She could see it all and would never forget what she saw. She saw Charles first, sitting high upon the royal dais. He sat with a very straight back and still as a statue. His cloak was of dark blue silk and the jewel of the George gleamed upon it. He had changed very much from the boy who had sat beside her in the woods. His brown square face was taut and strained and his dark eyes, fixed upon the face of the prisoner, had a very sombre concentration. Yet grave though he was today the eyes of every man and woman in the hall were continually drawn to him, he was so big and strong and so alive.
Lucy looked where Charles was looking and hardly recognized the Earl as the same man who had stood in his barge with his hand on the head of the Irish wolfhound. He wore the same crimson cloak, but not falling in the regal folds that had seemed a part of his tall dominating figure; he wore it now huddled about stooping shoulders in protection from the draughts that blew through ill-fitting windows. His beard was streaked with grey and his face furrowed with anxiety and illness. He had been for weeks in the Tower and the cold and damp of the place had increased the gout that always racked him. Lucy had not known that human beings could change so quickly. Was this what that terrible Tower did? There were exclamations of pity from the crowded benches, and little gusts of sibilant murmurings ran along the crowded galleries but they could not blot out the voice of the accusing lawyer who was haranguing the court. It went on and on, hard and rasping like a saw with broken teeth at its slow work of destroying some great tree. Then the rasping ceased and the prisoner stood to answer his judges.
He got up with difficulty and was not able to straighten his body to its former height, but his cloak fell about him again in its old manner and his voice was steady and had the same calm dignity as his face. There were no more exclamations of pity and the whispering galleries were silent. Lucy had not understood what the lawyer had been saying, and she did not now follow the Earl’s defence, but she was aware of his spirit and courage. She was at the age when new insights were continually flooding her receptive mind; not always comprehended when they came but accepted and treasured for future understanding. And so now the prisoner taught her something new about death, that in John Shepherd and Nan-Nan had been witnessed as a letting go of life. But dying could be something more than that. It could be a piece of work taken up, carried through and accomplished with resolution, something that could atone for life’s sins and failures, lifting a man above the tangled dark web to the best he could do, and leaving him there never to fall again.
“Bud, change places with me and you will get a better view of your sovereign,” said good-natured Uncle Barlow, and transferred her to the other side of his bulk. Although she had never seen the King and Queen, and had been longing to see them, Lucy had forgotten they were there. From the moment of coming in only Charles and the prisoner had existed for her. Everyone else had been just a shifting of dim colour and a faint murmuration of sound, like that of leaves on a tree that holds two peacocks with spread tails full of eyes.
Yet when she looked at the royal box she forgot the peacocks and her heart missed a beat, for her King and Queen were so small and frightened. The gilded royal box was bright as a jewel casket, yet it yawned like the mouth of a cave above the little beings who were so much too small for it. They were exquisite, as jewels should be, and as one looked at them they seemed to grow by virtue of their dignity and beauty. The King’s white face, framed by the graceful sweep of long dark hair that fell to his shoulders, shone like a clear-cut cameo above the shimmer of his satin doublet but it was stiff, expressionless and sad. The little Queen, though she sat still and upright, was yet restless. Her dark eyes darted from one face to another and she could not keep her right hand still. Her fingers kept touching the pearls at her throat or the curls on her forehead, and once she laid them lightly on her husband’s arm; but if he was aware of any comfort in her touch he gave no sign. Her left hand was in her lap, holding the hand of the bride-to-be, Princess Mary, who sat beside her.
The little girl scarcely looked like the happy bride she was reported to be. Her chestnut curls, fastened with a blue ribbon, framed a small face almost as white as her father’s. “They bring her day after day,” a voice muttered indignantly behind Lucy. “A child like that!” Lucy wondered too why she had to be there. Perhaps because she was so soon to be married she had to learn how a princess must behave when life suddenly turns dark and frightening. She was behaving well. Only the occasional trembling of her soft little mouth betrayed her; as did the Queen’s restless eyes and the expressionless mask of the King’s face. They had expected this trial to lead to the Earl’s triumphant acquittal, but their enemies had been too clever for them and things were not going in the way they had expected. They feared for him, and they feared for themselves without him if he should be broken and disgraced. The possibility of his death they were subconsciously refusing to consider and the refusal increased their fear.
It was at this moment that Lucy took the royal family under her maternal wing, quite unabashed by the presumption of what she did. They became an extension of her own family, a nimbus about the moon, separated and mysterious but part of it. But Charles was not mysterious. He sat squarely on the dais, his hands on his knees, sturdy and strong, and his George winked blindingly as the sun caught it.
Thirteen
1
May came in with a burst of warmth, showers and sunshine, birdsong and a sudden wealth of blossom, as though London decked herself for two happy events, May Day and the royal wedding. It seemed that the flowers were all out together. The gardens were full of them and many of the odd nooks and crannies of London that Robert Sidney loved were ablaze with the wild flowers. They grew wherever there was a patch of waste land or a corner with a bit of earth; buttercups, marjoram and pimpernel, bugloss, speedwell and joy-of-the-ground, the wildings that were sweeter to the eye and dearer to the heart than all the tulips in the world.
