The Puritan Princess Read online

  No. Those words stung as they always did. But it was the laughing young man’s mention of King Oliver that had unsettled me. I had come across the notion before, breathed on the lips of an ambassador or stamped on a pamphlet. And I had felt its consequences for us, even finding myself referred to as ‘princess’ once or twice, though usually by a servant whom I had taken to know no better. But I knew that Father was quite content to be Lord Protector. I knew too that the word ‘king’ could stir men into a frenzy of passions: could drop them to their knees in a storm of tears, weeping for the ‘martyr’ King Charles who had died on the scaffold, or rouse them to their feet in a furious clamour for a pure Commonwealth of free-born men. Why would Parliament risk reigniting these dangerous fires to make Father king? Heir to the dead tyrant’s corruptible crown. It was this thought that had caused my face to fade to alabaster at the young courtiers’ idle talk.

  And now today, here we are again. It is my older sister Elizabeth who whispers it to me as we sit with the family before the court, Betty’s children perched and tumbling around us. She is always the first with gossip, usually from her husband John Claypole who, as Father’s Master of Horse, is one of the most senior officials of the Protectoral household. Though, in this case, it is in John’s capacity as Member of Parliament for Northampton that he has heard the news.

  ‘John says some MPs are now talking openly of offering Father the crown.’ Elizabeth leans close to me, her familiar rosewater perfume scenting the air. ‘It’s John’s friends, his allies, who want Father to become king – John’s all for it.’

  ‘But why now?’ I ask, removing my little niece’s sticky hand which is clutching the satin folds of my dress where it drapes over my knees.

  Betty cocks her head at me, her eyes dancing. ‘Because at last John Lambert and the other army leaders are on the back foot. They have failed in governing each region directly – they are out of money and deeply unpopular. Father set up this rule by the Major-Generals as an experiment; an emergency response when it looked like the royalists were rising up again. But the threat has passed now and the people don’t want a lot of armoured generals like Uncle Desborough marching around spouting the Old Testament, closing alehouses and pulling down maypoles in Father’s name. And between us,’ she puts her hands over her daughter’s ears, ‘Father does not want it either.’

  This surprises me, for Father counts many of the Major-Generals not only as fellow visionaries of a reformed society but among his closest friends. These are the heroes who won the late war for Parliament and changed the world, the brothers-in-arms to whom Father would entrust his life – my own uncle and brother-in-law Charles Fleetwood within their ranks – and they guard their revolution and the power it brought to them jealously. ‘He actually said that?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, not in public, and certainly not in Charles’s hearing. He told me privately.’

  I know all too well Father’s fondness for late-night confessionals with Elizabeth and feel the usual pinch of envy at their closeness. I push the feeling away and concentrate instead on piecing the puzzle together, eager to prove myself Betty’s equal in understanding for all the nine years between us.

  ‘And if the Major-Generals’ regime is dismantled,’ I say slowly, ‘there will be a chance to establish something else in its place; a more traditional government with power returned to Parliament.’

  ‘Exactly.’ My big sister beams at me and I bask in the warmth of her approval. ‘A new constitution drafted by Parliament, with Father king and the country back on familiar ground. But we are not out of the woods yet; the army leaders will fight it, you’ll see.’

  I look over to the far end of the presence chamber where Father sits on the dais and scrutinise his expression for some hint of the sands shifting beneath us all. But I cannot read his face as his stocky frame leans forward from his gilt chair, head bent over the velvet cushion a kneeling figure holds up before him. The figure – who I know to be Master Simon, the engraver – appears to be pointing out various features of the object he is displaying in answer to Father’s studious questions. After a few minutes Father grasps him warmly by the shoulder and bows his head to him in respectful acknowledgement of a job well done. Sitting back in his chair he claps, the rest of the court following his lead. I smile to myself, forgetting the unease of moments earlier: I would know the round thick sound of the pressed air, the precise pace of his clapping hands anywhere; can still pick out his rhythm even once a hundred more join it in one swell of noise.

