Rebels and traitors

Chapter Seventy-Three — Hampshire and London: 1653

Orlando Lovell came ashore in Hampshire, sometime in early summer 1653, alone. He landed in a dapper cloak and an ash-grey suit, passing himself off as someone who travelled for education or business. He wore a sword like a gentleman. His baggage was compact and neat. He brought no horse, because Parliament imposed heavy customs duties on anyone importing horses into England unless they had obtained prior exemption from duty because they were diplomats. If Lovell thought of himself as a diplomat, it was not the kind who made formal addresses to the Lord Protector.

He bought a horse, finding it a good joke to cheat the man who sold it to him. Taking no trouble to hire a groom or other servant, he set about his personal business.

At this time, Lovell had not long been back in Europe. Earlier that year, a month before Oliver Cromwell lost his temper and dismissed the Rump Parliament, a disheartened Prince Rupert had returned to France from the West Indies, with Lovell in his company. While Rupert was devastated by the loss of his brother, Lovell's regret was a veneer. As he saw it, he had had a lucky escape, and not just from the hurricane. For the past three years he had led an adventurous life, but he had endured his fill of sailing.

Of course he had not died on the Defiance. That would have been the kind of bad planning Orlando Lovell deplored. During the storm, he was aboard one of their prize ships.

There was a disadvantage in capturing a ship: the victor had to reduce his own establishment by placing officers and men aboard, to sail her back to a home port. Prince Rupert had no home port, but if they were sound enough his prizes were attached to his slowly increasing squadron.

Lovell, a trusted officer, had sometimes been deployed elsewhere than on Maurice's flagship. Maurice, probably, had liked a break from him. Lovell, no admirer of commanders, had certainly liked a break from Maurice.

His vessel somehow survived, rendezvoused with Prince Rupert and limped back to France. At St Malo the bedraggled Lovell abandoned the rat-infested, rotten hulk on which he had floated back. He was ready to ditch Rupert too. He made his own journey to the court of King Charles II. Not many exiled cavaliers remembered him, but building up his reputation from scratch was nothing new. Orlando Lovell always had the air of a man they ought to remember. He could even persuade people to apologise for their forgetfulness, when in truth they had never met him before.

The young King's court and that of his widowed mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, moved between Paris and St Germain-en-Laye with their impoverished retinues. Lovell hated it. When, eventually, the French decided it was in their interests to begin making overtures to Cromwell and the English Commonwealth, the disgruntled Charles II moved to Holland. That had the advantage of placing him near the coast from which he would sail to invade his kingdom — if he ever did so. He had neither an army nor ships to transport it; there was no funding.

Throughout his exile, Charles would keep up the trappings of monarchy, dining in state formally to emphasise his privileged position — wasting money that-Lovell thought would be better spent on men and arms. Throughout this time, too, Charles was the focus of continual scheming which, though it never came to much in real terms, served to unsettle and preoccupy the Commonwealth.

Lovell found that among the English Royalists, several groups were plotting. These exiles were by definition those who had done most tenacious service to the royal cause, men most virulently opposed to Parliament, men who would find it difficult or impossible to return home — men like Lovell himself, though he would not have acknowledged any likeness to most of them. Some had been denounced and banished. Whether in France, Germany or Holland, they had nothing else to do but drink, duel — and conspire.

Lovell was a modest drinker, preferring to spend his cash on himself rather than splash out on carousing with a feckless group. Guarded, he kept to himself, so avoided fights. As one of Rupert's privateers, Lovell was rather isolated at court, especially after Rupert quarrelled with everyone and left for Germany. But scheming always attracted him. Ever grimly practical, he surveyed the field. Turncoats and double agents were everywhere. Orlando Lovell enjoyed feeling that no man near him could be trusted. It absolved him from letting any man trust him.

What his Royalism still supplied was danger and a challenge. He had always been restless and risk-loving. So long as he had means to live, intriguing for the young King would suit Lovell. Like many men of shallow morals, he called himself a patriot. He had no romantic longings to restore the monarchy; he had fought for the Stuarts for more than a decade and knew their limitations. Still, he had made his choice, just before Edmund Treves first met him in Oxford. A proud man, he never went back on a decision. He would stay loyal. Always sure of his own worth, he thought this gave him nobility.

Among the exiles, he identified various conspirators. The Louvre Group tended to be Catholic and courted alliance with Scotland. The Old Royalists were Anglican and opposed a Scottish alliance. A set called the Swordsmen associated with Prince Rupert in Paris, men who had no particular policy, other than fighting. The Action Party were more militant but just as unsuccessful. Sometime in 1653, the most famous and secretive group emerged, the Sealed Knot. They had hopes to attract backing from the Levellers. It was not completely crazy, because the Levellers had opposed the King's execution and disenchanted leaders of their party did come knocking at Royalist doors. They found them easily. That was how secret the secret plotters were.

