Rebels and Traitors (63 page)

Two further army reviews, at St Albans and Kingston, passed off peacefully. Parliament thanked Fairfax and promised to uphold his requests for redress of grievances. Some regiments made declarations of loyalty to him, Colonel Okey’s dragoon officers being particularly unctuous.

One reason the army capitulated was that the political situation changed. When the Agitators at Putney demanded to abolish the monarchy, King Charles took fright. Claiming that the Levellers intended to murder him, the King escaped from Hampton Court.

Against her expectations, the ending of the siege of Oxford brought Juliana Lovell a period of happiness as a mother and wife. For a short time she feared that Orlando had left England. Prince Rupert sailed to France; his brother Maurice to the Netherlands. At this point, the contempt Lovell had always felt for Rupert’s generalship, so often openly expressed, acted against him. He knew he had no chance of his name being put on the list of friends who received passports; he would be thanked for his service and told to save himself. Although Juliana did not immediately know it, Lovell decided to remain in England.

Being Lovell, he wasted no time on complaints. Without telling Juliana (though he did leave her a tender letter — albeit only a paragraph) he found an opportunity to escape from Oxford. After the New Model Army arrived, she had to submit to interrogation. She threw herself into the role of long-suffering wife, abandoned to her fate by a delinquent husband; she managed to bite her lip, while looking frightened but courageous. She did not need to weep; sensitive to upset, both her children were screaming so loudly in the kitchen that they were visibly disturbing the officer who questioned Juliana in the small parlour. And when did you last see your husband?’

She played simple. ‘When he went out for a scuttle of logs and never came in again.’

When?’

‘Certainly last Thursday week. I had my blue gown on, with the rent in the hem, and I do remember the meat was overdone at dinner …’

Clearly this prattling woman posed no danger. Equally clearly, she could not be allowed to continue to occupy such a grand house.

‘Oh! Will you turn me out on the streets with my little ones?’

‘Have you no friends to go to?’

‘I am an orphan. My foolish husband has been denounced by his good Parliamentarian family. I was married just as the war began and I have never known a settled life or the normal joys of peace.’

‘Well, there will be peace now!’ the captain assured her sanctimoniously as he quartered a large number of his soldiers in her house.

Enduring the enemy in her home was a bad experience. Fortunately it did not last. To Juliana’s amazement, Lovell reappeared in St Aldate’s, without any explanation. She had to stop him losing his temper at the New Model Army soldiers, but by warning him he was on a wanted list, she managed to keep him hidden. She wondered how the subterfuge could continue; however that was not Lovell’s plan. Wanting to use his family as a cover, he had come to fetch them. While the soldiers were out on duty, he produced a cart onto which with all-too-easy furtiveness he began to load their possessions. They owned more than when they arrived in Oxford as newlyweds. As well as purchases and the results of Lovell’s plundering, they had the McIlwaines’ Continental furniture.

And damme, whose terrible tuck is this?’ Lovell had discovered a sword under their bed. It was the blade he had picked up at Birmingham. ‘Have you taken a half-baked forgetful lover I don’t know about?’

‘You yourself gave it me for my protection, dearest.’ Juliana had been hoping to leave it behind. Whether or not he remembered the weapon, Orlando grunted and insisted that they bring it with them. He made a few feints with the blade, and shuddered fastidiously before packing it away.

‘You must be curious about our sudden move,’ Orlando then acknowledged to Juliana, as she and her maid Mercy Tulk manhandled a court cupboard out of the back door.

‘Oh, I fully understand,’ his wife murmured, controlling her breath and her sense of injustice as her husband merely busied himself counting dining chairs. The cupboard had bruised Mercy’s hip and fallen on Juliana’s foot. Were it night, this would be a moonlit flit.’

Lovell looked put out.

