The Forest (70 page)

But the house was also a serious place, on account of the visitors: the men of religion. King Charles’s promise to Alice at Bolderwood, that he would give his subjects
religious freedom, had actually come to pass in 1672. But it hadn’t lasted. Within a year, Parliament had struck it down. Dissenters were thrust firmly back to the margin of society and forbidden all public office. The only effect of the brief freedom was to cause all the dissenters to come out into the open so they’d be known in future. Alice quietly continued to provide a haven for Puritan preachers and was generally left alone; but it brought a certain air of seriousness and purpose into the house that was bound to affect the young girl living with her. There was something else, besides: although Alice hardly realized it, the preachers who came to seek her hospitality were older than they had been before.

For a few years Betty had been sent to a school for young ladies in Sarum; but while she had been happy enough there and made some friends, she had never really felt satisfied by the conversation of the other girls. Used to older people, she found them rather childish.

After this her mother had sent her, once or twice a year, to stay with relations or friends, on the assumption that she would meet young men. And she had; but often as not she had found them insipid until at last Alice had told her firmly: ‘Do not look for a perfect man, Betty. No man is perfect.’

‘I won’t. But do not force me to marry a man I can’t respect,’ she countered, ignoring her mother’s sigh.

By the time she was twenty-four, Alice was near despair. Betty herself was happy enough. ‘I love the house. I love every inch of the Forest,’ she told her. ‘I can live and die here alone contentedly enough.’

Until this June, while they were staying in London.

‘And when you consider’, her eldest daughter Tryphena remarked to Alice, ‘that this has occurred when all the world is thinking only of the great events now shaking the kingdom, I think she must be serious indeed.’

But that, alas, for Alice, was just the problem.

Figures in a landscape. A July night. There had been thousands the night before. But most, by now, had melted away into town, farm and hamlet, hiding their arms, going about their business as if they had never been out at all, the days before, marching round the western towns, trying to seize a kingdom.

Not all would be lucky, however. Some would be named, others given away, and sent to join the several hundred captured.

Figures on horseback, keeping out of sight, moving through woods when they can or out on to the bare, deserted ridges with none to witness them but the sheep, or a lonely shepherd, or the ghosts, perhaps, in the grassy earthwork inclosures, those silent reminders all over the countryside of the prehistoric age. Figures moving eastward now, still out on the chalk ridges, twenty miles or more south-west of Sarum.

Monmouth’s Rebellion was broken.

Nobody had expected King Charles to die. He was only fifty-four. He himself had expected to live many years and Sir Christopher Wren had been building him a fine new palace on the hill above Winchester where the king had looked forward to residing. But then suddenly, that February, Charles had been struck with an apoplexy. Within a week he was dead. And that left a huge problem.

Although Charles II had had numerous sons by his various mistresses, several of whom he had obligingly created dukes, he had left no legitimate heir. The crown, therefore, had been due to pass to his brother James, Duke of York. At first James had not seemed so bad a choice: he’d married a Protestant wife, had two Protestant daughters and one of those had married her cousin, the very Protestant ruler of the Dutch, William of Orange. But when James’s wife died and he married a Catholic princess, the English were less pleased. And when he soon afterwards admitted he was a Catholic himself, there had been consternation.
Wasn’t this just what Protestant Englishmen had dreaded for a century? England was more Protestant now than it had been in the time of the Armada or even the Civil War. Charles, to appease them, assured everyone that, if his brother should succeed him, he’d uphold the Church of England whatever his private views. But could anyone really believe that?

Most of the Parliament did not. They demanded that Catholic James be debarred from the throne. King Charles and his friends refused; and so began the great divide in English politics between those who would keep a Catholic off the throne – the Whigs – and the royalist group – the Tories. The problem dragged on for years. There were endless discussions and demonstrations. Although violence was avoided, it was really the same debate that had led to the Civil War: who should have the last say, king or Parliament? King Charles II, however, wheeling and dealing, had pursued his merry way for more than a decade, racing horses, chasing pretty women, getting money from Louis of France; and because the English liked the jolly rogue and thought he’d probably outlive his Catholic brother anyway, they went along with it. Mercifully, also, James had produced no heir with his Catholic wife. Time seemed to be on Protestant England’s side. Until this sudden death.

