“We’ll go too.”
How strange it was, therefore, that even now, Sarum close could still be so quiet.
Sarum close. It was a good place to be born a gentleman. It was even fashionable.
The choristers’ school young Adam attended, run by its famous headmaster Richard Hele, provided not only the choirboys for the cathedral, but an excellent preparation for the sons of the local gentry and merchants before they went on to the great schools of Winchester and Eton. Had not the Lord Chancellor, one of the Wiltshire family of Wyndham, been one of its notable old boys? And the great Mr Addison, essayist and editor of the
Spectator
, had he not been at school in Salisbury too? As for the world of fashion, that was run by the redoubtable, the indefatigable, Mr James Harris who lived at the fine house by St Ann’s Gate, not a hundred yards from their own. On the south side of his house he had set an elegant sundial which bore the legend: ‘Life is but a walking shadow’. Mr Harris’s grandfather, on his mother’s side, was no less a person than the Earl of Shaftesbury. Mr Harris organised the subscription concerts in the cathedral and the Assembly Rooms; there were balls, especially after the races held above Lord Pembroke’s estate near the edge of Cranborne Chase; there were literary societies, clubs, and a theatre. The great composer Handel himself had performed next door to Mr Harris’s house.
On any day one might expect to meet members of the local gentry – Eyres, Penruddocks, Wyndhams, even perhaps one of the Herberts from the great house at Wilton. Why, even prominent citizens of the town bore historic names – like the deputy recorder Edward Poore, descended from the very family that had founded the cathedral five centuries before; or his wife Rachel, whose kinsman Bishop Bingham had ruled the diocese soon afterwards.
Sarum close. One did not even have to know the inhabitants to understand the place. One glance at the buildings told you that it had entered the age of elegance.
The square Georgian façades were to be seen all round the close: at Mr Harris’ house in the north east corner, in several fine houses backing on to the river on the western side, like Myles Place and the nearly rebuilt Walton Canonry, in the smaller terraced façades appearing on the eastern side near the gates to the bishop’s place. Some were stone, some brick, some stucco. But the finest, the noblest of all was on the north side, facing the choristers’ green: Mompesson House. It was always said that Sir Christopher Wren himself had made the first designs; since then the Mompesson family and after them their relations the Longuevilles had remodelled the interior with a splendid new staircase and elegant plasterwork; quiet, solid, modest in size yet stately in proportion with its two storeys, its row of seven large rectangular windows with three dormers in the roof above, its light grey stone blending perfectly with the mellow red brick of the similar houses on each side of it, Mompesson stared from behind its iron railings unabashed – as though conscious of its own domestic perfection – towards the grass of the churchyard by the cathedral’s stately western façade. At each end of the railings that enclosed the few feet of lawn in front of the house stood a stone pillar with a heavy square lamp on top of it. The home of the Mompessons was everything a gentleman’s county town house should be.
Not that the close was perfect. In the graveyard round the cathedral, the broad acres of lawn were thoroughly unkempt. After a heavy rain the place looked as though a herd of cows had marched through it; the ditches round the old belfry stank; it was perhaps to be regretted that Mr Brown the sexton used to sell beer in the belfry, and when Mr Henry Fielding the author had recently occupied the small house near Mr Harris’s young Adam Shockley could remember with delight the echoes of the rowdy parties that had emanated at all hours from that little house and which so amused his father and shocked his mother and the other ladies of the close.
But this did not matter. The elegance of the eighteenth century was robust and common sense.
There was plenty in Salisbury, from the suspected adultery of one of the canons, to the rich, pungent and variegated smells in the streets to remind Adam that life had its seamy side as well.
Sarum was unchanging. The great cathedral with its dominating spire spoke more eloquently than any words for the security of the Church of England. The Settlement that had brought the Hanoverians to England guaranteed its easy ascendancy. The Test Act ensured that any man wanting public office must swear the oath of loyalty to the English Church – and if Protestant dissenters were released from this obligation each year by a special indemnity, the principle remained and the troublesome Catholics were denied any office.
True, there were other religious voices at Sarum: a community of Quakers at Wilton, Wesleyans, who had heard the great John Wesley himself preach on Salisbury Plain, Deists, who believed that God would reward a good man’s life regardless of his church, and even the occasional Jew. It did not greatly matter. Whatever men’s private opinions might be, whatever sects might be tolerated, the placid Church of England ruled and was unmoved.
Sarum was independent. The government of England might be in the hands of the great Whig oligarchs close to the king – men like Walpole and after him the Duke of Newcastle and his brother – but still half the House of Commons consisted of the solid country members who mostly called themselves Tories, and who cared not a rap what the king or his ministers thought of them. These were the men that Sarum sent. For the county, as before, the local gentry stood – the Goddard or Long families usually in the north, Wyndham or Penruddock in the south. There was Wilton, for the Herbert interest. And in Salisbury, the burgesses sent independent gentlemen of their own choice. Recently, they had taken to sending as one of their members one of the family of a rich turkey merchant named Bouverie who had bought the great estate south of the town beside the ancient forest of Clarendon. But they did so because he gave generously to the town. Even a Herbert could not interfere with the Salisbury election.
Then there was Old Sarum: still deserted: an empty, windswept, grassy mound overlooking the little village of Stratford-sub-Castle in the Avon valley below. The ancient pocket borough still had, nominally, eight electors with the right to send members to Parliament and the custom was for them to meet by a tree below the old hillfort to make their choice. In practice, it was the landlord of the place who decided.
And Old Sarum belonged to the Pitts. For around the turn of the century both the ruin and much of the village below had been bought by one Thomas Pitt whose discovery of a huge diamond had given him the nickname Diamond Pitt. Owning the borough was more profitable than ever. Would-be members of Parliament were paying well for a seat; one could even pawn the borough to another landowner. And for the whole of the eighteenth century, with one break when they pawned it to the Prince of Wales, the family which produced two of England’s greatest Prime Ministers owned Old Sarum.
