Rebels and Traitors (81 page)

The sheriffs of the City of London sent large quantities of wine for the funeral.

Nobody came forward to validate Brandon’s admission. The army remained resolutely silent. Although the axeman’s identity seemed glaringly obvious, public speculation ran rife for years. Royalists theorised that the masked executioner had been Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell’s chaplain, Hugh Peter, was named. Some claimed inside knowledge that it was Solicitor-General Cook. Years later Colonel Hewson’s man, Sergeant Hulet, was formally charged with having been the axeman’s assistant on that day, and was even found guilty by a jury, yet he was released unpunished, perhaps because of too many doubts. But Royalists’ favourite bogeyman for the task was Colonel John Fox, Tinker Fox of Birmingham.

A year after the execution, Fox was sent on Parliament’s business to Edinburgh, where the elders of the Kirk imprisoned him. By the time he was released in October 1650, he was so hugely in debt he was said to be ready to starve; his health collapsed and he died destitute at fifty with his wife having to petition Parliament for ten pounds to pay for his funeral. Gideon Jukes could not attend that burial; he would by then be himself in Scotland.

Gideon had resumed normal life as a printer.

Immediately after the King’s death, the mood in Basinghall Street was jubilant. Government was being reconstituted, with the King’s Privy Council now replaced by a Council of State. Machinery was enacted daily to institute a Commonwealth. Robert printed a banner in a large font with the Parliamentary resolution:
‘It hath been found by Experience that the Office of a King in this Nation is unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous to the Liberty, Safety and Public Interest of the People of this Nation; and therefore ought to be abolished.’
The House of Lords was done away with on even better grounds: that it was
‘useless and dangerous.

One by one, the trappings of monarchy and the nobility were reviewed. The crown and sceptre had been secured and locked up. Other emblems and oaths were redesigned — among them the Great Seal, the Mace, the oaths of office for judges, the titles of public institutions, badges and coinage.

Gideon was living at his parents’ house, now owned by Lambert and Anne. In part this was to save money until he decided whether he needed to set himself up in business separate from Robert. There was not enough work to keep both partners plus a journeyman, though Amyas would be leaving them. He was about to get married and was to be set up in his own workshop with his father-in-law’s help. He had had his apprentice bond returned. In that he was more fortunate than Gideon, whose bond had been a debt repayment. Still, his father had bequeathed him a useful legacy out of affection and his mother had added to that when she died. He joked that even his army arrears might one day turn up.

Robert had taken on a new, fourteen-year-old apprentice called Miles, who spent a lot of time lusting after girls who would not look at him and the rest staring into space.

This is a gormless, dawdling noodle of a lad, Robert!’

‘Oh, just like my previous apprentices,’ smiled Robert. Miles grinned vacantly before accidentally knocking over a pile of stitched pamphlets.

‘You could pick those up, young man, and re-stack them tidily’ Gideon hinted. Miles gawped at him as if he could not believe the newly returned partner was so stiff and unreasonable. Gideon mimed taking a sight on him with a musket, holding the pose in concentrated silence as if covering some pernicious Royalist he intended to blast to smithereens. Very slowly Miles stooped and retrieved the pamphlets. Robert hid a smile.

Another reason Gideon felt obliged to live with his brother was that relations between Lambert and Anne had become so strained he tried to be a peacemaker.

Lambert’s health had never fully recovered after Colchester. He was now in his middle forties, with a limp in his foot from Naseby; he had the poor digestion and rheumatics of a much older man, and grumbled like one too. He seemed unlikely to achieve his parents’ longevity. War had diminished his gusto; he was running to seed. Lumpish, touchy, dictatorial, and much given to seeking out old comrades for long nights of reminiscence, he ate and drank too much, with too little time spent at home. Gideon dared not imagine what happened in bed with his wife.

