Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

“But what a king!” John remarked disdainfully. “Half a dozen bastards scattered around Europe already, his tastes formed in Papist courts, and no knowledge of English people at all except what he learned when he was a fugitive. His father ruined us by his devotion to his principles, his son will ruin us by having none.”

“Then he will rule more easily than his father,” Hester pointed out. “A man with no principles will not be going to war. A man without principles doesn’t argue.”

“No,” John said. “I think the heroic days are over.”

There was a little silence as they both thought of the son who could not wait to see this day, and that if he had lived to see it then even he might have thought that it lacked a little glory.

“And what will happen to John Lambert?” Hester asked. “Will they free him from the Tower before Charles Stuart arrives?”

“They will execute him for certain,” John said. “I should think General Monck can hardly wait to sign the order. Lambert is too much of a hero to the army and the people. And when the new king comes home they will be looking for scapegoats to offer him.”

“It cannot be the end for him?” Hester asked incredulously. “He has never done anything but fight for the freedom of Englishmen and women.”

“I think it must be,” John said. “It’s a bitter, bitter ending to all our hopes. A king such as Charles restored, and a man like Lambert on the scaffold.”

But that very night, John Lambert climbed from his window in the Tower, slid down his knotted sheets, dropped into a waiting barge on the Thames, and disappeared into the April darkness.

“I have to go to him,” John said to Hester. He was saddling up Caesar in the stable. Hester stood in the doorway, blocking his path. “I have to go. This is the battle that tests everything I have finally come to believe, and I have to be there.”

“How do you know it is not a story, some ridiculous rumor?” she demanded. “How d’you know he has raised a standard, is summoning an army to fight for freedom? It could be nothing more than someone’s dream.”

“Because only John Lambert would choose Edgehill to raise his standard. And besides, if I go there, and nothing is happening, I can always ride home again.”

“And what about me? What about me if something is happening, if a battle is happening and you are in the midst of it and you are killed? Am I to be left here to keep the rarities and the gardens safe forever, with no son and no husband?”

He turned from the horse and came to the door of the stable and took her cold hands in his. “Hester, my wife, my love,” he said. “We have lived our lives in some of the wildest and strangest times that this country will ever see. Don’t deny me the chance to fight just once, on the side I believe in. That, in a way, I have always believed in. I have spent my life wavering from one view to another, from one country to another. Let me be wholehearted for this, just once. I know that Lambert is right. I know that what he wants for this country, a balance of power and justice for the poor, is what this country needs. Let me go and fight under his standard.”

“Why is it always fighting?” she cried passionately. “I can’t bear it, John. If you should be lost…”

He shook his head. “I want to go back,” he said simply. “I want to go back to Edgehill where the king was first defeated in the first war. I was never there. I ran from it, just as I ran from the war of the Powhatan in Virginia.”

She would have interrupted him, sworn that it was not a war, sworn that he was not a man who ran from conflict, but he stopped her.

“It was not that I was afraid, I’m not saying that I ran like a coward. But there was nothing that I saw clearly enough to die for. I knew the king was in the wrong, but I pitied him. I knew the queen was a fool, but she was a charming fool. I didn’t want to see her driven into exile. I think of her now sometimes, and I can’t believe that she has been brought so low. Many women are featherbrained and yet they don’t pay for their folly as she has had to pay. The cause didn’t seem wholly right to me. It didn’t seem wholly clear to me. Right up to the scaffold when they took him out and beheaded him, it didn’t seem quite right to me.”

Hester would have pulled her hands away from him but he held her fast. “You’re talking like a royalist,” she said hotly.

He smiled ruefully. “I know it. That’s what I’m saying. I have always been able to see both sides at once. But this time – for the first time in my life – the first time, Hester! – I have a cause I can truly believe in. I don’t think that Charles Stuart should come back. I do think that the people of this country should govern themselves without a king or bishops or lords. I do believe – my God, at last I believe – that we are a people who have earned our freedom and deserve to be free. And I want to go and fight for that freedom. Lambert has raised his standard, for freedom, for the good old cause. I want to be there. I want to fight for it. If I have to die for it I will.”

