Take Courage
Authors: Phyllis Bentley
by
PHYLLIS BENTLEY
1. The Clarksons Love Learning
3. The Ferrands Own Holroyd Hall
1. “You are an Arminian, Sir!”
1. I Live a Sober and Godly Life
2. Cloth and Ships are Just the Same
3. We Should Have Been Happy Ifâ¦
4. “Then were the People Divided”
4. “Out of the Depths have I Cried”
5. Woolpacks Hang on Bradford Steeple
1. Giles Ferrand Grows a Beard
2. Lord Fairfax Resigns his Commission
3. A Commonwealth becomes a Tyranny
1. A Man is Buried with his Cause
2. The Sun Shines on the Other Side of the Hedge
1. The Memory of the Just is Blessed
I Have Been Young, and am now old. I have lived in times very troublous and perplexed; times of rebellion, of civil war, of plague and famine, siege and battle, bewilderment and waste; times when brother raised his hand against brother, and those of my own household were divided against themselves. I have seen men so persecuted and hemmed about that they could abide it no longer, but rose up in arms to defend their just liberties against the oppressor; I have seen those same men deny those same liberties in their turn, till they too were cut down as an offence in the sight of God. I have heard the great cannon thunder over Bradford, and the screams of the women echo in the Bradford streets as the soldiers sacked the town; I have known those same streets quick with peaceful business, the hoofs of the packhorses clattering in the market; I have known them silent, in ruin and decay. I have felt a bitterness as of death when my dear love was struck down in the prime of his youth; I have trembled at the tramp of armed men in my husband's house by night, while he was fleeing over the moors. I have loved; I have sinned, I have repented; I have borne children and seen the dearest vanish forever beyond a far horizon; I have known both the wrath and the singular mercies of God.
Now I sit here, in the latter part of my age, at the door of my son's house, and think on all these things. My memory plays me strange tricks since I am grown old; I cannot call to mind what was written in the letters that came yesterday from the New World, or where my son is to preach to-morrow, but I remember very well all the long chequered story of the past; I can see as if it were now before my eyes the day when it all began for me, the day when I first met John and Francis.
Peace
1
THE CLARKSONS LOVE LEARNING
It was a Lord's Day in June, in 1625, the year when Charles I came to the throne; and I remember how in church that morning I was divided in mind between a wish that Mr. Okell should finish his sermon quickly and let us all out into the sweet sunshine, and a reluctance towards the visit at Little Holroyd which would follow the morning's service. For myself I was well content to listen to Mr. Okell's exhortation, which was a learned discourse on the sacraments from a text in Corinthians, for we Clarksons have always been fond of our book and eager to learn new things; but David, my little brother, my dear charge since our mother's death at his birth four years before, was growing drowsy beneath the heat and the length of the vicar's peroration. His blue eyes blinked and closed, his hot little fingers softened in my grasp, his fair head fell forward on his plump chest, he was asleep. William frowned and shook his arm; David started awake and looked about him, and his smooth cheeks flushed with the shame of finding himself misbehaving in church. But soon his sleepy little head nodded again, so Will, colouring and looking cross, took the child gently in his lap.
To look cross and act gently was like my elder brother Will, with his long glum face and lank loose-jointed body; I never could determine whether it was his big skew nose or his large pursed mouth or his crooked bushy eyebrows or the rough brown hair hanging unevenly on his bony shoulders which gave him that harassed and perplexed but warm and obstinate air. I was uneasy as I looked at him that day; what make of a girl was this Elizabeth Thorpe, I wondered, who had so bewitched our homely
Will? Would she prove a good wife for a minister of religion, which dear William had firmly set himself to be? The Thorpes were rich; Thorpes of The Breck at Little Holroyd had been master clothiers for generations past, and owned many closes of land besides. Would they be content to give their daughter to a yeoman's son? My father, Robert Clarkson, was a good scholar, a churchwarden of Bradford Church, an upright and honest man, and a master clothier too; but though I was then only a child of eleven years old, I knew already, as children do, that others could always over-reach my dear father when it came to trade, and trade has ever been thought much of in Bradford town. I loved my father so well that I often knew what was in his mind though I did not altogether understand it. I knew, when the widow Lister asked him to take her son as apprentice and he denied her and sent her to Mr. Thorpe, that the denial was a grief to him, though I did not know why; I knew, when a month ago I saw him standing with Mr. Thorpe by the loom in the upper chamber in our house in Fairgap, where Joshua Lister used to work, that it was more than a fault in the unfinished cloth that made my father look so sad; I knew, when Will told us, in his rapid jerky speech, of his affection for this Mistress Elizabeth, that my father for some reason was troubled by Will's choice. So I was loth to dine at Holroyd Hall, for my father's sake, and uneasy at the outcome of the visit, for Will's. Some children would have been eager to see a new place and strange folk, but I had lived so close at home, always about my father, that I was shy.