Anne still took the lead in running the grocery business. Lambert saw himself as the titular head, but let Anne get on with things as she had done while he was away. They did not tussle for supremacy; Lambert gave way as if he was too tired to care. Trade had suffered badly during the war. Lambert was given to pretending he thought this was Anne’s bad management; she ceased taking criticism as a joke. They sniped at each other over business, but there was worse amiss.

Gideon realised that in some ways he had been lucky to be away soldiering. Life was simpler: you only struggled for food, sleep and survival. He had made the army his own refuge from domestic problems, and now he wondered how far Lambert did the same. Gideon had been away from home for over six years, Lambert for five. Returning was bound to take readjustment.

Slowly, they both settled. Perhaps because he was younger and a single man, Gideon found it easier. He slipped back without too much anxiety into the print shop, conveniently filling the place Amyas left. Robert welcomed him, welcomed his skill and reliability, and particularly his conversation. A year older than Lambert, Robert would have been penned up with only the dream-struck new apprentice had Gideon not come home.

Gideon picked up that other people thought in Lambert’s absence something had been going on between Anne Jukes and Robert Allibone. He hated the idea. Robert was now forty-five, not too old for lust though surely too far gone for love (thought Gideon, at a mere twenty-eight), certainly Robert seemed fixed for ever as a widower. To Gideon, the man had aged noticeably; he was shocked at how the sandy hair had thinned and grown lank around Robert’s nearly bald crown. Never one with much concern for good eating, Robert’s diet at taverns had made him sallow and leather-skinned, with some of his freckles coarsening into liver spots. However, he remained lean and active, his mind sharp and his temperament kindly. As time went by, Gideon ignored other people sniggering; he convinced himself that if Robert did hanker after Anne, Anne safely ignored the infatuation.

The truth was that if Anne Jukes had ever had a soft spot for another man, it was not Robert but Gideon. Fortunately neither Gideon nor Lambert saw this.

Robert had guessed. Robert, trapped in unrequited and impossible heartache, was too great a spirit to speak of it. He had always been his own man, self-contained, emotionally reserved. He sought refuge in solitary evening journeys on his horse, Rumour; he dined several times a week at an inn in King Street, over in Westminster. Rumour had acquired a taste for buckets of ale, while Robert pecked for facts in the political undergrowth like a foraging blackbird tossing leaves. To those who knew him, Robert’s nosing around Parliament seemed perfectly natural. Writing the
Public Corranto
was the work he loved best. Disappearing on his own to hunt down news let him hide his secret sorrow.

Gideon understood that he was unwelcome on these jaunts. He did not know why. It seemed to him only that Robert had established a routine he did not wish to break and that he had sources to protect. When Robert found news to report, he would be bright-eyed and enthusiastic as he set the text in the print shop the next day.

Arrangements for becoming a Commonwealth did not always run smoothly. When a proclamation went to sheriffs and mayors to promulgate the Act for Abolishing the Kingly Office, even the Lord Mayor of the City of London, Abraham Reynoldson, refused, because it went against his conscience; he was summoned to the bar of the House, stripped of his office and thrown in the Tower for a month. The City was ordered to elect a new lord mayor — and one with a compliant conscience was immediately produced.

The House of Commons was working hard. Some days Robert Allibone could hardly scribble down all the matters of note. On the same day the 2nd of April, when Alderman Reynoldson’s conscience was discussed, plenty of fascinating items vied for prominence.

‘They gave an order for a committee looking into the affairs of Colonel Rainborough’s widow,’ Robert reported. ‘She is to be given a grant of land from the confiscations from deans and chapters — three thousand pounds was mentioned to me by an informant. Then who turns up in the House of Commons but your friend Sexby!’

‘Sexby?’
Gideon experienced a pang.

‘Quite the crawler, nowadays.’ Robert distrusted Sexby, despite his Leveller links. ‘There have been Scots commissioners lurking around since the attempt to make a Presbyterian peace. These dour souls are outraged by us lopping off a head that could have mouthed the Covenant. They scampered off, heading for The Hague, to make a devil’s pact with the Prince of Wales, begging
him
to make us all slaves of the Kirk.’

