Read the book: «The King’s List»

PART ONE

The Perfect Marriage

Autumn 1659

1

The rebellion was soon put down. I brought Luke and Anne to London on the pretext that they would be safer with the guards I had there, but they saw it for what it was: a form of house arrest for Luke. I tried to make him see that there was no chance of the King returning. He could see what little support he had from the abject failure of the uprising. The army generals who were in control would eventually stop arguing and a new leader to replace Cromwell would be found. Then it would be business as usual.

He stood on the worn patch of the carpet in my study, where I had once stood as a rebellious bastard before Lord Stonehouse, and said nothing.

I tried reason. It was not his beliefs, I said. He was as entitled to them as I was to mine. If more people wanted a monarchy, it would return. But too many people had gained too much land during Cromwell’s reign to want the King back. That was why all the Oxfordshire gentry who had made promises before the rebellion had not lifted a finger to help him and his friends when they were in prison.

He stood fidgeting in his bucket boots and floppy linen, staring straight in front of him, rigid in silence.

I tried diversion and flattery. He was mad about horses and had a very good eye for them. Would he go with the ostler to a horse fair and buy a pair?

His eyes gleamed for a moment, then he bit his lip and said nothing. Finally, I gave him an ultimatum. He could have his complete freedom and go into the City alone if he promised to have nothing more to do with the Sealed Knot and took no part in any further plots.

He stood rigidly to attention. He may even have clicked his heels. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he said, in his beautiful, clipped voice, a real Stonehouse voice which Anne had made sure he acquired, unlike mine which slipped, sometimes intentionally, into the sound of the London streets where I was brought up. ‘I am sorry. I cannot do that.’

I almost ordered Luke to dismiss, but that was part of the problem. He wanted to be a soldier. He had missed the war. Perhaps he believed that if he and his friends had fought, the Royalists would have won.

I sighed. ‘Go away and think about it, Luke.’

‘I suppose it’s too late to beat the French dog,’ said Scogman hopefully. He called him that because, in the manner of the man he declared to be his King, he dressed in French fashions: short doublets and increasingly wide-legged breeches which seemed about to fall from his hips. ‘You could cut his allowance.’

I would not do that. Beatings and other punishments had never worked on me. Nor would I let him be cooped up, although I insisted that Scogman went with him into the City. Anne agreed with that, at least. She wanted no more trouble.

People believed we had a perfect marriage. It certainly was a perfect relationship, but only because we rarely saw one another. Love had gone. It went for me when I became convinced Anne was taking potions to prevent having another child.

The child might have been another little Liz, who had died in infancy. Or another son, giving me the chance to be a better father. Once or twice I even unlocked the left-hand bottom drawer of my desk, and took out the papers on my bastard son.

It had happened when I was a Leveller, struggling after the rebellion for rights for the people. I had broken up with Anne and lived with a girl called Ellie. But then I had returned to Anne, and it was only by chance, years later, that I discovered I’d had a son with Ellie. I paid to have him brought up at Half Moon Court, in the house where I was raised, and still owned. I gave him a rudimentary education. Nothing fancy. He had no idea of my existence, believing the man Ellie lived with, a candle-maker to whom he was apprenticed, was his father. The file I took out of my drawer was marked: Samuel Reeves. Closed. Payments had stopped when he was indentured. Each time I took it out with the intention of throwing it away. It was pointless, stupid to keep it. Anne had no idea of his existence. But each time I put it back.

Apart from Luke, Anne’s child was Highpoint, our great estate in Oxfordshire. Estates were in decline. The extravagant years, when noblemen were expected to bankrupt themselves on the chance that the King might visit, went with his execution. The mood was, as one churchman put it, that ‘a house had better be too little for a day than too great for a year’. Even so, Anne improved the classical facade and opened up the lofty hall to the great sweep of the imposing staircase. She had an eye for paintings which lived, as she put it, rather than just hung. Many were bought cheap at Parliament’s ‘Sale of the Late King’s Goods’, a chaotic affair in Somerset House where dusty masterpieces were crammed amongst tapestries and chipped statues. She spotted dirty Titians and neglected Van Dycks, and had them restored and reframed to their original beauty. Her gardens were marvelled at. I admired Highpoint, but could not live there. Its builders, staff, stables, brew houses, granaries and farms drained most of our money. While she spent it in the country, I economised in town. It suited us both.

