Rebels and Traitors (97 page)

The Savoy had been a royal establishment for poor relief. Indigent locals who were neither too drunk nor too filthy to tolerate would be admitted by the master in the evening, set to pray for their royal founder, then offered a bed in a dormitory. Taken over for the Parliamentary sick and wounded, some of the rickety beds still had old blue counterpanes with red Tudor roses and gold portcullises. The governor and staff no longer wore red rose uniforms, but continued the old spirit of benevolent care, with a doctor and surgeon available but strict rules of behaviour: fines for missing church; pillory or cashiering for drunkenness and swearing; expulsion for marrying a nurse.

The nurses were mainly soldiers’ widows. They were reputed all to be looking very keenly for new husbands. Some achieved it. The one Gideon liked best was already spoken for. He could have persuaded her to ditch her betrothed, but he never thought to try.

The punishing journey from Scotland had aggravated his shoulder pain and Gideon saw his muscles were wasting too. The last thing he wanted was a withered arm. The Savoy surgeon admitted to insufficient expertise but sent him around London bone-setters one by one. All agreed that the dislocation looked cured, but was not; the stubborn round bone had remained out of place. New measures were attempted. A padded wooden staff was tried, to extend his arm and force back the joint. A rope suspended from a pulley was used to hang him up. Gideon was made to climb three steps of an upright ladder, during which ordeal, being too tall for the room, he banged his head badly. Finally, he went to a surgeon called Mr Elishak, who charged astronomical fees and who told him that since all else had failed, he must submit to the
glossocomium.
We call it the Commander. It is of some use where the luxation has existed for long periods, in a strong man whose limbs are resistant to manual manipulation.’

‘Why has nobody suggested this before?’ asked Gideon.

‘It must be used with great care. Accidents can happen.’

‘Oh excellent news!’

‘Face it, Captain Jukes: at this moment you cannot work, you cannot write or cut your meat, you cannot lie easy in your bed, you cannot hold your sweetheart on your knee. The pain has etched years upon you, and though you may have been once an even-tempered man, you have become fractious.’

‘Damnation, not I!’ raved the patient, irritably.

‘Oh, Captain, I was warned that you are choleric. The Savoy matron, a woman of sense and experience, considers I should examine your skull, lest you have suffered untreated cranial damage …’

‘There is nothing wrong with my head,’ growled Gideon. ‘Do your worst with the device!’

The Commander was a long wooden box, lined with padding, but fitted with a frightening array of pulleys. With this instrument of torture, the new surgeon applied swift traction of extreme severity. At least it was soon over.

Gideon thought he could feel a difference straightaway. Mr Elishak knew his stuff. He spent longer writing up Gideon’s case-notes for his memoirs than he had spent fixing the joint. His enormous fee was enhanced by plagiarising patients’ misery for his own glory:
‘One GJ, a soldier wounded at the battle of Dunbar, I cured of a most stubborn luxation with apt practice of the
glossocomium
, where many others had had unsuccess even though the patient was co-operative …’

Gideon lay speechless, listening to the scrawl of the quill pen. Afterwards, he was fastened in a plaster bandage made with oil, a variety of white lead, and what Mr Elishak called argillaceous earth’, his own mixture of pungent wet clay. Gideon promised to be diligent in allowing the posture of the joint to be retrained. Anything to be rid of surgeons.

He was returned to the Savoy, where shortly afterwards Robert Allibone discovered his whereabouts and came to collect him. Now Gideon allowed himself to be carried to Bread Street. Anne Jukes hired a nurse for his intimate care. He saw little of Anne, and less of Lambert. He sensed trouble in the house. Unwilling to face whatever new crisis had befallen them, Gideon ignored the signs until he was able to emerge from his bedchamber to resume normal life.

One day soon afterwards when he entered the kitchen, he found a cold hearth beside which sat Anne, weeping. Gideon could not remember his mother ever letting her fire go out. He could no longer avoid the question: ‘What has Lambert done?’

