Rebels and traitors

Chapter Fifty-Four — London and Lewisham: Autumn 1648

Anne Jukes was in her apron, with her hands all floury, when Robert Allibone's journeyman, as Amyas now was, urgently called her from her kitchen. Completely flustered, Anne gesticulated helplessly, not recognising Juliana among the strangers with Amyas. The tailboard was down. Amyas was shaking his head, almost as a warning, and then Anne saw the wasted, barely conscious soldier that this strange family had brought to her. Ah Lambert!

Her husband slithered over the edge of the cart. He had grown so thin that Anne Jukes, a brewer's sturdy daughter, was strong enough to haul his arm over her shoulder and support his weight. She staggered with him indoors. Amyas, bring these people in and look after their things, please. I need to know what has happened…'

So the Lovells gazed up from their ramshackle flatbed at the gracious gables and sash windows of a substantial three-storey London merchant's house, then they were brought into a warm kitchen that glittered with burnished copper utensils, where they waited to be interviewed by Anne. Upstairs, it took her almost an hour to get Lambert undressed, washed and laid in a clean bed. A maid had been sent running out for a doctor. Downstairs, Juliana Lovell took it upon herself to find a cloth and remove Anne's nutmeg-scented bread pudding from the oven when it was obviously done. The boys stared with great hope at the pudding until they fell asleep against their mother, who was already dozing in exhaustion on a settle.

So Anne eventually found them, and realised she would have to take them in. She went quietly back upstairs and made up the guest bed. It was a high four-poster, a full tester, with fantastical tapestry hangings and swag ties so heavy they could have knocked a bullock unconscious. There her refugees all slept together that night, the most comfortable night they had had since they left Essex, or perhaps ever.

Next day, Anne took the little boys to the Jukes' shop, where Thomas solemnly helped to weigh things out while Valentine gorged himself on sweet raisins and almonds. Leaving them in safe hands, Anne hurried home. She found Juliana was ready to let her guard down, lulled by the unaccustomed luxury of knowing that her children were warm, fed and secure. It was weeks since she had freely spoken to another adult. It was three years since she last had a close woman friend and longer than that since she had openly discussed anything to do with her family.

Anne Jukes first wanted to find out what had happened to Lambert. All her normal housework was deferred. Upstairs, her husband slumbered and began his recovery. Anne was herself in a state of shock. She welcomed a morning when she could sit idle at the kitchen fireside while she prepared herself for having Lambert home. She was acutely curious about the Lovells too.

Juliana told how they came upon Lambert, some miles beyond Chelmsford. 'I managed to learn from him that carts were provided to bring the sick and wounded to London,' Anne said. 'He says they took a stop to rest and his cart accidentally went on without him — he could not run after it — yet the fool decided he would then walk home… I had been told he had a serious sickness that he could not shake off. Gideon wrote to me that Lambert had the bloody flux — '

Gideon? wondered Juliana, imagining some pinch-mouthed, fatalistic puritan. Clearly an idiot, if he had told poor Anne her faraway husband was gripped by the generally fatal epidemic.

Once she remembered that she had met a woman called Jukes at the printer's in Basinghall Street, Juliana had reasoned, rightly, that carrying in a sick New Model Army soldier might persuade the guards at Moorgate to admit her without too many questions. One had been detailed to accompany her to the print shop; he pushed her aside from the driving seat, as if a woman could not be trusted to control a horse, so she let him have the trouble of arguing with it. At the shop Amyas took over, intrigued to see how Anne would react to having Lambert home. Juliana remembered again her curiosity about this woman and the printer, Allibone. He had appeared briefly but merely gave Amyas instructions to escort the cart to Bread Street.

There Anne Jukes had greeted her husband's sudden return with simple surprise. She bounced automatically to wild panic at his dire condition, then she braced herself to tackle it. 'Well, so, so! I have him back… Now tell me, Mistress Lovell, how were you passing by at that lucky moment?'

Juliana was relieved to unburden herself. First she spoke of why she and the boys had been at Pelham Hall, and what she presumed her husband had been doing. Annoyed at being abandoned, she would not lie to Anne about either his politics or his activities. Then Juliana told how the Pelham family had been so relieved to see the back of her, they equipped her with horse, cart, a hamper for the journey and a travel-pass to Colchester that said, accurately, she was a distressed daughter looking for her invalid father.

