ALICE

1635

What’s a life? Not a continuum, certainly. A collection of memories, perhaps; only a few.

She could just recollect old Clement Albion. She had been only four when he died, but she still remembered her grandfather. Not a face, exactly, but a quiet, benign presence in a Tudor house with big timber-framed gables. That must have been the old Albion House, she realized; not her Albion House.

Her Albion House began on a summer day.

It was very warm. It must have been late morning; perhaps it was a Saturday. She did not know. But they had walked down, just the two of them, from the old church at Boldre – just she and her father. She was eight at the time. They walked along the lane on the east side of the river and turned down the track into the wood. There were a number of young beech trees, saplings mostly, mixed with the oak and ash. The sun was slanting through the light-green lattice of the canopy; the saplings spread their leaves like trails of vapour through the underwood; birds were singing. She was so pleased that she had started to skip; her father was holding her hand.

They saw the house when they came round the bend in the track. The red-brick walls were nearly up. One of the two gables had already been refaced; the old oak roof timbers exposed their bare framework to the blue sky. The dusty site looked peaceful in the warm sun. A few men were quietly working on the upper storey; the clink of bricks being tapped into place was the only sound that disturbed the quiet.

They had stopped and stood there together, looking at the scene for a little while; then her father had said: ‘I’m building this house for you, Alice. This will be your very own and no one shall take it away from you.’ Then he had looked down and smiled, and squeezed her hand.

She had looked up and thought that her father must love her very much if he was building a whole house for her. And she experienced a moment – perhaps there are just one or two in a lifetime – of perfect happiness.

It wasn’t a big house. It was only a little larger than the old Tudor house of her grandfather and his father before him. Built in red brick, in a simple Jacobean style, it certainly qualified as a small manor house; yet hidden away, in a modest clearing in the middle of the woods, it had almost the air of an isolated grange or hunting lodge. To Alice it was magical. It was her house; because her father loved her.

Of course, he had hoped to have a son. She understood that now; but ten years had passed since that summer’s day.

Of Clement Albion’s two sons, William and Francis, it was her father William, the elder, who had done better. In fact, he had done brilliantly. As a young man, in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, he had gone up to London to study law. William had worked hard. It was a litigious age; a clever lawyer could do well. And when, fifteen years after the great Armada, the old queen had died and been succeeded by her cousin, King James of Scotland, the opportunities for amassing money had grown even greater.

For if James Stuart had one idea when, as a middle-aged man, he became King James of England, it was to have a good time. He’d never had any fun before. Son of the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots – whom he’d scarcely even known – the dour Scots Presbyterians who had thrown out his mother brought him up to rule according to their way of thinking and kept him on a tight rein. So when at last he got the throne of England as well, he was anxious to make up for lost time.

The liberated Scottish king’s ideas of fun turned out to be curious. A taste for pedantic scholarship – he was really quite learned and could be witty – led him to develop a full-blown theory that kings had a God-given right to do whatever they liked. Whether he truly came to believe this piece of startling nonsense or whether he was just amusing himself, no one has ever been sure. Another taste of this father of several children, which now became increasingly obvious, was his embarrassing, sentimental and even tearful passion for pretty young men. By his last years, court functions were apt to degenerate into a shambles of kissing and fondling these ‘sweet boys’. His third taste, which God knows he’d never been able to enjoy in the north, was a love of extravagance. Not the great displays and festivities in which (for someone else was always paying) Queen Bess had taken such delight: King James’s court favoured simple, gross excess. The feasts were often just a competition to see how much food could be conspicuously wasted. But even this was nothing compared with the licence given to the king’s friends to make free of the public purse. Old nobility like the Howards, or new like the family of the pretty boy Villiers, it was all the same: sales of offices and contracts, bribery, outright embezzlement. Everyone was at it.

Where rogues are stealing and fools spending, a wise man can surely make a fortune. William Albion had done so. By the time James’s small, shy son Charles had come to the throne in 1625, Albion had returned to the Forest a rich man. He had also married well – a modest heiress a dozen years his junior. His seat was a handsome estate in the Avon valley called Moyles Court – which contained, as it happened, the lands of his distant ancestor, Cola the Huntsman. Then he had Albion House, in the centre of the Forest, from his father; there were further holdings on Pennington Marshes; he also owned most of the village of Oakley.

Albion House he had rebuilt for Alice. The rest, he had hoped, would go to his son. But although his young wife had given him several more children, all had died in infancy. Time had passed. Then it was too late. Last year his wife had died, but William Albion had no wish to start another family at the age of sixty.

Alice was eighteen now. She was to inherit it all.

William had paused before making this decision. After all, there was his younger brother to consider.

Technically, by title, all the land he had was William’s to dispose as he wished. Old Clement, he felt sure, would have wanted him to give something to Francis; and if he hadn’t always promised Albion House to Alice he might have let Francis have that. But there was a further consideration.

What had Francis ever done to deserve it? For years, despite his father’s help and encouragement, he had drifted, never really worked. He was in London still. He had become a merchant, but not a very successful one. William was fond of Francis, but he could not quite restrain the impatience of the successful man for an unsuccessful brother. He gave, without even knowing it, a tiny shrug when Francis’s name was mentioned. So it seldom was. With the logic typical of the man who had made money, he reasoned that it was a waste of time to give it to someone who had not. Or, to put it more kindly, should his desire to keep the family name in the Forest cause him to dispossess the daughter he loved? No. Francis must fend for himself. Alice was the sole heiress.

It had come as rather a surprise to her that a few months before, when discussing in a general way the men she might marry, her father had mentioned one name with particular favour: John Lisle.

They had met him at a gathering of a number of local gentry families in the Buttons’ fine house near Lymington. He was a few years older than she and recently a widower. He had children. He had struck her as a sensible, intelligent man, although perhaps a little too earnest. Her father had talked to him more than she had.

‘But Father,’ she had reminded him, ‘his family …’

‘An ancient family.’ The Lisles were indeed a family of some antiquity who had for a long time possessed lands on the Isle of Wight.

‘Yes, but his father …’ The whole county knew about John Lisle’s father. Inheriting a good estate, he had squandered both it and his reputation. His wife had left him; he had taken to drink; in the end, he had even been arrested for debt. ‘Isn’t there bad blood …?’

Bad blood: that expression so beloved of the landed classes. A notorious brigand or two gave a certain patina to the ancestral furniture. But you had to be careful. Bad blood meant danger, uncertainty, unsoundness, blighted harvests, diseased trees. The gentry, who were still partly farmers, had their feet on the ground. Breeding people, after all, was no different from breeding livestock. Bad blood will out. It had to be avoided.

But to her surprise, her father only smiled. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘now let me advise you on that.’ And giving her that look of his that announced, ‘I speak with a lifetime of experience as a lawyer,’ he proceeded: ‘When a man has a father who has lost his substance there are two things he can do. He can accept a lowly condition, or he can fight back and make his fortune.’

‘Isn’t that what younger sons are meant to do?’

‘Yes.’ A cloud crossed his face as he reflected that this was just what his own younger brother had failed to do. ‘But when a father has dishonoured his family as well then the case is even sharper. The son of such a man faces not only poverty but shame, ridicule. Every step he takes down the street is dogged by shadows. Some men hide. They seek a life of obscurity. But the bravest souls outface the world. They hold their heads high; their ambition is not like a fire of hope, but a sword of steel. They seek fame twice: once for themselves and once to erase the shame of their fathers. That memory is always with them, like a thorn, driving them on.’ He paused and smiled. ‘John Lisle, I think, is such a one. He is a good man, an honest man. I’m sure he is kind. But he has that in him.’ He looked at her with affection. ‘When a father has an heiress as a daughter he looks, if he is wise, for a husband who will know how to use that fortune: a man of ambition.’

‘Not another heir, Father? The ambitious man, surely, might care only for her money.’

‘You must trust my judgement.’ He sighed. ‘The trouble is that most of the heirs of fine estates are either soft, or lazy, or both.’ And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he laughed.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked.

‘I was just thinking, Alicia.’ He sometimes called her that. ‘With your strong character I wouldn’t inflict you on some unsuspecting heir to a great estate. You’d destroy the poor boy entirely.’

‘I?’ She looked at him in genuine astonishment. ‘I have no thought of being a strong character, Father,’ she replied, which only caused him to smile at her the more fondly.

‘I know, my child. I know.’ He tapped his finger lightly on her arm. ‘Consider John Lisle, though. I only ask that. You will find him worthy of respect.’

When, two days later, Stephen Pride stopped at the cottage of Gabriel Furzey on the way to the green, he reckoned he was doing him a favour. ‘Shouldn’t you be going?’ he enquired.

‘No,’ said Gabriel, which, thought Pride, was typical.

If, in the three hundred years since they had quarrelled about a pony, the Prides and the Furzeys had remained in Oakley, it was for the very good reason that there were few more pleasant places to live. If they had had other quarrels about Forest matters down the generations – as they surely must have done – these were buried and forgotten. The Prides, by and large, still thought the Furzeys a little slow and the Furzeys still considered the Prides a bit pleased with themselves; although whether, after centuries of intermarriage, these perceptions had any validity it would be hard to say. One thing, however, which Stephen Pride and anyone else could have agreed upon was that Gabriel Furzey was an obstinate man.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Pride and went on his way.

The reason for his visit to the green was that young Alice Albion was there.

If there was one thing that had changed scarcely at all in the New Forest since the days of the Conqueror it was the common rights of the forest folk. Given their smallholdings and the poverty of much of the soil, this continuity was natural: the exercise of common rights was still the only way in which the local economy could work.

There were chiefly four, by name. The right of Pasture – of turning out animals to graze in the king’s forest; of Turbary – an allowance of turves, cut for fuel; of Mast – the turning out of pigs in September to eat the green acorns; and of Estovers – the taking of underwood for fuel. These were the four; although there were also some customary rights to marl, for enriching your land, and of cutting bracken as bedding for livestock.

The system by which these ancient rights were allocated, like ancient common law, was often complex and they might attach to an individual cottage; but it had been the custom to consider them as belonging to each landowner, who would claim them on behalf of himself and his tenants. The estate under which both Stephen Pride and Gabriel Furzey came belonged to the Albions. And since it would all, one day, belong to her, it was Alice, that morning, whom her father had sent, together with his steward, to collect some important information.

As he came up, Pride saw that she was sitting in the shade at the edge of the green. They had provided a table and a bench for her. The steward was standing at her side. On the table a large sheet of parchment paper was spread. She sat very upright. She wore a green riding dress and a wide-brimmed hat with a feather in it. In colouring she took after her mother. Her fair hair had a reddish tint, her eyes were more grey than blue. He smiled, thinking she looked rather fetching. He had seen this Albion girl around the place ever since she was a child. He was only seven years her senior. When she was twelve, he remembered, she hadn’t been too proud to race him on her pony. She had spirit. The Forest people liked that.

‘Stephen Pride.’ She needed no prompting from the steward and gave him a bright look. ‘What shall I write down for you?’