The sermon was over now and the Grammar School boys sang, and my father and Mr. Thorpe walked into the vestry before the Vicar, carrying their churchwarden's wands. My father at that time was of very tall stature, with his hair a silvery grey and his face somewhat hollowed; indeed he was excessively thin in all parts of his person, persisting, in spite of all our good Sarah urged on him, in a very spare diet. Then, as always, he was very gentle; indeed his grey eyes, though they had a lively sparkle,
were the gentlest, kindest eyes, I think, that ever looked out of any man's head. He was apt to splutter a little in his speech, especially when, as often happened, he had some merry quip or scholarly moral he was eager to tell the company, but his language was always very neat and well-chosen; indeed he used finer and better words than any man in Bradford save Mr. Okell. Walking beside him now, Mr. Thorpe, with his blunt, high-coloured face and his twinkling little eyes, looked very square and short and dark, and not nearly so fine a gentleman as my father, for all his wealth.
As soon as we were out of church, Will, throwing a jerked excuse over his shoulder, pushed off through the crowd, towards Mistress Elizabeth, as I supposed; David and I stood back by one of the gravestones to wait for father. Many halted to greet us as they passed, the women stooping to pat David's fair curls and coax his smile with baby talk. David was ever of a sweet and friendly disposition, and though he sometimes held tightly to my hand and his eyes widened in dismay if the lady begging a kiss were old or ill-favoured, he did not sulk or turn aside as some children do, but obediently offered them his soft round cheek. But the congregation had all passed by, and still my father did not come, and it grew lonely standing there on the hillside, watching the farthingales and tall hats grow less as the families descended the slope and crossed the beck by the Broad Stones and went home up Kirkgate to dine. David's hand trembled in mine, and his lip drooped, and suddenly he wailed out that he wanted his father, he wanted his father; poor little lad, he cried so bitterly the tears stood on his cheeks like marbles, and I was hard put to it to comfort him, for I wanted father too. I felt lonely, deserted, and somehow guilty, as if there was something wrong in our being there by ourselves; but though David begged to go home, I would not stir, I knew we must wait where father had bidden us.
Suddenly all the Grammar School boys came rushing out of the church, leaping and shouting and pushing each
other in play; they did not mean to be rough, but David cried out in fear and buried his face in my skirts, and as I bent over him and put my arms around him to comfort him, the tears stood thick in my eyes too.
Then one of the bigger boys turned and came back; the others in play struck at him and jeered, but he took no heed of them, not striving to avoid their blows by running, but coming soberly on. He halted beside the gravestones and stood squarely before us, his feet rather straddled, his face very set.
“If you will walk with me, Mistress Penninah,” he said gruffly, “I will bring you safe to Little Holroyd.” He added, seeing, I expect, that I did not quite know what to make of him: “I am John Thorpe, at your service.”
He was an awkward-looking lad four or five years older than myself, not tall, but very thickset for his age, with broad shoulders and long arms. In feature he was plain, and in complexion dark. At that time I did not fancy dark-complexioned folk, having dark hair myself, so John Thorpe had nothing handsome about him in my eyes, and it struck me as unmannerly that he kept his hat on his head while he addressed me. His voice too was harsh and untuneful, and his words had a homely sound about them, not like my father's. But he spoke with so much honesty and kindness that I knew at once he was to be trusted, and held him as a friend.
“My father bade me wait,” I began timidly.
“Here he is now, with mine,” said John. He jerked his head towards the east end of the church; and there sure enough came my father, walking slowly, his head bent, in deep talk with Mr. Thorpe. When they saw us, the two men waved us forward and my father called: “Pen, go with John.”
John took David's other hand, and we walked down Church Bank and along the water-meadows by the willows, then through the Turls, where the rooks calling in the trees seemed to mimic the men who lounged and laughed and shouted below, waiting already for the afternoon's
cock-fighting. I hurried David's step, for I hated to see the sport, so bloody and fierce and cruel; John without speaking quickened his gait too. Soon we had left the Green behind, and were climbing quietly up the steep lane towards Little Holroyd. David had now ceased crying, and seemed content to walk soberly between us, humming a little as he went. There had been rain the night before, and water still lay underfoot in some of the ruts and hollows beneath the trees. Presently we came to a pool stretching right across our path. David halted, and looked up at me with a pleading mischief in his eye. John, who was walking with head bent, seemingly much preoccupied, did not observe what was going on, and looked up in astonishment when he felt the drag on his arm. He stood stillâin the middle of the pool, as it chanced, poor John!âand turned an enquiring gaze on me.