'What was your father's situation?'

'As terrible as it could be.'

Germain Carlill, who had always been a misfit, had prematurely lost his wits like an old man. This was the sad secret Juliana and Mr Gadd had always kept. He began to fail in the 1630s, when Juliana was still a child. All the family were then living in Colchester, the original home of her vanished grandfather the haberdasher, a modest town house in the suburbs. As Germain became more and more vague and in need of constant care, he was placed with a young woman of the town; she was paid for nursing services with the rent from a property that Roxanne bought for the purpose. Germain had wasted most of their money but Roxanne earned some by making the costumes for a court masque. While doing that in London, she acquired the famous 'estate in Kent, with orchards' that Mr Gadd later touted as Juliana's dowry; it was little more than a small house with a market garden and few fruit trees near a village called Lewisham. The deeds were in Germain's name, for Roxanne wanted to ensure he would always be cared for. 'It was either that or put him in Bridewell. My father no longer knew us and could not be reasoned with.' Wiping away a tear, Juliana did not have to tell Anne Jukes that the Bridewell treatment of lunatics was to beat them with rods; it was supposed to drive out their demons and cure them, though it helped but few.

Once her grandmother could no longer bear Germain's decrepitude, being an intolerant woman who was angered by illness in others, she sold the Colchester house and took Juliana to London. There Roxanne died. Tottering himself, her guardian William Gadd saw his priority as settling Juliana; he never told Orlando Lovell that the 'Kentish orchards' were meagre and still belonged to Germain Carlill. Once she married, Juliana had frequently had to make excuses to Lovell for her non-receipt of the rents.

When Juliana went back to Colchester to look for her father after the siege, one of her trials was hearing from his keeper that no money had been received from the Lewisham tenants for some time. Juliana would have to discover why. None of the likely explanations was good.

Far worse news was waiting, however. By the time she arrived at Colchester and talked her way in through the victorious New Model Army soldiers, her father was dead. As she read the news-sheets, she had suspected this. He was too fragile to survive such a siege. His nurse's house had been lost to fire; the homeless had to shelter in a church. Before then, the poor old man — who was fifty, yet more like a man of ninety — had become utterly confused and terrified. Germain knew nothing of the civil war. He lived in his own world, no longer aware who he was, responding to his nurse out of habit. The noise of guns had appalled him; Juliana was told of one wild scene when he escaped to the town walls, half naked, and tried to instruct the soldiers to stop causing such a commotion. Starvation hit him hard. Already weak, he shrank to a wraith, refusing to eat even the unpalatable scraps that were available. His mind deteriorated further, very rapidly. He ranted uncontrollably and accused the poor woman who looked after him of trying to end his life. She had little to give him, and soon knew she could not save him.

'By the time I found her,' Juliana poured out to Anne Jukes through tears, 'she was herself desperately sick. She died, almost overcome by relief at telling me what had happened to Papa. She died apologising for his death — even though I was told by others afterwards that the woman had struggled to look after him long after most would have given up. She had not just shared her pitiful rations with him, but gave him the greater share because his pleas were so heartbreaking

Nobody left at Colchester could tell Juliana exactly when Germain Carlill died, or where he was buried. The dead had been disposed of by the fainting population in a random fashion, with no parish records kept. Nobody ever knew the full death toll among civilians.

Juliana had paid for the nurse to be buried. At the funeral, a woman who had probably intended to keep quiet suddenly came forward and told her where to find her father's remaining possessions. Juliana knew Germain had owned a watch and there had once been pewter, linen, colourful delft platters… she would never see any of those again. She did find sacks of haberdashery. She tracked down one great chair that her father had always sat in. In a chest, surviving because they must have seemed to have no value, were papers covered with her grandmother's patterns for lace and embroidery. Juliana piled all these onto her cart, with her own possessions.

She had one last task: to discover whether Orlando Lovell had been among the Royalists at Colchester. She was unable to find his name in the lists of prisoners and a few she was allowed to speak to had never heard of him. So she left Colchester, her last link with her own family, for ever.