  And so I hear rather than see Father stop clapping to wave Master Simon over to us. Smiling politely, he bows low and approaches Mother, who sits on the other side of me from Betty. We all strain to see the offering Master Simon makes to Mother and I catch the tang of wine on my brother Richard’s breath as he leans forward from where he stands behind us. And there it is, nestling in the creases of the crushed crimson velvet like a goose’s golden egg. The newly minted twenty-shilling broad coin, the arms of the Protectorate pressed proudly on one side and, I see as Mother turns it over, Father’s head gleaming on the other. I gaze in wonder at Father’s familiar profile – captured even down to the prominent wart on his chin – crowned with the laurel wreath of a Roman emperor, the great expanse of naked neck where his collar should be, oddly effeminate. He is a king already, I think, as I examine it closely and reflect with awe that, from now on, Englishmen from Bude to Berwick will carry the image of my father in their pocket.

  ‘I still cannot fathom how it has come to this.’

  ‘Keep your head still,’ my sister Mary chides me in the mirror. ‘How can I comb out these knots if you keep shaking your head?’

  I smile at her in the glass, her reflection as dear and familiar to me as if it were my own. Mary is only a year older than me and the two of us, born to our parents so many years after our other siblings, have always lived as twins – our two lives one shared experience.

  ‘There, finished.’ Mary drops a kiss on the top of my head. ‘My turn.’

  We swap and as I take the comb to Mary’s curls, I tell her all that Elizabeth had said earlier.

  ‘Father, king?’ Mary looks up at me with surprise.

  ‘Yes. Well, possibly.’

  ‘But that is extraordinary. Father is just Father; not a king, not a prince of royal blood.’

  ‘I know.’ I smooth Mary’s hair one last time before placing the comb on the chest. ‘But Father is extraordinary. Indeed I have begun to wonder if he was ever ordinary at all.’

  It is a thought I have long struggled with, yet something I doubt troubles my much older brothers and sisters in the same way. For they remember Father as an ordinary man, at his lowest point nothing more than a tenant farmer. They were on the cusp of adulthood when Father strode onto the world stage in his forties to answer Parliament’s call to arms; and fully grown up when his star ascended in the later years of civil war and the struggle for a peace settlement that followed.

  It was different for Mary and me. When we were children Father was the ruler of our small world and by the time we grew up, he had become the ruler of everyone else’s. It felt almost as if, as we had grown and our world had expanded, Father in turn had expanded to fill it. He had been my horizon when he was merely the cathedral’s tax collector of Ely and he is still my horizon now as Lord Protector of the whole country. I can never outgrow him or leave him behind as I imagine the daughter of a normal man would.

  ‘You realise what else this means,’ Mary says thoughtfully, chewing the bottom corner of her lip and bringing my attention back to her. ‘It means that our marriages, when they come to be arranged, will be matters of state. If we become princesses we can expect not just Father and Mother to have a say in who we wed but Secretary Thurloe, the Council and even Parliament to weigh in on the matter, to debate the most useful alliances we could make for the nation.’

  I quail at the thought before a more customary resentment takes over. ‘What you say is that the higher Father climbs, the
less control we have over our own futures; if he takes the crown, what little choice of husband we may have had before would vanish entirely. Mary, how can you speak of it so calmly?’

  ‘I merely accept things as they are, dearest,’ Mary replies, her soothing tone so like Mother’s.

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ I counter, and hear Father’s voice answering Mother’s in my reply.

  We stare at each other as we stand at the foot of Mary’s bed, firelight flickering on our nightgowns. Then, without further talk, we do what we do every night: hitch up our hems and sink onto our knees, elbows propped on the bed, fingers laced together and heads down.

  ‘Who shall we pray for tonight?’ Mary whispers after a few moments have passed.

  ‘Ourselves,’ I mutter, shutting my eyes tightly.

