London by Edward Rutherfurd
But poor Julius remained mystified. How was it possible, after listening so carefully to his proposal, and after agreeing upon the importance of London’s good will, for this mild, sweet-mannered king to do such a thing? Half the merchants in the city were now swearing they would never lend to him again. And even Julius had to remind himself more than once:
“He is still my anointed king.”
How fortunate she was, Martha thought, to have the respectable Mrs Wheeler to keep an eye on her husband while they were apart. It was Dogget who had first introduced them years before, when they had met her in Cheapside. “This lady comes from Virginia, Martha,” he had explained. She learned that Mrs Wheeler had taken pleasant lodgings in Blackfriars; and a few days later she noticed Meredith politely bow as she passed which, little as she liked Meredith, indicated that the lady must be respectable.
Mrs Wheeler was a good listener. If she did speak, it was always sensible and to the point. Martha had only once known her sound frivolous: one day, after she had been explaining to Mrs Wheeler the evils of the theatre, Martha had shortly afterwards come upon her and Dogget laughing together; but when Martha had asked why, after a moment’s hesitation she had told her a story that seemed hardly funny at all. Martha supposed that Mrs Wheeler had no great sense of humour.
Mrs Wheeler had become a friend of the whole family. When Dogget’s younger son became sick, it was she who came to help Martha sit through the night with him. When Martha’s own daughter wanted to become a sempstress, it was Mrs Wheeler, showing an unexpected skill, who taught her most of what she needed. Once, when she asked her if she ever thought of marrying again, Mrs Wheeler only laughed: “I can do well enough without a man.” And Martha felt she could quite understand. “A husband is a duty,” she agreed.
But one thing she loved to talk to Mrs Wheeler about was America. She could listen by the hour. Always the questions took the same form; after listening politely to a few details of Virginia, she would ask: “And Massachusetts. What did you hear of Massachusetts?”
The fabled, promised land. Martha had never given up her quest. She might say of the Mayflower: “Perhaps it was as well we did not go” – for over half the pilgrims who made that fateful voyage had perished within a year – but the dream of the godly commune, the shining city, had never faded from her mind. And indeed, in recent years it was not just in the mind of Martha: many Englishmen saw in that dream no mere hope but a very pleasant reality. The reason could be summed up in two words: Laud and Winthrop.
There could not be any doubt, it seemed to Martha, that Archbishop Laud must be a very wicked man. His grip upon London had increased with every year that passed. One by one the parishes were brought into line. Many clergymen resigned.
“What happened,” Martha could well ask, “to the Reformation?”
Not only that: he was worldly. When he rode into London, he came with a train of fine gentlemen, with lackeys riding before who cried: “Clear the path, make way for the lord Bishop”, as though he were a medieval cardinal. He was on the king’s council; he had virtual control of the treasury. “Laud and the king are one and the same,” men said. But even this worldly pomp did not shock Martha as much as his sacrilege.
“Keep ye the Sabbath.” Every good Puritan did. But the king and his bishop allowed sports and games, ladies were permitted to wear finery; once she had even seen some young people dancing around a maypole, and complained to the Church authorities. Nobody cared.
No wonder then if, seeing such outrages, she and countless Puritans like her had longed for a blessed means of escape.
This Winthrop had provided. The Massachusetts colony had continued growing even more rapidly than Virginia; Puritans who had hesitated to take to the seas before were gaining confidence. Word came back with every returning ship: “Truly it is a godly commune.”
How Martha yearned to go. The first of her friends to leave were people she had prayed with since her childhood. By 1634 many of her friends had gone. “But you will follow us one day, Martha,” they assured her. In 1636, she saw not a ship, but a small flotilla at Wapping, all bound for America. The trickle of emigration was turning into a flood. When Sir Henry had ironically remarked to Julius that Laud was a good friend to Massachusetts, he had spoken more truly than even he realized. Laud and the king might think they were only losing some troublemakers, but in fact during these and the next few years puritan ships were to ferry away no less than 2 per cent of England’s entire population to America’s eastern coast.
Sometimes she would speak to her family about it, and Dogget would mutter that they were too old. But, as she gently reminded him, they were both still only in their fifties, and people far older than that were making the voyage. Dogget’s younger son, who did not seem to know what he wanted to do, was agreeable. As for the elder son, the reports coming back of the cod catches were so astonishing that he had declared: “I’ll go if you do.” But the person who held Martha back, strangely enough was Gideon – or rather, to be precise, his wife.
Martha had always tried to love the girl. She prayed about it often. Yet she could not quite overcome a certain sense of disappointment. Gideon’s wife had given him nothing except girls. They came, with monotonous regularity, every two years. They were given, as might be expected, the virtuous names that Puritans so favoured; and each mildly expressed the family’s mounting exasperation about their sex. First Charity, then Hope; then Faith, Patience and finally, when still the awaited son had not arrived, Perseverance. But the thing most difficult to bear was her sickness.
The sickness of Gideon’s wife was a curious thing. It seemed to strike her whenever Martha and Gideon broached the subject of America. Its nature was never specified but, as Mrs Wheeler remarked to Martha one day: “She is exactly sick enough not to travel.”