It was the first time, as far as anybody knew, that a complete list of all the common rights had ever been written down. They had always existed. They were in people’s memories. Any dispute in the Swainmote, as the old Venderers’ Court was often called, could always be solved by reference to the local jury, advised by the representatives of the vills. So why would anyone want to write down all this mass of local information?

As Stephen Pride enumerated the commoning rights to which his smallholding was entitled, he knew the reason very well. ‘It is’, as he had remarked to his wife the day before, ‘for our sovereign lord, the cursed king.’ And as he looked young Alice Albion in the eye now, he knew equally well, although neither of them said it, that her opinion was just the same.

If the evidence of history is anything to go by it seems clear that members of the royal house of Stuart only make good monarchs if they have been properly broken in first.

King James had. His miserable years in Scotland, where by tradition the knife was never far from any monarch’s throat, had taught him to be canny. Whatever he might believe about the divine right of kings, he never in practice pushed his English Parliament too far. He was also quite flexible. His dream was to act as a broker between the two religious camps, marrying his children to both Protestant and Catholic royal houses, and seeking toleration for both religions in England. It was a dream largely unrealized; Europe was not ready for toleration yet. But, for all his faults, he tried. His son Charles, however, had received no such apprenticeship and displayed the Stuart inflexibility at its worst.

Sometimes it is a very great mistake to give a large idea, even a good one, to a small mind. And the idea of the divine right of kings was a very bad idea indeed. If one strips away the duplicity with which he tried to accomplish his aims, there is something naive and almost childish about the lectures that Charles I used to give his subjects. Although not without talent – his eye for the arts was remarkable – this belief in his rights blinded his intelligence to even the simplest political realities. No English king, not even mighty Harry when he kicked the Pope out of his Church, had ever made such claims to divine authority. No ruler, not even the Conqueror himself, had thought you could ignore ancient law and custom. Charles wanted to rule absolutely, as the French king was starting to do; but that wasn’t the English way.

It had not been long, therefore, before King Charles and the English Parliament were at loggerheads. The Puritans suspected that he wanted to bring back Catholicism – after all, his French wife was Catholic. Merchants disliked his habit of raising forced loans. Members of Parliament were furious to be told that he considered them, in effect, nothing more than his servants. By 1629 Charles had dissolved Parliament and decided to rule without it if he could.

The only problem was, what was he to do for money? Charles wasn’t desperate. As long as he didn’t get involved in any wars – that was always a huge expense – he could just about get by. There were customs and other dues, and the profits from the crown lands. But still he always needed more. One thing he did was sell titles. The new order of baronets was a nice little earner. And as he and his advisers looked about for other assets to exploit someone had suggested: ‘What about the royal forests?’

What were they good for? No one was quite sure. There were the deer, of course. The only time the royal court usually bothered about the deer was for a coronation or some other huge feast, when they provided a large supply of venison. There was timber. That needed more looking into. And there ought to be some income from the fines levied by the royal forest courts.

It was then that a clever official suggested: ‘Why not have a Forest Eyre?’

It was an ingenious suggestion because, once it had been explained to him, nothing could have been better calculated to appeal to King Charles. The Forest Eyre went back to Plantagenet times. Every so often – years might pass between these visitations – the king’s special justices would go down to inspect the whole system, correct any maladministration, clear up any outstanding cases and, you could be sure, levy some handsome fines. As far as anyone could remember, there hadn’t been an Eyre in generations. Old King Harry had held one a century ago. Since then, everyone had forgotten about them. It was just what King Charles loved: an ancient royal prerogative his naughty people had forgotten. In 1635, to everyone’s great annoyance, there had been an Eyre in the New Forest.

The results had been quite encouraging. The regular Forest court had been galvanized. Three huge thefts of timber – a thousand trees at a time – had come to light and elicited three stupendous fines of a thousand, two thousand and three thousand pounds. This was an enormous haul. But it was not these great fines that had infuriated the Forest. It was the attack on the ordinary folk.

That summer of 1635 there had been no less than two hundred and sixty-eight prosecutions brought before the Forest court. The average had usually been about a dozen. The Forest had never seen anything like it. Every inch of land they had discreetly taken in the last generation, every cottage quietly erected, all were exposed, all fined. There was not a village or family in the entire Forest that hadn’t been caught. None of the fines were lenient; some were vicious. Labourers occupying illegal cottages were fined three pounds. You could buy a dozen sheep, or a couple of precious cows for that, when most smallholders had milk from only one. A yeoman was fined a hundred pounds for poaching. A few yards of ground taken for some beehives, a troublesome dog, some illegally grazed sheep – all resulted in abrupt fines. As always, when King Charles set out to assert himself, he was thorough.

Was he within his rights? Not a doubt of it. But with his typical lack of tact, the Stuart king had managed to find an entire population that was naturally well disposed towards him and alienate them at a single stroke.

When the political quarrels of the seventeenth century have finally died away – which as yet, in England, they have not – Charles Stuart will surely emerge on to history’s page, once and for all, neither as a villain nor a martyr, but as a very silly man.

And now every cottager’s right to his ancient common rights was to be listed. To Pride it seemed interference for its own sake. Alice had other ideas.

‘The word in London’, her father had told her the day before, ‘is that the king wants to make an inventory of the whole area. And do you know why? He wants to offer the New Forest and Sherwood Forest together, as security for a loan! Imagine it,’ he continued with a shake of the head, ‘the whole Forest could be sold off to pay the king’s creditors. That’s what’s behind all this, in my opinion.’

When Pride had finished his brief account she thanked him pleasantly and then enquired: ‘Where’s Gabriel Furzey? Shouldn’t he be here?’

‘Probably,’ Pride answered truthfully.

‘Well.’ Alice might be only eighteen, but she knew she wasn’t standing any nonsense from Gabriel. ‘You tell him from me, if you please, that if he wants his rights recorded he’d better come now. Otherwise they won’t be.’

So, grinning quietly to himself, Pride went off and delivered the message.

When one looked at Gabriel Furzey and Stephen Pride, it was not hard to guess what the attitude of each might be to the inquiry. Pride – lean, keen-eyed – was every inch an independent inhabitant of the Forest. But he had his relationship with authority too. His ancestors might have grumbled about the existence of any outside order in the Forest, but natural intelligence and self-interest had led the Prides, for a long time now, into a calculated relationship with the powers that be. When the representatives of the vills attended the Forest courts there was sure to be a Pride or two among them. Occasionally one would even take a junior position in the Forest hierarchy – an under-forester, for instance, or one of the agisters who collected the fees. Here and there a Pride had graduated from the tenant into the yeoman class, owning land in his own name; and as often as not, when the local gentlemen chose some yeomen to sit with them on juries they’d be glad enough to choose a Pride. Their reason was very simple: these Prides were intelligent, and, even in a disagreement, men in authority know that it is always easier to deal with an intelligent man than a slow-witted one. A gentleman forester felt on firm ground if he said, ‘Pride thinks he can take care of that,’ or ‘Pride says it won’t work’.

And if some well-meaning person were to suggest that Pride might have been doing a little discreet poaching on the side, the informer was more likely to be met with a quiet smile and a murmured, ‘I dare say he has,’ than any thanks – there being always a sporting chance that the gentleman receiving this information had been doing a little of the same himself.

But Gabriel Furzey, short, adipose – Alice used to think, rather harshly, that he resembled an irritable turnip – had not reached an accommodation with anyone and, as far as Pride knew, had no plans for doing so.

When Stephen told him that Alice was waiting for him, therefore, he just shook his head.

‘What’s the point of writing things down? I know my rights. Always had ’em, haven’t we?’

‘That’s true. But …’

‘Well, then. Waste of time, isn’t it?’

‘All the same, Gabriel, you’d better go, I reckon.’

‘No, I ain’t goin’.’ He gave a snort. ‘I don’t need that girl to tell me what rights I got. I know. See?’

‘She’s not bad, Gabriel. It isn’t like that anyway.’

‘She tell me to come, didn’t she?’

‘Well, in a manner of speaking.’

‘Well, I won’t then.’

‘But Gabriel …’

‘An’ you can go along too,’ Furzey suddenly shouted. ‘Go on …’ This last was a sort of bray: ‘Goo … oon.’

So Stephen Pride left and, shortly after, so did Alice. And nobody wrote anything down about Gabriel and his rights.

It didn’t seem to matter.

1648

December. A cold breeze in a grey dawning.

A single man on a grey horse – in his forties; good-looking; dark hair greying, grey eyes watching – stared from the ridge by Lymington across the salt marshes to the small grey castle of Hurst in the distance.

Grey sea, grey sky, grey foam by a grey shore, soundless because distant. From that fort by the winter sea very soon would issue, under close guard, the small wreck of a captured king.

John Lisle pursed his lips and waited. He had thought of riding down to join the cavalcade, but then decided against it. It is not, after all, an easy thing to meet a king whose head, very soon, you plan to cut off. Conversation is difficult.

But it was not the fate of King Charles that concerned him so much. He cared nothing for him. It was the quarrel he had just had with his wife that worried him – the first serious crisis in the twelve happy years of their marriage. The trouble was, he couldn’t see a way out.

‘Don’t go to London, John. I beg you.’ Again and again she had pleaded through the night. ‘No good will come of this. I can feel it. This will be the death of you.’ How could she know such a thing? It didn’t make sense, anyway. It was not like her to be so timid. ‘Stay down here, John. Or go abroad. Make any excuse, but don’t go. Cromwell will use you.’

‘No man uses me, Alice,’ he had responded irritably.

But it hadn’t stopped her. And finally, some time before daybreak she had turned on him in bitter reproach. ‘I think you must choose, John, between your family and your ambition.’

The absurd unfairness of this had struck him with such force and so hurtfully that he could not speak. He had got up and ridden out of Albion House before dawn.

His eyes remained fixed on the distant fort. Like it or not, the thought kept nagging at him: what if she were right?

Although, two years after their marriage, her father’s death had left Alice the mistress of large estates, it had never occurred to John Lisle to retire to the Forest and give up his career. Nor had Alice ever suggested it. However much she loved him, she probably would have scorned a husband who only lived off her wealth. Besides, he had two sons from his first marriage to provide for, as well as the children that he and Alice had soon started to have together. He had been a hard-working lawyer and a good one. He had risen in his profession. And when, after eleven years of personal rule, King Charles had finally been forced to call a Parliament in 1640, John Lisle had been chosen, as a man of wealth and stature, to represent the city of Winchester.

Did that make him too ambitious? It was easy for Alice to say such a thing. She had never known anything but security. Disgrace, failure, ruin – she had never felt their keen bite. There had been times as a student, with no allowance from his drunken father and too proud to beg from friends, when John had gone without food. For Alice a career was a pleasant matter, something to be taken for granted, but from which one could always choose to retire. For him it was life or death. William Albion had been right. There was steel in John Lisle’s soul. And his ambition told him he must go to London.

They were coming out of Hurst Castle now, a party of horsemen. They started to ride along the narrow strand with the gunmetal sea behind them. King Charles was easy to spot because he was the smallest.

