The King's General (39 page)

"He made no attempt, you know, sir," cut in Jack, "to resist arrest. The whole staff would have gone to his aid had he given them the word. That I have on good authority. But he told all of them he wished to abide by Your Highness's command."

The prince rose to his feet and paced up and down the room.

"It's a wretched affair all round," he said. "There's Grenvile at the Mount, the one fellow who might have saved Cornwall, while Hopton fights a hopeless battle up in, Torrington. I can't do anything about it, you know. That's the devil of it. I shall be whisked away myself before I know what is happening."

"There is one thing you can do, sir, if you will forgive my saying so," I said.

"What then?"

"Send word to the Mount that when you and the council sail for the Sallies Sir Richard Grenvile shall be permitted to escape at the same time and commandeer a fishing boat for France."

The Prince of Wales stared at me for a moment, and then that same smile I had remarked upon his face before lit his whole ugly countenance.

"Sir Richard Grenvile is most fortunate," he said, "to have so fidèle an ally as yourself. If I am ever in his shoes and find myself a fugitive, I hope I can rely on half | so good a friend." He glanced across at Jack. "You can arrange that, can't you?" he " said. "I will write a letter to Sir Arthur Bassett at the Mount, and you can take it there and see your uncle at the same time. I don't suggest we ask for his company in the'v frigate when we sail, because I hardly think the ship would bear his weight alongside, Sir Edward Hyde."

The two lads laughed, for all the world like a pair of schoolboys caught in mischief.

Then the prince turned and, coming to the couch, bent low and kissed my hand.

"Have no fear," he said, "I will arrange it. Sir Richard shall be free the instant we ' sail for the Scillies. And when I return--for I shall return, you know, one day--I shall hope to see you, and him also, at Whitehall."

He bowed and went, forgetting me, I dare say, forevermore, but leaving with me; an impression of black eyes and gypsy features that I have not forgotten to this day....

Jack escorted me to the castle entrance once again.

"He will remember his promise," he said; "that I swear to you. I have never known f him go back on his word. Tomorrow I shall ride with that letter to the Mount." $ I returned to Penryn, worn out and utterly exhausted now that my mission was| fulfilled. I wanted nothing but my bed and silence. Matty received me with sour looks | and the grim pursed mouth that spelt disapproval.

"You have wanted to be ill for weeks," she said. "Now that we are here, in a sträng lodging, with no comforts, you decide to do so. Very well, I'll not answer for the! consequences."

"No one asks you to," I said, turning my face to the wall. "For God's sake, if I want to, let me sleep or die."

Two days later Lord Hopton was defeated outside Torrington and the whole Western army in full retreat across the Tamar. It concerned me little, lying in that lodging at Penryn with a high fever. On the twenty-fifth of February Fairfax had marched and taken Launceston and on the second of March had crossed the moors to Bodmin. That night the Prince of Wales, with his council, set sail in the frigate phoenix--and the war in the West was over.

The day Lord Hopton signed the treaty in Truro with General Fairfax, my brother-in-law, Jonathan Rashleigh, by permission of the Parliament, came down to Penryn to fetch me back to Menabilly. The streets were lined with soldiers, not ours, but theirs, and the whole route from Truro to St. Austell bore signs of surrender and defeat. I sat with stony face, looking out of the curtains of my litter, while Jonathan Rashleigh rode by my side, his shoulders bowed, his face set in deep grim lines.

We did not converse. We had no words to say. We crossed St. Blazey Bridge, and Jonathan handed his pass to the rebel sentry at the post, who stared at us with insolence and then jerked his head to let us pass. They were everywhere. In the road, in the cottage doors at Tywardreath, at the barrier, at the foot of Polmear Hill.

This was our future then, forevermore, to ask, in deep humility, if we might travel our own roads. That it should be so worried me no longer, for my days of journeying were over.

I was returning to Menabilly to be no longer a camp follower, no longer a lady of the drum, but plain Honor Harris, a cripple on her back.

And it did not matter to me; I did not care.

