London (116 page)

By the time Gideon finished, a short while later, Jane had slipped away; so as Julius, white with anger, accompanied him and his men to the gate, he found only Martha standing there. And it was then, enraged almost beyond endurance at what they had done, that he allowed himself to burst out with a cruelty he would never normally have used:

“What a good friend you are, Mistress Martha. You help your friend search for her treasure as well as letting her sleep with your husband.” After which, turning on his heel, he stalked back into the house.

Martha stared after him in astonishment. Then she frowned. Then she looked at Gideon. And saw that he was ghastly pale.

In the Puritan London of the Commonwealth, there were many sights to encourage and even inspire the faithful. But none, by the year 1653, could equal the famous preaching universally known as Meredith’s Last Sermon.

The years had at last caught up with Edmund Meredith. He was in his eighties now, and he had begun to look it. A sharp illness the previous year had left him so thin and gaunt that people meeting him gave an involuntary gasp, as though they were seeing a ghost. Edmund Meredith walked with death, and rose to the occasion.

His method was simple. As the rule of the saints had produced all the moral bigotry he had feared, and about which he had tried to forewarn Jane, it had also produced a religious confusion so great that even he could not be certain upon which bandwagon he should jump: Presbyterian, Quaker or some other free congregation? Who knew? So he had done the simplest thing of all. He had risen above them. His age only lent conviction to the performance. His language took flight; his gaunt face turned heavenward. The more inspired, the more soul-searing his sermons became, the more absolutely impossible it was to say quite where he stood. Nor did anyone care. Even the most severe and homespun Puritan women, dressed in black and with bonnets tightly tied, felt free to faint. Their husbands in their tall black hats would weep as Meredith’s spirit took wing.

For his last sermon Meredith would climb up the steps to the pulpit with such difficulty that, even before he started, the congregation was leaning forward anxiously. With his white hair hanging down to his shoulders – he had grown it long again now – and his hollowed eyes, the very sight of him produced an awed hush. His subject, always, was that of death.

There were many occasions for it: if the season was Lent, a meditation upon Christ’s death and resurrection; if Advent, upon the death of the heathen world and the birth of the Christian era. There was nothing in which the seed of death could not be discovered. And, since Sunday afternoon sermons were so greatly in vogue, upon any Sunday when he was in the dying mood, Meredith would refer to the traditional text of evensong:

“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” Gazing out over the congregation, he would stare towards the west window as though, at that very instant, he saw the host of angels coming for him, and cry out: “For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”

He was ready. The congregation could see it. Ready and willing. Indeed, it was clear that he might actually go, at any second, before their eyes. That very possibility made his sermons wildly popular. He was constantly in demand. In the autumn of last year he had preached at St Bride’s, St Clement Danes, St Margaret’s, Westminster, even St Paul’s. Nor did he ever fail to add that dose of humiliation without which no Puritan sermon of the day would be complete. Looking earnestly down at them he would enquire: “And tell me, dearly beloved, if with me now, you were to depart . . . are you ready?” He would pause sadly then, accusingly, point his long finger. “Are
you
ready?” And a great groan would arise from the congregation. For they never were. Which would lead him straight to his electrifying conclusion as, raising up on his toes as if he verily meant to fly, raising his arms up, straining his gaunt face heavenwards in what must, surely, be his final, heroic convulsion, he would cry out in a tremendous voice: “Yet the time is now, even now, I see him coming with all his angels; He is upon us. He has us. He clutches my heart, and yours. He is here. Now. Now!”

At which, with a crash, he would fall back, before staggering down from the pulpit again and being supported to his seat by two helpers. Meredith’s last sermon was the best thing he had ever done.

He was a little surprised therefore, just as he was beginning this sermon in St Lawrence Silversleeves, one January afternoon, to observe that two of his congregation, Martha and Gideon, were slipping out.

Jane and Dogget were lying on her bed together when the door suddenly opened and they found themselves face to face with Martha.

Martha had been thorough. It had not taken her long to get the truth from Gideon. Once directly challenged, he had not felt he could lie. “I do not know,” he had said defensively, “but I think it is so.”

“Even now?”