The party was taking a strange route. Instead of passing straight up the Forest centre through Lyndhurst, they were skirting its edge, riding westwards to Ringwood and then over the top to Romsey on their way, in stages, to Windsor Castle. Did they imagine anyone would try to rescue Charles in the Forest? It seemed unlikely.

Since King Charles had plunged the country into civil war, the New Forest had remained quiet. The nearby ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, like most of the English ports and the city of London, were for Parliament. Sentiment in Lymington had run with the bigger ports. Royalist gentry had tried to secure the Isle of Wight and Winchester for the king, but they couldn’t keep it up. The Forest itself, however, containing no strongholds of any kind, had been left undisturbed. The only difference from normal life was that, since the royal government had broken down nobody had paid any of the forest officers. So they had paid themselves, from the gentleman foresters down to the humblest cottager, in timber and deer and anything else the place provided. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know how.

‘The king can’t exactly argue about it, can he?’ Stephen Pride had remarked genially to Alice one day. Lisle wondered whether the new government, whatever form it finally assumed, would take an interest in the Forest.

Then he transferred his gaze back to the distant figures riding along the strand. How was it possible, he asked himself for the hundredth time, for that small person down there to have made so much trouble?

Perhaps, given the king’s views about his rights, the war had always been inevitable, from the day when Charles came to the throne. He just could not accept the notion of political compromise. He had kept councillors his Parliament detested, raised new taxes, favoured the Catholic powers his people hated and finally tried to force his bishops, who were so ‘High Church’ they could almost be taken for papists, on to the stern Calvinistic Scots. This last act of madness had brought the Scots out in armed rebellion and given Parliament the chance to impose its will. Strafford, his hated minister, had been executed; the Archbishop of Canterbury imprisoned in the Tower of London. But it had been no good. The two sides had been too far apart by then. They had drifted into civil war; thanks, in the end, to Oliver Cromwell and his ‘Roundheads’, the king had lost.

Yet even in defeat, King Charles would not deal honestly with his opponents. For Lisle, the last straw had been after the defeat of the king at the final battle of Naseby. Captured documents had proved beyond a doubt that, if he could, Charles would bring an army from Ireland or from Catholic France to subdue his people. ‘How can we believe he wouldn’t allow papism back into England, too?’ Lisle had asked. And when he had been sent with other commissioners to negotiate with Charles on the Isle of Wight, where the king had been held before his transfer to Hurst Castle, he had perceived exactly what kind of man he had to deal with. ‘He will say anything; he will play for time, because he thinks he rules by divine right and therefore he owes us nothing at all. He has the same character as his grandmother Mary Queen of Scots: he will go on plotting until the day his head is off.’

But this, of course, was just the trouble. It was what worried Alice and many others like her. It was why, now, there was a split between the many in Parliament who wanted a compromise and the sterner souls in the army, led by Cromwell, who believed that the king must die. How could you try to execute a king, the Lord’s anointed? Such a thing had never been done. What did it mean? Where would it lead?

Strangely enough, it was precisely because he was a lawyer that John Lisle saw that a legal solution to the problem of the king was impossible.

The constitution of England was actually rather vague. Ancient common law, custom, precedent, and the relative wealth and strength of the people concerned had governed the politics of each generation. When Parliament declared that it had been consulted since the reign of Edward I, nearly four centuries before, Parliament was right. When the king said he could call or dismiss Parliament as he liked he was also right. When Parliament, looking for written authority, appealed to Magna Carta they were not quite right, because that document was an agreement between King John and some rebel barons in 1215, which the Pope had ruled was illegal. On the other hand the implication of Magna Carta, which no one had ever denied before, was that kings must govern according to custom and law. Even bad King John never invoked the idea of divine right and would have thought it very funny. When Parliament rediscovered the medieval form of impeachment, which everyone had forgotten for centuries, to attack Charles’s ministers, they had law on their side. When they claimed, shortly before the Civil War began, that Parliament had the right to veto the king’s choice of ministers and to control the army they hadn’t a legal leg to stand on.

But at the end of the day, it seemed to Lisle, none of it mattered. ‘Don’t you see,’ he had explained to Alice, ‘he has chosen a position from which, legally, he cannot be budged. He says he is the divinely appointed fount of law. Therefore, whatever his Parliament does, if he does not like it, will be illegal. Cromwell wants to try him. Very well, he will say the court is illegal. And many will hesitate and be confused.’ His incisive legal mind saw it all with complete clarity. ‘The thing is a perfect circle. He can continue thus until the Second Coming. It’s endless.’

But to break with law and custom: that was dangerous too. Defeating an impossible king was one thing, but destroy him entirely and what would arise in his place? Many of the Parliament men were gentlemen of property. They wanted order; they favoured Protestantism, preferably without King Charles’s bishops; but order, social and religious. Many of the army, and smaller townsmen however, were starting to talk of something else. These Independents wanted complete freedom for each parish to choose its own form of religion – so long as it was Protestant, of course. Even more alarming, the party of Levellers in the army wanted a general democracy, votes for all men and perhaps even the abolition of private property. No wonder, then, if gentlemen in Parliament had hesitated and hoped to reach a settlement with the king.

Until two weeks ago. For then, finally, the army had struck. Colonel Thomas Pride had marched into Parliament and arrested any members who wouldn’t co-operate with the army. It was a simple coup, done while Cromwell was tactfully absent. Pride’s Purge, it was called.

‘Do you suppose’, Alice had asked with a smile, ‘that Colonel Pride has any relationship with our Prides here in the Forest?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I can see Stephen Pride arresting the Members of Parliament.’ She had chuckled. ‘He’d do it very well.’

But that had been the last time she had been able to see the funny side of the business. As the December days wore on, and the time for Charles’s removal from the little fort on the Forest shore drew closer she had become more and more gloomy.

‘Anyone would think it was you or I who was going to trial,’ Lisle had remarked testily. But this did no good at all.

What made it worse was that he himself had heard that several of the prominent lawyers on the Parliamentary side were discreetly withdrawing from the process. When she said, ‘Cromwell needs lawyers, that’s why he wants you,’ he knew, in fact, that she was right.

So what if he didn’t go up to London? What if he pleaded sickness and stayed down in the Forest? Was Cromwell going to come and arrest him? No. Nothing would happen. He’d be left alone. But if he ever wanted any appointment or favour from the new regime he could forget it.

Ambition, then. She was right. It was his ambition drawing him to the trial of the king.

And his conscience, too, damn it, he thought angrily. He was going because he knew the thing had to be done and he was man enough to do it. His conscience, too.

And ambition.

The little king was turning off the end of the strand now. A few moments more and the party disappeared from sight. Slowly, reluctantly, John Lisle also turned and rode back towards his house. He and Alice had had several homes in the last ten years. They had been in London and Winchester, on the Isle of Wight, where he was busy repairing his own family estates, at Moyles Court in the Avon valley or at Alice’s favourite Albion House. As it was almost Christmas now they were in Albion House.

What was he going to say to her on his return?

He had thought she might be asleep when he got back, but she was waiting for him, still in her nightclothes, although wrapped up, thank God, in the chilly air by the open door. Had she been waiting there since he left? A pang of pain and a rush of tenderness passed through him. Her eyes were red. He dismounted and went to her. ‘I’ll stay until after Christmas,’ he said. ‘Then, after that, we’ll think again.’ He told himself that this last bit was true, as if he had not already made up his mind.

‘The king has gone?’

‘Yes. On his way.’

She nodded sadly. ‘John,’ she said suddenly, ‘whatever God tells you must be done, we are with you, I and your children. You must do what you must do. I am your wife.’

Dear heaven, he thought, what a fine one. He embraced her and entered the house with a new joy in his heart.

1655

Thomas Penruddock would never forget the first time he saw Alice Lisle. He had been ten. That was two years ago.

They had set off from Compton Chamberlayne early in the morning. The village and manor of Compton Chamberlayne lay in the valley of the River Nadder, about seven miles west of Sarum, and the journey into the old cathedral city was easy and pleasant. After a rest and a brief visit to the ancient cathedral with its soaring spire, they had proceeded south, following the River Avon’s course, past the Gorges family’s great estate of Longford Castle and then, crossing the river a few miles further down, they had made their way up on to the plateau of wooded ground that is the northernmost corner of the huge New Forest.

The village of Hale lay just at this corner. From the manor house, set right on the edge of the ridge, there was a lovely view westward over the Avon valley floor. Two generations ago the Penruddocks had bought the manor for a younger son, and the Penruddocks of Hale and their cousins had always been on friendly terms. On this occasion his parents had taken Thomas to stay at Hale for a few days.

As it happened, Thomas had never been to Hale before. Their cousins welcomed them warmly, the young ones took him to play, and his first evening only seemed likely to be spoiled for a moment when an elderly aunt, looking at him intently, suddenly declared: ‘Dear heaven, John, that child looks exactly like his grandmother, Anne Martell.’

It was from his mother’s side, from her mother’s family the Martells of Dorset, that Thomas had taken his dark, rather brooding good looks. The light-haired Penruddocks were a handsome family too. His father, whom Thomas idolized, was thought especially so and it had always saddened the boy that they did not look exactly alike. So his saturnine face broke into a smile when the elderly aunt continued: ‘I hope you’re proud of him, John’ and his father replied: ‘Yes, I think I am.’

Colonel John Penruddock. To Thomas he was the perfect man. With his brown beard and laughing eyes, hadn’t he been one of the most dashing commanders on the royalist side? He had lost a brother in the war; a cousin had been exiled. His own gallant loyalty to the king had cost him dear – both in money and offices – when Cromwell and his wretched crew had triumphed; but Thomas would rather the Penruddocks lost every acre of their land than have his father any different, any less splendid than he was.

The next morning, to his great pleasure, he was allowed to join the men when they went for a ride.

‘I think’, their host said, ‘we’ll start across Hale Purlieu. Do you know’, he asked kindly, ‘what a purlieu is, Thomas?’ And, when Thomas shook his head: ‘No reason why you should. A purlieu is an area at the edge of a royal forest that used to be under forest law but isn’t any more. There are several places along this edge of the Forest that have been in and out, as the boundaries change down the centuries.’

The Penruddocks had ridden across Hale Purlieu and had started up over a high, wide tract of New Forest heath when they saw the two riders coming from their right on a track that ran directly across their path a little below them. Thomas heard his father mutter a curse and saw his cousins pull up sharply. He was about to ask what it meant, but his father looked so grim that he did not dare. So the Penruddocks watched silently as the figures, a man and a woman, passed two hundred yards in front of them without a sign or a word and continued across the heath.

He had a good look at them as they rode by. The man, quietly dressed, was wearing a high-crowned, broad-rimmed black hat of the kind favoured by Cromwell’s Puritans. The woman was equally quietly dressed, in dark brown with a small lace collar. Her head was bare, her hair reddish. They might be simple Puritans, but the quality of their clothes and their splendid horses indicated clearly that they were people of considerable wealth. Nobody moved until they were almost out of sight.

‘Who were they, Father?’ he at last ventured to ask.

‘Lisle and his wife,’ came the bleak answer.

