Rebels and Traitors (79 page)

‘Rough!’ exclaimed Gideon.

Again their eyes met. Colonel Fox nodded. ‘Be here at first light, mounted. You shall be my guide, Captain Jukes.’

It was a bitterly cold morning. The strangely matched pair rode south from Hackney through mists and near darkness, down past the tenterfields where newly dyed cloth was hung on endless parallel ropes. Robert’s horse was a knock-kneed grey called Rumour, a city horse, puzzled by the sight of growing grass; he preferred to amble over cobbles, with time to look in shop windows. At one point he stopped dead unexpectedly. There had been nothing to cause him fear. In this weather most of the tenter-lines were empty. Nothing flapped at him; the few lengths of pegged-out cloth were frozen solid.

‘Rumour flies … My partner, who is a whimsical spirit, named his horse in irony’ Fox looked on, while Gideon struggled. ‘This curmudgeonly nag knows his way to a certain inn in King Street at Westminster, then he knows his way home to the stable even with his rider beery —’ Drowsiness from overwork, Robert always claimed. ‘But he despises me and he hates strange places.’

‘He wants a carrot.’

‘Well, he is not getting one!’ snarled Gideon. Wishing he had worn a cloak against the cold, he kicked up the beast — though he did it warily because he knew that in the back yard behind the print shop Amyas had been naughtily training Rumour to rear up suddenly on his back legs and perform an upright
levade,
as if carrying a marquis in full armour, posing for Van Dyke. ‘I am in the wrong suit for portraiture!’ muttered Gideon in Rumour’s ear, as the horse for no reason moved off and now trotted sedately.

He guided them on, through Brick Lane and into the airy pleasaunce of Spitalfield, where many small cottages with gardens occupied lanes beyond the city wall among the fields and bowling alleys around the great road that came in from Essex to Aldgate. At this hour, most roads were deserted. They saw maybe one milkmaid and a couple of men up to no good in an apple orchard; there was no one from whom to ask directions, had Fox come alone. But he was in good hands with Gideon.

As Captain Jukes found his way so confidently, Colonel Fox weighed him up. Gideon was in his once-red New Model Army coat. That meant his britches were too tight under the crotch and the usual gap was widening just above his belt, so his back was freezing. As well as his odd appearance, he was full of London swagger and with a dubious way of manoeuvring himself into positions of trust. Still, on the whole, the man from the Midlands accepted his motives were reliable. Fox would not have brought him on this delicate errand otherwise. Their association could go one of two ways during this ride — either they would take to one another fast, or a wall of dislike would rise up between them and perpetuate itself every time one of them spoke.

‘I hear you were at Holmby, Captain.’ Fox had made enquiries overnight. Had Okey told him? ‘So — answer the question everybody wonders:
did
Cornet Joyce have direct orders from Oliver Cromwell?’

Gideon was terse. ‘He never said.’

‘You never asked?’

‘None of us. Our commission was in our hearts.’

People would always be fascinated by that incident. Speculating happily Fox filled in for himself: ‘There was a meeting in a garden. At Cromwell’s London house. Long June nights — minutes are not taken. No need for a secretary even to be there — so no chance of some disloyal clerk later making his reputation by spilling all… You all swore an oath of secrecy?’

‘No, sir, we did not need to.’ Gideon changed the subject curtly. ‘So what brings you all the way from Warwickshire, Colonel Fox?’

‘My garrison was closed down last May, despite my hearty resistance.’ The man was disgruntled, on the verge of obsession about his lost command. He reminded Gideon of how Sir Samuel Luke, that other great passionate Parliamentary volunteer, had resented being told to resign. ‘I have four thousand pounds in arrears to chase up — and I came to London for my wedding. My new wife is Lady Angelica Hasteville.’ Fox sounded impressed by that himself. Gideon could not imagine how this rough-and-ready self-made soldier from the shires had encountered a lady on terms where they might ally in bed and board. Perhaps she possessed money. ‘We were joined at St Bartholomew the Less in October.’

