The Puritan Princess Read online

  And madness can be the only way to describe the course our lives have taken. Mother tells me I have never known normal times; that the ever-shifting ground on which I first learned to walk, used to stay still. That my normal was, for everyone else, a world turned upside down. And so I returned to my books, peering into the pages of the past searching for parallels for our extraordinary times. For without precedents, where else can I look for guidance? There is no teaching in an age without rules, no textbook for revolution.

  Everything is history now.

  A log hisses in the grate when suddenly a volley of shouts and screams tears through the night-time silence. A furious knocking wrenches me out of my half-dream. In another moment, the guards burst into my bedroom, falling over each other in their anxiety to reach my bed. Through the open door behind them I can see torches flying through the air of the passage underneath running feet.

  Instinctively I pull the cover up to my chin, the fur hot and silky against my skin.

  ‘You must come with us, Your Highness. Now if you please.’

  Fear steals over me like a blanket of frost. I know not to question them, and scramble down from the bed, sliding my bare feet into slippers and grabbing a thick shawl to wrap around my nightdress. They bustle me from the room and I find myself slotting into a stream of other night-robed figures snatched from their sleep and hurrying through the palace corridors. I glance around, looking for Mary. Or Elizabeth, Mother, Father. But I see none of my family, just the familiar faces of courtiers, servants and officials swept along in one rapid current. Suddenly, my maid Katherine finds my hand and I clutch it gratefully, her small palm always so warm. There are shouts and calls from the guards, wails from children, but, for the most part, people press forward in silence, faces set with only one fixed thought: to get out of the palace.

  We emerge suddenly, erupting into the court like the jets of water that surge from the mouths of the bronze fishes on the great fountain Father had installed as the centrepiece of the privy garden at Hampton Court. I expect utter darkness but instead the sky lightens as if it is already dawn as the palace servants bustle around the enclosure lighting every lamp and torch there is. Everywhere candles and lanterns spring to life in clutched hands illuminating the underside of anxious faces. A lone blackbird starts to sing from the roof of the Great Hall, its sweet song eerie in the moonlight.

  It is then that I see Mother and the rest of my family on the far side of the courtyard surrounded by the unmistakable grey-and-black liveried backs of Father’s Life Guard. The sight of Father’s personal bodyguards is a relief and I press forward towards them, Katherine following.

  ‘Mother, what’s happened?’

  ‘Frances, thank the Lord.’ She squashes me to her bosom, unsupported in her loose white nightgown. ‘We’re not sure. When they came in to us they said it was a bomb in the chapel.’

  I look back towards the chapel, although of course it is blocked by the towering roof of the Great Hall. I notice they have brought us away from the chapel to the palace gate by the Banqueting House.

  ‘Is Father hurt?’ Mary asks, her voice shaking. ‘Is he safe?’

  ‘Your Father has gone with Secretary Thurloe and members of the Council …’ Mother tails off, looking around us abstractedly.

  I gather my scattered thoughts. So this wasn’t simply an attack on Father – he has faced assassins before. No, if it was a bomb in the palace, it could have killed any of us: my mother, my sisters, the children. I know there are men out there who hate my father, even if I struggle to reconcile this with the loving parent I know, but I had never thought there might be men who hate us too by extension. Men who wish to see us all die. This attack is something altogether more terrifying than any threat that has come before and I feel my heart thumping, blood coursing through my veins. I look around the anxious faces of my family and wish, not for the first time, that my brother Harry was not in Ireland. His is always the coolest head in a crisis, a glimpse of what Father must have been like as a young man. I turn to my other brother Richard as the next best thing. ‘Who has done this, Dick?’

  Richard runs a hand through his hair, sandy curls snaking through his fingers. ‘Royalists most likely. They are constantly plotting against us, scheming to bring the dead king’s son back. But we all thought the threat was passing. If it is them, this will play right into the army’s hands. Father can hardly dismantle the rule of the Major-Generals if the royalists are on the move again.’

