Rebels and traitors

Chapter Seventy-Five — London, Gravesend, Kent: London, 1654-55

On the 6th of September 1654, Richard Overton penned a letter to Secretary Thurloe. Marchamont Nedham brought a copy to show Gideon, now deemed to be an expert on Overton:

I suppose I should not much mistake myself if I should more than suppose that there will be attempts and endeavours by persons of great ability and interest against the government, as it now is: but for my part I shall seek my own quiet and the public peace, and be glad I may be an instrument in the prevention of disturbance. I may happily be capable of doing some considerable service therein, and as may fall in my way; and I assure you, I shall be very ready to do it, if it may find but your acceptance. If it do, I humbly beg the favour of your notice, when and where I may best wait upon you, and have some discourse about the business, and to receive your directions and commands therein. Sir, craving your pardon for this presumption, and with all due acknowledgements of other favours I formerly received from you, I shall still remain,

Your honour's most humble servant to command,

Richard Overton.

Gideon was fascinated. 'It is a wary piece of prose. I imagine that Secretary Thurloe enjoyed its deconstruction. The slithering clauses and two-faced humility are painful!'

'And most unlike the plain-speaking of the usual informants,' said Nedham.' "Ruth Wiskin testifies that one Christopher Emerson called the Lord Protector a rogue and a rascal, and a bloodsucker, and said that he should have his throat cut ere long"…'

Gideon considered Overton's note. 'Master Nedham, this phrase, "the government, as it now is", hints that he has lingering discomfort with the Protectorate. Is the man genuinely seeking public peace — or just strapped for cash?'

'He is an old pamphleteer, with no regular employment. The intelligence office has a large expenses fund, as Overton already knows.'

'This could be bluff — trying to find out what Thurloe knows. Will Thurloe meet him, as he asks?'

'Perhaps not, but there could be money. Last year Thurloe paid him twenty pounds for snitching on Sexby, whose behaviour was no secret anyway'

'Sexby?'

'You know him too?' asked Nedham, pointedly noting it.

'I have met him,' responded Gideon, playing down their association.

'Would you care to go into the West Country to observe him?'

'Is that where Sexby is? My new wife would not welcome my leaving her, Master Nedham!'

Gideon was trying to back away from all this intrigue, but he was being pressed hard to help. When the first Protectorate Parliament assembled in the autumn of 1654, unrest assailed on all sides. The Fifth Monarchists' leader, Major-General Thomas Harrison, was a constant thorn in Cromwell's side. Three army colonels — Alured, Saunders and Gideon's old colonel, Okey — petitioned with claims that Cromwell had adopted greater powers than had been wielded by Charles I. John Wildman was accused of stirring an army plot in Scotland, put in the Tower and left to stew. The Scotland plot had thrown up a new participant. One of the Levellers that General Monck dismissed from the army, Miles Sindercombe, fled to Flanders. There he made dangerous contacts, one being Edward Sexby.

Notes which Thurloe prepared for the Council of State about these plots indicated the wide range of his espionage. Long witness statements gave names, places where meetings had been held, lists of regiments which might mutiny. Actual conversations were reported: 'Overton and Wildman spoke together of their dislike of things, but no design was laid..' Thurloe knew far more than the various plotters ever seemed to realise. But he did not know enough.

Edward Sexby was openly intent on destroying Cromwell. Arresting Sexby became a priority. In February, a correspondent in the West Country reported that Sexby had been in Somerset, 'talking about a rising'. Two days later came a report from Exeter, addressed to the Protector, on efforts to preserve the peace: 'I also acquainted Your Highness that I had not been careless in making the most curious search after Sexby, having had parties out after him both in Devonshire and Dorsetshire..'

