Sarum

  A Digger: he had not met the term before; he wondered what it was.

  Of all the curious groups and sects thrown up by the ferment of the Civil War, the Diggers were amongst the most curious: but also, like many extremists, the most logical. Indeed, when Obadiah and Edmund had quarrelled about who should have the vote, the Presbyterian had been right to accuse Edmund of tendencies which would lead to what he called chaos.

  For if the Levellers had demanded a vote for all free men of property, the Diggers believed that all men should be free.

  “And if true freedom lies in the owning of land and goods; why then, should not – if all men are to be free – all goods be held in common?” So Edmund urged his sister and his ten-year-old brother that day as they sat at the big table in the farmhouse where the Digger community of St George’s Hill lived together.

  “All we have here, we hold in common,” he explained. “We labour together as friends.” He showed them round the place proudly.

  So this was the practical result of Edmund’s long agony and self-questioning.

  “’Tis like a monastery and a nunnery all together,” she joked.

  “There is no religious rule,” he assured her seriously, and she wondered how long the community could last upon such easygoing terms.

  She watched him carefully. He seemed so thin. There was a new gleam in his eye: was it a gleam of inner peace, or some suppressed desperation? She did not know.

  They spent a pleasant evening together. He was clearly happy to see them both. But he seemed equally happy when they left the next morning.

  Samuel was puzzled.

  “Does he mean we should not keep the farm?”

  “He wants no part of it.”

  “I wonder why he does not want the farm.”

  “He has been unhappy.”

  Samuel considered. He could not make much of this.

  “Is he happy now?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  He had died after a wasting sickness eighteen months later. The reports brought to Margaret told her he died contented. The community of Diggers did not last, but remained one of the more determined of the early European essays in practical communism.

  With only Margaret and Obadiah to look to, it seemed to Samuel, therefore, that in his life there were two worlds. There was the Avon valley, where Margaret ruled, and Salisbury, where Obadiah held court. Avonsford was his childhood, Salisbury the outside world. One, much loved, held him back: the other, undiscovered territory tempted him forward.

  Obadiah Shockley bided his time.

  By the time he was twelve, Samuel was a bright, fair-haired youth who looked even more like his sister than Nathaniel had. Quick-witted, he knew everything there was to know about the farm and the water meadows and, thanks to Jacob Godfrey, he already had a thorough understanding of the farm accounts. He had been given some schooling – pressed by Obadiah, Margaret had seen to that. She had engaged a young clergyman to come to the Shockley farm three days a week to tutor him. He had made excellent progress.

  But above all, Margaret taught him to know the local countryside.

  “I may not be a scholar like Obadiah,” she said defiantly, “but I understand the land.”

  There was seldom a day they did not walk five or ten miles.

  He knew the Avon valley, every inch of it, all the way up to Amesbury in the north and past Stonehenge beyond.

  Each part had its particular characteristic.

  There were the slopes and meadows near Old Sarum, where the villagers still held extensive common land.

  “But they are ploughing it into fields now,” she explained, “where they can close-fold their flocks.” Soon he was familiar with the complex set of bye-laws that regulated the villagers’ intense cultivation of their jointly owned flocks and hedged fields.

  Sometimes, they would follow the Avon downstream, past the cathedral, over the bridge and south to the little village of Britford, at the edge of old Clarendon Forest. Once or twice they walked further still, southwards five miles to Downton before turning back upstream. Or they would go to the city and then walk north east, past the great sweeping slope called Bishopsdown and into the long valley of the river Bourne, on whose eastern side lay the huge forbidding ridges that led away towards Winchester – magnificent country to gaze at, but a long, hard haul to walk over. But above all it was the western side of Sarum that Samuel Shockley loved. To the south west of the cathedral close lay the open fields that led to the village of Harnham with its mill. Behind that, the huge ridge of Harnham Hill rose like a protective wall. “That’s the place with the best views,” he would say: for from Harnham you could see the whole city – cathedral, close, market place and chequers laid out as clearly as on one of Speed’s maps.

