A Murder on London Bridge (51 page)

Wiseman frowned. ‘Did you hear the Dowager is going to France as soon as there is a favourable wind? And good riddance! I shall never forgive her for what happened to Jane Scarlet.’

‘No,’ agreed Chaloner. ‘Her obsession with Becket meant she did not notice the plot unfurling in her home, but she still bears some responsibility for what happened. She probably did
not
know Bristol planned to overthrow the government – she thought he was just here to cause trouble for the Earl, which she applauded – but she still should have reported his return to Williamson.’

‘Explain how Becket’s bones tie into all this.’

‘They do not – they were a totally separate matter, although it took me a long time to realise it. It was Blue Dick’s fault –
he
knew something odd was happening on the Bridge, and was monitoring Chapel House to find out what. I saw him enter the place just before he was murdered, and it led me to afford it too great a significance – Becket’s relics were nothing compared to the rebellion.’

‘They were nothing anyway,’ said Wiseman. ‘They do not exist.’

Chaloner nodded, but did not tell the surgeon that the whole affair owed its origins to a spiteful letter penned by the Earl of Clarendon.

‘Did I tell you Jane was offered three hundred pounds to keep quiet about the fact that it was the Dowager’s men who attacked her?’ asked Wiseman after a moment. ‘I told her to accept. Well, why not? She will never be able to tell anyone what really happened, so she may as well get something for her suffering.’

‘And the culprits are dead anyway,’ said Chaloner. ‘Martin at her hands, and Doucett at yours.’

Wiseman nodded cheerfully. ‘But they were better deaths than the alternative they faced – prison-fever in one of London’s dungeons.’

‘There is a lot of that about. Luckin and Winter have succumbed to that particular ailment.’

‘Well, what do you expect? The government is right to keep the affair quiet, and all the perpetrators have been brought to one kind of justice or another. But perhaps some good will come of it. The authors of the Clarendon Code may see their laws are unpopular, and agree to relax them.’

‘On the contrary. It has given them a glimpse of how dangerous religious dissenters can be, and they will slam a lid on ferment harder than ever in future. This nasty little plot has done the cause of religious tolerance no favours whatsoever.’

Wiseman sighed. ‘You are probably right. But this is maudlin talk, and we are supposed to be enjoying ourselves. Let us drink to each other’s health, and thank God we survived all this fuss.’

Chaloner smiled and raised his glass.

Not many miles away, on a ship that rocked gently on the restless sea, two men stood at the rail and smoked their pipes in companionable silence. The night was very dark, and there was no moon, but several lanterns had been lit and swung lazily with the movement of the vessel. The only sounds were the soft lap of water, the creak of timber and rope, and the occasional muttered order issued by the officer of the watch.

‘What a damned waste of time,’ said one eventually. ‘All that effort and planning.’

‘Not much effort and planning on my part,’ said Bristol ruefully. ‘I only received word a month ago that there was a rebellion in the making, and that the time might be ripe for me to return.’

Will Goff sniffed. ‘Well, it took
me
nigh on two years. I had to gather the iconoclasts, assemble my troop of masked men, indoctrinate the likes of Luckin to my way of thinking, arrange safe places for caches of arms. And then there was my brother.’

‘Your brother,’ said Bristol flatly. ‘I heard he tried to kill you, and that wretched ex-Spymaster saved your life.’

‘Stephen would never have harmed me – he was aiming for Thurloe.’

Bristol turned to look at him. ‘There is one thing I still do not understand, though: why you failed to help Winter destroy Clarendon and the bishops. The powder was in place, and all you had to do was make sure one barrel blew. The others would have followed, regardless of their dampness.’

‘And I would have been dead,’ said Goff flatly. ‘Besides, Leigh was behind me with a gun – I would have been shot. Like poor Stephen. Still, perhaps it is just as well my brother is gone. He was too fervent a supporter of our cause, and played too complex a game. We are better off without him.’

Bristol gaped at him. ‘You mean to try again? You will not return to New England?’

Will Goff smiled. ‘We may not have succeeded this time, but London is deeply discontented with the current regime, and there will be other opportunities. Besides, I plan to spend a few weeks with you in Holland. We shall have plenty of time to discuss it.’

Bristol frowned. ‘That is not a good idea. I have been warned that the Earl’s spy will be coming to hunt me down. And being discovered plotting more rebellion is unlikely to endear me to the King. I will never win back his favour!’

‘Do not worry about Chaloner,’ said Goff contentedly. ‘I shall ensure he does not carry tales of our plans back to his Earl.’

‘You will?’ asked Bristol dubiously. ‘How? I understand he is rather good at his job.’

‘But so am I,’ said Goff softly. ‘So am I.’

Historical Note

In February 1664, a woman was assaulted in her Turnstile home. Two Frenchmen broke into her house, bound her husband in his shirt, raped her, and then abused her with a link (a torch) that was said to have been lit. The villains were caught, and the first rumour was that the affair was hushed up for £300, because the culprits were servants of the King’s mother.

