London - Edward Rutherfurd [446]
Gideon and Martha: his two favourites of the seven grandchildren. How proud, he used to think, their namesakes would have been if they could have seen them with their quiet but determined characters, their serious faces and rather solemn eyes. They had been strictly brought up in the Puritan manner too. For since the toleration granted after 1688, the Dissenters, as all Protestants outside the Church of England were now called, had flourished. Over two thousand meeting-houses were now operating in England, with London of course the most vital centre. True Puritans seldom dressed in black or wore high hats, these days, but you could see hundreds of good folk, in plain brown or grey, flocking to hear the pastors preach on any Sunday. The harsh moral laws of the Commonwealth might have gone, but every child of one of these congregations knew that ornament in dress was sinful, that worldly pleasures were corrupting, and that, if they committed fornication, or got drunk, or gambled, the quiet, disapproving eyes of the whole community would be on them. The Puritans might be out of power, but their conscience was still a mighty force in England, and those Dissenters who felt they had a part to play in public life would take communion in an Anglican church, for form’s sake, perhaps as Church of England men. “I give the sacrament to five good Dissenters,” Meredith once told Carpenter. “I know what they’re doing and they know I know. Nor does it worry me. We are just getting round some legislation that shouldn’t be there.”
There was no such compromise in the Carpenter family. Now that they were not compelled to attend the Anglican Church with its bishops, the heirs of old Gideon and Martha did not do so. Neither little Gideon, aged nine, nor Martha, aged eleven, had ever entered an Anglican church at all. As for this popish-looking cathedral in front of them . . . they looked at their grandfather uncertainly.
It had rather surprised O Be Joyful, during the last decade, to find himself a revered figure in the family. Though he knew only too well that he did not deserve it, he felt for the sake of the next generations that he should at least try to fill the role. So when his grandchildren begged: “Tell us how Gideon fought with Cromwell against the king,” or asked him, “Did old Martha really sail in the Mayflower?” he did his best to satisfy them. He had even, God help him, been forced to keep up the old lie that he had tried his best to save Martha in the Great Fire.
Since his grown-up children had all expected him to help them instruct his grandchildren, he had also been forced slowly and painfully to teach himself to read again. It had not been easy. He had even had to ask Penny to take him to a good spectacle-maker for his tired old eyes. But he had done it, and by the time little Martha was five, he was reading the Bible to her every day.
Even more than the Bible however, there was one book that the family always wanted him to read. Written by a great Puritan preacher in the last part of King Charles II’s reign, it told in allegorical form the story of a Christian man who, suddenly overcome by the sense of his own sin and the death that soon awaits him, sets out on a quest. It was a very Puritan pilgrimage: no saints, no Church authority, nothing but faith and the Bible guided poor Christian. The land through which he travelled was a vast moral landscape of the kind so familiar to stern Puritan congregations. The Valley of the Shadow of Death, the village of Morality, Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, the Slough of Despond – these were the sort of places he encountered on the way to the Celestial City. The people he met, likewise, had such names as Hopeful, Faithful, Worldly-Wiseman, Mr No-Good, or the Giant Despair. The book’s tone was that of the Bible – the Book of Revelation, really – but it was still so neatly couched in plain man’s language that it could be enjoyed by any simple, unlettered fellow. Nor was its message harsh: on the contrary, poor Christian falls into all kinds of error from which he