The Forest (58 page)

Dear God, Alice could have cried out, if you put yourself at the head of four hundred men, capture the sheriff and declare war on the government, what do you expect? But she understood. She looked at the children, saw the eldest boy watching her intently, wanted to look at him with pity, but knew she must not. Instead, she looked stern. ‘What do you want with me?’ she asked.

‘It can’t be right’, the other said, indicating the six children, ‘to leave these without a father, whatever he did. I mean, it was he who stopped Wagstaff harming those men in Salisbury. He never hurt anyone. And if the Protector lets him live, I know he’d give him his word never to take up arms again, or even have any dealings with the king at all.’

‘Are you saying you wish me to write all this to my husband? You think he can persuade the Protector?’

‘Yes.’ A light of hope appeared in Mrs Penruddock’s face. ‘Would you do that?’

Alice stared at her. She could see the hope dawning and she knew she must crush it. She could not add to this family’s misery by awakening false optimism that would only be dashed. Her gaze fell upon Thomas again. The boy looked more sensible than his mother, she thought. ‘Mrs Penruddock.’ Putting on her sternest frown she addressed herself partly to the boy as well. ‘I must tell you that there is no hope at all. If the judges find him guilty he will surely die. That is all I have to say to you.’

The woman’s face fell, but she had not quite given up. ‘You will not even write?’ she pleaded.

Alice hesitated. What could she reply? ‘I will write,’ she said unwillingly. ‘But it won’t do any good.’

‘Well at least she said she’d write,’ said Mrs Penruddock to her children as they went back.

And write Alice did – a long and passionate letter. She described the interview to her husband and made all the points in Colonel Penruddock’s favour, including some that his wife hadn’t thought of. Whatever his intentions at the start of the ill-fated business, she hadn’t the least doubt that if Penruddock gave his word to Cromwell he would keep it.

John Lisle’s reply came a few days later. He agreed with Alice and had talked to Cromwell but, hardly surprisingly, he couldn’t help much.

The leaders will be tried by jury and the judges they ill-used at Salisbury shall not sit in judgement lest it be thought they seek vengeance.

If Penruddock is found guilty – and surely he is so – the Protector will grant him a merciful death. But he cannot do more. If he pardons Penruddock, what encouragement he’d give to any other rebellion.

Thomas did not remember the details of the days that followed. There were letters, desperate appeals; for a time it seemed that a guarantee of safe conduct and pardon offered to some of their followers might be applied to Penruddock and Grove too, but this was denied. Next the authorities appeared to hesitate about where the trials were to be, but by April it was decided that the rebels taken down in the West Country would be tried down there, in Exeter city, where they were being held. Every day he asked his mother, ‘When shall we go to see Father?’ and always she replied: ‘As soon as he sends for us.’

It was clear that his father still thought it might be necessary for his wife to go to London on his behalf, so they remained at home. But in the third week of April a message came. The trial was about to begin. Colonel Penruddock had sent for his wife.

‘Can’t I come too?’ Thomas had begged. Not now, he was told. So once again, he had to stay at home and wait.

His mother was gone a week, but before she returned he had already heard the verdict. Guilty. They had sent to Cromwell for the death warrant. She was frantic now. Penruddock and Grove had issued an appeal to the judges.

She herself, the moment she reached her home, immediately despatched a letter to Alice Lisle. ‘I’m sure she can do something,’ she declared. Although why this should be the case, when they had never heard another word from her, Thomas did not know.

One blow, however, they had not foreseen. On the day after her return, when she was trying to comfort her children, a party of six soldiers under an officer came to the door of the house and informed the unhappy woman that she must leave.

‘Leave? What do you mean? Why?’

‘House is sequestered.’

‘On whose orders?’

‘The Sheriff’s.’

‘Am I to be turned out of doors, then? With my children?’

‘Yes.’

They spent that night at an inn at Salisbury; the next with their cousins at Hale. The following day, however, word came that they might return. There had been a mistake. No decision as to their property had been taken yet.