Whatever it was, Anne could not even bear to name the crime. She shook her head, sobbing louder; then she jumped up and turned to Gideon for comfort. She flung herself upon him, to his great embarrassment. He was an unmarried man, with normal masculine reactions; had this happened before he met Juliana Lovell, he would have been entirely vulnerable. Anne Jukes was more than ten years older than he but she had always been good-looking and Gideon had a soft heart.

Somehow, however, he recoiled from danger. Anne’s old regard for him had increased, apparently, into a conviction that she had married the wrong brother. For a moment she clung to him but there were advantages in being tall; simply by standing straight, Gideon could choose who kissed him.

Anne sprang back before she made herself ridiculous by jumping up and down to get at him. She would not repeat her mistake. They passed it off as a moment of misery only.

When Gideon insisted on learning more about whatever turmoil his brother was in, Anne went to their chamber and returned with a piece of paper. Lambert had devoted himself to spiritual exploration of the most tortuous kind. He had written down a memo to himself:

1 That you shall not acknowledge nor yield obedience to any other gods but me

2
That it is lawful to drink, swear and revel, and to lie with any woman whatsoever

3
That there is no Sabbath, no Heaven, no Hell, no Resurrection, and that both soul and body die together.

‘Well, now you see!’ cried Anne bitterly.

Indeed, Gideon did. Number
3
was a dangerous dictum. Number 2 was a complete shocker. He groaned, while Anne told him the worst in a taut voice: These people whom
your brother
favours affirm that -in their words as said to me by
your brother -
“the man who tipples deepest, swears the frequentest, commits adultery, incest or buggers the oftenest” —’

‘Buggers?’

‘Do you know what it means?’

‘Oh, I have an idea …’

Not Lambert. Definitely not Lambert. But to
lie with any woman whatsoever
would appeal to him.

Anne continued bitterly: ‘They say, “Who blasphemes the impudentest, and perpetrates the most notorious crimes, with the highest hand and rigidest resolution, is the dearest darling to be placed in the tribunal Throne of Heaven. Each Brother of their fellowship ought to take his Fellow-Female on his knee, saying, Let us lie down and multiply …” He wanted me to join with him, but I would not do it, Gideon. He boasts to me of wicked women in the sect who have let him have his way. He claims that these sinful brethren should not only make use of a man’s wife, but of his estate, goods and chattels also, for all things are common … He asks what difference is there between this and what the Diggers believe — while in truth, there is a very great difference!’

‘Oh indeed.’ Gideon felt very ill now. Where is he?’

‘Your brother
is at a Christmas revel in the Horn Tavern in Fleet Street.’

‘Christmas?’

‘Free will is lawful. There is no sin. There are no laws.’

Sadly for Lambert that was untrue; there were laws directly forbidding this curious phase of his development. The sect he had joined was singled out for government disapproval.

‘Do you know what takes place in this congregation?’

Anne railed bitterly ‘The men will make free with the women. They will be gambolling, dancing and revelling — I suppose, you and he being so close-knit, you are going there to join him?’

‘No,’ replied Gideon with a gloomy sigh. ‘I am going there to try to fetch him back.’

Small chance, he thought. What grocer was going to turn up a chance to eat Christmas plum pudding and then to lie with everybody else’s wife?

Whatever the Bible said, in respectable City of London society a man
was
his brother’s keeper.

Although wobbly on his legs after so long as an invalid, Gideon walked to Fleet Street. The Horn Tavern was easy to find, due to a large crowd of fascinated onlookers who had congregated outside. Sounds of uninhibited celebration filled the street. Through a window Gideon saw wild dancing, with some participants dressed all in white and some of them only half dressed. One woman was walking on her hands upside down, with a man holding her legs like a wheelbarrow. Her skirts had fallen and she was bare from the waist down. Men had women sitting on their laps, whose bodies they were enthusiastically exploring while the women rejoiced and welcomed it.

As Gideon approached unsteadily, the tavern door was flung open. A man rushed out, stark naked. A beer-belly and the effects of the chilly December weather reduced any glimpse of his privates to the minimum, which was his only recourse to modesty — though Gideon saw he had sensibly retained his shoes.

