London - Edward Rutherfurd [405]
Dogget’s life was made simply unendurable. His two children hardly knew him, and out of sheer force of habit followed Martha’s lead. No one would speak to him. As for Jane, it was worse. If she stepped out of her house into the street, she was greeted with cries of “Whore!” The man down the street stopped bringing her firewood. The water carrier did not stop for her. People in the nearby Cheapside stalls would ignore her if she tried to buy anything. One day she returned to find ‘HARLOT’ painted on her door. By the end of the month she said sadly to Meredith: “You’re right, we must go.”
The snow was falling on the late January day when, Dogget having previously conveyed all her possessions away by cart, he and Jane stepped into a wherry down by the Vintry and were rowed away upstream. Their destination was a little settlement beside Westminster. A century ago some French merchants had for a time formed an enclave there, convenient for doing business with the royal palaces of Westminster and Whitehall, and ever since these streets had been known as Little, or Petty France. Petty France was regarded as a place for misfits; though more recently some literary folk, including John Milton, had taken lodgings there. “At least,” Meredith had advised, “Martha and her friends won’t bother you in Petty France. You can live quietly there.”
1660
During the decade of the 1650s no man in England was more loyal to the exiled House of Stuart than Sir Julius Ducket. But while Oliver Cromwell and the saints were masters of England, there was little that any Royalist could do. And so he read, and he pondered. He read the Bible, in its entirety, twice, and realized that it is the greatest book of history ever written. He read the classics; he studied English history and made notes upon the development of England’s constitution. And he waited.
Superficially, Cromwell’s rule was strong. His great, round wart-marked face seemed to Julius to hang over the land like a grim mask from the pagan age. He had executed the king, and chased his son away to France. The Scots were cowed, the Irish massacred and bloodily crushed. All this he did in only a few short years so that even Julius grudgingly admitted: “His sword is mighty indeed.”
Yet if the aim of the Commonwealth was to build a shining city on a hill, it was necessary to change men’s hearts as well as the laws. And was it really working? For Julius, the turning point had been the trial and acquittal of Dogget and Jane. “The Puritans have gone too far,” he told his family. In smaller ways, also, there were signs of unregenerate human nature at work. “Some of the watermen,” Julius reported one day, “have started a competition to see who can get fined the most times for drunkenness within a year.” It was as though, he reflected, the main streets had been swept clean for the Puritans, but the alleys were still full of sinners.
Nor was the case of religion any clearer. Anything it seemed, except bishops, was tolerated. In St Lawrence Silversleeves, Meredith had generally made use of the Presbyterian Directory but then, about the time of his celebrated Last Sermon, abandoned that for a form of Protestant prayers and hymns that Martha entirely approved of. Other churches were similar. So tolerant was Cromwell in these matters that one year he even forced Parliament to pass a law allowing Jews to enter England again. There had been none in the kingdom since Edward I had banned them back in 1290. Many Puritans, led by their hero William Prynne, who hated Jews, protested vigorously. But the thing was done; and soon afterwards Julius discovered a little