Rebels and Traitors (72 page)

The rest of Rainborough’s officers pleaded publicly for revenge for the murder. They took this chance to deplore the political situation, saying the King had deluded them ‘into the hopes of a safe peace by the expectation of an unsafe Treaty’. Then they asked why, if the country was paying taxes, those taxes could not be used to pay the army? So the miserable quest for payment of arrears continued.

Sir Henry Cholmeley’s collusion was taken for granted by both Royalist and Parliamentary news-sheets. Yet he was never examined or called to account.

Oliver Cromwell was ordered to end the siege at Pontefract. Although he sent for a formidable battery of guns, it took five more months. Cromwell was also instructed to conduct an enquiry into Rainborough’s murder; nothing came of that. When the castle eventually surrendered to John Lambert, in March 1649, six officers would be exempted from mercy: men who were believed to have taken part in the murder, some of whom brazenly admitted it. They were given six days to escape if they could; the governor and one other made a getaway but were recaptured and executed. William Paulden, who had led the raid, had already died during the siege. Three others were hidden in the castle walls by their colleagues and evaded capture. By then, the Leveller John Lilburne was complaining bitterly in London that William Rainborough had been given no help to find his brother’s killers.

The Tower Guards were moved back to St Albans. The House of Commons called for them to be disbanded, whether as a punishment for not protecting their colonel or because of fears that his radical spirit might linger dangerously among his men. The regiment, its name discontinued, was given to Colonel George Cook, a returned émigré from Massachusetts.

It took a fortnight to bring the body home. Even before he knew how negligently Parliament would treat his colonel’s murder, Gideon Jukes was considering his position. With Rainborough gone, the Levellers had lost the most senior officer to support their cause — the
only
officer of note. With him departed any real hope of having their new ideas accepted. Gideon had two gloomy November weeks of slow travel with the hearse. As he rode, he decided to resign from the army. He had been selected for escort duty because he was the most junior captain but when he left, he warned Major Wilkes that he might stay in London. He felt bad, because the regiment was in disarray, with terrible morale.

Gideon told Wilkes that although he would always support Parliament, he was a volunteer and now wanted to be a volunteer no longer. The major merely reminded him wearily that if he kept the horse he was issued with for escort duties, he would have to pay for it.

On the 14th of November they reached the outskirts of London. Messages had gone ahead. As the cortège arrived at Tottenham High Cross, the escort found an astonishing crowd. Major William Rainborough, the colonel’s brother, headed the mourners. Gideon had to tell him, as quickly as possible, what was now known about the circumstances of the murder. Although Gideon had prepared himself, he wept as he related it.

Opposition hacks would sneer snobbishly that Will the weaver, Tom the tapster, Kit the cobbler, Dick the door-sweeper’ had turned out for their hero, and so they had, though the crowd also contained many people from the professions and from commerce. Thousands of City Levellers were waiting, for the first time wearing sea-green ribbons in sympathy with Rainborough’s seafaring past.

The unprecedented procession wound through streets that were oddly silent. Even people who did not plan to follow the coffin, stood to watch it pass. Many cried. The cortège advanced slowly through Smithfield, past the cattle-pens and then the horse-market, always quieter on a Tuesday, than it would be at the main fair on Friday. Coming down along the western city wall, they passed the Old Bailey and the grim Fleet Prison, then approached Ludgate Hill. When they entered the old west gate, they were in London proper. Stationers’ Hall was to their left and old St Paul’s up ahead at the top of the short hill; Inigo Jones’s columned portico was facing them and beyond it, the much more ancient square tower, blackened with generations of coal smoke, its tall lancet windows and dramatic flying buttresses familiar and unmistakable. As the procession made its way around the church, stationers and booksellers closed their businesses and joined behind, all wearing the newfangled sea-green ribbons: Rainborough’s colours, the Levellers’ new symbol. At Cheapside, Gideon was in his home streets. By Bread Street he spotted Anne Jukes, with Robert and Amyas, who noticed with amazement that it was Gideon in charge of the honour guard, before they too began walking after the coffin.

The procession grew: forty coaches became fifty or sixty, followed by fifteen hundred horses. By the time they reached the commercial centre at Cornhill, passing close to Guildhall and right outside the flamboyant Royal Exchange, the perpetual creak and rumble of slowly moving wheels on the cobbles and the steady sounds of hooves from the multitude of gently ridden horses filled the air and would remain one of Gideon’s clearest memories.

After Leadenhall, they reached the Tower of London. Since Thomas had been commander of the Tower Guards, as his coffin passed, deep-throated cannon boomed out in his honour. These guns, which had not been fired in anger during the civil war — all the guns that remained here after Fairfax’s and Cromwell’s requisitions for Colchester, Wales and the North — resounded mournfully across the Thames. In the enormous procession, startled horses dragged their reins and skittered nervously.

