The Forest (55 page)

If the evidence of history is anything to go by it seems clear that members of the royal house of Stuart only make good monarchs if they have been properly broken in first.

King James had. His miserable years in Scotland, where by tradition the knife was never far from any monarch’s throat, had taught him to be canny. Whatever he might believe about the divine right of kings, he never in practice pushed his English Parliament too far. He was also quite flexible. His dream was to act as a broker between the two religious camps, marrying his children to both Protestant and Catholic royal houses, and seeking toleration for both religions in England. It was a dream largely unrealized; Europe was not ready for toleration yet. But, for all his faults, he tried. His son Charles, however, had received no such apprenticeship and displayed the Stuart inflexibility at its worst.

Sometimes it is a very great mistake to give a large idea, even a good one, to a small mind. And the idea of the divine right of kings was a very bad idea indeed. If one strips away the duplicity with which he tried to accomplish his aims, there is something naive and almost childish about the lectures that Charles I used to give his subjects. Although not without talent – his eye for the arts was remarkable – this belief in his rights blinded his intelligence to even the simplest political realities. No English king, not even mighty Harry when he kicked the Pope out of his Church, had ever made such claims to divine authority. No ruler, not even the Conqueror himself, had thought you could ignore ancient law and custom. Charles wanted to rule absolutely, as the French king was starting to do; but that wasn’t the English way.

It had not been long, therefore, before King Charles and the English Parliament were at loggerheads. The Puritans suspected that he wanted to bring back Catholicism – after all, his French wife was Catholic. Merchants disliked his habit of raising forced loans. Members of Parliament were furious to be told that he considered them, in effect, nothing more than his servants. By 1629 Charles had dissolved Parliament and decided to rule without it if he could.

The only problem was, what was he to do for money? Charles wasn’t desperate. As long as he didn’t get involved in any wars – that was always a huge expense – he could just about get by. There were customs and other dues, and the profits from the crown lands. But still he always needed more. One thing he did was sell titles. The new order of baronets was a nice little earner. And as he and his advisers looked about for other assets to exploit someone had suggested: ‘What about the royal forests?’

What were they good for? No one was quite sure. There were the deer, of course. The only time the royal court usually bothered about the deer was for a coronation or some other huge feast, when they provided a large supply of venison. There was timber. That needed more looking into. And there ought to be some income from the fines levied by the royal forest courts.

It was then that a clever official suggested: ‘Why not have a Forest Eyre?’

It was an ingenious suggestion because, once it had been explained to him, nothing could have been better calculated to appeal to King Charles. The Forest Eyre went back to Plantagenet times. Every so often – years might pass between these visitations – the king’s special justices would go down to inspect the whole system, correct any maladministration, clear up any outstanding cases and, you could be sure, levy some handsome fines. As far as anyone could remember, there hadn’t been an Eyre in generations. Old King Harry had held one a century ago. Since then, everyone had forgotten about them. It was just what King Charles loved: an ancient royal prerogative his naughty people had forgotten. In 1635, to everyone’s great annoyance, there had been an Eyre in the New Forest.

The results had been quite encouraging. The regular Forest court had been galvanized. Three huge thefts of timber – a thousand trees at a time – had come to light and elicited three stupendous fines of a thousand, two thousand and three thousand pounds. This was an enormous haul. But it was not these great fines that had infuriated the Forest. It was the attack on the ordinary folk.

That summer of 1635 there had been no less than two hundred and sixty-eight prosecutions brought before the Forest court. The average had usually been about a dozen. The Forest had never seen anything like it. Every inch of land they had discreetly taken in the last generation, every cottage quietly erected, all were exposed, all fined. There was not a village or family in the entire Forest that hadn’t been caught. None of the fines were lenient; some were vicious. Labourers occupying illegal cottages were fined three pounds. You could buy a dozen sheep, or a couple of precious cows for that, when most smallholders had milk from only one. A yeoman was fined a hundred pounds for poaching. A few yards of ground taken for some beehives, a troublesome dog, some illegally grazed sheep – all resulted in abrupt fines. As always, when King Charles set out to assert himself, he was thorough.

Was he within his rights? Not a doubt of it. But with his typical lack of tact, the Stuart king had managed to find an entire population that was naturally well disposed towards him and alienate them at a single stroke.

