The Forest (60 page)

‘We must live quietly,’ she told her children. With the estate to look after, and the children, it was hard to see how she could go to live in Switzerland.

The family was quite extensive. There were John’s two sons from his previous marriage. They were young men now, but she had always brought them up like her own and with their father’s fortune gone and his name in disgrace, how were they to make good marriages? As for her own children, her son, to her great grief, had died at sixteen, but there were three surviving daughters, Margaret, Bridget and Tryphena who would all be needing to find husbands.

And then there was little Betty – bright-eyed Betty, so small and full of life. She had been conceived that last night before her husband departed: that night when she had clung to him, praying that he would return, so afraid that he would not. Little Betty: the child John Lisle had never seen; the child she would remember him by.

Two years passed. Then another. And another. The baby had become a toddler; she ran about now, she talked. She asked about her father. Alice would tell her stories about him, what a fine man he was.

‘I shall go and see the king one day and tell him I want my daddy back,’ she said. And who knew, thought Alice, given the genial character of Charles II, it might work. But not yet. It was too soon. So she wrote to her husband and told him every detail of what they all did and how Betty grew; and he wrote long and loving letters in return; and they both prayed that with the passing of time, he might come back – one day.

In the meantime, what was there to do? She was glad at least to be in the Forest. It was the country of her childhood and her family. In Betty she could relive her own happy early days. There was comfort in that. There was always plenty to keep her occupied, from day to day. Yet how could she fill the other void in her life?

To her surprise it was religion that did so.

She had never been especially religious before her marriage. Of course, she and John had been vigorous supporters of their congregation in London; but how much of that, she wondered, had been her husband’s desire to keep close with Cromwell and his family? Her new interest had come from another source entirely and was quite unexpected.

Stephen Pride’s wife. It was unusual for a Pride to marry someone from outside the Forest, but one fine Saturday morning, when the Pride family had gone down into Lymington to the little market there, Stephen Pride had met his future wife and that was it. Her family had come from Portsmouth, some years before. She was quiet, kindly, about Alice’s age with light-brown hair and grey eyes very like Alice’s own. ‘He says he married me because I reminded him of you,’ Joan Pride once confessed to her. Alice couldn’t help being rather pleased about that.

Joan Pride was devout. All her family were. Like so many others in the small towns round England’s coasts, these honest folk had read their Bible in the days of Queen Elizabeth and found nothing there about bishops and priests and ceremonies; so they had preferred to gather in small meeting houses, choose their own leaders and preachers, and lead a simple, godly life in peace, if only they were allowed. When Charles I had found such freedom intolerable, many of these folk had emigrated to the new settlements in America; some had fought the king in Cromwell’s army. During the Civil War and under the Protector’s rule they had been able to worship as they pleased.

Every Sunday, therefore, while her husband watched with a tolerant smile, Joan Pride had set out from Oakley, sometimes taking one or two of her children, and walked the two miles into Lymington where she joined her family at the meeting house. And now and then, when she was not in London with her husband, Alice had joined the congregation at their prayers. There was no reason why not. In matters of religion these had been democratic days. Although somewhat surprised to find such an important lady in their midst, they quietly welcomed her; and for her part, she liked them. ‘I’ve heard sermons there from travelling preachers quite as good’, she had told John Lisle, ‘as ever I heard in London.’

Often on these occasions she would lead her horse beside Joan Pride and her children as far as Oakley, in pleasant conversation, before returning to Albion House. Their relationship was entirely comfortable. As was the custom, she called her tenant’s wife Goody Pride and Joan called her Dame Alice. When John Lisle had been made one of Cromwell’s Lords, properly she should have been called Lady Lisle, or My Lady, but Alice noticed with amusement that Joan Pride continued quietly to call her Dame Alice – which let Alice know what her Puritan friend thought of lordship. In this way, over the years, while they preserved the usual formality between landlord and tenant, Alice Lisle and Joan Pride became friends.

