The King’s List. Peter Ransley

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