The Puritan Princess Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my boys

  MIRANDA MALINS

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Cast of Characters

  Family Tree

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  PART TWO

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART THREE

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  Author Biography

  Credits

  Copyright

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE CROMWELL FAMILY AT COURT

  Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector

  Elizabeth Cromwell, his wife, Lady Protectoress

  Bridget (Biddy) Fleetwood, their oldest surviving child

  Charles Fleetwood, Bridget’s second husband, Major-General of the army and Councillor

  Richard (Dick) Cromwell, the Cromwells’ oldest surviving son

  Dorothy (Doll) Cromwell (née Maijor), Richard’s wife

  Elizabeth (Betty) Claypole, the Cromwells’ second daughter

  John Claypole, Elizabeth’s husband, MP and Master of Horse

  Mary (Mall) Cromwell, the Cromwells’ third daughter

  Frances (Fanny) Cromwell, the Cromwells’ youngest child

  THE CROMWELL FAMILY IN IRELAND

  Henry (Harry) Cromwell, the Cromwells’ second surviving son and acting Lord Deputy of Ireland

  Elizabeth Cromwell (née Russell), his wife

  THE WIDER CROMWELL FAMILY

  AT COURT

  John Desborough, Cromwell’s brother-in-law, Major-General of the army and Councillor

  Elizabeth (Liz) Cromwell, Cromwell’s unmarried sister

  Lavinia Whetstone, Cromwell’s niece

  Richard Beke, her husband, Major and Captain of the Protector’s Life Guard

  Sir Oliver Flemyng, Cromwell’s cousin and Master of Ceremonies

  OTHER MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL

  OF STATE

  John Lambert, Major-General of the army

  Nathaniel Fiennes, Commissioner of the Great Seal

  Sir Charles Wolseley, his brother-in-law

  Henry Lawrence, President of the Council

  Sir Gilbert Pickering, Lord Chamberlain

  John Thurloe, Secretary of the Council and chief spymaster

  Henry Scobell, Clerk to the Council and Justice of the Peace

  AT COURT

  Robert Rich, grandson and heir to the Earl of Warwick

  Earl of Warwick, his grandfather

  Countess of Devonshire, Robert’s grandmother

  Bulstrode Whitelocke, MP and Commissioner of the Great Seal

  Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, MP and courtier

  Marchamont Nedham, writer and editor of the newspaper Mercurius Politicus

  John Milton, poet, polemicist and Latin and French secretary

  Andrew Marvell, poet and deputy in the Latin and French secretariat

  John Dryden, writer and civil servant in the Latin and French secretariat

  Edmund Waller, poet and composer

  John Hingston, Master of Music

  Master Farmulo, Cromwell’s music teacher

  Samuel Cooper, painter

  John Michael Wright, painter

  Thomas Simon, chief engraver at the Mint

  Dr John Hewitt, clergyman

  Hugh Peters, chaplain

  Jeremiah White, chaplain

  Katherine, Frances’s lady-in-waiting

  Anne Grinaways, Mary’s lady-in-waiting

  Anthony Underwood, Gentleman of the Bedchamber

  Sir Thomas Billingsey, former Gentleman of the Bedchamber

  Nicholas Baxter, Gentleman of the Horse

  John Embree, Surveyor-General of Works

  Philip Jones, Colonel and Controller of the Household

  George Bate, physician

  Master Hornlock, tailor

  Master Riddell, jeweller

  Assorted singers and musicians including two boy trebles

  VISITORS TO COURT

  Thomas Belasyse, Viscount Fauconberg, courtier

  Francisco Giavarina, the Venetian ambassador

  Antoine de Bordeaux, the French ambassador

  George Fox, founder of the Quakers

  Margaret Fell, Quaker

  Sir William Davenant, opera composer

  Mountjoy Blount, the Earl of Newport, former courtier to King Charles

  Sir Thomas Billingsey, former courtier to King Charles

  PROTECTORAL OFFICERS AWAY

  FROM COURT

  Edward Montagu, General-at-Sea and later Councillor

  Robert Blake, General-at-Sea (jointly with Edward Montagu)