The searches failed. Soon Sexby showed just how cunning and influential he was: in March he was thought to be staying with a Captain Arthur in Weymouth, 'a man esteemed of no good principle'. Weymouth was close to Portland, where Sexby had been governor, and where he had used his charm to make firm friends throughout the community. He had acquired a mistress, Mrs Elizabeth Ford, a woman of quick wits and spirit. She became suspicious when a soldier came to the house, disguised as a yokel and pretending to have letters for Sexby. Mrs Ford raised the alarm; the mayor and the castle governor took into custody the very soldiers sent to arrest Sexby. Their spurious grounds were that the militiamen were attempting to deprive a freeborn Englishman of his liberty whilst they had no written warrant…

Sexby fled. He was next heard of in Antwerp.

Ports were watched. Customs officers carried out surveillance. They needed their wits. As Sexby escaped, other suspicious parties tried to enter England. Passengers in a ship bringing an ambassador from the King of Poland were a particular nightmare. One man not in the ambassador's accredited party loudly reviled the officers, saying they had no authority to question or seize him. As this troublemaker was secured, four shifty young Dutchmen queued to be interrogated.

'Gerrit Pauw, aged twenty-two; I am related to important Dutchmen and have come to England to see the country and learn English.'

A quiet man, waiting patiently, caught the customs officer's eye sympathetically. The officials were harassed by the diplomatic courtesies required for the Polish ambassador, bemused by the dozy Dutch boys, and desperate to keep pegs on a known Royalist — one Matthew Hutchin, also arrived in the same ship, who said he was carrying letters to Lord Newport at his house — a house to which Royalists in exile regularly sent correspondence — which Thurloe's agents routinely intercepted.

'Dirck Simonse, aged twenty. I am a gentleman living in the Hague. I have come to see fashions and learn English…'

The person still waiting was about thirty-six years, with a beard, quietly dressed. He tipped his black beaver hat with a nod, as if the busy officers knew him — an honest Englishman, the kind of diffident insider who can always pass through customs without paying duty.

'Cornelius Van Dyke, aged twenty, a chandler's son. I have come to see fashions, learn English — and to spend my money'

The quiet man picked up his bag, as if gently moving forward in the queue. He and the officer exchanged weary smiles over these youthful travellers, who wanted fun without parental supervision, probably hoping English girls were easy..

Merit Johhes, a Frieslander, aged thirty-four..' Jerit wanted to see fashions and learn English, but he had complicated matters by bringing over two trunks of linen and apparel. The linen he intended to sell, he claimed, if he could get a market for it; otherwise he would carry it back again, or make use of it himself… This was an extreme nuisance because the trunks had to be tediously searched.

By the time that was over, the officers saw the quiet Englishman had slipped past them and made his way ashore without being questioned.

Once he left Gravesend, Orlando Lovell — for it was he — burrowed into anonymity in Kent. He was now increasingly trusted by Langdale and had been asked to assess the situation for the Earl of Rochester, who had entered the country to lead a revolt which they feared was compromised. Lovell found it all too true.

As a Hants man, Lovell placed much of the blame on Kent. Although some of its secret byways reminded him of Hampshire, he deplored this large, insular county where every man was more concerned with his own property first and, if pushed, Kent second, with no love for the kingdom in general at all. There were no great lords to provide leadership and the people did not even like each other. As well as the famous disputes between Men of Kent and Kentishmen, the High Weald hated the Low Weald, the marsh folk were thought peculiar by everybody, and the Isle of Thanet was so lawless some had proposed splitting it off as a tiny county by itself. Intermarried families in their agricultural manors had knuckled down under Parliament for much of the first civil war, only rising en masse in 1648 as a reaction to harsh penalties and interference. Lovell had been there then.

What Lovell remembered of those depressing weeks were desertions, separations, fouled-up actions in stinking old castles and endless angry conversations with mediocre men who could neither take nor give orders, all countrymen who were just longing to sneak away to check on their cows and their field boundaries.

Now he was back in Kent, and when he set about investigating the intended arms network, Lovell had a shock. He was amazed how extensively the Protector's agents had uncovered the arrangements. They had already seized weapons and apprehended collaborators. Lovell had to watch his step. Soon he discovered just how the expensively funded exercise had come to grief. He raged at the carelessness.

