The Bleeding Land Read online

  And he met Matthew Penn.

  Penn was one of a gang of men who met regularly in the Lord to rail bitterly and loudly against the King’s advisers and did not seem to mind who heard. Not that they need fear many of the King’s men lodging or drinking in the Leaping Lord. Everyone knew that in February King Charles had placed Queen Henrietta Maria on a boat to Holland with their daughters and the crown jewels. Charles himself had ridden to York and most of London’s nobility had fled the broiling anger round Westminster and Whitehall for their country estates. Now, in the absence of any real voice of opposition, dissent had grown bold and Tom had heard the vox populi turn, sure as the Thames tide, against the King. He worked and he drank and he listened to men such as Matthew Penn, an apprentice lawyer, reading and distributing inflammatory pamphlets, inciting men to take up arms for the sake and safety of all Englishmen, with whom the King had broken his contract. Some clamoured against the clergy and some against the King’s courtiers. One of Penn’s associates, a slab-faced, bald-headed Puritan named Will Trencher, would tremble viciously when proclaiming that King Charles himself was orchestrating a Catholic plot that would see an Irish army sweep through the land butchering all God-fearing folk whether man, woman or child.

  ‘Parliament has issued the Militia Ordinance to preserve us from malignant threats!’ Trencher had blazed to the drunk and nearly drunk, ‘and it is our duty, gentlemen, to sharpen our blades!’

  But the whetstone upon whose edge Penn sharpened his ire was the gentry and highborn who, he regularly announced, used their position to intimidate and oppress others. Men such as Colonel Thomas Lunsford, whom Tom had watched assaulting the crowds outside Westminster the first time he had come to London.

  ‘I for one will rise in General Skippon’s new army of the people,’ Tom had heard Penn vow, ‘and I shall teach haughty bastards like Lunsford a rare lesson. I’ll whip that one-eyed whoreson from Westminster to London Bridge and there we’ll string the bastard up and watch him dance like the devil he is.’

  For men had begun to whisper of war between Parliament and the King. At first it had seemed impossible but now the trained bands and militias were beginning to form. The craftsmen and tradesmen of London were laying down their hammers and chisels and the clerks their pens and their papers. The brewers and leather-makers of the Boroughside, the glass-blowers and soap-makers of St Saviour’s, the dyers of the Bankside and the cloth-makers of St Olave’s were arming themselves. The bakers and the vendors of fruits, flowers and vegetables were locking their shops and being drawn into companies.

  Tom was in the midst of it all. At first he had felt completely alone, helpless and unmoving as a rock around which the waters were beginning to rise and roil. Yet he watched and he listened to the likes of Matthew Penn and Will Trencher and eventually their zeal began to seep into his own being. Their passions and their fury ignited the embers in his own soul. For Tom was angry. Somewhere deep within him, in his stomach and his heart and in the marrow of his bones, baleful serpents writhed and sought release to deliver their venom.

  And when Tom listened to Penn rail against men such as Lunsford, in his mind he saw Lord Denton.

  22nd August 1642

  ‘I met some unsavoury fellows last night,’ Emmanuel Bright said, slapping his mare’s rain-slick neck. The beast snorted, spraying water. ‘Mercenaries from the Low Countries and base villains to a man. One of them actually told me he cared nothing for the cause but only for His Majesty’s half crowns and our handsome women.’ The look on Emmanuel’s face told Mun that he was perhaps as impressed by these foreign soldiers as he was appalled.

  ‘War attracts such men as a corpse brings crows,’ Sir Francis muttered, looking up to the slate-grey sky for signs of blue. There were none.

  ‘I have seen such fellows too,’ Mun put in, watching those armed with pike or musket or nothing at all gather to the desultory beat of a lone drum, swelling the nevertheless contemptible throng before them. ‘They squawk loudly enough to anyone who will listen.’