Juliana confessed to Anne she was glad she never had to show her sons their grandfather without his wits and suffering. Eventually she would be able to tell Tom and Val about Germain, as she remembered him from her short but happy childhood — the affectionate father who had helped her learn her letters and given her a love of literature: gentle, always a little vague, unworldly, maddeningly untouched by common sense or commercial acumen, but also quite lacking in the greed, depravity and ambition that disfigured so many men's characters.

'Would he have been for Parliament or the King?' Anne Jukes asked curiously.

'I do not think he would have known how to decide.'

'Would he have wanted equality and liberty?'

Juliana smiled suddenly. She knew from their past meeting that Anne had a subscription to the Levellers. It would not have surprised her to hear that Anne attended meetings where she-preachers stood up. 'Oh, when he had his wits, my father could not have been for any other cause.'

'And you?' Anne wondered. She had learned enough from the episode yesterday when Juliana quietly removed the pudding from the oven during the crisis of Lambert's return — and then did not draw attention to her good deed. Anne was glad to have Juliana in her house for a few days. They understood one another, as some women do instinctively. 'So whom do you support?'

'I am a wife!' protested Juliana. The two women's eyes met.

'Oh you think as your husband does!' teased Anne Jukes. 'You think as your husband tells you to think — which is, you do not think at all.'

'He is the head of my household.' Juliana was smiling despite herself.

'You say he is never there.'

'So now Lambert has returned to you, will you do all he suggests — or will you wrangle?'

Anne smoothed down her apron. 'There will be fights ahead.' She let out the words like one who was just admitting it for the first time.

They sat in silence for a while, each pondering her own problems. When the moment came to rebuild the fire then develop a new subject, Juliana prodded, 'I do not suppose you have had much to do with Royalists?'

'Is there a family in England that does not have divided loyalties?' Anne was now in a gossipy mood. 'The Jukes had a terrible uncle, Bevan Bevan — a man who caused dissension every time he cleared his throat. He recently set himself on a horse and joined in the Kent rebellion. A more ridiculous cavalier the King could not muster; Bevan could hardly move for his weight and his gout, and he was far too old for adventuring. I am waiting to tell Lambert how the silly man advanced upon London with Lord Norwich's troops, and was with them when they swam their horses across the river by Greenwich. Bevan's horse managed to shed him and he was carried away by the current. Many were drowned; Bevan was among them. His body was washed ashore downriver. He was recognised by his belly — and his old red suit.'

'Your husband will rejoice at this?'

'My husband rejoices in no man's death,' Anne quickly replied. 'His uncle caused trouble all his life, but has left behind a wife nearly hysterical, with many children.' Anne paused. 'Elizabeth will marry again,' she confided, with certainty. 'There are women who always do.'

They smiled together, two natural survivors, deploring such women who could not live five minutes alone.

'Quite how many children?' Juliana queried meaningfully.

'Six or seven now, all badly behaved and snotty. You are right; it is enough to deter suitors — but the widow has ownership of a printing business…'

'Ah, just give her six months then!'

This time they both laughed gently.

Bereavement, loneliness and anxiety caught up with Juliana.

'Oh you have saddened me, Mistress Jukes,' she acknowledged. She had not gossiped by the fire with a woman friend since Nerissa died — she could not discuss Nerissa, both Irish and Roman Catholic, in this house of Independents. 'I am looking back and reassessing life. I have nobody now' No one except a husband who was missing yet again and who would not thank her for enquiring after him. Even Mr Gadd had stopped answering her letters. He might be too frail to write; more likely he had died of old age. 'I see very clearly how these wars have taken everything from us. Orlando and I never enjoyed a life together. I find myself thinking of what I have had and lost — then I look forwards, only to see what I shall now never possess.'

'You are young,' Anne reminded her.

'And, you may say, madam, you have your children! My boys give me much — but they also cause me constant fear, fear for them, and for all of us. Sometimes, Mistress Jukes, I feel that I am yearning constantly… for I know not what.'

