Rebels and Traitors (89 page)

‘I have put your money on the table.’

Let us hope no foul-minded churchwarden hears that!
‘Thank you.’

‘No, I must thank you.’ He seemed subdued. If it were Tom or Val, Juliana would be suspicious he was sickening. His face looked drawn. He seemed like a man who had been thinking too much; Juliana recognised it, for so had she. This is a good solution, I am glad I thought of it. I am under a very great obligation …’

When he tailed off, Juliana provided a succinct report on how she found the girl, Catherine. ‘She is bright, helpful, easy to instruct, without needing harsh words or biffs —’ She had not meant to allude to his silly letter. She cast down her eyes. ‘She sleeps on Mistress Anne’s truckle bed in the garret; she eats and prays with us. I am happy to have her in my household; she is glad to have been given a home. Be easy in your mind, Captain. I shall treat her kindly’

Gideon had remained standing. Now his chin came up. He looked at Juliana very directly, then asked without preamble, ‘Will you be kind to
me?’

She made no false pretence of misunderstanding. ‘You know that cannot be.’

’When did you last see your husband?’ Unbeknown to Gideon, the wording of that question took Juliana straight back to her unpleasant examination at Haberdashers Hall. It changed her willingness to answer. Automatically she was reduced to pinching her lips like a stubborn prisoner. Will he not come to you?’ demanded Gideon, bitterly. Will he not summon you to him?’

Juliana stayed silent, caught in her need to protect Lovell and his whereabouts. This was the result of war: she could never risk anyone on the opposite side knowing too much and making further accusations against him.

‘Nothing to say?’

It was hard enough to bear feeling forgotten and abandoned by Orlando; now she had an offer of friendship from a man to whom she was attracted, but she could not accept. Juliana’s position was impossible. ‘I am a married woman. Do not chastise me for my constancy.’

‘Oh I can never do that.’ Gideon flayed himself. ‘Not when, if it were ever my place to deserve it
,
I should hope for the same constancy towards me.’

Juliana smiled sadly. ‘I think that would not be hard to give.’ Gideon huffed. She rose from her chair. They were extremely still now. ‘You must not write to me.’

‘No.’ Gideon knew what he had been trying to do in his letters. He feared what he had indeed done. He did not repent, though he would not repeat it.

‘You must leave now, Captain Jukes.’ Gideon looked rebellious. Juliana nearly panicked. ‘You must! Merely to be here could cause comment. We live in a world of renewed morality. Indeed, I hear there is a new Act against Adultery, Incest and Fornication.’

‘I am not planning incest!’ snarled Gideon.

‘Nor I adultery — it is a felony; the penalty is death!’

‘For both parties.’

‘I see you read it too.’

‘I keep up with the news.’

Ah, you are a good citizen.’

‘You do not care for this putrid Act of Parliament, madam? Plenty of people ignore it.’

’And in doing so, they cause misery — to themselves and those around them. I have to take care for my children as well as myself — and since you will not, Captain Jukes, it seems I must care for you too.’

He seemed to accept this. With painful formality, they moved from the parlour and across the kitchen to the door. Juliana stepped outside first, looking for space in case an attempt was made to touch her. But Gideon left a clear yard of air between them.

‘Is this what you want, Juliana?’

Despite the intimacy of their previous conversation, she felt oddly shocked. You may not call me Juliana!’

‘Oh I think I may!’
replied Gideon, his voice low with open recognition of their mutual yearning.

He turned from her. His horse was waiting. He threw himself into the saddle in one strong movement — a dragoon mount in time of crisis — kicked his heels and rode. He refused to look back.

Juliana stepped quickly into the house, closing the door fast, lest she accept temptation.

Gideon reached the road, then halted.

Rumour, Robert’s eccentric horse, was always glad to stop and stand still. Gideon turned the beast, and sat for long minutes, staring at the house. Eventually, he could not help himself and he went back.