  Emmanuel ignored Mun’s suggestion that he indulged the mercenaries and their glory-adorned tales of war. ‘It would appear His Majesty’s divine right to rule his people holds no sway with such types,’ he said, ‘but rather that profit – a thing as changeable as the wind, it seems to me – is their only master.’

  ‘Take my word for it, such men are as dangerous as those now massing against us under Essex’s banner,’ Sir Francis said, nodding southwards. ‘I would rather be without them.’ His lip curled. ‘And yet we need them,’ he admitted.

  Mun had ofttimes heard his father criticize the profligacy of the Court, had even heard him talk disapprovingly of the King, and in the days before they had ridden from Shear House Mun had looked for signs in Sir Francis that he wavered in his enthusiasm for the cause. There had been doubts, Mun sensed, but doubts about war itself as a means to set things straight, rather than questions of his father’s loyalty to King Charles.

  ‘War is a horror beyond the man’s imagining who has not seen it with his own eyes,’ Sir Francis had said.

  ‘But you believe the crown was put on the King’s head by God, Father?’ Mun had asked. ‘So we shall have God on our side if it comes to war. Our cause is right.’

  ‘I fear God does not sully Himself in men’s wars,’ Sir Francis had replied. ‘And neither does war decide who is right. Only who remains. In some ways I cannot blame those in Parliament who seek to limit the King’s power, to dismantle the instruments of his Personal Rule. They wonder why they should support Charles’s financial expedients whilst he ignores their grievances.’ He cocked an eyebrow. ‘I can even accept that some believe the Reformation was a job only half done and would see the Church rid of the rags and patches of Rome. Though the Puritans are too zealous for my liking.’ He puffed life into his pipe, the tobacco releasing a languid curl of white smoke. ‘But we have made our place in this world, with no little help from the Crown, and I would protect that place.’ He frowned. ‘We shall do what we must.’

  ‘But if we lose shall we lose Shear House?’ Mun said, as much to himself as to his father. The thought, which had struck like lightning out of nowhere, horrified him. He had never considered what would come after this conflict. If indeed it came to war. The young do not see beyond the morrow, he could almost hear his father say.

  ‘Those who seek reform would not be reined in,’ Sir Francis did say, confirming Mun’s fears. ‘They would shake the world like a hound shakes a fox, and only the strongest would eat the scraps of what is left.’

  Mun had been struck by this revelation that his father marched – would fight – more out of duty to his king and a desire to preserve the world’s natural order than out of a belief that their cause was necessarily just. But then it made perfect sense, he realized, for if the rebels won, the Rivers family would likely lose everything. As for his own future, what would that hold if there were no estate to inherit? No land to manage, no farms to maintain? No rents to collect? So they would fight for their king. And the rebels be damned.

  And now Mun was soaked to his very bones. He was not alone; four thousand others who had come weary out of Warwickshire to Nottingham were waterlogged too, including the King of England himself. Perhaps it should have cheered Mun a little that King Charles appeared as miserably wet as he, but it did not. It was a pitiful force that had come out for their king and the column’s leaden progress through the kingdom had drawn a veil of melancholy over them all. A few days earlier the King had been denied entrance to Coventry. His progression through Newark and Leicester had met with a less than enthusiastic response and even here in Nottingham, a wealthy trading town, Mun sensed the disquiet of folk who resented having the cost of quartering the King’s army on the common laid at their door.

  ‘Damn this pissing rain,’ Emmanuel said, one hand on the reins and the other a tight fist gripping the cloak at his throat. ‘It’s keeping folk indoors when they should be here to receive their king.’

  M
ounted on Hector beside him, Mun stared straight ahead through the rain that dripped rhythmically from his broad hat and through the vapour rising from their horses’ muzzles and flanks despite its being high summer. On the field before them King Charles and his nephew Prince Rupert and divers other lords and gentlemen of His Majesty’s train stood in a soaking knot, shoulders slumped and talking in low voices amongst themselves.