Anne Jukes smiled a small, intensely rueful smile. 'Ah that, Mistress Lovell! When you find whatever we women run after so blindly, let me know, I pray you, what it is.'

Once, Anne would have jumped up, to lose her emotion in making a beef broth to revive Lambert. Time and weariness had overtaken her too. So she sat on beside the fire, and merely thought about how she ought to be doing it.

A few days later Juliana set off with her sons on their travels again. This time, she was taking them to the house with the orchard, which was — though Juliana carefully did not excite the boys with this thought — a possibility of somewhere to call home. Anxieties over what she might find kept her silent. It was far-sighted.

The journey took longer than she had hoped; they were frequently stopped and questioned by soldiers. They crossed over London Bridge, then travelled through Southwark and Deptford, on the old Woolwich Road, which ran out through Greenwich, although they turned off just before the cobbled highway passed through the middle of the still uncompleted Queen's House in the royal park. They went away from the river, following directions on a faint, tattered paper left by Juliana's grandmother. She at least had been here once; Roxanne Carlill was not a woman to buy property unseen. She probably lay with the land agent, thought Juliana, admitting the truth about her grandmother. Juliana understood now. Roxanne was a widow, and a widow in a foreign country, struggling to put bread on the table for her child — Germain, that wide-eyed innocent. The Levellers might say all men were born equal, yet Germain had been born both more affable and less able to help himself than most. Juliana's own children seemed to have escaped that — although she sometimes feared she saw a trace of her father in Valentine.

Perhaps not. It was Val who first spotted the overgrown path leading from the rutted lane where they had nearly bogged down. The day had been long enough for him; he jumped out of the cart and strutted off, announcing, 'I am going down there.' They had found the house, which was a large cottage with a collection of by now extremely gnarled mixed fruit trees. Immediately her heart failed, for she could see through the twilight that no lights showed and no smoke rose from the chimneys, yet the door was standing open.

The tenants must have left months before. Juliana never found out when, nor where they went. Why they left was obvious. The house had been vandalised. It could be by serving soldiers, disbanded troops, or local people who had decided that the property was owned by a Royalist. Plundering had taken place. Pointless plundering, mindless damage where fences were broken down, cupboard doors were wrenched off their hinges, firejacks were bent, mattresses and pillows were slit open and voided of their feathers, goods from the larder were not even stolen, but emptied upon the floor and kicked about.

The abandoned house had then reverted to nature. As damp entered the building, food remnants that were not taken by rats grew skeins and crowns of mould. Juliana found chairs where baby mice teemed squalidly in the seat-padding. Birds had hopped in through windows and nested in the upper rooms. Beetles of all types ran everywhere with the spiders. Wind and rain did their worst to the fabric.

Even then, the destruction continued. Someone had lived here, after the tenants' abandonment. Brutish people, with the lowest of standards, had occupied the dwelling not long ago; had caused more damage; strewn more rubbish; lit fires — not always in the hearths — and deposited human shit in room corners.

'I do not like it here,' mumbled Val nervously.

'I like it!' shouted Tom, running from room to filthy room like a true boy.

Juliana sat on a broken chair, thought better of it, then stood up again. In what had once been a tiny parlour, now with no door and all its shutters torn away, she gave way to despair and cried her eyes out.

Deciding that they would have to leave, she wrapped the boys in cloaks and blankets and sheltered with them beside their cart through a long, sleepless night in the open. Only in the pale light of next morning did she accept that they had nowhere else to go. Dispirited and almost broken, she began the task of clearing out her little house.

She had made one room just about habitable when, a few weeks after they arrived, they had a completely unexpected visitor. Juliana knew that she knew him, but out of context it took her a moment to remember who he was: he had ridden up on a squat pony, with a satchel slung around his body and a long birding gun, a solid man in a russet coat — 'Jolly Jack, mistress.' John Jolley! Squire Lovell's land agent.

Through her surprise, Juliana gasped questions about how he had known he might find her here — only to discover an offensive truth. Jolley had come to find Orlando, not her. Orlando had asked him to sell his Hampshire estates.

'So did you expect to find him here?'

'Not really. This was the only address I had.'

Juliana gritted her teeth. 'He wants to sell his land to finance revolt? Well, it is too late, Master Jolley. The uprising has failed.'