This time the Action Party had intended to arm troops all around the country, hoping that concerted risings in many places might stretch the Parliamentary army. Naturally they wanted surprise. 'And tossed it away!' growled Lovell, in despair. The idea had been ambitious — too ambitious for the fools into whose care it was placed.

Buying and distribution had been unsophisticated. Some weapons were to be imported, but correspondence revealed the ships and their landing places. Royalists had innocently written letters via the ordinary post service. They used ridiculous pseudonyms and labelled papers, 'Leave this at the post-house until called for' — just begging for some under-occupied postmaster to start wondering.

Gunsmiths in London had been asked to supply large numbers of weapons, on flimsy excuses: 'Lord Willoughby has a plantation to the south-west of Barbados called Savannah, with six hundred men in it; and they are sending a ship with arms and other commodities'. Lovell fumed; Willoughby of Parham, an old cavalier, must be just waiting for arrest after that fiasco. Other stories fed to gunsmiths were equally ludicrous: crackpot talk, for example, of buying commodities for a scheme to supply mulberry trees for silk-growing in Virginia… Worse, having established their cover, the Royalist agents had not even stuck to it, but confessed to the gunsmiths that they wanted false bills of lading in order to baffle government enquiries — and that all this was a tarradiddle because in reality there was a design to bring Charles II into England..

A gunsmith might drink the King's health as he took cavalier money, but once he was examined by Spymaster Thurloe, loyalty to Charles flew out of the window.

Transportation was bungled grotesquely. Ordinary county carriers were hired to take hampers and boxes to the homes of known cavaliers; these purported to contain wine bottles, saddles, or ladies' gowns. But the boxes were brand-new, specially constructed efforts in bright white deal, shrieking that they were the length and size of a bundle of muskets. They were incredibly heavy, sometimes too heavy for a carter's horses. The carriers, who were all under observation by Thurloe's agents, naturally swore they had no idea what was in the boxes. One, the Birmingham carrier, dodged interrogation as long he could, getting his brother to provide a list of items he had moved from London to the Midlands; this admitted to several hundredweight of mystery packages but tried to confuse the issue with 'Two firkins of soap for Mr Porter of Bromsgrove, and twenty-one fishes, fifteen whereof were for the informant, and six for the carrier's own use…'. If the carriers refused to confess what they had been asked to do, maids or porters in the inns where goods were stored in London eagerly informed on them.

It was too late for Lord Rochester to retreat back to Holland; he convinced himself there was still hope and went north. Over on the Continent, King Charles had moved to Middelburg, ready to cross to England once support took hold. But Lovell felt the whole design was ruined.

He took himself to London. On the way, he went to Lewisham again. The old house standing in the orchard appeared empty, though efforts had been made to replace elderly cherry trees. A neighbour informed him that Mistress Juliana Lovell had sold the property, sold up to one Lambert Jukes, a grocer of the City of London. He rented out the orchard, but kept the house and stayed in it when he came to the area on business: the man was involved in the ships'-biscuit factory that had been set up in the old Tudor palace in Greenwich.

Greenwich was reputed to have more cavaliers than London so, mindful of recruitment, Lovell went to explore. He found the supposed Royalists were decayed court servants, mainly musicians and art collectors, who had hung around hoping that Parliament would give them their unpaid wages from the late King. They lived near the park, partly paid off with royal paintings, waiting glumly for the possible restoration of the monarchy. They might be loyal in theory, but flautists and lutenists were useless as soldiers. If this was the best Lovell could do, his mission would be a disaster. He knew other locals were even more unfriendly; when Lord Norwich camped in the park during the ill-fated uprising of 1648, his men had been jeered at and pelted by the Greenwich watermen.