There was no answer when he knocked. He knocked and waited, knocked and waited.

At last, he accepted that his obsession with Colonel Lovell’s wife had been rebuffed. He still believed she was stricken with as much attraction to him as he felt for her. He could only admire her resolution. He rode away. He knew his pain was permanent. He was a lost man.

He did
not
know that nobody had heard him knocking. No one was there. The house stood quite empty. In panic at her emotions, Juliana had slipped out by a back door which she rarely used, a door hidden behind a curtain in the parlour. Half blind with tears, she went striding along a field path to the farm where she would find her children.

Had she been at home and heard Gideon return, her strength of will would have certainly dissolved.

They would not see each other. That must help. They would recover. Each of them tried to believe that.

If they had been asked to analyse what had just happened to them,
she
would have blamed lust, and would not have supposed it could possibly be love, or if so, not lasting love, nor true. She lacked faith, he would have said.
He
would already have called it love — though at the same time honestly acknowledging his lust. In this, they would both have been right, and both wrong.

How it would grow or die, if they remained apart, time and circumstance must show them. For Gideon Jukes, now smitten and devastated, holding off from Juliana Lovell was so hard and his misery so great, that only one course seemed open: he must go back to the army. What was more, he must go quickly — and go far.

He had a choice of Ireland or Scotland.

This was the situation.

Immediately after the King’s execution, Parliament urgently needed to impose order on Ireland and Scotland or see the union of Three Kingdoms disintegrate. (Wales had been sufficiently subdued by Cromwell to be no problem at this time.) The Scots’ army had been wiped out at the battle of Preston, but the Prince of Wales was proclaimed in Edinburgh as King Charles II immediately after his father’s death. To be accepted, however, he had to take the Covenant. While scruples delayed him, the Scots were recruiting a new army.

Meanwhile, Ireland deteriorated into confusion. The Royalist Marquis of Ormond had tried to unite all parties for the King. Catholics had been promised freedom of religion. Ulster Presbyterians loathed the new English republic with its tendency to dangerous free thought. The native Irish hated the English settlers. Ormond now controlled most of the country and he invited Charles II to come to Ireland. To enable this, Prince Rupert was pirating from a base at Kinsale, attacking Commonwealth ships and keeping the seas open.

In England, Cromwell and Fairfax spent part of the summer hunting down various groups of Leveller-inspired mutineers but eventually Cromwell was free for Ireland. While he was there, Charles II landed in Scotland. It gave Cromwell’s Irish mission greater urgency. Time was short. Troop numbers were inadequate. He had made careful preparations to have food and fodder shipped over, but his forces were cut off in hostile country. Mobility was hampered. General-at-Sea Robert Blake managed to pen up Prince Rupert’s ships at Kinsale, but any problem with weather or Rupert breaking out would be fatal. Cromwell therefore undertook the reconquest of Ireland with speed and unparalleled ferocity.

To Gideon Jukes in London, the full misery of what happened escaped him. Cromwell called the Irish barbarians, a denunciation Gideon did not share. But it was too far away. He read the news, and he had a tender conscience for the fate of other human beings, yet he was human himself. What was done in his name, beyond his reach, could be pushed to the back of his consciousness. However, he read enough to be deeply thankful that he had missed his chance to go on the Irish expedition.

Cities were taken. Garrisons were stormed amid bitter fighting and horrific scenes. At Drogheda and Wexford, the defending soldiers were all slaughtered, even after surrendering on the promise of their lives. The killing of prisoners continued long after any battle bloodlust ceased. Captured Catholic priests and friars were killed. The governor of Drogheda — the unpopular Royalist Sir Arthur Aston, one-time governor of Oxford — was beaten to death with his own wooden leg. Soldiers who took refuge in a church steeple were burned alive there. Civilians died too, which contravened the rules of war. Subsequently at Wexford the soldiers repeated this, even though Cromwell had given no orders for it. Two hundred refugees were drowned when their escape boat sank. The terrible scenes matched the barbarity of the Thirty Years War on the Continent — now, ironically, ended by the Treaty of Westphalia — the kind of brutality of which Parliamentary supporters had so bitterly complained when it was imposed upon English towns by Prince Rupert. Cromwell, however, saw his men as instruments of God.

