London - Edward Rutherfurd [391]
But that had been some time ago, while the war between Charles and Parliament was still in progress. Things had changed since then – very much for the worse, in his view. And after tomorrow there was no knowing what might happen. He felt pretty sure he would find a way to survive. But then, as he sat alone in his parlour and considered the matter again, it was not himself he was worrying about.
It was Jane. Though God knows, he had warned her.
The candle was still burning in her chamber and by its guttering light Jane looked across at the sleeping form beside her. She was glad he was so peaceful.
But was Meredith right? Were they in danger? Dogget didn’t believe it; but then, she thought affectionately, he had always had a cheerful attitude to life. Meredith on the other hand might be a cynical fraud, but his judgement was good. So were they star-crossed lovers – Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra? A subject for a play? The idea amused her. Dogget and Jane: a strange pair for a tragedy since, when they actually became lovers, she had been sixty. Even then, she thought it probably only happened because of the war.
Strangely enough, during the entire Civil War, the thing that Jane and many Londoners remembered most was the quietness. For that very first spring the whole area had been sealed off behind a rampart. It was a vast affair. Week after week the Londoners had gone out to dig. Every able-bodied man, including older men like Dogget, had been conscripted and issued with a shovel. They had even toiled on Sundays; and one fine afternoon, when Jane was serving refreshments to the workers, she was told: “A hundred thousand are labouring here this day.” The result, completed that summer, was a great earth wall and ditch, eleven miles round, that enclosed the city, all the suburbs on both sides of the river, out past Westminster and Lambeth in the west and Wapping in the east. Not only the suburbs, but great tracts of open ground, orchard and field, even the reservoir for Myddelton’s New River water supply, were all within the vast enclosure. The ramparts had entrances, forts and batteries of cannon supplied by the East India Company. They were impregnable. And here, clamped like a tourniquet across the main artery of the nation, the parliamentary opposition made its headquarters for the duration of the war.
If Meredith foresaw the outcome of the Civil War, it was still a long time before he was proved correct. The conflict was slow and halting – a skirmish here, a town or fortified house besieged there, a few pitched battles. Yet, when they emerged from the royal base at Oxford, King Charles and Prince Rupert had proved formidable. In the north, the big port of Newcastle, which supplied most of London’s coal, was gained for the king. Also much of the west. Even after the Presbyterian Scots had come down and helped inflict a severe defeat on them at Marston Moor, the message came back: “The Royalists are still in the field.” Part of the trouble lay in the Roundhead troops. The trained bands from London were usually the best, but they had still struck their colours and marched off home whenever their pay was late.
The war brought occasional hostilities to other parts of the country, but to Jane, living within the huge earthwork enclosure at London it brought, month after month, only a great silence.
True, once a week, before he had left, she