Lovell sauntered past speculators' sheds and decaying riverside wharfs to look at the biscuit factory. When Parliament sold off other royal residences, the elderly Palace of Placentia had been retained — according to a cynical alehouse informant, because no buyer could be found for such a ramshackle monstrosity. It was now crisply called Greenwich House and assigned to the Lord Protector; Cromwell, satisfied with Hampton Court, never came here. The already decayed buildings had suffered. Various buildings and gardens had been parcelled up and sold off. Horses had been stabled in the palace where kings and queens were once born; ninety poor Greenwich families were installed in the staterooms, before they were pushed out so the place could be a prison for captured sailors during the Dutch War. When the war ended last year, a venture making hardtack for the navy started up. Sneering, Lovell pictured Lambert Jukes as a puritan tradesman of the lowest quality.

Orlando Lovell had no real interest in grocers, though he was ready to demand that this tuppeny biscuit-maker give up details of Juliana's whereabouts — assuming he knew. There was no reason, on the face of it, why he should.

Lovell travelled by river to London, where he found a hot situation. In anticipation of Rochester's revolt, an order had been issued for the seizure of all horses in London and Westminster so they could not be commandeered by cavaliers. Horse-racing was banned, because race-meetings were a cover for conspiracy. Many known Action Party members were taken into custody. Security was tightened. A new City militia was organised. Extra troops were recruited for the Tower of London. Spies were out everywhere, watching Royalists.

The uprisings at the start of March failed to ignite. In Yorkshire, less than three hundred men came to a planned rendezvous with Lord Rochester. Other risings across the country were equally disappointing, even the most ambitious, that of Colonel Penruddock in Wiltshire. Leaders were captured, then executed or transported. Rochester was taken near Aylesbury, but bribed an innkeeper and escaped back to the Continent. Within a fortnight, Cromwell felt confident enough to stand down the militia.

Orlando Lovell turned up a few weeks later in Flanders; his movements in the intervening period were, as usual, mysterious.

The seizure of London horses caused local upset. Gideon Jukes now owned Robert Allibone's old mount which, amidst much grumbling about costs, he kept at livery in an inn in Holborn. He was summoned one morning by an excited ostler, to find soldiers in the act of removing his horse.

'You want Rumour? An old, nervous irritating nag, who only cares to wend his way to taverns for a bucket of ale?'

'All serviceable horses — '

'Serviceable doesn't cover this one!'

' — have to be taken to the Tower of London.'

'Outrageous! Rumour is no traitor. He has given his oath of allegiance to the Protectorate.'

'Just doing my duty, Captain Jukes.' Gideon was using his rank today, in the hope it would give him some purchase on the argument.

Rumour added his twopenny worth. He bit the soldier who was trying to harness him.

'Look — we have nowhere to put all these animals. Colonel Barkstead is in a complete tizz; Tower Green looks like Smithfield horse-fair… There are two solutions, Captain — ' The sergeant turned to Gideon, with a wild appeal. Every horse he tried to impound brought him new trouble from indignant citizens. 'Either we can put him down, which will waste a bullet — or you can hide him in a shed until it's all over.'

'Done!'

Hardly had Gideon reprieved the horse, for sentimental reasons, than he realised his error. His print shop had no outbuildings. If Rumour would agree to shift himself, he would have to be led from his familiar livery stable and taken to Shoe Lane. There, helpers must coax him to the shed in the back courtyard — which could only be reached by walking the horse right through Juliana's haberdashery shop. There would be neighing, horseshit, mud on the floor, breaking window-glass, leaning against fragile cabinets, flying ribbons and pin-packets, not to mention flabbergasted customers and a tense proprietor. Gideon knew before he asked her, Juliana would say this was not in her marriage contract.

His apprentice, Miles, refused to be involved. Gideon came up with two solutions. He did not ask his dear wife, he merely informed her, in the offhand manner of a head of household who is confident his every proposal reeks of common sense. (He realised he had become perilously like his father.) More astutely, he borrowed a bucket, which he filled with beer and carried ahead of Rumour to entice him to amble forwards, hopefully undistracted by baskets of bright haberdashery looking like treats to munch…

Other than this incident, they continued to live very quietly.