Then Colonel John Fox glanced down at his saddle pommel momentarily, as if embarrassed by his feelings. Gideon took back his scepticism. Even in the midst of war and trouble, he had glimpsed the human heart.

The dark bulk of the Tower of London suddenly lay ahead of them. With a grimace, Gideon brought them into Rosemary Lane. ‘Now, sir, we must keep our wits about us.’

He heard Fox draw a sharp breath. He can have seen nothing like this in sleepy, rural Warwickshire. Gideon knew what to expect, though he never frequented such districts. This was the kind of sink, where unnumbered souls festered, that thin-faced Solicitor-General John Cook wanted to eliminate.

Rosemary Lane was a reeking little haven of abject poverty. It lay outside the city wall in the ward of Portsoken. It had sinister alleys, tiny cottages, dark taverns, and one forlorn old church. It teemed with totters and their tat, so in finer weather both sides of the muddy lane would be lined with barrows and mats, displaying for sale the meanest type of old clothes, holed shifts, crinkled left boots and chipped dishes. Suits, or half-suits, that had passed through nine generations of owner and were held together only by stiff grime and patches. Dented pots in metal so base it hurt Gideon’s teeth to look upon them. Piles of crumpled linen, most of it stolen from washing lines, linen in curious shades of drab that were unknown to any fuller. Wardrobes of dead old ladies who had had no friends or family. Sheets that looked as if they had been stripped from week-old cadavers. Drowned sailors’ hats.

Amidst this squalor wandered dazed-looking paupers. Drabs with diseased noses made vague offers that Fox and Gideon did not even acknowledge. The few people who were up and setting off for occupations laboured in sweatshops or as ballast-heavers and coal-haulers — bad, backbreaking, dirty work that would eventually kill them. Occasional sad men relieved themselves against a wall, looking as if they had been in the streets all night; dark humps in doorways showed where other vagrants were still sleeping — or had died of cold unnoticed. There were of course far too many taverns, of the lowest kind.

The biggest cities have the highest dunghills!’ muttered Fox.

Here, close by the Tower of London where he normally would carry out state executions, in a mean lodging among his frightened family, lurked Richard Brandon. He was a typical Rosemary Lane inhabitant, poor, feckless, aware of the need for secrecy, yet somehow reeking of unreliability. His calm acceptance of the grim trade he had inherited from his father was chilling. He relished its supposed mysteries but took the fact that he was employed to kill prisoners with a coldness and hardness that Gideon found troubling. His father, John, had once told him public hangmen were strange men. Lambert claimed to have met one, or an assistant, while drinking in a particularly frightful tavern. Gideon had never expected to encounter such a being. He decided to let Colonel Fox take the lead, but when Brandon proved unwilling to trust a Midlander, it became necessary to convince him in the language and custom of East London.

A conversation occurred. It was longer than they wanted, but short enough. They would meet their appointment. Clinging to a bag with unexplained tools of his trade, Brandon was taken to a meeting-point beside the Tower. Colonel Axtell was waiting with a cavalry escort and a spare horse.

They did not bother to root out Brandon’s usual assistant, Richard Jones, a rag-and-bone man, although he lived on the same lane. Fox noticed Gideon’s disappointed expression. ‘I would think it neat,’ Gideon murmured regretfully, ‘if the King’s head was severed from his body by a ragman.’

‘You are a true Leveller, Captain Jukes!’ Colonel John Fox laughed. It was impossible to deduce whether he was sympathetic.

In a rattle of urgent hoofbeats, the horsemen swept away from Tower Hill. Frost on the cobbles slowed them up later, but while London was still sleeping they rode through the City, past Temple Bar and St Paul’s Cathedral, out through Ludgate, down the Strand to Charing Cross and into Whitehall. Everywhere was full of soldiers by the time they arrived. Shopkeepers were opening up — not all, but most. Like the puritans’ Christmas, this was designated a working day, not special. Crowds were already gathering outside the Banqueting House. Heavy grey clouds lowered above them, the solemn sky of a freezing dawn in the dead of English winter.

