Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [503]
Sarum might have liked the new king for he was married first to the daughter of the great lawyer Hyde, made Earl of Clarendon – a good local man whose cousin was bishop, and a loyal Anglican too. That marriage produced two Protestant daughters, Mary and Anne. But now the king had married again, a Catholic princess, and the people of Sarum did not like that at all. They had soon seen enough of the new rule.
Parliament had been dismissed. Arundel of Wardour, as great a Catholic as any in the land, was in high office; the king was clamouring for the Test Act to be repealed, and even his two Hyde brothers-in-law were dismissed for not supporting these moves towards Rome. The brief rebellion of Monmouth against these changes had taken place south west of Sarum; but the terrible trials of Judge Jeffreys that followed its collapse with their massive executions (and the Bloody Judge tried five hundred men a day) had filled even the king’s local supporters with disgust, just as the news of Louis XIV’s recent persecution of Protestants filled them with fear. At Salisbury, the mayor and five councillors were dismissed by the king.
“He has made sure that he offends every class in England. Even Tories are turning Whig. And now he has a son . . .”
This had been the final straw. Until then, James’s heirs had been his Protestant daughters. But with the birth of a Prince of Wales to his new Catholic wife, there seemed no hope for the Protestant island.
The succession had to change, and who more natural than Mary and her husband, that upstanding Protestant Dutchman, declared foe of the Catholic King of France, William, Prince of Orange?
The revolution was quick and easy. Doctor Shockley liked to say he had even played a small part in it himself. For when James and his forces camped in Salisbury the month before, and the townspeople had subserviently welcomed them, Samuel Shockley had not.
When James was afflicted with a nosebleed and the messenger came running to the doctor’s house, Shockley refused to attend him.
“Send Tuberville to His Majesty,” he suggested, and muttered, “Perhaps the quack will cut his head off.”
“This will be remembered,” the flunkey warned him.
“Good.”
James had soon gone. Now William was about to enter the city. Clarendon himself, so recently a minister of James, had arrived in the town with other Wiltshire Hydes to greet him.
It was as he walked away from the bishop’s palace that Samuel Shockley noted a curious sight. Two white birds had risen from the lawns beside Ward’s home and circled the roof before flying silently away towards the river.
He knew the local tale, which spoke of white birds appearing when a bishop is about to die, and for a second felt a pang about the heart. Then he put the thought from him: he was a scientist, a man of reason.
This was a day of celebration.
But first, young Forest. He had summoned him to his house. The young man was waiting there: dark-haired, quiet, polite. He had the same superficial charm as his father, the same coldness beneath, which was no doubt why, although they had been educated and gone to Oxford together, Shockley and his father had never become real friends.
Young George Forest was twenty.
Shockley did not waste time.
“No, Doctor Shockley.” He was lying of course.
“I have a patient – Susan Mason. Does that help you?”
George Forest said nothing. He waited.
How tedious duplicity was. Shockley sighed.
“She is with child, young Forest.”
Still he said nothing.
“You are surely not going to deny that you are the father, sir?”
It was the usual story. The young man had seen her at the inn, visited her as a light diversion, no doubt charmed her. It had taken him three weeks to persuade her even to confide in him who her lover had been. She was a pleasant, simple girl, with large grey eyes – attractive in a way – and only sixteen.
“Do you intend to marry her?”
George Forest stared at him in amazement. The heir to a baronetcy, a Forest, marry an inn-keeper’s daughter?
“I see. Are you aware that her father has discovered her condition sir, and turned