  William Lockhart, Cromwell’s ambassador to France and later commander at Dunkirk

  Robina Sewster, his wife, Cromwell’s niece

  Philip Meadowes, Cromwell’s ambassador to Denmark

  George Monck, General in command of the army in Scotland

  IN PARLIAMENT

  Sir Thomas Widdrington, Speaker of the House of Commons and Commissioner of the Great Seal

  Sir Arthur Haselrig, republican leader

  John Lisle, regicide, republican and Commissioner of the Great Seal

  Sir Christopher Pack, proposer of the new constitution

  THE RUSSELL FAMILY AT

  CHIPPENHAM

  Sir Francis Russell, second baronet

  Catherine Russell, his wife

  John Russell, their son and heir

  THE RICH FAMILY AT LEIGHS PRIORY

  Lord Rich, Robert’s father

  His second wife and young daughters

  IN YORKSHIRE

  Thomas ‘Black Tom’ Fairfax, former Commander-in-Chief of Parliament’s army

  OPPONENTS OF THE PROTECTORATE

  Edward Sexby, former Leveller and conspirator

  Miles Sindercome, former Leveller and conspirator

  Thomas Harrison, regicide and Fifth Monarchist

  OVERSEAS

  Charles Stuart, son of King Charles I, living on the Continent with an exiled court

  King Louis XIV of France

  Cardinal Mazarin, his chief minister

  Queen Christina, former ruler of Sweden

  All of the characters in this novel are real people.

  PROLOGUE

  30 JANUARY 1661

  We stand together, shoulder to shoulder, skirt to skirt, like a chain of paper dolls, come to see our father’s execution.

  Our hoods are pulled low over our faces although, in truth, few in the crowd would recognise us without our finery: we grace no coins, no medals or prints, and it is hardly likely any of them would have seen our portraits hanging, as they had, in the palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court.

  A frosted blast of wind whips around my cloak and sends the three nooses hanging from the gallows before me swinging as if the condemned men already danced their deaths. I stare at the gibbet in blank horror. It is a terrible thing, vast and three-sided like a triangle, designed, Father once told me, to hold twenty-four souls at a time.

  ‘Why did it have to be here?’ I speak sideways to my sisters. It is somehow worse, much worse, that this is happening at Tyburn, the dirty, eerie crossroads outside London where they hang common felons: highwaymen, thieves, murderers. ‘Parliament settled on t
reason as the crime, so it should have been the Tower.’

  ‘They wish to make a point, I suppose,’ Mary answers. ‘Some warning against men rising so far above their station.’

  Fear creeps up my back like a spider and I feel it crawl along my arm and onto Mary’s. She shivers against me.

  ‘We shouldn’t have come,’ I say.

  Mary stiffens. ‘We were right to come, Frances. Father would want us to be here; we were his soldiers too.’

  Her words conjure images of the russet-coated Ironsides of the old days and, as I watch them march through the air, I am surprised again by the resolve Mary has shown in these past days; it used to be me who was the brave one.

  ‘We are here for Henry too,’ Bridget says quietly on my other side, her voice breaking over his name.

  And that is when we hear them coming. A slow drumbeat parts the crowds and a dragging, catching sound behind it takes me back instantly to my early childhood when the boys drove the ploughs up and down the marshy fields outside Ely. But this is no plough. I know, without turning, that it is a hurdle, a great gnarled gate on which the horses have drawn the prisoners all the way along Holborn. It is a strange route to take from Westminster Abbey but, once again, symbolic – a final pretence that the men had come not from the sanctified chapel of kings but from Newgate prison, as most come to Tyburn.

  The crowd begins to swell forward, nudging us closer to the scaffold. I smile in the sudden memory of what my brother-in-law Charles had reported Father saying to General Lambert, the day their great army marched north to fight the Scots. When Lambert had remarked on the cheering, massing throng waving and wishing them success, Father had quipped that the crowd would be as noisy to see him hang.