‘They’ve got Moyles Court,’ his cousin remarked, ‘but they don’t come up here much.’ He sniffed contemptuously. ‘We never speak to them.’ His eyes rested upon the two figures as they finally disappeared. ‘Damned regicides.’

Regicides: the people who had killed the king. Not all the Roundheads had been for it. Fairfax, Cromwell’s fellow commander, had refused to take part in the trial of the king. Several of the leading men were unwilling to sign the death warrant. But John Lisle had shown no qualms. He’d been at the trial, helped draw up the documents, argued for execution, shown no remorse when the king’s head was cut off. He was a king-killer, a regicide.

‘And profited by it handsomely,’ his cousin added angrily. When royalist estates were confiscated by Parliament, Cromwell had given Lisle the chance to buy up land cheap. ‘His wife’s no better,’ Penruddock of Hale went on. ‘She’s in it as deep as he is. Regicides both.’

‘Those people’, his father said quietly, ‘are your family’s mortal enemies, Thomas. Remember that.’

‘They have the power, John,’ his cousin remarked. ‘That’s the trouble. And there’s not much to do about it.’

‘Oh,’ Colonel John Penruddock said thoughtfully, ‘I wouldn’t be sure of that, cousin. You never know.’ And Thomas saw the two men look at each other, but no further word was spoken.

He had wondered what it meant.

And now he knew. It was a Monday morning. They had been out all that damp March night, gathering parties of horsemen around Sarum; but Tom didn’t feel tired for he was too excited. He was riding with his father. It was still dark, an hour to go before dawn, when the cavalcade – almost two hundred strong – rode in beside the old Close wall, under the high shadow of the cathedral spire. At the head rode his father, another local gentleman named Grove and General Wagstaff, a stranger who had come with messages and instructions from the royal court in exile.

Passing the corner where the cathedral’s walled precincts met the town, they rode up the short street that brought them into the broad open ground of Salisbury market place. As puzzled heads popped out from shuttered windows, awakened by this unexpected clatter in the dark, the men-at-arms went quickly about their work.

‘Two men to each door,’ he heard his father order briskly. Moments later they had set guards by the entrance of each of the market place’s several inns. Next, his father sent patrols down the streets and to the gates of the cathedral Close.

It was only a few minutes before a young officer rode up and reported: ‘The town is secured.’

‘Good.’ His father turned to his friend Grove. ‘Would you go door to door? Let’s see how many of the good citizens of Salisbury are ready to serve their king.’ As Grove went off, Penruddock turned back to the young officer. ‘See how many horses you can find. Commandeer them, no matter whom they belong to, in the king’s name.’ He glanced across at his fellow commander. General Wagstaff, a rather hot-headed man, had served valiantly in the Civil War. With a trace of irritation Penruddock asked him now: ‘Where’s Hertford?’

The Marquis of Hertford, a mighty magnate, had pledged to join them with a large troop, perhaps a whole regiment of horse.

‘He’ll come. Have no fear.’

‘He’d better. Well, shall we look at the gaol? Wait here, Thomas,’ he instructed and, taking twenty men with them, the two commanders rode off into the darkness towards the city prison.

The Sealed Knot. Young Thomas looked around him at the shadowy horsemen in the market place. Here and there he could see the faint glow of a clay pipe that had been lit. There were soft chinks as a horse chewed its bit or a sword tapped against a breastplate of armour. The Sealed Knot – for two years the loyal gentlemen of this secret group had prepared to strike the blow that would restore England to its proper ruler. Even now, across the sea, the rightful heir, the eldest son of the murdered king, was waiting eagerly to cross. At strategic points all over the country, towns and strongholds were being seized. And his own gallant father was leading them in the west. He felt so proud of him that he could almost die.

It was not long before the two cavalier commanders returned.

His father was chuckling. ‘I found it hard to tell, Wagstaff, whether those men were more pleased to be let out of gaol or sorry to be made into soldiers.’ He turned as the young officer he had sent off came back to report on the horses. ‘We’ve just acquired about a hundred and twenty gaolbirds who are fit for service. Have we mounts for them?’

‘Yes, Sir. The stables at all the inns are full. So many people in town for the assizes.’ The judges from London had just arrived in Salisbury to hold the periodic sessions there. The place was packed with people who had business with the courts.

‘Ah, yes,’ Colonel Penruddock continued, ‘that reminds me. We’ve got the justices and the sheriff to deal with.’ He nodded to the officer. ‘Find them, if you please, and bring them here at once.’

Thomas found it hard not to laugh a few minutes later when the gentlemen in question appeared. For the officer had taken his father’s words quite literally. There were three men, two judges and the sheriff, all taken straight from their beds, still in their nightshirts and shivering in the early morning cold. A faint light was appearing in the sky. The expressions of angry dismay on the pale faces of the three could be clearly seen.

Up to now, Wagstaff had been content to confer quietly with Penruddock. After all, he had only come there as the representative of the king, whereas Penruddock carried all the weight of local respect. But for some reason the sight of these three important persons in their night attire seemed to stir him into a sudden access of irritation. He was a short, peppery soldier with a small beard and a long moustache. This last seemed to quiver with disgust as he glared at them.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ asked one of the judges with as much dignity as he could muster.

‘It means, Sir,’ replied Wagstaff furiously, ‘that you are arrested in the king’s name.’

‘I think not,’ replied the judge with a composure admirable for a man standing in a public place in only his nightshirt.

‘It also means’ – Wagstaff’s person bristled until his small body seemed to turn into a shout – ‘that you are about to be hanged.’

‘That isn’t quite the plan, Wagstaff,’ Penruddock gently interposed.

But for the moment it seemed Wagstaff wasn’t listening. He turned upon the sheriff now. ‘You, Sir,’ he barked.

‘Me, Sir?’

‘Yes, Sir. You, Sir. Damn you, Sir. You are a sheriff?’

‘I am.’

‘Then you will swear your oath of loyalty to the king, Sir. Now, Sir!’

The sheriff in question had previously fought as a colonel in Cromwell’s army and, whatever his situation, he was not going to be browbeaten. ‘I will not,’ he replied stoutly.

‘God’s blood!’ Wagstaff cried. ‘Hang them now, Penruddock. God’s blood,’ he added again for good measure.

‘That is blasphemy, Sir,’ observed one of the judges. It was a frequent complaint of the Puritan opponents of the loose-living royalist cavaliers that their language was blasphemous.

‘Damn your snivelling cant, you flat-faced Bible thumper, I’m going to hang you. Bring ropes,’ Wagstaff cried, casting about in the dawning for a promising point of suspension.

And it was several minutes before Penruddock could persuade him that this was not their best course. In the end, the judges had their official commission documents burned in front of them and the sheriff was put on a horse, still in his nightshirt, to be taken with them as a hostage. ‘We can always hang him later,’ a rather grumpy Wagstaff muttered with a small revival of hope.

It was getting quite light now and the enlarged forces had gathered in the market. There were nearly four hundred in all. To Thomas they seemed a huge army. But he saw his father purse his lips and quietly enquire of Grove: ‘How many citizens did you get?’

‘Not many,’ Grove murmured.

‘Mostly the gaolbirds, then.’ He looked grim. ‘Where’s Hertford?’

‘He’ll join us. Along the way,’ Wagstaff grunted. ‘Depend on it.’

‘I do.’ Colonel John Penruddock beckoned Thomas to draw close. ‘Thomas, you are to go to your mother and give her a full report of all that has passed. You are to remain at home until you receive my word to join me. Do you understand?’

‘But, Father. You said I could ride with you.’

‘You will obey me, Thomas. You will give me your word as a gentleman to do exactly as I say. Remain guarding your mother, your brothers and sisters, until I send for you.’

Thomas felt his eyes growing hot. His father had never asked for his word as a gentleman before, but even this tiny thrill of pleasure was swamped by the great wave of disappointment and misery that had just broken over him. ‘Oh, Father.’ He choked back the tears. He felt a huge sense of loss. He had been going to ride with his father, a fellow soldier at his side. Would the chance ever come again? He felt his father’s hand on his arm. The hand squeezed.

‘We rode together all this night. I was glad to have you at my side, my brave boy. The proudest, best night of my life. Always remember that.’ He smiled. ‘Now promise me.’

‘I promise, Father.’

‘Time to ride,’ said Wagstaff.

‘Yes,’ said Colonel John Penruddock.

*

Monday passed quietly at Compton Chamberlayne. Thomas slept in the afternoon. Just before dusk a horseman on his way up the road from the west towards Sarum brought news to Mrs Penruddock that her husband and his men had been at Shaftesbury, only a dozen miles away; but fearing that it might tempt Thomas to ride out there she did not tell him. On Tuesday a party of Cromwell’s horse arrived in Sarum. Within hours, they had ridden on, westward. When asked what their mission was they replied: ‘To hunt down Penruddock.’

Wednesday passed. There was no news. Somewhere over the big chalk ridges that swept towards the west, Penruddock was collecting troops, perhaps fighting. But although young Thomas stopped every horseman coming from the west and his mother sent three times a day to Sarum for news, there was none. Only silence. Nobody even knew where they were. Penruddock’s Rising had rolled away out of sight.

Why was it happening? Why had the members of the Sealed Knot decided they could strike now and why was level-headed Colonel John Penruddock involved in this perilous business?

Whatever the king’s faults, the shock at the execution of Charles I had been widespread. Tracts describing him as a martyr had sold in such huge numbers that there were almost as many in circulation as Bibles. Nor was it long before the Scots – who had no more wish to be ruled by Cromwell and his English army than they had to be subject to Charles I and his bishops – had crowned his son as Charles II on condition that in Scotland, at least, whether he liked it or not (and the jolly young libertine didn’t like it at all!), he would uphold the rule of their dour Calvinistic faith. Young Charles II had promptly tried to invade England, been completely routed by Cromwell and, after hiding in an oak tree, fled for his life. That was four years ago, but from his exile abroad the young king had been busily preparing to regain his kingdom ever since.

As for Cromwell, what sort of government had he offered? A Commonwealth, it was called. But take away the mask of a Parliament of squires and merchants hand-picked by himself and it was clear that the power was still entirely with the army. Not even the one that had won the Civil War, though, for the democratic Levellers had been crushed and their leaders shot. Cromwell was called Protector now and signed himself Oliver P., just like a king. Three months ago, when even his own chosen Parliament had refused to increase his army, he had dissolved it. ‘He’s a worse tyrant than the old king ever was,’ they protested. With the royalists still plentiful on the one hand, Parliament men and even army democrats furious on the other, it was not unreasonable to hope that Cromwell might be toppled. As always in the affairs of men, however, the outcome would have nothing to do with the merits of the cause and everything with timing.

The news came on Thursday.

‘They’ve been broken.’ It had happened during a night-time skirmish in a village down in the West Country. ‘Wagstaff got away, but Penruddock and Grove are taken. They’re going to be tried. For treason.’