“Perhaps.”

Now, as well as Gideon, she had another neighbour with her. “There must be proof,” she had told Gideon. And the proof was there. The neighbour looked shocked, Gideon embarrassed. Martha’s face was taut and white. Having seen, she left.

An hour later, having heard Jane’s account, Meredith looked grim. “It’s the very thing I always feared. I could see the way the wind was blowing even before they killed the king. Now the Puritans have changed all the laws . . .” He shook his grey old head sadly. “Curse these saints with their moralizing and their witch-hunts,” he muttered. “And now you are taken in adultery.”

“At my age,” Jane shrugged, “it sounds absurd.”

“But you forget,” Meredith warned her urgently. “The penalty for adultery nowadays is death.”

Young O Be Joyful sat on the edge of his seat. It was strange to see Mrs Wheeler and Uncle Dogget, as he called him, standing together like criminals. But then of course they were. Everyone knew it now. Even Dogget’s children understood that their father was wicked. Martha had seen to that.

The trial of Jane and Dogget took place in the Guildhall. The courtroom was packed. There was, even amongst the good Puritans and the crowd, some wry amusement at the age of the accused. Yet there was no sense, it seemed, of the deeper irony of the event.

That here, before a stern judge and a jury of twelve solid citizens, was a woman, entering old age, absent from her husband for over a decade, who was prosecuting another woman older than she, for doing something with her husband which, if truth were told, she did not even wish to do herself. Why? Because she had been made a fool of; because she was jealous of both for loving each other; because her God was a vengeful God.

The judge was grave. He knew what the verdict would be.

The evidence was irrefutable. The crime had been seen; the witnesses were reliable. The accused, upon the advice of a lawyer found by Meredith, pleaded not guilty. The witnesses, they said, had misunderstood what they had seen. No carnal act had taken place. But there was not a single soul in that courtroom who believed this manifest lie. The business did not take long. Everyone knew what the penalty for their crime must be. There was no needless mercy, no extenuation in the London of the saints. Their justice was a great, dark rock. The court became quiet as the judge instructed the jury. Nor did the twelve good men take long to consider their verdict. After only minutes they signalled that they were ready. Solemnly the jury foreman stood before the judge, to answer the awful question: “How do you find?” And clearly his voice rang out. “Not guilty, my lord.”

“Not guilty?” Martha was standing, trembling with rage. “Not guilty? Of course they are guilty.”

“Silence!” the judge thundered. “The jury has spoken.” He nodded to Jane and to Dogget. “You are free to go.”

“This is an outrage,” Martha cried. But no one was listening.

The judge sighed. The verdict had been exactly as he expected. For if, in their zeal, the saints had passed stern, Old Testament laws, they had overlooked one thing: the trials resulting still had to go before an English jury. And the ordinary citizens had not entirely lost their humanity. The idea of hanging a man and a woman for adultery, however much they disapproved of the culprits’ conduct, offended their sense of fairness. So they refused to find them guilty. Of the twenty-three known cases brought to court in the London area, only one secured a conviction. “So does this mean they are innocent?” O Be Joyful asked Martha. “No,” she replied irritably, “it does not.” Nor, she saw to it, did the weakness of the jury mean that the guilty couple escaped all punishment. There was still the community to deal with. As minister at the church, Meredith had to explain the situation to them. “You can’t stay in the parish,” he told them both. “They won’t have you.” And the truth of this was quickly seen.

Dogget’s life was made simply unendurable. His two children hardly knew him, and out of sheer force of habit followed Martha’s lead. No one would speak to him. As for Jane, it was worse. If she stepped out of her house into the street, she was greeted with cries of “Whore!” The man down the street stopped bringing her firewood. The water carrier did not stop for her. People in the nearby Cheapside stalls would ignore her if she tried to buy anything. One day she returned to find ‘
HARLOT
’ painted on her door. By the end of the month she said sadly to Meredith: “You’re right, we must go.”

