But now, at last, it seemed to Ralph Shockley that a new age had begun.
For in 1830, not only had a new monarch, William IV the sailor king ascended the throne, but more important, having been forced by the great Irishman Daniel O’Connell at last to grant votes and full liberties to all British Catholics, the last of the reactionary prime ministers, the Duke of Wellington, fell from office and, after twenty years in the political wasteland, the reforming Whigs came in again.
“Lord Grey is prime minister,” Ralph cried, “and his programme is reform.”
The Great Reform Bill of 1831 was the greatest step towards democracy in England since Simon de Montfort’s parliament nearly six hundred years before. It was not intended to be, any more than Montfort’s was. The Whig aristocrats who fashioned it had no intention of encouraging so dangerous a notion as votes for the people. It was intended only to remove the pocket or rotten boroughs, to give representation to new communities who had none, and to allow the vote – though not a secret ballot – to substantial freeholders in the boroughs. True, the preposterous idea of allowing the vote to all householders, regardless of the value of their property, was suggested in the course of the debates. It was even voted upon. It received one vote.
“But,” as Porteus truly said, “if you allow the middle classes so many votes, then the lower classes will want them next. It must be opposed, sir, tooth and nail.”
It was. For a year the Bill was sent back and forth between Commons and Lords. The Government resigned and called a snap election which it resoundingly won.
“The Bill, the Bill and nothing but the Bill,” was the cry. And each time he walked out of the town, Ralph Shockley would look up at the old hillfort of Old Sarum, where under an elm tree the preposterous charade of holding an election had been carried on by a handful of bought electors for so long, and cry: “Old Sarum, you’ll soon be gone.”
“And after that,” he told his wife happily, “there’ll be reforms of the factories, child labour, and even education. Thank God I’ve lived to see these better times.”
It was Agnes who first noticed the change in Canon Porteus.
At first she thought nothing of it. They were all getting old, she supposed. Even Ralph, though he still sometimes had the enthusiasm of a boy when an idea like the Reform Bill excited him, was past sixty. Frances, as the years had passed, had grown more and more staid and withdrawn, and her one rebellion against her husband had not only never been repeated but, Agnes suspected, had even been forgotten. If, during the passage of the Reform Bill which signalled an attack upon everything he stood for, the canon seemed unusually silent, she supposed it was only natural.
“You have won your cause and he is old,” she said to Ralph. “Do not agitate him by referring to it now.”
For the best part of a year, Ralph hardly saw Canon Porteus.
“Ever since the election,” he joked, “poor old Porteus has hardly left his house.”
On June 26, 1832, the bells of Salisbury rang and every light in the city was lit to celebrate the passing into law of the Great Reform Act.
Ralph Shockley led his family in triumph the very next morning to stand upon the earth walls of Old Sarum.
“Just a pleasant old ruin again,” he said contentedly. “No longer an infamy.”
At first, no one thought anything of it.
It was some time since he had been seen about, but if he had decided to pause to look at something, few had the courage to interrupt the stiff old canon in his reverie. Perhaps it was unusual that he was not wearing his usual black, broad-brimmed hat. No doubt he was about to go inside again.
He was standing by the corner house on the east of the choristers’ green and opposite the entrance to the close. He seemed to be looking at something at the far end of the green, a little to the left of Mompesson House.
Several passers-by, bowing politely to the venerable figure and receiving no acknowledgement, tried to follow his gaze to see what it was that had so engaged his attention. But feeling it impolite to linger there without his invitation, they soon passed on and went about their business. Once a cart from the town had to make a detour to get round him and the driver silently cursed the arrogance of the clergy and the gentry who did not deign to move for him.
He was standing there when Ralph Shockley and his family left the house in New Street to walk to Old Sarum. He had not moved when they got back.
Around the middle of the day some urchins came by. They had less reverence for the motionless old figure in his antiquated black silk stockings who stood there like a petrified tree. They began to play a game around him.
And it was one of these children, early in the afternoon, who noticed something strange: something which, when he pointed it out, caused them all to go into peals of laughter.
For at the motionless canon’s feet there had now appeared a little puddle.
It was Doctor Barnikel who, mercifully, came by just afterwards, who understood what had happened, and who led poor Porteus home.
“I fear,” he told Agnes that evening, “his mind may not recover.”
The canon did not speak again.
It was, there was no doubt of it, a blessing that, on October 1 – the very day when Porteus had been brought to the old Manor House at Fisherton Anger where Mr William Finch ran his commodious and comfortable private asylum for the insane – the canon should have a second seizure, this time a stroke, and died.
“I am only sad,” Frances confessed, “that he should have lived to see the reforms.”
But the duty of Frances to her late husband was not over. She set out to protect his memory too.
She could not deny that his mind had been affected at the end – too many people knew. But in the year after his death, a minor change took place in Salisbury that gave her her opportunity: gas lights were introduced into the streets.
