Sam was right when he said we should not see better till we had suffered worse. From a tyranny, England now turned into a chaos, so dreadful that at last decent men thought any government at all, however tyrannous, would be preferable to this state of having none.
How this chaos came about, I do not altogether know; I did not take as much notice of what went on as I should. At the time I excused myself for this, saying that I was so tired, so worn-out and weary with all the long struggles, private and public, I had gone through in my life, that I could struggle no more. But now I see that I was in fault; it was because too many English folk were tired and allowed themselves to take little notice, that the good old cause went down in ruin.
On his deathbed, Oliver, perhaps because he was afraid to trust anyone else, named his son Richard as his successor, and so we had as Protector a young gentleman who, as the soldiers said with truth, had never drawn sword or lifted voice in the Commonwealth’s cause. If Richard had possessed the virtues of angels, still to many zealots of our cause, and I own to myself also, it was very repugnant that we should have shed so much blood simply to establish another dynasty on the throne. But as it chanced, Richard Cromwell, though doubtless a mild good lad enough, had no qualities fitting him to govern England; indeed he was less fitted even than princes are who inherit a kingdom on the hereditary principle, for he had not been trained and exercised to government as are princes of the blood. If there is anything worse for a nation than a strong tyrant, it is a weak one; and looking back on poor Richard Cromwell now I am reminded of that Old Testament King—Reho-boam I think his name was, yes, Rehoboam, Solomon’s son—who, speaking very high to his people on his accession, with threats to chastise them with scorpions where his father had used only whips, very soon found himself with but few subjects left to chastise. So it was, perhaps, with poor weak Richard; he spoke high but lost all.
At first things went well; a Parliament was called, Lord Fairfax was welcomed there warmly as Member for Yorkshire, and the Duke of Buckingham was released. But this quiet did not last long. The Royalists sprang up and rebelled, though for the time they were put down again; Parliament was angry with the Army, and the Army with Parliament. Parliament contended that the sword should lie in the people’s hand, that is, the Army should obey the Parliament; but the Army objected that it had fought the battles and won the victories, and it was not right to leave the soldiers rebuked and scorned and on free quarter and in such long arrears of pay. Then there came divisions in the Army itself, the older officers playing a haughty, self-seeking game, the younger ones, as we heard, caring more for Parliamentary government and a quiet behaviour. Lambert was in favour again, and then out, and then in again. Richard was turned out, and the Army came in; then somehow the Parliament seemed to be in power again. I simply could not make head or tail of it all; the people we had been used to trust and admire seemed all at each other’s throats, so we knew not whom to believe in.
I remember one day when there had come some news or other about General Monck, who was in command in Scotland, refusing to allow his soldiers to sign, or even to read, a petition which Lambert’s soldiers had got up to send to Parliament. Lambert was in Yorkshire at that time, and he was a Yorkshireman and had been a friend of Lord Fairfax’s and had relieved Bradford in the Civil War and fought many fine battles and Captain Hodgson was still serving under him, and we had always trusted him; but now it seemed as if Monck, who had changed his side after that battle long ago in Cheshire so that I never liked him, was supporting Parliament, while Lambert was against it; so I knew not whom to look to. Well, that day John was out at the side of the house making a new place for chickens for me, and I went out to see how the work was going, and stood watching for a little time. He was as skilful as ever with carpentry. I did not like to see him at such work at his age; but owing to the confused state of the country the cloth trade was in terrible straits, and we had to take thought about our outgoings and straiten our expenditure in many ways, and so he made this himself instead of hiring a man to do it for him. I mentioned the news about Monck which had come, and asked him what he thought of it, but he said nothing. I asked him other questions about political matters too, but got no reply; and so at last I burst out in a grieved tone:
“I am fairly puzzled, John, where to find our cause. What do you think of it all?”
“Why ask me?” muttered John, placing a nail very carefully, ready to strike it with the hammer.
“But John,” I persisted: “which is in the right, Monck or Lambert?”
“I do not know,” said John. “I do not know!” he shouted suddenly, and he gave me a strange angry glare, and threw down the hammer, and limped off into the house.