  And to the west: Herbert country he called it.

  It was a good description. For there, in the broad, shallow valley that ran to Shaftesbury in the west, lay the huge, well-managed estates of Lord Pembroke, head of the Herbert family. Even if the recent earls were lesser figures than their Tudor forebears who had made Wilton House like a Renaissance court half a century before, their power and influence was formidable. He loved to walk out from the city, past the next-door villages with their Saxon names, Fisherton, and Bemerton, to King Alfred’s old town of Wilton itself. Sometimes he would walk past Wilton, up on to the ridge to the west and into Grovely Wood where, nine hundred years before, the small farm in the clearing long since forgotten had given his own family their name.

  Herbert country. The words also had another important meaning for Margaret – one that made Obadiah scowl.

  For whenever they went to Wilton, they never failed to walk through the hamlet of Bemerton and stop there to view a small, grey stone and flint rectory and, on the other side of the lane from it, a little village chapel hardly the size of a low barn, into which they would go to say a prayer.

  Each time they did so, Margaret would say the same thing as they came out.

  “I remember him. Your father was his friend.”

  For Margaret was eleven years old when the great poet George Herbert died.

  “Was he of the great family at Wilton?” Samuel had once asked when he was young.

  “A distant cousin,” she told him.

  “Did he go often to Wilton House then?”

  She had smiled sadly.

  “I don’t think so. He was a poor cousin, you see.”

  “He went everywhere else in Sarum though, didn’t he?”

  “Everywhere.”

  For though he had only been at Bemerton a few short years, George Herbert had left an extraordinary memory behind him in the slow, quiet days before the Civil War.

  “There was not a house in his parish he hadn’t visited a dozen times,” she assured him; and then added firmly: “There were good priests in the Anglican Church too, whatever Obadiah may say.”

  And that was the trouble. Who could deny that the author of the finest religious poetry written in the English language was a saintly man? Who could deny that when, during the few years of his perfect ministry at Bemerton, George Herbert had poured out his entire poetic work before tragically dying? “His gentle spirit,” as Margaret liked to say, “was touched by God.” Not even Obadiah could quite deny that.

  But Herbert was an Anglican; he had delighted to go to the cathedral to hear the singing; he had even written a guide for priests on how to perform their duties.

  Often, Margaret would cry, even in Obadiah’s presence:

  “A good Anglican priest – aye, with bishops and all – was as good as any Presbyter. Think of George Herbert.”

  It was a dangerous thing to say.

  How different, how stern, was the world of Obadiah.

  Though it often seemed a little frightening, Samuel was conscious, from the first, of the preacher’s moral stature and his power.

  Why, Obadiah even knew Cromwell himself; and Cromwell was Samuel’s hero.

  For Cromwell could do everythin
g. He had not only defeated the wicked king. He had made the Scots and Irish obey him; and generously gave scores of Irish estates to the loyal army men whom Parliament had never even paid. Even Parliament bowed to Cromwell: he was strong; he was just; his all-powerful hand was guided by God.

  Samuel had almost forgotten Nathaniel now and his light-hearted ways. He knew what he thought of the Royalists. They were traitors. And there were a number lurking near Sarum too – gentry like the Penruddocks, the Mompessons and the numerous Hydes. When the foolish Presbyterians in Scotland had signed a covenant with the king’s son (as if one could trust a Stuart’s word) and proclaimed him Charles II, he remembered the excitement when the young man had then invaded England. Cromwell’s loyal troops had soon crushed him at Worcester; but after that there had been those at Sarum, including the Hydes and an infernal Anglican priest named Henchman, who had helped him on his dramatic flight to the southern coast. Already a popular tale was growing about how the young man had been forced to hide up an oak tree.

  One must keep watch, Obadiah warned him, when there were such traitors so close at hand.