They could hear the loudly beaten drums as Colonel Tomlinson came with the escort party at a fast walking pace across St James’s Park, bringing his prisoner, the King.

They went in through a back door and found the place packed. They nodded to the guards. So many soldiers were milling about, nobody paid any attention. There was no difficulty slipping through. The undercroft was seething. As usual in crowds, most noticed only their immediate neighbours. Surreptitiously, Gideon managed to locate a private room, where Fox and he stowed their charge. To keep Brandon occupied, they sent a soldier to find him breakfast. And some for us,’ pleaded Fox, clearly not expecting it would happen.

Upon arrival, Brandon insisted he must be given a written order for today’s work. It was the rule, and of course was for his protection. They had chosen him because he was professional.

Colonel Axtell bustled off to see Cromwell about it, leaving Gideon and Colonel Fox to ensure the hangman stayed put. A true printer, Gideon wondered whether the Brandon family owned a cache of tattered warrants for all the traitors and political misfits they had beheaded. Robert would have wondered whether a memoir could be made of it, but by tradition the public hangman led a life of secrecy. He was a non-person; his experiences were not for public consumption, however great the public’s lust for lurid snippets from the block. Robert would claim public interest — always his excuse for printing’s more soiled commerce — but Gideon remained sceptical about sensational tracts.

Colonel Hewson brought in two of his men. Gideon had seen John Hewson at the Putney Debates, where he opposed the Levellers. He also knew that in the second civil war Hewson was in Kent, where his regiment joined in the mopping-up of Dover, Sandwich, Deal and Walmer. Originally a shoemaker, he had worked his way up through the ranks until he became one of the signatories to the King’s death warrant; a sermonising zealot, he called himself ‘a Child of Wrath’.

Hewson had singled out a sergeant, a man he knew and trusted. This fellow was to stand in for the executioner’s normal assistant. Brandon and his companion-to-be were provided with grey periwigs and false beards, the axeman’s frizzled grey, the other of a lighter, tawnier shade.

‘Now we’ll frock you —’

The hangman looked alarmed. But he and the sergeant were merely provided with shapeless cover-alls. Gideon helped them arrange these, a necessary disguise when many people owned only one set of garments, by which they might be identified.

Then they waited. Like the King, now penned in his apartments in Whitehall Palace with Bishop Juxon, they had to sit out a three-hour delay. People in the streets outside were saying it was because Brandon had refused to come. In fact, the House of Commons had belatedly decided they must pass an order making it illegal to proclaim the Prince of Wales as King when his father was dead.

During this tedium, Colonel Fox opened up and told Gideon why there had been the moment of awkwardness at Okey’s house, when Okey introduced him. While carrying out his duties as the commander of President Bradshaw’s guard, Fox had been arrested for debt; it took a special order of the court to obtain his release. He uttered some choice comments, once again complaining that he was owed four thousand pounds in arrears. It seemed a large figure. Apparently a dispute with the treasurer of his garrison had complicated matters though, according to Fox, allegations of corruption were entirely erroneous … Gideon kept a non-committal face. The executioner and his temporary assistant listened in with great curiosity.

To while away more time, they took Brandon to check the scaffold. It had been erected outside a great window on the landing of the main staircase. He confirmed that arrangements were satisfactory. One Tench, a drum-maker in Houndsditch, had provided ropes, pulleys and hooks with which the King could be fastened down, in case he resisted.

The warrant finally came. It was passed to Brandon discreetly, though a whispered conversation took place outside the room. Gideon knew how to eavesdrop; he overheard that one of the three officers listed in the King’s death warrant, the fabulously named Colonel Hercules Hunks, had refused to sign the order accepting his part in today’s business. Colonel Axtell had burst out that he was ashamed of Hunks. The ship is coming into harbour — will you strike sail before we come to anchor?’ Oliver Cromwell, infuriated, called Hunks a peevish fellow and scrawled out the necessary warrant himself. Gideon managed to peek at it and saw Cromwell had had it signed by Colonel Hacker, another of the officers in charge.