It gave her the pleasure of creating it and me the power it emanated. We saw one another at glittering occasions there where I was Sir Thomas Stonehouse, charming to the county, most of whom were covert Royalists. Lady Stonehouse – I called her that at first, in a slightly mocking way, until, as the house gained in eminence, it became impossible to call her anything else – put on her sober dress and mien when she came to town to entertain Cromwell and the other old generals who ruled the country. Cromwell would call me Tom, but he would never dream of calling Anne anything other than Lady Stonehouse.

So we believed it would continue until the family grave at Highpoint (she had already planned it) bore not one of those stiff, heraldic memorials that were going out of fashion, but a personal portrait that recorded our enduring love and affection for one another.

2

Like a pebble in a pool, the summer rebellion made a small impact but caused wide ripples. There was unrest in the City. Mutterings that there would be a tax strike if a successor to Cromwell was not found soon. I had the usual vitriolic letter from my father, Richard Stonehouse, threatening what would happen to me when the King returned.

Cromwell had given me Richard’s estates and made me Sir Thomas Stonehouse, in return for supporting him and signing the King’s death warrant. I had done it for Anne, who had become so obsessed with the place she had fallen into an illness from which I was afraid she would die. It was also true that Richard’s father, Lord Stonehouse, finally intended me to have it. He feared Richard’s profligacy would destroy the estate, but had died before he could complete a new will. Richard saw it much more simply: I had seized Highpoint by signing away the King’s life. The estate was blood money. To my father, I was what I had always been: Tom Neave, bastard, scurrilous pamphleteer, usurper and, worst of all, regicide – King killer.

At erratic intervals, from different parts of Europe, my father sent me such letters. Under Cromwell, who had built up a powerful navy as well as a full-time army, Britain had become the most feared nation in Europe. In those years I could afford to throw Richard’s incoherent letters into the night soil without reading them. Now the armies – there was not one but several – were beginning to disintegrate. Soldiers had not been paid. Their generals quarrelled. Montague, who headed the navy, was suspected of being involved in the rebellion and there were moves to put him in the Tower. I read my father’s letter with more than usual care.

He praised Luke for his courage and part in the rebellion. With all my father’s old contacts in Oxfordshire, I wondered if he had deliberately involved Luke in it. In the same post was a letter for Anne from her old friend and mentor, Lucy, the Countess of Carlisle, who was in Brussels with the makeshift court of Charles Stuart. I had rescued her from the Tower, but Cromwell had exiled her for spying for the King. Now she was spying for me. Her letter was full of gossip about penniless dukes and duelling courtiers and – principally – about Mrs Palmer, Charles’s new mistress.

‘She has enslaved him,’ Lucy wrote. ‘When she is in the room he cannot take his eyes from her. She is planted of course, by the Villiers family – she was Barbara Villiers – for their benefit, if the King ever crosses the water. The whole place is alive with the feeling that it is going to happen but I am afraid we have all heard it so many times before & everyone is as poor as ever & the food just as vile.’

Anne, as usual, gave the letter to me for my amusement and, as usual, I took down my Bible to decode it. It made disturbing reading. Far from discouraging the Royalists, the failed rebellion had made them even more determined. Lucy gave figures for a large number of troops from Ireland. There was money from Europe and the West Country. Richard was heavily involved. He had played a major part in the summer rebellion.

It was late evening when I decoded the letter. I went from my study to return it to Anne. The door of Luke’s room was open as was that of the anteroom of Anne’s apartment. He often slipped in to see her, to agonise over the width of a pair of breeches, or the colour of a cloth. I could hear the murmur of her voice from the corridor and was raising my hand to knock when Luke spoke.

‘When I have the estate I will have a proper steward, not that rogue Scogman.’

Her reply was inaudible but I could guess she agreed with the sentiment. She had her own house steward at Highpoint, a correct and punctilious man. I went into the anteroom. Unlike the rest of the house, which was dark and gloomy, she had, in a short space of time, made her rooms bright with fresh paper and a few of her favourite pictures. There was no sign of her maid and I raised my hand to knock again.

‘Of course, Grandfather will have Highpoint first,’ Luke said.

She loathed Richard much more wholeheartedly than I did and once would have had him killed by Cromwell if I had not interceded, but her reply was chiding, indulgent. ‘Oh. Will he. Then what will happen to your father and me?’