The snow was falling on the late January day when, Dogget having previously conveyed all her possessions away by cart, he and Jane stepped into a wherry down by the Vintry and were rowed away upstream. Their destination was a little settlement beside Westminster. A century ago some French merchants had for a time formed an enclave there, convenient for doing business with the royal palaces of Westminster and Whitehall, and ever since these streets had been known as Little, or Petty France. Petty France was regarded as a place for misfits; though more recently some literary folk, including John Milton, had taken lodgings there. “At least,” Meredith had advised, “Martha and her friends won’t bother you in Petty France. You can live quietly there.”

1660

During the decade of the 1650s no man in England was more loyal to the exiled House of Stuart than Sir Julius Ducket. But while Oliver Cromwell and the saints were masters of England, there was little that any Royalist could do. And so he read, and he pondered. He read the Bible, in its entirety, twice, and realized that it is the greatest book of history ever written. He read the classics; he studied English history and made notes upon the development of England’s constitution. And he waited.

Superficially, Cromwell’s rule was strong. His great, round wart-marked face seemed to Julius to hang over the land like a grim mask from the pagan age. He had executed the king, and chased his son away to France. The Scots were cowed, the Irish massacred and bloodily crushed. All this he did in only a few short years so that even Julius grudgingly admitted: “His sword is mighty indeed.”

Yet if the aim of the Commonwealth was to build a shining city on a hill, it was necessary to change men’s hearts as well as the laws. And was it really working? For Julius, the turning point had been the trial and acquittal of Dogget and Jane. “The Puritans have gone too far,” he told his family. In smaller ways, also, there were signs of unregenerate human nature at work. “Some of the watermen,” Julius reported one day, “have started a competition to see who can get fined the most times for drunkenness within a year.” It was as though, he reflected, the main streets had been swept clean for the Puritans, but the alleys were still full of sinners.

Nor was the case of religion any clearer. Anything it seemed, except bishops, was tolerated. In St Lawrence Silversleeves, Meredith had generally made use of the Presbyterian Directory but then, about the time of his celebrated Last Sermon, abandoned that for a form of Protestant prayers and hymns that Martha entirely approved of. Other churches were similar. So tolerant was Cromwell in these matters that one year he even forced Parliament to pass a law allowing Jews to enter England again. There had been none in the kingdom since Edward I had banned them back in 1290. Many Puritans, led by their hero William Prynne, who hated Jews, protested vigorously. But the thing was done; and soon afterwards Julius discovered a little community of Jews who had moved in near the Aldgate. “They even plan to build a synagogue there,” he told his family. Indeed, Julius perceived only one real religious hardship: the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, being deemed Royalist, was banned. Londoners were required to conduct christenings, marriages and funerals only before a magistrate now. Yet even so, in one or two churches, Anglican clergymen still secretly used the Prayer Book; and when Julius’s son was to marry, his father reported with a smile: “I’ve found a loyal clergyman who will perform the ceremony in our house.”

But greater than all these confusions was the fact that nobody, including Cromwell, could make up his mind how the Commonwealth should be governed.

Everything was tried. At first, Parliament was to rule; but Parliament agreed nothing, quarrelled with the army and refused to dissolve itself. Cromwell kicked them out, as he did their successors in a series of constitutional experiments. Cromwell had already made himself Protector, and what was left of the Parliament was so weary of the army by now that they suggested he become king under the old constitution. “We didn’t fight for that!” the army of saints cried. “But he very nearly took their offer,” Julius noted. “So much for Puritan rule.”

Patiently, therefore, he waited. If Martha and Gideon ruled the parish, he did nothing to provoke them. Meredith delivered his Last Sermon many more times and when he finally departed, he did so in style. Giving the sermon at St Paul’s Cross itself, before an audience of hundreds, and having chosen from the Book of Revelation for his text, he had reached his crescendo, his gaunt face upturned just as the sun, breaking through cloud, smote upon it. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” he cried. “He carries me away to a great and high mountain, and shows me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven.” Looking now at his audience for the last time he called to them: “Come with me, dearly beloved, come to that place.” Then, staring up, straight at the sun, his arms outstretched towards it: “He calls to me, He that is Alpha and Omega, He calls to me now: ‘Come hither. Come hither.’” At which he fell, with a crash, from the pulpit, never to rise.