The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [232]
For a few years Betty had been sent to a school for young ladies in Sarum; but while she had been happy enough there and made some friends, she had never really felt satisfied by the conversation of the other girls. Used to older people, she found them rather childish.
After this her mother had sent her, once or twice a year, to stay with relations or friends, on the assumption that she would meet young men. And she had; but often as not she had found them insipid until at last Alice had told her firmly: ‘Do not look for a perfect man, Betty. No man is perfect.’
‘I won’t. But do not force me to marry a man I can’t respect,’ she countered, ignoring her mother’s sigh.
By the time she was twenty-four, Alice was near despair. Betty herself was happy enough. ‘I love the house. I love every inch of the Forest,’ she told her. ‘I can live and die here alone contentedly enough.’
Until this June, while they were staying in London.
‘And when you consider’, her eldest daughter Tryphena remarked to Alice, ‘that this has occurred when all the world is thinking only of the great events now shaking the kingdom, I think she must be serious indeed.’
But that, alas, for Alice, was just the problem.
Figures in a landscape. A July night. There had been thousands the night before. But most, by now, had melted away into town, farm and hamlet, hiding their arms, going about their business as if they had never been out at all, the days before, marching round the western towns, trying to seize a kingdom.
Not all would be lucky, however. Some would be named, others given away, and sent to join the several hundred captured.
Figures on horseback, keeping out of sight, moving through woods when they can or out on to the bare, deserted ridges with none to witness them but the sheep, or a lonely shepherd, or the ghosts, perhaps, in the grassy earthwork inclosures, those silent reminders all over the countryside of the prehistoric age. Figures moving eastward now, still out on the chalk ridges, twenty miles or more south-west of Sarum.
Monmouth’s Rebellion was broken.
Nobody had expected King Charles to die. He was only fifty-four. He himself had expected to live many years and Sir Christopher Wren had been building him a fine new palace on the hill above Winchester where the king had looked forward to residing. But then suddenly, that February, Charles had been struck with an apoplexy. Within a week he was dead. And that left a huge problem.
Although Charles II had had numerous sons by his various mistresses, several of whom he had obligingly created dukes, he had left no legitimate heir. The crown, therefore, had been due to pass to his brother James, Duke of York. At first James had not seemed so bad a choice: he’d married a Protestant wife, had two Protestant daughters and one of those had married her cousin, the very Protestant ruler of the Dutch, William of Orange. But when James’s wife died and he married a Catholic princess, the English were less pleased. And when he soon afterwards admitted he was a Catholic himself, there had been consternation. Wasn’t this just what Protestant Englishmen had dreaded for a century? England was more Protestant now than it had been in the time of the Armada or even the Civil War. Charles, to appease them, assured everyone that, if his brother should succeed him, he’d uphold the Church of England whatever his private views. But could anyone really believe that?
Most of the Parliament did not. They demanded that Catholic James be debarred from the throne. King Charles and his friends refused; and so began the great divide in English politics between those who would keep a Catholic off the throne – the Whigs – and the royalist group – the Tories. The problem dragged on for years. There were endless discussions and demonstrations. Although violence was avoided, it was really the same debate that had led to the Civil War: who should have the last say, king or Parliament? King Charles II, however, wheeling and dealing, had pursued his merry way for more than a decade,