  It is too much to expect to sleep with such thoughts to unsettle me. Returned to my own room, I lie in bed for hours, too awake to slide fully into sleep, too tired to run my eyes along the lines of Aristotle’s Politics. The book lies open across my stomach, my thumb hooked under it still keeping my place even though I know I will not lift it up again tonight. Still, something in the pressure of the pages, the weight of the expensive binding on my body, calms me. Books are my companions and always shared my bed even in childhood when Mary used to lie beside me with her doll and the books in our house were fewer, more precious possessions.

  My oldest brother Richard – who would always choose a ride out with his dogs over an afternoon’s reading – used to tease me for being bookish, but this was more than made up for by Father’s ready pride in my quick mind. ‘My little scholar’ he took to calling me and his praise sent me in search of more and more books, convinced I had found a role for myself among his multitudinous offspring. Father always appreciates talents in others that he does not possess himself and as I would read at his feet by the fire after supper, he would tell me of his misspent school days.

  ‘I was never of a scholarly bent, Fanny, not like you. Master Beard would try his best but I was always too much rooted in the soil, too busy living in the real world. I didn’t want to think about other countries or other times. This is God’s country, here, now: the Promised Land for his people. And it is our duty to make the best of it. I was too busy thinking about how my father should invest that year’s rent money or who should stand for the town council. I lived in a world of acres, bills, lawsuits, not one of great philosophy or grand theories. And then I had but a year up at the university in Cambridge before my father died and at eighteen I had to go home and manage the household: business affairs, a mother and seven sisters to marry off didn’t leave much time for reading, apart from my Bible of course. Ha, I should say not!’

  I would laugh then as he wanted me to. Make some joke about all the many women in Father’s life, of whom I – the youngest of his four daughters – was but the most recent addition. But I knew Father’s levity masked the truth of a difficult time and, from across the fireplace, Mother’s weary smile as she pinned a patch to the elbow of one of my brothers’ shirts spoke volumes. How Father must have leaned on her when he brought her home as his bride three years later.

  And harder years lay ahead for them: a decline in Father’s fortunes forcing them to sell up his properties in Huntingdon and take a farm tenancy in St Ives; seven babies to birth and raise; a crisis of faith. But then, after sixteen years, God turned back to Father. A legacy came from an uncle – some modest properties and a position as tithe collector in Ely – and Mother and Father began to live and love once more. Mary and then I were the unexpected results of their new life: ‘a second family’, so Father’s friends teased him, and eight-year-old Betty was the baby of the family no longer.

  From the gallery outside my room, I hear the telltale scuffle as the retiring soldiers, tired from their shift, shuffle away; the scrape and stamp of the new men, fresh and alert as they settle into comfortable positions. Still sleepless, I huddle down under the thick fur coverlet and think of the dead King Charles. My room here in Whitehall Palace used to be his study and I often hear his soft slippered steps pacing around my bed, the Scotch lilt of his voice dictating a letter to his secretary. Sometimes I can even smell the sweet perfume his pageboys have rubbed into his hair and pointed beard. How different this royal chamber is from our children’s bedroom in my first home – the timbered tax-collector’s house in Ely. There, on frosted nights like this one, Mary and I would chafe our fingers together against the cold under the patchworked blankets on our rickety bed, listening to the tangle of chimes as the cathedral bells interlaced with those of St Mary’s next door.

  When I was three, the king and Parliament went to war, taking Father away from me one morning, my earliest memory his tan boots high above my face as he bent to kiss Mother from his horse. He was of little importance then, an obscure MP who raised a local troop of horse and led them to the war. But he showed a raw talent for battle and rose through the officer ranks, moving us all to London when I was seven and war was giving way to politics. Our first lodgings in a townhouse on Drury Lane seemed the height of sophistication to me and, though Mary and I still shared a bedroom, there were no more rough walls with damp patches or fenland frost inside the windows; we did not have to creep barefoot down flagstone stairs to the kitchen for our darned stockings dried above the kitchen fire.

