Rebels and traitors

Chapter Eighty- Three — London: 1657

John Cecil threw himself on the Protector's mercy and revealed everything about the plots. According to him, the others, Boyes in particular, were ruthless men of violence — 'not having the fear of God in their hearts, but moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil'. In giving their confessions and acting as witnesses against Sindercombe, Cecil and Toope escaped trial and punishment.

Miles Sindercombe stalwartly refused to admit anything. He was tried for treason on the 9th of February, a month after his arrest. Found guilty, he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.

Whilst in the Tower of London, Sindercombe was visited by his widowed mother, his sister Elizabeth and an anonymous sweetheart. Somehow, he obtained an unknown toxic substance which he swallowed the night before his execution. Two hours later he was found in a coma, with a note that confirmed he intended to kill himself; he could not be restored to consciousness and very soon died. Before the civil war, Sindercombe had been apprenticed to a surgeon so it was presumed he had used his knowledge of poisons, though the substance was never identified, nor could his inquest decide how he had obtained it. Two post mortems had failed to ascertain anything certain. His suicide note declared, 'I do take this course because I would not have all the open shame of the world executed upon my body' Though he could not be hanged as intended, as a suicide, his body was drawn to Tower Hill on a hurdle, naked; it was buried with an iron stake through the heart.

An unexpected result was renewed pressure on Cromwell to adopt the title of king. Although rumours of the failed fireball circulated almost immediately, Thurloe did not formally announce details of the plot to Parliament for ten days, after a frenzy of speculation had built up. Then he emphasised alarmingly how the assassination attempt had involved not only home-grown radical terrorists but designing foreign powers, all in alliance with the ever-treacherous Royalists. News-sheets relayed frightening stories of armies raised by these enemies, armies that were poised to sail to England at any moment in a flotilla of ships… This overlooked the known facts that Charles II had had a destructive quarrel with his brother the Duke of York; he had no money to pay for a fleet and his armies overseas were dwindling daily.

In the aura of panic, a day of thanksgiving for Cromwell's deliverance was held on Friday the 20th of February, with an enormous public feast in the Banqueting House. All the MPs were invited, as were foreign ambassadors. Four hundred luxurious dishes were served and the regal evening ended with a splendiferous musical entertainment. So great was the crush that a staircase collapsed, causing many injuries, particularly to Cromwell's eldest son Richard; he would eventually be known as Tumbledown Dick, supposedly from his indecisiveness, though perhaps also because in the accident he suffered several broken bones.

It had been assumed by many that the Protector would be offered the crown as he hosted this glittering occasion. This did not happen; perhaps the accident to Richard was an inhibiting factor. The formal request was made the following Monday, in the austere and appropriate environment of the House of Commons. It was stressed that a new monarchy, with a defined hereditary succession, might preserve Cromwell from further desperate attempts on his life. The offer specifically referred to the Sindercombe Plot: 'the continual danger your life is in from the bloody practices of the malignants and the discontented party… it being a received principle amongst them that nothing is wanted to bring us into blood and confusion and them to their desired ends, but the destruction of your person…'

The first address to Cromwell was probably drafted by John Thurloe. It was repeated by Parliament in a modified form, but it was not universally welcomed; a hundred army officers appealed to Cromwell to reject the idea. Cromwell consistently maintained that kingship was unimportant to him; however, most people assumed he was attracted and would succumb eventually. It was believed that events were being stage-managed by Thurloe, with Cromwell's full approval.

After much private deliberation and prayer, however, Oliver Cromwell took an unexpected decision. After nearly two months' thought, he refused the crown. He conceded that those who had made the proposal were honourable, and that their purpose was to set the nation on a good footing. But he concluded that it would be sinful to take upon himself the title of king.

Cromwell made this surprise announcement to Parliament at a special meeting in the Banqueting House on the 7th of May. At the end of June Parliament would go into recess for six months and he was to be reproclaimed Protector, with much ceremony.