I followed very soberly, greatly troubled to think that a man so straight in purpose, so honest, decent and experienced, as my John, should not know which course was the right one.
Before I reached the house he came out again, holding another hammer in his hand; as he passed me he mumbled something to the effect that he had need of this hammer and had been obliged to fetch it. But this was all pretence; he could not meet my eyes, and spoke in a very conciliatory way; it was meant as a kind of apology for speaking to me harshly. I smiled.and replied in a very friendly tone; but I must own, what is a strange interconnection of small things with great ones, that I have always disliked that chicken-run, feeling always in it John’s perplexity and distress.
Moreover, it was at this time that John began to suffer from a persistent thorn in the flesh, a very painful affection about his waist, which for long would not vanish, but came again whenever he was troubled, and so the sight of the chicken-run placed me always in mind of that also.
As the disorder of the country grew and grew, Sam and Will began to pour letters in on us, belabouring us with complaints and news and suppositions.
“I wish they would save their pence and our eyes,” grumbled John, poring over one of Will’s much-crossed epistles.
Sam’s letters were at least plain and comprehensible in their words, though they related very variable feelings; for one week “the City” would be angered with the Parliament, and the next with the Army, and the next it would be sick and tired of both of them, according to Sam, and determined not to meddle with the dispute. Looking back on it now, this time reminds me of the house-end I saw fall in Kirk–gate in the first siege of Bradford. A stone fell, and another, and another, and then two or three, and then there came a kind of muffled cracking, and an awful pause, and then suddenly crash! down came the wall in a roar. The muffled crackings of impending dissolution were ever increasing in our ears, at that time.
Will, however, did not agree, and he wrote very often to tell us so. John complained jestingly at first that he wished Will would write plain English—he was growing as fond of texts as Lister, said John, but as became a scholar used much more obscure ones. Then John began to re-read the Book of Revelation, “in order to keep pace with thy brother’s metaphors, wife,” said he, smiling. But soon he jested no more about Will’s letters, but handed them to me to read without a word, and made no comment on them; he was uneasy at their contents, and I shared this uneasiness. For Will, at first as distressed and perplexed as John and I were at the confusion of all we believed to be good, turned naturally enough to Holy Writ for comfort, and compared the present troubles to the opening of that seventh seal from which such woes poured upon the children of men. This was natural enough, though I have ever thought it rash to force the mystical words of John the Divine into close earthly comparisons. Will, however, seemed determined so to force them; he delivered sermons, and wrote many letters to The Breck, comparing every small happening in Parliament and the Army to the hail and fire mingled with blood, or the embittering of the waters of the earth by wormwood, or the darkening of the sun and air by reason of the smoke from the bottomless pit, and other such matters from Revelation, so that it would have been ludicrous had it not been so lamentable. But then one unfortunate day poor Will got it into his head that the sentence of John the Divine which saith they should be tormented five months was strictly applicable to the present unsettlement of our nation. It was about the autumn of 1659, as I remember, when the Army had turned the Parliament out of doors; David sent me a very fine pamphlet against this shocking illegality, writ by an erstwhile Latin secretary to the Council of State, a poet, John Milton. From that day, which to the most of us seemed very gloomy, Will began to be cheerful and hopeful; and from that day his friends had cause to be distressed for him. He went about wagging his head and uttering mysterious prophecies of good days to come, as if he had special information about the future from the government or from God, which last he indeed believed himself to have, poor fellow. A brother minister, joking him, asked if he could tell the exact date of this consummation, whereupon Will with flashing eyes rebuked him and named a day. This day was several times postponed, as the months went by and no good settlement appeared, Will confessing, in public, very humbly and candidly that he was but a poor weak soul unfit to be the Lord’s instrument, and he had understood imperfectly the message the Lord required him to deliver to His faithful people. Eliza was wretched over these continually deceived prophecies, and she begged me privately to ask Will often to The Breck, for our quiet warm home life, with Abraham running in from school and drawing diagrams of looms to show the action of the reeds and treadles, and so on, soothed Will and seemed to drive away his sick fancies and restore him to ordinary life.
