Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [474]
But in the south west, the Royalists were still strong. For although in June, Lord Essex and his Parliamentary army hurried through Sarum swearing boldly that they would crush the Royalists of the south west, only last month word came that Essex had capitulated in Cornwall.
There was constant movement.
To and fro across Wiltshire the various armies had gone: Parliamentary Ludlow and Waller, Royalist Goring.
Two days before the king himself had clattered through the city’s streets, leaving a strong force of artillery at the great house beside Clarendon Forest on the east side of Salisbury, and a large garrison at Wilton on the west. Margaret had heard he was coming, and, curious, made her way down to the city, taking little Samuel with her.
“See,” she told him as the long cortege of horses went by, “right or wrong, there is the king.” And although he was only four, Samuel always remembered the tired-looking man with the fine, oval face and long nose who rode thoughtfully down the high street.
Nathaniel was at Wilton.
But it was not Nathaniel she found at the farm on her return.
It was Edmund.
She had not seen him for nearly two years. He had changed so much that for a moment, she scarcely recognised him. His hair which, like most of the gentlemen, including Cromwell, in the Parliamentary forces, he wore long before, had now been cut to the short fringe that gave the Roundheads their name. It was not the haircut that struck her most though, but the fact that so much of his hair was gone. His face was haggard, his clothes worn almost threadbare.
But there was something else about him – a look in his eyes that she could not explain, but which troubled her.
“I need rest and food,” he told her, then looked nervous. “Or are you Royalist now?”
“I am your sister,” she replied. “But you must not be seen. Royalist troops are everywhere.” And turning to little Samuel beside her, who was staring curiously at the stranger she told him: “Say nothing to anyone about your uncle. It’s a secret.” Then she put him in her own room upstairs and locked the door. He slept for fifteen hours.
“Lord Essex gave up,” he told her bitterly, as they sat together in her room the next day. “We want no more aristocrats leading us now: we need Cromwell and his men.”
How haggard he was. He seemed to be almost mumbling to himself, and again, she was conscious of some deeper alteration in him: it was as if, where her dear Nathaniel might secretly doubt the success of his cause, her older brother had begun to doubt himself.
Apparently reading her thoughts, he looked up sadly.
“I have changed,” he said.
And then, in a voice sometimes weak from fatigue, sometimes strangely urgent, he told her something of what he had seen: of the rich nobles who fought only for profit, hoping to gain confiscated Royalist estates if they won; of the Presbyterians, like Obadiah, who wanted to substitute their own religious tyranny for that of the king.
“But I have seen better men than these – simple, godly men, who fight for a noble cause,” he went on. “Better men, Margaret, than Obadiah: better men than I. True religious men who fight for freedom to worship as they please. These are the men who fight for Cromwell. And so shall I.” He spoke with a new humility, born of mental suffering; she liked him better for it.
“You mean the Sectaries?”
“Call them what you will.”
There were many such men in the army, she knew, and their voice was getting stronger: political and, more often, religious radicals: men who believed they were fighting to establish a new order in England, led by tough, professionally-minded officers – Cromwell’s “plain men” – who might not be gentlemen but who knew their business, which most of the gentlemen in the Parliamentary Army had shown they did not. Their exact political aims were not yet clear; but they were increasingly powerful.
Margaret looked at him thoughtfully, wondering where this would lead.
“How long will you stay?” she asked.