The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [202]
The party was taking a strange route. Instead of passing straight up the Forest centre through Lyndhurst, they were skirting its edge, riding westwards to Ringwood and then over the top to Romsey on their way, in stages, to Windsor Castle. Did they imagine anyone would try to rescue Charles in the Forest? It seemed unlikely.
Since King Charles had plunged the country into civil war, the New Forest had remained quiet. The nearby ports of Southampton and Portsmouth, like most of the English ports and the city of London, were for Parliament. Sentiment in Lymington had run with the bigger ports. Royalist gentry had tried to secure the Isle of Wight and Winchester for the king, but they couldn’t keep it up. The Forest itself, however, containing no strongholds of any kind, had been left undisturbed. The only difference from normal life was that, since the royal government had broken down nobody had paid any of the forest officers. So they had paid themselves, from the gentleman foresters down to the humblest cottager, in timber and deer and anything else the place provided. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know how.
‘The king can’t exactly argue about it, can he?’ Stephen Pride had remarked genially to Alice one day. Lisle wondered whether the new government, whatever form it finally assumed, would take an interest in the Forest.
Then he transferred his gaze back to the distant figures riding along the strand. How was it possible, he asked himself for the hundredth time, for that small person down there to have made so much trouble?
Perhaps, given the king’s views about his rights, the war had always been inevitable, from the day when Charles came to the throne. He just could not accept the notion of political compromise. He had kept councillors his Parliament detested, raised new taxes, favoured the Catholic powers his people hated and finally tried to force his bishops, who were so ‘High Church’ they could almost be taken for papists, on to the stern Calvinistic Scots. This last act of madness had brought the Scots out in armed rebellion and given Parliament the chance to impose its will. Strafford, his hated minister, had been executed; the Archbishop of Canterbury imprisoned in the Tower of London. But it had been no good. The two sides had been too far apart by then. They had drifted into civil war; thanks, in the end, to Oliver Cromwell and his ‘Roundheads’, the king had lost.
Yet even in defeat, King Charles would not deal honestly with his opponents. For Lisle, the last straw had been after the defeat of the king at the final battle of Naseby. Captured documents had proved beyond a doubt that, if he could, Charles would bring an army from Ireland or from Catholic France to subdue his people. ‘How can we believe he wouldn’t allow papism back into England, too?’ Lisle had asked. And when he had been sent with other commissioners to negotiate with Charles on the Isle of Wight, where the king had been held before his transfer to Hurst Castle, he had perceived exactly what kind of man he had to deal with. ‘He will say anything; he will play for time, because he thinks he rules by divine right and therefore he owes us nothing at all. He has the same character as his grandmother Mary Queen of Scots: he will go on plotting until the day his head is off.’
But this, of course, was just the trouble. It was what worried Alice and many others like her. It was why, now, there was a split between the many in Parliament who wanted a compromise and the sterner souls in the army, led by Cromwell, who believed that the king must die. How could you try to execute a king, the Lord’s anointed? Such a thing had never been done. What did it mean? Where would it lead?
Strangely enough, it was precisely because he was a lawyer that John Lisle saw that a legal solution to the problem of the king was impossible.
The constitution of England was actually rather vague. Ancient common law, custom, precedent, and the relative wealth and strength