It was only gradually that the full story emerged. The Sealed Knot’s great rising had not exactly failed: it had never really started. Despite the fury of the Parliament men at being dismissed, despite the fact that some of Cromwell’s army was still in the north pacifying the Scottish Highlands, the senior men of the Sealed Knot had concluded, quite rightly, that their organization wasn’t ready for a full-scale rising. A flurry of confused messages to and fro between the Knot and the king in exile had not only left some agents, like Wagstaff, believing the rising was still on, but had also alerted Cromwell who had promptly brought extra troops into London and other key points. At one rendezvous after another the conspirators had either failed to turn up or quickly gone home. By the day before the events at Salisbury the whole thing had been completely called off.

But nobody had told Penruddock. It was just a question of timing.

Thomas had never seen his mother like this before. Although she had passed on the saturnine looks of the Martells to her son, she herself had a broad, open face with a mass of chestnut hair. She was a simple soul, she understood her household, but she had always left all matters of business and politics to her husband and followed behind him. She had seen him spend over a thousand pounds in the king’s cause, and suffer a fine of thirteen hundred more. The last few years had been hard as they struggled to pay this off. But a trial for treason, as even Thomas knew, could mean stiffer penalties for the family. They could lose Compton Chamberlayne and everything they had. As his mother fussed about her household daily tasks, supervising her children, the kitchen, the larder, household servants and now estate workers too, he wondered if she knew and was trying to carry on as normal, or whether she just closed her eyes even to the thought.

But above all, he watched her for signs of what was happening with his father.

His first letter had been brought to them on Thursday night. It begged her to remain where she was and await further word. Within days another came with instructions.

Thomas could see his mother doing her best. His father asked her to use all her influence on his behalf, to approach all sorts of people. Such business did not come easily to her. She asked friends for help. The trouble was, almost all of them were among the gentry with royalist connections. After a fruitless week of seeing friends who couldn’t help and writing to others who probably wouldn’t, his mother announced to the family one day: ‘We’re all going to the Forest tomorrow.’

‘Whom are we going to see?’ Thomas asked.

‘Alice Lisle.’

‘At least she can see us,’ his mother declared as the old carriage rolled across the Forest. She had learned that Alice Lisle was at Albion House, so they had spent a night at Hale before setting off again at dawn. ‘She may have married Lisle, but she’s still an Albion. We used to know them,’ she had remarked plaintively.

By late morning they were at Lyndhurst and by noon they had passed Brockenhurst and were crossing the little ford from which the track led down towards the house in the woods.

As he looked at his two younger brothers and three sisters, Thomas thought of the conversation he had had with his mother the night before. ‘I think Mrs Lisle hates us, Mother,’ he had suggested.

‘Perhaps, but she’s a woman with children too,’ his mother had replied in her simple way. And then, with a sudden vexation he had seldom seen before: ‘Oh, these men! I don’t know. I really don’t.’

So they rolled in through the gateway to Albion House and the surprised servants told their mistress who was there; and after a short pause Alice Lisle gave orders that they might come in. They were escorted into the parlour.

Alice Lisle was dressed in black, with a plain white apron, a big linen collar and cuffs. Her reddish hair was tucked into a linen cap. She looked every inch a Puritan. Mrs Penruddock had dressed as simply as she could, although her lace collar showed plainly enough that she was the wife of a cavalier. What’s the use of pretending, she had thought?

Alice Lisle looked at Mrs Penruddock and her children. She was standing herself and she did not suggest they sit down. She had understood, of course, at once. The Penruddock woman had come to plead and was using her children. She didn’t blame her. She supposed she’d have done the same. She saw the other woman look round for her own children but she had already had them swiftly taken to another part of the house. She didn’t want the children to meet because it might suggest an intimacy that was impossible. She stood stiffly. She dared not show any weakness. ‘My husband is in London and will not return this month, I think,’ she said.

‘It was you I came to see.’ Mrs Penruddock had not prepared a speech because she didn’t really know how. ‘I remember your father very well. My grandfather and old Clement Albion were friends, you know,’ she blurted out.

‘That may be.’

‘Do you know what they’re doing to my husband? They’ve accused him of treason!’ Her voice went up at this last as though it were something outrageous.

Dear God, Alice could have cried out, if you put yourself at the head of four hundred men, capture the sheriff and declare war on the government, what do you expect? But she understood. She looked at the children, saw the eldest boy watching her intently, wanted to look at him with pity, but knew she must not. Instead, she looked stern. ‘What do you want with me?’ she asked.

‘It can’t be right’, the other said, indicating the six children, ‘to leave these without a father, whatever he did. I mean, it was he who stopped Wagstaff harming those men in Salisbury. He never hurt anyone. And if the Protector lets him live, I know he’d give him his word never to take up arms again, or even have any dealings with the king at all.’

‘Are you saying you wish me to write all this to my husband? You think he can persuade the Protector?’

‘Yes.’ A light of hope appeared in Mrs Penruddock’s face. ‘Would you do that?’

Alice stared at her. She could see the hope dawning and she knew she must crush it. She could not add to this family’s misery by awakening false optimism that would only be dashed. Her gaze fell upon Thomas again. The boy looked more sensible than his mother, she thought. ‘Mrs Penruddock.’ Putting on her sternest frown she addressed herself partly to the boy as well. ‘I must tell you that there is no hope at all. If the judges find him guilty he will surely die. That is all I have to say to you.’

The woman’s face fell, but she had not quite given up. ‘You will not even write?’ she pleaded.

Alice hesitated. What could she reply? ‘I will write,’ she said unwillingly. ‘But it won’t do any good.’

‘Well at least she said she’d write,’ said Mrs Penruddock to her children as they went back.

And write Alice did – a long and passionate letter. She described the interview to her husband and made all the points in Colonel Penruddock’s favour, including some that his wife hadn’t thought of. Whatever his intentions at the start of the ill-fated business, she hadn’t the least doubt that if Penruddock gave his word to Cromwell he would keep it.

John Lisle’s reply came a few days later. He agreed with Alice and had talked to Cromwell but, hardly surprisingly, he couldn’t help much.

The leaders will be tried by jury and the judges they ill-used at Salisbury shall not sit in judgement lest it be thought they seek vengeance.

If Penruddock is found guilty – and surely he is so – the Protector will grant him a merciful death. But he cannot do more. If he pardons Penruddock, what encouragement he’d give to any other rebellion.

Thomas did not remember the details of the days that followed. There were letters, desperate appeals; for a time it seemed that a guarantee of safe conduct and pardon offered to some of their followers might be applied to Penruddock and Grove too, but this was denied. Next the authorities appeared to hesitate about where the trials were to be, but by April it was decided that the rebels taken down in the West Country would be tried down there, in Exeter city, where they were being held. Every day he asked his mother, ‘When shall we go to see Father?’ and always she replied: ‘As soon as he sends for us.’

It was clear that his father still thought it might be necessary for his wife to go to London on his behalf, so they remained at home. But in the third week of April a message came. The trial was about to begin. Colonel Penruddock had sent for his wife.

‘Can’t I come too?’ Thomas had begged. Not now, he was told. So once again, he had to stay at home and wait.

His mother was gone a week, but before she returned he had already heard the verdict. Guilty. They had sent to Cromwell for the death warrant. She was frantic now. Penruddock and Grove had issued an appeal to the judges.

She herself, the moment she reached her home, immediately despatched a letter to Alice Lisle. ‘I’m sure she can do something,’ she declared. Although why this should be the case, when they had never heard another word from her, Thomas did not know.

One blow, however, they had not foreseen. On the day after her return, when she was trying to comfort her children, a party of six soldiers under an officer came to the door of the house and informed the unhappy woman that she must leave.

‘Leave? What do you mean? Why?’

‘House is sequestered.’

‘On whose orders?’

‘The Sheriff’s.’

‘Am I to be turned out of doors, then? With my children?’

‘Yes.’

They spent that night at an inn at Salisbury; the next with their cousins at Hale. The following day, however, word came that they might return. There had been a mistake. No decision as to their property had been taken yet.

The fact that Alice Lisle, hearing about it the same day, had guessed that the sheriff, a greedy man, was probably trying to get the property for himself and sent an urgent message to her husband to have the order rescinded was something the Penruddock family never knew.

The day after that Mrs Penruddock and all her children set out for Exeter. It took them three days. By the time they reached it the warrant for the executions had arrived from Cromwell, written and signed in his own hand. Instead of the usual gruesome hanging, drawing and quartering of traitors, Penruddock was to be executed cleanly by having his head struck off with an axe. Never having seen a traitor’s execution the family did not fully understand what a mercy this was.

They were allowed, in that last week, to see him twice. The first time came as a shock to Thomas. Although, thanks to his wife, he had been provided with a clean shirt, Colonel Penruddock was looking gaunt and haggard in his small cell. His gaolers had not let him wash as often as he wished and Thomas was aware of a certain grimy odour in his father’s presence. The effect of this, however, after the initial shock, was to make him even more moved than he might have been otherwise. The little children just stared at their unkempt father in confusion. He spoke to them all in his usual calm and kindly way, blessed them and kissed them and told them they must be brave.

‘Perhaps’, Thomas heard him murmur to their mother, ‘Cromwell may relent. But I do not think so.’

The second occasion was more difficult. With time passing, although she tried to keep calm, his mother had become more and more distracted. As the day of the execution approached she seemed to think that her appeal to Alice Lisle was sure to bring relief. ‘I can’t understand why it’s taking so long,’ she would suddenly break out plaintively. ‘The reprieve must come.’ She’d frown. ‘It must do.’ She also for some reason would return in her mind, again and again, to the fact that the sheriff’s men had turned her out of her house for two days. ‘To think they could do such a thing,’ she would exclaim.

They knew their second visit would be their last because the execution was to be the following day. They went there in the afternoon and entered the prison.

But for some reason there was a delay. They had to wait a while in an outer chamber, where they found themselves in the company of the senior gaoler who passed the time by thoughtfully eating a pie and picking his teeth. He had a dirty grizzled beard, which he had not trimmed because, nowadays, there was no one to make him. They tried not to look at him.

But he looked at them. They interested him. He did not like royalists, especially cavalier gentry, which these Penruddocks were. If the father of these children was about to have his head cut off, so much the better. He observed their aristocratic clothes – lace and satin for the girls; why, the younger boy had little rosettes on his shoes – and wondered idly how they would look after he and his men had had a chance to spoil them. He could see the clothes in tatters, the boys with a black eye or two and the mother …

The mother was jabbering on about something now. She’d hoped for a reprieve. That was a joke. No one was going to reprieve Penruddock, even he knew that. But he listened curiously all the same. She’d hoped Judge Lisle would speak to Cromwell. He’d heard of Lisle. Never seen him, though. Close to Cromwell he’d heard. The woman had written to his wife. A useless hope, obviously, but the wives of condemned men sometimes got like that.

‘Lisle, did you say,’ he suddenly interjected with a smile, to throw her off guard. ‘Judge Lisle?’

‘Yes, good man.’ She turned to him eagerly. ‘Has anything been heard from him, do you know?’

He paused. He intended to savour this. ‘The warrant for your husband’s death is made out by Lisle. In his own hand. He was with Cromwell when he signed it.’