  ‘’Tis not the rain that keeps them away,’ Sir Francis said, patting Priam’s thick neck. The stallion nickered softly. ‘Men are more keen to bring in the harvest than go to war.’

  ‘Then we shall have to drag them from the fields, Father,’ Mun said, ashamed of the gloomy rabble of men, women and children who had gathered to greet their king. Given its central position within the kingdom and its intersecting trade routes Nottingham had seemed to Mun the perfect town for the muster. The King would raise the Royal Standard against the Westminster rebels and thousands of loyal men would rally to form an awe-inspiring army. But it had not happened like that. Mun glanced around, taking in the glum faces, framed by bedraggled, dripping locks and broad-brimmed hats, of the mounted men around him. There were perhaps two thousand cavalry there on that sloping field beneath the great castle wall. Opposite them on the other side of the King’s party were, Mun reckoned, no more than six hundred infantrymen who had marched from Yorkshire and whom he’d heard one of Sir Francis’s friends refer to as the scum of the county. They did not look much standing there, drawn loosely into companies, with their assortment of pole-arms, clubs and muskets. They stank too, of stale sweat and wet wool, and Mun was reminded of his times in London with its thronging streets and its odorous masses.

  ‘Do you recognize any of them, Sir Francis?’ Emmanuel asked, for he knew that in his days at court Sir Francis had met many men who had fought in the Low Countries for money or honour or both.

  ‘A few. Not many,’ Sir Francis admitted. ‘But I’d wager the Earl of Essex is looking at his lot and thinking just the same as us. Devereux is an experienced soldier, but he is cautious. He won’t move against us until he is sure of having the advantage.’

  ‘They say he has already prepared his coffin and takes it with him wherever he goes,’ Mun said, smiling at the thought. ‘Not the actions of an optimistic man.’

  ‘Not optimistic perhaps, but well prepared nevertheless,’ Sir Francis said grimly.

  All men knew that the earl was strongly Protestant, but during one of Mun’s sojourns in London he had heard the rumour that Essex was one of the Puritan nobles in the House of Lords. Now he asked his father if the rumour was true.

  Sir Francis removed his hat and with his hand brushed off the rain that had pooled on its crown. ‘The man tends towards the zealous,’ he admitted, ‘frowns on gaming and drinking and, I dare say, fears for his soul.’ He put his hat back on and coughed into a fist. ‘Yet I maintain hope that he would not go as far as those whom he serves. The King’s right to rule, divine or otherwise, is one of the moorings of society which not even Essex would see severed.’ But to Mun’s eyes his father did not look convinced.

  Parliament had wasted no time in choosing Essex, one of the few English nobles with any military experience, to lead their army, commissioning him to the post of Captain-General and Chief Commander. And neither was the man alone amongst the peerage and greater gentry to have apparently sided with the rebels, though such were few in number so far as Mun could gather.

  ‘Yet he is friends with the troublemaker Pym,’ Emmanuel said.

  ‘Aye, who holds the pursestrings of the army raised against us. We face capable opponents and must seek to put such men back in their place at the first opportunity.’ Sir Francis scowled. ‘Or else risk the flame of war spreading to ignite the whole country.’

  As if to prove his fears well founded a cheer went up as the infantry company split and six men appeared from the mass carrying the Royal Standard which they had fetched down from Nottingham Castle.

  ‘This is war then,’ Mun said under his breath, half terrified half exhilarated by what he was seeing. Then the small party stopped before the infantry and there waited whilst His Majesty, Prince Rupert and several other dignitaries walked with great austerity across the churned earth to take their places beside the banner, which looked to Mun no different from those hung with city streamers used each year at the Lord Mayor’s Show.

  The procession came forward with the standard and Mun stood in his stirrups to get a better view. The King was smaller than Mun had imagined him. Wrapped in a sodden black cloak and with a purple feather plastered to his hat Charles cut a pale, gaunt, sorry-looking figure. In contrast, his nephew Prince Rupert was remarkably tall, six feet and four inches men said. A most striking man, he was well built and handsome, causing Mun to muse that if one did not know better one might be forgiven for presuming that of the two men Rupert and not the other was the King of England. But for the solemn authority that clung to Charles even more determinedly than the rain-sodden cloak. Mun had never seen anyone look more vulnerable. And yet dignified.

