When Edmund Treves was nearly killed by the head of the Virgin Mary he took his first step towards marriage.
In truth his first step was very shaky. The soldiers’ pot-shots had cracked into the stone Virgin, shearing off her veiled head. That smashed down on to the pavement, narrowly missing him. Oxford townspeople shouted with delight at the decapitation; their applause mingled with mutters of horror from robed university men. Treves saw in confusion that a stone shard from the statue had sliced across his wrist, causing blood to flow Another shot rang out. It was his first time under fire. The familiar wide main street called the High, with its ancient university buildings, suddenly became a place of terror. As Treves realised the danger, his knees buckled and he nearly fainted.
Among the noisy onlookers, one man watched in silence. Orlando Lovell weighed up how the old feuds between town and gown festered with new complications. Freshly returned from the Continent after some years away, he saw with astonishment that tradesmen were openly jeering at frightened dons. Buff-coated troops had clustered in the gateway of Oriel College, threatening to manhandle gawping college servants and then firing at the University Church.
He knew it was the second wave of soldiers. These Parliamentarian hooligans had driven out a Royalist force only a few days previously, each group finding a welcome in some quarters but each fearing reprisals. Barely controlled by their officers, the newcomers were skittish. Already some had mutinied at a muster in the University Parks; dragoons had gone armed to church on Sunday, in fear of the townsmen’s hostility; rival gangs had become drunk and caused chaos in running street-fights.
Today’s soldiers were vandalising the ancient church of St Mary, to take out their spite against Archbishop William Laud. Authoritarian and ceremonial, he had enclosed altars with railings, repaired crucifixes, set up statues, imposed a uniform Prayer Book and, worst of all, insisted on the controlling power of bishops. Independent free thinkers were outraged. Now Laud languished in the Tower and these raucous London rebels were shooting at ‘scandalous images’, those hated statues with which Laud’s chaplain had embellished a provocative new porch on St Mary’s Church. To Lovell, as he stood watching, such scenes in England were astonishing. The anger Laud’s measures had caused was distasteful, because it seemed pointless.
People in the crowd had told him one puritan alderman had claimed he witnessed people bowing to these statues: Nixon, a grocer. Nixon had interceded for All Souls College — to which he supplied figs and sugar — when the Puritans proposed to batter at religious images on the gate. Churches did not buy food in bulk, however, so at St Mary’s the soldiers were doing what they liked. Lovell found their indiscipline a grave offence.
The endangered scholar was an idiot. With a curse, Lovell strode across the road, caught the swooning Treves roughly under the elbow and dragged him upright. Jeers came from the Parliamentary soldiers. The rescuer kicked Mary’s head away, as he hauled the young scholar across the frontage of the church and the two of them stumbled out of danger. The troopers held fire, following their progress with aimed muskets, though the gesture was merely to intimidate; the football kick had pleased them — as had been intended.
‘Take more care!’ ordered a mounted officer crisply. Lovell assessed the rebel commander curiously: in his sixties, receding hair, thin, upswept moustache, tasselled baldric. This was Lord Saye and Sele himself, one of the leading Parliamentarians. He was a colonial financier, a campaigner against Ship Money, a plotter at his Broughton home with some prime enemies of the King. A man of great political skill, Saye and Sele had been nicknamed ‘Old Subtlety’ by King Charles.
Lovell passed muster, then Treves was waved away, assessed as a dreamy scholar who had ambled into the line of fire whilst in a world of his own.
‘I could have been shot!’ He nearly collapsed again.
Lovell walked him towards the Cornmarket, then wheeled him into an alehouse. He had taken command, setting the pattern of their future relationship. Pushed onto a straight-backed settle, Edmund first suspected the man was about to insist on some very strong beverage, yet Lovell quietly ordered small beer, the same watery brew that children drank.
He was sturdy and tanned. It was mid-September and still mild, but he kept a heavy black cloak close around him like a spy He had been wearing a dark hat with a lowish crown and a long thin feather, which he now tossed aside on a table. He raised his tankard and held it steady. ‘I’ll drink to your health when I know your name.’
