Rebels and Traitors (15 page)

Then Sir Thomas Holte enclosed a third of Aston Manor to enlarge his park. The Tews were driven out.

The social gulf between the Tew family and that of ‘Black Tom’ Holte was vast. They had nothing. He had everything. Though his forebears had a long pedigree in the Midlands, his real social eminence developed with the Stuart kings. On the accession of King James, Holte had been knighted; later he pushed forward to be among the two hundred who paid a thousand pounds each for a baronetcy — a new rank, invented to create funds for the king. His red-handed badge then gave Sir Thomas Holte precedence over all except royalty and the peerage. He built himself a gem of Jacobean architecture, an ostentatious stately home to signify his importance. He sired sixteen well-fed children, by two wives. As lord of the manors of Aston, Duddeston and Nechells, Holte enjoyed an aristocratic idleness that was never made the subject of sermons or by-laws. He flourished, with the minimum of loyal service to the kingdom, while growing ever richer on the proceeds of brutal business methods. He hunted, quarrelled and counted his rents. He bought the extra manors of Lapworth and Bushwood; he acquired Erdington and Pipe. He became a Justice of the Peace for the county of Warwickshire and lay rector of Aston parish. With no opposition, or none that mattered, he then seized for himself the breezy open common. Some of it became his new deer park and the rest he parcelled out in tiny batches to local artisans. Their leases were short enough to keep the men craven, lest by displeasing their landlord they should lose their livelihoods.

With land in a commanding position astride the vital River Bourne, Holte controlled the necessary water supply for industry; he soon owned seven mills on the Bourne and two more on the River Rea, with dozens of one-man forges leased from him. Acquisitive, hot-tempered and vindictive, he had a reputation as well read and versed in languages, though this was not tested in Birmingham where the locals had their own curious intonation but only the Welsh drovers needed real interpreting. Velvet-suited Holte sons went to London as courtiers to the King. Pink-cheeked, pearl-bedecked Holte daughters played shuttlecock in the Long Gallery until they wed other landowners, their carefully negotiated marriages providing their father with more ample cash to adorn Aston Hall. The eldest son fell out with his father for twenty years and a daughter was reputedly locked up in a garret, but their father disdained to be called to account for either; he tried to ruin his son, who had married a girl with no dowry, even when pressed to forgive him by King Charles.

Aston lay a very short walk from Birmingham, where Sir Thomas Holte was disliked and insulted. Notoriously, he sued a local man for spreading rumours that Holte had struck his cook with a kitchen cleaver so violently that one part of the victim’s head lay upon one shoulder and another part on the other’. Judges on appeal cleared the defendant of slander on the curious grounds that his claim did not say in so many words that the baronet had murdered the cook. The wry judgment stated,
‘notwithstanding such wounding, the party may yet be living’.
This lawsuit led locally to open animosity that increased in the civil war. Sir Thomas Holte naturally supported the King; the rebellious people of Birmingham did not.

The Tews took neither side. The war would not be fought for them. They owned nothing worth fighting for. Following the land enclosure, they were homeless and destitute, without trade or other income. They gravitated to the town, but found little charity there; they were too strong-bodied to win places in guild almshouses and, if approached, the Birmingham churchwardens would only move the Tews on — back to their home parish of Aston, where Sir Thomas Holte was master. Their plight might be his fault, but he influenced the Aston churchwardens when they gave or withheld poor relief, so the Tews were convinced their chances were hopeless. ‘If he cared, he would never have thrust us off the common,’ moaned Kinchin’s father, Emmett Tew, a shiftless, shabby laggard to whom complaining had always come easier than making the best of it. He had a point. Many aristocrats claimed that giving alms to the poor only encouraged them to remain idle and beg for more relief. This opinion allowed people of high birth and low cunning to avoid paying conscience money. It worked too. The number of paupers diminished, as they died from starvation and disease.