One snowy winter’s afternoon Will came hurrying into The Breck with that wild light in his eyes which we had grown to dread, and cried out that the day of the Lord was at hand. I urged him to the fire and made him take off his boots, for snow-broth has the most astonishing ability to find its way through leather, and sent Abraham out to see if his uncle had remembered to stable his horse—sure enough he had forgot it. But I had hardly got Will comfortable by the fire, and brought John down from the loom-chamber to have a word with him, when he was up and for the road again; he said he must spread the good news, it was laid on him to spread it all over the West Riding. John asking him very soberly and stolidly what this good news was, Will told him in a loud excited shout that the five months of torment had begun that very morning. He pursed his mouth with such determination as he said this, and his head seemed so to nod and tremble, that we did not like to contradict him, but gave his horse a feed of oats and let him go, Abraham on his own offer leading the horse by the bridle down the snowy lane and into Bradford. When he had gone I turned to John and asked what he thought of Will’s carriage.
“Nay, Penninah, I think as thou dost,” said John heavily.
“I fear his brain is turning,” I whispered.
“He hath suffered much, and for many years,” said John. “Do not forget he began to suffer before we married.”
When Abraham came back from Bradford he brought news which caused John and I to look at each other strangely. For it was rumoured in Bradford that day that Lord Fairfax, ill though he was with gout and chill, had risen up and gathered some old soldiers together, and marched to meet Lambert at a rendez-vous on Marston Moor.
“At last, at last!” said John very quietly.
“Why,” said I, shivering a little at the strangeness of it, “perhaps Will hath a message from the Lord, after all.”
“Nay, Penninah,” said John: “It is more like Will hath heard this rumour, and translated it. But yet he may be the Lord’s instrument in the spreading of this news, that I do not deny.”
“Lord Fairfax may indeed give us back our freedom in five months,” said I.
“Aye, he may,” said John soberly. “But do not count on it, Penninah. We do not much deserve it.”
At first it seemed as if John were wrong and poor Will right, for most of Lambert’s army, which was ready to march north to fight with Monck, at the sight and speech of their old general came over to him, while the rest mouldered away. Captain Hodgson was one of the officers who would not join Monck and Fairfax; he came home to Coley, very discontented, and when he rode over to The Breck to see us, justified his action, saying that he would never oppose Lambert or help to restore a King.
“Restore a King!” cried I. “There is no talk of such a thing, surely.”
“There is talk of little else,” snapped Hodgson.
“But Monck stands for a free Parliament,” said I.
“Aye—free as it was before Noll purged it,” grumbled Hodgson. “Such a Parliament will be very like to restore the King.”
“I do not believe it,” I told him firmly.
“What else can be done?” contended Hodgson peevishly. “Now Lambert is out of the running, it is young Charles as King, or Monck for Protector, which you please. I do not know which would be the worse; perhaps you can tell me, Mrs. Thorpe.”
“But there’s Black Tom, d’ you see,” put in Isaac Baume, who was supping with us.
“Aye—now if Fairfax were Protector,” began Hodgson more hopefully.
“Lord Fairfax will never take that unlawful office,” said my husband quickly.
“England is likely to pay dear for his scruples,” grumbled Hodgson.
He proved right, alas. Monck delayed so long in taking action of any kind, as I remember, that a great petition was signed in Yorkshire, imploring him to call a Parliament. In this petition, which was headed by Lord Fairfax—John signed it among others—there was a very sad reference to the decay and ruin of the cloth trade, which indeed at that time was almost dead. The Parliament was called, and Will was jubilant, but soon we began to have very mournful letters from Sam. Monck was made Commander-in-Chief of the Parliament’s forces, and Lord Fairfax was a member of the new Council of State, but they seemed still undecided what was best to be done, and meanwhile many men began to clamour for the King’s restoration. I heard last night, wrote Sam, what I never in my life heard before, the King’s health proposed openly at a banquet. For my part, I was so sick and tired of all this endless turmoil, I did not greatly care, though I knew I ought to care, whether the King returned or not, so he ruled decently with a free Parliament and gave us a settled government. I had been weary of monarchy, but I was more weary of anarchy. I suppose many people in England felt the same.