Ridiculously, Edmund felt tempted to supply a false one but he owned up to his identity. Lovell grunted. He enjoyed the fact he appeared threatening. He leached out danger with every move. Though a stranger to Oxford, yet he was at ease in his surroundings. He looked to Edmund as if he must smell of sweat and horseflesh, though in fact only a faint hint of old tobacco had smoked his dark garments, garments that were more serviceable than rich. He seemed liable to put up those well-travelled boots on a bench, while leaning back in a relaxed pose and calling for ripe cheese, clay pipes and available wenches …
Yet he remained sitting neatly. His light brown eyes gave nothing away, as he stated: ‘Orlando Lovell.’
The tapster was glaring at them. Lovell ignored it. Treves had scrub-bled up his gown and shoved it under the bench on their arrival; scholars were barred from alehouses. Since the colleges owned most of the inns in Oxford, there was a good chance that breaking the rule would be reported by an innkeeper anxious to preserve his lease.
‘So you are a scholar!’ said Lovell, smiling. It was perfectly obvious from the young man’s sober dress. Having red hair and the pale colouring that goes with it, Edmund looked innocent as a child, though he was now made a little raffish by blood staining his linen cuff where the stone fragment had struck him.
Without seeming to do so, Orlando Lovell expertly drew out the scholar’s history. He was a good-humoured youth from a family of minor gentry who would be hard pushed to secure him a position in life. In peacetime, his options were to become a country squire (difficult, with no estate of his own), a lawyer (though he lacked friends and family who could push for him as patrons) or a clergyman (not advisable while religion was causing such strife in the kingdom). His father had died some years before; his mother struggled. The family lacked sufficient funds or influence to send children into royal service at court. Edmund was too well born to undertake labour or trade, yet did not possess enough land to live off. Money had been scraped together to send him to the Merchant Taylors School, which his mother’s brothers had attended. Somehow, with a smattering of the classics and the Merchant Taylors’ influence, he had gained a place as an exhibitioner at St John’s College in Oxford. If Oxford was not precisely educating him for a career, that was simply the way things had been through the centuries — and, cynics might say, how things would always be.
‘Are you a university man, Master Lovell?’
‘I never had that privilege.’
Lovell deduced Treves would probably leave without taking his degree. That was relatively common; he would be following many who had nonetheless become great men in political or literary life. ‘It may be, dearest Ned,’ wrote his mother in one of her weekly letters, seeking to console herself, ‘that receiving education at a great university is a benefit in itself, and should you achieve something of note in your life to come, the record will state that you were once present at that seat of learning and none will think badly of you …’ This feeble sentence whimpered to a close and Alice Treves snapped out her true feelings: ‘Though in truth, I should be heartily glad to see you properly set up with a degree.’
Treves gloomily explained new regulations instituted by the all-controlling Archbishop Laud. To obtain a degree, it was no longer enough to attend a few lectures and hand in occasional written work. He must pass an examination.
‘You have time to study harder.’
‘Yes, but there is a war now!’ Edmund burst out excitedly. Like most scholars, he paid as much attention to politics and religion as to his books — which meant, as little as he could get away with. He had been born the year before King Charles was crowned. He grew up in an England that was stable and prosperous, where he had been innocently unaware of trouble. The headmaster at his school and the dons he encountered at university were all loyal to the King; he took his lead from them. His college had benefited by an enormously expensive new quadrangle, paid for by Archbishop Laud, who had been President of St John’s and also the university’s Chancellor. Laud was impeached the first year Edmund went up to Oxford. At St John’s, the threat of their President being executed was a talking point even scholars could not ignore.
Lovell’s interest focused. ‘Your college is pricelessly endowed, I think?’ he quizzed. ‘There must be an excellent cellar. Do you enjoy a good kitchen?’
‘Colleges are expecting to lose their treasures,’ was the cautious reply. Even Treves could spot a chancer.
All over the kingdom, Lovell knew, men were seizing the initiative and taking control of weapon stores, town magazines, ships and money. In Cambridge a member of Parliament called Oliver Cromwell was adroitly removing the university silver for melting down. When Royalist forces had occupied Oxford under Sir John Byron, Byron afterwards thought it prudent to take away with him much of the Oxford university plate, lest it too fall into Parliament’s hands’. The Christ Church plate was refused him, only to be discovered hidden behind wall-panelling. Whatever Byron left was now being tracked down by Lord Saye and Sele. But he, like Byron, had studied at Oxford and was diffident about looting his alma mater. He burned popish books and pictures in the streets, yet he had accepted the pleas of the Master of Trinity that the college pictures were not worth destroying — We esteem them no more than a dishcloth’ — so those old masters were left, discreetly turned against the wall.