Then a pamphlet hit the streets — literally, for it was scattered there — entitled Killing no Murder. Authorship of Killing no Murder was ascribed to "William Allen" — the genuine name of a New Model Army Leveller, an old associate of Sexby's. Allen denied involvement. Thurloe arrested John Sturgeon, another disaffected member of Cromwell's Lifeguards; whose connections with the Sindercombe plots were known. He had recently returned, secretly, from exile in Holland. Killing no Murder was printed in Holland.

Enough copies escaped into circulation. When Gideon Jukes read Killing no Murder, he laughed at its irony. Then he went hot-foot to visit Secretary of State Thurloe.

Thurloe saw him immediately. Gideon was taken to a small inner cabinet, where Thurloe had a copy of the pamphlet and a pile of witness examinations in front of him. 'This pernicious document has appeared all over the Continent — even published in Dutch! Royalists are crowing with delight, naturally…'

'But it is most certainly not by a Royalist,' Gideon murmured. He had brought his copy. It was a long tract, but he had read it carefully. As Thurloe brooded, Gideon quoted: "To Tour Highness justly belongs the honour of dying for the people… Religion will be restored, Liberty asserted, and Parliaments have those Privileges they have fought for…"

Thurloe angrily took up the bile: ' "In the Black Catalogue of High Malefactors, few can be found that have lived more to the affliction and disturbance of Mankind…" This is slander and treason! It asks whether His Highness be a tyrant and if so, whether it be lawful — or profitable to the Commonwealth to do justice upon him? It means by killing him. It pretends that His Highness has put himself above the law, therefore should not have the law's protection.'

'Do you know where this has come from?' Gideon asked.

Thurloe summarised angrily: 'We were alerted to several Dutch vessels in the port of London. Colonel Barkstead learned that prohibited goods had been concealed in houses near the river. Barkstead ordered a search. At the house of Samuel Rogers, a distiller of strong- waters in St Katharine's Dock, he seized seven parcels of books, two hundred to each parcel. Rogers of course claimed no knowledge. When a watch was set secretly on his house, however, lo! There appears one Edward Wroughton — a man already known to us for distributing scandalous literature in Swan Alley'

'Coleman Street?'

'You know it?'

'By reputation,' agreed Gideon, with a smile.

'Fifth Monarchy' snarled Thurloe briefly. 'Venner's group. Your Okey is one — '

'Not my Okey!' Knowing that John Okey had recently only narrowly escaped a treason charge for involvement with the Fifth Monarchists, Gideon quickly distanced himself.

'Wroughton demanded to see an arrest warrant. These people are practised; he pointed out that the warrant specified the assistance of a constable. Barkstead's customs officer was compelled to send for one. Wroughton went along peacefully, but when they got him to the Tower Gate he suddenly broke free and they had to chase him all the way to Galley Quay'

'Was Wroughton working for himself?'

'He was in league with John Sturgeon.'

'Arrested too?'

'Officers recognised Sturgeon in East Smithfield, carrying yet more bundles. They had paper wrapped about them, and were tied up with pack- thread, but the paper was loose and ruffled up, so the book titles were visible. The officers took from Sturgeon a pocket pistol' — Thurloe riffled through the examination papers — ' "which he had in a money- bag, a weapon with four barrels in the stock, being all charged and ready for execution." He gave a false name, and has since refused to co- operate. "Asked, whether or not he hath delivered any such books to Edward Wroughton? He saith, he will not answer to that, nor any other questions that shall be asked of him — though it be whether two and two make four"…' Thurloe continued reading, with a startled expression, as if he had just noticed a postscript: 'Barkstead is so concerned he has asked for a back-dated warrant for Wroughton — lest he escape on a technicality!'

He looked up. He gazed for a moment at Gideon. 'And you have anxieties, Captain Jukes?'

This was Gideon's cue: 'I do not believe this well-penned piece, Killing no Murder, comes from William Allen. Edward Sexby wrote it.'

Thurloe started. 'It is Sexby's style?'