  He would serve Cromwell one day. The boy felt a warm glow when he thought of the great man’s righteous cause. Like a good Puritan, he began to use Biblical phrases in his speech and he would stand in front of a mirror and practise stern looks. Margaret sometimes made light of these enthusiasms, but he disregarded her. For there had been no men like Cromwell, he knew, since the time of the Old Testament prophets.

  Although as he passed his thirteenth birthday, young Samuel modelled himself upon his hero, he sometimes caught himself in acts of enjoyment. And then he was angry and ashamed. The delights of the eye, let alone food and drink, these were the lusts of the flesh, and as sinful as dancing and the maypole. He had a weakness for beauty.

  “These things belong to children,” Obadiah explained. “But as you grow to be a man, you put off childish things and learn to take joy only in walking the paths of righteousness.” He longed to be strong, and to be a man.

  When he was thirteen, Samuel inadvertently committed a sin that proved to him he was still utterly weak.

  He had been walking past the gates of Wilton House.

  Ever since he was seven, the place had been specifically fascinating to him, for in that year, the great Tudor mansion had burnt down, and each year afterwards, mighty building works had been continuing to replace it. Now a new house was standing there and he had often gazed at its stately outlines from the road.

  Today however, as he started towards it, he saw a short, familiar figure coming from the house.

  Old William Smith was a plasterer. The year before he had done work for Margaret at the farm and ever since, Samuel knew, he had been busy at the great house. The dust that covered his grizzled head suggested that he had been hard at work that afternoon. He greeted the young man, and seeing the direction of his gaze he asked him.

  “Want to go in?”

  Samuel hesitated.

  “There’s only us workmen and the housekeeper there,” Smith assured him. “The family’s in London.”

  And so it was that Samuel Shockley saw inside one of the great masterpieces of English baroque architecture. He had never seen such a place before.

  There had been, would be, far larger country houses; there had been, most assuredly would be, far greater parks. Was it the setting by the river that made the park so perfect? Was it the long grey lines that made the new house grow out of the ground with the same, stately simplicity of the cathedral less than three miles away?

  “Old Inigo Jones himself designed the state room,” Smith told him; and he admired the perfect single cube, leading into the magnificent double cube of the great salon with its big rectangular windows looking over the park.

  These rooms, some of the noblest in all England, were certainly impressive. And yet:

  “It’s a friendly place,” the boy remarked.

  For, except in a few cases, the English version of the stately baroque movement of Europe had somehow contrived an island character of its own. In place of the European style, with its huge, high volumes, its Roman arches and great marble staircases, its domes, pediments, pilasters and sumptuous paintings whose tortured forms seem to be striving to climb out of their already splendid spaces into the empyrean itself, the English version in that century was altogether a more friendly affair. Lacking Europe’s feudal princes, her Catholic Inquisition, lacking that sense of awe – and, in Wilton’s case, building on a former abbey whose site and stones perhaps retained their quiet, contemplative air – the northern English usually made their country palaces feel like large manor houses: grand to be sure, but still domestic homes; this intimacy was their grace and charm.

  And the new house at Wilton, with its stately proportions, its magnificent collection of Vandykes and its painted cube and double cube looking over the gentle stream of the river Nadder where moorhens and swans bobbed and glided over the lazy river weeds, was just such a place.

  Samuel Shockley looked at the sumptuous furnishings, the splendid paintings and the lovely setting. And he experienced only delight. It seemed to him there could not be a finer way to live.

  It was only as he returned home afterwards that he realised his weakness and his sin.

  “These are the world’s shows,” he murmured. “They are there only to ensnare and to deceive.” And trying to put the charming vision from him, he went on his way, disgusted with himself and chastened. Obadiah would never have been taken in by such a place, he considered, nor great Cromwell. They were strong, and stern.

  It was in this frame of mind that he arrived at the Shockley farm to find Obadiah on a visit to Margaret. As soon as he arrived, he could sense a tension in the air.