‘Oh … don’t worry. I will protect you, Mother.’

It was banter. She did not take him seriously, but still I could not trust myself to speak. If I had gone in he would have thought I was spying on him, which, by that time, it was impossible to deny.

I returned to my study and picked up my father’s letter. Luke’s grandfather would have Highpoint first, would he? Again I wondered if my father was in contact with Luke, and picked up his letter.

Richard Stonehouse was a threat to the state. That was how John Thurloe, the Secretary of State, for whom I worked, regarded him. Throughout fifteen years of turmoil and change, whatever people thought of his methods, John Thurloe had kept a steady hand on the affairs of state. He had built an admired and feared network of contacts, spies and informers that made one ambassador say: ‘He has the secrets of Princes in his pocket.’ Not just princes. Nobles, gentlemen, politicians, merchants, lawyers, ministers: anyone of any consequence was recorded in papers at his offices in Whitehall. He was one of the few people with Cromwell when he died. Cromwell trusted him implicitly. So did I. I knew what he would say about my father – he had said it often enough.

‘Write to Amsterdam.’

In other words, have him killed by our agent there. I had always recoiled from it. Thurloe thought it was a sign of weakness, but it was not just that he was my father. What was the point? He was a pathetic figure with no real hope of his King returning. But I could not stand the thought of him poisoning my son’s mind.

I had much more to do but Luke’s words and Anne’s indulgence continued to irk me. I felt excluded in my own house. I had put Luke under house arrest but, in a curious way I did not fully understand, I felt I had imprisoned myself.

I flung down my pen and had a glass of sack while I shrugged into my shabby old Brandenburg coat. Anne would call a servant to put on a coat but I detested all that formality. A servant sprang up from the booth in reception, the gold embroidered falcon glittering on his cuffs. He was new – Anne had been dissatisfied with some of the staff – and for a moment I could not recall his name.

‘I am going to the club. Would you be good enough to tell Lady Stonehouse that I shall not be in for supper?’

No, I did not want the coach; nor the ostler to get my horse. I went down the steps into Queen Street, turning surreptitiously to put two fingers up to the austere stone falcon over the entrance. With a feeling of release I breathed in the stink of the streets, walking my legs back to life through Covent Garden towards Parliament. There, swathed in the mists from the river was New Palace Yard, a huge open space full of eating houses, taverns and coffee houses. Coffee had taken London by storm, almost overnight, like pantaloons and feathers in hats. It was in the Turk’s Head Coffee House that the Rota Club met.

It was a pretend Parliament. A republican debating society that anyone with eighteen pence could join and have a vote. Cromwell had purged Parliament, reducing it to a small number – the Rump – until even that had been dismissed. With historically a large Royalist majority he could never have governed. Yet he never reformed it. God would provide the answer. God never did, and there we were, crammed into the smoke-filled Turk’s Head a few steps from Westminster, the republican Parliament that might have been.

The eighteen pence included coffee and pipes of tobacco. I found the coffee foul, boiled thick as soup and bitter, but many sniffed appreciatively and were very knowing about different Turkish blends. It certainly kept people sober and the debate fierce. As novel as the coffee was the Balloting Box. The motion was put and every member dropped his ball in the Aye or the Noe section. That evening the question was whether a Minister should serve a fixed term only and it was decided he should, to avoid consolidation of power.

We streamed into the night, flasks of Dutch brandy coming out to take away the taste of the coffee, and the real business began. William Clarke, whom I used to dub ‘Mr Ink’ in our republican days, took me to one side. He was now rather grand and staid, being secretary to the Committee of Safety, the hotchpotch of army officers that ran the country.

‘Lambert won’t fight,’ he said, taking a pull from my flask. Lambert was the general who had put down the summer rebellion. He had gone north to subjugate another general, Monck, in charge of the Scottish army, who had refused to join the Committee of Safety, declaring it illegal. ‘His troops are not paid. Some of them are without boots.’

He slipped me a paper, containing army movements and committee minutes. It was old, thin stuff, some of it rehashed from what I had seen before. He read the disappointment in my face and took another drink from my flask.

‘What happened at the last meeting?’

He wiped the brandy from his lips. He looked ill and feverish. ‘I wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘I was excluded. How can I take the minutes of a meeting when I’m excluded?’ He addressed me as if I was personally responsible, almost immediately muttering, ‘I’m sorry, Tom. It used to be difficult to know who will be in charge tomorrow. Now I scarcely know who is in charge today.’