Kinchin’s mother was pregnant yet again, though she looked too old for it; the new child would probably die but if it survived birth, it might have to be sneaked into a church porch and abandoned. Idealists in England would soon debate the principle that all men came into the world equal — yet the Tews knew that from birth to death they were less than the rest. Hounded from their toehold amid the gorse and wild-flowers, they joined the tinkers, pedlars, gypsies, vagabonds, cut-purses, thieves, actors, wounded soldiers and sailors, idiots and sturdy beggars who bedevilled better-off society. Many were begging through no fault of their own, though that never earned them kindness. Few refuges existed. There were houses of correction where destitute young boys could be taught trades, but few girls entered apprenticeships; their only legitimate option was to become servants. For Kinchin, that option was pretty well closed. No respectable housewife would take in a starved, scab-encrusted runt, who was bound to steal. So Sir Thomas Holte had his portrait painted in green silk, tulip-bottomed britches braided with gold and a silver jacket, his black-bearded personage hung about with rosettes, bows, baldrics and expensive lace-trimmed gauntlets. Kinchin Tew grew up wearing a mildewed skirt she had filched from washerwomen who had laid laundry to dry on thorny bushes. She never had shoes. Now although she looked a child still, she was fourteen, and a tribe of Tews was expecting her to earn for them — in what filthy manner no one had yet specified.

Some people who lost their livelihoods took to the road. As far back as memory would go, the Tews had had their fixed base in North Warwickshire; they clung on in their home district, except for one of Kinchin’s brothers who left to try to be a sailor. Since they lived at the very centre of England, Nathaniel had a long walk to the sea in any direction and nobody expected to see him again. Little William was ordered into a charity apprenticeship but ran away after three weeks. Sukey found a position as a dairymaid, caught cowpox and died. Pen died of nothing in particular, as the poor did. Other Tews drifted into town and pleaded for jobs which rarely lasted more than a few days. Self-employed cutlers could not afford unskilled help, bigger businesses wanted workmen they could trust, and Tews tended to lose patience and barge off in a huff anyway.

Birmingham was sufficiently prosperous to offer them advantages. Just one of a multitude of small English towns, it stood at a crossroads of medieval pack-roads. A parish church dominated the old village green, which had been built around with little houses. Along the dog-leg curve of the single main street were several markets, chiefly for cattle which provided both meat sold by the butchers in the Shambles and hides for leather-working. There were sheep pens and a corn cheaping. The town boasted commercial cherry orchards, from which all the Tew children stole fruit, and a rabbit warren whose dozier coneys sometimes ended up in the Tews’ cooking pot with bits of nettle and root. An old moated manor-house graced the pretty water-meadows of the River Rea, which was crossed by two stone bridges. The river here and its associated pools and springs had long supported cottage industries. Along the main stream were tanyards, steeping tanks, maltings and watermills. In recent decades Askrigge’s corn mill had been converted by the entrepreneur Robert Porter to a steel mill, while numerous small open-fronted forges lined the side streets; they turned out every kind of metalwork, though mostly knives. Increasingly, the smiths made swordblades.

Because it had industry as well as its markets, Birmingham had been one of the most flourishing towns in Warwickshire for a hundred years. Although it still lacked borough status, self-made men had built handsome houses on the rising ground, surrounded by gardens and orchards. The local guild maintained almshouses for the few paupers of whom it approved. The guild financed market officials — the bailiffs, the ale and meat connors, the leather sealers and the constable, whose suspicious glare Tews of all ages tried to avoid. It supported the parish churchwardens, bellman, organist and caretaker; it also paid for a midwife. In the guildhall was housed the King Edward the Sixth Grammar School, where fortunate boys were given as good an education as Will Shakespeare had devoured at Stratford-upon-Avon — though lice-ridden, rude rascallions from the common were of course excluded, while girls had no perceived need of learning at all. Kinchin could neither read nor write. However, she knew the value of everything, especially its price as second-hand when second-hand meant stolen.

