The Wolves of Andover

CHAPTER 18

From Martha’s Diary: Begun Thursday, August 28th, 1673

These, then, are the words of Thomas Morgan Carrier, known as the Welshman, who places in my hands through faith and through trust the whole of his story; inscribed by my hand alone through his remembrances. Committed in secret from the eyes of men and the tongues of women and hidden from the knowledge of the teller himself, I will commence to make a true record of these happenings.

I were born in Carmarthenshire during the cruel winter of sixteen and twenty-six. My father while crossing a crook of the River Towy heard the Hag of Warning, Goorach uh Hribun, shriek out from down under the ice and snow, “My wife. Oh, my wife,” and by this he kenned that my mother, who labored even then to birth me, would die. Runted and puny, I had no name until I were past four months old and the ground could be dug up to bury my mother’s body. The earth where I first placed my feet to walk was savage hard and rocky with scarce enough topsoil to fill the hand. But Father was canny and carried inland from the shores of Llandach sea sand mixed with lime and dung. From this he grew barley and oats for his sons and daughters, and fodder for his cows. We bartered our sheep and milk cattle in the lowland fairs for corn and wool culled from the beasts of Tremain. And the Welsh cotton my sisters made of it could have floated a man in the Cardigan Bay, so tight was it woven. The old house, or hendre as it is even now called, was small but cunning-built. And a harp sat in the window, though none of us could play it but our mother, for it was said that a Welshman without a harp had no soul.

The winters through we huddled nightly over the smoking peat and daily whipped the cattle against a frozen sleep. But when spring came, my brother and I would run to the southern pastures and rest in the hafod, the summerhouse of loose rock and thatch. There we would stay until the frosts came again, chasing the wolves from the calves and chasing each other through the hills above Llangadok. I grew to a man swallowing the dust from my brother’s feet, for though I stood hands above him, I could never best him in a race. And so we lived our days until my brother died, his heart giving out at the end of a great race between Carmarthen and Kidwelly, a distance of ten miles and more. I was but fourteen, and into that graveyard furrow my keenness for life was also buried, dropping away like sunlight into a well.

I lived that winter through doing as my father willed until the March thaw, when he gave me a bundle of woolens to take to Swansea for tin. I walked two days and a night through fog and a tearing wind but didn’t so much as raise my collar against the rain, so low was I. There is a legend in Cymry, which is what the Welsh call their land, of a monster called the Afang which likes the taste of flesh better than cake. It lives in the bogs and lowlands, swallowing up man and cattle alike, and with the flesh, it devours the essence of its prey. So, too, it seemed to me, following down the River Truch to the sea, that to stay in my father’s house would be my soul’s end.

When the bale of woolens was boarded onto a merchant ship, I boarded with it, and paid for my passage with the woolens and with strokes of tar and sandstone upon the deck. The three-master was filled with coal and iron bound for Caernarvon and hugged the coast around St. David’s Head to New Port and Cardigan, banking the Irish Sea. I slept every night upon the deck because the beams below could not contain my height. But the biting cold up top was nothing compared to the stench of rotting wool over the pale and wormy seamen resting in the holds below. For a day and a night we spied an Irish galley with thirty oars and a square-rigged sail. It was a shallow-draughted pirating ship out of Dublin only seventy sea miles westward and would have overtaken us had a gale not sprung up.

We rounded Badesey Isle in a storm that howled like the dogs of Hell with waves that breached the topmost timbers. Men were blown from the decks and floated like corks in a monstrous vat of ale. On the third day the skies parted and I saw like a crouching giant the gray walls of the Castle Caernarvon.

I made my first night’s supper on the wharf, putting my back to unloading ships full of cargo: wheat and barley, woolens and hides, waiting to be shipped to England and beyond. There had never been the likes of this fortress, so I thought, with eight angled towers, thirty feet or higher, braced walls punched through with murder holes, gates, arrow loops, and spy corridors. To look upon it was to know the shame, and the pride, of being a Welshman—shame that an English fort sentineled our fairest port, pride that it had to be built so high and so stout to keep our great-grandsires from overrunning it again.