He had found them somewhere to live, a small farmhouse on the estate of a Royalist, Sir Lysander Pelham of Pelham Hall in Sussex. Mercy Tulk refused to go with them, preferring to stay in the town she knew; she would return to her old mistress, the midwife. Whatever happened to faithful servants who would travel with you anywhere? wondered Juliana, though she knew the answer.

They then lived in Sussex for over a year. Disillusioned by Royalist failure, or so he said, Lovell played no part in the last flares of resistance that Fairfax and the New Model mopped up in the West and Wales. The King was at Newcastle, then Holdenby House. So long as Charles toyed with agreeing to impose Presbyterianism, he only antagonised Lovell. Lovell hated any authoritarian government.

‘Should you then join this new radical movement, dearest? Become a Leveller?’

He roared with indignation at that too.

Once the Levellers seemed to be holding sway in the Parliamentarian army, Juliana hardly dared bring a news-sheet into the house. Lovell procured them anyway at the nearest market town, winding himself into a fury over the numerous reports of Remonstrances and Declarations, like a man picking at a half-healed scab, unable to leave it alone. ‘Damme, I know my father and my brother Ralph will go into ecstasies at this fantasy of birthrights.’

‘I believe the Levellers claim we are all born equal under God. Would you not like to have natural parity with Ralph?’ asked Juliana wickedly.

‘Sweetheart, I am equal to Ralph any day!’

‘You have not suffered like him.’

‘Ah, Juliana, do not hold my luck in the field against me. Estates cannot be divided up; it would diminish them.’ This was an intriguing glimpse of Lovell as the scion of landed gentry. He had no bitterness; he shrugged and made his own way. That he went off abroad at only sixteen to do it was simply precocious. The pity was that he broke with his family. Their differences were almost nothing to do with politics, though Lovell was becoming more and more the dedicated Royalist and the next phase of his career would confirm that.

Sir Lysander Pelham, their landlord and patron, looked like a barrel on legs, though some of it was due to enormous folds of clothing on a man with short thighs. He wore a huge hat with a sweeping brim, burgeoning with white ostrich feathers, and rough-hewn cavalry boots of enormous width, over which he was prone to tripping, especially when in sack. This was most of the time. Calling for a cup of sack was the noble Lysander’s idea of conversation. When he wanted to sound cosmopolitan he roared for a
gobletto di sachietti-
a phrase he claimed as his own invention, proudly holding the opinion that the English knew more about foreign languages than the foolish foreigners who spoke them
.

Among country squires, Sir Lysander did verge on sophistication; he possessed rags of Latin, Greek and several European tongues, knew a quarter of a treatise on mathematics and a glimmer of astronomy, was haunted by memories of books he had half-read twenty years ago, and had once met Sir Francis Bacon (who was by then extremely elderly and mistook him for a cook). Sir Lysander had a heart of gold — though, he claimed, very little money. Seven generations of Pelhams had spent their lives in royal service, adroitly dodging all changes of religion and monarch so that not one ever fell out of favour or was beheaded. By never entertaining any monarch at the Hall, they also managed not to go bankrupt, though since it never received extravagant modernisation to please royalty, their home did now look old-fashioned and rundown.

When the civil war began, Sir Lysander chose his side in the same spirit as Sir Ralph Verney who had famously explained:

Lysander had devoted himself to the Royalist cause from the day King Charles set up his standard at Nottingham. When the royal standard fell down that stormy night and everyone else hid away in their lodgings, the Sussex knight had stood grappling with the pole and striving to hold the soaking wet flag upright for two hours, notwithstanding the rain and darkness and the fact that his cries for sack to sustain him went unheeded. Once he recovered from the ague he caught that dark night, he fought valiantly at every skirmish and battle that presented itself before his regiment — which Lovell described to Juliana as ‘flybitten as any other farming tenants mounted on carthorses’ — until his great faithful charger lay down exhausted at Naseby Weeping, Sir Lysander then announced, If my dear Smudge can no longer bear me, it is a sign of God’s will that I must retire from the fray. Henceforth I shall support my beloved sovereign only with my prayers.’