  ‘Ground’s too bloody soft,’ Sir Francis mumbled under his breath. Two soldiers had been summoned forward and were now on their knees digging into the earth with knives and clawing handfuls of mud from the hole. ‘If they don’t go down at least three feet the thing will blow over in the first gust.’

  Up went the Royal Standard and Mun felt the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck bristle. At its top hung a flag with the King’s arms quartered and a hand pointing to a crown.

  ‘What does it say, Father?’ Mun asked, for below that image were written several words but there was not enough wind to unfurl the flag and reveal the motto. ‘You must have seen it before.’

  ‘It says “Give Caesar his due”,’ Sir Francis replied, arching his back and wincing at some stiffness.

  One of the lords barked an order and two sorry-looking trumpeters stepped forward and put their instruments to their lips but were forestalled with a raised hand belonging to King Charles himself, who was reading the proclamation he held in the other.

  ‘Pen and ink!’ the King called, throwing out an arm but not taking his eyes from the parchment. Someone hurried forward with a pen which the King accepted with a curt nod before seeming to strike out some parts of the text and make his own additions here and there. At last satisfied, he handed the parchment to a herald who proceeded to read, with some difficulty it seemed to Mun, the proclamation which declared ground and cause for His Majesty’s setting up of his standard, namely to suppress the rebellion of the Earl of Essex, in raising forces against him. The King required the aid and assistance of all his loving subjects to put down the traitors with all haste. When the herald finished he glanced nervously towards but not at the King, who nodded resolutely and waved his hand in small circles at the trumpeters. The fanfare sounded and an officer of the infantry flung his hat into the air, at which hundreds more did the same with cries of ‘God save the King! God save King Charles!’

  An officer of the cavalry beside Sir Francis lifted his own hat from his head and yelled, ‘Hang up the Roundheads!’

  Mun grinned at Emmanuel and together they took up the shout. ‘Hang up the Roundheads!’ they called, rain spraying from their lips, their horses whinnying at the sudden clamour. Mun waved his sodden hat in the air and shivered with the thrill of it all.

  Because he was going to war.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE ROYAL STANDARD was blown down that same night it was put up and could not be planted again for several days because the ground was too soft, and a storm raged, scouring the Royalist camp and making horses skittish and men whisper of ill portents. There were murmurs that even King Charles himself saw the gloomy ceremony as ominous, for he was by all accounts a man for whom solemn ritual was the foundation upon which authority rested firm. But if the King was fainthearted Mun had seen no sign of it as he had watched for three consecutive days His Majesty bring forth the standard to the field. Mun listened each time the
proclamation was read aloud, straining to catch every word that was borne off by the wind, so that in the end he could have repeated it verbatim.

  ‘By God we shall teach the rebels!’ Emmanuel had said through a grin on the third day, patting one of the new Dutch wheellock pistols holstered on his saddle. A gift from Sir Francis, their polished ivory butt-caps gleamed in the pink dawn light. ‘We’ll send them running back to London with their tails between their legs.’

  Mun had laughed at the image of the rowdy London apprentices as whining hounds seeking to win back their master the King’s favour, having been scolded. But then he had thought of Tom, whom none of them had seen for almost eight months. His brother should have been with them, witnessing the King make ready to whip his errant hounds. But where was Tom?

  ‘What has become of you, brother?’ he whispered. He could understand why his brother had run off the night of Martha’s death, especially after what had passed between him and their father, but they had all thought he would come back after a day or two, been certain he would. They had been wrong. They had even looked for Tom in London, but found no traces. Now all they could do was hope and pray that he was all right and that he would return to Shear House. To his family.