When the political quarrels of the seventeenth century have finally died away – which as yet, in England, they have not – Charles Stuart will surely emerge on to history’s page, once and for all, neither as a villain nor a martyr, but as a very silly man.

And now every cottager’s right to his ancient common rights was to be listed. To Pride it seemed interference for its own sake. Alice had other ideas.

‘The word in London’, her father had told her the day before, ‘is that the king wants to make an inventory of the whole area. And do you know why? He wants to offer the New Forest and Sherwood Forest together, as security for a loan! Imagine it,’ he continued with a shake of the head, ‘the whole Forest could be sold off to pay the king’s creditors. That’s what’s behind all this, in my opinion.’

When Pride had finished his brief account she thanked him pleasantly and then enquired: ‘Where’s Gabriel Furzey? Shouldn’t he be here?’

‘Probably,’ Pride answered truthfully.

‘Well.’ Alice might be only eighteen, but she knew she wasn’t standing any nonsense from Gabriel. ‘You tell him from me, if you please, that if he wants his rights recorded he’d better come now. Otherwise they won’t be.’

So, grinning quietly to himself, Pride went off and delivered the message.

When one looked at Gabriel Furzey and Stephen Pride, it was not hard to guess what the attitude of each might be to the inquiry. Pride – lean, keen-eyed – was every inch an independent inhabitant of the Forest. But he had his relationship with authority too. His ancestors might have grumbled about the existence of any outside order in the Forest, but natural intelligence and self-interest had led the Prides, for a long time now, into a calculated relationship with the powers that be. When the representatives of the vills attended the Forest courts there was sure to be a Pride or two among them. Occasionally one would even take a junior position in the Forest hierarchy – an under-forester, for instance, or one of the agisters who collected the fees. Here and there a Pride had graduated from the tenant into the yeoman class, owning land in his own name; and as often as not, when the local gentlemen chose some yeomen to sit with them on juries they’d be glad enough to choose a Pride. Their reason was very simple: these Prides were intelligent, and, even in a disagreement, men in authority know that it is always easier to deal with an intelligent man than a slow-witted one. A gentleman forester felt on firm ground if he said, ‘Pride thinks he can take care of that,’ or ‘Pride says it won’t work’.

And if some well-meaning person were to suggest that Pride might have been doing a little discreet poaching on the side, the informer was more likely to be met with a quiet smile and a murmured, ‘I dare say he has,’ than any thanks – there being always a sporting chance that the gentleman receiving this information had been doing a little of the same himself.

But Gabriel Furzey, short, adipose – Alice used to think, rather harshly, that he resembled an irritable turnip – had not reached an accommodation with anyone and, as far as Pride knew, had no plans for doing so.

When Stephen told him that Alice was waiting for him, therefore, he just shook his head.

‘What’s the point of writing things down? I know my rights. Always had ’em, haven’t we?’

‘That’s true. But …’

‘Well, then. Waste of time, isn’t it?’

‘All the same, Gabriel, you’d better go, I reckon.’

‘No, I ain’t goin’.’ He gave a snort. ‘I don’t need that girl to tell me what rights I got. I know. See?’

‘She’s not bad, Gabriel. It isn’t like that anyway.’

‘She tell me to come, didn’t she?’

‘Well, in a manner of speaking.’

‘Well, I won’t then.’

‘But Gabriel …’

‘An’ you can go along too,’ Furzey suddenly shouted. ‘Go on …’ This last was a sort of bray: ‘Goo … oon.’

So Stephen Pride left and, shortly after, so did Alice. And nobody wrote anything down about Gabriel and his rights.

It didn’t seem to matter.

1648

December. A cold breeze in a grey dawning.

A single man on a grey horse – in his forties; good-looking; dark hair greying, grey eyes watching – stared from the ridge by Lymington across the salt marshes to the small grey castle of Hurst in the distance.

Grey sea, grey sky, grey foam by a grey shore, soundless because distant. From that fort by the winter sea very soon would issue, under close guard, the small wreck of a captured king.

John Lisle pursed his lips and waited. He had thought of riding down to join the cavalcade, but then decided against it. It is not, after all, an easy thing to meet a king whose head, very soon, you plan to cut off. Conversation is difficult.