It was the week after John Lisle had fled from England that Joan Pride came to Albion House. She just happened to be passing that way, she said. She had brought some cakes she had baked. It would have been the height of bad manners not to accept such a gift, even though she didn’t particularly want them, so Alice thanked her kindly, while Joan Pride’s grey eyes took in everything she saw in the big house she had never entered before.

‘Perhaps we shall see you at the meeting house, Dame Alice,’ she had said gently, as she left.

‘Yes,’ Alice had replied absently. ‘Yes, of course.’

She had gone to Boldre parish church, however, the next Sunday and for several more afterwards. With her regicide husband on the run she did not want to do anything that might cause unfavourable comment in the new royalist regime.

She was riding by a small coppice she owned about a month after this, when she noticed Stephen Pride at work on the fence. Asked what he was doing, he showed her where a section had been broken down. ‘Don’t want the deer getting in,’ he remarked. Had her steward asked him to see to this? she enquired. ‘Just noticed it as I was passing,’ he replied; and although she offered, he refused to take any payment. Gradually, in the weeks that followed, she noticed a number of similar incidents. One of the cattle was sick: it was brought in to her steward. When a tree fell across the lane that led to Albion House, Pride and three of the Oakley villagers were cutting it up and carting the wood to the house by early morning without even being asked. Her Forest friends were silently looking after her, she realized.

She continued to go to Boldre parish church. She suspected that Joan Pride understood. But after some time, when it was clear that nothing she did was going to help her husband or save his fortune, she turned up at the Lymington meeting house again one Sunday and was quietly welcomed as if she had never avoided the place. She went often thereafter.

And she might have continued to do so indefinitely, had it not been for the English Parliament.

King Charles II was a tolerant man and, unlike his father, his tolerance seemed to extend to religion. He told his councillors that he was content to allow his subjects to worship as they pleased. But his council and his Parliament were not content with that at all. The gentlemen in Parliament wanted order. They had no wish to encourage the Puritan sects who had given so much trouble before. And besides, if people were free to worship as they pleased it might allow the Roman Catholic Church to flourish again and that was unthinkable. So the Acts of Parliament followed and the new king could not stop them. Only the Anglican prayer book with its formal services might be used in churches. Protestant sects – Dissenters as they were called – were banned from any church. Soon, it was said, a new Act would ban them from meeting within five miles of any town. Joan Pride’s congregation at Lymington was practically illegal.

‘It’s monstrous,’ Alice declared. ‘What possible harm can these people do?’ But the law was the law. She went to Boldre church, used the Anglican prayer book and held her peace. She told Joan Pride she was sorry for what had happened and the other woman made no comment. Indeed, for three months she did not even see her friend. And then one day she chanced to meet her in the lane that led south from Boldre church, and Joan Pride told her that there was a preacher, a certain Mr Whitaker, who was willing to come to Lymington. ‘But we daren’t have him in the town, Dame Alice. So we’ve nowhere for him to preach,’ she explained.

Alice had heard of this preacher, a scholarly young man with a fine reputation. ‘I should like to have heard him myself,’ she confessed. After only a few moments’ thought, and rather to her own surprise, she heard herself saying: ‘He could come to Albion House. He might stay as my guest and preach in the hall. Mightn’t you and your friends come to hear him there?’

And so it was done. Mr Robert Whitaker proved to be a splendid preacher. Before the royal Restoration he had been a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was also very good-looking. Her daughter Margaret, especially, seemed to take an interest in him; and he, for his part, seemed to need little persuading before he promised to come and visit them again. Alice was not sure what she thought of this new development. A young preacher, however eloquent, was not quite the match she had considered for one of her daughters.

She had hardly had time to worry about this, however, before a letter from her husband had driven all other thoughts from her mind. He had a friend who was to make a visit to Switzerland and who would be happy to convey her with his family, at no cost to herself, and bring her back again after a month. She could bring little Betty, the daughter he had never seen. They were to leave in three weeks. As John Lisle wrote:

There being no time to carry messages back and forth between us, I shall either rejoice to see you, my dearest love, and my daughter in Lausanne; or else learn with grief but understanding, that you cannot make this journey.

