'Well, now you see!' cried Anne bitterly.
Indeed, Gideon did. Number 3 was a dangerous dictum. Number 2 was a complete shocker. He groaned, while Anne told him the worst in a taut voice: 'These people whom your brother favours affirm that — in their words as said to me by your brother — 'the man who tipples deepest, swears the frequentest, commits adultery, incest or buggers the oftenest' — '
'Buggers?'
'Do you know what it means?'
'Oh, I have an idea…'
Not Lambert. Definitely not Lambert. But to lie with any woman whatsoever would appeal to him.
Anne continued bitterly: 'They say, 'Who blasphemes the impudentest, and perpetrates the most notorious crimes, with the highest hand and rigidest resolution, is the dearest darling to be placed in the tribunal Throne of Heaven. Each Brother of their fellowship ought to take his Fellow-Female on his knee, saying, Let us lie down and multiply…' He wanted me to join with him, but I would not do it, Gideon. He boasts to me of wicked women in the sect who have let him have his way. He claims that these sinful brethren should not only make use of a man's wife, but of his estate, goods and chattels also, for all things are common… He asks what difference is there between this and what the Diggers believe — while in truth, there is a very great difference!'
'Oh indeed.' Gideon felt very ill now. 'Where is he?'
'Your brother is at a Christmas revel in the Horn Tavern in Fleet Street.'
'Christmas?'
'Free will is lawful. There is no sin. There are no laws.' Sadly for Lambert that was untrue; there were laws directly forbidding this curious phase of his development. The sect he had joined was singled out for government disapproval.
'Do you know what takes place in this congregation?'
Anne railed bitterly, 'The men will make free with the women. They will be gambolling, dancing and revelling — I suppose, you and he being so close-knit, you are going there to join him?'
'No,' replied Gideon with a gloomy sigh. 'I am going there to try to fetch him back.'
Small chance, he thought. What grocer was going to turn up a chance to eat Christmas plum pudding and then to lie with everybody else's wife?
Whatever the Bible said, in respectable City of London society a man was his brother's keeper.
Although wobbly on his legs after so long as an invalid, Gideon walked to Fleet Street. The Horn Tavern was easy to find, due to a large crowd of fascinated onlookers who had congregated outside. Sounds of uninhibited celebration filled the street. Through a window Gideon saw wild dancing, with some participants dressed all in white and some of them only half dressed. One woman was walking on her hands upside down, with a man holding her legs like a wheelbarrow. Her skirts had fallen and she was bare from the waist down. Men had women sitting on their laps, whose bodies they were enthusiastically exploring while the women rejoiced and welcomed it.
As Gideon approached unsteadily, the tavern door was flung open. A man rushed out, stark naked. A beer- belly and the effects of the chilly December weather reduced any glimpse of his privates to the minimum, which was his only recourse to modesty — though Gideon saw he had sensibly retained his shoes.
The crowd shrieked with glee. 'Our Adam wants no fig-leaf — only a three-leaf clover!' When the hideously familiar apparition gesticulated, they pulled back nervously.
The capering figure had spotted Gideon. 'Brother! I cannot stop — I have the call!'
Gideon made a grab, but with his right arm still in plaster it was difficult. The wild nude shrugged him off and careered onwards, galloping away down Fleet Street. A cat-calling crowd ran in hot pursuit. Gideon leaned against the tavern wall, feeling weak and in despair.
Lambert Jukes had found a fine old way to punish his wife for her foray into Digging. He had become a Ranter.
Chapter Seventy — London: 1651-53
Lambert Jukes might have been discreetly plucked from Ranting, had he not thrown off his clothes before his dash through the streets. A stark naked, portly man in his forties, all flabby white flesh and ecstatic vision, made an easy target for parish constables. He attracted attention, as screaming women fled, mongrels barked, boys pointed and men gaped — men who were perhaps lost in the wish (Lambert suggested later, rather hopefully), that they too would have cut such an impressive figure.
'Or perhaps not,' muttered his baleful brother Gideon.
Lambert was cornered at the Fleet Conduit. Although he managed to floor three law officers in the process, they wrapped the flailing culprit in a blanket to avert public outrage and carried him to nearby Bridewell. His relatives could only hope that he would be diagnosed as crazy. Treatment of the insane was dire, but if Lambert was deemed accountable for his beliefs and actions, criminal law kicked in. He would be tried on a capital charge. Ranting was seen as so dangerous politically, there was no chance of bail.
Major William Rainborough sent expressions of concern. Anne and Gideon would have gladly done without this. Anne blamed the major for encouraging her husband's extreme views; he had paid for documents Lambert had read. Rainborough was an awkward connection; in view of his association with the Ranters, Parliament formally designated him dangerous. An ordinance forbade him from ever again acting as a justice of the peace in England. William Rainborough would make fruitless attempts to gain a navy post, only giving up when he abandoned England and emigrated to live among relatives in Massachusetts. He was protected to some extent by his late brother's eminence, or he would probably have been imprisoned. Rather than accept this kind of patronage, the Jukes family rallied to look after their own.
Gideon's visits to Lambert in prison horrified him. Once a royal palace and later used to lodge visiting foreign dignitaries, Bridewell was an enormous complex on the Thames at Blackfriars, rambling around three huge courtyards. Its glory days were long over. For a hundred years this had been a place of relief for the poor — but it was always a hard refuge. On arrival, both sexes were stripped and whipped, a spectacle that attracted so much salacious public attention that a special viewing gallery had been built. There was now a hospital for soldiers, where the grim conditions made Gideon delighted he had been taken to the Savoy instead. The general inmates included not only the indigent poor, but wilful beggars, rogues of all types and criminals from brutal organised gangs. It was also a standard prison for gutter prostitutes.
In this company, Lambert's insouciance was swiftly crushed. He soon cut an anxious, sorry figure. Gideon and Robert Allibone worked hard to have him transferred to the Gatehouse, a lock-up attached to Westminster Abbey that was used mainly to house Royalist officers. They chose to accept Parliament's view that Ranting was a political offence, an affront to the respectability of the Commonwealth. If they had been prepared to claim that Lambert was out of his wits, an alternative would have been Bedlam, but in that screeching madhouse they now feared he would go really insane. By contrast, Bridewell was the original house of correction, where inmates were made to work — either at carding and spinning, or, for intransigent cases, cleaning the sewers. Lambert submitted sweetly to being put in a sewer gang although later, when his health broke down in the filthy conditions, he gave in to his brother's entreaties and was transferred to a better cell in the quieter prison. By then he seemed almost sad to leave the new friends he had made among the gong-cleaners, as the sewermen were called. At the Gatehouse, Gideon assured him, all he would be required to do among the cavaliers was wear beribboned lovelocks and write lyric poetry. His brother greeted this idea with more horror than he had shown on shovelling ordure.
Being arrested naked had shocked Lambert. When he came to himself — 'When the drink wore off!' his wife muttered — he refused to recant, but ceased raving and dancing. They were fortunate. Others clung unrepentantly to their beliefs. One Ranter interred at Bridewell was a defiant shoemaker. Whenever he heard any mention of God, he would laugh and say, 'he believed money, good clothes, good meat, and drink, tobacco and merry company to be gods'. Anne heard that the wife had remonstrated, but the man retorted coldly that 'if she would give him any beer or tobacco he would take it, but as for her advice, she might keep it to herself.'
Scared that Lambert might be infected with these attitudes, Anne Jukes did not waste breath on nagging. She made a petition to Parliament. Mary Overton, wife of the Leveller, Richard, helped her write it. She pleaded Lambert's long military service and his dismal health since Colchester, then cited her own need for support and