  ‘I heard it’s the Levellers,’ Elizabeth interrupts, her beautiful chestnut locks loose over her shoulders. ‘Thurloe said so to Father.’

  ‘Well, they hate Father just as much as the royalists now he is the one to rule.’ Dick smiles ruefully. ‘More perhaps, as only those who once fought for the same cause can. Nothing is so bitter than the falling out of friends.’

  Their words unsettle me with the picture they paint of enemies gathering around us on all sides. Could Father really have done anything so terrible to drive a former friend to this? To turn a man who fought shoulder to shoulder with him in battle into one who would kill him as he slept? Father is the same man he ever was: so how can he now be judged a bad man where before he was judged a good? And what of me? Is it my fate to live or die by his reputation even though it was made on muddy battlefields hundreds of miles away from me when I was only a child?

  I look around in confusion and see people cradling their most precious possessions, snatched as they ran from their rooms: a courtier carries a silver clock even as his stockings slip down around his ankles, a lady clutches her perfume chest. One of the cooks is staggering under the weight of a great cheese. Somewhere further off I hear a child crying.

  ‘It will be those Fifth Monarchy men, sir,’ Katherine says, fear making her forget her place. She pulls her faded brown shawl more tightly around her, digging her fingers under her armpits. ‘The ones who say His Highness must be removed for the kingdom of Christ to come again. A few of the men in my poor William’s regiment have gone that way. I’ve heard,’ she adds quickly, before we accuse her of consorting with such lunatics. I know she is thinking of her husband, killed only a few yards from where Father sat on his horse, on the field of Marston Moor. She searches for my hand and I take it, as I always do, feeling it small and warm in mine.

  ‘Are they many? Are they still here in the palace?’ I look around nervously, half expecting to hear shouts and howls of pain; the sound of fighting.

  ‘Scores of them!’ My younger nephew Henry, Elizabeth’s boy, thrusts his head between us, clutching at his mother’s nightdress. ‘And one had his hand cut off in the struggle!’

  ‘Not his hand, stupid, his leg.’ His older brother Cromwell pushes him and grins up at us.

  ‘I heard it was his head.’ Elizabeth leans down to them and they shriek gleefully, hopping from foot to foot.

  ‘Betty, please.’ Mother’s tone is firm and she smiles gratefully as the graceful, black-gowned figure of John Thurloe, Secretary to the Council of State and – everyone knows – Father’s chief spymaster, drifts noiselessly towards us.

  I wonder how it is that he is fully dressed when no-one else is.

  ‘Highness.’ He bows to Mother. ‘Let us fetch you all out of the cold. The guardroom beneath the Chairhouse would perhaps be safest.’

  He takes Mother’s arm and leads us across the courtyard as calmly as if he were taking us into dinner. The crowds part to let us pass, some bow and curtsey – deferential even in this night-time panic. I pause to watch them but Richard hurries me under the great Holbein gate, and we turn up the stone steps into the guards’ room.

  Having made us as comfortable as he can in the spartan barracks, Thurloe stations several household guards outside the door and dispatches Katherine and our other attendants back to our rooms to fetch our clothes and to pack our things.

  Thurloe closes the door behind them, bright hazelnut eyes darting into the furthest corners of the room. Reassured we are alone, they settle at
last on my brother Richard as the oldest male member of the family present. ‘Highness.’ He addresses Dick in his customarily soft, quiet voice, quite unshaken by this tumult. ‘I suggest that you take the family to Hampton Court as soon as it is light enough. It is Friday today after all so you would be making the journey in any event and it can do no harm to go a little earlier than usual. I will have the royal barge readied for you, with an extra troop of the Life Guard. His Highness will follow you later today; I have already agreed the matter with him.’

  No one questions this. We all know that it is Thurloe who takes charge in an emergency; he whom Father trusts above all others.

  There is nothing to do then but wait.