'Machiavelli peppering Scriptures and illustrations from the ancient Romans, like Jamaica spices mixed in a mortar. He cites not only Francis Bacon, but — cheekily — your own Secretary of Tongues, Mr John Milton! This is well-argued, thoughtful, sustained work. Twenty pages as good as anything Nedham produces for you — Gideon noticed Thurloe looking put out. 'Well — I am a printer, as you know, and was told many years ago, never to take responsibility for ideas — but I can evaluate prose! See here, where he appeals to members of the army as his audience. The phrase he uses, to all those Officers and soldiers of the Army that remember their engagements and dare to be honest — "engagement" is a word beloved of Sexby; it is used again afterwards. And at the end he suddenly turns to the business of Miles Sindercombe, claiming his death was not suicide, but Colonel Barkstead smothered him with pillows. He equates Sindercombe with Brutus and Cassius — "give him statues and monuments" — '

'Wickedness!' snarled Thurloe.

'Persuasive wickedness: take it seriously. This has all Sexby's fervour. And the pamphlet is meant to introduce some new drama: "Courteous reader, expect another sheet or two of this subject if I escape the tyrant's hands"…' Thurloe shuddered. Gideon pressed on: 'Your arrest of Sindercombe and the rest lost Sexby his helpers. He will have to come to London himself.'

'Boyes too?' queried Thurloe. 'Your man Lovell?'

Gideon jumped on this instantly: 'If you think Lovell will come, then you know he has left England?'

Thurloe was almost tetchy. 'He went to Flanders.' Gideon considered it, thinking of Thomas, now taken right abroad, to a strange country out of all reach of his family. 'Lovell may come here again — but Sexby will not send him. For Sexby, it is necessary that the Protector's life be taken by a man with the right credentials. A Royalist assassin will not do. The proclamation in June would seem an apt moment.' He and Thurloe both silently considered how the scene would be: trumpets, bells and bonfires, aldermen and soldiers, volleys of shot and huge crowds applauding them… a stupendous public occasion at which to cause terror with an assassination. Gideon then repeated, 'Sexby will come himself.'

Thurloe leaned back in his chair, his mouth compressed into an even tighter line than normal. He twirled a pen slowly between the fingers of his right hand. 'Reports come regularly that Sexby is here — we never see him to detain him…' He leaned forward to his papers again, looking tense. 'He somehow keeps the interest of both the Spanish and Charles Stuart… Here — from the end of January: "It is not above five or six weeks since Sexby came last from England." — So he was meddling, in December! Then he went back. Nothing changes!' Thurloe growled. 'Nothing, nothing, nothing…' He read again grimly: ' "You need to be very careful, that when His Highness should go forth to take the air, there be a special care had of the followers, that there be no strangers in company, but those who are known to be faithful…" This came only in April.'

Gideon did not trust the April report. 'That sounds like some fool who has heard about the previous plots and reminds you to gain credibility. Did you pay money for that statement?'

'Cynic!' rebuked Thurloe good- humouredly. He plucked out another paper: ' "The sum of my intelligence from Flanders: Sexby did not go for England at the time formerly mentioned: want of money was the cause of his stay: he hath now received fourteen thousand pieces of eight, will be in England by the first of February. He expresses great regrets that the plot against His Highness's life did not take and gives out that he will lose his own, rather than fail to accomplish that design"… Well, Sexby may come. Lovell may come. But I have a new concern.' Thurloe looked up and pierced Gideon with his fiercest gaze. 'Captain, when the Sindercombe plotters were examined, one — it was Toope — said Sindercombe had told him that a second great firework existed, in a box. He never knew where it was.'

'The gunpowder will be spent,' Gideon muttered at once, shaking his head. 'Even if he could have stored the bombarillo somewhere dry, it will be badly decayed.'

'Pitch and tar survive,' argued Thurloe. 'The spiteful thing could still do great damage. The first flamed up violently when it was tried. I want to find it, Captain. I would like you to find it.'