But it was not the fate of King Charles that concerned him so much. He cared nothing for him. It was the quarrel he had just had with his wife that worried him – the first serious crisis in the twelve happy years of their marriage. The trouble was, he couldn’t see a way out.

‘Don’t go to London, John. I beg you.’ Again and again she had pleaded through the night. ‘No good will come of this. I can feel it. This will be the death of you.’ How could she know such a thing? It didn’t make sense, anyway. It was not like her to be so timid. ‘Stay down here, John. Or go abroad. Make any excuse, but don’t go. Cromwell will use you.’

‘No man uses me, Alice,’ he had responded irritably.

But it hadn’t stopped her. And finally, some time before daybreak she had turned on him in bitter reproach. ‘I think you must choose, John, between your family and your ambition.’

The absurd unfairness of this had struck him with such force and so hurtfully that he could not speak. He had got up and ridden out of Albion House before dawn.

His eyes remained fixed on the distant fort. Like it or not, the thought kept nagging at him: what if she were right?

Although, two years after their marriage, her father’s death had left Alice the mistress of large estates, it had never occurred to John Lisle to retire to the Forest and give up his career. Nor had Alice ever suggested it. However much she loved him, she probably would have scorned a husband who only lived off her wealth. Besides, he had two sons from his first marriage to provide for, as well as the children that he and Alice had soon started to have together. He had been a hard-working lawyer and a good one. He had risen in his profession. And when, after eleven years of personal rule, King Charles had finally been forced to call a Parliament in 1640, John Lisle had been chosen, as a man of wealth and stature, to represent the city of Winchester.

Did that make him too ambitious? It was easy for Alice to say such a thing. She had never known anything but security. Disgrace, failure, ruin – she had never felt their keen bite. There had been times as a student, with no allowance from his drunken father and too proud to beg from friends, when John had gone without food. For Alice a career was a pleasant matter, something to be taken for granted, but from which one could always choose to retire. For him it was life or death. William Albion had been right. There was steel in John Lisle’s soul. And his ambition told him he must go to London.

They were coming out of Hurst Castle now, a party of horsemen. They started to ride along the narrow strand with the gunmetal sea behind them. King Charles was easy to spot because he was the smallest.

The party was taking a strange route. Instead of passing straight up the Forest centre through Lyndhurst, they were skirting its edge, riding westwards to Ringwood and then over the top to Romsey on their way, in stages, to Windsor Castle. Did they imagine anyone would try to rescue Charles in the Forest? It seemed unlikely.

Since King Charles had plunged the country into civil war, the New Forest had remained quiet. The nearby ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, like most of the English ports and the city of London, were for Parliament. Sentiment in Lymington had run with the bigger ports. Royalist gentry had tried to secure the Isle of Wight and Winchester for the king, but they couldn’t keep it up. The Forest itself, however, containing no strongholds of any kind, had been left undisturbed. The only difference from normal life was that, since the royal government had broken down nobody had paid any of the forest officers. So they had paid themselves, from the gentleman foresters down to the humblest cottager, in timber and deer and anything else the place provided. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know how.

‘The king can’t exactly argue about it, can he?’ Stephen Pride had remarked genially to Alice one day. Lisle wondered whether the new government, whatever form it finally assumed, would take an interest in the Forest.

Then he transferred his gaze back to the distant figures riding along the strand. How was it possible, he asked himself for the hundredth time, for that small person down there to have made so much trouble?

Perhaps, given the king’s views about his rights, the war had always been inevitable, from the day when Charles came to the throne. He just could not accept the notion of political compromise. He had kept councillors his Parliament detested, raised new taxes, favoured the Catholic powers his people hated and finally tried to force his bishops, who were so ‘High Church’ they could almost be taken for papists, on to the stern Calvinistic Scots. This last act of madness had brought the Scots out in armed rebellion and given Parliament the chance to impose its will. Strafford, his hated minister, had been executed; the Archbishop of Canterbury imprisoned in the Tower of London. But it had been no good. The two sides had been too far apart by then. They had drifted into civil war; thanks, in the end, to Oliver Cromwell and his ‘Roundheads’, the king had lost.