I laughed. ‘Don’t worry, Bill. This will be very useful.’

In other words, like Lucy, he would be paid. I ended the evening in a chop house with Sam Pepys.

We had both climbed out of the streets, his father having been a tailor. His patron, Lord Montague, was under suspicion of involvement in the summer rebellion and Pepys had lost his position as his secretary.

‘So I have nothing to do, which is bad, and no money to do it with, which is worse, unless Lord Montague is reprieved …?’

He looked at me hopefully. I concentrated on my mutton chop in pomegranate jelly. Montague was able, if a little headstrong, and I had put a case for him but John Thurloe was adamant. Montague would go to the Tower. When the Secretary of State made a decision it was final. Montague was finished. I complimented Pepys on his choice of eating house. Only a good chef could turn a tough old piece of mutton into such a rare delicacy.

He made a face at me and sighed. ‘Then I am done. I will have to while away my hours writing a diary.’

‘A diary?’

‘A record of each day. Big events. Plenty of those. There’s a new government every day. Small ones – the sort of things you and I get up to.’ He gave me a prodigious wink.

‘How are you going to sell it?’

‘Sell it?’ He looked shocked. ‘I’m writing it in shorthand. I could never sell it. My wife might read it.’

He roared with laughter and I ordered another bottle of claret to launch his new enterprise. By the time I stumbled out of the Hackney in Queen Street I was only too glad for James in reception – I remembered his name and used it several times – to help me out of my Brandenburg coat.

Two or three times a week I found my way to the offices of the Secretary of State in Whitehall. I say ‘found’ because the old palace in which Cromwell had installed government offices was a labyrinth in which even servants got lost. After going through the Elizabethan Great Gate, past buildings with crumbling timbered gables, I snaked through a warren of twisting corridors which seemed to get narrower and narrower, taking me past room after room of state papers before reaching John Thurloe’s apartment overlooking the river.

He never wasted time and greeted me with no more than a nod. I gave him the figures Lucy had sent me.

‘How sound are they?’

‘I don’t know. But Richard Stonehouse is at the heart of it.’ In Thurloe’s presence, I never referred to him as my father.

He shrugged. He had trained as a lawyer and counted his words. Words cost money. He had said all he had to say about my father, and the ball was in my court. Although I expected nothing, it was always worthwhile, when making a concession, seeking a quid pro quo.

‘I wonder if it’s wise to send Montague to the Tower?’

He stared at me coldly and I thought I had gone too far. With his dark eyes set rather too close together in a thin, cadaverous face, it was like being observed by a surgeon planning to operate. At last he spoke.

‘As it happens, I’ve been reflecting on what you said. I’ll send him to the country instead.’

‘I’ll write to Amsterdam about Richard Stonehouse.’

Another nod and he returned to the papers he was working on. The interview was over. I was surprised and gratified about Montague. I was almost out of the room when he spoke again.

‘Tom.’

He never called me Tom. Perhaps Sir Thomas; usually he dispensed with names altogether. When I returned he was gazing out of the window at the hazy line of the river, watching the press of boats going under London Bridge. Two boats had collided and an argument had erupted.

‘If you’re going to do it, you’d better get on with it. I expect I shall be out of office next week. Or shortly after.’

I thought I had misheard him. He continued to stare down the river as if the accident absorbed all his attention. Oars were pushing the quarrelling boatmen to one side and the other boats resumed their steady flow.

‘Out of the office?’

He turned his full gaze on me. There may even have been a hint of amusement on his face at my bewilderment. ‘Out of office. The Committee of Safety is yesterday’s story. They have caved in to General Monck. The Rump Parliament is to be assembled to er … run the country, led by Arthur Haselrig.’ There was a wealth of dry scepticism in the hesitation. ‘Arthur has been good enough to inform me that I will not be invited to join the State Council.’

I still did not take it in.

I could find nothing to say. If he was out of office, so was I. The boatmen had settled their difference and were steering back into the stream of traffic.

‘I suspect we shall be wanted again,’ he said. ‘I suggest we meet once a week at my chambers in Lincoln’s Inn.’

I stammered something, which he interrupted with a final nod before returning to his papers.

