Take Courage (50 page)

Sam proved a good letter-writer, at least in my judgment. He did not, it is true, write with the flowing elegance of Thomas or the courteous grace of David, but there was a shrewd humour in his homely sentences, and he had a knack of bringing a thing vividly before you; if he sometimes misspelled a word, he did not often misjudge a character. We heard from him how he visited Whitehall, and the Exchange, and the Tower, and Paul's—it all sounded very brisk and bustling and noisy, which would be agreeable to Sam. He seemed to be pleasing his master with his quickness for figures and understanding of cloth, but he observed:
Yesterday I saw the Lord General going to his office
so often that at last John wrote to him somewhat sternly, and told him his place was in Blackwell, not Whitehall, and that he hoped no son of his would prove an idle apprentice; it was enough pleasure for a lad of his upbringing, wrote John, to go to hear the noted preachers on Lord's Day. After this Sam was silent for so long that I was troubled, and wrote urging him to send to us more often by the carrier; whereupon a very lively letter came to me from Sam, saying that he had seen the Lord General—I gasped, but the next line read:
hearing a sermon in Cripplegate
, so that I could not but laugh, and even John smiled, if a trifle grimly.

Too soon this pleasure of Sam's, in seeing Lord Fairfax from afar, was ended. For the Scots, dissatisfied with our sectaries for not establishing the Presbyterian Church, proclaimed the late King's eldest son as King under the title of Charles II, and having made him sign the Presbyterian Covenant, fetched him over to Scotland from foreign parts. It was thought by some that the Scots might invade us again; and Cromwell was fetched home from Ireland—where he had performed some notable cruelties—to be ready, under the command of Lord Fairfax, against such an invasion. But now the Council of State, of which both these generals were members, began to debate whether it would not be wisest to prevent the Scots' invading us by
our first invading them; and at this moment Lord Fairfax threw up his general's commission.

Such an uproar as this caused, such earnest dissuasion from the Council and Lord Fairfax's officers, such discussion all over the kingdom! Lord Fairfax's motives were much debated. Some said it was his wife had persuaded him, she being so zealous a Presbyterian and thinking it wrong to fight the Presbyterian Scots; and indeed Lady Fairfax's carriage towards all those of Independent beliefs in religion lent colour to this view. But for my part I do not think it; I think Lord Fairfax felt that horror towards the course to which the Council was instructing him, which a person of Lord Fairfax's noble and scrupulous mind must necessarily feel. To invade a nation lest it should invade us! But how could one be sure of its intent? How take such an aggression upon one's conscience? Surely such an invasion was totally unwarranted, totally wrong! To defend ourselves if attacked is a common right; to attack a nation supposedly friendly, with whom we had sworn a solemn Covenant, was surely just the reverse. And so the Lord General, though strongly urged to the contrary even by Cromwell, sent his commission to the House of Commons by his secretary, and was Lord General no more; “My conscience is not satisfied,” said he soberly, “and so I must desire to be excused.” Thus our best and noblest man was lost to our cause. Cromwell had his place, with what results, alas, we have only now ceased to smart from; and Lord Fairfax with his wife and Moll retired to Yorkshire, and lived at his new-built house at Nun Appleton, not very far from Marston Moor.

Cromwell marched into Scotland, and our Yorkshire Lambert under him, and our Captain Hodgson under General Lambert. They found the Scots a hard nut to crack, but defeated them at last; and then some of the Scots poured down into England through Lancashire, Lambert on their side harassing them, and Cromwell hot in their rear. Cromwell caught the Scots at Worcester, and there was that great and final battle of the Civil War, when young Charles
Stuart escaped only by hiding in an oak tree, or so we are now told. This was indeed the last battle, and a great victory; and a Thanksgiving was ordered by Parliament, and letters of Cromwell's describing the battle were read from the pulpits, on a following Lord's Day. But we at The Breck had no heart for letters or thanksgiving either. We were glad enough to see the Scottish invasion defeated, but doubted whether there need have been any invasion, had Cromwell not been in power; and what that power might lead to, we already doubted miserably, though our imagination fell far short of the hateful truth.