What should she do? I must go, she concluded. ‘You are going to see your father,’ she told the little girl. She began to prepare and pack.

So it came as a particularly painful blow when, five days before she was to leave, a messenger arrived with news that John Lisle had been murdered in Lausanne. It was not certain who was behind it. Certainly not the king himself. At no time did Charles II ever indulge in acts of vengeance of this kind. But there were other royalists who were certainly capable of such a deed. It was said that his French mother, the widow of the executed king, might have been responsible. Alice thought so.

Anyway, she had no husband now and Betty had no father. By chance young Whitaker came calling not long after.

1670

Zephyr was blowing his gentlest breeze through the green glades as King Charles II of England went forth in his New Forest, that warm August day, to hunt.

He had been there before. Five years back, when the terrible plague was raging in London, the king and his court had come down to the safety of Sarum; and while there he had made a small tour of the villages round about. ‘When I was running away from Cromwell, after I hid in the oak tree, I came through Sarum.’ This had included a ride into the Forest. ‘I slept rough in the New Forest two nights,’ he genially told his courtiers, ‘and not even the charcoal burners knew I was there.’

And now he had decided to visit the Forest again, with a party of courtiers, for his royal pleasure.

Stephen Pride looked at his friend Purkiss and Purkiss looked at Puckle. Furzey should have been there too, but he had said he wasn’t coming, not for any king. So it was the three of them and Pride’s son Jim, who were waiting on their ponies by the gate of the King’s House at Lyndhurst, where they had been told to report, as the king and his party emerged.

Then Stephen Pride looked at King Charles II of England and King Charles II looked at Stephen Pride.

The royal visitor was certainly a memorable figure. Tall, swarthy, with that mass of curling brown hair that fell to his chest so thickly that you might have thought it was a wig, Charles II exhibited both sides of his ancestry very clearly. His fine brown eyes and the long line of his mouth were those of the Celtic Stuart family, but to these features were added the heavy nose and the sensual, cynical power of his French mother’s Bourbon ancestors. He glanced now at Pride with exactly the same cheerful cynicism he would have shown if he were addressing a pretty young serving wench or his royal cousin King Louis XIV of France.

Stephen Pride stared, but it wasn’t so much the king whom Pride was looking at. It was the women.

There were several of them. They were dressed in hunting clothes just like the men, with jaunty hunting caps. The queen was not among them that day, but there was a vivacious, dark-haired young woman who whispered something in the king’s ear that made him laugh. This, Pride guessed, must be the comic actress, Nell Gwynn, whom all England knew to be the king’s latest mistress. He noticed an elegant young Frenchwoman and several others. Were these all royal mistresses too? He didn’t know. But as the independent New Forest smallholder looked at the French and Celtic prince he wondered, with a touch of secret envy, how the devil the handsome rogue got away with it all.

There were nine in the royal party including the king and four ladies. Pride did not know who the other men were, but one – a strikingly handsome youth, a delicate version of the king, really – he assumed must be Monmouth, the monarch’s bastard son. In attendance was Sir Robert Howard, an aristocrat whose official title of Master Keeper meant he was nominally in charge of the deer in the bailiwick in which they were to hunt; there were also several local gentlemen keepers. The party was to hunt from Bolderwood lodge and, as Jim Pride was underkeeper there, he had recruited his father and Puckle to act as extra riders. There were usually some tips to be had on these occasions. Furzey had been asked too, but as he’d refused they’d taken Stephen Pride’s friend Purkiss from Brockenhurst. He had a reputation for being no fool, so they reckoned they were probably better off with him than with Furzey anyway.

They were all ready. Stephen Pride was sixty years old, but he had to admit he was quite excited. He’d been a happily faithful husband for over thirty years, but to his own amusement he found himself stealing glances at the king’s pretty lady friends. Life in the old dog yet, he thought cheerfully, and was glad he was fit enough to participate with his son in what, he supposed, would be a tiring day.