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By Root 4026 0

five miles to Downton before turning back upstream. Or they would go to the city and then walk north east, past the great sweeping slope called Bishopsdown and into the long valley of the river Bourne, on whose eastern side lay the huge forbidding ridges that led away towards Winchester – magnificent country to gaze at, but a long, hard haul to walk over. But above all it was the western side of Sarum that Samuel Shockley loved. To the south west of the cathedral close lay the open fields that led to the village of Harnham with its mill. Behind that, the huge ridge of Harnham Hill rose like a protective wall. “That’s the place with the best views,” he would say: for from Harnham you could see the whole city – cathedral, close, market place and chequers laid out as clearly as on one of Speed’s maps.

And to the west: Herbert country he called it.

It was a good description. For there, in the broad, shallow valley that ran to Shaftesbury in the west, lay the huge, well-managed estates of Lord Pembroke, head of the Herbert family. Even if the recent earls were lesser figures than their Tudor forebears who had made Wilton House like a Renaissance court half a century before, their power and influence was formidable. He loved to walk out from the city, past the next-door villages with their Saxon names, Fisherton, and Bemerton, to King Alfred’s old town of Wilton itself. Sometimes he would walk past Wilton, up on to the ridge to the west and into Grovely Wood where, nine hundred years before, the small farm in the clearing long since forgotten had given his own family their name.

Herbert country. The words also had another important meaning for Margaret – one that made Obadiah scowl.

For whenever they went to Wilton, they never failed to walk through the hamlet of Bemerton and stop there to view a small, grey stone and flint rectory and, on the other side of the lane from it, a little village chapel hardly the size of a low barn, into which they would go to say a prayer.

Each time they did so, Margaret would say the same thing as they came out.

“I remember him. Your father was his friend.”

For Margaret was eleven years old when the great poet George Herbert died.

“Was he of the great family at Wilton?” Samuel had once asked when he was young.

“A distant cousin,” she told him.

“Did he go often to Wilton House then?”

She had smiled sadly.

“I don’t think so. He was a poor cousin, you see.”

“He went everywhere else in Sarum though, didn’t he?”

“Everywhere.”

For though he had only been at Bemerton a few short years, George Herbert had left an extraordinary memory behind him in the slow, quiet days before the Civil War.

“There was not a house in his parish he hadn’t visited a dozen times,” she assured him; and then added firmly: “There were good priests in the Anglican Church too, whatever Obadiah may say.”

And that was the trouble. Who could deny that the author of the finest religious poetry written in the English language was a saintly man? Who could deny that when, during the few years of his perfect ministry at Bemerton, George Herbert had poured out his entire poetic work before tragically dying? “His gentle spirit,” as Margaret liked to say, “was touched by God.” Not even Obadiah could quite deny that.

But Herbert was an Anglican; he had delighted to go to the cathedral to hear the singing; he had even written a guide for priests on how to perform their duties.

Often, Margaret would cry, even in Obadiah’s presence:

“A good Anglican priest – aye, with bishops and all – was as good as any Presbyter. Think of George Herbert.”

It was a dangerous thing to say.

How different, how stern, was the world of Obadiah.

Though it often seemed a little frightening, Samuel was conscious, from the first, of the preacher’s moral stature and his power.

Why, Obadiah even knew Cromwell himself; and Cromwell was Samuel’s hero.

For Cromwell could do everything. He had not only defeated the wicked king. He had made the Scots and Irish obey him; and generously gave scores of Irish estates to the loyal army men whom Parliament