Then, to everyone’s surprise, at the very end of 1636 Gideon’s wife gave birth to a boy. So great was the family’s joy that they cast about for a name that would express their gratitude to the Lord. And at last Martha came up with a striking solution. One winter’s morning a rather astonished Meredith held the infant at the font, and with a wry glance at the family announced: “I baptize thee: O Be Joyful.”
Instead of a name, Puritans would sometimes take an entire phrase from their beloved Bible. It was a clear expression of Puritan loyalty, yet one that even Laud could hardly do anything about. And so O Be Joyful Carpenter, Gideon’s son, entered the world.
Gideon’s wife could now relax. The first four years of any infant’s life were by far the most dangerous. Having delivered herself of such a precious burden, she knew very well that, for some years at least, not even Martha would suggest that O Be Joyful should be risked on the long sea voyage. She became quite healthy.
It was a great surprise to her family, and not least to herself when, in the summer of 1637, Martha performed a criminal act. The sight she had witnessed had finally driven her conscience beyond all endurance, as it had enraged all London.
Although a gentleman and a scholar, Master William Prynne, most people agreed, was a contentious fellow. Three years earlier, he had written a pamphlet against the theatre which King Charles considered an insult to his wife, who was then engaged in some court theatricals. Prynne was sentenced to have his nose split and his ears cut off in the public stocks. Martha was outraged, but there was no public disturbance.
In 1637 however, Prynne was in trouble again, this time for writing against the desecration of the Sabbath by sports and, more dangerous still, for urging that bishops should be abolished. “He shall go to the stocks again,” the king’s court declared. “Even the stumps of his ears shall be ripped out; and then he shall go to perpetual prison.”
“Is all free speech forbidden, then?” the Londoners demanded. “If the king and Laud treat him like this, what will they do to us, who agree with every word he says?”
The day of the punishment itself was a sunny summer’s day, 30 June. Drawn along Cheapside in a cart, the tall figure
But it was only when Meredith, in his sermon next Sunday, made reference to the wickedness of those like Prynne who denied God’s bishops, that something within Martha suddenly gave way. Standing up, she spoke quietly but clearly: “This is not the house of God.”
There was an astonished silence. She said it again.
“This is not the house of God.” And then, feeling Dogget tugging at her arm, she calmly proceeded: “I must speak out.” And did so.
It was remembered for many years, that little speech in St Lawrence Silversleeves; even though, until the beadle dragged her from the place, it could not have lasted more than a minute. It touched on popery, on sacrilege, on God’s true kingdom – in simple words with which every Protestant in the congregation could identify. But most of all, it was remembered for one terrible sentence: “There are two great evils walking this land,” she said: “and one is called a bishop, and one is called a king.”
“She will surely,” they said, “have her ears cut off too.”
It took all Julius’s powers of persuasion to save her. The Bishop of London would have hauled her to gaol, but Julius could never forget the awkward guilt he felt about Gideon; and so, on the Tuesday following her outburst he carefully explained to her: “I think you must leave the country. Have you any thought of where you could go?”
“I will go,” she said placidly, “to Massachusetts.”
And so it was, in the summer of 1637, that Martha, her young daughter and both Dogget’s sons, prepared to set sail from London. Gideon and his family could not travel yet; and since Gideon needed his help in their little business, it was agreed that Dogget himself would remain in London for a year or so while they decided what to do.
The company that gathered to take ship at Wapping was a varied one. There were a number of craftsmen, a lawyer, a preacher, two fishermen. There was also a young graduate of Cambridge, who had recently inherited money, partly from the sale of a tavern in Southwark. His name was John Harvard.
The last words Martha spoke, as the boat was about to leave, were to Mrs Wheeler. “Promise me that you will keep an eye on my husband.”
So Mrs Wheeler promised that she would.
There were many ships that arrived on the shores of Massachusetts in the autumn of 1637. One was the vessel that carried Martha and John Harvard. Many others also came from England, and some from different places.
Hardly anyone noticed the slow old ship which had ploughed its way up from the Caribbean with a cargo of molasses. Indeed, within a season or two, even the harbour-master and the clerk who noted its arrival at Plymouth would probably have forgotten its existence if the captain of the vessel had not chosen the brief lay-over in port as his time to die. It was memorable because although the hair of the old mariner was white, his skin was black. “Black as your hat,” the clerk told his wife.
Orlando Barnikel died quietly because he knew in his heart that he had no true reason to live any longer.
The years after his buccaneering had not brought Black Barnikel great satisfaction. He had gradually settled into a quieter role as a sea-captain for hire. Men now knew him as a shrewd, skilful old operator, whose ships came through all weathers and who had a knack of avoiding trouble.
Where were his sons? Two, he knew, were dead. One was a Barbary Corsair, a Mediterranean pirate, a lower kind of fellow than he had ever been. A fourth – who even knew? They had gone from him, and come to nothing; it was, he now knew, inevitable for a man who was black in a white man’s world.