  How right he was.

  But as I peer from beneath my hood at the faces around me, I realise that Father was only partly right. As many are here to see him hanged, it is true, but they are not cheering and bustling as they had been to see him lead his army. Nor are they laughing, drinking and pinching each other with the holiday mood that I understand usually accompanies public hangings. They are solemn, watchful, nervous.

  For this is no ordinary execution. This crowd has come to witness something grotesque; an act outside the conventions of normal society, a violation of God’s law, a performance of pure, visceral vengeance by their so-called ‘merry monarch’. This would be a traitor’s death for men beyond the reach of the law, beyond the reach even of the king; a second death for men already with God.

  For these prisoners are already dead.

  They are not living men that the hangman and his assistants now unstrap from the hurdle and haul upright to stand, propped awkwardly beneath each noose, wrapped in their death shrouds. They are corpses, disturbed from their consecrated sleep, taken from their allotted square of earth. Robbed from their Christian graves.

  John Bradshaw, president of the court that tried the young Charles Stuart’s father, the tyrant King Charles.

  Henry Ireton, Bridget’s husband and the fiercest, cleverest man in Father’s army.

  And Father, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, Oliver Cromwell.

  At the sight of Henry, Bridget’s hand creeps into mine and I think how, though she had taken a long time to accept Henry as a suitor, she had grown to love him deeply. Something in the gesture – in the childlike feel of her small hand in mine; her, my big, brave sister, so much older than me, so strong, so sure of herself and of her nearness to God – breaks me.

  ‘Father!’ I blurt out the word though I know better. ‘Our Father …’ Louder now. Heads turn towards us.

  Mary seizes my hands and bows her head: ‘Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come …’

  I remember myself and mumble along with her. The heads turn back to the gallows.

  I watch, cold tears tumbling down my cheeks, as the hooded bodies are strung up with a great fanfare and a proclamation condemning the traitors is read to the crowd, the wind whisking the words away from all but those closest to the steps. The accused men cannot stand on stools to await their fate, of course, neither can they be hanged without their shrouds for risk of their bodies disintegrating on the scaffold. And so the swaddled, decaying bodies are hoisted up instead to swing aimlessly in the air, no kicking and jerking convulsing their shapes but instead a still, almost serene acceptance.

  They are not there, I tell myself. They are with God. No one can hurt Father now.

  We stand there for hours, numb from the cold, until with the winter sun slipping towards the horizon the corpses are cut down, falling with a dull, muffled thud onto the ground below. With the corpses at his feet, the executioner draws a huge axe from beneath the straw and instinctively the crowd pulls forward for a closer look. Still in their green-moulded death shrouds, the men are arranged like animals on a slab before a butcher. The executioner paces before the bodies, tilting his head to examine the angles and cuts which would produce the best joints. Satisfied and with a last stretch and cricking of his neck and shoulders, he sets to work.

  The heads are struck off first, the swaddling grave clothes dulling the axe’s impact so that it takes eight violent attempts to hack off Father’s head, almost as many to remove Henry’s; each blow followed by a gasp from the crowd. The executioner holds each head aloft, not bothering to keep them at arm’s length, certain for once that no fresh blood will fall on his jacket. His assistants join in and toes and fingers are attacked next, those nearest to the scaffold scrabbling forward for a grisly souvenir. Bridget grips my fingers with her own and we lace our bones together fiercely as if, by this, we can counteract the dismembering playing out before our eyes.

  When, at last, the butchers grow bored by their labours, the three headless trunks are thrown unceremoniously into a deep pit on one side of the gallows, dropping through the air to land on top of one another with a hideous muffled thump like sacks of flour thrown down from a mill-loft. The heads remain above ground, spirited into a bag from which they will no doubt be taken to sit atop spikes in the time-honoured way. I watch in horror as the distance between the heads and bodies grows. I have been told that the old king was made whole again after his head was struck off: that it was carefully sewn back onto his body before it was lowered into the holy crypt of the chapel at Windsor castle. There will be no such happy fate for our beloveds, forced to spend eternity headless in an unmarked pit of thieves and murderers.

