The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [233]
James became king. A Catholic on the throne – the first since Bloody Mary a century and a quarter ago. The country held its breath.
Then, in June that same year, Monmouth’s Rebellion had begun.
In a way it was bound to happen. Charles II had always adored his eldest natural son. Monmouth the handsome. Monmouth the Protestant: when the Whigs in Parliament wanted to exclude Catholic James, they told King Charles they’d rather have Monmouth. Charles, a Catholic Stuart at heart, protested that the boy was not legitimate, but the pragmatic English Parliament told him they’d worry about that. Charles had refused to allow such a thing but, as far as Monmouth was concerned, the damage had been done. He was a spoiled young man, forever getting into trouble, always protected by his doting father. It seemed the English wanted him as king. Even before his father’s death he had allowed himself to be implicated in one aborted plot that might have killed both Charles and James. Small wonder, then, if, with Catholic James suddenly placed over a most unwilling English nation, Monmouth, in his thirties now but vain and immature, might have thought the English would rise for him if he gave them the chance.
He had started in the West Country. People had flocked to his banner – small farmers, Protestants from the ports and trading towns – several thousand strong. The local gentry, the men of influence, however, had held back, cautious. And wisely so. For yesterday, at the Battle of Sedgemoor, the royal troops had smashed the rising. Everyone had scattered, to hide or flee as best they could.
Figures in a landscape, in the misty morning. Monmouth was fleeing. He had only two companions with him now. He needed to find a port from which to sail, somewhere he would not be betrayed. ‘We had better go’, he decided, ‘to Lymington.’
There were other fugitives, too, that July morning, heading in the same direction.
‘But isn’t he everything you have taught me to love?’ Betty was looking at her mother in genuine confusion. ‘You can hardly object to his family,’ she added, ‘since he is an Albion.’
Alice sighed. There had been no news, yet, from the West Country. Was Monmouth about to succeed? The whole business made her fearful. And now her daughter insisted on troubling her with a suitor. She wished the young man, just for a month or two, could be made to disappear.
Peter Albion was a credit to his family. If his grandfather Francis had deserved her own grandfather’s scorn, Francis’s son had done better. He’d become a physician and married a rich draper’s daughter. Young Peter had practised law and, with his parents’ numerous friends to help him, had already, by the age of twenty-eight, established himself as a rising man. He was handsome, with the traditional Albion fair hair and blue eyes; he was industrious; he was clever, thoughtful, ambitious. It was Tryphena who had encountered him and invited him to call; and it was she who summed him up: ‘He looks an Albion, but he’s just like father.’
Perhaps, Alice thought, that was why Betty liked him so much. He fitted the description of the father she’d never known.
But that, unfortunately, was precisely why Alice wanted to discourage him. ‘I’m getting old,’ she told Tryphena. ‘I’ve seen too many troubles.’ Troubles in England; troubles in the family. She did not doubt that the causes her husband had fought for had been just; she was quite sure, when she helped the dissenters, that she did right. But was it all worth it – the fighting, the suffering? Probably not. Peace was worth more, it seemed to her, than any of the small freedoms won in her lifetime. And peace was what she wanted now, for her old age and, above all, for her daughter.
It wasn’t so easy