the King escaped from Hampton Court.
Chapter Forty-Four — Pelham Hall: 1646-47
Against her expectations, the ending of the siege of Oxford brought Juliana Lovell a period of happiness as a mother and wife. For a short time she feared that Orlando had left England. Prince Rupert sailed to France; his brother Maurice to the Netherlands. At this point, the contempt Lovell had always felt for Rupert's generalship, so often openly expressed, acted against him. He knew he had no chance of his name being put on the list of friends who received passports; he would be thanked for his service and told to save himself. Although Juliana did not immediately know it, Lovell decided to remain in England.
Being Lovell, he wasted no time on complaints. Without telling Juliana (though he did leave her a tender letter — albeit only a paragraph) he found an opportunity to escape from Oxford. After the New Model Army arrived, she had to submit to interrogation. She threw herself into the role of long-suffering wife, abandoned to her fate by a delinquent husband; she managed to bite her lip, while looking frightened but courageous. She did not need to weep; sensitive to upset, both her children were screaming so loudly in the kitchen that they were visibly disturbing the officer who questioned Juliana in the small parlour. And when did you last see your husband?'
She played simple. 'When he went out for a scuttle of logs and never came in again.'
When?'
'Certainly last Thursday week. I had my blue gown on, with the rent in the hem, and I do remember the meat was overdone at dinner.. '
Clearly this prattling woman posed no danger. Equally clearly, she could not be allowed to continue to occupy such a grand house.
'Oh! Will you turn me out on the streets with my little ones?'
'Have you no friends to go to?'
'I am an orphan. My foolish husband has been denounced by his good Parliamentarian family. I was married just as the war began and I have never known a settled life or the normal joys of peace.'
'Well, there will be peace now!' the captain assured her sanctimoniously, as he quartered a large number of his soldiers in her house.
Enduring the enemy in her home was a bad experience. Fortunately it did not last. To Juliana's amazement, Lovell reappeared in St Aldate's, without any explanation. She had to stop him losing his temper at the New Model Army soldiers, but by warning him he was on a wanted list, she managed to keep him hidden. She wondered how the subterfuge could continue; however that was not Lovell's plan. Wanting to use his family as a cover, he had come to fetch them. While the soldiers were out on duty, he produced a cart onto which with all-too-easy furtiveness he began to load their possessions. They owned more than when they arrived in Oxford as newlyweds. As well as purchases and the results of Lovell's plundering, they had the Mcllwaines' Continental furniture.
And damme, whose terrible tuck is this?' Lovell had discovered a sword under their bed. It was the blade he had picked up at Birmingham. 'Have you taken a half-baked forgetful lover I don't know about?'
'You yourself gave it me for my protection, dearest.' Juliana had been hoping to leave it behind. Whether or not he remembered the weapon, Orlando grunted and insisted that they bring it with them. He made a few feints with the blade, and shuddered fastidiously before packing it away.
'You must be curious about our sudden move,' Orlando then acknowledged to Juliana, as she and her maid Mercy Tulk manhandled a court cupboard out of the back door.
'Oh, I fully understand,' his wife murmured, controlling her breath and her sense of injustice as her husband merely busied himself counting dining chairs. The cupboard had bruised Mercy's hip and fallen on Juliana's foot. 'Were it night, this would be a moonlit flit.'
Lovell looked put out.
He had found them somewhere to live, a small farmhouse on the estate of a Royalist, Sir Lysander Pelham of Pelham Hall in Sussex. Mercy Tulk refused to go with them, preferring to stay in the town she knew; she would return to her old mistress, the midwife. Whatever happened to faithful servants who would travel with you anywhere? wondered Juliana, though she knew the answer.
They then lived in Sussex for over a year. Disillusioned by Royalist failure, or so he said, Lovell played no part in the last flares of resistance that Fairfax and the New Model mopped up in the West and Wales. The King was at Newcastle, then Holdenby House. So long as Charles toyed with agreeing to impose Presbyterianism, he only antagonised Lovell. Lovell hated any authoritarian government.
'Should you then join this new radical movement, dearest? Become a Leveller?'
He roared with indignation at that too.
Once the Levellers seemed to be holding sway in the Parliamentarian army, Juliana hardly dared bring a news-sheet into the house. Lovell procured them anyway at the nearest market town, winding himself into a fury over the numerous reports of Remonstrances and Declarations, like a man picking at a half-healed scab, unable to leave it alone. 'Damme, I know my father and my brother Ralph will go into ecstasies at this fantasy of birthrights.'
'I believe the Levellers claim we are all born equal under God. Would you not like to have natural parity with Ralph?' asked Juliana wickedly.
'Sweetheart, I am equal to Ralph any day!'
'You have not suffered like him.'
'Ah, Juliana, do not hold my luck in the field against me. Estates cannot be divided up; it would diminish them.' This was an intriguing glimpse of Lovell as the scion of landed gentry. He had no bitterness; he shrugged and made his own way. That he went off abroad at only sixteen to do it was simply precocious. The pity was that he broke with his family. Their differences were almost nothing to do with politics, though Lovell was becoming more and more the dedicated Royalist and the next phase of his career would confirm that.
Sir Lysander Pelham, their landlord and patron, looked like a barrel on legs, though some of it was due to enormous folds of clothing on a man with short thighs. He wore a huge hat with a sweeping brim, burgeoning with white ostrich feathers, and rough-hewn cavalry boots of enormous width, over which he was prone to tripping, especially when in sack. This was most of the time. Calling for a cup of sack was the noble Lysander's idea of conversation. When he wanted to sound cosmopolitan he roared for a gobletto di sachietti — a phrase he claimed as his own invention, proudly holding the opinion that the English knew more about foreign languages than the foolish foreigners who spoke them.
Among country squires, Sir Lysander did verge on sophistication; he possessed rags of Latin, Greek and several European tongues, knew a quarter of a treatise on mathematics and a glimmer of astronomy, was haunted by memories of books he had half-read twenty years ago, and had once met Sir Francis Bacon (who was by then extremely elderly and mistook him for a cook). Sir Lysander had a heart of gold — though, he claimed, very little money. Seven generations of Pelhams had spent their lives in royal service, adroitly dodging all changes of religion and monarch so that not one ever fell out of favour or was beheaded. By never entertaining any monarch at the Hall, they also managed not to go bankrupt, though since it never received extravagant modernisation to please royalty, their home did now look old-fashioned and rundown.
When the civil war began, Sir Lysander chose his side in the same spirit as Sir Ralph Verney, who had famously explained:
'… for my part I do not like the quarrel, and do heartily wish that the King would yield and consent to what they desire; so that my conscience is only concerned in honour and in gratitude to follow my master. I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him.'
Lysander had devoted himself to the Royalist cause from the day King Charles set up his standard at Nottingham. When the royal standard fell down that stormy night and everyone else hid away in their lodgings, the Sussex knight had stood grappling with the pole and striving to hold the soaking wet flag upright for two hours, notwithstanding the rain and darkness and the fact that his cries for sack to sustain him went unheeded. Once he recovered from the ague he caught that dark night, he fought valiantly at every skirmish and battle that presented itself before his regiment — which Lovell described to Juliana as 'flybitten as any other farming tenants mounted on carthorses' — until his great faithful charger lay down exhausted at Naseby. Weeping, Sir Lysander then announced,
