August 1659
On a bright, summer day I rode alone from London to Oxford, getting fresh horses by showing the ring that told the world I was Sir Thomas Stonehouse, Second Secretary of State and a mix of other titles and honours. These, not to put too fine a point on it, meant I was – or had been – Oliver Cromwell’s spymaster.
Cromwell had been dead for eighteen months. His son Richard had succeeded him but had nowhere near the iron grip of his father on the country. Outside London, Oliver Cromwell’s spectre still hung over the country. Some people could not believe he was dead. Others said his spirit had been seen at the great battlefields of Marston Moor and Naseby. Few wanted to rekindle that war except members of the Sealed Knot, Royalists who believed the executed King had died a martyr. They wanted revenge and the return of the King’s son, who had done little for his country, except sire fifteen bastards at my spies’ latest count. Some in the Sealed Knot were sincere. Most wanted their lands and power back.
My son, Luke, was sincere. When my steward, Scogman, told me Luke was a member of the Sealed Knot my first instinct was to confront him – not about being a Royalist, for he scarcely made that a secret, but about joining a hopeless, ramshackle conspiracy like the Knot. I dismissed this approach. Luke would not believe me. It would make things worse between us, and they were bad enough. I determined to let him find out for himself. The Knot leaked like a sieve. Simultaneous uprisings were planned in the north, the West Country and even in East Anglia, Cromwell’s old heartland. Luke was part of a group planning to take over an armoury in Oxford. I could have told him who would let him down, the county gentlemen who would promise money which would not be paid, or troops who would not arrive. Instead I would let him find out for himself. He would be arrested. Scogman would see he was not charged or gaoled but brought straight back to me.
It would be a salutary lesson, better than any I could give him. He would be contrite, realising how false his friends were, how hopeless the Royalist cause was. England would never see a King on the throne again, least of all the self-proclaimed Charles II, who begged his way from one European court to another. I would be magnanimous. Because of the war I had rarely seen Luke as a child. This would bring us closer together, giving me the father–son relationship I had always wanted.
So I imagined until the rebellion grew closer and Scogman set out for Oxford. He wore bucket boots with a jump jacket of oiled leather, and carried an old-fashioned broadsword and a pistol. I not only felt a flood of nostalgia for the war, but the weapons brought me to my senses with a jolt. Years at my desk had given me the mind of a planner, not a soldier. I began to think like a soldier again and a soldier – unlike a politician – knew that nothing went according to plan. My intelligence might be wrong. It could be a full-scale rebellion. Luke might be killed.
When I reached Highpoint, my estate in Oxfordshire, I learned the intelligence was right. One of the leading Royalists in the county, Sir Simon Barber, had been bought with land he had lost during the war. The others would not move a finger without him. From information Barber gave us some were arrested.
‘Including Luke?’ I said with relief.
Scogman shook his head. Luke had disappeared. From that moment the plan I had carefully constructed to bring my son to his senses, and the two of us closer together, fell to pieces.
Although the uprising was a dismal failure everywhere else, Sir George Booth, an excellent soldier and well-liked in his county, managed to raise 4,000 men and hold Cheshire and part of Lancashire for several weeks. This inspired Luke and a group of hotheads to try and take over an armoury. It was a foolhardy project; the sort Cromwell used to dismiss with contempt as going for glory, not results. Scarcely more than boys, they were too young to have fought in the war and were dying to distinguish themselves for their King. Two did. Several were wounded, including Luke. I made sure he was kept in a separate cell. I hired a coach and removed my ring so only the gaoler knew who I was and, with Scogman, went there late one evening.
It was hot and muggy. The stench of the gaol hit us through the windows of the coach. We clamped nosegays of herbs tightly to our faces.
‘You’ll need those, sir,’ the gaoler said. ‘Time of the year for gaol fever. Found one of them dead in his cell this morning.’ He spat reflectively as he selected a key. ‘Unless it was the plague.’
I silently cursed my stupidity. A fine lesson if Luke died from it! He had never been very well ever since he had suffered a bad burn to his face in the riots in London at the end of the war. Although she never said anything, I knew my wife Anne blamed me for not allowing them to shelter with her friend Lucy Hay, the Countess of Carlisle, because I suspected she was a Royalist.
‘Hurry, man!’ I said, almost snatching the key from the gaoler. Then, when he was about to insert it in the lock I stopped him, putting a finger to my lips.
Luke had a beautiful voice, which rang out like a church bell. What he was saying was the last thing I expected to hear.
‘When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates;
And my divine Sarah whispers
At the prison Grates …’
There was more. It was a poem by the Royalist poet Richard Lovelace, written in his cell. After lying ‘entangled in Sarah’s hair’, the poet says, the very gods ‘know no such Liberty’.
A hollow knocking came from the cell next door, and one of Luke’s fellow prisoners joined in. His voice was much more feeble but its import just as determined as they chanted that when they sang about the glories of the King, ‘the winds that curl the Floodes know no such liberty’.
I signalled to the gaoler. Far from stopping them, the sound of the key redoubled their defiant chanting of the final line. There was so little light from the barred window, I could see only a shape sprawled on a stone bench. As the gaoler opened the door further, the candles in a corridor sconce lit up his face. Few would have thought us father and son without the hook of the Stonehouse nose. There the resemblance ended. At seventeen, the fresh, tight curves of his good cheek held the lofty arrogance that only a privileged upbringing on an estate like Highpoint gives a man. The raw, rippled skin of his burned cheek, which at first had made him a withdrawn child, now only emphasised that absolute assurance, as he realised people often took it as a badge of the war he had never fought in.
Most people saw the same assurance in my face, but it was skin deep. Once I had believed in the republic as Luke believed in the King. I still did, but not with the enthusiasm of the child of the streets I had once been. Years of working with Cromwell, of looking for a form of government that would work without falling back on the army, had convinced me that power came first. If I looked in the mirror, which I seldom cared to, I saw a man who looked older than his thirty-five years, whose cheeks were rather too pink from sweet sack, and whose once fiery red hair was a dull copper streaked with grey.
The rush of relief when I saw that Luke was not only well, but