more delight than he thought necessary in wrenching his shoulder back into its socket.
A new horse was allocated by an agent.
A typical 'dragoon nag', this was a wry-nosed, sniffling creature that sickened and died after a day and a half. A horse doctor was summoned, far too late.
'What have you done to this bone-shaker, Sergeant?'
'He was snotty and hot on arrival.'
'You should have rejected him.'
'By the time I got a proper look, the agent was long gone. I hoped the sad beast was just spavined.'
The veterinarian stood up from the carcase and gave Gideon a straight look. He believed his equine expertise had given him acute understanding of human nature too. He was observant, certainly; he saw that Gideon was in his light-hearted mood. 'Have you any real idea what 'spavined' means, Sergeant Jukes?'
'None at all. I gather he didn't have it?'
'Bastard strangles,' diagnosed the solemn expert. Gideon noticed the man was bandy-legged and knotted like a bunch of old rope — possibly the results of being thrown and kicked many times.
'Bastardy is more serious than honest strangles?' queried Gideon demurely.
'Goes around stables like a rat through shit. Mounts will be dropping all along the lines now. Keep your head down, or you'll cop the blame.'
'If I can get anyone to help drag him, I'll try to find a ditch upstream of a Royalist garrison to leave him in.' Gideon knew cavalrymen and dragoons felt little sentimentality towards their horses. In the midst of battle nobody could afford to stand weeping over the body of a faithful mount. But despite their short time together, he had taken responsibility for his animal. He felt driven to assert this: 'His name is Sir Rowland.'
'Rather extravagant?'
'Least I could do. He had nothing else going for him.'
Not only did Sir Rowland cause an epidemic, but since the horse had been supplied to him by the army, Gideon had to replace it at his own cost. Highly indignant, he pointed out that the army had been cheated by the two-timing agent, who had passed off on them a horse that was only fit to be fed to pigs. This happened so frequently no one got excited. Gideon then claimed that because of their pay arrears, he had no money for a new horse, 'even a new one of this piss-poor, rib-rattling quality'. He managed by borrowing other men's mounts, until February. When the next campaign season was about to start, the New Model battened down to finish the Oxford siege and his colonel reviewed the condition of his regiment. First he scrutinised the men's spiritual and political views; Okey was famous for weeding out anyone who failed to match his own beliefs. Next he inspected their horses. That was bad news for Gideon.
John Okey had come to view Sergeant Gideon Jukes as a slyly subversive character. This Jukes received pamphlets from London, which Okey suspected were seditious; the sergeant passed them on to others once he had read them. He seemed dangerously intrigued by England's Birth-right Justified, by John Lilburne, a man Gideon had heard of in the Eastern Association while he himself was working for Sir Samuel Luke. Colonel Lilburne, though then on good terms with Oliver Cromwell, had not joined the New Model Army but resigned from service because he refused to take the oath of the Covenant. He believed Presbyterianism, with its enforced suppression of all other beliefs, was just as terrible as imposed Catholicism or high Anglicanism.
Saturnine, highly intelligent and passionately argumentative, 'Freeborn John' Lilburne had become a prolific political author. He had a history of imprisonment for sedition. In 1637, after a pamphlet critical of bishops, he was pilloried, flogged — two hundred stripes — and imprisoned, becoming a popular hero, but was freed by the Long Parliament. Then early in the war, Royalists captured him; they took him to Oxford where they intended to hang him. Parliament threatened retaliation against its Royalist prisoners; in the nick of time Lilburne was saved when his pregnant wife Elizabeth carried a letter from the Speaker of the House of Commons to the King's headquarters. Subsequently he was freed in a prisoner-exchange. Now his quarrel was with Parliament.