He was a widower. The Pelham line would die out. All four of Sir Lysander’s sons — Phillip, Jeremy, Hengist and Little Barty, who was only fifteen — had perished fighting for the King. Juliana suspected that Lovell was hoping to ingratiate himself so he might be made the knight’s heir. If so, he had reckoned without Sir Lysander’s forthright daughters, Bessy and Susannah, not to mention their husbands. The girls arrived in carriages from different directions, each nursing an infant at the breast and towing a cowed spouse. ‘Pulled by the nose!’ muttered Sir Lysander to Lovell. ‘I would get more spunk from Hercules and Ioleus.’

Hercules and Ioleus were his two white-faced bullocks, all he had left of a once-great herd after comprehensive plundering by one army and another. His trees were felled, his horses and cattle stolen, his palings broken down, his barns raided and his house robbed out, with even the pillows slit open and their feathers scattered over half the county. The two bullocks had been somehow left behind and became rather close friends. Sir Lysander explained to Juliana that they had lofty ancient Greek ideals and earthy ancient Greek habits. ‘The love between males, which is unselfish, philosophical — and requires from the parties some adaptability in performance.’

Juliana cast her eyes down. ‘I never heard of this before!’

‘Then you never were in military quarters, madam.’

Untrue. Juliana thought back pensively to when Fairfax’s New Model Army shared her house in Oxford. All she remembered were constant filth from muddy boots, queues day and night for the overflowing privy, endless demands for bread and butter and the men’s tireless stares of disapproval for her and her little household. They kept Mercy and her out of the kitchen while they let the fire go out. When they wanted to make Juliana feel a sinful malignant, they piously sang psalms for hours, once trapping her son Tom in the room with them, until he bit a sergeant. The worst of it all had been the necessity to endure what was done. To complain risked more bad behaviour and uncertain official reprisals.

Now life was better. Although Orlando, who was ostensibly the knight’s estate manager, often came in with his boots on after tramping through farmyards, Juliana only had to mop up after his one pair. She had trained the boys to sit on a bench and pull off their dirty shoes when they were called in for dinner. Tom and Val ran free in chicken-run and orchard, while as a family who lived in their own accommodation, generally they were left to their own devices.

Attempts at household regulation still foundered on Orlando’s free-booting habits. Juliana did sometimes wonder how such a man could have been a competent soldier and whether he saw their life here only as some kind of game. He came and went in disorderly bursts. He continued to excite their sons at inappropriate moments, taking them from Juliana’s lap when she was quietly reading to them, then when he remembered business of his own needing attention, he abruptly passed them back to her, stirred up and fractious.

Thomas was approaching four, Valentine had had his first birthday just after Oxford fell and was now unsteadily toddling. When Sir Lysander took Orlando on a trip to London (for reasons that were not quite clear), toys for which both boys were far too young were brought back. Given the warlike period, it was no surprise when Tom received a gun and even Val was given a flat-cast pewter cavalier, pressed out of metal. ‘I won’t have my boys play with dolls, Juliana!’

‘Valentine is still in baby skirts, Orlando; he loves his doll.’

‘Nonsense. Look at the exquisite detailing. I had a ship of the same type, with rigging and cannon and a wavy waterline —’

Val’s soldier, on which he soon cut his lip, was one-dimensional, whereas Tom’s copper toy musket was fully modelled, with imitation scroll motifs and a tiny trigger. It really fired. For a mother it was a nightmare. The harder Juliana tried to hide the hideous little weapon, the more Orlando conspired with Thomas and made her out to be a spoilsport. Fortunately when the toy misfired, it was Orlando who had it and was burned in the hand — after which he banned the gun and gave it away to an ostler’s child. (Juliana found the ostler and warned him of the danger, but he had been in the Earl of Essex’s infantry and told her he had spiked it and made all safe; his sneer was telling.) Tom cried for four days. Juliana was left to deal with that.