William brought a bunch of wildings when he came on horseback to fetch Lucy to watch the May morning festivities. It was not often they saw each other now, for since her expedition with Uncle Barlow, which had thoroughly upset her, Lucy was no longer allowed to go into the London streets, and William was never allowed to come to the little house at St. Giles. But May morning was something special and Mrs. Gwinne hoped an outing with her father would keep Lucy’s mind off the Earl of Strafford’s trial, which had ended in the Commons bringing in the Bill of Attainder.
“What’s that?” Lucy had demanded of her grandfather, running to him in his library from the kitchen, where she had heard the servants talking of it.
“An invention of the devil,” he had told her savagely, “discontinued since the Wars of the Roses. Who would have believed that they could have raked that up again?” He had been jerked right up out of himself, shouting at her as though it were her fault, a man she did not know he could be.
“But what is it?”
“A parliamentary bill which can be brought in if impeachment fails. Parliament simply decrees a man guilty of treason. Legal proof is not required. Go to your grandmother.”
Her grandmother had tried to comfort her. It might not happen. His Majesty, they said, would refuse to sign the Bill of Attainder. She herself was confident the Earl would be saved. No, it could not happen to Dr. Cosin, who had done nothing except speak his mind with more zeal than discretion. Lucy was not to worry and she might go maying with her father.
They left the horse at an ale house and joined the crowd in Drury Lane. The sun was scarcely up and the air was fresh and cool. All the people were carrying bunches of flowers and may boughs were fastened over the doors. The bells were ringing and everyone seemed happy and Lucy managed to be happy too. Her hand was warm in her father’s and he was talking to her of the time when they would be together in Roch. And then they heard the violins and saw the milkmaids dancing up the street with their pails garlanded with flowers; as in the years to come pretty Nell Gw
ynne would see them, standing at the door of her lodging in Drury Lane in her smocked sleeves and bodice, herself observed meanwhile by the kindling eye of Samuel Pepys. Then all the people in the street were dancing, Lucy and William with them, and the sun rose up over the roofs of London and flooded them with gold. When they rode back to St. Giles, through fields of buttercups, the larks were singing in the blue air above their heads.
The next day the bells rang again, this time for the royal wedding. It awed Lucy to think that a little girl younger than herself was being married today. They said she would wear a silver gown, her curls tied up with silver ribbon, her train carried by sixteen nobly-born little girls dressed in white, and that the bridegroom would wear doublet and hose of raspberry satin. She wondered what Charles would wear and all day she saw in imagination the exquisite figures of her other family moving through the ritual of the wedding, and the supper and dancing that were to follow, in that Palace by the river where the swans floated. When she went to bed she dreamed of the wedding and it was a nice dream until there was a rumble of thunder which shattered the pretty thing to pieces, and the charming figures fell away into nightmare and were lost.
She woke up scared in the big bed she now shared with her mother, because since Nan-Nan’s death the sorrowing Elizabeth had not wanted to sleep alone. The rumble of spring thunder was dying away into the distance but she remained chill and trembling. The night was peaceful out here in the country but what was happening in London?
The thunder made William think of the waves booming along the Pembrokeshire coast, and he sat and listened to it with restless longing. He had come tonight with Robert Sidney to visit Old Sage in his pew at St. Paul’s Church. They had talked to him for a few moments and he had accepted their information with courtesy, but had been glad to return to his books. Robert was reading too now but William, to whom books were anathema, merely sat with his hands on his knees trying to control his restlessness.
The friendship between himself and Robert had been an astonishment to their friends but not to themselves. Robert, a countryman at heart, liked talking about the land, and though William could not quite qualify as one of his fantastics Robert found him sufficiently odd to be attractive. He was a rough roistering fellow but Robert could see both his younger children in him; Lucy’s warm-hearted out-going affection and the simplicity and goodness of Justus. Old Sage, who found all human creatures lovable, had taken Lucy’s father to his heart, and William on his side was fascinated by the old man, and had told Robert he would give a good deal to hear the history that Old Sage’s tongue could not tell.
The thunder died away but another sound invaded their quietness, the distant roar of an angry mob. William, who enjoyed disturbances within reason, lifted his head like a scenting hound. Light was flickering in the east window, only lightning perhaps, but it might be another fire. There had been several lately. A man could be useful, yelling and passing buckets, and he sighed gustily.
Robert closed his book. He was sick at heart, ashamed of his own helplessness but unaware of anything that he could do to stop this avalanche of tragedy that was descending on them all. “Sit down, man,” he said to William, who had half risen. “You know what it is. What we have had all this week. Seamen rioting for pay. Apprentices rioting for Strafford’s death. Catholics beaten up in the streets. Catholic houses attacked. Any excuse for a row. They will quiet down when the rain comes.”