The fact that Alice Lisle, hearing about it the same day, had guessed that the sheriff, a greedy man, was probably trying to get the property for himself and sent an urgent message to her husband to have the order rescinded was something the Penruddock family never knew.

The day after that Mrs Penruddock and all her children set out for Exeter. It took them three days. By the time they reached it the warrant for the executions had arrived from Cromwell, written and signed in his own hand. Instead of the usual gruesome hanging, drawing and quartering of traitors, Penruddock was to be executed cleanly by having his head struck off with an axe. Never having seen a traitor’s execution the family did not fully understand what a mercy this was.

They were allowed, in that last week, to see him twice. The first time came as a shock to Thomas. Although, thanks to his wife, he had been provided with a clean shirt, Colonel Penruddock was looking gaunt and haggard in his small cell. His gaolers had not let him wash as often as he wished and Thomas was aware of a certain grimy odour in his father’s presence. The effect of this, however, after the initial shock, was to make him even more moved than he might have been otherwise. The little children just stared at their unkempt father in confusion. He spoke to them all in his usual calm and kindly way, blessed them and kissed them and told them they must be brave.

‘Perhaps’, Thomas heard him murmur to their mother, ‘Cromwell may relent. But I do not think so.’

The second occasion was more difficult. With time passing, although she tried to keep calm, his mother had become more and more distracted. As the day of the execution approached she seemed to think that her appeal to Alice Lisle was sure to bring relief. ‘I can’t understand why it’s taking so long,’ she would suddenly break out plaintively. ‘The reprieve must come.’ She’d frown. ‘It must do.’ She also for some reason would return in her mind, again and again, to the fact that the sheriff’s men had turned her out of her house for two days. ‘To think they could do such a thing,’ she would exclaim.

They knew their second visit would be their last because the execution was to be the following day. They went there in the afternoon and entered the prison.

But for some reason there was a delay. They had to wait a while in an outer chamber, where they found themselves in the company of the senior gaoler who passed the time by thoughtfully eating a pie and picking his teeth. He had a dirty grizzled beard, which he had not trimmed because, nowadays, there was no one to make him. They tried not to look at him.

But he looked at them. They interested him. He did not like royalists, especially cavalier gentry, which these Penruddocks were. If the father of these children was about to have his head cut off, so much the better. He observed their aristocratic clothes – lace and satin for the girls; why, the younger boy had little rosettes on his shoes – and wondered idly how they would look after he and his men had had a chance to spoil them. He could see the clothes in tatters, the boys with a black eye or two and the mother …

The mother was jabbering on about something now. She’d hoped for a reprieve. That was a joke. No one was going to reprieve Penruddock, even he knew that. But he listened curiously all the same. She’d hoped Judge Lisle would speak to Cromwell. He’d heard of Lisle. Never seen him, though. Close to Cromwell he’d heard. The woman had written to his wife. A useless hope, obviously, but the wives of condemned men sometimes got like that.

‘Lisle, did you say,’ he suddenly interjected with a smile, to throw her off guard. ‘Judge Lisle?’

‘Yes, good man.’ She turned to him eagerly. ‘Has anything been heard from him, do you know?’

He paused. He intended to savour this. ‘The warrant for your husband’s death is made out by Lisle. In his own hand. He was with Cromwell when he signed it.’

The effect was delicious. He watched her face fall into abject confusion. She seemed to collapse and wither before his eyes. He had never seen anything equal to it. The fact that he hadn’t the least idea whether Judge Lisle was even within a hundred miles of Cromwell or the warrant made it even better. ‘’Tis well known,’ he added for artistic effect.

‘But I wrote again to his wife,’ poor Mrs Penruddock wailed.

‘They say it’s she’, he went on blandly, ‘who especially urged the poor Colonel’s death.’ The suggestion that he pitied her cursed husband made the thing sound more plausible. The woman almost fainted. The eldest boy looked ready for murder. And he was just trying to think whether there was anything else he could invent to taunt these unhappy people when a signal from one of the guards told him that the prisoner was ready.

