Rebels and Traitors (43 page)

True soldiers, the Blues were happy to complain about their masters, but when theory cropped up, they lost interest.

In the course of the week, Gideon managed to hand over the Newport officers’ letter to Sir Samuel Luke — along with two large veal pies baked by his mother. Parthenope had noted Gideon’s stories of how country landowners liked presents. There was some coldness of reception for the letter, and Gideon was told he need not wait to take a reply. He had therefore to return next day to Newport. On his last evening, he went again to a tavern, this time with his brother Lambert. They took along their father, his role strangely changed so he seemed like a small boy being allowed out with adults. Lambert led them down Thames Street to the gracious area where once wealthy merchants had houses on the old road down to London Bridge.

Lambert knew a good tavern; Lambert always did. A hum of voices rose as the door was opened. It had a dark, noisy taproom, full of busy argument. Flagstone floors; dark panelled walls; two rows of old long tables; casement windows, set in deep embrasures, but barely visible through the smoke from pipes and the great log fire at the further end; waiting men and girls moving about rapidly, with trays borne aloft on their shoulders.

As soon as he entered, Gideon re-experienced his homesickness for London life. Lambert was subdued, regretful at losing him. As they ordered, Gideon looked around and listened to the flow of voices. He realised that he had been missing not only London, but the thrill of plotting. Although he liked his work as a scout, life at Newport Pagnell seemed empty by comparison. He had enjoyed the years leading up to war. He had been fired by political tension, excited by the hope of change. He loved being among men with opinions. These here were probably arguing about the rising price of haddock, but it could just as well be about freedom from tyranny.

That was why, sitting in Lambert’s chosen inn off New Fish Street Hill, Gideon took a decision that if the army really was to be remodelled, he would try to be transferred to the new force. He told Lambert. The brothers’ old wrangling had diminished. Partly it was the shift in their joint responsibility for their father, who now sat with them silently, wearing a sweet smile, far away in some world they could not enter. ‘Lambert, I am sick of being stuck hungry in a backwater. To be honest, it is galling that we are pitifully equipped and never paid. We need our salaries so we can eat. Is it too much to ask?’

‘Spare the country and pinch the soldier, that’s the way to thrive!’

‘Proverb?’

‘Read it in a news-sheet.’

‘Oh then it must be true! The new army will have regular monies, guaranteed by Parliament.’

‘You believe that?’ scoffed Lambert.

‘No, but who wants his old-age memories to be of
Newport Pagnell?’
The two Londoners laughed.

Lambert confessed that he too wanted to move on from the Trained Bands. They both saw the problem for him. Who would run the grocery business? Who would, in the most literal sense, mind the family shop?

‘The women!’ It was their father who startlingly spoke up. ‘If they were widowed,’ declared John, emerging from frailty like some papery old prophet, ‘they would set to and take it on.’ True.

His sons reviewed this option. Women did run businesses when pressed. In the City there was a minor tradition of female business-management. Their mother was fading, yet still a hard worker. Parthenope knew the price of everything and could judge commodities perfectly. Anne Jukes was more than capable. Anne, who had once seemed just the prettiest girl in Bishopsgate when Lambert first squired her, nowadays displayed more independent traits. Lambert told Gideon how his wife took herself to Coleman Street where women preached -

‘Notoriously!’ interrupted Gideon with a grin. There was the famous Mrs Attaway from Bell Alley — the lace-maker — until she ran off with her paramour, both of them leaving behind young children.’ It was an undeserving jibe but men were merciless with women who set themselves up as spiritual arbiters then broke the moral code.

Lambert smirked. Anne has quite lost her nervousness of petitioning Parliament. Now she regularly joins with women who are pleading for peace. She has met those whose husbands are in jail for producing seditious literature. Your Robert would know the men — John Lilburne, who has been pamphleteering for years, and that man Richard Overton, who lured you into the masque …’ Gideon pretended not to remember
The Triumph of Peace.
‘Indeed, if it fell to my wife to organise our shop, I should heartily welcome it! Otherwise she will end up a she-controversialist, leading her sisterhood in prayer and tumults.’

‘Would you trust Anne and Mother with your capital?’ Gideon asked, giving his brother a sideways glance.