But William, who had had a dull day, was not disposed to have a dull night, and he lumbered to his feet. Old Sage, his finger marking the place in his book, glanced up at Robert with a gleam of amusement in his eyes. He lifted one expressive eyebrow and his Socratic nose wrinkled briefly, not with distaste for the smell of ale which since William’s entry had been effectively banishing the scent of herbs which distilled from his own person, but merely drawing Robert’s attention to it. Robert sighed and rose, for Old Sage was quite right. It only needed a few more drinks to get William excitable, and if he went down in the city now he would run into trouble. He must take him home.
Out in the aisle, William already striding down towards the door, Robert looked down at Old Sage. Where did he live? “Can you make your way home through the streets?” he asked. “May I, later, come with you?”
Old Sage looked up at him, smiled and shook his head. The expression of peace on his face was unchanged but he looked weary, and it gave Robert a pang of dismay to see that he was once again reading the last chapters of St. John’s gospel. But there was nothing he could do for a man so entirely contented with his situation as it was. He could only shut him in with his glow-worm light and join William in the churchyard.
They went round into Covent Garden and down Bedford Street to the Strand. There was certainly a fire somewhere in the city, and lightning flickered in the dark sky to the east, over London Bridge and the Tower, and the tumult was coming nearer up the Strand. The oppressive darkness, the flickering light and the growing menace of the noise affected Robert not with fear but with a distaste that was near to nausea. How thick hatred was, and how vile the taste of evil in the mouth. His arm, linked in William’s in graceful friendship, became a hook of steel. He swung him round and took him relentlessly home but when they reached William’s lodging, where the Guards from Whitehall were out across the street to protect the Palace, drenching rain was just beginning. There was no more rioting that night.
2
The next day London was in an uproar. The King, it was said, had tried to save the Earl by means of some dark and terrible plot. He had tried to introduce troops into the Tower. A popish plot. The Gunpowder Plot all over again. All good Protestants would be murdered in their beds. The French fleet was sailing to invade England and would be in the Thames at any moment. The shops were closed and all day the crowds surged through the streets demanding justice and the death of Strafford. He was to blame. Everything would come right, even the hunger and poverty of the people and the quarrel between the King and Parliament, if they could have the blood of Black Tom Tyrant.
The Earl meanwhile, aware that there had indeed been a plot and that it had failed, was more afraid for the King than for himself. The King had publicly declared as a matter of conscience that if the Lords passed the Bill of Attainder he would never sign it, and he had promised Strafford that he would not be sacrificed. If he held to that in face of the appalling clamour he might save the Earl but what of himself? Yet if he broke his promise the crown, and Charles himself, could hardly recover from the shame of such a surrender. On the evening of the next day the Earl wrote to the King the golden letter, so glorious in scapegoat literature, that shone about him for ever. “May it please your Sacred Majesty,” he wrote, “I understand the minds of men are more and more incensed against me, notwithstanding your Majesty hath declared that, in your princely opinion, I am not guilty of treason, and that you are not satisfied in your conscience to pass the bill. This bringeth me in a very great strait; there is before me the ruin of my children and family, hitherto untouched with any foul crime: here are before me the many ills which may befall your Sacred Person and the whole Kingdom, should yourself and Parliament part less satisfied one with the other than is necessary for the preservation both of King and people; there are before me the things most valued, most feared by mortal men, Life and Death . . . To set Your Majesty’s conscience at liberty, I do most humbly beseech Your Majesty (for preventing of evils which may happen by your refusal) to pass this Bill . . .”
Having written his letter he gave himself to prayer that he might have strength for whatever should be next asked of him.
The quietness of his cell was not echoed in London. The ports were closed, the quays idle, and the Lords, driving in their coaches to the debate on the Bill of Attainder, could hardly make their way through the crowds. Only eleven had the courage to vote against it and the Bill was passed. The decision now lay with the King alone and next day the citizens gathered about Whitehall. They saw the m
en arriving whom the King had summoned to advise him, the judges and bishops, and did not know what they were saying to the King. A rumour that the Spanish fleet as well as the French was now entering the Thames, and the knowledge that Whitehall was full of the Catholic servants of the Queen, maddened them, and by nightfall the streets about Whitehall were blocked by a muttering, unsatisfied crowd.
Robert watched them from William’s window and did not like the look of them. He knew crowds and this was a nasty specimen. The dark fallen human spirit wanted revenge for all the suffering and frustration of man upon this earth. His own guilt man would not recognize, and he was unable to get his hands on God to punish him for the intolerable act of creation. He would live and sleep with his frustration for a long while, the fires of his hatred so banked down that he hardly knew he had them; and then one day some God-like figure would rise before his eyes and be at his mercy, and the whole thing would surge over like a cauldron come to the boil.
“I hope Old Sage is safe in the church,” said Robert suddenly.
William was startled. “What makes you think of him just now?” he asked.
“There is something God-like about Old Sage,” said Robert. William shrugged his shoulders. Fatherhood being the gold thread of his being, the thing by which God had him firmly hooked to himself, his thoughts were with the children in the Palace. “Those children,” he said to Robert. “The little bride and bridegroom and the rest. If they were to look from a window they would be terrified.”
“Their elders will have the sense to keep them on the river side of the Palace,” said Robert. “I am going now to see if Old Sage is in the church.”