I got lost on the way out in the web of alleys that linked small courts and gardens, where the first piles of fallen leaves were being swept away. I had to be directed by the gardener to the Great Gate. It was a bright, unseasonal day. I walked aimlessly back to Queen Street. I badly needed a drink, but dare not. Everyone seemed busy but me, from hawkers crying to gentlemen in coaches on their way to the City. I did not have the heart to raise two fingers to the falcon over the door, but hurried up the steps, suddenly realising how much there was to do.

Everything that I had put off I did that day, coming to a decision on problems that had seemed intractable yesterday, dictating to my secretary, Mr Cole, until the servant came to light the candles. I left my father till last.

‘There is one more.’

I had coded the letter a year ago, after a particularly vitriolic letter from my father when Cromwell died. The code was embedded in a letter ordering some diamonds from a jeweller in Amsterdam, one of our agents. As proof that the job had been done, I requested him to send Richard’s ring. If Mr Cole did not know what it meant, he knew what it signified. He had done enough such letters for Richard’s father, Lord Stonehouse, including one ingeniously condemning me as a plague child, which should have resulted in my death. His only reaction was to push back his long white hair and rub his wrist with a sigh of relief.

‘Mr Thurloe has kept us busy today, sir.’

‘He has indeed, Mr Cole.’

I said no more. He would know soon enough. I poured myself a large sack and raised it to the portrait of Lord Stonehouse over the flickering fire. Anne thought it dreadful – ‘even worse than he looked in real life, if that were possible’ – but, for me, it was an old companion. In the shifting light of the candles and the fire, my grandfather’s smoke-blackened face with the beaked Stonehouse nose seemed to come alive. That evening I thought he looked disapproving. No Stonehouse had been out of office since before the reign of James the First.

I finished the sack. I considered going to the club but, with my sudden loss of influence, felt disinclined to, and found, for the first time in years, I had nothing more to do than go down to supper.

3

The first sign of unrest in the City is always when apprentices, egged on by their masters, begin to riot. They were roaming the streets, hunting down Quakers, a sectarian group which the City saw as a serious threat to order. Church ministers hated them because they were against tithes and interrupted services. I came across a group of them when I rode through Covent Garden on my way to my weekly meeting with John Thurloe.

It had been raining since early morning. Some of the Quakers had no outdoor coats and the feet of their children were bare, but their eyes shone exultantly as they chanted. A growing group of apprentices jeered at them, but their singing only grew louder. I tried to force my horse through. The apprentices tipped or drew off their hats at me.

‘Remove your hats for the gentleman,’ yelled an apprentice at the Quakers.

He was provoking them. They acknowledged no social betters and whatever tattered scraps they wore remained firmly on their heads. The rumble of an approaching carriage caused the apprentices to cry out in increased fervour.

‘Off with their hats!’

One caught a woman a stinging blow on the head. Her bonnet flew off. The blow scarcely interrupted her singing but the child with her flinched and darted away, stopping when she saw the carriage. There was no danger. The coachman saw her, slowed and turned away the horses. But the occupant of the carriage, no doubt in a hurry, rapped loudly with his stick. The coachman jumped, lost the reins for a moment and the horses panicked, heading straight for the child. There was an innocence in her mud-stained face, a curiosity in her widening eyes as she stared towards the tossing heads, the shafts that were about to impale her.

There are some instincts that, however rusty, spring back into life. It was the cavalryman I had once been who drove his horse between the carriage and the child, diverting the horses towards the street posts and helping the coachman bring them back under control.

The apprentices had stopped shouting and the Quakers singing. The child had not moved. She still had that fixed look of curiosity on her face. I picked up her hat, which had been swept off in the draught from my horse, and gave it to her. She turned and ran, disappearing into the group of Quakers.

The door of the carriage scraped open, its occupant so corpulent he could extract himself only with the aid of the footman, whom he berated, before flinging abuse at the coachman.

I found my breath. ‘You should leave your coachman to do the driving, sir.’

He moved to face me at the speed of a ship turning round. His fat cheeks narrowed his eyes into slits. ‘You should leave the country, Sir Thomas, to those who know how to govern it.’

I had not seen Sir Lewis Challoner for years. Cromwell had thrown out Royalists like Sir Lewis, creating the Rump Parliament, which had now returned, giving the army some semblance of legitimacy. It was another sign of unrest that, in spite of his part in the rebellion, he was back.

