The Forest (64 page)

They were allowed, in that last week, to see him twice. The first time came as a shock to Thomas. Although, thanks to his wife, he had been provided with a clean shirt, Colonel Penruddock was looking gaunt and haggard in his small cell. His gaolers had not let him wash as often as he wished and Thomas was aware of a certain grimy odour in his father’s presence. The effect of this, however, after the initial shock, was to make him even more moved than he might have been otherwise. The little children just stared at their unkempt father in confusion. He spoke to them all in his usual calm and kindly way, blessed them and kissed them and told them they must be brave.

‘Perhaps’, Thomas heard him murmur to their mother, ‘Cromwell may relent. But I do not think so.’

The second occasion was more difficult. With time passing, although she tried to keep calm, his mother had become more and more distracted. As the day of the execution approached she seemed to think that her appeal to
Alice Lisle was sure to bring relief. ‘I can’t understand why it’s taking so long,’ she would suddenly break out plaintively. ‘The reprieve must come.’ She’d frown. ‘It must do.’ She also for some reason would return in her mind, again and again, to the fact that the sheriff’s men had turned her out of her house for two days. ‘To think they could do such a thing,’ she would exclaim.

They knew their second visit would be their last because the execution was to be the following day. They went there in the afternoon and entered the prison.

But for some reason there was a delay. They had to wait a while in an outer chamber, where they found themselves in the company of the senior gaoler who passed the time by thoughtfully eating a pie and picking his teeth. He had a dirty grizzled beard, which he had not trimmed because, nowadays, there was no one to make him. They tried not to look at him.

But he looked at them. They interested him. He did not like royalists, especially cavalier gentry, which these Penruddocks were. If the father of these children was about to have his head cut off, so much the better. He observed their aristocratic clothes – lace and satin for the girls; why, the younger boy had little rosettes on his shoes – and wondered idly how they would look after he and his men had had a chance to spoil them. He could see the clothes in tatters, the boys with a black eye or two and the mother …

The mother was jabbering on about something now. She’d hoped for a reprieve. That was a joke. No one was going to reprieve Penruddock, even he knew that. But he listened curiously all the same. She’d hoped Judge Lisle would speak to Cromwell. He’d heard of Lisle. Never seen him, though. Close to Cromwell he’d heard. The woman had written to his wife. A useless hope, obviously, but the wives of condemned men sometimes got like that.

‘Lisle, did you say,’ he suddenly interjected with a smile, to throw her off guard. ‘Judge Lisle?’

‘Yes, good man.’ She turned to him eagerly. ‘Has anything been heard from him, do you know?’

He paused. He intended to savour this. ‘The warrant for your husband’s death is made out by Lisle. In his own hand. He was with Cromwell when he signed it.’

The effect was delicious. He watched her face fall into abject confusion. She seemed to collapse and wither before his eyes. He had never seen anything equal to it. The fact that he hadn’t the least idea whether Judge Lisle was even within a hundred miles of Cromwell or the warrant made it even better. ‘’Tis well known,’ he added for artistic effect.

‘But I wrote again to his wife,’ poor Mrs Penruddock wailed.

‘They say it’s she’, he went on blandly, ‘who especially urged the poor Colonel’s death.’ The suggestion that he pitied her cursed husband made the thing sound more plausible. The woman almost fainted. The eldest boy looked ready for murder. And he was just trying to think whether there was anything else he could invent to taunt these unhappy people when a signal from one of the guards told him that the prisoner was ready.

‘Time to see the Colonel, now,’ he announced. And so the Penruddocks passed from his presence. Being unversed in the practices of malice, it had not occurred to them that every word the gaoler said had been a lie.

Colonel Penruddock had done all he could to prepare himself for his final meeting with his children. They found him washed, brushed and in good spirits. To each he spoke cheerfully and calmly, and told them to be brave for his sake.

‘Remember,’ he said, ‘no matter what difficulties may face you, they are still small beside the sufferings of Our Lord. And, if men revile you, that is nothing when He watches over you and loves you with a love far greater than they can ever know.’