The effect was delicious. He watched her face fall into abject confusion. She seemed to collapse and wither before his eyes. He had never seen anything equal to it. The fact that he hadn’t the least idea whether Judge Lisle was even within a hundred miles of Cromwell or the warrant made it even better. ‘’Tis well known,’ he added for artistic effect.

‘But I wrote again to his wife,’ poor Mrs Penruddock wailed.

‘They say it’s she’, he went on blandly, ‘who especially urged the poor Colonel’s death.’ The suggestion that he pitied her cursed husband made the thing sound more plausible. The woman almost fainted. The eldest boy looked ready for murder. And he was just trying to think whether there was anything else he could invent to taunt these unhappy people when a signal from one of the guards told him that the prisoner was ready.

‘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.

But Lisle had been wrong if he believed that he mightn’t be viewed as a regicide. As he waited in Switzerland for news, it soon became clear: he had too many enemies.

‘My dearest husband,’ Alice wrote sadly, ‘you cannot return.’

There was talk, each year, of her going to join him in Lausanne, where he was now living. But it was not so easy. For a start, money was short. Most of John Lisle’s property had been confiscated or removed. One estate had been given to some of his own relations on the Isle of Wight who had remained faithful to the royalist cause. Another went to the new king’s younger brother James, Duke of York. The London house was gone. Alice alone had to support the family now on her New Forest inheritance and try to send money to her poor husband too.

‘We must live quietly,’ she told her children. With the estate to look after, and the children, it was hard to see how she could go to live in Switzerland.

The family was quite extensive. There were John’s two sons from his previous marriage. They were young men now, but she had always brought them up like her own and with their father’s fortune gone and his name in disgrace, how were they to make good marriages? As for her own children, her son, to her great grief, had died at sixteen, but there were three surviving daughters, Margaret, Bridget and Tryphena who would all be needing to find husbands.

And then there was little Betty – bright-eyed Betty, so small and full of life. She had been conceived that last night before her husband departed: that night when she had clung to him, praying that he would return, so afraid that he would not. Little Betty: the child John Lisle had never seen; the child she would remember him by.

Two years passed. Then another. And another. The baby had become a toddler; she ran about now, she talked. She asked about her father. Alice would tell her stories about him, what a fine man he was.

‘I shall go and see the king one day and tell him I want my daddy back,’ she said. And who knew, thought Alice, given the genial character of Charles II, it might work. But not yet. It was too soon. So she wrote to her husband and told him every detail of what they all did and how Betty grew; and he wrote long and loving letters in return; and they both prayed that with the passing of time, he might come back – one day.

In the meantime, what was there to do? She was glad at least to be in the Forest. It was the country of her childhood and her family. In Betty she could relive her own happy early days. There was comfort in that. There was always plenty to keep her occupied, from day to day. Yet how could she fill the other void in her life?

To her surprise it was religion that did so.

She had never been especially religious before her marriage. Of course, she and John had been vigorous supporters of their congregation in London; but how much of that, she wondered, had been her husband’s desire to keep close with Cromwell and his family? Her new interest had come from another source entirely and was quite unexpected.

Stephen Pride’s wife. It was unusual for a Pride to marry someone from outside the Forest, but one fine Saturday morning, when the Pride family had gone down into Lymington to the little market there, Stephen Pride had met his future wife and that was it. Her family had come from Portsmouth, some years before. She was quiet, kindly, about Alice’s age with light-brown hair and grey eyes very like Alice’s own. ‘He says he married me because I reminded him of you,’ Joan Pride once confessed to her. Alice couldn’t help being rather pleased about that.

Joan Pride was devout. All her family were. Like so many others in the small towns round England’s coasts, these honest folk had read their Bible in the days of Queen Elizabeth and found nothing there about bishops and priests and ceremonies; so they had preferred to gather in small meeting houses, choose their own leaders and preachers, and lead a simple, godly life in peace, if only they were allowed. When Charles I had found such freedom intolerable, many of these folk had emigrated to the new settlements in America; some had fought the king in Cromwell’s army. During the Civil War and under the Protector’s rule they had been able to worship as they pleased.

Every Sunday, therefore, while her husband watched with a tolerant smile, Joan Pride had set out from Oakley, sometimes taking one or two of her children, and walked the two miles into Lymington where she joined her family at the meeting house. And now and then, when she was not in London with her husband, Alice had joined the congregation at their prayers. There was no reason why not. In matters of religion these had been democratic days. Although somewhat surprised to find such an important lady in their midst, they quietly welcomed her; and for her part, she liked them. ‘I’ve heard sermons there from travelling preachers quite as good’, she had told John Lisle, ‘as ever I heard in London.’

Often on these occasions she would lead her horse beside Joan Pride and her children as far as Oakley, in pleasant conversation, before returning to Albion House. Their relationship was entirely comfortable. As was the custom, she called her tenant’s wife Goody Pride and Joan called her Dame Alice. When John Lisle had been made one of Cromwell’s Lords, properly she should have been called Lady Lisle, or My Lady, but Alice noticed with amusement that Joan Pride continued quietly to call her Dame Alice – which let Alice know what her Puritan friend thought of lordship. In this way, over the years, while they preserved the usual formality between landlord and tenant, Alice Lisle and Joan Pride became friends.

It was the week after John Lisle had fled from England that Joan Pride came to Albion House. She just happened to be passing that way, she said. She had brought some cakes she had baked. It would have been the height of bad manners not to accept such a gift, even though she didn’t particularly want them, so Alice thanked her kindly, while Joan Pride’s grey eyes took in everything she saw in the big house she had never entered before.

‘Perhaps we shall see you at the meeting house, Dame Alice,’ she had said gently, as she left.

‘Yes,’ Alice had replied absently. ‘Yes, of course.’

She had gone to Boldre parish church, however, the next Sunday and for several more afterwards. With her regicide husband on the run she did not want to do anything that might cause unfavourable comment in the new royalist regime.

She was riding by a small coppice she owned about a month after this, when she noticed Stephen Pride at work on the fence. Asked what he was doing, he showed her where a section had been broken down. ‘Don’t want the deer getting in,’ he remarked. Had her steward asked him to see to this? she enquired. ‘Just noticed it as I was passing,’ he replied; and although she offered, he refused to take any payment. Gradually, in the weeks that followed, she noticed a number of similar incidents. One of the cattle was sick: it was brought in to her steward. When a tree fell across the lane that led to Albion House, Pride and three of the Oakley villagers were cutting it up and carting the wood to the house by early morning without even being asked. Her Forest friends were silently looking after her, she realized.

She continued to go to Boldre parish church. She suspected that Joan Pride understood. But after some time, when it was clear that nothing she did was going to help her husband or save his fortune, she turned up at the Lymington meeting house again one Sunday and was quietly welcomed as if she had never avoided the place. She went often thereafter.

And she might have continued to do so indefinitely, had it not been for the English Parliament.

King Charles II was a tolerant man and, unlike his father, his tolerance seemed to extend to religion. He told his councillors that he was content to allow his subjects to worship as they pleased. But his council and his Parliament were not content with that at all. The gentlemen in Parliament wanted order. They had no wish to encourage the Puritan sects who had given so much trouble before. And besides, if people were free to worship as they pleased it might allow the Roman Catholic Church to flourish again and that was unthinkable. So the Acts of Parliament followed and the new king could not stop them. Only the Anglican prayer book with its formal services might be used in churches. Protestant sects – Dissenters as they were called – were banned from any church. Soon, it was said, a new Act would ban them from meeting within five miles of any town. Joan Pride’s congregation at Lymington was practically illegal.

‘It’s monstrous,’ Alice declared. ‘What possible harm can these people do?’ But the law was the law. She went to Boldre church, used the Anglican prayer book and held her peace. She told Joan Pride she was sorry for what had happened and the other woman made no comment. Indeed, for three months she did not even see her friend. And then one day she chanced to meet her in the lane that led south from Boldre church, and Joan Pride told her that there was a preacher, a certain Mr Whitaker, who was willing to come to Lymington. ‘But we daren’t have him in the town, Dame Alice. So we’ve nowhere for him to preach,’ she explained.

Alice had heard of this preacher, a scholarly young man with a fine reputation. ‘I should like to have heard him myself,’ she confessed. After only a few moments’ thought, and rather to her own surprise, she heard herself saying: ‘He could come to Albion House. He might stay as my guest and preach in the hall. Mightn’t you and your friends come to hear him there?’

And so it was done. Mr Robert Whitaker proved to be a splendid preacher. Before the royal Restoration he had been a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was also very good-looking. Her daughter Margaret, especially, seemed to take an interest in him; and he, for his part, seemed to need little persuading before he promised to come and visit them again. Alice was not sure what she thought of this new development. A young preacher, however eloquent, was not quite the match she had considered for one of her daughters.

She had hardly had time to worry about this, however, before a letter from her husband had driven all other thoughts from her mind. He had a friend who was to make a visit to Switzerland and who would be happy to convey her with his family, at no cost to herself, and bring her back again after a month. She could bring little Betty, the daughter he had never seen. They were to leave in three weeks. As John Lisle wrote:

There being no time to carry messages back and forth between us, I shall either rejoice to see you, my dearest love, and my daughter in Lausanne; or else learn with grief but understanding, that you cannot make this journey.

What should she do? I must go, she concluded. ‘You are going to see your father,’ she told the little girl. She began to prepare and pack.

So it came as a particularly painful blow when, five days before she was to leave, a messenger arrived with news that John Lisle had been murdered in Lausanne. It was not certain who was behind it. Certainly not the king himself. At no time did Charles II ever indulge in acts of vengeance of this kind. But there were other royalists who were certainly capable of such a deed. It was said that his French mother, the widow of the executed king, might have been responsible. Alice thought so.

Anyway, she had no husband now and Betty had no father. By chance young Whitaker came calling not long after.

1670

Zephyr was blowing his gentlest breeze through the green glades as King Charles II of England went forth in his New Forest, that warm August day, to hunt.

He had been there before. Five years back, when the terrible plague was raging in London, the king and his court had come down to the safety of Sarum; and while there he had made a small tour of the villages round about. ‘When I was running away from Cromwell, after I hid in the oak tree, I came through Sarum.’ This had included a ride into the Forest. ‘I slept rough in the New Forest two nights,’ he genially told his courtiers, ‘and not even the charcoal burners knew I was there.’

And now he had decided to visit the Forest again, with a party of courtiers, for his royal pleasure.

Stephen Pride looked at his friend Purkiss and Purkiss looked at Puckle. Furzey should have been there too, but he had said he wasn’t coming, not for any king. So it was the three of them and Pride’s son Jim, who were waiting on their ponies by the gate of the King’s House at Lyndhurst, where they had been told to report, as the king and his party emerged.

Then Stephen Pride looked at King Charles II of England and King Charles II looked at Stephen Pride.

The royal visitor was certainly a memorable figure. Tall, swarthy, with that mass of curling brown hair that fell to his chest so thickly that you might have thought it was a wig, Charles II exhibited both sides of his ancestry very clearly. His fine brown eyes and the long line of his mouth were those of the Celtic Stuart family, but to these features were added the heavy nose and the sensual, cynical power of his French mother’s Bourbon ancestors. He glanced now at Pride with exactly the same cheerful cynicism he would have shown if he were addressing a pretty young serving wench or his royal cousin King Louis XIV of France.