For Richard Grenvile had escaped to France.

 
28

Defeat and the aftermath of war... Not pleasant for the losers. God knows that we endure it still, and I write in the autumn of '53, but in the year '46 we were new to defeat and had not yet begun to learn our lessons. It was, I think, the loss of freedom that hit the Cornish hardest. We had been used, for generations, to minding our own affairs, and each man living after his fashion. Landlords were fair and usually well liked, with tenant and labourer living in amity together. We had our local disagreements, as every man will with his neighbour, and our family feuds, but no body of persons had ever before interfered with our way of living, nor given us commands.

Now all was changed. Our orders came to us from Whitehall, and a Cornish County Committee, way up in London, sat in judgment upon us. We could no longer pass our own measures and decide by local consultation what was suited to each town and village. The County Committee made our decisions for us.

Their first action was to demand a weekly payment from the people of Cornwall to we revenue, and this weekly assessment was rated so high that it was impossible to find the money, for the ravages of war had stripped the country bare. Their next move *as to sequester the estate of every landlord who had fought for the King, and Decause the County Committee had not the time or the persons to administer these estates, the owners were allowed to dwell there, if they so desired, but pay to the . otnmittee, month by month, the full and total value of the property. This crippling ^junction was made the harder because the estates were assessed at the value they ad held before the war, and now that most of them were fallen into ruin through the Anting, it would take generations before the land gave a return once more.

,. A host of petty officials, the only men at these times to have their pockets well lned, and they were paid fixed salaries by the Parliament, came down from Whitehall to collect the sums due to the County Committee; and these agents were found in every town and borough, forming themselves in their turns in committees and subcommittees, so that no man could buy as little as a loaf of bread without first going cap in hand to one of these fellows and signing his name to a piece of paper. Besides these civil employees of the Parliament, we had the military to contend with, and whosoever should wish to pass from one village to another must first have a pass from the officer in charge, and then his motives were questioned, his family history gone into, detail for detail, and as likely as not he would find himself arrested for delinquency at the end of it.

I truly believe that Cornwall was, in that first summer of '46, the most wretched county in the kingdom. The harvest was bad, another bitter blow to landlord and labourer alike, and the price of wheat immediately rose to fantastic prices. The price of tin, on the contrary, fell low, and many mines closed down on this account.

Poverty and sickness were rife by the autumn, and our old enemy the plague appeared, killing great numbers in St. Ives and in the western districts. Another | burden was the care of the many wounded and disabled soldiers who, half naked and half starved, roamed the villages begging for charity. There was no single man or; woman or little child who benefited, in any way, by this new handling of affairs by Parliament, and the only ones to live well were those Whitehall agents, who poked their noses into our affairs from dawn to dusk, and their wealthy masters, the big II Parliamentary landlords. We had grumbled in the old days at the high taxes of the if King, but the taxes were intermittent. Now they were continuous. Salt, meat, starch, lead, iron--all came under the control of Parliament, and the poor man had to pay accordingly.

What happened upcountry I cannot say--I speak for Cornwall. No news came to us \ much beyond the Tamar. If living was hard, leisure was equally restricted. Thel Puritans had the upper hand of us. No man must be seen out of doors upon a Sunday,! unless he were bound for church. Dancing was forbidden--not that many had the? heart to dance, but youngsters have light hearts and lighter feet--and any game o£| chance or village festival was frowned upon.

Gaiety meant licence, and licence spelt the abomination of the Lord. I often! thought how Temperance Sawle would have rejoiced in the brave new world, for allf her royalist traditions, but poor Temperance fell an early victim to the plague..,I The one glory of that most dismal year of '46 was the gallant, though, alas, s Ol useless, holding of Pendennis Castle for the King through five long months of siege. l The rest of us were long conquered and subdued, caught fast in the meshes off Whitehall, while Pendennis still defied the enemy. Their commander was Jac K| Arundell, who had been in the old days a close friend as well as kinsman to '

Grenviles, and Sir John Digby was his second-in-command. My own brother Robil was made a major general under him. It gave to us, I think, some last measure of prid in our defeat that this little body of men, with no hope of rescue and scarce a boatloa of provisions, should fly the King's flag from March the second until August ' seventeenth, and even then they wished to blow themselves and the whole garrison to eternity rather than surrender, but starvation and sickness had made weaklings oft'" men, and for their sakes only did Jack Arundell haul down his flag. Even the enemy respected their courage, and the garrison were permitted to march out, so Robin tola us afterwards, with the full honours of war, drums beating, colours flying, trump sounding.... Yes, we have had our moments here in Cornwall....