It was with amazement therefore that, in August 1834, Ralph Shockley heard his own sister say, with perfect seriousness:
“My poor husband, you know, was entirely well until the gas was introduced.”
“But he died before that,” he protested.
Frances ignored him completely.
“That gas is dangerous,” she maintained. “It turned my poor husband’s mind and killed him. It ought to be removed.”
“Let her think it,” Agnes begged him when he told her.
“The gas never hurt anyone,” he grumbled, irritated at his elder sister’s folly.
But, just to prove him wrong, Frances fainted by one of the lamps, the very next week, just as it was being lit.
“It’s the noxious fumes,” she said afterwards. “They made me faint. And when I think what they did to my poor husband . . .”
From this time on, she fainted by the gas lamps several times a year.
In 1834 Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel, beloved by all but always unmarried, suddenly died. In his will, he left the bulk of his estate to Agnes Shockley.
Ralph was not surprised.
“I always knew he loved you,” he said pleasantly, “even before I had to go away.”
“He was a kind friend,” Agnes answered.
“That’s why I asked him to look after you,” Ralph added. “Just to make sure he never . . .”
Agnes looked at him in surprise.
“Wasn’t that taking a risk?”
“Oh no. Not with him,” he replied cheerfully. “Or you, of course,” he added, just a moment too late.
EMPIRE
1854: OCTOBER
The afternoon sun gleamed on the railway lines.
As she stood on the platform at Milford station, and looked back eastwards towards Southampton, the shining metal tracks seemed to promise a distant, brighter destiny, a larger world.
It would be hers, very soon.
Jane Shockley was going to leave Sarum. She was going to serve. She wanted it so passionately.
She was of medium height, her hair a very light auburn brown with, sometimes, a
flash of red. Her blue eyes looked out with a directness that could be disconcerting. Her face was not beautiful. “My nose,” she used to lament with a laugh, “is too big.” But she was considered, by those at her school who knew about such things, very passable.
She picked up her small valise. The whalebone stays pinched her. “I wish our stomachs,” she often complained, “were not supposed to be quite so unnaturally small.” Where was the porter?
A thought suddenly struck her. Service or passion. Which had she really been seeking? She smiled at herself. Both, probably.
She moved along the train towards the engine, hissing by the station house.
She was back at Sarum – but not for long.
True, they had rejected her at the interview. She did not blame them. But they had also told her what she must do, and nothing was going to stop her now.
She looked up at the familiar scene – there they were, her childhood friends, the huge, bare chalk ridges in their great horseshoe, staring down at the city they enclosed. In the north, the mound of Old Sarum, and there, in the centre, was the spire, scraping the silent blue sky above. Sarum. She loved the place. It was and always would be part of her.
But yesterday she had seen Florence Nightingale.
Like everything to do with the remarkable expedition of Florence Nightingale, it had all happened so fast.
It was only ten days since the article by Russell in the Times – one of the most dramatically influential that august journal ever printed – had startled all England like a thunderclap. Wounded British soldiers, who had gone out to fight England’s just and necessary war to halt the advance of the despotic Czar Nicholas on the Crimea, were being treated worse than animals in the disgraceful hospital conditions in Scutari.
It was a challenge to the empire. Why, even her allies the French were sending out fifty Sisters of Mercy. In such circumstances, could England do less?
Jane Shockley had seen the letter in the Times appealing for nurses a few days later. She had hesitated. Was she worthy? Then in Wilton, by chance, she had met Mrs Sidney Herbert.
“Go and see them at least.” It was all the encouragement she needed.
The role played by the Herbert family in the expedition of Florence Nightingale was decisive. By God-given good fortune, it was a younger son of the old Lord Pembroke, Sidney Herbert, who with his wife chanced to be friends of the redoubtable Miss Nightingale with her little hospital for gentlewomen in Harley Street. He also happened to be a junior minister conducting the war.
He had acted completely on his own initiative – invited Miss Nightingale to go, though female nurses had never been used on campaign before, found funds, and provided the Herbert house in Belgrave Square as headquarters of the enterprise.
The Herberts and Florence Nightingale moved quickly. The interviews for nurses at Belgrave Square started three days after the Times article.
They had not taken long with Jane. She was interviewed by Miss Stanley and Mrs Bracebridge; they were friendly but frank with her.
“Your qualifications from the Salisbury Training College are admirable for a teacher, and we see you are sincere, but you are not trained as a nurse.”
“I hoped – I thought perhaps – you might have room for a few volunteers willing to learn,” she suggested. And then with inspiration: “Are not trained nurses hard to find?”
The two women smiled ruefully.
“Yes. But we shall find them.”
Jane sighed.
“Those that come must be very dedicated,” she said.
And it had been then that the unexpected voice behind her cut through the room like a knife.
“Not at all.”
She had not heard her come in. There could be no doubt who she was. She walked to the table.