Four of poor Will’s five months went by. We heard that Parliament had voted the government of England to be by King and lords and commons; we heard that the young King had declared he would grant liberty of conscience to all his subjects, and a free and general pardon. Then we heard that Lord Fairfax had gone abroad to visit him. At this last piece of news we saw the Restoration, as men began to call it, was indeed upon us; we knew not whether to be glad or sorry, but held our tongues and went about our business quietly, with sore hearts. Not so Will, however; he was still sure that government by Parliament alone, and the full Presbyterian religion, would be established by a special act of Providence within the next four weeks. Argument with him was useless, for it seemed but to excite him, so that his speech grew confused and vehement, and his head began to nod.
One warm day of full spring there was an ordination held in Bradford Church. Will was one of the ministers appointed, after our Presbyterian fashion, to examine the young candidates and ordain them—he had not yet lost the respect his godly life had won him amongst his fellow ministers by his prophecies and mystical vagaries, though he was well on his way to doing so, poor Will. John and I were present at the ceremony, and I trembled whenever Will had to speak; for he was apt to mix both his words, putting the heads of some on the tails of others, and his ideas, so that several times his questions were unintelligible to the candidates, making them blush and hesitate, and once or twice there was a titter. But Will looked so honest and good, if ailing, with his pursed mouth and his nodding head and his harassed staring eyes, that he was mostly received with a tender respect. Nevertheless, I was glad when the ceremony was over.
Afterwards we had many guests to dinner at The Breck. There were several ministers from neighbouring churches, and our own new Bradford minister, Mr. Waterhouse, and Will and Eliza, and the Listers and the Baumes. Will seemed dazed when he reached our house, but recovered himself a little when he had taken some good homely meat and ale. I had put Abraham to help our maids with the serving, and told him to give special care to his uncle, which he did ably, yet without letting it be seen, being a very sweet-natured lad and neat in his ways.
“What is that sound, child?” said Will to him as Abraham brought round the jug of ale.
“I do not know, Uncle Will,” replied Abraham politely.
“Run to the door and listen,” commanded Will.
Abraham hesitated, for I think that, like myself, he heard no sound at all, but he went obediently to the door and set it ajar. He stood there a few moments, while doubtless the sound grew louder, then returned and murmured courteously in his uncle’s ear.
“Church bells?” said Will in a loud excited tone. “Church bells? Hearken, Abraham; run to Little Holroyd and enquire why they think the bells are being rung and where.”
Abraham looked to me for permission, and then ran off.
He was so long absent that to tell the truth I had forgot him, and we had left the table and were sitting about the hearth talking when at last he returned. He was flushed and untidy, as if he had run some way, and when I looked at him enquiringly over the heads of the guests, he very vehemently shook his head. Unluckily poor Will caught the direction of my glance, and saw him.
“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings!” he cried in his harsh uncertain voice. “Come, tell thy news.”
“They knew naught of the bells in Little Holroyd, Uncle,” said Abraham, trying to put him off.
“So then you went to Bradford,” said Will, divining this from his tone; for indeed none of our children, thanks be to the Lord, has any skill in deception.
Abraham stood downcast, shuffling his feet, and seeing his trouble I intervened, bidding him fetch Mr. Baume a more comfortable chair. Abraham would have been off like an arrow, but Will would not be interrupted; he stretched out a ponderous hand and detained the boy.
“Why do the bells ring, Abraham?” he said in a pompous sermonising tone, glancing round at the rest of us to call our attention.
“‘Tis the King’s Restoration, Uncle Will,” said poor Abraham reluctantly. “The wind is from the south—it is not Bradford church bells which are ringing. They say the King landed in England yesterday.”
We kept a sad and perplexed silence, looking down. Into this silence there came a sudden loud wild groan. I turned, startled, to see Will, his face dark crimson, fall forward in his chair. Lister and I sprang to him and raised him; his head lolled loose from side to side, his eyes were turned up to show the whites, he breathed very heavily and strangely.
Poor Will! He died in our house that night. It was an apoplexy, the physician said. I think Will’s end became him; he was buried, or so it seemed to us then, with his cause.