Philippa Gregory - Virgin Earth

Monck pretended to consider, wrote and argued by letter with Lambert, while the Committee in London scraped around trying to find money to pay the soldiers under Lambert’s command. They sent nothing. Lambert was caught between the deceit of General Monck and the incompetence of the Committee. He would not attack General Monck when they were still in debate, and by the time he realized that the general was spinning out the argument as a tactic, his army had melted away, and the general had won without a shot being fired.

When he should have been planting his orange-hearted narcissi in his orange garden at Wimbledon House he was watching his army disappear down the Great North Road, knowing that he had been tricked by Monck and betrayed by London.

“What will happen to him?” Hester asked John.

John scowled. “Monck has had him accused of treason,” he said miserably. “Treason against the old Parliament, who were so lazy and incompetent that no one cared when Lambert locked them out. Now they’ll call themselves martyrs, no doubt. And they’ll call him a traitor. Once he’s in the Tower it’s not a very long walk to the scaffold.”

In February Lambert turned the remnants of his army south and marched them home in tattered boots. There was no money to buy them provisions or proper clothes. Monck was far ahead of him and marched into Whitehall to be greeted by a stony silence.

George Monck was not a man to be cast down by unpopularity. He put his troops throughout the streets of London, and they were accustomed to doing their duty among a resentful population. London was an easier billet than Edinburgh, and within days there was no one shouting for a free parliament and John Lambert left on the streets. With a large free feast to celebrate the expulsion of Lambert’s Committee of Safety it was possible to generate an enthusiasm for Monck’s new council of state, run by himself.

By the time John Lambert brought his exhausted army home it was all over. He was ordered to go to his house at Wimbledon and not approach Parliament.

He wrote to John Tradescant from Wimbledon. The note arrived as the family and guests were eating dinner.

Please send me, in pots, your finest specimen tulips of this season to the value of £300.

“What does he say?” Hester asked John, hovering over his shoulder to read the note.

“He says that he wants my best tulips,” John said. “What that means is something different.”

“It means that he will have to confine himself to gardening and painting,” Elias Ashmole said cheerfully. He helped himself to another slice of baked ham. “It means that the balance of power has swung to George Monck and he will decide who rules the country from now on. And if I read the predictions of the planets aright then he will want a king, or at the very least another Lord Protector.”

Hester looked at Ashmole with dislike. “Then God help us,” she said sharply. “For since of all the women in England he chose a foul-mouthed washerwoman to take as his wife, what on earth will he choose for a king?”

Elias Ashmole was not in the least downcast. “I should think it a very good chance that he would choose the rightful heir,” he said. “And then we shall see some changes.”

“Then we shall see the same thing again,” Hester said bitterly. “Only this time the battles will have to be fought without anyone’s heart in them.”

“Peace, my wife,” John said quietly from the end of the table. “Mr. Ashmole is our guest.”

“A most frequent guest,” Frances observed sweetly, her head bowed demurely over her plate.

In spring, when John Lambert should have been enjoying the daffodils bobbing and the yellow aconite carpeting the beds of his orange garden, he could see only a small square of blue sky from his window in the Tower and George Monck was the undisputed new man of power in London. Lambert was on trial for nothing, sentenced for nothing. They had imposed on him a fine of such a huge amount that not even a man of his fortune and with friends such as his could meet it. It was essential to George Monck that his great rival be safely out of the way while he discovered, for the last and greatest leap of his life, which would be the winning side this time.

Monck had fought as a mercenary for anyone who was prepared to hire an unprincipled sword. He had fought for King Charles before being recruited by Cromwell to fight for Parliament in Ireland. Thereafter he had fought for Parliament. Unlike John Lambert, who had spent his life in pursuit of a written constitution to protect the rights of Englishmen, Monck had spent his life merely trying to be on the winning side.

In April he decided that the winning side was, after all, the Stuarts, and, with a packed house of Parliament men who agreed with him, he sent terms to Charles Stuart at Breda.

“It is over then,” John said to Hester, who was seated on the terrace and looking out over the garden where the trees were showing fresh and green and the air was smelling sweet. “It’s over. They are bringing Charles Stuart back, and all of our struggle for all of these years counts for nothing. When they write the histories our lifetime will be nothing more than an intermission between the Stuarts, they won’t even remember that for a while we thought there might have been another way.”

“As long as we have peace,” Hester suggested. “Perhaps the only way to find peace in this country is with a king on the throne?”

“We must be better men than that!” John exclaimed. “We must want more than a comedy of ceremony and handsome faces. What have we been doing for all these years but asking questions about how men should live in England? The answer cannot be ‘as easily as possible.’”

“The people want the diversion of a new coronation,” Hester said. “Ask them in Lambeth market. They want a king. They want the amusements and the entertainments, they want the corrupt tax collectors that you can bribe to look the other way.”

“But what a king!” John remarked disdainfully. “Half a dozen bastards scattered around Europe already, his tastes formed in Papist courts, and no knowledge of English people at all except what he learned when he was a fugitive. His father ruined us by his devotion to his principles, his son will ruin us by having none.”

“Then he will rule more easily than his father,” Hester pointed out. “A man with no principles will not be going to war. A man without principles doesn’t argue.”

“No,” John said. “I think the heroic days are over.”

There was a little silence as they both thought of the son who could not wait to see this day, and that if he had lived to see it then even he might have thought that it lacked a little glory.

“And what will happen to John Lambert?” Hester asked. “Will they free him from the Tower before Charles Stuart arrives?”

“They will execute him for certain,” John said. “I should think General Monck can hardly wait to sign the order. Lambert is too much of a hero to the army and the people. And when the new king comes home they will be looking for scapegoats to offer him.”

“It cannot be the end for him?” Hester asked incredulously. “He has never done anything but fight for the freedom of Englishmen and women.”

“I think it must be,” John said. “It’s a bitter, bitter ending to all our hopes. A king such as Charles restored, and a man like Lambert on the scaffold.”

But that very night, John Lambert climbed from his window in the Tower, slid down his knotted sheets, dropped into a waiting barge on the Thames, and disappeared into the April darkness.

“I have to go to him,” John said to Hester. He was saddling up Caesar in the stable. Hester stood in the doorway, blocking his path. “I have to go. This is the battle that tests everything I have finally come to believe, and I have to be there.”