Rebels and Traitors (47 page)

Before the sad clear-up, the battlefield was filled with the terrible moans and screams of wounded and dying men, the wheezing death-throes of horses. The aftermath had the normal blood and terror. Royalists who escaped fled at least to Leicester, though Leicester was bound to be retaken by Parliament so some cavaliers kept going as far as their base at Newark, thirty miles distant. Fugitives were hunted and chopped down by cavalry, who rode up behind them and severed their necks with sword blows from above. A group of Royalist horse lost their way, were trapped by New Model pursuers in a dead end, butchered in a churchyard and their bodies tossed contemptuously into clay pits. One desperate fugitive ran for thirty miles, only to surprise a serving girl who was able to kill him with the dolly-stick she had been using to pound laundry.

Cromwell took his cavalry straight on to Leicester, Okey’s dragoons with him. Much of the New Model had to stay at Naseby clearing up. The dead were stripped and buried; the wounded were collected. Prisoners were marched away. Various Royalist ladies of quality were found close to the battlefield and quietly returned to private life. Women of the lower orders fared much worse. A group of females were in an encampment, unaware of the battle’s outcome. They were denounced as Irish, though they were more likely Welsh. Since they carried knives, whether for their own protection or merely for preparing dinner, they were violently attacked there among the smouldering campfires, denounced as whores, then mutilated by slashing their noses and faces. About a hundred, it was said, were murdered in cold blood.

Elsewhere, a large consignment of cheese and biscuit was discovered among the plunder. Parliament’s weary soldiers devoured this, praising God.

Gideon Jukes did not know how long he lay semi-conscious. When he managed to crawl upright, he had been left behind by the dragoons. Now he was bemused. Standing among the littered carcases of men and horses, with his eyes still stinging from the sulphurous smoke of the gunpowder and every muscle aching, he wondered what he was supposed to do. He stumbled about, his booted feet unable to bear him straight. A little while later, he found himself close to where booty was being sorted. Someone handed him a share of the captured cheese and biscuit, which he ate mechanically. He was spent. He needed to be given orders. He felt lost without his regiment.

The field was said to be four miles broad, yet Gideon had a ridiculous chance encounter there. A familiar figure came along — wide-bodied, trailing a battered pike with its shaft bent, his blood-covered breastplate unbuckled so his tattered shirt hung out. It was unmistakably Lambert, who until that moment had had no inkling that Gideon was enlisted or present. His brother’s helmet, his heavy iron pot, was missing, along with the soft Monmouth cap he usually wore under it. His tow-coloured hair was black with filth, his face streaked with blood and grime.

Coincidence never fazed Lambert. Trust you to sniff out the snap —’ Gideon tore in two the cheese he had been eating. Lambert took hold of the halves and measured them by eye, adjusting for fairness as if they were brothers squabbling at home; then both munched grimly in silence until they could take in no more.

‘You join at Windsor?’

‘Newport Pagnell.’

Lambert nodded. ‘I tried to get and see you there. We were under orders not to mingle, in case the Newport garrison poked us in the eye for having better coats and guns.’

‘No, it was because New Model Army soldiers kept trying to run off and join our rather fine garrison!’ Gideon corrected his brother with a grin. ‘I’m with Okey. Spent half the day on my knees in a ditch with a bramble cane in my ear.’

‘We saw you crazy devils whooping and playing at cavaliers,’ Lambert said, jealously.

‘Going at it like heroes! … I have lost my father’s horse.’ Guilt was fixating Gideon.

‘You have lost your father,’ Lambert informed him in a grey voice, ‘so there will be no comeback for the mare … He slipped away in his sleep at the end of March. Colonel Rainborough gave me home leave from Windsor for the funeral.’

‘Our father would have wished to see this day …’ Tears of grief mingled with tears of stress and fatigue as Gideon thought of John Jukes’s delight if he had known of the victory. Then he imagined his mother, without John, to whom she had cleaved for nearly fifty years.

‘God is our strength!’ Lambert saluted the last crumbs of biscuit with the New Model’s watchword of the day. Food had undone him. He looked down and saw that he was standing in a pool of blood. A wound to the foot which he had not felt in the heat of battle finally made its presence known. He passed out in a dead faint; Lambert could not stand the sight of blood. Gideon just about caught him and supported his substantial weight while others rushed to help lower the hefty pikeman to the ground.

A regimental surgeon’s mate glanced at Lambert, cut off his shoe and stocking, and performed rapid cleaning. Gideon stood by, unable to move, suspended in lassitude. ‘He’ll live. Get him into one of the carriages going out to Northampton.’ With two hundred captured vehicles, the Parliamentarian wounded were travelling in style.

‘Find yourself another horse!’ Lambert woozily commanded as he was lifted into his conveyance, still the elder brother, still trying to organise …

It was only early afternoon. Over Broad Moor, frantic plovers called and searched for fledglings they would never find again. The corn and even the prickly gorse were trampled flat. Smoke lay as thick as the mist that had hidden the armies from each other at daybreak. At least it hid some of the carnage.

Lambert would be tended at Northampton. Parliament sent doctors to attend the wounded there. Gideon helped collect other casualties until a riderless horse was given to him, so he set off to Leicester after his regiment. Along the road he witnessed the bloodied bodies of Royalists who had been chopped down as they tried to escape. Some still had in their hats the beanstalks that the King’s men had worn as their field sign. The postures of the corpses and their wounds told its story of sword-blunting massacre. Flight gave a licence for a killing spree. Failure to surrender permitted bloody vengeance. The New Model Army had taken it.