James became king. A Catholic on the throne – the first since Bloody Mary a century and a quarter ago. The country held its breath.

Then, in June that same year, Monmouth’s Rebellion had begun.

In a way it was bound to happen. Charles II had always adored his eldest natural son. Monmouth the handsome. Monmouth the Protestant: when the Whigs in Parliament wanted to exclude Catholic James, they told King Charles they’d rather have Monmouth. Charles, a Catholic Stuart at heart, protested that the boy was not legitimate, but the pragmatic English Parliament told him they’d worry about
that. Charles had refused to allow such a thing but, as far as Monmouth was concerned, the damage had been done. He was a spoiled young man, forever getting into trouble, always protected by his doting father. It seemed the English wanted him as king. Even before his father’s death he had allowed himself to be implicated in one aborted plot that might have killed both Charles and James. Small wonder, then, if, with Catholic James suddenly placed over a most unwilling English nation, Monmouth, in his thirties now but vain and immature, might have thought the English would rise for him if he gave them the chance.

He had started in the West Country. People had flocked to his banner – small farmers, Protestants from the ports and trading towns – several thousand strong. The local gentry, the men of influence, however, had held back, cautious. And wisely so. For yesterday, at the Battle of Sedgemoor, the royal troops had smashed the rising. Everyone had scattered, to hide or flee as best they could.

Figures in a landscape, in the misty morning. Monmouth was fleeing. He had only two companions with him now. He needed to find a port from which to sail, somewhere he would not be betrayed. ‘We had better go’, he decided, ‘to Lymington.’

There were other fugitives, too, that July morning, heading in the same direction.

‘But isn’t he everything you have taught me to love?’ Betty was looking at her mother in genuine confusion. ‘You can hardly object to his family,’ she added, ‘since he is an Albion.’

Alice sighed. There had been no news, yet, from the West Country. Was Monmouth about to succeed? The whole business made her fearful. And now her daughter insisted on troubling her with a suitor. She wished the young man, just for a month or two, could be made to disappear.

Peter Albion was a credit to his family. If his grandfather Francis had deserved her own grandfather’s scorn, Francis’s son had done better. He’d become a physician and married a rich draper’s daughter. Young Peter had practised law and, with his parents’ numerous friends to help him, had already, by the age of twenty-eight, established himself as a rising man. He was handsome, with the traditional Albion fair hair and blue eyes; he was industrious; he was clever, thoughtful, ambitious. It was Tryphena who had encountered him and invited him to call; and it was she who summed him up: ‘He looks an Albion, but he’s just like father.’

Perhaps, Alice thought, that was why Betty liked him so much. He fitted the description of the father she’d never known.

But that, unfortunately, was precisely why Alice wanted to discourage him. ‘I’m getting old,’ she told Tryphena. ‘I’ve seen too many troubles.’ Troubles in England; troubles in the family. She did not doubt that the causes her husband had fought for had been just; she was quite sure, when she helped the dissenters, that she did right. But was it all worth it – the fighting, the suffering? Probably not. Peace was worth more, it seemed to her, than any of the small freedoms won in her lifetime. And peace was what she wanted now, for her old age and, above all, for her daughter.

It wasn’t so easy to come by. A couple of years ago, at the time of that stupid plot to assassinate the king and his brother, Tryphena’s husband had been arrested and questioned for days. Why? Not because he had even the faintest connection to the plot, but because of his family associations and friends. Once you were an object of suspicion you would always remain so. It was inevitable.