Stephen Pride stared, but it wasn’t so much the king whom Pride was looking at. It was the women.

There were several of them. They were dressed in hunting clothes just like the men, with jaunty hunting caps. The queen was not among them that day, but there was a vivacious, dark-haired young woman who whispered something in the king’s ear that made him laugh. This, Pride guessed, must be the comic actress, Nell Gwynn, whom all England knew to be the king’s latest mistress. He noticed an elegant young Frenchwoman and several others. Were these all royal mistresses too? He didn’t know. But as the independent New Forest smallholder looked at the French and Celtic prince he wondered, with a touch of secret envy, how the devil the handsome rogue got away with it all.

There were nine in the royal party including the king and four ladies. Pride did not know who the other men were, but one – a strikingly handsome youth, a delicate version of the king, really – he assumed must be Monmouth, the monarch’s bastard son. In attendance was Sir Robert Howard, an aristocrat whose official title of Master Keeper meant he was nominally in charge of the deer in the bailiwick in which they were to hunt; there were also several local gentlemen keepers. The party was to hunt from Bolderwood lodge and, as Jim Pride was underkeeper there, he had recruited his father and Puckle to act as extra riders. There were usually some tips to be had on these occasions. Furzey had been asked too, but as he’d refused they’d taken Stephen Pride’s friend Purkiss from Brockenhurst. He had a reputation for being no fool, so they reckoned they were probably better off with him than with Furzey anyway.

They were all ready. Stephen Pride was sixty years old, but he had to admit he was quite excited. He’d been a happily faithful husband for over thirty years, but to his own amusement he found himself stealing glances at the king’s pretty lady friends. Life in the old dog yet, he thought cheerfully, and was glad he was fit enough to participate with his son in what, he supposed, would be a tiring day.

‘I should think we’ll be taking a lot of deer today,’ he remarked to one of the gentlemen keepers, who gave him an old-fashioned look.

‘Don’t count on it, Stephen,’ he murmured. ‘I know the king.’

And to Pride’s astonishment they had not gone a quarter-mile before he saw the Master Keeper’s hand shoot up and the king’s voice rang out. ‘Nellie wants to see the Rufus tree.’

‘The Rufus tree!’ his courtiers cried out.

So off they all went, instead, to the Rufus tree.

‘It will be like this’ – the gentleman smiled at Pride – ‘the whole day.’

And indeed, they had only gone another quarter-mile when suddenly there was a further change of plan. Before seeing the Rufus tree the king wished to inspect his new plantation. This meant a couple of miles’ extra riding and the party obediently swung round to go off there instead.

Pride looked at his companions. They were not very pleased.

‘Doesn’t look as if we’re going to get much out of this,’ Puckle remarked with reproach to Jim Pride. Money and the odd haunch of venison tended to come when numbers of deer were killed. The gentlemen keepers were usually pretty good at making sure the riders like Puckle were looked after. But if they were just going to wander about like this all day, the prospects weren’t so promising.

‘It isn’t Jim’s fault,’ Pride defended his son.

‘It’s early yet,’ said Jim hopefully.

Pride glanced across at Purkiss. He felt bad about him because he had asked the Brockenhurst man himself.

Purkiss was a tall man with a long face and a quiet, intelligent manner. The Purkisses were an ancient Forest family, respected for their good sense. ‘They go quietly,’ Pride would say, ‘but they’re always thinking. No one ever makes a fool of a Purkiss.’ If he felt guilty about wasting Purkiss’s time, however, Purkiss himself looked content enough. He seemed to be meditating to himself.

The king’s plantation, it had to be said, was a fine affair. So much timber had been lost during the lax administration and confusion of the last seven decades that everyone agreed something needed to be done. As so often with Charles II, behind his sensual indulgence, the king’s keen intelligence was at work. Just as, after the city of London had suffered its great fire, he had studied every detail and firmly supported the huge rebuilding programme of Sir Christopher Wren, so now the royal patron of the arts and sciences had devised a practical and far-seeing project in his royal forest. On his personal orders three large areas – three hundred acres in all – were to be fenced off like coppices and sown with acorns and beech mast. Thousands of fine timber trees would result for eventual harvesting. ‘Future generations, at least, will bless me,’ he had reasonably remarked.

The party arrived at the big inclosure. The seedlings stretched away in lines like an army. The party dutifully looked and expressed their admiration. But the king, Pride noticed, although genial, was also surveying the scene with a sharp eye and, taking two companions, he cantered away round the perimeter to inspect the fence.

Having returned satisfied, he gave the order: ‘Now for that Rufus tree.’

So back they went again. The four Forest men bringing up the rear of the cheerful cavalcade said little now. Jim was looking glum, Puckle bored. But Purkiss still seemed quite happy and, when Stephen Pride remarked that he was sorry to have brought him on a fool’s errand, the Brockenhurst man just shook his head and smiled. ‘It’s not every day I get the chance to ride with the king, Stephen,’ he said calmly. ‘Besides, a man may learn much and profit from such an occasion.’

‘I can’t see much profit myself,’ Pride answered, ‘but I’m glad if you can.’

If the Rufus tree had been old at the time of the Armada, eighty years later its long life was clearly nearing its end. The ancient oak was decrepit. Most of its branches had died back. A great rent in the side showed where a large limb had broken off. Ivy grew on the trunk. Only a little crown of leaves grew from its topmost branch. As a mark of respect it had been enclosed behind a stake fence.

The two acorns which had tumbled down and taken root after the Armada storms stood not far off, noble oak trees now. One was shorter and broader because it had been pollarded; the other, untouched, grew high.

They all surveyed the hoary old hulk with reverence. Several of the party dismounted.

‘This is where Tyrrell shot my ancestor William Rufus, Nellie,’ the king announced. He glanced at Sir Robert Howard. ‘That’s almost six hundred years ago. Can this tree really be so old?’

‘Undoubtedly, Sir,’ said the Master Keeper, who hadn’t the faintest idea.

‘What exactly is the story?’ young Monmouth asked.

‘Yes.’ King Charles looked sternly at Howard. ‘Let’s have it exactly, Master Keeper.’

And the aristocrat, a little red, had just started to bluster some vague and garbled version of the tale he’d obviously forgotten, when to everyone’s surprise there was a movement from the back, and a tall figure stepped forward and made a low bow. It was Purkiss.

Stephen Pride watched in astonishment as his friend calmly made his way to the front. Now Purkiss, in a respectful voice and with a serious countenance enquired: ‘May I, Your Majesty, recount the true story of this tree?’

‘You certainly may, fellow,’ King Charles said affably, while Nellie pulled a face at Howard.

And so Purkiss began. First he explained about the oak tree’s magical Christmas greening and, when Charles looked doubtful, the gentlemen keepers assured him this was perfectly correct. The king leaned forward in his saddle after that, paying close attention to Purkiss’s every word.

Purkiss was good. Pride listened with admiration. With the quiet reverence of a verger conducting the faithful round a cathedral, he gave the story of Rufus’s death with every detail recorded or invented in the chronicles. He described the evil visions of the Norman king seen the night before; what he had said to Walter Tyrrell in the morning; the monk’s warning. Everything. Then, solemnly, he pointed to the tree. ‘When Tyrrell loosed the fatal arrow, Sire, it grazed the tree and then struck the king. It left a mark, they say, which once could be seen up there.’ He pointed to a place some way up the trunk. ‘It was only a young tree then, Your Majesty, so the mark was carried higher with the years.’

He explained how Tyrrell fled across the Forest to the River Avon at Tyrrell’s Ford and how the king’s body was carried on a forester’s cart to Winchester. He concluded with a low bow.

‘Well done, good fellow!’ cried the monarch. ‘Wasn’t that well done?’ he asked the courtiers, who agreed that it was excellent. ‘That’s worth a golden guinea,’ he said, producing a gold coin and handing it down to the Brockenhurst man. ‘How do you come to know all this so well, good friend?’ he then enquired.

‘Because, Your Majesty’ – Purkiss’s face was as solemn as a judge’s – ‘the forester who carried away the king’s body on his cart was my own ancestor. His name was Purkiss.’

There was a peal of laughter from Nellie.

King Charles bit his lip. ‘The devil he was,’ he said.

Pride stared at his friend with stupefaction. The cunning rascal, he thought. The cleverness with which the thing was done; the way Purkiss had carefully stopped and let the king draw this last, astounding piece of information from him. And the man was still standing there, without even the hint of a smirk on his face.

As for King Charles II of England who, whatever his vices or his virtues, was certainly one of the most accomplished liars who ever sat upon a throne, he gazed down at Purkiss with professional admiration. ‘Here’s another guinea, Purkiss,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if your ancestor’s name appears one day in history books.’

Which it did.

It was not often that Alice Lisle couldn’t make up her mind. Some people would have been surprised to know that such a thing ever occurred. But this morning, as she looked coldly at her family and at Mr Hancock the lawyer, she hesitated; and her hesitation was not unreasonable. ‘I wish that somebody would tell me’, she remarked in her usual businesslike manner, ‘how I am to ask a favour of a man when my husband killed his father.’

For they wanted her to ride across the Forest and see the king.

There were many who thought that Alice Lisle was hard. She didn’t really care. If I’m not strong, she had long ago concluded, who will be? If she was attacked, who would defend her? She had looked about. She didn’t see anybody.

It wasn’t as if she had a husband any more. Sometimes she would have liked one: somebody to hold her, comfort her and love her; especially during that period, just after John Lisle’s death, when she was passing sadly from her childbearing years towards the age of fifty. But there had been no one, so she had faced it all alone.

God knows there had been plenty to do. And she had managed fairly well. Her triumph had been the marriage of her stepson. With the help of family friends she had found him a handsome girl who was heiress to a rich estate near Southampton. Her late husband would have been proud of her, and grateful, for that. As far as her own daughters were concerned they had so far married godly men, but none of wealth; and this, Alice frankly admitted, was probably her own fault.

The religious meetings she had begun at Albion House had soon grown into something more. Word spread quickly among the Puritan community. Since the new restrictions upon them, men who had been living as well-beneficed ministers had to toe the line of the Anglican Church; those who refused lost their livings. So there was no shortage of respectable men who were only too glad of the hospitality of a country house from which to preach. Soon she found she was letting them stay at Moyles Court as well and people were coming to hear preachings from Ringwood, Fordingbridge and other villages up the Avon river almost as far as Sarum. Some of the preachers, inevitably, were handsome unmarried men.

Margaret, as she had foreseen, had married Whitaker. Tryphena had wed a worthy Puritan gentleman named Lloyd. But Bridget, Alice considered, had found the most distinguished man of them all, a scholarly minister named Leonard Hoar, who had been in America and studied at the new university of Harvard before returning to England as a notable preacher. There had been talk of his returning with Bridget to Puritan Massachusetts when a good position came up, perhaps at Harvard. Sometimes Alice thought there was too much nervousness in his disposition, but his brilliance was undoubted. She was sorry that she seldom saw them.

