Rebels and Traitors (34 page)

While the King exulted, Parliament hastily summoned the Eastern Association troops back south. They were to join with the rags of Waller’s army and prevent the King from sweeping to victory. A second battle was fought at Newbury. Weak deployment by the Earl of Manchester allowed the King to evade what should have been a decisive action. This was the occasion when Oliver Cromwell’s exasperation with Lord Manchester brought him to argue for a new kind of army, which would be concentrated under one tried and determined commander. But while that idea was discussed in Parliament, the year ended with the same kind of stalemate as previously, Marston Moor almost seeming to count for nothing.

In Oxford one Sunday in early October a terrible fire occurred. For the garrison, the townspeople and those left behind by the field armies, this assumed much more importance than any aspect of the war. It began when a foot-soldier who had stolen a pig was roasting the beast in a cramped dwelling near the North Gate. The little house caught light. Fanned by a high north wind, flames spread rapidly. A frightening conflagration raced through much of the western area, from George Street south through St Ebbe’s, destroying houses, stables, bakeries and brewhouses. As well as providing billets for soldiers, this was an area of labourers and artisans, who lived in cramped small cottages with too many thatched roofs and wooden chimneys. Oxford houses at the time tended to be built with timber rather than brick or stone. Their beams, bargeboards and decorative pargeting were grey with age and tinder-dry; the closeness of the buildings helped the flames to leap ferociously through entries and passageways.

Juliana had smelled smoke. Soon the McIlwaines’ house was threatened. It survived, but not before Juliana and her friend had begun frantically gathering what they could — Juliana could carry little more than the baby. Outside, only half-hearted fire-fighting efforts were being attempted, for there was no good access to water. Ladders were brought to rescue trapped people — or to enable thieves to take advantage of abandoned houses — but the streets were full of fleeing, screaming inhabitants, who rushed in all directions not knowing where to take refuge. Some carried bundles of possessions, but most were just concerned to save their skins.

Feeling the approaching heatstorm and panicking, the women rushed out into the High. Nerissa pulled Juliana to safety in Christ Church, where the large quadrangle and heavy stonework would offer protection if the fire leapt across the street. Eventually the blaze was extinguished, however, and they were able to return home, finding the house still as they had left it, though every room and everything they owned was blackened with soot and smuts and stank of smoke. They coughed for days. The reek lasted weeks. Juliana found herself sniffing obsessively and peering through the windows in case a new fire had started. She slept badly and remained on edge.

Collections of money were started for homeless people, many of whom had lost their trades with their workshops. Relief was haphazard. The destitute would still be begging for assistance two decades later. Eighty houses were destroyed. Bread and beer were hard to find, since brew-houses, bakehouses and malthouses were destroyed. The butchers’ stalls in Queen Street had also gone. There was food, however. Oxford always had a good supply of provisions. The King repeatedly ordered every household to lay in stocks to survive a siege.

At the end of the month, unexpectedly, Juliana came in from the market and saw boots warming by the fire, boots with enormous bucket-tops and butterfly-shaped leather patches on the insteps, which held mighty spurs. McIlwaine and Lovell had returned. Juliana found her husband in their room, face down, spread-eagled on the bed.

At first, Juliana convinced herself Lovell was unchanged. He and the colonel seemed more reticent and jaded, though neither had been badly wounded. They spoke only briefly of the battle of Marston Moor. McIlwaine had managed to get away with Prince Rupert, which saved his life; had he been captured, he would have been shot for being an Irishman. After hiding all night in a beanfield — a story loved by his enemies though rather played down by him — Rupert rendezvoused with his surviving men at York then refused an appeal from the Marquis of Montrose to fight in Scotland and instead rode back across the Pennines, picking up stragglers. Meanwhile Lovell had lost his horse and was captured by Roundheads after lying for hours in a damp gorse patch. Unlike most of the fifteen hundred prisoners taken after the battle, he somehow escaped. In subsequent weeks at home, he said little of what had happened to him.

The men’s dark memories only slowly became apparent. When their husbands first reappeared, Juliana and Nerissa exchanged discreet glances, asking no questions. When Lovell came to the kitchen, where Colonel McIlwaine was tasting small pies as warily as if he had never seen a pie before, Juliana brought Tom to his father. It was six months since he had seen the child. Lovell responded with polite remarks on how Tom had developed. He held the boy; he held him close for a long time, staring at the fire. But he was not taking joy in his infant, merely using him as a comforter.

That night in bed, Juliana was shocked by the new force and urgency of Lovell’s lovemaking. A foolish girl might have preened herself that he had missed her — which no doubt was true. Yet she realised that as he worked out his passion, he had locked himself away within some misery he might never share with her. The man was obliterating his disappointments through sexual effort. His ferociousness was a punishment — though hardly Juliana’s punishment, for what had she done wrong? She provided wifely consolation, but she found it frightening and painful. In the end, Lovell’s extreme passion roused her — she could not help herself — but after they fell back exhausted, they lay silent and uncommuning. Dry-eyed in the darkness, Juliana did not sleep.

She felt used like a whore. She could not help being angry.

As she surveyed her bruises the next day, while Lovell still lay in a dead sleep, she wondered if a similar scene had taken place in the McIlwaines’ bed. Going downstairs, she almost believed that she heard a man weeping, though she could not believe it. Nerissa McIlwaine did not appear that morning and when Juliana did find her, quietly spreading herself damson jam on a crust of bread, it seemed impossible to ask intimate questions.

Some time before the end of that year, the Lovells’ second child was conceived.

The King wintered at Oxford serenely. There was no sign that anything would ever change.