Throughout her childhood she had slunk through the commercial areas looking for opportunities. If she was shooed away from the Market Cross near the corn market, she moved on through the noisy beast market to the Welch Cross. She would beg openly or she would keep her eyes peeled for spillage and accidental loss. Small change dropped amongst the sordid straw of the cattle pens was often ignored by those who lost it; Kinchin would pounce and grab despite the dung and slime. Stray carrots and apples slipped into the tacked-on pocket of her tattered skirt however bruised they were. As evening fell, she would gaze longingly at unsold produce that the countryfolk might prefer not to carry home again. Clasping any trophies, she usually made her way to Dale End near the Old Priory or to Digbeth and Deritend, which was Dirty End, down by the river. Those places were where her adult relatives would most likely be lurking at the many taverns that supplied the forge-men’s mighty thirsts. Tews sometimes earned a few pence for pot-washing; they could drain dregs while they were doing it.

If Kinchin had a friend, it was Thomas, an ostler at the Swan Inn in the High Street, a wiry, affable man who on stormy nights would let her sneak into the stable and bed down in the warmth with the horses. Recently she just kept the Swan in reserve, in case she was ever truly desperate. One day Thomas would want to be kept sweet, and she had a good idea how. Meanwhile her anxieties lay elsewhere.

Today, Mr Whitehall had come upon her while she dawdled in Moat Lane, near the manor-house. He whined the usual plea: ‘Pray you, give but a comfortable kiss, Kinchin!’ The old parson’s tremulous, beseeching voice contrasted with the expert controlling grip in which he grasped her. She could feel his heart pounding through the black woollen clergyman’s habit that he still wore, despite holding no position; no congregation would knowingly accept him. Even to Kinchin, herself unwashed, he had a rank smell that had nothing to do with mildewed Bibles. A cinnamon kiss, a kiss with some moistness —’

Why me?
thought Kinchin drably.

A new indignity began. She felt Mr Whitehall’s right hand pummelling between her legs. Her skirts were of thick and coarse worsted, which she had pulled around her clumsily; their heavy pleats were thwarting his entrance, yet he worked with bruising vigour. Confused, Kinchin wrestled and kicked, but in her agitation she had allowed his stinking wet mouth to fasten on hers. Disgusted by his excitement, the girl became angry; this time her ordeal was as painful as it was unwelcome.

He had lain long in Bedlam. What was a kiss to comfort a madman?
He might give me a penny
… A clawing hand that knew exactly how female dress would be arranged now tugged at her placket, thwarted only by the bunched folds of a garment that was several times too big for her.

‘Let it be our secret, Kinchin, our special secret!’

Kinchin Tew wanted to be special in some way —
any
way — and Mr Whitehall knew it.

‘Oh Mr Whitehall, put it away!’

For a moment the new voice confused Kinchin. Although she knew the minister’s cunning, she was surprised how rapidly he released his hold and slid apart from her. She glimpsed the offending prick, but it was sheathed away into his britches as soon as he heard the order.

With gratitude, Kinchin recognised Mistress Lucas, wife to a Birmingham forge-man. She was a quiet but forthright woman in a well-laundered white cap and apron over a modest oatmeal-coloured skirt and bodice, with a basket on one arm. She had chivvied the minister matter-of-factly but the way her eyes lingered on Kinchin acknowledged that she knew this was a rescue. ‘Come along with me and I’ll give you some bread and butter, Kinchin.’

As soon as they emerged from Moat Lane, squeezing between small houses into the close below St Martin’s Church, they met unusual bustle. All morning a cavalcade had been passing through town. The stream of mounted men and foot soldiers caused havoc in the markets, where there was always a squash of animals and people. It was the main Royalist army, coming down from the north, headed up by the King himself. The passing of the royal coach caused a particularly bad scrimmage and a humorous moment when a frightened goose landed on its roof.