Defeat, and the aftermath of war… Not pleasant for the losers. God knows that we endure it still—and I write in the autumn of 1653—but in the year ’46 we were new to defeat, and had not yet begun to learn our lesson. It was, I think, the loss of freedom that hit the Cornish hardest. We had been used, for generations, to minding our own affairs, and each man lived after his fashion. Landlords were fair, and usually well liked, with tenant and laborer living in amity together. We had our local disagreements, as every man with his neighbor, and our family feuds, but no body of persons had ever before interfered with our way of living, nor given us commands. Now all was changed. Our orders came to us from Whitehall, and a Cornish County Committee, way up in London, sat in judgment upon us. We could no longer pass our own measures and decide, by local consultation, what was suited to each town and village. The County Committee made our decisions for us.
Their first action was to demand a weekly payment from the people of Cornwall to the revenue, and this weekly assessment was rated so high that it was impossible to find the money, for the ravages of war had stripped the country bare. Their next move was to sequester the estate of every landlord who had fought for the King. Because the County Committee had not the time nor the persons to administer these estates, the owners were allowed to dwell there, if they so desired, but had to pay to the Committee, month by month, the full and total value of the property. This crippling injunction was made the harder because the estates were assessed at the value they had held before the war, and now that most of them were fallen into ruin, through the fighting, it would take generations before the land gave a return once more.
A host of petty officials who were paid fixed salaries by the Parliament, and were the only men at these times to have their pockets well lined, came down from Whitehall to collect the sums due to the County Committee; and these agents were found in every town and borough, forming themselves in their turns into committees and subcommittees, so that no man could buy as little as a loaf of bread without first going cap in hand to one of these fellows and signing his name to a piece of paper. Besides these civil employees of the Parliament, we had the military to contend with, and whosoever should wish to pass from one village to another must first have a pass from the officer in charge, and then his motives questioned, his family history gone into, detail for detail, and as likely as not find himself arrested for delinquency at the end of it.
I truly believe that Cornwall was, in the first summer of ’46, the most wretched county in the kingdom. The harvest was bad—another bitter blow to landlord and laborer alike—and the price of wheat immediately rose to fantastic prices. The price of tin, on the contrary, fell low, and many mines closed down on this account. Poverty and sickness were rife by the autumn, and our old enemy the plague appeared, killing great numbers in St. Ives and in the western districts. Another burden was the care of the many wounded and disabled soldiers, who, half-naked and half-starved, roamed the villages, begging for charity. There was no single man or woman or little child who benefited in any way by this new handling of affairs by Parliament, and the only ones to live well were those Whitehall agents who poked their noses into our affairs from dawn till dusk, and their wealthy masters, the big Parliamentary landlords. We had grumbled in the old days at the high taxes of the King, but the taxes were intermittent. Now they were continuous. Salt, meat, starch, lead, iron—all came under the control of Parliament, and the poor man had to pay accordingly.
What happened up country I cannot say—I speak for Cornwall. No news came to us, much beyond the Tamar. If living was hard, leisure was equally restricted. The Puritans had the upper hand of us. No man must be seen out of doors upon a Sunday unless he were bound for church. Dancing was forbidden—not that many had the heart to dance, but youngsters have light hearts and lighter feet—and any game of chance or village festival was frowned upon. Gaiety meant license, and license spelled the abomination of the Lord. I often thought how Temperance Sawle would have rejoiced in the brave new world, for all her Royalist traditions, but poor Temperance fell an early victim to the plague.
The one glory of that most dismal year of ’46 was the gallant, though alas! so useless, holding of Pendennis Castle for the King through five long months of siege. The rest of us were long conquered and subdued, caught fast in the meshes of Whitehall, while Pendennis still defied the enemy. Their commander was Jack Arundell, who had been in the old days a close friend as well as kinsman to the Grenviles, and Sir John Digby was his second-in-command. My own brother Robin was made a major general under him. It gave us, I think, some last measure of pride in our defeat, that this little body of men, with no hope of rescue and scarce a boatload of provisions, should fly the King’s flag from March the second until August the seventeenth, and that even then they wished to blow themselves and the whole garrison to eternity, rather than surrender. But starvation and sickness had made weaklings of the men, and for their sakes only did Jack Arundell haul down his flag. Even the enemy respected their courage, and the garrison were permitted to march out, so Robin told us afterwards, with the full honors of war, drums beating, colors flying, trumpets sounding… Yes, we have had our moments, here in Cornwall… When they surrendered, though, our last hopes vanished, and there was nothing now to do but sigh, and look into the black well of the future.