To his wife he spoke what words of comfort he could and
then he made her promise that she would take the children out of Exeter at first light the following morning. ‘At first light, I beg you. You must be well clear of the city and on your way before morning is stirring. Do not stop until you get to Chard.’ This was nearly twenty-five miles, a good day’s journey.

Mrs Penruddock nodded and murmured a few words, but she seemed to be in a daze. As for Thomas, he could only bow his head to hide the tears when his father embraced him and told him to be brave. Almost before he knew what was happening the door of the cell was being opened and they were being taken out. He tried to look back at his father. But they had shut the door again.

It was not until ten that night that Mrs Penruddock seemed to spring to life. The smaller children were asleep in the big chamber they all shared at the inn, but Thomas was awake when she suddenly sat bolt upright, with a look of horror on her pale face and cried: ‘I never bade him adieu.’

She started to search for pen and paper on the table. ‘I know it’s here,’ she murmured plaintively. ‘I must write a letter,’ she added with urgency.

Thomas found her what she needed and watched as she wrote. It was hard to know what to make of his mother. When she had the will to do so, when she concentrated her mind, she could express herself with dignity; but then, in almost the same breath, some other petty or homely thought would come into her mind and cause her suddenly to veer off her course entirely. So it was with her letter. It started so well:

My sad parting was so far from making me forget you, that I scarce thought upon myself since, but wholly upon you. Those dear embraces which I yet feel, and shall never lose … have charmed my soul to such a reverence of your remembrance …

Yet a few lines later the memory of the sheriff’s men suddenly intruded.

’Tis too late to tell you what I have done for you; how turned out of doors because I came to beg mercy …

And then returned once more, abruptly, to a lovely and passionate ending:

Adieu, therefore, ten thousand times, my dearest dear! Your children beg your blessing, and present their duties to you.

It was eleven at night when she finished, but a groom, when handsomely paid, agreed to take the letter to the gaol and returned a little after midnight with a brief and loving reply in the Colonel’s hand.

Not until the early hours, however, did Thomas fall asleep.

It would never have happened if Mrs Penruddock had been on time. She had tried to be. By eight o’clock on that pale grey morning the carriage had already been waiting at the gateway of the inn for nearly an hour.

She wanted to be gone. She not only meant to obey her husband, but she wanted to remove herself from the scene, to close herself off – and her children, of course – from the terrible business, from the loss she could not bear to think about. This was no intentional delay. But first one thing was missing, then another; then the youngest girl chose that moment to be sick. By nine, Mrs Penruddock was in such a state of fretful agitation that she lost her purse and had a quarrel with the innkeeper who thought he might not be paid. Unthinkingly, she warned him that if he didn’t mind his tongue she would surely see her husband should hear
about it. Which made him give her such a strange look; and as she realized with an awful coldness that in a few moments, dear God, she’d have no husband and perhaps then not even money to pay any more innkeepers at all, she might well have burst into tears; except that now her native strength came back to her rescue again and she came to herself enough to realize where her purse might be, and to find it. So then, at last, with ten o’clock sounding from a bell nearby, she mustered her children and bustled them to the carriage, and called for Thomas.

But Thomas had gone.

He couldn’t help it. He had walked along the street and followed the passing crowd which, he guessed, must be going towards the place of execution. For how, being in the city still, could he lose the opportunity to see the father he loved so much, and worshipped, one last time?

He could not get close when he came to the place because there was such a crowd; and besides, even if he could have got to the front, to the very foot of the scaffold, he did not dare, for he knew that by his father’s orders he should not be there.

But he found a cart to stand on, along with a dozen apprentices and other urchins, and from there he had a perfect view.

There was a platform in the middle of the place. They had already set a block upon it. Half a dozen soldiers guarded it.

He had waited a quarter of an hour before the parties arrived. They came on horseback, followed by a cart with a guard of foot soldiers carrying muskets and pikes. In the cart, in a clean white shirt, his long brown hair tied back, stood his father.