I made my bed in the shack of an old crippled seaman named Darius in a court off Newgate Street hard by the jail. For weeks I bent my back to loading off bales by the outer postern. I lifted those bales to my shoulders and walked like a mule up King’s Head Street to High Street, day upon day. Mornings as I walked to the wharf, I carried the old lame man on my back to the western wall of the castle. At the foot of Eagle Tower he would sit, there to beg the day through.

The soldiers posted in the tower would greet us by calling down, “Look, there is Darius with his Black Dog.” For idleness sake, they threw at us roots and stalks and once a bottle which cracked open my skull. Seeing the blood, Darius called up through his fist, “My Black Dog against any two of ye. A shillin’ a throw-down, ye damnable whores. Tonight on Market Green.”

By that evening I had lifted a quarter ton of iron and a hundredweight of wool from two ships and had walked six miles to a nearby town and back again. The king’s men had gathered between the market sheds and the smithy shop when I came walking onto the green, Darius on my back. I placed him on the ground and turned to face them. There were eight gray-coated soldiers, but seeing me up close, they quickly sent for a bigger man. The man they found was near as tall as me, with the bulk of unkind livelihood, but he was spindle-shanked and angled poorly for hand-to-hand. He spit into his hands and made a run for me, grinning, showing the whites of his eyes. There was some grunting and circling about and I would have put him gently to ground, but for the knee he put in my groin. I broke his arm before I brought him to his knees and pounded his skull with my fists. The rest of the men backed off a ways and soon moved, grumbling, on to their suppers. One man stayed, a hardened corporal, a Welshman named Jones, who paid Darius his wager and led us to Green Gate Street for a pie and ale.

Laughing, Jones watched us eat like the starving men we were, and he said in Welsh, “You’re a fierce dog, all right. Black Dog is a name the Englishers fear well. It’s the stalking spirit of Newgate Prison, a dungeon in London dug deep into the ground and full of horrors. No light, swarming with vermin and other creeping things, the condemned lying like swine on the ground, howling and roaring. And when the Black Dog comes on paws of madness and despair, sweet death is welcome.”

The corporal gave us more ale and recounted his memories of London. “It is the fairest of cities to those who have the mettle. It matters not whether you are Welsh, Cornish, or Scots. All are welcome. Even the damned Irish can find a motherly teat to feed their base and ugly natures. The city is like a great forge that takes in pig iron and puts out fine instruments of every kind, instruments of peace and war. It’s a fire-filled, loud, boastful place. Hammers beating in one yard. Pots clinking in another. And tumbling bodies of water turned by wheels, rushing through the heart of it. Church bells clamoring at all hours. Wagon wheels beating the coppered streets into an alchemist’s dream. Dogs and horses and men braying for dominance. The huzzas of soldiers out for a drink and a piss at all hours of the night.

“And the women, Great God in Heaven, man. The whores are like nothing you’ve ever seen. Not like these little kitchen morts here, girls who will lift their skirts for the smallest brass mirror. The doxies of London have great silken thighs and breasts to make a man cry for his ma. Even the Welsh milkmaids are game for a proper backwards toss. All a man needs is his infantry wage and voice enough to say, ‘After you, my dear.’ ”

Jones walked with us along Castle Ditch Street to our nightly hovel, Darius falling to sleep as I carried him, snoring wetly against my back. When we approached King’s Gate, Jones said, “Here I must leave you, Thomas. I have a mind to billet you into the fort so you can serve the king, and make me a handsome sum throwing to ground every last one of the Englisher bastards. But you are Welsh, as I am Welsh, and I would say to you as a friend—or as a father—might: walk, ride, or crawl from this place and get you to London. Live in this place and you’ll die a wharf rat like Darius here, or lose your nose from the French disease got off some dock whore. The king takes into his own bodyguards able men of great height and strength, which, by God, you are such a one. Make yourself known. I will give you a packet for a captain that I’ve served with in the trained bands. He is Welsh and will be glad for another countryman.”

He bade me good night and knocked heavily with his fist on the gate. When the night watch opened to him, he called out over his shoulder, “The world’s gone all English, Thomas, and Welsh e’now is but a barley-bread tongue.”