For the moment, then, Alice could consider her daughters settled, except for little Betty. And as Betty was still only nine, there was time enough before she needed to worry about her.

Other matters, however, were not so settled. Money was always a problem. None of her Puritan sons-in-law was rich and with the new regime there wasn’t a chance of preferment. ‘And because I’m a woman,’ she told her family frankly, ‘men always think they can cheat me.’

There was the Christchurch merchant who had owed money to John Lisle, although he denied it; there were the Lisle relations on the Isle of Wight, withholding part of her stepson’s inheritance – they were still trying to wriggle out of that. When the Christchurch merchant told her she was a peevish, troublesome woman she had coldly demanded: ‘And if I weren’t, would you pay me what you owe? Would you feed and clothe my children? I think not. First you try to rob them,’ she told him scornfully, ‘then you call me names if I complain.’ She had learned to be tough.

‘No one is going to love me,’ she had remarked to Hancock the lawyer, ‘but perhaps they will respect me.’

She looked at the three people before her now. Whitaker: handsome, honest, a fine man, but not a man of business. Tryphena: her husband was no fool, but he was away in London. Narrow-faced Tryphena herself was a good woman and a loyal daughter, but even now, in her thirties, she was as literal as a child; the idea of being subtle, or even tactful, had simply never crossed her mind. John Hancock the lawyer, however, had good judgement. With his neatly curled grey hair and his stately manners, he should really have gone to practise in London, but he preferred to live down near Sarum. Like all good advocates he understood that the law is a negotiation and that indirect means are as good as direct. It was to John Hancock that she would listen.

‘You really think I should go and see the king?’

‘Yes, I do. For the simple reason that you have nothing to lose.’

Alice sighed. The problem involved no less a personage than the king’s brother James, Duke of York. In this case it was Alice who was defending herself against the charge of withholding money. For after being given part of John Lisle’s forfeited estate, the duke had somehow become convinced that Alice was secreting some of Lisle’s money, to which he was entitled. He had even started a lawsuit against her, which had already dragged on for some years.

‘I think that the Duke of York, who is an honest but obstinate man, really believes you are secreting this money and that if he were convinced you were suffering hardship, he would drop the case,’ Hancock explained. ‘He is of the opinion that you are cheating him because you are John Lisle’s widow. The king is a much easier man than his brother. If you can convince him, he would persuade James. At least you should try. You owe it to little Betty.’

‘Ah. You hit me there, John Hancock.’

‘I know. I am ruthless.’ He smiled. Betty, playing outside: the threat of the duke’s lawsuit was a cloud over her future fortune.

‘I know why you are unwilling to go,’ Whitaker remarked amiably. ‘It’s the king’s reputation with women. You fear he’ll make an attempt upon your virtue.’

‘Yes, Robert,’ Alice said drily. ‘Of course.’

‘I hardly think’ – Tryphena had been listening carefully and now she frowned – ‘that the king would make any attempt upon Mother. His interest is only in women who are young and beautiful.’

So it was agreed that Alice should go and that she should take little Betty with her. ‘Perhaps’, Alice said wryly, ‘the sight of the child may soften the king’s heart, even if the sight of me is unlikely to excite him.’

While Tryphena prepared the girl for her outing, Alice did, all the same, take some trouble over her own appearance so that, as she surveyed herself in the glass, she could murmur a little wistfully: ‘John Lisle didn’t marry such an ill-looking woman, at least.’

It was noon when they left Albion House and started up the lane that led northwards towards the small ford. They missed their visitor, approaching from the south, by only a few minutes.

Gabriel Furzey rode slowly through the gate to Albion House. He’d been glad when Stephen Pride went off with his son Jim, so that none of the Prides was around to see him as he went on his errand.

The truth was Gabriel Furzey was in trouble.

The presence of Charles II in the New Forest that year was not entirely a matter of royal whim. The Forest was very much in the royal mind just then. The merry monarch was always on the lookout for extra income and, like his father before him, he had realized after a time that the royal forests might be a useful asset. The second King Charles was going about things in a much jollier manner; but he was just as thorough. He did more than institute a Forest Eyre; his Commission of Inquiry was going into everything. The regarders were checking every boundary in the Forest. The encroachments and land grants were all carefully recorded; timber selling, charcoal selling, the administration of the forest officers – all were inspected. The king was letting them know that his Forest was to be properly managed in future. There was even a deer census, which revealed that the New Forest still contained some seventy-five hundred fallow and nearly four hundred red deer. Clearly the king wanted to know exactly what the place was truly worth. And, the largest task of all, his justices were ordered to record exactly who held what rights in the Forest and what they should be paying for them.

‘A complete register of claims, right down to the last hog to eat the acorns on the forest floor,’ Hancock the lawyer had described the inquiry to Alice. The justices in Eyre had already held two sessions about the claims. A final one, at which Alice’s would be dealt with, was due shortly. ‘As well as establishing what everyone owes,’ Hancock had pointed out, ‘this will cut off any further claims. Either a claim is recorded, or it’s invalid. It also seems to me’, he added, ‘that the king is cleverly preparing the ground for the future. Once our claims are recorded, we can’t complain about anything he may do at a later date. So long as he doesn’t infringe what is already registered he can look for ways to profit from the Forest in any way he can.’

Whatever the royal motives might be, one thing was very clear: these claims would be final and binding. If yours wasn’t in here it would never be recognized in the future. Every landlord and peasant in the Forest had understood that perfectly by now and they had all turned up before the justices at Lyndhurst. The basis of most claims was the less formal register made thirty-five years before. Whatever was in that would be recognized. If there were further claims they could be added but would need to be proved.

And that, for Gabriel Furzey, was the trouble.

It was his own fault, that was the worst of it: a moment of obstinacy and bad temper a long time ago. Worse still, it was Stephen Pride who had urged him to go and make his claim with young Alice; Stephen Pride who knew he hadn’t. So now the Prides of Oakley had all their rights and he didn’t.

Not that it had made any difference. All through the years of political strife, when no one had bothered much about the Forest, the people of Oakley had gone about their lives as they always had before. He had pastured his few cows, cut turf, collected wood and no one had ever questioned it. Until recently he had clean forgotten about that business of claims back in 1635. And then this New Forest Eyre had come along.

It was his son George who had brought up the matter. Furzey had two sons: William, who had married a girl over in Ringwood and gone to live there, and George, who had stayed at Oakley. When Furzey died, George would take over the smallholding, so naturally he had an interest in the business. Furzey had heard about the coming registration of claims that spring and wondered if he ought to be doing something. Since he hated this sort of thing, though, and remembered the previous occasion with embarrassment, he had tried to put it out of his mind.

Then one evening George had come home with a worried look on his face. ‘You know this register of claims? Stephen Pride says we were never on it, Dad. Is that right?’

‘Stephen Pride says that, does he?’

‘Yes, Dad. This is serious.’

‘What does Stephen Pride know?’

‘You mean he’s got it wrong?’

‘’Course he has. I fixed all that. Years ago.’

‘You sure, Dad?’

‘’Course I’m sure. Don’t you worry about that.’

‘Oh. That’s all right then. Had me worried.’

So George had stopped worrying and Gabriel Furzey had started.

It had to be all right, though, didn’t it? A commoner’s rights were his, weren’t they? Always had been, long before all this writing of things down. All through the spring and summer Furzey had meant to do something about it; week after week he had put it off. He had half expected Alice or her steward to come and check the village; but Oakley was just the same now as it had been thirty-five years ago, so they probably assumed there was nothing to alter. Alice Lisle had many things to think about; she had probably forgotten about Furzey’s failure to turn up all those years ago. The court had met, but he had heard that Alice was not presenting her claims until later. The court had met again. But now time had run out. He had to do something. He rode up to the house.

As it happened, his timing could not have been better.

John Hancock the lawyer would be presenting Alice’s and numerous other landowners’ claims before the court. As Furzey stood before him with his hat in his hand, he understood the situation at once. ‘The claims for Mast and Pasture will not be a difficulty,’ he reassured the villager. ‘Nor, I think, will the right of Turbary. These clearly belong to your cottage. However,’ he continued, ‘the right of Estovers is not so straightforward.’ And when Furzey looked mystified and mumbled that he’d always had that right the lawyer explained: ‘You may think you have, but I shall have to examine the records.’

The ancient rights of the Forest folk, although they derived from common practices that went back into the mists of time, were by no means as simple as might be supposed. The common rights in the Forest belonged not to a family but to the individual cottage or holding. Some cottages had some rights, some had others. The right of Estovers – of collecting wood – was especially valuable and had been granted back in Norman times only to the most important village tenants, those who held their dwelling by the tenure known as copyhold. The Pride smallholding in Oakley, for instance, had always been a copyhold. Down the centuries, other villagers without copyholds had often claimed, or assumed they had, the right of Estovers and some had got away with it for so long that no one ever questioned it. From time to time, however, some new attempt was made to restrict this practice of helping oneself to the Forest’s underwood; and the rule which applied to Furzey now stated that he might claim the right of Estovers only if the cottage – the ‘messuage’ was the ancient legal term – he occupied had been built before a certain date in the reign of Queen Elizabeth – an arcane dispensation of which Furzey himself had never even heard.

The estate records were kept at Albion House. Hancock knew where they were and, as he had nothing special to do until Alice returned from her mission, he thought he might as well see what he could find. It was the sort of burrowing the lawyer rather enjoyed. ‘When did your family first occupy your holding?’ he enquired.

‘My grandfather’s day,’ Furzey told him. ‘We was in another cottage before then. Always in Oakley, though,’ he added firmly, in case it mattered.

‘Quite. Sit and rest.’ The lawyer gave him a professional smile. ‘You don’t mind waiting, do you? I’ll see what I can find.’

The hunt had lasted less than a quarter of an hour. Stephen Pride still couldn’t quite believe it.

The thing had been beautifully managed, too. The king had been placed in a perfect spot in a glade. He was armed with the traditional bow. His ladies were grouped behind him. Pride and the Forest men, aided by the gentlemen keepers and two of the courtiers, drove some deer through and the king, in the most cheerful manner, loosed an arrow, which shot quite close over one of the deer before embedding itself in a tree.

‘Well shot, Sire,’ cried one of the courtiers, while Charles, without the slightest show of disappointment, turned to his ladies for approval.

Stephen Pride, riding past an instant later, could have sworn he heard Nellie cry: ‘I hope you’re not going to hurt any of those poor little deer, Charles.’ And after a moment or two, just as they were about to begin another drive, there was a shout: ‘To Bolderwood!’ And to the utter astonishment of the Forest men, the whole party prepared to ride back to the lodge, where refreshments were awaiting them. Did all kings, Stephen wondered, get bored so quickly?

But Charles II was not bored at all. He was doing what he liked best, which was to learn how things worked, with a shrewder eye than people supposed, and to flirt with pretty women. And an hour afterwards he was quite happily doing the latter when he observed, with no great pleasure, two figures, cut, it seemed, from the same brown cloth, riding towards him. Who the devil, he murmured to the Master Keeper, were they? Alice Lisle, he was informed. The child was her daughter.