The crowd shrieked with glee. ‘Our Adam wants no figleaf — only a three-leaf clover!’ When the hideously familiar apparition gesticulated, they pulled back nervously.

The capering figure had spotted Gideon. ‘Brother! I cannot stop — I have the call!’

Gideon made a grab, but with his right arm still in plaster it was difficult. The wild nude shrugged him off and careered onwards, galloping away down Fleet Street. A cat-calling crowd ran in hot pursuit. Gideon leaned against the tavern wall, feeling weak and in despair.

Lambert Jukes had found a fine old way to punish his wife for her foray into Digging. He had become a Ranter.

Lambert Jukes might have been discreetly plucked from Ranting, had he not thrown off his clothes before his dash through the streets. A stark naked, portly man in his forties, all flabby white flesh and ecstatic vision, made an easy target for parish constables. He attracted attention, as screaming women fled, mongrels barked, boys pointed and men gaped — men who were perhaps lost in the wish (Lambert suggested later, rather hopefully), that they too would have cut such an impressive figure.

‘Or perhaps not,’ muttered his baleful brother Gideon.

Lambert was cornered at the Fleet Conduit. Although he managed to floor three law officers in the process, they wrapped the flailing culprit in a blanket to avert public outrage and carried him to nearby Bridewell. His relatives could only hope that he would be diagnosed as crazy. Treatment of the insane was dire, but if Lambert was deemed accountable for his beliefs and actions, criminal law kicked in. He would be tried on a capital charge. Ranting was seen as so dangerous politically, there was no chance of bail.

Major William Rainborough sent expressions of concern. Anne and Gideon would have gladly done without this. Anne blamed the major for encouraging her husband’s extreme views; he had paid for documents Lambert had read. Rainborough was an awkward connection; in view of his association with the Ranters, Parliament formally designated him dangerous. An ordinance forbade him from ever again acting as a justice of the peace in England. William Rainborough would make fruitless attempts to gain a navy post, only giving up when he abandoned England and emigrated to live among relatives in Massachusetts. He was protected to some extent by his late brother’s eminence, or he would probably have been imprisoned. Rather than accept this kind of patronage, the Jukes family rallied to look after their own.

Gideon’s visits to Lambert in prison horrified him. Once a royal palace and later used to lodge visiting foreign dignitaries, Bridewell was an enormous complex on the Thames at Blackfriars, rambling around three huge courtyards. Its glory days were long over. For a hundred years this had been a place of relief for the poor — but it was always a hard refuge. On arrival, both sexes were stripped and whipped, a spectacle that attracted so much salacious public attention that a special viewing gallery had been built. There was now a hospital for soldiers, where the grim conditions made Gideon delighted he had been taken to the Savoy instead. The general inmates included not only the indigent poor, but wilful beggars, rogues of all types and criminals from brutal organised gangs. It was also a standard prison for gutter prostitutes.

In this company, Lambert’s insouciance was swiftly crushed. He soon cut an anxious, sorry figure. Gideon and Robert Allibone worked hard to have him transferred to the Gatehouse, a lock-up attached to Westminster Abbey that was used mainly to house Royalist officers. They chose to accept Parliament’s view that Ranting was a political offence, an affront to the respectability of the Commonwealth. If they had been prepared to claim that Lambert was out of his wits, an alternative would have been Bedlam, but in that screeching madhouse they now feared he would go really insane. By contrast, Bridewell was the original house of correction, where inmates were made to work — either at carding and spinning, or, for intransigent cases, cleaning the sewers. Lambert submitted sweetly to being put in a sewer gang although later, when his health broke down in the filthy conditions, he gave in to his brother’s entreaties and was transferred to a better cell in the quieter prison. By then he seemed almost sad to leave the new friends he had made among the gong-cleaners, as the sewermen were called. At the Gatehouse, Gideon assured him, all he would be required to do among the cavaliers was wear beribboned lovelocks and write lyric poetry. His brother greeted this idea with more horror than he had shown on shovelling ordure.