My brother-in-law, Jonathan Rashleigh, like the rest of his Royalist landlords, had his lands sequestered by the County Committee, and was told, when he went down to Truro in June, that he must pay a fine of some one thousand and eighty pounds to the Committee before he could redeem them. His losses, after the ’44 campaign, were already above eight thousand, but there was nothing for it but to bow his head to the victors and agree to pay the ransom during the years to come. He might have quitted the country and gone to France, as many of our neighbors did, but the ties of his own soil were too strong, and in July, broken and dispirited, he took the National Covenant, by which he vowed never again to take arms against the Parliament. This bitter blow to his pride, self-inflicted though it was, did not satisfy the Committee, and shortly afterwards he was summoned to London and ordered to remain there, nor to return to Cornwall until his full fine was paid. So yet another home was broken, and we, at Menabilly, tasted the full flavor of defeat. He left us, one day in September, when the last of the poor harvest had been gathered in, looking a good ten years older than his five-and-fifty years, and I knew then, watching his eyes, how loss of freedom can so blight the human soul that a man cares no longer if he lives or dies.
It remained for Mary, my poor sister, and John, his son, so to husband his estate that the debt could month by month be paid, but we well knew that it might take years, even the remainder of his life. His last words to me, before he went to London, were kind and deeply generous. “Menabilly is your home,” he said, “for as long a time as you should so desire it. We are one and all sufferers in this misfortune. Guard your sister for me; share her troubles. And help John, I pray you. You have a wiser head than all I leave behind.”
A wiser head… I doubted it. It needed a pettifogging mind, with every low lawyer’s trick at the finger’s end, to break even with the County Committee and the paid agents of the Parliament. There was none to help us. My brother Robin, after the surrender of Pendennis, had gone to Radford, to my brother Jo, who was in much the same straits as ourselves, while Peter Courtney, loathing inactivity, left the West Country altogether, and the next we heard from him was that he had gone abroad to join the Prince of Wales. Many young men followed this example—living was good at the French Court. I think, had they loved their homes better, they would have stayed behind and shared the burdens of defeat with their womenfolk.
Alice never spoke a word of blame, but I think her heart broke when we heard that he had gone… It was strange, at first, to watch John and Frank Penrose work in the fields side by side with the tenants, for every hand was needed if the land was to be tilled entirely and yield a full return. Even our womenfolk went out at harvesting—Mary herself, and Alice, and Elizabeth, while the children, thinking it fine sport, helped to carry the corn. Left to ourselves, we would have soon grown reconciled and even well content with our labors, but the Parliament agents were forever coming to spy upon us, to question us on this and that, to count the sheep and cattle, to reckon, it almost seemed, each ear of corn, and nothing must be gathered, nothing spent, nothing distributed among ourselves, but all laid before the smug, well-satisfied officials in Fowey town, who held their license from the Parliament. The Parliament… The Parliament… From day to day the word rang in our ears. The Parliament decrees that produce shall be brought to market only upon a Tuesday… The Parliament has ordered that all fairs shall henceforth be discontinued… The Parliament warns every inhabitant within the above-prescribed area that no one, save by permission, shall walk abroad one hour after sunset… The Parliament warns each householder that every dwelling will be searched each week for concealed firearms, weapons, and ammunition, from this day forward, and any holder of the same shall be immediately imprisoned…
“The Parliament,” said John Rashleigh wearily, “decrees that no man may breathe God’s air, save by a special license, and that one hour in every other day. My God, Honor, no man can stand this long.”
“You forget,” I said, “that Cornwall is only one portion of the kingdom. The whole of England, before long, will suffer the same fate.”
“They will not, they cannot, endure it,” he said.
“What is their alternative? The King is virtually a prisoner. The party with the most money and the strongest army rules the country. For those who share their views life is doubtless very pleasant.”
“No one can share their views and call his soul their own.”
“There you are wrong. It is merely a matter of being accommodating, and shaking hands with the right people. Lord Robartes lives in great comfort at Lanhydrock. The Treffrys—being related to Hugh Peters and Jack Trefusis—live very well at Place. If you chose to follow their example and truckle to the Parliament, doubtless you would find life here at Menabilly so much the easier.”
He stared at me suspiciously. “Would you have me go to them and fawn, while my father lives a pauper up in London, watched every moment of his day? I would sooner die.”