The tussle for Ireland continued over the New Year. Sickness began to afflict Cromwell’s troops. Every time an Irish army was destroyed, another soon sprang up in its place. A mistake at Clonmel cost the English nearly two thousand men — a rare disaster. But at the end of May the situation was sufficiently stable for Cromwell himself to sail back to England, leaving Henry Ireton to finish the job. Plague was sweeping the country and would claim Ireton. However, two years later, resistance finally petered out, allowing what became known as the Cromwellian Settlement.

Half a million people had already died of famine, fighting or disease and in the settlement hundreds of thousands would be dispossessed. Vast tracts of land were parcelled up for New Model Army soldiers, an easy solution to covering their pay arrears. Two-thirds of the country — two and a quarter million acres — were either given to the troops or awarded to those who had lost their own land in the old uprising of 1641. Most of the soldiers sold their land to speculators. The inhabitants of Leinster and Munster were expelled, ‘to Hell or Connaught’ -the far west of Ireland where the land was poor and living bleak. A third of them died of exposure. Many, especially children, were sent as slaves to the plantations of the West Indies. The legacy of loathing for Cromwell would last for centuries.

There was military necessity, caused by Irish geography and by the emergency in Scotland. But there were no grand concepts at stake; it was a simple struggle for power and vengeance, fuelled by religious bigotry. Rights of individual liberty, freedom of thought and conscience, rights which had been argued and fought for in England, received no recognition. Viewed as dispassionately as possible, the treatment of Ireland was the ultimate signal of how coarsened soldiers could become after too much war, especially when they went away from their own country and the oversight of their own people, and were instead among those they had been taught and encouraged to view as less than human. If civil war was terrible, war overseas — with its extra terrors and deprivations -could be even crueller. Moral responsibility was readily abandoned.

The Levellers had been right in wanting not to cross frontiers and, insofar as he considered Ireland, Gideon positioned himself with their view. But his personal motives were still pressing. Cromwell returned to England to address the Scottish problem. He should have been working alongside Fairfax, but Fairfax was reluctant to fight the Scots, with whom he had co-operated on so many important campaigns, and his conscience remained uneasy about the King’s execution. Citing ill health, he resigned. Cromwell and other leaders pleaded with him, but he was adamant. Fairfax retired. Parliament gave the Lord Generalship to Oliver Cromwell so he would be going to Scotland as commander-in-chief.

Even though it meant travelling a great distance and crossing into another country, Gideon Jukes decided this fight was necessary. He felt bitterly depressed by the return of King Charles II. Even after so much hard effort, little had been achieved, the Commonwealth was under direct threat and everything was, once again, still to accomplish.

More than that, eight years after Gideon began fighting Royalists, his enemy had assumed a specific identity. His gloom was increased by the thought that Colonel Orlando Lovell, ‘the Delinquent Lovell’, that unknown, absent, yet unavoidable husband of the desirable Juliana, could be among the cavaliers who accompanied the new King Charles. With Charles, Lovell was coming closer. Well, that was one reason for Gideon Jukes to go to Scotland. Every time he aimed his musket, he stood a chance of picking off his man.

The King had hoped that the charismatic Marquis of Montrose would rally non-Presbyterian support in Scotland, so he could avoid a distasteful alliance with the Covenanters. But Montrose was speedily captured then hanged, drawn and quartered in Edinburgh just before Charles arrived. Held a virtual prisoner by the Covenanters, the young monarch was subjected to religious indoctrination, with sermons several times a day. He was systematically isolated from friends and supporters. Expediency, his personal trademark, convinced him that if he was to reclaim the English throne, he would have to take the Presbyterian Covenant.