'Me? Surely the Lord Protector has his guards — '

'Toope was a Lifeguard!' Thurloe lifted yet another paper from his pile. 'Sturgeon is another such… Here I have an agent saying he shared a conversation in a tavern with some from His Highness's Lifeguard; they claimed one man in three of them is not to be trusted.'

Gideon knew enough history to be aware that great men surrounded by bodyguards were still at risk of assassination — most usually by their bodyguards. Not only did the soldiers have access, they lived close enough to see through their masters' charisma and to become disenchanted.

'Why trust me?' he demanded.

Thurloe smiled. 'I trust your desire to live in harmony with your wife, free of Colonel Lovell! Besides, you have an honest face.' He could be smooth. Flattery would not make Gideon co-operate; of course, John Thurloe knew that. He was both smooth and clever. He knew Gideon Jukes would assist for his own reasons.

Thurloe was right. Throughout the summer months, Gideon spent long hours searching. His mission was to find the explosive device, but he believed this would bring him close to Lovell.

He was given access to Cecil and Toope, whom he found less chastened than they should have been, in his opinion. They were as suspicious of him as he of them. Still, they helped him put together a list of places they had frequented with Miles Sindercombe. They also confirmed that the person they knew as Boyes had had a lad with him, a typical lad, who needed a wash and a haircut, who moped around taverns as they huddled at meetings or scuffled after his father looking bored. The lad had even helped Boyes carry the first firework, when it was brought in its hand- basket to Sindercombe.

'So Boyes made it?'

The second-hand glimpse of Thomas kept Gideon's interest from flagging. Hearing of it made Juliana tolerate his frequent absences from home and made Miles lenient when left to work in the print shop alone. Gideon did not mention Lovell's supposed second firework.

Cecil and Toope had never known where Boyes lodged. But they said he was easily able to come to assignations, so his room could not have been far away, certainly nearer than Sindercombe's room with Daniel Stockwell on London Bridge. Their regular haunts had been in the streets around Whitehall and Westminster. Gideon made house-to-house enquiries, undeterred by hostility from locals, who hated officialdom. Where he knew for certain that conspirators had stayed in particular houses or inns, he insisted on seeing the rooms they had occupied and searching for the missing firework. He went to all the drinking houses — and in King Street these were numerous. There he talked not only to landlords, but ostlers and tapsters. With Thurloe's approval, he promised money — either for details of the previous plots or reports about anyone suspicious who might turn up now.

The area where Gideon was searching had inns and ordinaries — the places where cheap meals could be bought — that he knew Robert Allibone had frequented when he winkled out subjects for his Public Corranto. Robert was always secretive, but Gideon used his name as an introduction. Once an ostler asked laughingly, 'Have you still got that silly old horse, Rumour? He liked his quart of ale!'

A landlord elsewhere rightly pointed out that Gideon was searching for ex-soldiers, but half the male population of London had fought in the civil wars at some time. They all knew how to swagger, and many had hoarded weapons since their time in service. The man Gideon was trying to track down would never stand out.

'You are asking us to remember a customer from January, and it is now high summer? Impossible. Besides, anyone who ever has a drink looks suspicious by the light of the wrong candle-end. We give him a stare, thinking he seems a bit odd, then he's guaranteed to glare back, looking even worse. You want to give up, Captain, before you're worn out!'

At yet another inn, Gideon met a bandy-legged landlord called Tew, an ex-sailor, now cultivating his beer belly. Like the rest, he denied any knowledge of Lovell; like the rest he gave the impression he knew something that he would not say. Tew ran the Swan, he said, with his sister. She was far too busy brewing to be called out for an interview, so Gideon did not meet her.

The Swan was a name- change; Robert would have known it as the Two Tuns. It seemed to thrive and had good ale. Gideon said so to the landlord. 'Well, pass on to your sister my praise — and what I said about the Delinquent, Lovell. If she ever does emerge into daylight from her brewhouse, she may see him.'