Indeed, after Lord Fairfax's resignation, John was never young again. In years he was not yet old, being about the same age as the Lord General, at that time barely forty; but disappointment, and the rheumatic pains begun by his long army service, continually growing on him from this time forward, served to slow and age him. Yes; when Black Tom ceased to be the Parliament's General, John Thorpe ceased to be a young man.

With what a sick perplexity we watched the transactions of the next few years, when all we had fought for was through weaknesses and excesses gradually lost, and our fine new freedom fell under the tyranny of one bold man, I remember with a sore heart now. The words
a settlement of the nation
, at first spoken so hopefully and cheerfully, began presently to be of such common use as to excite derision, and then they became an exasperation, and then at last were left unspoken in despair.

Looking back on it all now, I cannot see why the Parliament, now so old, for it had been sitting more than ten years, did not dissolve itself and call for another election, and then this fresh Parliament, elected by the people, could have settled the nations' affairs. There were difficulties perhaps in the forms to be used, all the laws of England being framed in the King's name, but surely these could have been got over—they were not made a difficulty during the war. Perhaps the Parliament did not wish to dissolve itself, fearing to lose its power and not trusting the people—fear and mistrust are at the root of most great evils, it seems to me. Be that as it may, the Parliament hesitated and would not dissolve, and named a distant date for dissolving and then went back on this and seemed likely to stay at Westminster for ever, whereupon Cromwell lost patience and turned the members out by force of arms. 'Twas said he had the Speaker pulled down from his seat, and handed the great Mace of office itself carelessly to a musketeer, saying: “Take away this bauble!” Words and acts so dreadful, so opposed to all English notions of freedom and
constitutional rule, so contrary to all for which we had shed English and Scottish blood through nine long years, that even now, when I think of them, my spine grows cold and the hair stirs on my head. Was it for this that my Francis died, and Mr. Atkinson, and Sarah's Denton, and all those thousands of well-loved men; was it for this that Isaac Baume limped, and Giles Ferrand's head burned, and John could scarce rise from his chair if the wind was east; was it for this that Bradford was sacked and the cloth trade ruined; was it for this that children starved and women wept? We had fought for liberty, for our right to be governed by a free Parliament, and now, inch by inch, these rights were dragged from our hand. To do Oliver Cromwell justice, I think he did not mean to destroy our liberty; nay, he even thought he was protecting it; but once you destroy lawful ways of rule and depend upon your own goodwill for justice, you become, whether you wish it or no, a tyrant.

So it was with Oliver. He encourages a purge of Parliament so that King Charles may be beheaded; next you find him turning out what is left of Parliament by armed force. Then he summons a Parliament of Puritan notables—good enough men, no doubt, honest and godly, but uneasy and uncertain because they depend on goodwill from above instead of resting on the solid election of the people. This Parliament resigns its power after a while into Oliver's hands, and behold he is Lord Protector! An office which, because it is not subject to any constitutional checks, is far more arbitrary than English kingship.
Oliver P
he signed himself—it made John sick to see it, on proclamations and in the diurnals.

No; Cromwell did not understand, I think, how he had betrayed the people; he continued to call Parliaments, and to use the same language, of justice and righteousness and the workings of Almighty God, as in the days when he was fighting for and not against them. But he quarrelled with the Parliaments—how could he not?—and his writings and utterances while he was Protector, at least as they were
reported in the diurnals, had an uneasy, almost querulous ring about them, as if he were surprised to find himself concerned, for the first time in his life, to defend himself. He betook himself to the palace in Whitehall, and he and his family lived there in a great state which ill became them—though Cromwell himself, as our Sam reported, had a natural greatness of demeanour which enabled him to carry it. Then he appointed Major-Generals to govern the various districts of England—a company of silly mean fellows, who ruled according to their wills, by no law but what seemed good in their own eyes. Our Lambert had the north-eastern district, but God knows he made but a poor hand of it, for almost everything agreeable was forbidden—one scarcely dared to sneeze unless one were an Independent. Cock-fighting and horse-racing I was not sorry to see forbidden, but there was little harm in bowls or football, nor did I see any sense in the breaking in half of our Bradford Market Cross. As for the Royalists, poor souls, such as were suspected of any malignant leanings had to pay a fine again, this time a tenth part of their estate. And then, God help us! there was actually a motion made offering Oliver the kingship! He refused the crown, it is true, but took ten weeks doing so. Meanwhile he had quarrelled with Lambert, he had quarrelled again with Parliament; while the Army was on free quarter—an imposition the whole country groaned under—and near thirty weeks behind in pay, the government being in difficulties for money, just as it used to be in the late King Charles's days, owing to war adventures abroad and resentment at home. At last Cromwell exercised such an arbitrary power that the whole land grew weary of him; we had fought ourselves free, and were not inclined to become his slaves.