When they surrendered, though, our last hopes vanished, and there was nothin now to do but sigh and look into the black well of the future.

My brother-in-law, Jonathan Rashleigh, like the rest of the royalist landlords, ha his lands sequestrated by the County Committee and was told, when he went dowr H Truro in June, that he must pay a fine of some one thousand and eighty pounds to the committee before he could redeem them. His losses, after the '44 campaign, we already above eight thousand, but there was nothing for it but to bow his head to The King's General I47 victors and agree to pay the ransom during the years to come. He might have quitted the country and gone to France, as many of our neighbours did, but the ties of his own soil were too strong, and in July, broken and dispirited, he took the National Covenant, by which he vowed never again to take arms against the Parliament. This bitter blow to his pride, self-inflicted though it was, did not satisfy the committee, and shortly afterwards he was summoned to London and ordered to remain there, nor to return to Cornwall until his full fine was paid. So yet another home was broken, and we at Menabilly tasted the full flavour of defeat. He left us one day in September, when the last of the poor harvest had been gathered in, looking a good ten years older than his five and fifty years, and I knew then, watching his eyes, how loss of freedom can so blight the human soul that a man cares no longer if he lives or dies.

It remained for Mary, my poor sister, and John, his son, to so husband his estate that the debt could month by month be paid, but we well knew that it might take years, even the remainder of his life. His last words to me before he went to London were kind and deeply generous.

"Menabilly is your home," he said, "for as long a time as you should so desire it.

We are, one and all, sufferers in this misfortune. Guard your sister for me, share her troubles. And help John, I pray you. You have a wiser head than all I leave behind."

A wiser head... I doubted it. It needed a pettifogging mind, with every low lawyer's trick at the finger's end, to break even with the County Committee and the paid agents of Parliament. There was none to help us. My brother Robin, after the surrender at Pendennis, had gone to Radford to my brother Jo, who was in much the same straits as ourselves, while Peter Courtney, loathing inactivity, left the West Country altogether, and the next we heard from him was that he had gone abroad to join the Prince of Wales. Many young men followed this example--living was good at the French court. I think, had they loved their homes better, they would have stayed behind and shared the burdens of defeat with their womenfolk. Alice never spoke a word of blame, but I think her heart broke when we heard that he had gone.... It was strange, at first, to watch John and Frank Penrose work in the fields side by side with the tenants, for every hand was needed if the land was to be tilled entirely and to yield a full return. Even our womenfolk went out at harvesting, Mary herself, and Alice and Elizabeth, while the children, thinking it fine sport, helped to carry the corn.

Left to ourselves, we would have soon grown reconciled and even well content with our labours, but the Parliament agents were forever coming to spy upon us, to question us on this and that, to count the sheep and cattle, to reckon, it almost seemed, each ear of corn, and nothing must be gathered, nothing spent, nothing distributed amongst ourselves, but all laid before the smug, well-satisfied officials in Fowey town, who held their licence from Parliament. The Parliament... The Parliament...

From day to day the word rang in our ears. The Parliament decrees that produce shall be brought to market only upon a Tuesday.... The Parliament has ordered that all fairs shall from henceforth be discontinued.... The Parliament warns every inhabitant within the above-prescribed area that no one, save by permission, shall walk abroad one hour after sunset.... The Parliament warns each householder that every dwelling will be searched each week for concealed firearms, weapons, and ammunition, from this day forward, and any holder of the same shall be immediately unprisoned.