“They are coming for money.” A strong, pleasant face, piercing eyes, a mouth that twitched with amusement. “You look shocked,” she laughed. “None of them,” she went on, “save perhaps one, has dedication, a sense of mission,” she sniffed, “yet.” She gazed at Jane. “But they’re trained. I have Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Tractarians, and others who may be anything. But they are trained. Are you serious in wanting to nurse?’
“Yes.” She thought she was.
“Get training in a hospital. Then I can use you.”
“How shall I apply?”
“Why, use the penny post girl! What a question.”
She blushed.
“I shall.”
“A great empire needs many dedicated servants,” the great woman smiled. “Good luck.”
Empire and service.
A British empire that stretched all round the globe; a British empire that, directed by strong men like Palmerston, would swiftly humble any who failed to show respect to her citizens; an empire where Englishmen grew rich, thanks to free trade and Mr Gladstone’s low taxes. Empire and free trade: this was the combination that most English towns, even sleepy Salisbury, favoured.
Service and empire: serving the mighty East India Company, and living well besides; serving as officers, administrators, missionaries: these were things the Shockleys of Sarum did. Nothing thrilled her more than to receive the letters from her brother Bernard on his plantation in India, or her Uncle Stephen the missionary, from Africa – messages from the empire, that wide and exciting world.
Her upbringing in Salisbury close had been conventional. Though her father, Ralph’s elder son, had died of consumption when she was only nine, old Frances Porteus had conveniently died the same year and left them the tenancy of her house in the close and a modest fortune besides.
“There’s nothing to stop you marrying well,” her mother always told her. And certainly Sarum was not short of pleasant society – Wyndhams, Jacobs, Husseys, Eyres – good county or near county families with educated menfolk into which a well brought up girl with a little money should be pleased to marry.
“Why must you always want something more?”
“I don’t know, mama.”
She had insisted on going to the training college. This was well enough. The regime was strict. Young gentlewomen were given a training that enabled them to teach, if the family circumstances were so poor that they had to work, or to manage their households with great efficiency if all went well and they married.
She had insisted upon teaching. There were twenty-five private day schools in Salisbury now. Her mother had shaken her head. The girl was getting eccentric.
And then, six months ago, her mother died.
She was twenty-three. She had a pleasant house in the close, five hundred pounds a year, a cook, a housemaid, two horses stabled in the town, pleasant neighbours, and had turned down two perfectly acceptable offers of marriage. She enjoyed her work. She should now, of course, find a companion since it was not proper for an unmarried woman to live alone. But she hesitated.
Why was it she read those letters so avidly from overseas? Why was it she scanned the newspapers for news when other young ladies quietly did their needlepoint? Why must she, as her mother used to complain, always have opinions?
“Men have opinions. Women listen.”
“I suppose,” she said to her mother, a month before she died, “I am looking for a cause.”
“There are any number of them, my dear.” There was the College of Matrons by the close gate, Eyre’s almshouses, Hussey’s almshouses, Blechynden’s almshouses for poor widows – the list of charities and needy folk in Salisbury, to which Mrs Shockley never failed, like every other Sarum lady, to devote herself was endless.
“No. Something more.”
“In Sarum, Jane? What could there possibly be? And why?”
There had been no answer.
After her mother’s death she had thought of going to visit her brother. Or even her missionary uncle. “Madness,” she had been told of the latter idea.
Now Florence Nightingale.
Beside her bed, as always, two books: Wordsworth’s poems and the love sonnets of Elizabeth Ba
rrett Browning.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach . . .
She knew them all by heart. She loved the moving story of how the poet Browning had rescued Elizabeth from her father and eloped with her.
“But no Browning comes to elope with me from the close,” she laughed sadly to herself.
It was morning. Outside, the sun was already well up. The leaves were falling from the trees around the choristers’ green. Below, she could hear Lizzie the housemaid scurrying about.
Sarum. Life was slow. But it was pleasant.
But today was a day for decisions. She knew they must be made now, while the spirit of adventure was still strong. Was she to go to London to train? If so, how soon? Difficult decisions, uncomfortable ones. She lingered lazily for a moment in bed before beginning such a fateful day.
There was a knock on the door: Lizzie with a letter, from Bernard.
Before the girl had even closed the door, she had slit it open.
My dear Sister,
With the loss of dear Mama you are entirely alone at Sarum and this perturbs me. Harriet joins me in suggesting most warmly that you come to spend at least half a year here. Your two nieces and nephews long to see their aunt – we have made you out to be a dragon so don’t disappoint us on any account. You will find amusement here and some society, a change of air, I need hardly say. There are some young fellows here too, quite gentlemen, who perhaps . . . but I run on.
This war in the Crimea is already having a remarkable effect upon our fortunes – for the better! Here in Hoogly District, as you may know, we have a large crop of desi – jute as it’s called in England. We do an excellent trade with America already, even with a firm called Bradley and Shockley – isn’t that a coincidence? But more important, this war in the Crimea has cut off the supply of Russian raw flax and hemp to Dundee, and we are quite supplanting them with our jute instead. The profits are remarkable. However, I shall tell you more when you come here, and you can see for yourself.