The sheriff mounted the platform first, then two other men, then the executioner wearing a black mask, carrying an axe that glinted silver. They escorted his father up next.

They did not waste undue time. The sheriff in a loud voice read out the death warrant for the crime of treason. His father moved forward with the executioner towards the block. He said a word to the sheriff, who nodded; and the executioner stood back while his father produced a piece of paper at which he glanced. Then, looking calmly over the crowd, Colonel Penruddock spoke.

‘Gentlemen,’ his voice rang out. ‘It has ever been the custom of all persons whatsoever, when they come to die, to give some satisfaction to the world, whether they be guilty of the fact of which they stand charged. The crime for which I am now to die is loyalty, in this age called high treason. I cannot deny …’

The speech was clear, but long. The crowd was fairly quiet, but Thomas could neither hear nor follow all of it. He understood the sense, however. His father had some points to make about how he had been treated, also it was important that he clear others, especially those close to the Sealed Knot, of any complicity. All this he did simply and well. Only when it was done did he express the hope that England would one day be restored under its rightful king. Then he commended his soul to God.

One of the sheriff’s men stepped forward and scooped up his father’s hair under a cap he slipped over his head. He glanced at the executioner who nodded.

They were going to the block, now. His father knelt down and kissed the block, then, still kneeling, turned to the executioner. He said something. The executioner presented the head of the axe to him and he kissed it. The crowd was utterly silent. Colonel Penruddock said something else, Thomas could not hear what, then turned back to the block again. Silence. He was going to lay his head over the block.

It was the last moment. Thomas wanted to cry out. Why had he waited so long, until they were all so silent? He wished he had cried out, no matter that he had disobeyed, to let his father know that he was with him, even at the last.
A cry of love. Was it too late? Could he not? He felt the terrible shock of parting, the surge of love. ‘Father!’ He wanted to shout. ‘Father!’ Couldn’t he? He took a breath.

His father’s head went down on to the block. Thomas opened his mouth. Nothing. The axe fell.

‘Father!’

He saw a sudden spurt of redness, then his father’s head, falling, with a small bump, to the ground.

For Alice Lisle the years that followed Penruddock’s Rising did not bring peace of mind. Superficially, it might have seemed that she had everything. Her husband’s career went from strength to strength. In London they had acquired a fine house in the pleasant riverside suburb of Chelsea. They and their children were close to Cromwell and his family, joining the same Puritan group at worship. The Cromwell family even took an estate near Winchester, not far from one of the handsome places that John Lisle had acquired in that part of the county. The Lisles were rich. When Cromwell had made a new house of peers he had chosen John Lisle to be one of them, so that now the lawyer was called Lord Lisle and Alice was his lady.

The Protector was all powerful. His army had crushed Scotland and Ireland. England’s trade increasingly dominated the high seas. The Commonwealth of England had never been mightier. Yet despite all this, Alice was uneasy; and there were days when she felt the same apprehension as she had that grey winter when her husband had gone to London to execute the king.

For the trouble was that the Commonwealth didn’t really work. She could see it, often, more clearly than her husband. Each time the Parliament and the army, or some faction within either, failed to come to an agreement, and
her husband would come home with some new form of constitution that he and his friends were going to try, saying, ‘This time we shall resolve matters,’ she could only nod quietly and hold her peace. And sure enough, months later, there would be a new crisis and a new form of government chosen. The months after Penruddock’s Rising had been the worst. In order to crush any thought of further opposition, Cromwell had divided the country into a dozen regions, placed a major-general in charge of each and ruled by martial law. It had achieved nothing except to make all England hate the army and after a time even Cromwell had to give it up. But the underlying issue remained the same. Dictatorship or republic, army or civil rule, rule of the landed classes or rule of the ordinary people: none of these issues was decided; nobody was content. And as Cromwell tried one expedient after another she came to wonder: take Oliver Cromwell away and what have you? Nobody, not even her clever husband, knew.