The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [210]
The woman’s face fell, but she had not quite given up. ‘You will not even write?’ she pleaded.
Alice hesitated. What could she reply? ‘I will write,’ she said unwillingly. ‘But it won’t do any good.’
‘Well at least she said she’d write,’ said Mrs Penruddock to her children as they went back.
And write Alice did – a long and passionate letter. She described the interview to her husband and made all the points in Colonel Penruddock’s favour, including some that his wife hadn’t thought of. Whatever his intentions at the start of the ill-fated business, she hadn’t the least doubt that if Penruddock gave his word to Cromwell he would keep it.
John Lisle’s reply came a few days later. He agreed with Alice and had talked to Cromwell but, hardly surprisingly, he couldn’t help much.
The leaders will be tried by jury and the judges they ill-used at Salisbury shall not sit in judgement lest it be thought they seek vengeance.
If Penruddock is found guilty – and surely he is so – the Protector will grant him a merciful death. But he cannot do more. If he pardons Penruddock, what encouragement he’d give to any other rebellion.
Thomas did not remember the details of the days that followed. There were letters, desperate appeals; for a time it seemed that a guarantee of safe conduct and pardon offered to some of their followers might be applied to Penruddock and Grove too, but this was denied. Next the authorities appeared to hesitate about where the trials were to be, but by April it was decided that the rebels taken down in the West Country would be tried down there, in Exeter city, where they were being held. Every day he asked his mother, ‘When shall we go to see Father?’ and always she replied: ‘As soon as he sends for us.’
It was clear that his father still thought it might be necessary for his wife to go to London on his behalf, so they remained at home. But in the third week of April a message came. The trial was about to begin. Colonel Penruddock had sent for his wife.
‘Can’t I come too?’ Thomas had begged. Not now, he was told. So once again, he had to stay at home and wait.
His mother was gone a week, but before she returned he had already heard the verdict. Guilty. They had sent to Cromwell for the death warrant. She was frantic now. Penruddock and Grove had issued an appeal to the judges.
She herself, the moment she reached her home, immediately despatched a letter to Alice Lisle. ‘I’m sure she can do something,’ she declared. Although why this should be the case, when they had never heard another word from her, Thomas did not know.
One blow, however, they had not foreseen. On the day after her return, when she was trying to comfort her children, a party of six soldiers under an officer came to the door of the house and informed the unhappy woman that she must leave.
‘Leave? What do you mean? Why?’
‘House is sequestered.’
‘On whose orders?’
‘The Sheriff’s.’
‘Am I to be turned out of doors, then? With my children?’
‘Yes.’
They spent that night at an inn at Salisbury; the next with their cousins at Hale. The following day, however, word came that they might return. There had been a mistake. No decision as to their property had been taken yet.
The fact that Alice Lisle, hearing about it the same day, had guessed that the sheriff, a greedy man, was probably trying to get the property for himself and sent an urgent message to her husband to have the order rescinded was something the Penruddock family never knew.
The day after that Mrs Penruddock and all her children set out for Exeter. It took them three days. By the time they reached it the warrant for the executions had arrived from Cromwell, written and signed in his own hand. Instead of the usual gruesome hanging, drawing and quartering of traitors, Penruddock was to be executed cleanly by having his head struck off with an axe. Never having seen a traitor’s execution the family did not fully understand what a mercy this was.
They were allowed, in