'That I know,' replied the agent calmly. 'But in conscience I wanted to explain to him face to face that I cannot sell. His activities — ' John Jolley hesitated over his words. Jolley supported Parliament, Juliana knew without ever asking. "What they call his malignancy has become well known. By going into Kent in arms against Parliament, he is adjudged to have broken his parole. The estate is absolutely taken from him. The lands will be sold to pay New Model Army soldiers.'

'No appeal?'

'None, you may believe it.'

The agent gave Juliana a small amount of money, which he had managed to wrest from the Hampshire Committee as her 'fifth' for the previous year. Would he have given my fifth to Orlando, had Orlando been here…?

Jolley then stayed a few days, presumably out of loyalty to the Lovell family. He shot rabbits and birds to hang up for meat. Looking around at the conditions in which she was living, he himself made some basic repairs for her, then he found a local carpenter to help patch up doors, windows and the roof.

'I cannot afford to pay him,' Juliana protested frankly.

'I have squared him for two weeks' work for you.'

"With your own money?' She was horrified, yet she was desperate to have the work done.

'I shall mention it to the squire on my return. He will most likely see his way to reimbursing me.'

'Does he soften towards Orlando?'

'No, mistress. But the squire will be too proud to see me out of pocket for his son.'

For a blinding moment Juliana wondered if she was expected to make John Jolley an offer of payment in kind — she and Nerissa Mcllwaine used to joke about women with loose morals who 'never had to pay a tradesman'. She felt hot. Setting her jaw against the very thought, she thanked the man sincerely but briefly. The moment passed.

'Has any word of my husband reached Hampshire?'

'None. And none has reached you, Mistress Lovell?'

'No.' Except that because of John Jolley's visit, Juliana now knew for sure Lovell had been here. Mr Gadd would have told him years ago where the house was. So it must have been Lovell and his Royalist associates who wrecked it. That smacked into her like a betrayal.

To have the house linked to Lovell was dangerous. Juliana inherited it when her father died but, as a wife, everything of hers legally belonged to her husband. Lovell could, now that she owned it, sell the house and land and leave her destitute. Even more simply, Parliament could remove it from her because her husband was a Royalist. Enquiry discovered that John Jolley had not mentioned this property to any committee, for which she was thankful.

After Jolley left, their living conditions improved. The carpenter made the house sound. Juliana swept, washed, even found one or two usable tools and utensils, hidden in outhouses or discarded in undergrowth. They lived frugally, but they survived. It was a hard winter for the poor. As she eked out their meagre funds, sometimes they had no dinner on the table. Eventually, though, they had a larder that would sustain them through the spring, because when Juliana wrote to confirm that she was settled, Anne Jukes sent one of the grocery carriers with a great quantity of goods, out of gratitude for saving Lambert. Now they had flour, sugar, butter, currants, almonds, even spices.

They still had to outwit the iron-cold English winter. They dressed in layers, sometimes wearing almost everything they owned. They slept some nights all huddled together, when even a hot brick wrapped in old rags would not keep the bed warm. Even on the mildest days, they woke to find a thick layer of frost on their one window with glass, and the frost would stay all day, never melting. When Juliana made the boys nightshirts, they would put them on beside the fire, then dive into bed shrieking; they soon learned how to dress in their day clothes next morning while huddled underneath the bedclothes. Laundry froze solid on the washing line. Milk came from the farm with lumps of ice in it. The boys paddled through slush in the lane, then scampered home with their fingers red-raw and their wet stockings stiff on their chilblained little feet.

When she could, Juliana followed the news. Apart from wanting information about Lovell's fate, she knew this was a momentous period. The New Model Army had called the King to account. Despairing of a peaceful settlement, they had brought him to trial at Westminster. So it was in the dead of that freezing winter, at the end of January, that she left her sons in the care of a friendly woman she had come to know on a farm locally. She considered taking them to London with her, so they could participate in the historic event, but she thought them too young so she went alone.

Juliana Lovell took a boat from Greenwich, travelled upriver and joined the crowds outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on the 30th of January. There she watched the public execution of King Charles.