The Forest (61 page)

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.

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.

Yet even in defeat, King Charles would not deal honestly with his opponents. For Lisle, the last straw had been after the defeat of the king at the final battle of Naseby. Captured
documents had proved beyond a doubt that, if he could, Charles would bring an army from Ireland or from Catholic France to subdue his people. ‘How can we believe he wouldn’t allow papism back into England, too?’ Lisle had asked. And when he had been sent with other commissioners to negotiate with Charles on the Isle of Wight, where the king had been held before his transfer to Hurst Castle, he had perceived exactly what kind of man he had to deal with. ‘He will say anything; he will play for time, because he thinks he rules by divine right and therefore he owes us nothing at all. He has the same character as his grandmother Mary Queen of Scots: he will go on plotting until the day his head is off.’

But this, of course, was just the trouble. It was what worried Alice and many others like her. It was why, now, there was a split between the many in Parliament who wanted a compromise and the sterner souls in the army, led by Cromwell, who believed that the king must die. How could you try to execute a king, the Lord’s anointed? Such a thing had never been done. What did it mean? Where would it lead?

Strangely enough, it was precisely because he was a lawyer that John Lisle saw that a legal solution to the problem of the king was impossible.

The constitution of England was actually rather vague. Ancient common law, custom, precedent, and the relative wealth and strength of the people concerned had governed the politics of each generation. When Parliament declared that it had been consulted since the reign of Edward I, nearly four centuries before, Parliament was right. When the king said he could call or dismiss Parliament as he liked he was also right. When Parliament, looking for written authority, appealed to Magna Carta they were not quite right, because that document was an agreement between King John and some rebel barons in 1215, which the Pope had ruled was illegal. On the other hand the implication of
Magna Carta, which no one had ever denied before, was that kings must govern according to custom and law. Even bad King John never invoked the idea of divine right and would have thought it very funny. When Parliament rediscovered the medieval form of impeachment, which everyone had forgotten for centuries, to attack Charles’s ministers, they had law on their side. When they claimed, shortly before the Civil War began, that Parliament had the right to veto the king’s choice of ministers and to control the army they hadn’t a legal leg to stand on.

But at the end of the day, it seemed to Lisle, none of it mattered. ‘Don’t you see,’ he had explained to Alice, ‘he has chosen a position from which, legally, he cannot be budged. He says he is the divinely appointed fount of law. Therefore, whatever his Parliament does, if he does not like it, will be illegal. Cromwell wants to try him. Very well, he will say the court is illegal. And many will hesitate and be confused.’ His incisive legal mind saw it all with complete clarity. ‘The thing is a perfect circle. He can continue thus until the Second Coming. It’s endless.’

But to break with law and custom: that was dangerous too. Defeating an impossible king was one thing, but destroy him entirely and what would arise in his place? Many of the Parliament men were gentlemen of property. They wanted order; they favoured Protestantism, preferably without King Charles’s bishops; but order, social and religious. Many of the army, and smaller townsmen however, were starting to talk of something else. These Independents wanted complete freedom for each parish to choose its own form of religion – so long as it was Protestant, of course. Even more alarming, the party of Levellers in the army wanted a general democracy, votes for all men and perhaps even the abolition of private property. No wonder, then, if gentlemen in Parliament had hesitated and hoped to reach a settlement with the king.

Until two weeks ago. For then, finally, the army had
struck. Colonel Thomas Pride had marched into Parliament and arrested any members who wouldn’t co-operate with the army. It was a simple coup, done while Cromwell was tactfully absent. Pride’s Purge, it was called.

‘Do you suppose’, Alice had asked with a smile, ‘that Colonel Pride has any relationship with our Prides here in the Forest?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I can see Stephen Pride arresting the Members of Parliament.’ She had chuckled. ‘He’d do it very well.’

But that had been the last time she had been able to see the funny side of the business. As the December days wore on, and the time for Charles’s removal from the little fort on the Forest shore drew closer she had become more and more gloomy.

‘Anyone would think it was you or I who was going to trial,’ Lisle had remarked testily. But this did no good at all.

What made it worse was that he himself had heard that several of the prominent lawyers on the Parliamentary side were discreetly withdrawing from the process. When she said, ‘Cromwell needs lawyers, that’s why he wants you,’ he knew, in fact, that she was right.

So what if he didn’t go up to London? What if he pleaded sickness and stayed down in the Forest? Was Cromwell going to come and arrest him? No. Nothing would happen. He’d be left alone. But if he ever wanted any appointment or favour from the new regime he could forget it.

Ambition, then. She was right. It was his ambition drawing him to the trial of the king.

And his conscience, too, damn it, he thought angrily. He was going because he knew the thing had to be done and he was man enough to do it. His conscience, too.

And ambition.

The little king was turning off the end of the strand now. A few moments more and the party disappeared from sight. Slowly, reluctantly, John Lisle also turned and rode back
towards his house. He and Alice had had several homes in the last ten years. They had been in London and Winchester, on the Isle of Wight, where he was busy repairing his own family estates, at Moyles Court in the Avon valley or at Alice’s favourite Albion House. As it was almost Christmas now they were in Albion House.

What was he going to say to her on his return?

He had thought she might be asleep when he got back, but she was waiting for him, still in her nightclothes, although wrapped up, thank God, in the chilly air by the open door. Had she been waiting there since he left? A pang of pain and a rush of tenderness passed through him. Her eyes were red. He dismounted and went to her. ‘I’ll stay until after Christmas,’ he said. ‘Then, after that, we’ll think again.’ He told himself that this last bit was true, as if he had not already made up his mind.