In then walked a civilian, a man with a downturned mouth, clad in a grey suit with slightly effusive white shirtbands, carrying a satchel of documents, bearing a goblet of claret, and eating an apple. He seemed to have recently partaken of a good supper and was now ready to clear off extra business before the day ended. Hudibras, the gallivanting, truth-defending hero, would possess a constant companion in his loyal squire, Ralpho. This secretary may have made himself the model for witty, prescient, courageous, loyal, level-headed Ralph. However, he introduced himself plainly as Mr Butler, secretary to Sir Samuel Luke, MP.
Samuel Butler was around thirty years old, roughly ten years older than Gideon. The son of a minor landowner, educated at Cambridge University, his interests were history and poetry, music and painting. But he needed to earn his living. As an administrative assistant in a garrison he brought intellect and culture, not to mention legible handwriting for letters and lists.
Any future poet would regard a printer as a hireling, a mere ink-stained artisan. A printer deplored a poet as a dilettante dreamer, whose much-revised effusions were a devil to disentangle for type-setting and — more important — brought in no money. However, at their first meeting Gideon, with his stomach rumbling violently, was simply offended by the way the man chomped so thoughtlessly on his fruit. It looked like a pippin. A little rough- skinned. Juicy, crisp and sweet.
The young boy, who seemed edgy and liable to steal the firedogs, had to be tackled first. Mr Butler ascertained that he was able-bodied and just of serving age (fifteen years to sixty-five). He came from a small village called Elstow, where his father, though a freeholder, worked as a maker and mender of pots and pans.
'A tinker?' The secretary looked askance. Though this boy's humble, pot-fettling background might one day seem romantic, in 1644 at Newport it counted against him to be the barely schooled son of a Bedford kettle- mender. Parliament had struggled hard to shake off the Royalist slander that the Earl of Essex led a disreputable rabble of decayed tapsters, released prisoners — and tinkers. Moreover here, one sniffing boy was much like another: very young recruits were a nightmare. Lads played the fool with gunpowder, whined about long hours on duty, drank, stole food, were scared to be in open country in the dark, missed their mothers and were dangerously uncoordinated when first put on a horse.
'So you are a ragamuffin.'
'I have had schooling; I can read and write.'
And curse and swear, lie and blaspheme against the Lord?' The boy nodded enthusiastically but Samuel Butler made preparations to admit him to Captain Ennis's company. A soldier was called to lead the recruit to the quartermaster.
'Robert Cox has come in,' the trooper mentioned to the secretary. 'News from Oxford.'
'I will take his report shortly — If the rabbits are ready to go up to Sir Samuel's father, there is correspondence too. The messenger must wait, though; I must copy it into the Letter Book. If Cox has acquired the latest Mercurius Aulicus, send it straight in to Sir Samuel. He will post it on to Sir Oliver, but he will want to read it first.'
Mr Butler's pen was dipped into an inkpot and applied with due formality in the regimental roll. He called after the tinker's lad, 'I forgot your name?'
'John Bunyan.'
Gideon Jukes had now met two notables of English literature. He had no idea. All he cared about was the secretary's apple. It had been reduced to a core, not tossed aside, but gently placed upon a sheet of used drafting paper. There it sat growing soft, while fuzziness spread about the nearest ink on the paper and the mouldings made by Samuel Butler's teeth started gently to go brown…
Having dispatched Bunyan, the secretary remembered his wine, sipped from the goblet, and immediately cheered up. 'And your name?'
'Gideon Jukes. Sir, I have not eaten for two days.'
'Well, well; credentials first… Age?'
'Twenty-three.'
'From?'
'The City of London.'
Butler was scowling. 'You were brought in.' That must be garrison code for an arrest.
Gideon let rip: 'I have been brought to misery. I was stopped in my honest business, insulted, kidnapped, threatened, starved, and joggled here on a cursed, mangy, thin-tailed, farting horse…' The future master of colourful tetrameters looked intrigued. 'Since your rob-dogs plucked me up, no one has even had the courtesy to tell me where I am, so I can put it in my petition of complaint!'
'Newport Pagnell.' It meant nothing. His friends and family would never think to look for Gideon here, even if they raised a ransom. 'Who are you for, Jukes?' It was a standard question, though Mr Butler had not asked it of the enlisting boy.
'For Parliament.'
'For Parliament and the King?'
'That rubric's a nonsense, a coward's refuge.'
Butler smiled slightly. 'So you say you are in the London Trained Bands?'
To Londoners there were no others worth mentioning. Gideon retorted proudly, 'I am in the Green Regiment, under Colonel John Warner, alderman and grocer. My troop is the third, that of Captain Robert Mainwaring. You may write to him to vouch for me, which he will do. He works at the Customs House, lives in Aldermanbury…'
At the secretary's silence, he realised a letter requesting validation had already been sent. They were hot on correspondence here.
'Why are you not at your work or with your regiment?'
Gideon held up his damaged fingers. 'Not safe with a musket. I need to practise dexterity'
'So why were you brought here?' asked Mr Butler, looking away from the missing digits shyly. 'Did you have a ticket for the road?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'I was doing loyal work.'
'There is an ordnance: you must be issued with a pass.'
'Apparently so,' replied Gideon. 'Hence I am deemed to be a spy.'
'That seems a reasonable deduction. Are you?' From a poet, this was refreshingly direct. Mr Samuel Butler had not yet settled into his future role. If he had a work in progress, he must be writing it secretly in his closet after his duties, scrawling couplets more as a refuge from the tedium of military life than in any hope yet of fortune and fame. 'Are you a spy, Master Jukes?'
'No.' Gideon, the quiet man, stood his ground monosyllabically.
Then the secretary asked him in a mild tone: 'Would you like to be?'
For a Cheapside boy, the relocation offer was an insult. So was the way they had pressed him to enlist here. 'After your poxy horse ride from Hell?'
'Then go home to your family'
Ah. It was an offer of distancing himself from his troubles. 'Oh I'll stay if I choose, sir!'
'Well, make up your mind, Master Jukes.'
'Very well, I shall try it.'
So, once London had vouched for him, Gideon took up a new career.
Newport Pagnell was, and is, a small English market town. Historically, it grew up beside the great North West Road, the old Roman military route across the Midlands towards North Wales. On the way to Northampton, it was fifty miles from London, fifteen from Bedford, thirty or more from Oxford. During the civil war Newport Pagnell was in the territory of the Eastern Association. Their committee regarded it as a hamlet on the road to somewhere else. But in the military context, to be within reach of those other centres justified Newport Pagnell's opinion that it was 'of considerable consequence'.
Gideon learned that the establishment of a Parliamentary garrison had been luck. At the end of 1643, the cavalier Sir Lewis Dyve had captured Newport Pagnell. Prince Rupert wanted to harry Parliament's Eastern Association; during the operation Royalists even briefly occupied Bedford and skirled around Northampton stealing cattle. However, less than three weeks later, Dyve evacuated Newport in haste as a result of an 'error': misunderstanding garbled instructions from the King.
