“You must honour your sister Margaret as you would your mother,” he declared. And Samuel never heard the preacher say a word against her in those days; despite the fact that Margaret, when he was alone with her at the farm would often cry:
“Beware of Obadiah, Samuel. He is a viper.”
She could not be right. On his visits to them at the farm, who could have been more kindly than Obadiah towards him? Was it not Obadiah who had honoured him, that very January, by giving him a little leather-bound copy of the great John Milton’s pamphlet on the Reformation?
“Read it carefully,” Obadiah had enjoined in his serious way: “for none has explained better than Milton why the prelates and the papist superstitions need to be done away with.”
He had even heard Obadiah remark to a gentleman in the close that young Samuel had the mind of a scholar – which, considering his very modest attainments with the pen, was unhoped-for praise indeed. As for Obadiah being a devil, no one in Sarum other than Margaret seemed to say so. For Obadiah Shockley was reckoned a great man by then; and what could anyone have to fear from him?
The world was a better place for Obadiah now. For Presbyterians ruled.
The king was dead – executed after intriguing too many times. Two Wiltshire men, including Edmund Ludlow, had signed the death warrant. Now the Protector, Cromwell, ruled over a Presbyterian Parliament instead.
It was firm rule – when young Ludlow opposed Cromwell’s dictatorship he was told to stay at his post in Ireland or face arrest if he came back. As for Parliament, this was the Barebones Parliament – a small number of compliant men nominated by the Presbyterian congregations. The three Wiltshire men – Eyre, Ashley Cooper and Greene – were all sound, conservative fellows, to Obadiah’s liking.
And no place seemed more utterly Presbyterian than Sarum.
For the cathedral priests had gone: the whole panoply of ecclesiastical dignitaries that had ruled the diocese of Sarum for six centuries – bishop, dean, archdeacons, canons with their accompanying vicars choral and choristers – Parliament had removed them all. It had taken most of their lands as well, and those solid Puritan townsmen, Ivie and Dove, had gone to London to obtain some of these possessions for the town. The town council ruled the close now; they had opened it up.
It was the parish priests and preachers who ruled – men like Strickland of St Edmunds and his colleagues at St Thomas’s and St Martin’s – all staunch members of the Presbyterian Westminster Assembly. They preached from pulpits that had been moved, in the Presbyterian manner, to the centre of the church. They preached in the cathedral too.
“’Tis just what every church should be now, a parish church for preaching,” Obadiah explained to Samuel and Margaret. And when Margaret objected that the great building seemed to her to be something more than a mere local church, he replied impatiently: “Only the papists in the past made the thing so monstrously large.”
The building had not gained from the change in regime. That very year, the tower of St Edmund’s church had collapsed; and although the belfry door had been renewed, other damage done by the soldiers in the chapter house had not. Even that was not all. When, to defend England’s trading interests against constant and arrogant Dutch competition, Cromwell had been forced to fight a brief war with the Netherlands too, a party of Dutch prisoners had been casually left, this very year, in the cloisters for weeks. “And a fine havoc they have made in there as well,” Margaret said with disgust. Part of the close was a rubbish dump; in another area, butchers had set up a little abattoir and were selling their meat there too. The bishop’s palace was made into tenements, and partly used as an inn; coaches had been allowed through on the north eastern and western sides and had churned up the turf and broken gravestones in the churchyard.
But if the buildings had not gained, the local vicars had. For now, instead of their lowly lodgings in the town, the council had bought them fine houses in the close where they lived with all the dignity of the canons they had ousted.
Obadiah had a house in the close. He lived in sober state.
He did not go often to the farm, but he let Samuel know that he was always welcome at the handsome house in the close and Samuel was proud that his brother was such an important man in the city. The preacher took a genuine interest in the boy, too, because he saw that he had a quick intelligence.
Besides, as he quietly but remorselessly reminded Margaret, it was he, Obadiah, who was in practice head of the family now. It was something Margaret could not deny.
If only Edmund had been there.
But Edmund had gone.
Samuel always remembered him as a quiet, gentle figure.
After the visit of young Moody, and his strange outburst, Samuel could sense that some kind of watershed had been passed. There was a new closeness between Margaret and Edmund and a feeling of peace and family affection came over the whole household. It was Edmund who acted as his first tutor, teaching him to read and write and parse a little Latin.
Yet there was also, after a little time, a sense of withdrawal. Edmund was still head of the family, but he seemed content to leave the running of the farm to Margaret and Jacob Godfrey. He grew a little thinner each year. Samuel remembered him mostly sitting or walking alone, not unhappily, but thoughtfully, as if some great debate were occupying his mind.
Then, in the spring of 1649, just after King Charles was executed, he left.
It was over a year before Samuel saw him again. Whenever he asked his sister where Edmund was, she had answered only: “Near London”; and if he asked when he would return she would only say: “I do not know.”
Edmund did not return, but one spring they visited him.
It was a long journey, almost to London; but when at last their little carriage bumped up St George’s Hill, Samuel found to his surprise that their destination was an extensive farm, not unlike those he knew at Sarum. And his surprise was greater still when, staring at a group of roughly dressed labourers trudging up the slope towards the house, he saw Edmund amongst them.
“Why does he work with the labourers?” he asked in surprise.
“Because he chooses to,” Margaret answered. And then she explained: “Your brother Edmund has become a Digger.”
A Digger: he had not met the term before; he wondered what it was.