‘Go home, Sir Lewis. You are banned from the City.’

He smiled. Suddenly he was enjoying himself. ‘You are forgetting yourself, sir. You are dislodged from office, are you not, Sir Thomas?’

The singing began again, this time on a triumphant, exalted note. A man was holding up the child I had saved. He was an odd figure in that crowd, dressed in sailor’s slops, a coloured jumble of canvas doublet, breeches and linen shirt, tight-fitting to avoid being caught in the rigging of a ship. At his side stood a woman who would soon be in danger of wearing no clothes at all. She was flinging away her tattered skirt and beginning to remove her blouse, the singers round her chanting in ecstasy. The apprentices watched in a mixture of stunned disbelief and licentiousness. I had heard of this Quaker rite, but never seen it. The woman reached a state of euphoria where the innocence of Eden came upon her and compelled her to remove her clothes before God entered the garden, asking who told her of her nakedness.

In this attempt to return to a time before sin she had unpeeled her blouse, revealing breasts which, from bearing children, were as shrunk as old leather wine bottles. Perhaps the girl perched on the sailor’s shoulders was her child. Far from feeling the cold and the driving rain, the woman embraced it, her skin glowing with effort, drawing superstitious awe from the watching crowd.

Except for Sir Lewis. What was innocence for her was the utmost depravity for him, a consequence of the religious licence Cromwell had given such pernicious sects.

As she dropped the blouse in a pool, spurning it with her dancing feet, Sir Lewis ordered his footman to seize the whore while the coachman went for a constable.

‘If there still is anyone keeping order in this Sodom and Gomorrah,’ he said.

‘Leave her,’ I said to the footman. ‘I will deal with her.’

Sir Lewis lost all restraint. The brooding sourness built up during his enforced exile burst out of him. He looked the arrogant, despotic hanging magistrate I had first met years ago.

‘You? You can do nothing! You are one of the creators of this evil!’

The woman, now naked, danced in a mounting frenzy, matched by the insistent rhythm of the Quakers’ singing, accompanied by the apprentices, whose shocked outrage had been overwhelmed by prurience. They outdid one another in nudges and jokes, gazing lasciviously, their handclapping, which had begun with a mocking slowness, increasing in speed until it matched the ecstasy of the singers.

‘Your master Thurloe has been sacked. You have no power. No position. It is you who should flee – if you can, regicide!’ He spat the word out. ‘There was a ballot to be on the jury of those who killed the King. I was lucky enough to win a place.’

When you have been in power for a decade you do not lose it overnight, whether it has substance or not. ‘Get in your coach, Sir Lewis, or I will bring an action against you for endangering the life of that child.’

‘That slattern –’ he began, but saw the look on my face and turned to shout at his coachman to open the door.

I strode over to the crowd. The apprentices stopped clapping when they saw my expression. Disgust and outrage began to return to their faces at the sight of the naked woman.

‘Stop her,’ I said to the sailor.

‘I cannot. She is with the Lord.’

I told an apprentice to fetch a constable. ‘Name,’ I said to the sailor.

‘Stephen Butcher,’ he said, with one of those beatific smiles that made me want to strike him across the face.

I knew of him. He was one of the followers of the Quaker preacher James Nayler who had re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem by riding into Bristol on an ass. I had wanted Nayler to be dealt with quietly, but he had been charged with blasphemy, flogged, and his tongue bored. As I feared, his supporters had increased tenfold.

There was no sign of the constable. The apprentices were looking at me expectantly, itching to be told to lay their hands on the woman. Blood oozed in a muddy rivulet on one of her feet where she had cut herself on a stone, but she seemed unaware of it. I looked away but, in spite of myself, could not keep my eyes from her. Shrivelled as her breasts were, her gyrations and the look of ecstasy on her uplifted face smoothed out its lines, giving it a strange, mesmeric beauty, and leaving no doubt that the girl who had nearly been killed was her daughter.

Her dance not only took the years from her; it took them from me. Anne’s body was a distant memory. When the urge came on me, Scogman found me a whore. Working for Cromwell late into every night had killed the desire even for that. I was not sorry. I thought of love, if I thought of it at all, as a false god, a spy within which robbed a man of his secrets and left him helpless, out of control. I had seen many men ruined by love; I had almost been destroyed by it myself. Had not my relationship with Anne become immeasurably better without love?