  Then came the long-drawn-out peace negotiations with the king, another burst of fighting, a trial and then a cold January morning when King Charles stepped out of the Banqueting House to an executioner’s block. I was ten when England was declared a Commonwealth; a republic, with no need for kings or lords any more. Parliament was supreme and I was in awe. But we were not at peace: royalists kept harrying the edges of the fledgling Commonwealth and the government dispatched Father with the army to Ireland and then Scotland to put an end to the fighting once and for all.

  He was away two years and, though Mother tried her best to keep us cheerful and occupied with the gentlewoman’s diet of sewing, singing, reading and polite conversation, we longed for Father and the lively chaos he sprouts around him, as over-wintering seedlings miss the sun. When, finally, he returned home in triumph, he found Parliament bickering and prevaricating in search of a lasting settlement, and me, precocious and restless as ever, demanding audiences of his friends and colleagues to explain affairs to me. There followed a busy time, with Father and his allies working till all hours, and so we moved to rooms in the old Cockpit within the wider estate of Whitehall so Father could walk to Council meetings or to Parliament in just a few minutes. For me, the move brought new levels of luxury: my own room and a maid – Katherine, a war widow pensioned by Father – to wait upon Mary and me and help us grow accustomed to the corseting clothes of young ladies.

  But little did I know how my life, already so different, was about to change for ever. Father and the other senior officers of the army lost patience with their political masters and in ’53 dissolved Parliament at musket-point. The godliest men were nominated to govern in an assembly but they could only look up at heaven or down at their navels – never straight ahead. The assembly split into factions and the army council went to Father to ask him to rule. And so we had a new government by a Lord Protector and Council of State working with Parliament. I was just fifteen when we became the first family in the land three years ago. We were to move into the royal apartments of Whitehall and Hampton Court, I was to have many maids and ladies-in-waiting, tutors in music and languages and a dress allowance to spend as I pleased. And best of all, the royal library to plunder and the finest minds of the court with whom to discuss my loot. People began to curtsey to me; other girls dropped their conversations as I drew near; young men circled. I remember the first time a servant called me Highness and I didn’t know to whom she was speaking.

  My older sisters Bridget and Elizabeth made much of the stark contrast of this life to their apprenticed womanhood, where supper with our neighbours was the highest social occasion and Mother allowed them each a few penn
ies a month to spend on ribbons or other dainties. But their attitudes to the greater opportunities open to Mary and me were typically different: Betty helped me to spend my dress allowance, cooing over the silks and satins and teasing me for affording what she could not at my age; while Bridget warned me sternly not to slide into sinful vanity and bid me attend to the lessons I was lucky enough now to have.

  They were both right in their own ways, as they always are, but as I listened to them battle over my soul, I could not help wondering what the ultimate purpose of my newly exalted cultivation was to be. If my fate was merely to marry a man approved of (if not even chosen) by my parents, would my expensive clothes and new mastery of the humanist curriculum bring me fulfilment or serve simply to enhance my value on the marriage market? Perhaps I would suffer for being prized more highly, seeing me sold as a princess to the highest bidder in a diplomatic alliance where, a decade ago, plain Biddy and Betty Cromwell could take a more natural course and simply fall in love with family friends.

  It took four months to ready the palaces for us as they had fallen into such disrepair in the years without a king. So it was April ’54 when we finally moved in, the spring blooms bursting from the beds beneath the deep-bayed latticed windows of my new grand bedroom, the old king’s study. I basked in the excitement of it all even as it left me nervous and bewildered, though others were not so easily impressed. My grandmother, Father’s mother, who moved with us, clucked and clicked her tongue in distrust at our new grandeur: ‘There are those who’ll hate us for it,’ she said time after time, ‘Oliver’s friends as much as his enemies.’ Since she was then in her ninth decade, it felt to me that the madness of these great changes was too much for her; and she died a few months later to be buried incongruously in Westminster Abbey, unable to escape her son’s staggering ascent even in death.