Cromwell’s Blessing. Peter Ransley

      I waited at the Exchange on those two days with a strange, growing eagerness which gradually turned into disappointment and disillusion. When mail came my heart beat a little faster; but there was no reply. Perhaps Richard had returned to France. Or feared a trap. On one of the visits to the Exchange, being near London Bridge, I remembered my promise to take money to Scogman’s wife and children. My prayers for his survival had been answered and he had become a kind of folk hero to me. I crossed the river to Bankside and went to the address from the regiment list. It was a brothel.

      When I was woken that night by Liz’s coughing I could still see the whores wiping their eyes as they laughed.

      ‘Scogman? Married? Give the money to me, dear. I’ll see she gets it! Kids? He scarpers too quickly to give his name to any kids. Scoggy? Give him my undying love, darling.’

      I winced as I remembered how, previously, I had lent him an angel, which he still owed me, to send to this starving family.

      I tried to forget my humiliation by helping Jane to nurse Liz and, since Dr Latchford seemed at a loss, the next morning rode to Spitall Fields to get a herbal syrup from Matthew, the cunning man who had brought me up. Late in life he had had a stroke of good fortune. Unwilling to disappoint anyone, he had always promised a cure for everything, from the plague to a broken heart. Too erratic to be trusted, his business was on the point of failure when he met an apothecary, Nicholas Culpepper, who separated those remedies of Matthew’s which worked, from those which didn’t. And he put his finger on Matthew’s unique ability. While his remedies were unreliable, his knowledge and collection of herbs, from aloe to vervain, were unrivalled.

      Together they produced simple herbal remedies for the poor. Culpepper infuriated doctors like Latchford by setting himself up as a doctor in Spitall Fields, outside the City, where the College of Physicians had no jurisdiction. Matthew had a room in the apothecary’s house, which, on a gloomy day, was like walking into summer, the air smelling of rosemary, lavender and sage.

      When I arrived, Matthew was chopping herbs on a bench. One of his eyes was milky blue, and he stooped like a goblin, but he was as lively as ever, and his optimism unquenched.

      ‘Little Liz! The poor mite! I know exactly what will cure her. It drew three infants back from the grave last week.’ He caught Culpepper’s eyes staring sternly over his spectacles, swallowed and toned down his promises. ‘It will soothe the cough so she can eat more easily and sleep.’

      I put the jar of syrup in my saddle pouch and rode back through the City. Crowds were building up, and it was increasingly difficult to get through. They were thickest round the bookstalls and hawkers: there were more pamphlets sold that day than hot pies.

      From one pamphlet I learned how badly Cromwell had lost the debate. Half the army was to be disbanded, receiving a miserable six weeks’ money in lieu of their long arrears of pay. Another gave an ominous response from the soldiers: not a petition this time, but a set of demands. One called for an apology from Holles for the soldiers being called enemies of the state they had fought for. Another was for full pay. It was signed not by the soldiers, but by men who called themselves agents, or agitators. Levellers. One of the signatories was Nehemiah.

      Going down Cornhill, there was such a press of people I found it difficult to control my horse and was forced to dismount. The trouble came from a bookshop displaying the sign of the Bible. More people came to it to argue than to buy books. A Presbyterian minister called Edwards was haranguing the crowd. He had written a series of books called Gangraena, the latest an attack on the sins of Cromwell’s army. The gangrene lay in the heresies the army was supposed to spread.

      Edwards, a tall cadaverous man who wore his hair long, was railing against ‘sectaries’ who broke away from the true Presbyterian Church. A severe-looking Puritan holding a copy of Gangraena, a tome as thick as the Bible, stared directly at me, his expression saying he knew I was one of the heretics.

      ‘Such people believe in liberty of conscience!’ Edwards cried, as if liberty was worse than the plague. ‘I tell you this. Liberty of conscience leads to thought, thought to error and error to hell.’

      I could not stand there silent. ‘So we are not to think for ourselves?’

      ‘Not in religion, sir.’ People stood aside as he pushed towards me. ‘A farmer does not expect a weaver to plant his corn, nor a weaver allow a farmer to weave his cloth.’

      ‘But if the farmer, or his corn, is bad – what is a man to do? Starve? Can he not plant his own corn?’

      ‘Plant his own corn! You heard him. Here is another of your damned sectaries.’ He pushed his face into mine. ‘Because, sir, your corn would come up as tares and weeds – heresies and blasphemies.’

      Once I had started I would not give way. The Puritan holding Gangraena with all the reverence of the Bible shook his head despairingly at me. From angry mutterings, the crowd began to jostle and abuse me. It was an astonishing reversal of the mood of the crowds before the war, who had all been for liberty and their rights, whether for religion, a patch of ground or a loaf of bread. Perhaps they now linked liberty to the pillaging soldiers in five years of chaos and war. There was such an aching desire for normality, for order at any price, that people were willing to give away their very thoughts to this narrow-minded churchman. Another voice came from the back of the crowd.

      ‘I know him! He is a bastard, a devil who pretends to be a lord!’

      George’s manner suggested he knew about my rift with Lord Stonehouse. His voice chilled me even more than it had as a child, for at least then I could believe he was the only one who was mad. Now that madness seemed to have infected half London. George pushed his way through the crowd, his face flushed with religious zeal. He had shaken my hand only a few weeks before, but now he levelled a finger at me.

      ‘I accuse him. He denies he has a soul,’ he cried.

      There was an abrupt silence. People near me drew away. Others craned forward, breaths stilled, eyes staring. A gob of food slipped unnoticed from the mouth of a man eating a pie. The shop sign creaked as a kite perching on it swooped to snatch the pie the man was holding. Almost nobody laughed, all of them giving way to the minister, his long hair drifting round his face in the wind, his voice soft with disbelief.

      ‘Do you deny the immortality of the soul, my son?’

      In a sense, George’s accusation was true. Every time he beat me he said it was for the good of my soul, until one day I told him that, as I did not have one, he could stop wasting his time. That same perversity brought the words from my mouth.

      ‘I did when he beat me.’

      The Puritan holding Edwards’s book looked at me in horror. Moses when he saw the golden calf could not have acted with more anger than the outraged minister after I uttered those words. ‘He has condemned himself out of his own mouth!’

      ‘Blasphemy.’

      ‘Heresy.’

      ‘Arrest him!’

      A stone hit me. I ducked another and tried to draw my sword, but hands seized me. Two cutpurses, under the guise of holding my horse and quietening it, were gradually edging it away. They called it the penny horse lay: if the cutpurses were caught, they demanded a penny for holding it. If they got away, they sold the horse at a farrier outside the walls. I drew my sword, scattering people in front of me, but my sword arm was caught from behind.

      George grabbed me triumphantly. The minister was shouting for constables. George was about to march me off when something struck his head. A book fell at his feet as he slowly released me and sank to the cobbles. Gangraena. A man came towards me and in my groggy state I thought the Puritan who had been holding the book wanted to claim me as his own arrest, until I looked into his eyes under the stovepipe hat and heard Richard’s cultured, measured, unhurried voice in my ear.

      ‘I think we should be going. Unless you prefer to lose your horse, rather than your argument?’

      He threw my sword at me and stopped the