The Dowager, Queen Henrietta Maria, was a woman of strong religious faith and decided opinions. Her haughty manner, along with her Catholicism, made her an unpopular figure in Restoration London, and her home, Somerset House on The Strand, became a focal point not only for prominent Catholics – including her group of Capuchin friars – but also for people who disliked the Earl of Clarendon. The portly, fussy, disapproving Earl had made an enemy of her, and she was only too happy to entertain his opponents. The Duke of Buckingham, Lady Castlemaine and the King’s pimp, Edward Progers, were among them. She left London for her native France in 1665, and never returned.

Another eminent Catholic of the time was Sir John Winter. He was a wealthy purveyor of lead and timber, who also possessed an extensive knowledge of gunpowder. Doubtless, this would have been seen as a worrying combination in an age of religious intolerance.

Lord Bristol, also Catholic, had been in disgrace since July 1663, partly for a reckless attempt to impeach the Earl of Clarendon in Parliament. A warrant for his arrest was issued on 23 August for ‘crimes of a high nature against the King’s person and government’, but he promptly went into hiding. Then, on 17 January 1664, he arrived at Wimbledon parish church and renounced his Catholicism in front of the vicar and witnesses. The hapless cleric, Thomas Luckin, was later arrested and taken to the Tower for failing to take the fugitive into custody. Also present at the incident were Abraham Doucett and William Martin.

Meanwhile, the Clarendon Code comprised four acts of Parliament that were passed between 1661 and 1665, during Clarendon’s Lord Chancellorship. All were designed to curb nonconformists. They comprised the Corporation Act (1661), which forbade municipal office to anyone not taking the sacraments at a parish church; the Act of Conformity (1662), which excluded them from Church offices; the Conventicle Act (also 1662) which made nonconformist worship illegal, even in private houses; and the Five-Mile Act (1665), which forbade nonconformist ministers to live or visit any place within five miles of somewhere they had preached. Some of these restrictions were loosened in 1689, but others were not repealed until the nineteenth century. They were bitterly opposed in 1660s London, because the King had promised religious tolerance and ‘liberty to tender consciences’ in a statement given in Breda in 1660, shortly before he was invited to reclaim his throne.

Many other people in
A
Murder on London Bridge
were real. John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Spymaster General and Secretary of State, was living in quiet retirement between Lincoln’s Inn and his Oxfordshire estates in the mid 1660s, the rabid pamphleteer William Prynne was his London neighbour, and Richard Wiseman was appointed as Surgeon to the Person in June 1660. John Bulteel was the Earl of Clarendon’s private secretary, and the clever, ruthless Joseph Williamson was Spymaster General. Humphrey Leigh was Sergeant at Arms to the Lord Chancellor from 1660 to 1673.

William Goff was a regicide, and his brother Stephen converted to Catholicism while in exile with the Royalists during the Commonwealth; he was later chaplain to the Dowager at Somerset House. William Goff left England at the Restoration, but was followed by Royalists determined to make him face justice. He was said to have lived in a cave in New England to avoid them. Thomas Chaloner, uncle of the fictional Thomas Chaloner of
A Murder on London Bridge
, was another regicide; he died in exile in 1662.

The Wardens of the London Bridge in 1664 were Robert Hussey and Anthony Scarlet, and the bookseller Charles Tyus and his wife Sarah were Bridge tenants. Henry Phillippes also lived on the Bridge, and was a mathematician–surveyor. His home allowed him to study the tides of the Thames, and he was a prolific writer of textbooks on them. He invented something known as the Phillippes Tide Ring, an instrument for measuring tidal variation. He gave a paper to the Royal Society in 1665, and died in 1677. Casper Kaltoff was a mechanic, who probably died in 1664.

Richard Culmer, vicar and iconoclast, was proud of the fact that he had despoiled Canterbury Cathedral, smashing its medieval stained glass with a pike as he stood on a long ladder. In his own words, he ‘rattled down proud Becket’s glassy bones’. The probability is that Becket’s relics, like so many others, had been destroyed during the Reformation – King Henry VIII certainly ordered them burned. Culmer was known by his contemporaries as Blue Dick, presumably for his penchant for blue clothes. He died in 1662. Another famous iconoclast of the time was Michael Herring, the zealous churchwarden of St Mary Woolchurch in London.

Five brave Penderel brothers did help the King escape after the Battle of Worcester. They belonged to an ancient and much-respected Catholic family, and did not, unlike many others, flock to London to take advantage of the King’s gratitude. The King rewarded them for their courage, anyway.

The London Bridge of 1664 was a very different place to the neatly functional late-nineteenth-century structure that bears its name today. It was the city’s only crossing of the river, and was topped by medieval houses, although a fire in 1663 had denuded its northern end. Above the Stone Gate were displayed the severed heads of men associated with the execution of Charles I, and the glorious Nonesuch House was an exotic mansion with onion domes.

Originally, the Bridge boasted its own chapel, too, dedicated to St Thomas Becket (who was said to have spent a night in Winchester Palace before travelling to his martyrdom in Canterbury). The chapel was demolished in 1533 and a secular house raised on its foundations.

Peter de Colechurch, credited with raising the first stone bridge in the late twelfth century, is thought to have been the only person ever buried in the chapel. Bones were discovered in the remnants of the old crypt when the Bridge was finally demolished in the early 1830s, which may well have been de Colechurch’s. It seems they were tipped unceremoniously into the river.