  They were standing in the parlour, in front of the fire. Margaret was gazing at her elder brother defiantly; Obadiah had a prayer book in his hand.

  As Samuel entered the room, Obadiah was holding the prayer book up. His pale face was grave as he announced:

  “This book is a work of iniquity.”

  For the Puritans had dispensed with Cranmer’s melodious Book of Common Prayer. It was altogether too papist. In its place they substituted their own plain Directory. Gone were all the familiar ceremonies – not only the communion, but the time-honoured rituals that celebrated the sacred events of men’s lives – the burial, even the marriage service. In place of the marriage, a brief, bleak recording of vows before a justice.

  This was the Puritan rule. And Margaret hated it.

  Worse, she used the Prayer Book each Sunday in the privacy of the farmhouse and she did so in Samuel’s presence. It was something that Obadiah had suspected, but only last week Samuel had thoughtlessly allowed a remark to drop that made Obadiah sure. The view of the Presbyterian was clear. It must be stopped.

  But Margaret was defiant.

  “I prefer the Prayer Book to your dull Directory.”

  “And you use it in front of Samuel?”

  “Yes.”

  Obadiah sighed. Even if his sister had insisted on her own way with the Prayer Book, it was obviously wrong to bring the boy up on a book that was anathema to the authorities.

  He glanced at Samuel who was standing beside him.

  “Foolish and wicked woman,” he said in exasperation.

  But Margaret only laughed angrily. She snatched up the book.

  “Obadiah,” she cried in scorn, “Obadiah the biter!”

  It was the nickname Nathaniel had given him after Obadiah had bitten his hand. He had not heard it for twenty years, had even forgotten it. But now, suddenly, the pain and humiliation of his brother’s taunts came back to him vividly. For a second, he was no longer the respected preacher, but the unhappy adolescent. It was an affront to his dignity.

  And she had said it in front of the boy.

  Samuel was staring at Margaret in surprise. He did not see the viperish look Obadiah gave her before he recovered himself.

  Had Margaret been wise she
would have apologised. Instead in her fury at his attack on her Prayer Book, she said:

  “Go preach in churches. You do not deceive me. A biter by nature you were and always will be.” Then, turning to Samuel, “Did you not know, Samuel, that your brother Obadiah bites? He’ll nip off your hand in a moment, if you do not take care.”

  Samuel looked from one to the other in astonishment. How could Margaret address the preacher in this way? Did she not owe him respect?

  Much as he loved her, she must be mistaken.

  Remembering his own sin that morning when he had taken such pleasure in the house at Wilton, he solemnly went to Margaret and took the book quietly from her hands. Then he threw it in the fire.

  “We should not look at the book any more, sister Margaret,” he said gravely, and left the room. He hoped he had expiated his sin.

  Margaret gasped in astonishment.

  But if Samuel had seen Obadiah’s smile, he would have been even more surprised. For the expression on the face of the brother whom no one had loved, was a twisted smile of revenge.

  It was soon after this incident that he saw Obadiah again at an exciting event.

  This was the trial of Ann Bodenham, for witchcraft.

  The trial was a sensational affair and, because he pleaded with her, Margaret, who refused to go herself, finally agreed to let him do so in a party which included Obadiah and Sir Henry Forest and his two children.

  The court was packed. The list of her crimes was truly terrible: not only had she been addicted to popery in her youth, but she had spoken of evil and unlucky days. It was fortunate for Sarum, he discovered, that the great Matthew Hopkins, the witchfinder general, should happen to have been passing through Sarum at that time or she might never have been discovered. But once he investigated her, the terrible truth soon came out. Years before, the court learned, she had been a servant to the notorious Doctor Lambe, who had been torn to pieces by a London mob in 1640 when they had discovered he was a sorcerer. Obadiah shook his head sadly at this revelation.

  “Lambe was a friend of the king’s favourite Buckingham,” he told Samuel. “Beware of papists and other wicked men, Samuel; they transmit their evil like the plague.”