Lovell made a scathing assessment of these cliques: their hopes were ridiculous, their disorder was dire. He despised them for working against one another, for their piss-poor judgement and lamentable lack of security. Typically, he attached himself to none of them. However, he did offer his services. Charles II always played the innocent, but from the start of his exile after the battle of Worcester he had used loyal friends to organise underhand designs. Lovell was told in confidence that Lord Cottingham and Sir Edward Hyde were behind the murders of two Commonwealth diplomats, Isaac Dorislaus at The Hague and Anthony Ascham in Madrid, with the King's connivance. He learned that his friend Edmund Treves was in the party that killed Dorislaus. He also heard Edmund later died at Worcester. He was surprised how much the waste of that good young life depressed him.

Hyde was very much still active in intrigue, though many cavaliers despised him as an over-ambitious careerist. Lovell hated Hyde. But also dabbling with secret work was Sir Marmaduke Langdale. Langdale had been one of Charles I's premier commanders. A long-faced, lean-figured, old-school cavalier, he had operated mainly in the north, a regular opponent of the Fairfaxes. He formed the Northern Horse from the relics of Lord Newcastle's broken troops after Marston Moor but they were defeated at Naseby. In the second civil war Langdale was crushed by Cromwell at the battle of Preston and captured; he escaped in various disguises, including that of a milkmaid. Now permanently excluded from England by Parliament, Sir Marmaduke Langdale was a member of Charles II's council in exile.

It was with Langdale that Orlando Lovell condescended to work. Langdale viewed him with fair regard. As a man of action, Lovell was experienced, physical, energetic, cool-headed and brave-hearted, a strong swordsman and an accurate shot. His mental skills included his ability to assess the enemy and, to a lesser extent, operational planning. Though a truculent follower, he made a terse but efficient leader. His supreme talent was to be devious. He was so good at that because he enjoyed it so much. Lovell would make a rabid plotter.

The plan hatched with Langdale was that Lovell would go across to England and resume normal life. He would pose as a penitent returning from exile; he would recover his estates, give false oaths of loyalty, establish himself somewhere convenient, recruit and report back on conditions. For this, his easiest disguise would be to live once again with his wife; he could use the regular Royalist claim, that he had come back to England 'to settle his family'.

At the moment when Lovell first landed in Hampshire, Juliana was still reluctant to believe he was dead. She was doggedly waiting to hear from him and would have taken up their old family life, wherever and however Lovell suggested. Had he found her, Lovell's plan would have worked.

So he landed in Hampshire. When he looked around his home county, he could see much damage but signs of recovery. True, war had had permanent effects. Large tracts of forest had been felled, stolen by locals for fuel or more recently commandeered by Parliament for shipbuilding; swathes of great trees, a whole generation, were lost forever. Farms had decayed too, but they were now slowly being reclaimed for crops and livestock. Cattle and horses were now bred again. Prices were stabilising, fences were rebuilt, buildings that had been damaged beyond repair were pulled down for tidiness and to reuse their materials. Country-born, Orlando Lovell noticed these things. He had been born into the landowning class and was disgusted by the suffering imposed on the land by long years of war. His heart hardened against the rulers of the Commonwealth, whom he saw as responsible for the destruction.

In Hampshire, he was infuriated to find that his own meagre estates had never been returned to him after Juliana helped him compound for pardon. They were forfeited to Parliament. Worse, his property had been snapped up, at a knock-down price, by one of many astute speculators who were grabbing Royalist land: his own land agent, John Jolley. Lovell would never see the money; it went to pay Parliamentary soldiers.

When Jolley admitted this outrage, he only escaped injury because they were in a tavern with people watching — people who might report a trouble-making Royalist. Jolley informed the incensed Lovell that an information had been laid against him by somebody unknown. He had been proscribed by Parliament; designated 'dangerous and disaffected'; ordered into banishment. If caught, he would be imprisoned. He faced a firing-squad or the gallows.

Lovell disappeared fast, before he could be betrayed. In Hampshire he could trust no one. He had intended to try to see his father, but this was likely to go badly so he did not wait to do it. He had learned one other thing from John Jolley: Juliana and their two sons were at Lewisham. Lovell travelled there, but he found tenants in possession. He did not approach them. Had he done so, and had he tracked down Juliana to Shoe Lane, he would not have been too late. She would not — could not — have turned away her husband. She had not yet gone looking for a printer. So if Lovell lost her, it was due to his own inertia.

Fearing that trouble might follow him from Hampshire, Lovell burrowed into hiding in London. Much of the news there was of the trial of the Leveller, John Lilburne, who had returned to England from exile in Bruges; he claimed that Cromwell's dismissing the Rump had rendered his banishment invalid. His old ally Richard Overton tried to get him a good lawyer and attended daily. The jury would find Lilburne not guilty; he would try to obtain a writ of habeas corpus but would be put in the Tower again anyway.

During this highly charged trial, John Thurloe took over sole management of the intelligence service for Cromwell. Around the same time, intuition warned Colonel Orlando Lovell that he was being watched. Immediately he packed, changed his coat and his hairstyle, sold his horse for more than he had paid for it, left his lodging through an inconspicuous alley and escaped back to the Continent.