This was the world that young Adam Shockley knew. One would have to say that, in the great calm of eighteenth century England, it was typical.
Prince Charlie’s advance was rapid. His Highland army took Preston. Then, the large if disorganised force moved on to Derby. George II was abroad; England was short of troops, but the king’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, was collecting a force to oppose him. The French, who had promised to support the Stuart heir, did not.
Bonnie Prince Charlie had made his call.
And nothing happened.
Adam could not understand it. Day after day, while he was white with excitement, his father went gruffly about his business at the Forest estate, as usual. The friends who had often sat with him after dinner showed no sign of arming either.
In the first week of December, he could bear it no longer. One morning, he confronted his father.
“When are we going to ride,” he demanded, “to fight for the Prince?”
Jonathan Shockley looked at him in surprise. What was the foolish boy talking about? It was a fault of his character that, while he enjoyed a quick and rather caustic turn of mind, he did not always bother to explain himself to his slower witted son. He would read the vicious diatribes of the Tory poet Alexander Pope to his friends, or sit by himself of an evening and laugh till he wept at the dry satire of the author of
Gulliver’s Travels
, that other fine Tory, Dean Swift. But when it came to such mundane matters as his child, he did not always trouble to while away the hours in his company.
“You may be,” he said with a snort. “I haven’t time.” And he left the house.
It was a betrayal. Mortified and confused, Adam went up to his room and wept.
The truth of the matter was that, in England at least, the Jacobite cause had been dead for a generation. Of course, when things went wrong, a country gentleman would curse those damned Hanoverians, and men with a certain turn of mind, like Jonathan Shockley, might speak of the king over the water. But what was the good of a cause to a gentleman after dinner, if it was not already lost? Besides, the Stuarts were still tainted with Catholicism. No sane man in England wanted that trouble again.
The next morning, soon after dawn, Adam Shockley went quietly to the place where Nathaniel’s sword hung. Carefully, he took it down. He had never held it before. It was heavy. But as he looked along the great steel blade he felt a thrill of excitement and awe. Once again, the ancient sword would do its work in the service of the true-born king.
Five minutes later he was in the stables with his pony, and soon afterwards, the gate keeper of the close, who had only just opened the gate at dawn, was astonished to see the small figure on his pony canter by, in possession of a sword that seemed almost as big as he was.
There were few people stirring as he left the town and took the road towards Wilton. At Wilton he took the northern road that led up the Wylie valley towards Bath. He had a guinea in his purse.
It was not until he was almost past Grovely Wood that Jonathan Shockley, cantering on his big grey mare, came up with him.
The gatekeeper had come to the house soon after dawn, to enquire if he knew his son had left. When he had heard the man’s story and seen the sword gone from the wall he was at first completely baffled. But then he remembered the boy’s foolish question of the day before.
“By God,” he thundered to his horrified wife, “the young fool’s gone to Derby.”
It was reasonable to guess, therefore, that he would have taken the main north western road.
“I’ll horsewhip him,” he swore.
But as he came up to him now, and saw his small face set with determination and the ludicrous sword bumping at his side, Jonathan Shockley suddenly felt a wave of affection for his son. As he took the pony’s bridle he said kindly:
“Come, Adam, you’ll fight in a better cause, another day.”
And so it was that from that day, though he wept with rage the next spring when news came of the final defeat of the prince at Culloden, Adam Shockley lived with a new hope and determination in his heart.
The Stuart cause might be lost, but he would still be a soldier.
After the Forty-five, as the rising came to be known, Jonathan Shockley no longer passed his hand over the glass. But at dinner, if he chanced to see his son, he would call to the company:
“Take care, gentlemen. Here comes a damned dangerous Jacobite.”
1753
He stood before his parents and smiled.
“You are sure you want to be a soldier?”
He nodded. He was certain.
His father was sitting on a tall-backed chair; his mother standing beside it with her hand resting on her husband’s shoulder. They were a good-looking couple, both greying now, his father the more robust of the two. He thought he saw a little twitch at the corner of his mother’s mouth and he noticed that, once or twice, she had blinked her eyes rather rapidly. There was a frown of concern on Jonathan’s broad face.
He was sorry to disappoint them but he could not help it.
He knew very well what his mother would have liked. Elizabeth Shockley had always hoped her son would be a clergyman. True, many church benefices were poorly paid and some parish curates nearly starved. But her family still had some influence that might have got him preferment. Many a rector or prebendary lived like a gentleman, and at Sarum, at least, the dean lived like a lord.
All the great men of her own youth had been clergymen. Sarum had been full of distinguished figures – Izaac Walton, the writer’s son, who had improved the cathedral library; Dean Clarke, the great mathematician; Bishop Sherlock, friend of the queen and denouncer of the Deists. She had always dreamed of seeing her only son a great man like one of these.
But there had always been one problem, as his headmaster Mr Hele had explained:
“The boy is a credit to you, madam, but he will never be a scholar. I think you must forget the church.”
Adam had not been sent to Winchester or Eton after the choristers’ school, but to a modest local establishment run by one of Jonathan’s friends.
He was not stupid, but like an animal whose body is not yet coordinated, his brain often seemed to move clumsily and at times, to his shame, a kind of fog seemed to descend upon its operations. The year before, when in order to bring the English calendar in line with that of continental Europe, the date had been moved by eleven days, he could not shake off the feeling, shared by many of the illiterate folk, that the eleven days had been lost. And when he heard his father laughing at a little group of labourers in the street who were crying, “Give us back our eleven days,” he began to defend them.