From the Tower it was a short distance through St Katharine’s to the parish of Whitechapel and Wapping. Wapping High Street, close to the Thames, was a long street, off which ran numerous alleys filled with small tenements or cottages, built by sailors’ victuallers, the stock from which the Rainborough family had originally come. Among the numerous shipping-related businesses were more than thirty taverns for the refreshment of sailors, from which the sailors now emerged, even the tipsiest managing to stand erect respectfully. The parish church itself, the Chapel of St John, Wapping, had a foreign look. Its belfry was no more than a gatehouse above a classically pedimented entrance door, with neither tower nor spire, which gave the chapel a plain, Dutch or Scandinavian appearance. Thomas Rainborough was buried there at St John’s, alongside his father. There was a long wait while as many as possible packed in. It was an Independent funeral and the Royalist press sneered that ‘the godly had their hands in their pockets’ (despising religious formality). Thomas Brooks, the colonel’s friend and colleague, who had served with him on water and land, preached the sermon. Appropriately he took his theme from St John:

Colonel Rainborough had never had wind and tide on his side, thought Gideon rebelliously He assessed the man for himself quietly, and decided Rainborough was perhaps never intended for the political greatness that was being put upon him now. But when the colonel’s life was cut short, he was only thirty-eight years old, probably still finding his way. He was great enough to terrify his enemies and to give heart to his friends, through what he was and the thought of what he might have become. He was honest and fearless, worthy of the affection and respect that were shown to him that day at Wapping, worthy of the real grief that affected so many people. Gideon Jukes, for one, felt as if he had lost a father for the second time. It left him more disheartened than he had ever been since the war started seven years before.

Brooks was outspokenly critical of those who now held power:

The boom of the great guns had an unexpected benefit in the depot that housed the young people who had been ‘spirited’. As soon as the cannonade began, all the keepers rushed to see what was going on. Most of their charges were too subdued or too youthful to take advantage. But for one troubled soul, the great funeral at Wapping provided an escape.

Her name was temporarily Alice Smith. She chose it to sound respectable on the indentures they had given her. Six months after she was taken from Covent Garden, she ended up in a holding-house, or depot, in St Katharine’s-by-the-Tower, moved there from St Giles-in-the-Fields as the day for shipment to Virginia or the Indies grew closer. The second civil war, with the navy revolt and blockades downstream in the Thames estuary, had delayed transportation and given her a respite, but towards the end of the year the young people were told their boat would come soon.

During her captivity — though it was never openly called that — she had come to regret her agreement to emigrate. She was by nature more suspicious than the other kidnapped young people. She kept her ears open. Soon, the situation began to worry her. She overheard a pair of desperate parents begging to have their stolen child returned. She noted how the staff spoke among themselves of their kidnapped charges’ fates. Always ready to believe she had been lied to for the gain of others, Alice Smith began to fear that once she reached her destination she would find that the ‘service’ she had signed up for was not mild housework with respectable colonists but hard manual labour out of doors on plantations, in conditions close to slavery. Once she arrived overseas, it would be too late. She asked as many questions about conditions as she dared. When this was discouraged, she soon disbelieved all the glowing promises.

She stayed at the depot, because it was an easy life — so far. She had shelter and food. Even the meagre daily diet was better than she had been used to; her health and with it her inbuilt truculence began to revive. She kept alert for news of their ship, and was keyed up to abscond. When the matron and staff ran out to watch Rainborough’s funeral procession, she decided to waste no more time. So she calmly filled an apron with whatever she could carry, then she slipped out of an unguarded door and made off.

St Katharine’s was a forbidding area. It lay beyond the Tower, outside the city walls. Less than a hundred years before, this had been an empty quarter used only for drowning pirates on the foreshore; convicted pirates were by tradition chained to ramps until three tides had passed over them — a story that had been told to the spirited youngsters in the process of subduing them. Alice was not afraid of long-dead pirates — though she turned instinctively away from the river.

The main feature of this parish was a charitable foundation for the poor, the Royal Hospital or Free Chapel. Founded and supported by various queens of England, it had been a Catholic institution but was spared by Henry the Eighth during his dissolution of monastic orders, because it had belonged to his mother. The hospital was regarded with suspicion because, even when nominally Protestant, it was run by lay brethren and sisters. Like so many religious properties, it had attracted the poor and helpless until it became the centre of a rat’s nest of lanes and mean streets, containing perhaps a thousand houses where stick-thin, dull-eyed paupers struggled against starvation and disease. As with all the liberties beyond London’s walls, the area became a haven for illegal trades and the outsiders who practised them. The small, stinking cottages and dilapidated tenements housed a lawless English underclass and foreigners who were no better. The alleys had suggestive names: Dark Entry, Cat’s Hole, Shovel Alley, Eagle and Child Alley, Axe Yard and Naked Boy Court. This grim district was a natural place to position the depot for stolen children: rough, unfriendly, secret and rarely visited by anyone respectable.

In some ways it was no worse an area than Southwark, across the river, where ‘Eliza’ and Jem Starling had holed up the previous year. There were just as many seamen on this side, with watermen of all types, especially the drunken, unemployed variety. Among the wrongdoers who had emerged like fleas at the funeral commotion were prostitutes looking for clients and vagabonds planning to pick pockets as the great procession of mourners wended up Wapping High Street. Astute ones had adorned their dishevelled coats with sea-green ribbons so they would blend in.