Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [489]
Samuel had almost forgotten Nathaniel now and his light-hearted ways. He knew what he thought of the Royalists. They were traitors. And there were a number lurking near Sarum too – gentry like the Penruddocks, the Mompessons and the numerous Hydes. When the foolish Presbyterians in Scotland had signed a covenant with the king’s son (as if one could trust a Stuart’s word) and proclaimed him Charles II, he remembered the excitement when the young man had then invaded England. Cromwell’s loyal troops had soon crushed him at Worcester; but after that there had been those at Sarum, including the Hydes and an infernal Anglican priest named Henchman, who had helped him on his dramatic flight to the southern coast. Already a popular tale was growing about how the young man had been forced to hide up an oak tree.
One must keep watch, Obadiah warned him, when there were such traitors so close at hand.
He would serve Cromwell one day. The boy felt a warm glow when he thought of the great man’s righteous cause. Like a good Puritan, he began to use Biblical phrases in his speech and he would stand in front of a mirror and practise stern looks. Margaret sometimes made light of these enthusiasms, but he disregarded her. For there had been no men like Cromwell, he knew, since the time of the Old Testament prophets.
Although as he passed his thirteenth birthday, young Samuel modelled himself upon his hero, he sometimes caught himself in acts of enjoyment. And then he was angry and ashamed. The delights of the eye, let alone food and drink, these were the lusts of the flesh, and as sinful as dancing and the maypole. He had a weakness for beauty.
“These things belong to children,” Obadiah explained. “But as you grow to be a man, you put off childish things and learn to take joy only in walking the paths of righteousness.” He longed to be strong, and to be a man.
When he was thirteen, Samuel inadvertently committed a sin that proved to him he was still utterly weak.
He had been walking past the gates of Wilton House.
Ever since he was seven, the place had been specifically fascinating to him, for in that year, the great Tudor mansion had burnt down, and each year afterwards, mighty building works had been continuing to replace it. Now a new house was standing there and he had often gazed at its stately outlines from the road.
Today however, as he started towards it, he saw a short, familiar figure coming from the house.
Old William Smith was a plasterer. The year before he had done work for Margaret at the farm and ever since, Samuel knew, he had been busy at the great house. The dust that covered his grizzled head suggested that he had been hard at work that afternoon. He greeted the young man, and seeing the direction of his gaze he asked him.
“Want to go in?”
Samuel hesitated.
“There’s only us workmen and the housekeeper there,” Smith assured him. “The family’s in London.”
And so it was that Samuel Shockley saw inside one of the great masterpieces of English baroque architecture. He had never seen such a place before.
There had been, would be, far larger country houses; there had been, most assuredly would be, far greater parks. Was it the setting by the river that made the park so perfect? Was it the long grey lines that made the new house grow out of the ground with the same, stately simplicity of the cathedral less than three miles away?
“Old Inigo Jones himself designed the state room,” Smith told him; and he admired the perfect single cube, leading into the magnificent double cube of the great salon with its big rectangular windows looking over the park.
These rooms, some of the noblest in all England, were certainly impressive. And yet:
“It’s a friendly place,” the boy remarked.
For, except in a few cases, the English version of the stately baroque movement of Europe had somehow contrived an island character of its own. In place of the European style, with its huge, high volumes, its Roman