'Oh I'll tell her — but I give nowt for your chances, Captain,' answered Nat Tew in his lugubrious sing-song accent, enjoying the hopelessness. It made Gideon hunch his shoulders and move on. London landlords were bad enough; northerners, with their world-weary pessimism, made him truly depressed.

King Street had inns from end to end. These were all dark, unwelcoming holes, full of unhelpful, untrustworthy, dangerous-looking people, none of whom wanted to have anything to do with the government. At least Gideon knew they would have been the same, whatever government held power. They had all heard about Sindercombe's firework — the one placed in the palace chapel. A few even made vague claims, which rapidly collapsed under scrutiny, that they knew a man who knew someone else who had seen the device sitting on a tavern table… Nobody had ever heard of a second firework — or so they said.

In June, Thurloe received information that Sexby might be making one of his secret trips back to England.

There was no mention of Lovell. However, according to intelligence, Charles Stuart was sending his own would-be assassins. Gideon believed Lovell would be among them, perhaps the leading one. Everything he had learned about the man suggested he was too restless to hang around some hostile European town in a rundown regiment of the King's or Duke of York's, waiting to take part in a hypothetical invasion that might never happen. Lovell would be up to mischief. Lovell would return to England.

Lovell was indeed back. After the failure of the firework plot, he had fled to the Continent, taking Thomas. It was now almost a year since Tom had joined his father. He had had his thirteenth birthday, in November, and it was not lost on him that his father had been quite unaware of this anniversary. Tom knew his mother would have been thinking of him. In his heart, he knew she thought about him every day. Being thirteen had made Tom wonder what his life would be. As Royalist exiles, he and his father were living on their uppers, with no real social place and no prospects. Tom loathed being in a foreign country, unable to speak the language, uncertain of his way around, frightened he might never see his home again. Other sons of cavaliers were sent back to England to live on their fathers' estates with their mothers; arrangements were made for these sons to have education and careers. Tom Lovell realised that no such life was planned for him. When he tried to talk to his father, Orlando merely said, 'We have to shift for ourselves, lad.' Tom mentioned cautiously how Lambert Jukes had once offered him an apprenticeship. His father's reaction was dramatic: 'Damme, I'd sooner have you dead in a ditch than a manufacturer of ships' biscuit!'

'Well, I never agreed to it,' Tom backed out hastily. 'Though Uncle Lambert did tell me, I could end up an alderman — or even Lord Mayor of London.'

Orlando Lovell became so distressed and annoyed, that although normally abstemious, he drank a whole bottle of Rhenish wine in half an hour before dinner, and then was ill after it.

He almost refused to bring Tom with him the next time he came back to England. But there was nowhere in unfriendly Flanders where a penniless English boy could be safely left. It was cheaper, and more secure, to bring Tom back. Travelling as a pair also made them less conspicuous.

Thomas seemed compliant. He never asked to return to his mother, never now even wanted to write to her. So father and son slipped ashore at Dover, which Royalists rightly believed was a slack port where unlawful immigrants could easily land. They made their way to London. After several moves to confuse observers, Lovell took them to an inn where they had stayed once before, the Swan in King Street. They had now slipped back into their old skulking life, looking anonymous and unremarkable.

But Thomas had his own ideas about that.

One evening, half an hour's walk away in Bread Street, Anne Jukes happened to glance out of a small window that overlooked the private yard at the back of her house. Lambert had recently completed his father's long-ago-planned house-of-easement, in memory of John. It was also to please his wife who, ever since the Ranting incident, believed it her right to exact work around the house at frequent intervals.

Glancing through the pane, Anne suppressed a startled squeak. She saw a boy she recognised, carrying a small bundle, slip into the house-of-easement. He did not come out.

Ten minutes later Anne walked quietly across the yard. She pulled open the door and remarked into the gloom, 'I made one of my walnut cakes this afternoon. I can bring you some out here — but you have no need to crouch in the dark. There is Gideon's old room in the house, just waiting to be occupied by somebody who needs a refuge, Thomas.'