'Does he soften towards Orlando?'
'No, mistress. But the squire will be too proud to see me out of pocket for his son.'
For a blinding moment Juliana wondered if she was expected to make John Jolley an offer of payment in kind — she and Nerissa Mcllwaine used to joke about women with loose morals who 'never had to pay a tradesman'. She felt hot. Setting her jaw against the very thought, she thanked the man sincerely but briefly. The moment passed.
'Has any word of my husband reached Hampshire?'
'None. And none has reached you, Mistress Lovell?'
'No.' Except that because of John Jolley's visit, Juliana now knew for sure Lovell had been here. Mr Gadd would have told him years ago where the house was. So it must have been Lovell and his Royalist associates who wrecked it. That smacked into her like a betrayal.
To have the house linked to Lovell was dangerous. Juliana inherited it when her father died but, as a wife, everything of hers legally belonged to her husband. Lovell could, now that she owned it, sell the house and land and leave her destitute. Even more simply, Parliament could remove it from her because her husband was a Royalist. Enquiry discovered that John Jolley had not mentioned this property to any committee, for which she was thankful.
After Jolley left, their living conditions improved. The carpenter made the house sound. Juliana swept, washed, even found one or two usable tools and utensils, hidden in outhouses or discarded in undergrowth. They lived frugally, but they survived. It was a hard winter for the poor. As she eked out their meagre funds, sometimes they had no dinner on the table. Eventually, though, they had a larder that would sustain them through the spring, because when Juliana wrote to confirm that she was settled, Anne Jukes sent one of the grocery carriers with a great quantity of goods, out of gratitude for saving Lambert. Now they had flour, sugar, butter, currants, almonds, even spices.
They still had to outwit the iron-cold English winter. They dressed in layers, sometimes wearing almost everything they owned. They slept some nights all huddled together, when even a hot brick wrapped in old rags would not keep the bed warm. Even on the mildest days, they woke to find a thick layer of frost on their one window with glass, and the frost would stay all day, never melting. When Juliana made the boys nightshirts, they would put them on beside the fire, then dive into bed shrieking; they soon learned how to dress in their day clothes next morning while huddled underneath the bedclothes. Laundry froze solid on the washing line. Milk came from the farm with lumps of ice in it. The boys paddled through slush in the lane, then scampered home with their fingers red-raw and their wet stockings stiff on their chilblained little feet.
When she could, Juliana followed the news. Apart from wanting information about Lovell's fate, she knew this was a momentous period. The New Model Army had called the King to account. Despairing of a peaceful settlement, they had brought him to trial at Westminster. So it was in the dead of that freezing winter, at the end of January, that she left her sons in the care of a friendly woman she had come to know on a farm locally. She considered taking them to London with her, so they could participate in the historic event, but she thought them too young so she went alone.
Juliana Lovell took a boat from Greenwich, travelled upriver and joined the crowds outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on the 30th of January. There she watched the public execution of King Charles.
Chapter Fifty-Five — Westminster: January 1649
It came as a surprise to Gideon that when, back in London, he offered his services again to the Trained Bands' Green Regiment, they failed to welcome him with rapture. 'You can't just turn up! We are not a dump for cast-off New Modellers.'
'I am experienced.'
'And infected with fantastical, wild ideas, no doubt. All our officers are Presbyterians now. We don't have room for Baptists and Levellers and anti-monarchist firebrands with their bowels all on fire for giving potboys the vote.'
'I can use a snaphance musket.'
'Use it to shoot ducks then.'
'Is Colonel Warner still in charge?'
'No, he died in the summer.'
While Gideon was away, his old colonel, Sir John Warner, had been elected Lord Mayor of London. His obituaries took up almost as much newsprint as those for Thomas Rainborough, and in the conservative press more. Warner had been Lord Mayor during a contentious period. His predecessor, Sir John Gayre, had colluded with the Royalist rebels in Kent — to the extent that he was indicted for high treason. However, Warner was a puritanical Independent, who would be remembered longest for having abolished the traditional satirical puppets at Bartholomew's Fair. After he died, every puppeteer that August had a puppet playing Warner, making him a fool.
'Here lies my lord Mayor, under this stone,
That last Bartholomew's Fair, no puppets would own,
But next Bartholomew's Fair, who liveth to see,
Shall view my lord Mayor, a puppet to be!'
Reforms that would give the puppets much more to squeak about were coming to a head, and Gideon would find work. By remaining in London he witnessed December's and January's astonishing events.
Only three weeks after Rainborough's funeral, the move to bring the King to trial began. Up until then, peace negotiations had continued. Presbyterians, who still dominated Parliament, sent commissioners to the Isle of Wight, to speak to the King directly. He misinterpreted their eagerness to reach a settlement, which was really born out of deep fear of the radical republicans. The King took it for weakness, not grasping that even the Presbyterians now thought he was hopeless to deal with.
It was seven years since the war began, and one draft treaty after another had come to nothing. It was three and a half years since Naseby, after which the New Model Army thought there should be no further argument. Now, Henry Ireton was put in charge of steering their proposals with an iron hand. On behalf of the army Ireton drew up a remonstrance which demanded abandoning negotiations, dissolving the Long Parliament which had been sitting for almost a decade, reforming the franchise and putting the King to trial on a charge of high treason.
This was unacceptable to Parliament. Parliament, as it was then constituted, therefore had to go. A secret committee — three MPs and three senior army officers — gathered in a private room. They looked at the members, name by name, marking those who 'had continued faithfully to the public interest'. This meant specifically those who supported Ireton's latest remonstrance.
Next day, Colonel Pride's regiment appeared in Westminster and the rest, over 140 Members, were forcibly debarred from the House of Commons. Forty-one were taken prisoner and locked in an alehouse overnight — the alehouse adjoining Westminster Hall, which was ironically nicknamed 'Hell'. The eldest were offered parole, with permission to sleep at their own homes, but they refused, because they would not recognise the authority by which they were apprehended.
After Pride's Purge the tiny remainder came to be known derisively as the Rump Parliament ('full of maggots' jeered their enemies). These men put in hand the King's trial. Few were dedicated republicans, in fact, but they distrusted Charles and were exasperated by years of failing to reach a compromise. Even those who believed in monarchy as a principle were now prepared to remove the current office-holder.
The New Model Army transferred the King from Carisbrooke to the nearby mainland, a grim prison at Hurst Castle, cut off on all sides by sea except for a narrow pebbled causeway. In that cold bastion, the trappings of sovereignty were stripped from him. He lived in a dark cell where candles were needed even in daylight. It was said that only one servant was allowed him, though the House of Commons formally approved a daily allowance of ten pounds for his maintenance — ten pounds, when an infantry soldier was paid only eight pence a day. Charles also had a specified list of servants that started with two personal attendants and ran into: a carver, a cupbearer, a sewer, a master of the robes, a page of the back stairs, a paymaster, servants of the wood-yard, of the cellar and buttery, of the pantry and ewry, a page of the Presence, a groom of the chamber, a master cook and two undercooks. He was allowed to keep two pet dogs.