Before he died, however, he had decided that there was one last debt he wished to repay. And asking for a lawyer, he privately dictated a brief document, which he gave to the mate, whom he trusted, with a simple instruction that it was to be given to Jane, whom he carefully described. “God knows if she’s alive or what she’s called now,” he said, “but I left her in Virginia.”
Then, for the hour still left him, he had stared silently out of the window, at the harsh, rocky shore and the cold, unforgiving sea.
1642
Who could ever have believed that things had got so far? In 1637, believing that they had cowed the Puritans in England, King Charles I and Archbishop Laud turned their attention northwards and gave orders that the Church of England Prayer Book and services were straight away to be forced upon the dour Presbyterians of Scotland. Within weeks, all Scotland was aflame. And by the following year, a huge organization had arisen of Scots prepared to die to defend their Protestant cause. They had taken an oath; they were armed; they were ready to march upon England. The name of their endeavour was to ring through Scottish history: the Covenant.
To Charles it was time for stern measures. He called to his side his toughest servant, the trusted lieutenant who for some years had been ruling the unlucky Irish with an iron fist. The Earl of Strafford returned and a force of sorts was put together, but half the troops seemed to agree with the Covenanters. After more than a year of useless negotiation, Charles reluctantly summoned a Parliament. “For I dare say,” he reasoned, “with the marauding Scots at the door, the gentlemen of England will raise a decent army.” They demanded to discuss Charles’s government, so he impatiently dismissed the so-called Short Parliament within days. “We must hire an army, then,” Charles decided. And here began his greatest problem.
Money. He asked the city of London for a loan. No one would lend. Strafford told the merchants: “If we need to we’ll get cash by cutting the coinage.” As for the city’s refusal: “Double the demand, sire,” he suggested to the king in the Londoners’ hearing, “and hang a few aldermen. That’ll do it.”
“If only the king had listened to me,” Julius lamented to his brother, “about how to raise debt, he would not have been in this position now.” But he was. Seeing his weakness, the canny Scots occupied the north of England and would not go away until paid a huge indemnity. Charles therefore had to call Parliament again; and in the autumn of 1640, they were ready for him.
“These parliament men,” Henry angrily declared, “are dangerous radicals – no better than traitors. They’re in league with the Scots.” Of course they were. But traitors they were not, and hardly even radicals. They were mostly country gentlemen of substance who were appalled at Charles’s government. One, a senior fellow named Hampden, intended to lead a crusade against Ship Money. Another, a squire from East Anglia named Oliver Cromwell – a distant kinsman, as it happened, of Secretary Thomas Cromwell who had dissolved the monasteries a century before – up to Parliament for the first time, was shocked by what he saw as a godless court. But most important of all, the leader of the pack, was a master tactician called Pym.
“Pym’s reasoning is very simple,” a stout gentleman informed Julius one day in the Royal Exchange. “As long as the Scots sit tight up north – and they’ve promised us they will – and we refuse him any money down here, King Charles is trapped in a vice. Can’t do anything.” He chuckled. “So you see, it’s time to squeeze him now.”
And squeeze they did. The king’s right to customs, stripped away; Parliament must be called every three years; the present Parliament to sit as long as its members saw fit; the Ulster settlement to be returned to the Londoners. One by one these Acts were passed, humiliating Charles. By November, Strafford had been sent to the Tower; within a month, Archbishop Laud as well.
Yet, as the Parliament went about this grim business in the spring of 1641, Julius was not alarmed. Parliaments had crossed kings for centuries, whenever they dared; caused favourites to fall, even deprived monarchs of their mistresses! The situation was bad, but hardly desperate. Indeed, str
It was not long after the Parliament had begun. Julius remembered the day vividly because William Prynne had just been released from jail and a huge crowd had been leading the earless Puritan hero in triumph through the streets. The shouts of the crowd were still ringing in his ears when, to his surprise, he learned that Gideon Carpenter was at the door; and he was even more puzzled when Gideon, looking at him steadily, showed him a large scroll of paper and asked him: “Do you want to sign?”
“Sign what?” Julius had demanded.
“It’s a petition. We have nearly fifteen thousand signatures. For the abolition of bishops and all their works, root and branch.” And Gideon pointed to the mass of signatures he had collected.
Julius had heard of this petition. Started by Pennington, a vigorous Puritan on the common council, and encouraged by the Presbyterian Scots envoys who had recently arrived in London, it had been signed by many who had hated Laud and his Church. But whatever the king’s troubles with Parliament, Julius could not imagine King Charles even deigning to look at such a document. “Why bring it to me?” he had asked, only to receive a reply that surprised him further. “When you had me whipped,” Gideon said quietly, “you didn’t give me a chance.” He stared at him. “But I’m giving you one.”
A chance? What was the solemn young man talking about? “Take it elsewhere,” he said curtly. But he still wondered afterwards. Giving him a chance: it was a strange expression. Soon he learned another.
Parliament now turned to impeach Strafford, but its legal grounds were unclear. “We’ll accuse him of unspecified crimes and the king must sign his death warrant.” To which the city of London added a gentle gloss: “We lend no money till his head is off.”