  A few hours later, as the first pinks of dawn tint the edges of the clouds, I clamber into the barge and settle, huddling against Mary, on the cushioned benches, swathed in three of my cloaks and a soft wool blanket. The bargemen push us off from the landing stairs and take up their rhythmic row, the muffled sound of oars patting against the swell of the Thames which breaks around us in dark inked waves. We sit in silence. Laying my head on Mary’s shoulder, I watch the great jumble of the palace fade from view, the tiny figures of the guards swarming over it like ants over crumbling headstones.

  I am not sorry to come early to Hampton Court. It is my favourite place in the world; a rural paradise far from the busy streets of London. I spent my childhood under the big sky of the fens, which explains perhaps why at Whitehall, in the centre of the noise and smells of the great city of Westminster, I find myself longing for the quiet river, privy garden and endless deer park of Hampton Court. Our life there is quite different. Where Whitehall is Father’s place of work – the site of state occasions, meetings with Parliament, the reception of envoys from foreign princes and the sitting of the many committees that manage the day-to-day administration of the nations – Hampton Court is our home.

  It is only here, away from the public eye, that Father can indulge his gentlemanly tastes for sport, music and fine classical statues; tastes which would provoke the disapproval of his most puritan Bible-waving subjects. None of us will ever forget the time an outraged iconoclast Quaker cook took a hammer to Father’s statue of Venus and Adonis, calling it a wicked heathen image. Father himself spent hours watching anxiously as the court masons did their best to repair his beloved statue but he insisted the Quaker be sent away with no more than a flea in his ear: ‘I will not punish a man for acting out of his faith,’ he said. ‘His way is the equal of mine.’

  And so at the end of each week, we travel here to Hampton Court for Father to relax, far from the glare of Whitehall. Of course the court comes with us – the everyday meetings and business of government must continue – but we live more simply, more informally, with Father hunting and hawking and sharing his treasure trove of stories with us over a laughing supper. Elizabeth tells me we have invented something new by dividing the week this way, with two days of rest following five of work, and that others have now begun to do the same; she is delighted whenever we begin a fashion.

  Father follows us upriver later that day, as Thurloe had promised, though I do not see him as I would expect to. He does not go out to ride, or come to our family rooms for dinner and a cuddle with Mother. Instead he is closed up in his private study, talking late into the night with Thurloe and the fifteen or so members of the Council of State, working through supper and sending the servants for more candles. The atmosphere even here is tense and rumours of the conspirators fly along the corridors and across the long tables at supper. There have been arrests and Thurloe’s messengers travel up and down the river between Hampton Court and the Tower of London, their faces grave under broad-brimmed hats, letters taken out and pressed into their hands through half-opened doors.

  Mother retires early with a headache and I follow her, climbing into the bed beside her, a child again in my fear. She whispers nothings into my hair, slowing the beat of my heart into sleep so that it is there that I wake at dawn, wondering if Father had slept in the great bed of the state bedchamber, finding his own private bed usurped, or if, indeed, he had come to bed at all. I lie for some minutes moving from the twisting thoughts of my dreams into the uncertainties of a new day and feel my resolve hardening as pale sunlight slips around the edges of the yellow curtains. I must consult Mary at once.

  I go straight from my parents’ chamber to Mary’s, hurrying along the long gallery, wondering absently if Katherine will be worried when she comes to wake me and finds my bed untouched. Mary is still asleep and her room thick with darkness – her lady-in-waiting Anne not such an early riser as Katherine. I pull the curtains a little apart, enough to light the room gently, and walk around the bed until I am level with Mary’s head, her dark curls, fluffed with sleep, stirring now on the pillow.

  ‘Mary, we must take control of our lives,’ I say; simple and to the point.

  ‘Hmmm?’ She keeps her eyes closed.

  ‘We must start living our own lives. Today.’

  ‘What time is it?’ Mary turns away from me, burying her face in the pillow.

  ‘Time that we understood things for ourselves.’ I am pacing now, warming to my theme even as my bare feet feel the morning chill. ‘We know now that we could be murdered in our beds at any moment. And if Father becomes king, the danger only greatens. If we are expected to run these risks, I think it only fair that we gain something from the bargain – more choice over our futures.’

