Rebels and traitors

Chapter Fifty-One — Wapping: 14 November 1648

Gideon Jukes escorted the coffin to London.

More details of the raid had emerged. Twenty-two Royalists had ridden out from Pontefract Castle, on Friday night. 'Eluding' Sir Henry Cholmeley's troops, a feat they achieved with ease, they crept south to Doncaster. They hid up in woods. At sunrise on Sunday morning, they emerged and met a spy from the town, carrying a Bible as identification — obviously the same man who directed Gideon. He passed on to the cavaliers details of how Doncaster was guarded and gave directions where to find Rainborough.

The horsemen presented themselves at St Sepulchre's Gate, on the south side. They claimed that they had brought dispatches from Cromwell. Since they appeared to have ridden up on the London road, the single sentinel on this approach believed it all too trustingly.

The raiders split up: six to fall on the guard at St Mary's Gate north of the town, through which they would make their eventual escape; six to tackle the main guard as it patrolled the middle of the town; six to cover the streets in case the alarm was raised. Four went to Rainborough's lodging, where they gained admittance by once again spinning the yarn about dispatches and were taken upstairs by the lieutenant.

After the murder, the cavaliers rode home in daylight to Pontefract. At two o'clock in the afternoon, in full view of Cholmeley and his several hundred cavalry, who made no attempt to interfere, they trotted back into the castle. A great shout was heard from within the garrison. It was said that the castle governor then sent a letter to Sir Henry Cholmeley to say that Rainborough was lying dead on the streets of Doncaster. Cholmeley was reported to have burst out laughing, and laughed for a quarter of an hour.

In Doncaster, recriminations flew. Captain John Smith was believed to have been with a whore at the Hinde Tavern. He fled, leaving a note for Major Wilkes, in which he claimed he intended to go to Fairfax at army headquarters to protest his innocence. He never got there; his money ran out halfway. Discovered and arrested, he was taken to London with a warrant to answer to both Houses of Parliament. While he was locked up at Ludgate, someone told him he had been convicted by a council of war and would be summarily shot. According to him, when he appealed to God for advice, God advised him to escape — so he took himself to the Netherlands, where in a feeble attempt to clear his name he issued a pamphlet, full of excuses for his own conduct and accusations of cowardice and grudge-bearing against Major Wilkes.

The rest of Rainborough's officers pleaded publicly for revenge for the murder. They took this chance to deplore the political situation, saying the King had deluded them 'into the hopes of a safe peace by the expectation of an unsafe Treaty'. Then they asked why, if the country was paying taxes, those taxes could not be used to pay the army? So the miserable quest for payment of arrears continued.

Sir Henry Cholmeley's collusion was taken for granted by both Royalist and Parliamentary news-sheets. Yet he was never examined or called to account.

Oliver Cromwell was ordered to end the siege at Pontefract. Although he sent for a formidable battery of guns, it took five more months. Cromwell was also instructed to conduct an enquiry into Rainborough's murder; nothing came of that. When the castle eventually surrendered to John Lambert, in March 1649, six officers would be exempted from mercy: men who were believed to have taken part in the murder, some of whom brazenly admitted it. They were given six days to escape if they could; the governor and one other made a getaway but were recaptured and executed. William Paulden, who had led the raid, had already died during the siege. Three others were hidden in the castle walls by their colleagues and evaded capture. By then, the Leveller John Lilburne was complaining bitterly in London that William Rainborough had been given no help to find his brother's killers.

The Tower Guards were moved back to St Albans. The House of Commons called for them to be disbanded, whether as a punishment for not protecting their colonel or because of fears that his radical spirit might linger dangerously among his men. The regiment, its name discontinued, was given to Colonel George Cook, a returned emigre from Massachusetts.

It took a fortnight to bring the body home. Even before he knew how negligently Parliament would treat his colonel's murder, Gideon Jukes was considering his position. With Rainborough gone, the Levellers had lost the most senior officer to support their cause — the only officer of note. With him departed any real hope of having their new ideas accepted. Gideon had two gloomy November weeks of slow travel with the hearse. As he rode, he decided to resign from the army. He had been selected for escort duty because he was the most junior captain but when he left, he warned Major Wilkes that he might stay in London. He felt bad, because the regiment was in disarray, with terrible morale. Gideon told Wilkes that although he would always support Parliament, he was a volunteer and now wanted to be a volunteer no longer. The major merely reminded him wearily that if he kept the horse he was issued with for escort duties, he would have to pay for it.

On the 14th of November they reached the outskirts of London. Messages had gone ahead. As the cortege arrived at Tottenham High Cross, the escort found an astonishing crowd. Major William Rainborough, the colonel's brother, headed the mourners. Gideon had to tell him, as quickly as possible, what was now known about the circumstances of the murder. Although Gideon had prepared himself, he wept as he related it.