‘Honest men served you faithfully in this action,’
Oliver Cromwell would write to the Speaker of the House of Commons.
‘Sir, they are trusty. I beseech you in the name of God not to discourage them. I wish this action may beget thankfulness and humility in all that are concerned in it…’
It was natural for those honest men of faithful service to exult that the Lord had shown His favour by awarding them easy victory. Riding alone in search of the dragoons, however, Gideon Jukes experienced more melancholy feelings. He was all too aware how close the battle at Naseby came to being lost and how hard it had in fact been won. Then the mercy of God was not on any of the roads to Leicester that evening. The joy of the victor was tempered in Gideon’s heart.

It was a clear evening with blackbirds singing from vantage points on stately trees and high barn roofs. He passed through the South Leicestershire hamlets, with their medieval churches, their elegant Tudor granges and halls owned by wealthy men who had taken over the church leases when the old monastic endowments were reformed. Sibbertoft, Husbands Bosworth, Shearsby and Peatling Magna … ridiculous British village names. Gideon had taken the westward road, because the eastern route through Market Harborough was clogged with conveys of guards and their dispirited, defeated prisoners. Children who should not have been allowed out stood on gates to watch his passing and to wave, thinking that today’s procession of desperate fugitives and stern-faced pursuers was an exciting carnival. ‘Who are you for, Mister?’

‘I’m for freedom,’ Gideon answered, deliberately puzzling the tousle-haired little scamps. He had fought for their future, though they neither knew it, nor cared.

He struggled to control the strange horse, which had been terrified in the fight and would not go easily under him. It was the tallest horse he had ever ridden, a beautiful creature that must have been the delight of its previous rider — some Royalist cavalryman who was now dead, in all probability. Maybe not even an English cavalier, but a Frenchman, or one of the King’s Irish or German mercenaries. Now this horse was carrying one of the victorious New Modellers through the peaceful countryside, and neither of them much enjoyed the experience.

While the horse flicked its ears manically whenever he tried to soothe it, and pulled sideways across the roadway at every opportunity, Gideon kept his thoughts fixed on his dead father and his fears for his brother. He was utterly tired, mentally and physically, but he knew that he must keep awake. He had to find his regiment. He was bound to return to the colours. He could not allow himself to doze in the saddle; he dreaded the moment when exhaustion would claim him and force him to sleep.

Gideon’s fear was the fear of remembered noise and terror: scenes of horror that he had barely taken in at the time, but which he knew from old experience would be etched in his memory. The battle of Naseby was now with him for ever; whenever he was particularly weak or weary, this day’s work would come rampaging through his dreams.

Oxford always had violent noises at night. In the last month of her pregnancy, Juliana slept fitfully. When she realised there was knocking at the street door, she roused herself. Tipsy soldiers and ne’er-do-wells sometimes banged as they passed. Although it was intended to cause anxiety, the malefactors rarely kept it up but staggered on their way. Juliana longed to return to sleep, but she lay partly tensed for trouble.

When this noise became too insistent to ignore, she pulled a shawl around her shoulders. Stumbling and complaining, she blundered downstairs without lighting a candle. It was high summer and must be after midnight, judging by the dawn light which had already filtered through window curtains. The knocking continued. As she was about to unfasten the door onto St Aldate’s, she became sufficiently alert to stop, laying her head against the wood and calling out, Who is it? Who goes there?’

‘Juliana!’

She recognised Colonel McIlwaine’s voice. In a flurry, she hastened to draw the bolts and open up. Sleepily laughing, she began to apologise for keeping him standing out on the doorstep of his own house.

‘Juliana.’ She stopped talking when she saw his face. ‘Juliana.’ The figure she admitted was spectral and abrupt. Seizing her shoulders, the colonel dropped a kiss upon her forehead with a kind of fervent despair. ‘Lock the door — lock it tight!’

He strode past, making his way to the kitchen where faint warmth still came from the embers of the fire. He flung his muddy cloak on a chair, his hat — in which was a wizened wreath of vegetation — upon the table. He sank down on a bench. He laid his head in his hands, then shuddered long and hard.

Juliana hovered in the doorway behind him, stricken.

She recognised a man in trouble when she saw one. Lumbering to the hearth, fastening the loose ribbons on her nightgown for decency, she knelt and raddled up the coals, reaching for a pan to heat hot water. At the noise of utensils, McIlwaine raised his head. Always hook-shouldered and gaunt, his general appearance seemed unchanged, yet she noticed he was wearing his swordbelt but the hangers were empty. He had been waiting out of doors on foot; quickly she wondered where he had stabled his horse and what condition the beast was in.

‘Let me find you food and drink.’ She managed to keep her tone level. In response, the colonel breathed once rapidly, then he groaned. Juliana sat back on her heels and remained still. Moments passed, seeming long and extraordinary.

‘Hot water to wash then,’ she suggested gently.

‘I want nothing… You are very kind.’ Juliana read the worst into that heavy statement. This was a man in deep grief.

‘You have come alone, sir?’ Doggedly she began to prod for explanations: ‘There have been rumours of fighting — but there are always rumours, usually wrong…’ Only a slight lift of the colonel’s chin, and maybe a shadow in his dark eyes, confirmed for her that battle had taken place. ‘For the love of God, Owen, tell me what has happened.’