Blood on the Strand (45 page)

Behn waved an expansive hand. ‘They are nothing, a diversion. Did I tell you I paid that impecunious Wiseman five pounds to
say you were dead when Holles shot at you? I had managed to spike one of the colonel’s dags, but I could not lay my hands
on the second.’

‘Yes, you did mention it,’ said Eaffrey patiently. ‘Several times. You are very clever.’

Behn preened at the praise. ‘I was terrified Heyden would catch on and tell everyone. He is too curious for his own good,
and insisted on examining your “corpse”, even though I did my best to stop him. Still, you fooled him, because he has no idea
you are still alive.’

‘Actually, Johan, he felt my neck for a pulse – and he has seen enough death to be aware that cadavers do not have one. He
knows I am alive.’

‘No!’ whispered Behn, gloating triumph evaporating like a puff of steam. ‘What shall we do? Hire an assassin in France to
deal with him? We cannot let him live, not if you want to be safe.’

‘Tom will not betray me,’ said Eaffrey softly.

‘How can you be sure?’ asked Behn worriedly.

‘Because I know him,’ replied Eaffrey. She turned slightly, and glanced at the elderly man who sat huddled in an old-fashioned
woollen cloak nearby. It hid his bandaged shoulder. He shot her a brief smile, and then turned his pale eyes to the book he
was reading:
Musaeum Tradescantianum
.

The quarrel between the Earl of Clarendon and George Digby, earl of Bristol was public and bitter. They had been allies in
exile during the Commonwealth, but it did not take not long after the King’s Restoration in 1660 for their friendship to disintegrate.
Their disparate personalities did not help. Bristol was gay, witty and fun-loving – a man of ‘irresponsible brilliance’; Clarendon
was pompous, staid, respectable and something of a killjoy. They clashed when Clarendon dismissed Bristol from a post at the
University of Oxford – in the distasteful bigotry of the time, Clarendon objected to a Catholic holding the position – and
they disagreed violently about which European princess the King should marry. One of Clarendon’s most ardent supporters was
his cousin, Sir Alan Brodrick. Brodrick was a Court debauchee, who never amounted to much, despite his kinsman’s patronage.

Matters came to a head when the blustering Sir Richard Temple arrived on the scene in 1663. He offered to manipulate parliament
on the King’s behalf, and allegedly recruited Bristol to help him. Fur flew once
details of the plan emerged. The King was furious at the presumption, and ordered Temple to explain himself in the House
of Commons. Temple lost his official posts, but survived to side against Clarendon in another dispute in the late 1660s. Bristol
did not fare so well. He made a desperate attempt to have Clarendon impeached for treason in June 1663, but it failed miserably
– mostly because the charges were manifestly false – and the incident left his reputation in tatters. The Commons claimed
its time was being wasted, and the King ordered Bristol’s arrest. Bristol fled the country, and only emerged from hiding when
Clarendon finally fell from grace in 1667. One of the charges of a later impeachment was that Clarendon had stolen black marble
from St Paul’s Cathedral to use on the fabulous new Clarendon House in Piccadilly.

The Middlesex County Records of 1663 tell of a case in which one Matthew Webb was stabbed in the chest with a rapier, and
nine gentlemen of the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields were accused of his murder. Of these, William Dillon, Thomas Sarsfeild
(written as ‘Garsfield’ in some sources) and Richard Fanning were sentenced to hang; George Willis, Gregory Burne, Walter
Fitz-Gerrard and Laurence Clarke produced a King’s Pardon; and Richard Fitz-Simons and Peter Terrell disappear from the records
altogether.

Shortly after his execution – with a silken noose, as was his prerogative as a gentleman – Dillon was dissected at a Public
Anatomy demonstration at ‘Chyrurgeons’ Hall’. Samuel Pepys was among the audience, and professed himself very impressed with
the lecture. He also enjoyed the dinner that followed, along with being given a private viewing of Dillon’s corpse, which
he touched.

Perhaps the most famous barber-surgeon of the 1660s was Richard Wiseman. He held a royal appointment, but was best known for
raising the surgical profession to a level where it was considered equal to that of the physicians. He wrote significant academic
tomes on his subject, and was elected Master of the Company of Barber-Surgeons in 1665. The Master in May 1663 was Thomas
Lisle, who also held the post of King’s Barber. Francis Johnson was paid an annual salary of £10 as the Company’s beadle after
1659, and the clerk in 1658 (and possibly until 1685) was Richard Reynell.

The Trulocke brothers – William, George and Edmund – were gunsmiths with business premises on St Martin’s Lane. William Leybourn
was a mathematician–surveyor who drew maps of London after the Great Fire of 1666, and Adrian May was a Groom of the Privy
Chamber. Thomas Greeting was a famous Court musician who made extra money from teaching – he gave Pepys’s wife lessons on
the flageolet.

John Thurloe was Oliver Cromwell’s Spymaster General and Secretary of State in the 1650s, but fell from power after the Restoration.
He lived quietly in Lincoln’s Inn, where he was a bencher. A fellow bencher of this time was William Prynne, one of London’s
most repellent fanatics. Prynne had lost his ears for writing unpalatable nonsense in the 1630s, although the punishment did
nothing to make him more moderate in the future. He wrote about two hundred books and pamphlets, many of them deeply unpleasant.
On 27 June 1663, Samuel Pepys visited Lincoln’s Inn, and wandered up and down the gardens that were in the process of being
landscaped. The Inn’s archives for that year contain records that detail
tree-felling and the levelling of uneven ground for the remodelling.

Thomas Scot was one of Thurloe’s predecessors. He was appointed head of the intelligence services in 1649, but fell out of
favour until 1660, when he took over from Thurloe. He did not keep the post for long. He was one of the fifty-nine men who
had signed Charles I’s death warrant – as was Thomas Chaloner (1595–1661) – and was executed on 17 October 1660. Later, the
running of intelligence matters fell to the clever Oxford academic Joseph Williamson.

Scot had three children. Thomas Scot the younger played a role in the disastrous Castle Plot – an attempt to seize Dublin
Castle and its lieutenant – but managed to save himself by making a deal with the Royalists whereby he would escape execution
in exchange for naming his co-conspirators. He was kept in the Tower, and not pardoned until 1666. His sister, Alice Scot,
married one of Cromwell’s wartime scoutmasters. And William Scot was perceived by the Royalist government as a dangerous dissident.
He embarked on a torrid affair with another Restoration spy called Eaffrey Johnson, who later married a German merchant named
Johan Behn. Eaffrey (or Aphra) Behn made a name for herself as a playwright, and some of her work enjoyed a twentieth-century
revival – it had been discredited by the Victorians, who considered it too lewd.

The affair between Aphra Behn and William Scot may have taken place partly in Surinam, where her remit was to seduce him and
encourage him to work for Williamson. Lady spies were probably rare in Restoration England, although historians disagree about
Aphra Behn’s effectiveness and importance. Some say she was clever enough
to take on men in a man’s world, and others say she was not very good at it. Whatever the truth, she eventually returned
to England – without Scot – and turned her attention to the stage.