For a moment it looked as if she would cry out against him, then she stepped to one side and opened the stable door. Caesar the war horse stepped out, raising his big hoofs delicately over the threshold, and walked at once to the mounting block and stood still, his neck arched, as if he too wanted to go into battle for the rights of freeborn Englishmen.

John smiled to see the horse and then looked at Hester. “Are you angry with me?”

“No,” she said unwillingly. “I’m proud of you, even though this goes against my own interests. I’m glad to see you at last knowing what you believe and going to fight for it. I shall pray that you win. I have always thought that nothing mattered but that we survived these days and it is a change for me to think, like you, that there is something worth fighting for.”

“You think it’s worth fighting for?” he asked. “To keep the king out, to keep Parliament free? To get justice for everyone in this country?”

Unwillingly she nodded. “Yes,” she said. “And if any man can do it then Lambert is that man. I know it.”

John took her hand again, kissed it and then caught her to him and held her hard against him. “I shall come back!” he said passionately. “Trust me, Hester. I shall come back to you. And God willing we will make this country a place where poor men can be free.”

He came back within a fortnight. All three men who had been so powerful in Hester’s life came back to their separate destinations: John Lambert to the Tower on a charge of high treason, Charles Stuart to Dover and the road to London lined with people crowding to touch his sacred hand, and John, head drooping, home to the Ark.

Caesar clip-clopped toward his stable, his ears back, his head low. John dropped off his back in the stable yard and fell to his knees as his legs buckled under him. The garden lad ran to raise him and shouted for Cook. She took one look out of the kitchen door and called for Frances and Hester who were tidying the rarities room.

Hester ran out to the terrace and then round the corner to the stable yard to find John seated on the mounting block, rubbing his stiff muscles. He tried to get to his feet when he saw her, but she went to him and put her arms around him.

“Are you injured?”

“Heartsick.”

“Hurt in your body?”

“No.”

“Your legs?”

“I’m just stiff. I’m too old, Hester, to ride all day and all night.”

“Was there a battle?”

“There was a skirmish. We were hopelessly outnumbered. On the day when it mattered, when it mattered more than anything in the world, there were not enough men ready to stand up and fight for their liberty.”

She wrapped her arms around him and held his weary head close to her heart. She found she was rocking him as she used to rock Johnnie when he woke from a nightmare.

“There was hardly anyone there,” John said flatly. “Lambert was captured almost straight away. They didn’t even bother with us. It was him they wanted. He would have got away but his horse was tired, we were all tired. And discouraged. Because when it really mattered there were not enough men ready to stand up and fight for their liberty.”

He pulled back and stared up into her face as if she could answer him. “Why is it?” he demanded. “Why is it that people can see so clearly when it is a question of their safety or their wealth, or their comfort? But when it is a question of their freedom they leave it for someone else to defend. They don’t see how they come to their freedom. They don’t realize that if the bargees at Wapping are unjustly taxed and the miners in the Forest of Dean are excluded from their rights, if the commoners are driven from the commons and the rich and the mighty encroach, then we are all at risk – even if it is not our own gardens which are taken. Even if it is not yet our rights which are threatened. Why don’t people see it? When governments persecute the sick, the poor, the women, then everyone has to stand up and defend them. Why don’t people see that?”

Hester looked into his angry face for a moment and then pulled him back to her and held him against her heart. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “You would think people would know by now that when there is an evil you should stop it at once.”

Charles Stuart, who was to be known as Charles the Second, came home to a country mad with joy. People wanted to get back to a system that everyone knew, many of them hoped to gain from a change of government: a chance to settle old scores and regain old ground. Quakers, sectaries, Roman Catholics and a number of old women who could be named as witches by spiteful neighbors felt the brunt of popular confidence which expected the new king to restore the old persecutions as well as freedoms. Commoners all around the country helped themselves to firewood, poached from the royal forests and the derelict parks, and there was a great rush of burglary from the empty palaces before the new royal servants came to stock-take.