I knew he would sooner die, and loved him for it. Dear John, you might have had more years beside your Joan, and be alive today, had you spared yourself, and your poor health, in those first few months of aftermath… I watched him toil, and the women too, and there was little I could do to help but figure the accounts, an unpaid clerk, with smudgy fingers, and tot up the debts we owed on quarter days. I did not suffer as the Rashleighs did, pride being, I believe, a quality long lost to me, and I was sad only in their sadness. To see Alice, gazing wistfully from a window, brought a pain to my heart, and when Mary read a letter from her Jonathan, deep shadows beneath her eyes, I think I hated the Parliament every whit as much as they did.
But that first year of defeat was, in some queer fashion, quiet and peaceful to me who bore no burden on my shoulders. Danger was no more. Armies were disbanded. The strain of war was lifted. The man I loved was safe across the sea, in France, and then in Italy, in the company of his son, and now and then I would have word of him from some foreign city, in good heart and spirits, and missing me, it would seem, not at all. He talked of going to fight the Turk with great enthusiasm, as if, I thought with a shrug of my shoulder, he had not had enough of fighting after three hard years of civil war. “Doubtless,” he wrote, “you find your days monotonous in Cornwall.” Doubtless I did. To women who have known close siege and stern privation, monotony can be a pleasant thing… A wanderer for so many months, it was restful to find a home at last, and to share it with people that I loved, even if we were all companions in defeat. God bless the Rashleighs, who permitted me those months at Menabilly. The house was bare and shorn of its former glory, but at least I had a room to call my own. The Parliament could strip the place of its possessions, take the sheep and cattle, glean the harvest, but they could not take from me, nor from the Rashleighs, the beauty that we looked on every day. The devastation of the gardens was forgotten when the primroses came in spring, and the young green budded on the trees. We, the defeated, could still listen to the birds on a May morning, and watch the clumsy cuckoo wing his way to the little wood beside the Gribben hill. The Gribben hill… I watched it, from my chair upon the causeway, in every mood from winter to midsummer. I have seen the shadows creep, on an autumn afternoon, from the deep Pridmouth valley to the summit of the hill, and there stay a moment, waiting on the sun.
I have seen too the white sea mists of early summer turn the hill to fantasy, so that it becomes, in a single second, a ghost land of enchantment, with no sound coming but the wash of breakers on the hidden beach, where, at high noon, the children gather cowrie shells. Dark moods too of bleak November, when the rain sweeps in a curtain from the southwest. But, quietest of all, the evenings of late summer, when the sun has set, and the moon has not yet risen, but the dew is heavy in the long grass.
The sea is very white and still, without a breath upon it, and only a single thread of wash upon the covered Cannis Rock. The jackdaws fly homeward to their nests in the warren. The sheep crop the short turf, before they too rub together beneath the stone wall by the winnowing place. Dusk comes slowly to the Gribben hill, the woods turn black, and suddenly, with stealthy pad, a fox creeps from the trees in the thistle park, and stands watching me, his ears pricked… Then his brush twitches and he is gone, for here is Matty tapping along the causeway to bring me home; and another day is over. Yes, Richard, there is comfort in monotony…
I return to Menabilly to find all have gone to bed, and the candles extinguished in the gallery. Matty carries me upstairs, and as she brushes my hair, and ties the curling rags, I think I am almost happy. A year has come and gone, and though we are defeated we live, we still survive. I am lonely, yes, but that has been my portion since I turned eighteen. And loneliness has compensations. Better to live inwardly alone than together in constant fear. And as I think thus, my curling rag in my hand, I see Matty’s round face looking at me from the mirror opposite.
“There were strange rumors in Fowey today,” she says quietly.
“What rumors, Matty? There are always rumors.”
She moistens a rag with her tongue, then whips it round a curl. “Our men are creeping back,” she murmurs. “First one, then two, then three. Those who fled to France a year ago.”
I rub some lotion on my hands and face.
“Why should they return? They can do nothing.”
“Not alone, but if they band together, in secret, one with another…”
I sit still, my hands in my lap, and suddenly I remember a phrase in the last letter that came from Italy.
“You may hear from me,” he said, “before the summer closes, by a different route…” I thought him to mean he was going to fight the Turks.
“Do they mention names?” I say to Matty, and for the first time for many months a little seed of anxiety and fear springs to my heart. She does not answer for a moment—she is busy with a curl. Then at last she speaks, her voice low and hushed.
“They talk of a great leader,” she says, “landing in secret at Plymouth from the Continent. He wore a dark wig, they said, to disguise his coloring. But they did not mention names…”
A bat brushes itself against my windows, lost and frightened, and close to the house an owl shrieks in warning. And it seemed to me, that moment, that the bat was no airey-mouse of midsummer, but the scared symbol of all hunted things.