Opposition hacks would sneer snobbishly that 'Will the weaver, Tom the tapster, Kit the cobbler, Dick the door-sweeper' had turned out for their hero, and so they had, though the crowd also contained many people from the professions and from commerce. Thousands of City Levellers were waiting, for the first time wearing sea-green ribbons in sympathy with Rainborough's seafaring past.

The unprecedented procession wound through streets that were oddly silent. Even people who did not plan to follow the coffin, stood to watch it pass. Many cried. The cortege advanced slowly through Smithfield, past the cattle-pens and then the horse-market, always quieter on a Tuesday, than it would be at the main fair on Friday. Coming down along the western city wall, they passed the Old Bailey and the grim Fleet Prison, then approached Ludgate Hill. When they entered the old west gate, they were in London proper. Stationers' Hall was to their left and old St Paul's up ahead at the top of the short hill; Inigo Jones's columned portico was facing them and beyond it, the much more ancient square tower, blackened with generations of coal smoke, its tall lancet windows and dramatic flying buttresses familiar and unmistakable. As the procession made its way around the church, stationers and booksellers closed their businesses and joined behind, all wearing the newfangled sea-green ribbons: Rainborough's colours, the Levellers' new symbol. At Cheapside, Gideon was in his home streets. By Bread Street he spotted Anne Jukes, with Robert and Amyas, who noticed with amazement that it was Gideon in charge of the honour guard, before they too began walking after the coffin.

The procession grew: forty coaches became fifty or sixty, followed by fifteen hundred horses. By the time they reached the commercial centre at Cornhill, passing close to Guildhall and right outside the flamboyant Royal Exchange, the perpetual creak and rumble of slowly moving wheels on the cobbles and the steady sounds of hooves from the multitude of gently ridden horses filled the air and would remain one of Gideon's clearest memories.

After Leadenhall, they reached the Tower of London. Since Thomas had been commander of the Tower Guards, as his coffin passed, deep-throated cannon boomed out in his honour. These guns, which had not been fired in anger during the civil war — all the guns that remained here after Fairfax's and Cromwell's requisitions for Colchester, Wales and the North — resounded mournfully across the Thames. In the enormous procession, startled horses dragged their reins and skittered nervously.

From the Tower it was a short distance through St Katharine's to the parish of Whitechapel and Wapping. Wapping High Street, close to the Thames, was a long street, off which ran numerous alleys filled with small tenements or cottages, built by sailors' victuallers, the stock from which the Rainborough family had originally come. Among the numerous shipping-related businesses were more than thirty taverns for the refreshment of sailors, from which the sailors now emerged, even the tipsiest managing to stand erect respectfully. The parish church itself, the Chapel of St John, Wapping, had a foreign look. Its belfry was no more than a gatehouse above a classically pedimented entrance door, with neither tower nor spire, which gave the chapel a plain, Dutch or Scandinavian appearance. Thomas Rainborough was buried there at St John's, alongside his father. There was a long wait while as many as possible packed in. It was an Independent funeral and the Royalist press sneered that 'the godly had their hands in their pockets' (despising religious formality). Thomas Brooks, the colonel's friend and colleague, who had served with him on water and land, preached the sermon. Appropriately he took his theme from St John:

'The whole world (saith he) lies in wickedness, in malignity; the world lies in troublesomeness. The greatest part of the great ones of this world do basely and wickedly against God! When may a man be said to do gloriously? — When he does things others have no heart for, or are afraid to do. When he holds on, notwithstanding discouragement, "blow high or blow low, rain or shine, let men smile or frown"… I need not tell you what discouragements the noble Champion met with, but through all he was able to do God's work and to serve his generation… It is nothing for a man to serve his generation when he hath wind and tide on his side.'

Colonel Rainborough had never had wind and tide on his side, thought Gideon rebelliously. He assessed the man for himself quietly, and decided Rainborough was perhaps never intended for the political greatness that was being put upon him now. But when the colonel's life was cut short, he was only thirty-eight years old, probably still finding his way. He was great enough to terrify his enemies and to give heart to his friends, through what he was and the thought of what he might have become. He was honest and fearless, worthy of the affection and respect that were shown to him that day at Wapping, worthy of the real grief that affected so many people. Gideon Jukes, for one, felt as if he had lost a father for the second time. It left him more disheartened than he had ever been since the war started seven years before.

Brooks was outspokenly critical of those who now held power:

'If Parliamentmen and men in the army, and in the City, and round the Kingdom did believe more gloriously, they would do more gloriously for God, in their relations and places than now they do…

'The more I think of the gallantry and worth of this Champion, the further off I am from discovering his worth. I think he was one of whom this sinful Nation was not worthy; he was one of whom this declining Parliament was not worthy; he was one of whom these divided, formal, carnal Gospellers was not worthy. He served his Generation faithfully, though he died by the hands of treachery… They honoured him in life and they showed no small respect to him in death: He was a joy to the best, and a terror to the worst of men.'