Of all the curious groups and sects thrown up by the ferment of the Civil War, the Diggers were amongst the most curious: but also, like many extremists, the most logical. Indeed, when Obadiah and Edmund had quarrelled about who should have the vote, the Presbyterian had been right to accuse Edmund of tendencies which would lead to what he called chaos.
For if the Levellers had demanded a vote for all free men of property, the Diggers believed that all men should be free.
“And if true freedom lies in the owning of land and goods; why then, should not – if all men are to be free – all goods be held in common?” So Edmund urged his sister and his ten-year-old brother that day as they sat at the big table in the farmhouse where the Digger community of St George’s Hill lived together.
“All we have here, we hold in common,” he explained. “We labour together as friends.” He showed them round the place proudly.
So this was the practical result of Edmund’s long agony and self-questioning.
“’Tis like a monastery and a nunnery all together,” she joked.
“There is no religious rule,” he assured her seriously, and she wondered how long the community could last upon such easygoing terms.
She watched him carefully. He seemed so thin. There was a new gleam in his eye: was it a gleam of inner peace, or some suppressed desperation? She did not know.
They spent a pleasant evening together. He was clearly happy to see them both. But he seemed equally happy when they left the next morning.
Samuel was puzzled.
“Does he mean we should not keep the farm?”
“He wants no part of it.”
“I wonder why he does not want the farm.”
“He has been unhappy.”
Samuel considered. He could not make much of this.
“Is he happy now?”
“I wish I knew.”
He had died after a wasting sickness eighteen months later. The reports brought to Margaret told her he died contented. The community of Diggers did not last, but remained one of the more determined of the early European essays in practical communism.
With only Margaret and Obadiah to look to, it seemed to Samuel, therefore, that in his life there were two worlds. There was the Avon valley, where Margaret ruled, and Salisbury, where Obadiah held court. Avonsford was his childhood, Salisbury the outside world. One, much loved, held him back: the other, undiscovered territory tempted him forward.
Obadiah Shockley bided his time.
By the time he was twelve, Samuel was a bright, fair-haired youth who looked even more like his sister than Nathaniel had. Quick-witted, he knew everything there was to know about the farm and the water meadows and, thanks to Jacob Godfrey, he already had a thorough understanding of the farm accounts. He had been given some schooling – pressed by Obadiah, Margaret had seen to that. She had engaged a young clergyman to come to the Shockley farm three days a week to tutor him. He had made excellent progress.
But above all, Margaret taught him to know the local countryside.
“I may not be a scholar like Obadiah,” she said defiantly, “but I understand the land.”
There was seldom a day they did not walk five or ten miles.
He knew the Avon valley, every inch of it, all the way up to Amesbury in the north and past Stonehenge beyond.
Each part had its particular characteristic.
There were the slopes and meadows near Old Sarum, where the villagers still held extensive common land.
“But they are ploughing it into fields now,” she explained, “where they can close-fold their flocks.” Soon he was familiar with the complex set of bye-laws that regulated the villagers’ intense cultivation of their jointly owned flocks and hedged fields.
Sometimes, they would follow the Avon downstream, past the cathedral, over the bridge and south to the little village of Britford, at the edge of old Clarendon Forest. Once or twice they walked further still, southwards five miles to Downton before turning back upstream. Or they would go to the city and then walk north east, past the great sweeping slope called Bishopsdown and into the long valley of the river Bourne, on whose eastern side lay the huge forbidding ridges that led away towards Winchester – magnificent country to gaze at, but a long, hard haul to walk over. But above all it was the western side of Sarum that Samuel Shockley loved. To the south west of the cathedral close lay the open fields that led to the village of Harnham with its mill. Behind that, the huge ridge of Harnham Hill rose like a protective wall. “That’s the place with the best views,” he would say: for from Harnham you could see the whole city – cathedral, close, market place and chequers laid out as clearly as on one of Speed’s maps.
And to the west: Herbert country he called it.
It was a good description. For there, in the broad, shallow valley that ran to Shaftesbury in the west, lay the huge, well-managed estates of Lord Pembroke, head of the Herbert family. Even if the recent earls were lesser figures than their Tudor forebears who had made Wilton House like a Renaissance court half a century before, their power and influence was formidable. He loved to walk out from the city, past the next-door villages with their Saxon names, Fisherton, and Bemerton, to King Alfred’s old town of Wilton itself. Sometimes he would walk past Wilton, up on to the ridge to the west and into Grovely Wood where, nine hundred years before, the small farm in the clearing long since forgotten had given his own family their name.
Herbert country. The words also had another important meaning for Margaret – one that made Obadiah scowl.
For whenever they went to Wilton, they never failed to walk through the hamlet of Bemerton and stop there to view a small, grey stone and flint rectory and, on the other side of the lane from it, a little village chapel hardly the size of a low barn, into which they would go to say a prayer.
Each time they did so, Margaret would say the same thing as they came out.
“I remember him. Your father was his friend.”
For Margaret was eleven years old when the great poet George Herbert died.
“Was he of the great family at Wilton?” Samuel had once asked when he was young.
“A distant cousin,” she told him.
“Did he go often to Wilton House then?”
She had smiled sadly.
“I don’t think so. He was a poor cousin, you see.”
“He went everywhere else in Sarum though, didn’t he?”
“Everywhere.”
For though he had only been at Bemerton a few short years, George Herbert had left an extraordinary memory behind him in the slow, quiet days before the Civil War.