The Forest

  ‘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.

  1664

  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.

  There was something else that bothered her too. ‘All that we have done, John,’ she would say to Lisle, ‘if it were not done to establish a just and godly rule, then better it had not been done at all.’

  ‘That is what we are about, Alice,’ he would respond irritably. ‘We are establishing a godly rule.’

  But were they? Oh, the Parliament had made some fearsome laws. They had even made adultery punishable by death – except that juries quite rightly refused to convict in the face of such monstrous punishment. Swearing, dancing, all kinds of amusements that offended the Puritans were outlawed. The major-generals had even managed to close half the inns where people went to drink. But what did this mean if, at the centre, she saw Oliver Cromwell, when his supporters put it to him, quite clearly tempted by the idea of taking the title of king, and who clearly meant his son, a nice but weak young man, to succeed him as Protector? Visiting Whitehall, she had been shocked to find the other leading families of the new regime dressed up in silks and satins and brocades exactly like the old royalist aristocracy they had replaced. It seemed to her, though she was too wise to say it, that little had changed at all.

  And so it was, as the years had passed, that while to all outward appearances Alice loyally supported her husband, whom she loved, in his busy public life, she withdrew, within herself, into a more private world. She found that she cared less and less what party people belonged to, and more and more about what kind of individuals they were. When poor Mrs Penruddock, a few months after her husband’s execution, had finally been stripped of all his family’s property and had petitioned Cromwell for mercy, Alice had vigorously argued on the family’s behalf and been glad when a part of their estates had been granted back so that Mrs Penruddock could support her children.

  ‘I don’t know why you care about these people, who certainly care nothing for you,’ Lisle had remarked.

  Because Colonel Penruddock, deluded or not, was probably worth ten of our friends, she might have told him. But instead she kissed him and said nothing.

  One thing she did like about the Commonwealth regime, however, was its tolerance in matters of religion. That tolerance, of course, did not extend to the Roman Church. As a good Protestant she could not have sanctioned that. Popery meant the enslavement of honest people by cunning priests and brutal inquisition; it meant superstition, backwardness, idolatry and, like as not, domination by foreign powers. But within the broad range of Protestant congregations, stern Cromwell was surprisingly liberal. He had refused to allow the Presbyterians to impose their forms upon everyone; independent churches, choosing their own ministers and their own forms of worship, were allowed. Fine independent preachers, drawing their inspiration directly from their own religious experience, were encouraged. Alice liked the preachers. They were mostly honest men. When she thought of how they would have been treated by King Charles and his bishops – silenced, hounded out of house and home, even perhaps put in the stocks or sentenced to have their ears cut off – at least she could believe that the Commonwealth had brought some real improvement to the world.

  Then Cromwell had suddenly died.

  No one had been prepared. They’d thought he’d live for years. His son Richard had tried to step into his place, but he wasn’t cut out for the job. It would be all right, Lisle told Alice. There were wise men like himself to guide the regime. But she had shaken her head. It wouldn’t work. She knew it wouldn’t.

  It didn’t. Even Alice was amazed, though, at how quickly everything had fallen apart. The very circumstances that the gentlemen of the Sealed Knot had hoped for at the time of Penruddock’s Rising had now, only a few years later, come to pass. The people, after the brief rule of the major-generals, had come to hate the army. The army was divided within itself. The Parliament men wanted to have their own say again. The royalist gentry saw their chance. If the terms were right, people started to say, perhaps they’d be better off with a king again. Finally General Monk, who believed in order, and the city of London, which had had enough of the army, agreed together to restore the previous regime.

  Young Charles II was ready and waiting. He had gone through the necessary period of adversity. If he had ever believed in his father’s foolish doctrines they had long ago been knocked out of him. Tall, swarthy, affable, deeply cynical, longing to escape from exile, determined not to be thrown out again, ready to compromise, completely penniless – here at last was a Stuart who had been properly trained to be King of England. Terms were negotiated. The king would return. The English prepared to rejoice just as though they had never cut off his father’s head.

  It was a bright day in early May when John Lisle arrived back from London. Alice had been sitting with one of her daughters by the window and they ran out to greet him. He was looking cheerful, yet Alice had thought she detected a trace of awkwardness in his manner. When she asked for news he had smiled and said: ‘I’ll tell you as we dine.’

  As the family ate together he painted a pleasant picture. The Parliament men, the army, the Londoners, everyone was to be reconciled with each other and the king. It was all to be the friendliest business imaginable. There was to be no vengeance. Only after the children had left them alone did Alice ask: ‘You say there is to be no vengeance? None?’

  John Lisle poured himself another glass of wine before replying. ‘Almost.’ He came to it slowly. ‘There is, of course, the matter of the regicides. As it happens’ – he tried to speak easily, as if he were discussing some interesting case in the courts – ‘it is not the king who is pressing this, but the royalists. Those gentlemen want to see some blood shed for all the losses they have suffered.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well …’ He looked awkward now. ‘The regicides are to be tried. Executed probably. The king will decide, but I think it likely.’

  She stared at him blankly for a moment, before saying quietly: ‘You are a regicide, John.’

  ‘Ah.’ He put on his professional smile.
‘That can be disputed. You must remember, Alice, I did not in fact sign the king’s death warrant. I think it could be said that I am not a regicide.’

  ‘Said by whom, John? They have always called you one. You were with Cromwell, you argued for the king’s death. You helped draw up the accusations, the papers …’

  ‘True. Yet even so …’

  Was he trying to give her hope, break the news to her gently, or was it possible that her clever husband, faced by this crisis, was suddenly unable to face the obvious truth?

  ‘They will hang you, John,’ she said. He did not reply. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I think I should go abroad. It would not be for long. A few months at most, I suppose.’ He smiled reassuringly. ‘I have friends. They will speak to the king. As soon as this matter of the regicides is over I can return. It seems wisest. What do you think?’

  What could she say? No, stay here with your wife and children until they come to hang you? Obviously not. She nodded slowly. ‘I am sorry for it, John,’ she said miserably, then forced herself to smile. ‘We should rather have you alive, though. When shall you leave?’

  ‘At dawn tomorrow.’ He looked at her earnestly. ‘It will not be for long.’

  She never saw him again.

  He had been right about the king. Young King Charles II, whatever his faults, had no appetite for vengeance. After twenty-six surviving regicides had been hanged in October that year he quietly told his council not to look for any more. If they appeared they would have to hang, but if they stayed out of sight he was content to leave them alone. This vengeance being not quite enough for the king’s royalist supporters, however, they hit upon what seemed to them a happy idea. The following January the corpses of Cromwell and his son-in-law Ireton were dug up from their graves, brought to the Tyburn gallows in London and hanged there for all to see. Much wisdom was shown, no doubt, in choosing January, rather than a warmer season of the year.