‘Lectures are cancelled while all becomes muster, drill and fortify’ trilled Edmund.
‘Don’t you spend all hours swearing and gaming?’ Lovell was teasing, to some extent.
‘No, our statutes forbid gambling for money — more of Laud’s reforms. We must keep our hair trim, dress plain, and not loiter in the streets in loathsome boots. There is to be no hunting with dogs or ferrets, and we may not carry weapons —’
‘And what do you do for —’ Lovell spoke in his usual polite timbre though the undertone was feral. Edmund looked alarmed. Lovell merely rubbed one cheekbone beneath his hooded eye, with the tip of a languid finger.
‘For entertainment? We write Greek graces and solve Latin riddles,’ Edmund replied solemnly.
The gentle jest puzzled Lovell. He reviewed it, considering how he should answer, or whether any answer was needed. Young Treves was accustomed to rapid banter, hurled to and fro by disrespectful students. Curious, he took it upon himself to ask what Lovell was doing in Oxford.
‘I came with Byron.’ Had Lovell been left behind here as a Royalist spy?
‘Are you a professional soldier?’
‘I have served in arms since I was younger than you.’
‘How long is that?’
‘A decade.’ As Edmund looked impressed, Lovell turned the conversation. ‘So, master scholar — no weapons! How does that suit in the present upsets?’
Then, while Lovell listened in amused silence, Edmund explained how many scholars and some dons had left Oxford, never to return; the normal new intake of students had dried up. Those who remained were drilling and helping to fortify the town.
As the risk of action increased, Edmund Treves had helped dig trenches, fortify Magdalen Bridge and carry stones to the top of Magdalen Tower to be thrown down upon any attackers. Lovell belched derisively. Treves pleaded with him for advice on how to join up in the King’s service and Lovell agreed to help him.
Lovell set down his empty tankard and collected his hat. ‘So what does your mother think of your warlike aims? Do you correspond?’ Edmund admitted that his mother wrote to him very fondly every week. And you reply …?’
‘As often as seems advisable.’ Edmund did reply every week, ornamenting his letters with phrases in Greek and Latin to prove that he was studying. However, he had enough about him to fudge the issue when talking to a sophisticated ex-mercenary ten years his senior, whose expression verged on wry. ‘Do you have family, Master Lovell?’
‘None that trouble me,’ replied Lovell briefly.
When this chance acquaintance between Lovell and Treves grew into an unlikely friendship — or what passed for friendship in an uncomfortable city, riven by faction — it was Lovell who recommended that Edmund Treves should try to marry an heiress he had heard about. Just as it was Lovell who advised Edmund on becoming a soldier, it was he who came up with Juliana Carlill.
In the autumn of 1642, in England, a gentleman of eighteen had two likely fates lying ahead of him: marriage and death. Many would achieve both very quickly. Few used their fear of a coffin as a reason to delay jumping into a marriage bed; it was commoner to hurry between the sheets, while the chance was there.
Sadly it also became common for young married women to lose their new husbands while they were heavy with their first pregnancy. A proportion of widows would remarry especially those were young, proven to be capable of child-bearing, and perhaps blessed with a legacy; some could hope for second chances. For others, life would be bleaker. Widows, especially widows on the losing side, could only expect to be shunted into corners of other people’s parlours, often dogged by lawsuits and disappointed in their children. Despite this — luckily for men of eighteen — only in the most sensible families were young girls advised to be cautious about marriage.
For in the autumn of 1642, nobody supposed the civil war would last long. Most people were sure that some form of reconciliation would be negotiated between the King and Parliament. Anything else was unthinkable.
So Edmund Treves, who gave little thought to the possibility of dying until the Virgin Mary’s head nearly killed him in the High, was soon presented with another dangerous fate. Edmund had not learned good judgement. He never considered that the war into which King and Parliament had stumbled was set to drag on pretty well for the rest of his life. He failed to understand that war should be approached not as an impromptu game of fives against a college wall, but with great caution. Love, too, needed long-term planning. This was a risky time to take major decisions — especially when they were prompted by a man whose reliability was untested.
Bearing a whole flowery nosegay of misapprehensions, therefore, Edmund Treves travelled cheerfully from Oxford to a house near Wallingford, in order to meet a young lady about whom he knew only what his new friend had told him — much of which would turn out to be wrong. Had he been older and worldlier, it was generally agreed, he would not have visited a prospective bride in company with Orlando Lovell.