But for young Betty things could be different. Her youngest child, having lost her father, had missed the joys of early childhood she had known; but the rest would be better: a life of peace and security – the sort of life that she, Alice, had always expected to live in her house in the friendly Forest.

The very day after news of Monmouth’s arrival in the West Country Peter Albion had come to Tryphena’s house to pay his respects to his cousin Alice and her daughter. He had been pleasant company, very polite, but quietly forthright. ‘The English will not tolerate a Catholic king,’ he stated. ‘Nor do I think they should.’ He bowed to Alice as though he clearly expected she would endorse these views. ‘Let us hope Monmouth succeeds.’ He had smiled. ‘I have some friends in that camp, Cousin Alice. I expect word of success at any time. Then, I can assure you, we shall see King James sent packing.’

As he spoke, she had felt herself go cold. It was her own husband again, John Lisle. ‘Do not say such things,’ she cried. ‘This is dangerous.’

‘I should not, I assure you, Cousin Alice,’ he said quietly. ‘Except in such company as this.’

Such company as this; the phrase had terrified her. Was Betty already assumed to be a conspirator? Was Peter Albion going to drag her into that role? ‘Leave us, Sir,’ she begged, ‘and speak no more of this.’

But he had, nonetheless, seen Betty again a few days later. And although she had not liked it, it had been difficult to refuse her kinsman entry to the house. Wisely, he had never made any reference to these dangerous subjects again, but as far as she was concerned the damage was done. She had begged her daughter to have no more to do with him, to no avail. It wasn’t easy: Betty was twenty-four. And she might, that very day, have taken her back to the safety of the Forest if she had not received, this morning, a letter from John Hancock.

Do not, I urge you, return to Albion House. Rebellion has broken out at Lymington. They have sent to you for support already. For God’s sake stay in London and say nothing.

She had hastily torn up the letter and thrown it in the fire.

Say nothing. Would young Peter Albion say nothing? And Betty? She looked at her daughter desperately. ‘Dear child,’ she began softly, ‘if you are not careful we shall soon be hunted.’ She shook her head at the thought of it. ‘Like deer in the Forest.’

Stephen Pride walked slowly past Oakley pond. He was seventy-five, but he certainly didn’t feel it. Tall and lean, he still strode about – more slowly, a bit stiffly perhaps – just as he had all his long life. Common sense told him he wouldn’t live much longer, but whatever cause God had prepared to strike him down, he had no sense of it. ‘I’ve known men live to be eighty,’ he remarked contentedly. ‘Reckon I might.’

It had been one of the small joys of his long life to watch the pond by the hamlet’s green. Its fluctuations were always the same, year after year, with the seasons. By late autumn, after the rains had fallen, the pool was fairly full. In winter it often froze. Two years ago, in the coldest winter Pride could ever remember, the pond had been frozen solid from November to April. Then, when the spring showers came and the warmth of May, the pond’s whole surface would be covered with white flowers, as though the water itself had broken into blossom.

The wonder of the pond was the way it filled. There was no stream, as such, not even a rivulet. But as the rains fell on the nearby heath, somehow, as by a miracle, they drained off invisibly, tiny trickles you hardly saw that gathered by the hamlet into a small snake of water that ran across the green and spread out into the shallow depression beside it.

By summer, however, the pond began to evaporate. The warm heath soaked up any showers that fell upon it. The snake of water disappeared. Day by day the animals cropping the lush grass by the pond’s edge advanced a little further. By the fence month in midsummer the pond was
only half its springtime size. By August it was often completely dry. As he looked at it now, two cows and a pony were grazing in the green depression beside the three or four large puddles remaining at its centre.

Stephen Pride was feeling relieved. He had been to Albion House that morning and had just walked back. The news there had been exactly as he’d hoped: Dame Alice was still in London and no word had come to say she was returning. That was good. He’d known and loved Dame Alice all her life, and he didn’t want to see her back at present, not the way things were at Lymington.