‘You must say, “Charles Stuart, eldest son of the late King”!’ Gideon reproved Robert.

‘Strip me naked, so I must.’

‘So what of Sexby?’

‘Honest Edward tells Parliament he has chased gallantly after the Scotch commissioners and has personally arrested them at Gravesend — with not a moment to spare (as he told it). He has tucked them up safe under guard in a fort — for which he has been awarded
twenty pounds,
not a penny less
.
’

‘Handsome!’

Robert heard the edge in Gideon’s tone. ‘Did you obtain any benefit for that secret work of yours in January?’

‘I was allowed to buy dinner for Colonel John Fox.’

’A
colonel
! Should he not have treated you?’

‘He lacks his arrears,’ replied Gideon dryly.

Robert was still niggled. ‘I do not know how Sexby showed his face, preening himself, when that very day a petition was brought for the four Levellers who are languishing in the Tower
.
’ John Wildman, John Lilburne, William Walwyn and Thomas Prince had been arrested on suspicion of promulgating republican pamphlets called
England’s New Chains Discovered
and
The Second Part of England’s New Chains Discovered.
‘There was no time for
them,’
snarled Robert. The petition got short shrift — the Commons had to rush to the day’s most pressing business.’

And what fine work was that?’

‘
“Ordered,
That the Committee of the Revenue do take care, and give Order, That the Seats in the House be repaired”.’

‘Seats,
Robert?’ For a moment Gideon was flummoxed, then he sadly grinned. ‘All you can expect from a
Rump,
I suppose.’

Of the civilian Levellers, William Walwyn was in some respects the most influential, yet the most discreet. Anne Jukes and Robert had a high opinion of him: a quiet, home-loving man who always said his favourite occupations were a good book and the conversation of friends. There was no evidence that Walwyn had contributed to the
England’s Chains
pamphlets. His guiding principles were toleration and love. It was thought astonishing that he had been arrested, unlike Lilburne, who had spent so much time in the Tower of London that at least one of his children was born there and given the name Tower. ‘The pathetic soul died,’ said Anne Jukes. As you might expect!’

The critical pamphlets had been condemned in Parliament as scandalous and highly seditious, destructive to the present government, tending to division and mutiny in the army and to the raising of a new war. ‘Somebody must have read them carefully’ scoffed Gideon.

The four Levellers were arrested by troops of horsemen, dragged from their beds in dawn raids. They were taken to Whitehall and charged with treason. During John Lilburne’s examination by the Council of State, at one point he was sent into an adjoining room; he could hear Oliver Cromwell losing his temper and shouting at Lord Fairfax: ‘I tell you, sir,’ — thumping the table — ‘you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them, or they will break you!’

The fear of army mutiny was justified: unhappiness homed in on impending service in Ireland. With England now settled, Cromwell was to make an expedition to end the long unrest there. Three hundred infantrymen in Colonel Hewson’s regiment swore they would not leave for Ireland until the Levellers’ programme had been introduced; they were cashiered without pay arrears. The next serious event, which caused Gideon a desperate crisis of conscience, happened in London. This involved Robert Lockyer, a young Particular Baptist from Bishopsgate; Anne Jukes, whose family also came from Bishopsgate, had grown up with some of his relatives. Lockyer served in Whalley’s regiment, which had incorporated some of Cromwell’s original Ironsides; although Whalley himself was more or less a Presbyterian, there were radicals among his men. This regiment was guarding the King at Hampton Court when Charles escaped to Carisbrooke. They subsequently fought at Colchester. Whalley himself supported Pride’s Purge, was a member of the High Court of Justice and signed the King’s death warrant. He believed his regiment was governed by ‘Reason, not Passion’ — but he was wrong.