  I can look no more, turning my eyes instead on the men, women and children pressed around me. Each face is caught, fixed in a moment of horror like a smashed clock. Could there be one among them who is not thinking of the moment on this same day twelve years ago when the traitor king’s head had been held out above the scaffold at Whitehall? Mary and I had not been told of it for months. We were mere children and a conspiracy of silence attempted to keep us that way; broadsheets were hidden, letters thrust hastily into pockets and servants hushed. I look across at Bridget. She had known of course – she had been a new bride then, starting her family with Henry. She was in the crowded gallery at the king’s trial and Henry had signed the death warrant; ninth on the vellum. Bradshaw first. Father third.

  I close my eyes and savour the silence. When men come to write of this – the chroniclers, the gossips, the hacks and government newsmen who even now press against the scaffold, notes and pens in hand – they will say how the people cheered to see Old Noll, the great usurper, strung up and cut down to size; how justice was done and how God smiled on this day.

  But we will know the truth. We are here too.

  PART ONE

  Four years earlier, January 1657

  CHAPTER ONE

  They want to make my father king. King of England, Scotland and Ireland. King Oliver – the first of his name.

  I have heard this before, when Father was first made Lord Protector three years ago, again in ’55 and then at my cousin Lavinia’s wedding last year. What a day that was. I had never seen anything more beautiful than the bride
who shimmered with happiness in her gold-edged gown as she planted a kiss on my cheek. The newlyweds laughed and whispered and the candles in the huge sconces along the Great Hall here in the Palace of Whitehall burned low as we feasted and danced into the night. At seventeen, it was the first time I had been allowed to stay up so late, the first time too a man had held my hand as he led me through a dance.

  I had danced first with my brother Richard and after him with my brother-in-law Charles Fleetwood, Bridget’s second husband. But then Robert Rich, grandson of the great Earl of Warwick, had asked me to dance and something about the pressure of his hand on mine sent my eyes after him for the rest of the day as he drank and supped, weaving among the other guests. Later, once the corners of the room had receded into the dusk, I found my feet following my eyes and I hovered behind a Plantagenet suit of armour listening to Robert as he joked with his other noble friends.

  ‘You have to hand it to Cromwell, he throws a fine wedding party,’ a young courtier had said, spilling fat drops of red wine over the rim of the cup he pressed to his lips.

  ‘Ha,’ Robert had scoffed, eyes dancing above a long, aristocratic nose. ‘Surprisingly regal affair for a lot of East Anglian farmers.’

  Another had chuckled at that. ‘True. The court becomes less starched and stuffed by the day, fewer soldiers about too. Perhaps King Oliver might not be such a bad idea after all.’

  That brought a swell of fists as the men clunked their heavy goblets together, candlelight flashing on the pewter.

  I had shrunk back then, slippered feet pressing into the alcove. Tears threatened to come but I swallowed them down. I was my father’s daughter; no man would make me cry. Robert had come to find me later to ask for another dance but I had turned my marble-white shoulder to him and talked to my sister Mary instead.

  I was hurt by his insult to my family of course, though hardly surprised. A man cannot rise from obscurity to become Head of State as my father has done – his wife and children scaling the mountain in his wake – without attracting the hatred and envy of others. There is no greater vice than ambition, after all, and it is a charge Father is particularly sensitive to; the sin of pride being so foreign to his nature. But these insults never stick to him for long as Father, far from denying his humble stock, glories in it. It is he who speaks of being nothing but a ‘good constable’ to watch over the people. It is he who tells the courtiers, ambassadors and envoys who press in to see him each day that our family name should rightly be the humble ‘Williams’, not the grander ‘Cromwell’ assumed by my great-great-grandfather to reflect the glory of his uncle, King Henry’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell. It is he who would have Master Cooper paint him ‘warts and all’.