‘Time to see the Colonel, now,’ he announced. And so the Penruddocks passed from his presence. Being unversed in the practices of malice, it had not occurred to them that every word the gaoler said had been a lie.

Colonel Penruddock had done all he could to prepare himself for his final meeting with his children. They found him washed, brushed and in good spirits. To each he spoke cheerfully and calmly, and told them to be brave for his sake.

‘Remember,’ he said, ‘no matter what difficulties may face you, they are still small beside the sufferings of Our Lord. And, if men revile you, that is nothing when He watches over you and loves you with a love far greater than they can ever know.’

To his wife he spoke what words of comfort he could and then he made her promise that she would take the children out of Exeter at first light the following morning. ‘At first light, I beg you. You must be well clear of the city and on your way before morning is stirring. Do not stop until you get to Chard.’ This was nearly twenty-five miles, a good day’s journey.

Mrs Penruddock nodded and murmured a few words, but she seemed to be in a daze. As for Thomas, he could only bow his head to hide the tears when his father embraced him and told him to be brave. Almost before he knew what was happening the door of the cell was being opened and they were being taken out. He tried to look back at his father. But they had shut the door again.

It was not until ten that night that Mrs Penruddock seemed to spring to life. The smaller children were asleep in the big chamber they all shared at the inn, but Thomas was awake when she suddenly sat bolt upright, with a look of horror on her pale face and cried: ‘I never bade him adieu.’

She started to search for pen and paper on the table. ‘I know it’s here,’ she murmured plaintively. ‘I must write a letter,’ she added with urgency.

Thomas found her what she needed and watched as she wrote. It was hard to know what to make of his mother. When she had the will to do so, when she concentrated her mind, she could express herself with dignity; but then, in almost the same breath, some other petty or homely thought would come into her mind and cause her suddenly to veer off her course entirely. So it was with her letter. It started so well:

My sad parting was so far from making me forget you, that I scarce thought upon myself since, but wholly upon you. Those dear embraces which I yet feel, and shall never lose … have charmed my soul to such a reverence of your remembrance …

Yet a few lines later the memory of the sheriff’s men suddenly intruded.

’Tis too late to tell you what I have done for you; how turned out of doors because I came to beg mercy …

And then returned once more, abruptly, to a lovely and passionate ending:

Adieu, therefore, ten thousand times, my dearest dear! Your children beg your blessing, and present their duties to you.

It was eleven at night when she finished, but a groom, when handsomely paid, agreed to take the letter to the gaol and returned a little after midnight with a brief and loving reply in the Colonel’s hand.

Not until the early hours, however, did Thomas fall asleep.

It would never have happened if Mrs Penruddock had been on time. She had tried to be. By eight o’clock on that pale grey morning the carriage had already been waiting at the gateway of the inn for nearly an hour.

She wanted to be gone. She not only meant to obey her husband, but she wanted to remove herself from the scene, to close herself off – and her children, of course – from the terrible business, from the loss she could not bear to think about. This was no intentional delay. But first one thing was missing, then another; then the youngest girl chose that moment to be sick. By nine, Mrs Penruddock was in such a state of fretful agitation that she lost her purse and had a quarrel with the innkeeper who thought he might not be paid. Unthinkingly, she warned him that if he didn’t mind his tongue she would surely see her husband should hear about it. Which made him give her such a strange look; and as she realized with an awful coldness that in a few moments, dear God, she’d have no husband and perhaps then not even money to pay any more innkeepers at all, she might well have burst into tears; except that now her native strength came back to her rescue again and she came to herself enough to realize where her purse might be, and to find it. So then, at last, with ten o’clock sounding from a bell nearby, she mustered her children and bustled them to the carriage, and called for Thomas.

But Thomas had gone.

He couldn’t help it. He had walked along the street and followed the passing crowd which, he guessed, must be going towards the place of execution. For how, being in the city still, could he lose the opportunity to see the father he loved so much, and worshipped, one last time?