‘They are honest women,’ Lambert replied simply. He knew their talents too; wives of members of the great London trade associations could be powerful and respected. He made a grand resolution: ‘By my life, I shall start showing them the ledgers and order books —’

‘Save your breath,’ chortled John, into the rim of his tankard. ‘They know more about the books than you do, or than I ever did either.’

Gideon would treasure that evening all the rest of his life, for as well as refining his bond with his brother, it was the last time he ever saw his father. The three Jukes men enjoyed this rare excursion together, then both Gideon and Lambert kept the memory fondly in their hearts.

Next day, Gideon returned dutifully to Newport Pagnell, riding a good new horse bought for him by his parents. He was determined that garrison life would now be temporary. Sir Thomas Fairfax arrived in London from the north in February, and impressed the House of Commons with his modest bearing. Parliament appointed Fairfax to be commander of the new army.

In February too, Sir Samuel came back to Newport. Still trying to drum up money or tools to repair Newport’s defences, he complained that the area all around was becoming increasingly malignant. Gideon watched the situation deteriorating daily. That month a detachment of Manchester’s army were quartered at Newport, causing such overcrowding Sir Samuel complained that soldiers were having to sleep ‘three and three in a bed’. Since requests for money still failed, he claimed poignantly that his garrison was now so under-funded that two of his soldiers had only one pair of britches between them; when one soldier was on duty the other was compelled to remain in his quarters in bed.
‘If the soldiers mutiny for want of pay, I cannot help it…’
The entire garrison was fractious and discontented.

Biding his time over asking for a transfer, Gideon assessed his commander’s mood. Sir Samuel was a small man with a great spirit. He had thrown himself into his role as Scoutmaster-General with energy and application.
Mercurius Britannicus,
the official Parliamentary news-sheet, said of him:
‘This noble commander watches the enemy so industriously that they eat, sleep, drink not, whisper not, but he can give us an account of their darkest proceedings.’
Sir Samuel stood for order in religion and society. While he struggled to control his men, he was anxiously attempting to rid the garrison of religious sectaries; he also feared that Newport Pagnell town was a hotbed of sexual licence, which would go the way of Sodom and Gomorrah. Such a sinful place clearly posed a terrible lure to his soldiers, whom he could not keep penned in the castle. He imposed a battery of approved chaplains, sermons three times a week and prayers and Bible-reading every morning at the changing of the guard.

Hunched at Newport, smarting at his impending loss of office, Sir Samuel knew his time was limited. Everyone could see it rankled. He was heard muttering of the new army, ‘I should be glad to know who is what — and what pension we poor cast-off lads shall have!’ Towards the end of March his anxieties about the King’s intentions grew so severe he actually allowed a group under Major Ennis to pass themselves off as cavaliers, in order to escape detection in deeply Royalist territory. However, he ordered them firmly that he wanted to hear of no cavalierish practices.

To break in upon Sir Samuel’s worries would need care. Eventually, Gideon set up a discussion by enquiring whether Sir Samuel had enjoyed the veal pie his mother sent. The knight at once replied that it was the best veal pie he had ever had. ‘Sir, she claims it is achieved by just management of orange peel and nutmeg.’ Then he piped up and requested leave to enlist in the New Model Army.

As he feared, Sir Samuel became fretful. ‘You want to be
moulded
in the new army’s bread-trough — And just as I discovered you to be the source of an excellent pie!’

‘Sir, I am of the party who believe the war now
must
be won.’

‘That’s a valiant belief

‘Have I your leave to go then, sir? I had hopes of taking a recommendation — since they are being choosy.’ Luke was glaring, but Gideon pressed on doggedly. ‘I could beg your secretary Mr Butler to prepare an encomium. I would tell him not to varnish it too thickly with testimonials, or Sir Thomas Fairfax will suspect I am a half-baked, squint-eyed laggard who cannot shoot straight…’

Sir Samuel appeared to relax. But his answer was a blunt no.