As I stared at the twist and turn of the woman’s rump, I caught the sailor’s smile, more knowing than saintly. I snatched up her clothes and thrust them angrily at him. ‘Cover her.’

‘Is that what your voice is telling you?’

I had had enough of the Quakers and their inner voices. I flung the clothes at him. ‘Do it!’

Without the smile leaving his face, Stephen Butcher picked up the clothes. ‘Martha,’ he said. ‘Martha.’ He seemed to be calling her from a great distance, for at first she did not respond. But the mood was broken for most of the Quakers, whose singing gradually stuttered to a stop. That slowed the woman’s dancing but did not stop it. Like a top, her whirling became a stagger until the sailor caught her by the arm. She gazed at him dizzily, as if she did not know him. He held her patiently until she regained her balance.

‘Martha,’ he said gently. ‘He is here. The man who saved Hannah’s life.’

She looked at him blankly, her breasts heaving as she drew in great gulps of air, and then at the clothes he was holding out to her. ‘I heard the Lord coming. I heard him. I saw him!’

‘Put them on,’ I said.

Martha took a step towards me. The lines were folding back into her face. Stretch marks slackening her belly suggested several children. ‘The sin is in your eyes, not in my clothes.’

Butcher dropped the blouse over her head and held out her underskirt. At least he was a pragmatist, I thought – he had seen the approaching constables. Automatically, Martha hooked the blouse to her skirt. Her body disappeared, except where the wet rags clung to it. Momentarily, perversely, before the constable came up to me, I felt I had destroyed something.

‘Lewdness in a public place,’ I said to the constable.

‘Your name, sir?’

His colleague dug him in the ribs and pointed to the falcon ring on my finger. ‘I beg your pardon, Sir Thomas.’

He seized Martha roughly, although she made no resistance. Some of the crowd bowed their heads; others began singing. Her daughter Hannah stood staring, thumb in mouth, before flinging herself at her mother. I suspected Martha was a recent convert, for the girl had absorbed none of her piety. When a constable pulled her off, she bit him, momentarily freeing her mother, yelling that they would escape to Spital, beyond the walls. Incensed, the constables began to drag them both away. Martha broke down and began to struggle, pleading with the constables that her daughter had the flux, and would die in gaol. This was a fine show for the apprentices, who liked nothing better than seeing the rewards of sin – unless they were committing the sins themselves – and began jeering and applauding.

I cannot say why I acted as I did next, for it was quite out of character. Perhaps the girl crying that they would escape to Spital, like her dancing mother, brought back to me the time of my life I preferred to forget.

‘Leave them,’ I said.

The constables stopped, staring at me uncomprehendingly. The girl half-wrenched away, screaming as a constable twisted her arm behind her back.

‘Release them,’ I snapped.

The girl immediately turned to run. Her mother stopped her, giving me a bewildered look which changed into one of gratitude, tinged with the piety that so aggravated me. The apprentices, robbed of their prey, began to mutter rebelliously.

‘Arrest him,’ I said, pointing at the sailor, Stephen Butcher.

‘On what charge?’ said the constable whose hand had been bitten.

‘Incitement to lewdness.’

In Puritan England there was no distinction between sin and crime. Adultery had become a felony, and, just as Eve picked the apple, it was invariably the woman’s fault. The apprentices moved threateningly towards me, but one of them, who from his superior clothes looked like a lawyer’s clerk, cried: ‘We have a Solomon amongst us. He has arrested the whoremaster, not the whore.’

The apprentices switched in a moment from threatening me to applauding me. ‘The whoremaster not the whore,’ they chanted.

Hannah stood puzzled, her thumb in her mouth again. She whispered to her mother, who pointed to me. Hannah darted over to me. She looked as if she was about to hug me but the thought of her flux, and the stench that came from her, made me draw away in disgust and she made a strange genuflection, somewhere between a bow and a curtsey, before fleeing back to her mother.

Stephen Butcher went without resistance, but stopped as he passed me. The constables attempted to jerk him away, but they might as well have tried to move one of the ships he sailed in. His muscles bulged under his linen shirt as he anchored himself in front of me. There was a livid scar on his neck and one of his ears was twisted out of shape. For a moment I thought the smile on his face was a feint and he was about to strike me, but in a voice as gentle as melted butter he had a much more cunning blow to land.

‘Your voices are telling you different things. Listen to the right one.’