The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [214]
The Protector was all powerful. His army had crushed Scotland and Ireland. England’s trade increasingly dominated the high seas. The Commonwealth of England had never been mightier. Yet despite all this, Alice was uneasy; and there were days when she felt the same apprehension as she had that grey winter when her husband had gone to London to execute the king.
For the trouble was that the Commonwealth didn’t really work. She could see it, often, more clearly than her husband. Each time the Parliament and the army, or some faction within either, failed to come to an agreement, and her husband would come home with some new form of constitution that he and his friends were going to try, saying, ‘This time we shall resolve matters,’ she could only nod quietly and hold her peace. And sure enough, months later, there would be a new crisis and a new form of government chosen. The months after Penruddock’s Rising had been the worst. In order to crush any thought of further opposition, Cromwell had divided the country into a dozen regions, placed a major-general in charge of each and ruled by martial law. It had achieved nothing except to make all England hate the army and after a time even Cromwell had to give it up. But the underlying issue remained the same. Dictatorship or republic, army or civil rule, rule of the landed classes or rule of the ordinary people: none of these issues was decided; nobody was content. And as Cromwell tried one expedient after another she came to wonder: take Oliver Cromwell away and what have you? Nobody, not even her clever husband, knew.
There was something else that bothered her too. ‘All that we have done, John,’ she would say to Lisle, ‘if it were not done to establish a just and godly rule, then better it had not been done at all.’
‘That is what we are about, Alice,’ he would respond irritably. ‘We are establishing a godly rule.’
But were they? Oh, the Parliament had made some fearsome laws. They had even made adultery punishable by death – except that juries quite rightly refused to convict in the face of such monstrous punishment. Swearing, dancing, all kinds of amusements that offended the Puritans were outlawed. The major-generals had even managed to close half the inns where people went to drink. But what did this mean if, at the centre, she saw Oliver Cromwell, when his supporters put it to him, quite clearly tempted by the idea of taking the title of king, and who clearly meant his son, a nice but weak young man, to succeed him as Protector? Visiting Whitehall, she had been shocked to find the other leading families of the new regime dressed up in silks and satins and brocades exactly like the old royalist aristocracy they had replaced. It seemed to her, though she was too wise to say it, that little had changed at all.
And so it was, as the years had passed, that while to all outward appearances Alice loyally supported her husband, whom she loved, in his busy public life, she withdrew, within herself, into a more private world. She found that she cared less and less what party people belonged to, and more and more about what kind of individuals they were. When poor Mrs Penruddock, a few months after her husband’s execution, had finally been stripped of all his family’s property and had petitioned Cromwell for mercy, Alice had vigorously argued on the family’s behalf and been glad when a part of their estates had been granted back