Christmas brought an atmosphere closer to normality. The weeks before had been bleak, however. The men had been difficult ever since their return. Lovell was irritable and distant. Owen McIlwaine was drinking hard and uncharacteristically; Juliana noticed that his wife, who could be frankly outspoken, did not criticise. Nerissa must have seen this before. The men often took themselves off to be among other soldiers in taverns, close-bonding in hard knots over many tankards.

‘They are sticking together, trying to forget,’ Nerissa explained to Juliana.

‘Omitting us from their confidence?’

‘They were unprepared for such a bloody defeat. Their instinct is to protect their families from knowing what they endured. They will not speak in front of us — yet trust me, they need to. You must have noticed, they are both constantly on guard. They jump like cats at the slightest alarm.’

‘Orlando is tormented by memories and night terrors.’ Juliana had found out, when Lovell would never come to bed, that it was from fear of lurid nightmares. ‘I can do nothing right;
he
has dropped three plates, yet
I
am blamed for clumsiness.’

‘Many a woman has left her husband under these trials, Juley, and gone home to her mother. I am too far from home to do it —’

‘And I have no mother alive.’ Juliana had taken on Lovell as a challenge; she would not abandon him. ‘What can we do, Nerissa?’

‘Nothing. Live with it.’

Juliana made sure she talked to Lovell, asking gentle, general questions about Marston Moor. When he flared up initially, she backed off, yet she came back to it, until he let his guard drop. However bitter he might be, Orlando Lovell always stayed true to his intelligence. He lived with angry self-knowledge. He had applied honesty to their marriage; this was a courtesy he gave formally to Juliana as his wife. So, bit by bit, he allowed her probing and she drew from him a portrait of the great conflict.

He began with his usual disparagement of Rupert, then went on to blame Lord Newcastle. ‘Yet, Orlando, he has spent his entire mighty fortune in the King’s service?’

Lovell raved against the Duke’s hedonistic lifestyle before the war — his legendary entertainments and twin passions of horse dressage and banqueting. ‘Oh he is a great enthusiast. Horses, women, art, architecture — and, until now, the King’s cause. But after Marston Moor, he fled to the Continent — he told Rupert he would not bear the laughter of courtiers.’

‘Should
he
be blamed for the disaster?’

‘When the rebels attacked, this piece of nobility Newcastle had retired to his coach to enjoy a pipe of tobacco.’

‘That’s bad, I agree. But Lord Goring commanded Newcastle’s cavalry on the right wing, did he not?’ Juliana asked.

‘Goring drinks himself under the table nightly!’ Lovell set off in rage again. ‘No one has his capacity for sin. He is all wining, whoring and gaming. A legend for debauchery — and for failure to control his men. Sweetheart, the fool had Fairfax routed and beaten out of sight. If Goring had not chased from the field in search of Fairfax’s baggage-train, our case would have been quite different. Their leaders — bumbling Manchester and that dour Scot, Leven — had given up. Leven ran scared for fourteen miles from the field before he stopped.’

‘Better things are said of Sir Thomas Fairfax?’

Calmer, Lovell considered the question with some interest. ‘A sickly, stubborn, crazily brave northerner. Armies have these characters, men who flare alight when action starts. We heard that Fairfax found himself alone, threw off his officer’s sash and the field sign from his hat, then he passed right through Goring’s men unrecognised. This was our undoing. Fairfax reached Cromwell and supplied him with full intelligence; Cromwell knew that you must be persistent, methodical, drive ever forwards, keep at it. So he took his troops looping around to eliminate Goring’s men.’

And what is known of Cromwell?’

‘Nothing. Nothing, but that he broke us, then he held his men in check — as Rupert never can. Cromwell traversed the whole field and when he had mopped up Goring’s cavalry, he turned on the centre and destroyed our infantry’

‘That was hard fighting?’

‘Carnage. Slash and stab. Limbs flying, men with their faces ripped off, sides torn open, brains spilling from their heads —’

Lovell fell silent abruptly. It was time to stop. With her hand on his shoulder, Juliana saw the sweat shine on his face. She brought their son to him again, to remind him of life and hope and, perhaps, responsibility.

So they came to Christmas. With the onset of traditional festivities, the men did rally to accompany their wives. It was the year when, in response to that Covenant signed with the Scots, a Parliamentary committee was deciding just how the Church of England would be reformed. Christmas featured. The Covenant required the rooting-out of
‘superstition, heresy, schism, profaneness, and whatsoever shall be found contrary to sound doctrine and the power of Godliness’.
Removing superstition provided a wreckers’ charter. Not only would the clutter of idolatry be removed from churches — paintings, coloured windows, statues, crucifixes and those hated altar rails that Archbishop Laud had ordered — but the calendar would be cleansed too. Henceforth there would be no pagan festivals or saints’ days. The only holy days would be Sundays and occasional national celebrations such as the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes Day — the day the great papist plot to blow up Parliament was prevented. But the celebration of Christmas would be banned.

In defiance, Royalists celebrated Christmas with gusto. The rich showed their generosity (within limits); the poor were welcomed (within limits), welcomed to warm halls that had been decorated with holly and ivy. Carols resounded, sometimes even in tune. Mince pies and plum pottage, which were popish fare to Presbyterians, became political emblems to Royalists, so gave double pleasure in the eating. There was beef and mutton; there were collars of brawn stuck with rosemary; there were capons, geese and turkeys.

Merry Old English indigestion followed, which the sensible worked off with country walks on starlit evenings. Streets in towns were alive with mummers, some of whom took the spirit of things dangerously far, demanding not merely traditional alms and Christmas boxes, but money with menaces. To refuse them because they were feckless and aggressive was disturbing to the refuser, who wanted to be generous. Traditions die hard, however. The civil jails were as full as the taverns, and as noisy. Only the prisons containing political prisoners were rank with despair.