Lilburne had embarked on a serious campaign for reform. Gideon had found his pamphlet startling. After a dry argument that Parliament's power should be limited in order to protect individual rights, it went on to denounce a curious mix of monopolies: preaching, as held by the established Church; wool and foreign trade, as controlled by the Merchant Adventurers; and printing. That was what caused Robert Allibone to send this pamphlet to Gideon; it echoed Robert's long-term loathing of the dead hand of the Stationers' Company.
Robert wrote that Lilburne had been sentenced by the House of Lords for publishing criticism of the Earl of Manchester; insulting a peer was a serious offence. Despite refusing to recognise the Lords' right to try him, Lilburne was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment, barred from holding civil or military office and fined two thousand pounds. The harsh penalty inspired mass marches, a petition signed by over two thousand citizens of London and a vocal lobby of Parliament.
It also led to the creation of the astonishing political organisation that would be called — by its opponents — the Leveller Party.
This began as a group of radical Londoners with headquarters at the Whalebone Tavern. Lilburne was their nominal head, with other pamphleteers: a master silk-weaver called William Walwyn and Richard Overton, the would-be actor Gideon remembered from The Triumph of Peace. Allibone had joined the group. Members paid a small subscription and met in taverns, the closest for Robert being the Nag's Head in Coleman Street. He spoke highly of Walwyn, a retiring family man, mainly self-taught, whose measured, lucid prose praising reason, toleration and love alarmed his opponents almost as much as it inspired devotees.
Robert said printers were well represented. The group elected officers and their executive committee met three times a week at the Whalebone, though others gathered regularly in various London parishes. Robert sent Gideon an anonymous tract which he reckoned was Walwyn's and Overton's collaboration, called A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens. Addressed to the House of Commons, it reminded members that they were representatives of the people. Then its propositions were: absolute religious freedom, a completely free press, the end of monopolies and discriminating taxation, the reforming of unjust laws, and — astonishingly — abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords. Robert Allibone found this exhilarating; Gideon did too, though not in front of his colonel.
Colonel Okey preferred to see his men at prayer meetings. Freedom of conscience is always regarded as a threat to military discipline. Okey viewed nervously the idea that instead of Parliament giving orders to the army, the army might make demands of Parliament.
Since men from the Newport Pagnell garrison were assisting at the siege of Oxford, Colonel Okey suggested the dangerous, horseless Jukes should reattach himself to his old colleagues.
'Once he takes a dislike, he never lets go. I am screwed and wrung!' complained Gideon to his brother.
'Stuff the Newports! Come to us,' suggested Lambert. 'Find a place in the sea-greens, Gideon.' The regiment referred to itself by its colonel's colours.
'In your rabble? I heard the governor of Abingdon wrote a distressed plea to Parliament to order your officers back to the regiment because it is so out of control.'
Lambert grinned. 'Six out of ten of our dear officers sloped off home during the winter break. Some of the lads have been too brisk with requests for provisions and, true, the town complained. Abingdon is of doubtful loyalty. But Rainborough has been empowered to have plunderers shot under martial law.'
'Articles of War. All commanders have that right.'
'Well, we are all being polite to Abingdon now, even when our stomachs are rumbling… I am with good lads, Gideon. You would like them, and they you.'
'Can I transfer between regiments?'
'It has been known! You went to Okey from Luke,' scoffed Lambert with his usual disrespect for rules. 'Remember Sexby? Edward Sexby, who was at your wedding?'
'Do not remind me of my wedding.'
'Oh I enjoyed it!' Lambert chortled. 'Sexby went off to serve under Oliver Cromwell — who was he? we innocently wondered at the time
… Some relative of Sexby's, happily for him; they were, and are, extremely close and friendly. By cunning self-advancement, in the New Model, Sexby ended up in Fairfax's horse. If he can dodge around, so can you, my boy' Lambert clapped his gloomy brother on the shoulder with a mighty paw, forgetting the shoulder had been dislocated. 'We are gaining new companies of foot. You can slip in among them — on my recommendation. Of course it means coming down to half pay!' In the New Model, dragoons were paid one shilling and sixpence a day
