Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [507]
For Bonnie Prince Charlie was marching from the north. And the Shockleys would surely ride to join him.
No object in the Shockley household was more venerated than the sword of Nathaniel Shockley, which Charles Moody had brought back from Naseby. It hung high on the wall over the stairs, gleaming dully – a daily reminder to the boy of the family’s romantic Cavalier past.
It was a past that Jonathan liked to refer to.
“Some Shockleys were for Parliament in those days,” he conceded to Adam, “but the best of us were for the king.”
It gave the boy the feeling that his family, too, had been one of the loyal band of true gentlemen like the Penruddocks and Hydes who had been loyal to a sacred cause.
And did not his father sometimes after dinner pass his hand over his wine glass, with a dour flourish, in the Jacobite sign to toast the true Stuart king over the water? The family fortune might be lost, there might be a German king on the throne and Whig politicians who tolerated religious free-thinkers, but Jonathan Shockley, a solid Tory if ever there was one, at least enjoyed this show of loyalty to a past when, by supposition, the family was more noble and the times better.
Now the time had come. The Pretender’s son, the dashing Charles Edward, was on his way south. From the border to Derby, not a hand had been raised against him by a people who were still indifferent to Hanoverian rule.
Each day, when Adam Shockley went to ride his pony, he whispered to it:
“We’ll go too.”
How strange it was, therefore, that even now, Sarum close could still be so quiet.
Sarum close. It was a good place to be born a gentleman. It was even fashionable.
The choristers’ school young Adam attended, run by its famous headmaster Richard Hele, provided not only the choirboys for the cathedral, but an excellent preparation for the sons of the local gentry and merchants before they went on to the great schools of Winchester and Eton. Had not the Lord Chancellor, one of the Wiltshire family of Wyndham, been one of its notable old boys? And the great Mr Addison, essayist and editor of the Spectator, had he not been at school in Salisbury too? As for the world of fashion, that was run by the redoubtable, the indefatigable, Mr James Harris who lived at the fine house by St Ann’s Gate, not a hundred yards from their own. On the south side of his house he had set an elegant sundial which bore the legend: ‘Life is but a walking shadow’. Mr Harris’s grandfather, on his mother’s side, was no less a person than the Earl of Shaftesbury. Mr Harris organised the subscription concerts in the cathedral and the Assembly Rooms; there were balls, especially after the races held above Lord Pembroke’s estate near the edge of Cranborne Chase; there were literary societies, clubs, and a theatre. The great composer Handel himself had performed next door to Mr Harris’s house.
On any day one might expect to meet members of the local gentry – Eyres, Penruddocks, Wyndhams, even perhaps one of the Herberts from the great house at Wilton. Why, even prominent citizens of the town bore historic names – like the deputy recorder Edward Poore, descended from the very family that had founded the cathedral five centuries before; or his wife Rachel, whose kinsman Bishop Bingham had ruled the diocese soon afterwards.
Sarum close. One did not even have to know the inhabitants to understand the place. One glance at the buildings told you that it had entered the age of elegance.
The square Georgian façades were to be seen all round the close: at Mr Harris’ house in the north east corner, in several fine houses backing on to the river on the western side, like Myles Place and the nearly rebuilt Walton Canonry, in the smaller terraced façades appearing on the eastern side near the gates to the bishop’s place. Some were stone, some brick, some stucco. But the finest, the noblest of all was on the north side, facing the choristers’ green: Mompesson House. It was always said that Sir Christopher Wren himself had made