Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [471]
It was as he walked along the path above the river that Sir Henry Forest, turning to look towards the water, forgot the Civil War again.
For there they lay: William Shockley’s proudest achievement – the water meadows: a little masterpiece of scientific irrigation, stretching across the valley bottom – acres of green, rich grazing, man-made, worth a fortune now. They lay next to his estate; but he had no water meadows of his own.
He stared at them thoughtfully, his eyes narrowing.
If those Shockleys fell out with each other, he might have those water meadows yet.
1643: AUGUST
The first event that Samuel Shockley could remember to the end of his long life took place when he was three.
To him it seemed the happiest of days.
He was riding on Nathaniel’s shoulders and they were entering the cathedral.
The sunlight was catching Nathaniel’s long, fair hair; his uncle’s strong hands held his feet and he leaned over to play with the long silky strands of his pointed beard.
He did not understand what they were doing, but he knew it was important. Everything Nathaniel did was important: he was winning the war.
The sun was warm. Little Samuel always remembered the sunshine that day.
For Margaret, it was a day first of bright sunshine but then of gloom.
How pleasant it was, to ride into the city in the little cart with Nathaniel. Her Nathaniel, in his brightly coloured doublet, his breeches tucked into his boots with their folded tops and lace edgings. Nathaniel gaily wearing his broad-brimmed Cavalier’s hat, and smoking his long clay pipe.
“The best pipes in England are made by Gauntlet of Wiltshire,” he declared, as they drove along, and showed little Samuel the tiny stamp of a gauntlet under the bowl of the pipe that was the mark of the famous maker.
Nathaniel that long summer. Her Nathaniel. As they walked gaily through the close with the child, she could see that people mistook them for husband and wife. “And with Samuel, my brother and the farm to look after,” she thought with a smile, “what would I do with a husband now if I had one?”
The war had gone well for Nathaniel – badly for Edmund and Obadiah. The forces for Parliament were poorly organised and badly led. At Edgehill in the north, the king’s dashing young cousin Prince Rupert had trained the Cavalier squires in the new Swedish tactics of lightning charges and swept all before him. Lord Pembroke had gone to London and the gentlemen supposed to lead the Parliamentary forces in Wiltshire – Hungerford and Baynton – had quarrelled. Everywhere the king’s cavalry and Cornish infantry were winning; one after another, the towns of Wiltshire fell; and in May 1643, Seymour, whom the king had made Marquis of Hertford, swept down to Sarum from Oxford, captured the city, and imprisoned the mayor for three weeks.
Obadiah had gone to London. Edmund was with the Parliamentary forces – Margaret did not know where.
But with the Royalists came Nathaniel.
“And as well for our property that I am here and Edmund is not,” he cried happily, as he first strode into the hall. For with the Royalists in the ascendant at Sarum, the known supporters of Parliament were being fined and plundered.
Thank God for the farm. To the Shockleys, it had always been a place of refuge. By sheer good luck William Shockley had sold up the old fulling mill and the cloth business and moved his young family to the farm just a few years before one of the worst attacks of the plague in centuries had come to Sarum. The plague had missed Avonsford this time and the Shockleys had not only been safe, but had been able to send generous supplies into Salisbury to help the heroic mayor John Ivie in his fight to save the townspeople. And later, being wealthy, he had sent money when Ivie tried to run a brewery for the benefit of the town’s poor – a venture the other brewers soon scotched.
Now, with the Civil War, the town seemed scarcely in a better state. The population was down, the cloth industry sunk in depression, and many merchants