All this we watched with an increasingly sore heart, a very sick disappointment and perplexity. The country being so disturbed, with no settlement in prospect, and the Dutch so against us on the seas, the plight of the cloth trade grew desperate—so desperate, indeed, that Oliver himself admitted to the Parliament his serious concern for this
staple English trade. If John had not been local assessor to the Parliament, and steward to a gentleman from the south who held property in the district, we should have fared but poorly, though it is true that at this time we were able to some extent to collect our rents. John being so noted for his service to Lord Fairfax, for whom everyone high and low still had a great respect, did not suffer much inconvenience from the new political and religious bodies which were always being appointed to pry into people's affairs. But the decay of liberty at the hands of our own friends, the sinful divisions amongst those who lately were brothers in arms for a high cause, these were a dark cloud and a running sore, and marred all that should have been enjoyable to us. Thomas took his Master of Arts degree, and was ordained, and began his ministry in Peterborough, whence we heard excellent reports of him; Sam came out of his apprenticeship and seemed like to follow the natural course of industrious apprentices and marry a partnership with his master's daughter, an honest hearty girl from all we heard of her; David resigned his fellowship and began a happy ministry in Surrey; so that if the times had been right we should have had much quiet joy and pride in our family. But the times were not right, and everything that was wrong with them seemed as it were underlined for us in our own house by a pointing finger, and the one who pointed the finger was Chris.

For we knew not what to do with Chris.

At this time he was in his teens and very well grown for his age; tall and slender but as strong as steel, his voice very manly, deep and musical. It was John's especial care, nay it was almost a point of honour with him, to show kindness to Chris and a persistent concern for his welfare, and as I saw it eased him to do so, it was my part to accept his kindness and make it welcome, though sometimes his generosity irked me, for I am one always more blessed in giving than receiving. As often happens with a duty very faithfully and scrupulously performed, the faithfulness brought its own reward, for John grew truly fond of Chris—
not as a son, for that is of the blood, not to be gained by merely willing it, but perhaps as a dear nephew. It seemed to me that the affection he had given to Francis, which had been turned to hatred, found its full fruition in Francis's son. Chris as a child being very loving and merry, was as sweet in manner to John as to anyone else, and this was pleasurable to John; and since John was of a reserved nature and not given to many caresses, this suited Chris too. He would carry a broken toy to John to be mended with a look of perfect trust which was very agreeable to me; the fondness between Sam and Chris, too, made it easy for my sons to be all brothers together. This was when Chris was a child. Had the times been right, John's great honesty and Chris's natural goodness would have brought us safely to the time when he left home and found his place in the outer world; but there was no place in Cromwell's Protectorate for Chris.

Chris was a natural leader in all sports and games and feats of daring, quick in decision, swift in action, both adventurous and determined; but at his book he was not so much slow or stupid as not there at all. His mind was out in the sun and wind, he listened to teaching from a great distance. Such fragments of learning as he acquired simply stuck in his bright head by chance as they blew by. I strove to teach him his Latin accidence, but even when he was a great lad, taller than I, he could never be relied on to give a first declension genitive accurately. John spent hours striving to put the rules of arithmetic in his head, and would not despair, but he never got Chris beyond the golden rule—Abraham at six was a better mathematician than Chris at sixteen. At one time John began to take Chris about to market with him, thinking, I believe, that as Thomas and Sam were so well provided for, there was room for Chris as well as Abraham as clothiers at The Breck. Chris enjoyed these excursions, being always completely happy when he was on a horse, but when asked to give some account of the cloth sold, or distinguish between different qualities of yarn, he was amazed and disconcerted,
and stood on one foot with a perplexed air, grieved with himself and quite at a loss. He looked with interested amusement at our looms upstairs, but could not throw a shuttle to save his life.