  Mary abandons sleep and turns to face me then, her grey eyes bleary as she props herself up on her elbows. ‘Please don’t talk of our being murdered in our beds, I am frightened enough as it is.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I take her hand then and kiss it before bowing low to her in an approximation of courtly love; despite being the younger of our pair, I always play the man when we act out our romantic hopes. She slides over in the bed to make way for me and I pull myself up and sit next to her, snaking my arm around her shoulders, my head thrown back against the carved oak headboard.

  ‘Think of the brightest, best ladies at court,’ I continue, Mary’s head heavy on my shoulder. ‘The ones who proved themselves in the war – defending their homes from besieging troops when their men had gone, taking up causes, protecting their families. Think of Bridget working with Henry Ireton and Father on the peace terms the army put to the king. I know she had a hand in them; she’s told me enough times when scolding me for idleness. She was here at Hampton Court when they presented the terms to the king – she met him, dined with him twice; can you imagine that? And it’s not just women of our station who have been empowered by the war. Think of the ordinary women out there in the city – the preachers and printers, the Leveller wives and their petitioning. They don’t sit around all day sewing and waiting for a man to speak to them. Why should that be our fate?’

  ‘I can see you now, Fanny, preaching hellfire at St Paul’s Cross with the other Quakers.’

  Mary giggles and I poke her in the ribs.

  ‘I’m not saying I want to preach to anyone, Mall,’ I say, answering my nickname with hers, well aware what a Ranter I sound with this speech. ‘I don’t know what I want … But I do know that we won’t have any choices at all if we are married off to some wealthy widower or foreign duke who only wants to set us in a display cabinet along with his other treasures. If we can pre-empt Father’s match-making and find companions of our own choosing, we can search for fulfilment on our own terms.’

  When Mary stays silent, I turn my thoughts to our older sisters, always setting the parameters. ‘Betty was seventeen when she married John – a whole year younger than me.’

  Mary twitches her lips and I can see she is counting in her head. ‘Yes – but Biddy was two years older than I am now, remember? She was twenty-one when she wedded Henry, twenty-seven when she married Charles.’

  ‘That doesn’t count.’ I shake my head. ‘Bridget is a challenge; Father probably couldn’t get her off his hands any sooner.’

  Mary slaps my wri
st in mock reproof.

  ‘Anyway, that was ten years ago, before all this.’ I gesture at the grandeur of the room, its silken tapestries now shining in the morning sun as it rises over the great deer park. ‘It is our time now.’

  Having fixed on the idea, I cannot shake it from my head. It seems so clear to me that love must be the answer to fear, and a life lived to the full each day the best defence against death. Mary might be cautious but I know Father would agree with me. No one values love of all kinds greater than he – the love of wife and children, of kin, of friends and brothers-in-arms – though I know that he would urge me to seek the love of God in all of them. Mindful of this, later that morning I go with Katherine in search of our chaplain, Jeremiah White. He is a young and eager man and a great deal more charming than most in holy orders. Where others walk with God with the dragging steps of a penitent, Jeremiah gambols along beside Him like a dancing master. It is this joy in his faith, this lightness of spirit that endears him to Father, who cares far more about a man’s passion for Christ than his style of worship – how else could he count both former archbishops and dissenting Quakers among his friends, enjoying a glass of wine and spirited discussion with each, sometimes in the same evening?

  I find Jeremiah in the Great Hall listening to the singing boys rehearse, servants busily clearing the remains of breakfast from the tables around him. The boys’ soaring trebles stop me at the door and I too listen with great joy to their sound, looking up past the mounted stags’ heads into the vaulting beams as if I can see the voices as they wing and swell into the vast space overhead. They finish a motet and John Hingston, Father’s Master of Music, plays a chord on the organ to check their tuning. He glimpses me as he turns to speak to the boys and waves; Mary and I take weekly singing lessons with him and he has become a good friend.