of Justice falling into disuse.
Having faced down Royalist plots and republican dissidence, and finally refused the Crown (May 1658) the Protector’s personal power was at its height, his position seemingly unassailable. But as the year 1658 progressed, shadows lengthened over Oliver Cromwell: the recurring illness, thought to have been malaria, which had dogged him since his first expedition to I
reland, laid him low. The deaths of a son-in-law, a favoured niece, his baby grandson and finally his favourite daughter, Bettie, seem to have been too much for him and he spent much of the summer at Hampton Court, bedridden and despondent. Charles Stuart, meanwhile, having grown bored of Bruges and with little else to do, spent that hot summer at Hoogstraten, just north of Antwerp, hunting and playing tennis, which is what he was doing when the astonishing news was brought to him that Oliver Cromwell was dead.
Cromwell had died on the afternoon of 3 September 1658, the anniversary of his victories at Dunbar and Worcester, as a tremendous storm raged over England. On his deathbed, he named his son Richard as his successor. Or so at least his advisers thought – they couldn’t really hear him properly. Despite the fears expressed by Damian Seeker in this book, England did not descend into a bloodbath. Rather, yet more ill-conceived Royalist plots came and went, and there ensued a mainly peaceful struggle between Army, Parliament, and the ineffectual new Lord Protector, Richard, who was induced to demit office in June 1659. The struggle came to an end when General Monck marched down from Edinburgh in early 1660 to restore the Long Parliament for long enough to vote for its own dissolution. There now seemed to be only one solution to England’s political impasse: on 8 May 1660, it was declared that Charles II had been King since 30 January 1649. The Stuarts were coming home.
Under the Stuarts, the fates of those who had held sway during the Republic varied widely. Some, like George Downing, who deserted the sinking ship of the Protectorate just in time, or cryptographer Samuel Morland, slipped smoothly into the new administration. Both would betray former comrades and intelligence agents. Others, such as John Thurloe and John Milton, suffered brief periods of imprisonment, Thurloe on his release working quietly for a time for the restored government. Those whom Charles held to be irredeemably responsible for the death of his father, however, were hunted down without mercy, some in England, some on the continent of Europe, and some, as detailed in Charles Spencer’s Killers of the King, and Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s The King’s Revenge, even to the Americas. But that’s another story.
Shona MacLean, Conon Bridge, March 2020
[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations Page 32