The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [218]
‘Perhaps we shall see you at the meeting house, Dame Alice,’ she had said gently, as she left.
‘Yes,’ Alice had replied absently. ‘Yes, of course.’
She had gone to Boldre parish church, however, the next Sunday and for several more afterwards. With her regicide husband on the run she did not want to do anything that might cause unfavourable comment in the new royalist regime.
She was riding by a small coppice she owned about a month after this, when she noticed Stephen Pride at work on the fence. Asked what he was doing, he showed her where a section had been broken down. ‘Don’t want the deer getting in,’ he remarked. Had her steward asked him to see to this? she enquired. ‘Just noticed it as I was passing,’ he replied; and although she offered, he refused to take any payment. Gradually, in the weeks that followed, she noticed a number of similar incidents. One of the cattle was sick: it was brought in to her steward. When a tree fell across the lane that led to Albion House, Pride and three of the Oakley villagers were cutting it up and carting the wood to the house by early morning without even being asked. Her Forest friends were silently looking after her, she realized.
She continued to go to Boldre parish church. She suspected that Joan Pride understood. But after some time, when it was clear that nothing she did was going to help her husband or save his fortune, she turned up at the Lymington meeting house again one Sunday and was quietly welcomed as if she had never avoided the place. She went often thereafter.
And she might have continued to do so indefinitely, had it not been for the English Parliament.
King Charles II was a tolerant man and, unlike his father, his tolerance seemed to extend to religion. He told his councillors that he was content to allow his subjects to worship as they pleased. But his council and his Parliament were not content with that at all. The gentlemen in Parliament wanted order. They had no wish to encourage the Puritan sects who had given so much trouble before. And besides, if people were free to worship as they pleased it might allow the Roman Catholic Church to flourish again and that was unthinkable. So the Acts of Parliament followed and the new king could not stop them. Only the Anglican prayer book with its formal services might be used in churches. Protestant sects – Dissenters as they were called – were banned from any church. Soon, it was said, a new Act would ban them from meeting within five miles of any town. Joan Pride’s congregation at Lymington was practically illegal.
‘It’s monstrous,’ Alice declared. ‘What possible harm can these people do?’ But the law was the law. She went to Boldre church, used the Anglican prayer book and held her peace. She told Joan Pride she was sorry for what had happened and the other woman made no comment. Indeed, for three months she did not even see her friend. And then one day she chanced to meet her in the lane that led south from Boldre church, and Joan Pride told her that there was a preacher, a certain Mr Whitaker, who was willing to come to Lymington. ‘But we daren’t have him in the town, Dame Alice. So we’ve nowhere for him to preach,’ she explained.
Alice had heard of this preacher, a scholarly young man with a fine reputation. ‘I should like to have heard him myself,’ she confessed. After only a few moments’ thought, and rather to her own surprise, she heard herself saying: ‘He could come to Albion House. He might stay as my guest and preach in the hall. Mightn’t you and your friends come to hear him there?’
And so it was done. Mr Robert Whitaker proved to be a splendid preacher. Before the royal Restoration he had been a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was also very good-looking. Her daughter Margaret, especially, seemed to take an interest in him; and