England generally seemed to be declaring itself a land worth fighting for that spring. Gideon Jukes picked his way among the farms and hamlets, going about his duties according to orders, though at the same time hopefully searching for the New Model Army. Around him the fields were fresh and green. When he skirted great houses, avenues of imported horse-chestnut trees heaved and tossed pinkish-white candles of blossom in the frisky breeze; along the lanes and tangled hedges, the whiter starlets of may blossom draped small trees and bushes in disorganised sprays from crown to floor. Willows flickered their bright young leaves beside the watercourses, which had swelled over their banks after April showers. Swans stretched their necks on the banks. Grey rabbits sat and stared. Occasionally a house showed its grey walls or tall red-brick chimneys, half glimpsed across the roll of the countryside. There were few visible cattle or horses; wise owners were hiding them in pits or secret shacks, lest they be rounded up and stolen by soldiers. While Gideon gloomily patrolled, treasurers were appointed to secure eighty thousand pounds for maintaining the New Model Army. Fairfax was its commander-in-chief. Skippon commanded the infantry, Thomas Hammond the artillery, although the command of the cavalry was not at first granted. Skippon reviewed the foot at Reading, Fairfax the horse at St Albans. For much of April, as the new force was put together, it exercised at Windsor. Gideon received a letter to say his brother Lambert had been released from the Trained Bands and had joined up as a pikeman. Gideon became ever more frustrated at being trapped in Newport.

At the end of April Fairfax took the New Model Army to relieve Taunton, but when the King and his main army left Oxford on a new summer campaign, Fairfax was ordered to wheel about and besiege Oxford instead. A small detachment went to Taunton, where Robert Blake was holding out so valiantly he answered a summons to surrender by retorting that he would sooner eat his boots. On the approach of the relieving force, the Royalists withdrew, saving Blake the trouble.

Fairfax surrounded Oxford but could make little progress as he awaited his artillery train. Samuel Luke’s troops still scouted in the area; as they mouldered in their crumbling castle, with their commander condemned to retirement, their pay in arrears, ill-equipped and hungry, their garrison saw its end-date. Relations between these run-down unhappy men and the buffed-up celebrities in the New Model Army became strained. Then Luke’s personal troop, under Captain Evans, was reduced into the cavalry regiment of Colonel Greaves. His deputy, Samuel Bedford, was promoted away to be Scoutmaster General of the Committee of Both Kingdoms, Parliament’s main war committee.

As the garrison was fragmenting, discipline began breaking down. In the middle of March, Major Ennis was given leave to attend to a family crisis; he left pay for his men with a lieutenant, who then ran away with the money. Lieutenant Carnaby used the cash to further his marriage to a surgeon’s daughter.

On hearing that the reprobate was to be found at the Dog Tavern on Garlick Hill, Sir Samuel wrote in fury to London, demanding that a warrant be issued and the culprit clapped in irons.
‘If officers be permitted to run up and down at their own wills, I fear we must not expect to see good days in England long…’
Four days later the scandal worsened when a London apothecary, disappointed by Carnaby’s winning the surgeon’s daughter, cut his own throat. His neck was said to be severed three-quarters through, though the wound was stitched up. Carnaby wrote to Sir Samuel and apologised. He did not return the money. The soldiers’ arrears were not paid.

Sir Samuel was still obsessed that his garrison and the Eastern Association were a Royalist target. News that bridges over the River Cherwell close to Oxford were being repaired convinced him of imminent attack — even though he said wryly,
‘This is a poor and beggarly town; here are nothing worthy of the enemy but fair maids and young lace-makers — which I intend to send out to them as a forlorn hope at their first approach.’

At the end of May the crunch came. Prince Rupert besieged Leicester, clearly a distraction to compel Fairfax to abandon Oxford. It was the old story. The prince’s men broke into Leicester amidst terrible atrocities. Soldiers and civilians were slaughtered; ruthless pillaging occurred.

Fairfax was instructed to leave Oxford, seek out the King and recover Leicester. On the 5th of June, Fairfax and the army arrived near Newport Pagnell. At this point, as an exceptional measure, Sir Samuel Luke’s importance was recognised: Parliament granted him an extension as commander of Newport Pagnell for the next twenty days. Only one other member of the House of Commons had similar treatment: that was Oliver Cromwell.

The New Model Army quartered nearby for several days. Gideon knew this was his one chance to transfer. Sir Thomas Fairfax stayed at Sherington, a mile away, with his army at Brick Hill. Although Sir Samuel Luke was the most hospitable man and naturally good-mannered, he never invited the new general to visit. His father, Sir Oliver, wrote to him afterwards rebuking him for this lapse, saying it had caused comment.