Lindsey Davis - Rebels and traitors

Among the noisy onlookers, one man watched in silence. Orlando Lovell weighed up how the old feuds between town and gown festered with new complications. Freshly returned from the Continent after some years away, he saw with astonishment that tradesmen were openly jeering at frightened dons. Buff-coated troops had clustered in the gateway of Oriel College, threatening to manhandle gawping college servants and then firing at the University Church.

He knew it was the second wave of soldiers. These Parliamentarian hooligans had driven out a Royalist force only a few days previously, each group finding a welcome in some quarters but each fearing reprisals. Barely controlled by their officers, the newcomers were skittish. Already some had mutinied at a muster in the University Parks; dragoons had gone armed to church on Sunday, in fear of the townsmen's hostility; rival gangs had become drunk and caused chaos in running street-fights.

Today's soldiers were vandalising the ancient church of St Mary, to take out their spite against Archbishop William Laud. Authoritarian and ceremonial, he had enclosed altars with railings, repaired crucifixes, set up statues, imposed a uniform Prayer Book and, worst of all, insisted on the controlling power of bishops. Independent free thinkers were outraged. Now Laud languished in the Tower and these raucous London rebels were shooting at 'scandalous images', those hated statues with which Laud's chaplain had embellished a provocative new porch on St Mary's Church. To Lovell, as he stood watching, such scenes in England were astonishing. The anger Laud's measures had caused was distasteful, because it seemed pointless.

People in the crowd had told him one puritan alderman had claimed he witnessed people bowing to these statues: Nixon, a grocer. Nixon had interceded for All Souls College — to which he supplied figs and sugar — when the Puritans proposed to batter at religious images on the gate. Churches did not buy food in bulk, however, so at St Mary's the soldiers were doing what they liked. Lovell found their indiscipline a grave offence.

The endangered scholar was an idiot. With a curse, Lovell strode across the road, caught the swooning Treves roughly under the elbow and dragged him upright. Jeers came from the Parliamentary soldiers. The rescuer kicked Mary's head away, as he hauled the young scholar across the frontage of the church and the two of them stumbled out of danger. The troopers held fire, following their progress with aimed muskets, though the gesture was merely to intimidate; the football kick had pleased them — as had been intended.

'Take more care!' ordered a mounted officer crisply. Lovell assessed the rebel commander curiously: in his sixties, receding hair, thin, upswept moustache, tasselled baldric. This was Lord Saye and Sele himself, one of the leading Parliamentarians. He was a colonial financier, a campaigner against Ship Money, a plotter at his Broughton home with some prime enemies of the King. A man of great political skill, Saye and Sele had been nicknamed 'Old Subtlety' by King Charles.

Lovell passed muster, then Treves was waved away, assessed as a dreamy scholar who had ambled into the line of fire whilst in a world of his own.

'I could have been shot!' He nearly collapsed again.

Lovell walked him towards the Cornmarket, then wheeled him into an alehouse. He had taken command, setting the pattern of their future relationship. Pushed onto a straight-backed settle, Edmund first suspected the man was about to insist on some very strong beverage, yet Lovell quietly ordered small beer, the same watery brew that children drank.

He was sturdy and tanned. It was mid-September and still mild, but he kept a heavy black cloak close around him like a spy. He had been wearing a dark hat with a lowish crown and a long thin feather, which he now tossed aside on a table. He raised his tankard and held it steady. 'I'll drink to your health when I know your name.'

Ridiculously, Edmund felt tempted to supply a false one but he owned up to his identity. Lovell grunted. He enjoyed the fact he appeared threatening. He leached out danger with every move. Though a stranger to Oxford, yet he was at ease in his surroundings. He looked to Edmund as if he must smell of sweat and horseflesh, though in fact only a faint hint of old tobacco had smoked his dark garments, garments that were more serviceable than rich. He seemed liable to put up those well-travelled boots on a bench, while leaning back in a relaxed pose and calling for ripe cheese, clay pipes and available wenches…

Yet he remained sitting neatly. His light brown eyes gave nothing away, as he stated: 'Orlando Lovell.'

The tapster was glaring at them. Lovell ignored it. Treves had scrubbled up his gown and shoved it under the bench on their arrival; scholars were barred from alehouses. Since the colleges owned most of the inns in Oxford, there was a good chance that breaking the rule would be reported by an innkeeper anxious to preserve his lease.

'So you are a scholar!' said Lovell, smiling. It was perfectly obvious from the young man's sober dress. Having red hair and the pale colouring that goes with it, Edmund looked innocent as a child, though he was now made a little raffish by blood staining his linen cuff where the stone fragment had struck him.

Without seeming to do so, Orlando Lovell expertly drew out the scholar's history. He was a good-humoured youth from a family of minor gentry who would be hard pushed to secure him a position in life. In peacetime, his options were to become a country squire (difficult, with no estate of his own), a lawyer (though he lacked friends and family who could push for him as patrons) or a clergyman (not advisable while religion was causing such strife in the kingdom). His father had died some years before; his mother struggled. The family lacked sufficient funds or influence to send children into royal service at court. Edmund was too well born to undertake labour or trade, yet did not possess enough land to live off. Money had been scraped together to send him to the Merchant Taylors School, which his mother's brothers had attended. Somehow, with a smattering of the classics and the Merchant Taylors' influence, he had gained a place as an exhibitioner at St John's College in Oxford. If Oxford was not precisely educating him for a career, that was simply the way things had been through the centuries — and, cynics might say, how things would always be.

'Are you a university man, Master Lovell?'

'I never had that privilege.'

Lovell deduced Treves would probably leave without taking his degree. That was relatively common; he would be following many who had nonetheless become great men in political or literary life. 'It may be, dearest Ned,' wrote his mother in one of her weekly letters, seeking to console herself, 'that receiving education at a great university is a benefit in itself, and should you achieve something of note in your life to come, the record will state that you were once present at that seat of learning and none will think badly of you.. ' This feeble sentence whimpered to a close and Alice Treves snapped out her true feelings: 'Though in truth, I should be heartily glad to see you properly set up with a degree.'

Treves gloomily explained new regulations instituted by the all-controlling Archbishop Laud. To obtain a degree, it was no longer enough to attend a few lectures and hand in occasional written work. He must pass an examination.

'You have time to study harder.'

'Yes, but there is a war now!' Edmund burst out excitedly. Like most scholars, he paid as much attention to politics and religion as to his books — which meant, as little as he could get away with. He had been born the year before King Charles was crowned. He grew up in an England that was stable and prosperous, where he had been innocently unaware of trouble. The headmaster at his school and the dons he encountered at university were all loyal to the King; he took his lead from them. His college had benefited by an enormously expensive new quadrangle, paid for by Archbishop Laud, who had been President of St John's and also the university's Chancellor. Laud was impeached the first year Edmund went up to Oxford. At St John's, the threat of their President being executed was a talking point even scholars could not ignore.