By midmorning the following day I had my letter from the corporal and some small coins pressed into my hand. It was in the first days of April when I left the city walls, and at the first mile marker, I peered back through the laggardly fog at the towers of Caernarvon and for a time felt myself to be at liberty.

Past thirty miles, I walked through the great castle of Conwy and then, in a needling shower, pushed my way into the vale of Clwyd. I worked from farm to farm, fallowing and herding, pressing on to the border lowlands in Denbigshire, where I lambed forty lambs for a great lordly house. But I burned to see London and so, not wanting to end my days in Wales, I passed beyond the fair pasturelands of Wales into England.

I made my way among the white chalk downs and gleaming hills of the Cotswold farmers and there my path crossed a brawny, pock-faced man, loaded with the hides of rabbit and lamb. He offered to show me the roads into London if I would stand his guard during the night. By noontide the third day we had traveled down Tyburn Street to the gallows, the westward portal to London.

The Tyburn gallows were three great posts joined topmost with stout beams. They rose up, tall and menacing, from the middle of the road, so that any cart or footman must pass around them. So large were they that three prison carts could have been backed into them at one time. There, dangling from the beams, were three bodies, freshly hanged: a man, a woman, and a boy. A few village women were yet gathering up their baskets of food, lingering long after the last of the struggling feet had stopped. Their children played in and out of the hanging posts, stuffing themselves with nuts and singing, “Hangman, hangman, one, two, three. Hangman, hangman, you can’t catch me.”

The hides trader took his leave of me at a crossroads and, pointing the way, told me how to find my way to King’s Gate. But because I was threadbare, I was then kicked and beaten to the stables, and finally to the king’s coal pits behind the Scottish Yard. Because of my size, I was set to loading and carrying coal for the cook fires hard by the Thames. Day upon day I corded wood and off-loaded barrels for the small-beer brewery. I slept crooked in a stairwell under the bake house and fought off wharf rats as great as bull mastiffs to keep what little bread I was thrown.

The bake woman was Welsh and a sharp-tongued gossip, and though she would hardly look at me, she found my silence a midden into which she dropped never-ceasing news of the day. London had become like a body with two heads that strained and tore at itself to go separate ways. One head was the common Parliament, led by fire-filled Puritans whose lay preachers had given themselves such names as Praise-God Barebones. These Puritans knocked down gilded altars, believing they were the stuff of idolatry, and resurrected in their place rude wooden tables for the communion bread. The other head was the king with his Catholic wife and archbishop, who would have every man in England read from a common prayer book of his own devise. The bake woman would spit into the fire and say hotly, “It won’t be long now afore the king’s wife will have us bakin’ the blood of our newborns into the wafers for her mass.”

On a morning in June at low tide, the damp stones stinking of the privy pits above, I was kicked awake by a river guard and told to go to the stables to help hang a door.

It was early yet, the fog not yet risen from the Scottish Yard, but at every lodge there were ’prentices and workmen standing in their doorways, waiting for me. And at every station the masons, porters, and smiths grinned and pointed, hiding their mouths behind their fists. Even the master of the beer cellar had roused himself from his bed. The porter’s lodge at the outer wall discharged the porter’s boy and two guards at a run as they followed me across Whitehall Road, and behind them came a full measure of workmen together in a tide.

To the west of Whitehall Street lay the horse-guard yard, flanked on three sides by the stable. Standing about the yard were six or seven of the king’s mounted men in blue coats and breeches, and with them a slant-eyed fool who wore around his neck a riding halter. He was large but with a child’s soft looks. One of the horse guards, seeing the crowd, walked towards me with a bridle and bit in one hand, and in the other a short whip.

With a great laugh he said to his fellows, “I’ll raise my wager, now that I’ve seen the Welshman. Ten shillings my fool beats your fool.”

He stopped within an arm’s breadth and, holding up the bridle, said, “Come, my great dray, bend down your head and take this between your teeth. I swear to you the whip will but tickle your neck if you run apace. Win for me and I’ll give you a shilling.”

He cocked his head at me, his smile faltering when I didn’t move. “Come, come. Take this bit and then give me your hand so I may straddle your back.”

Dropping the bridle down to his waist, he gave a great sigh as though deeply burdened by my silence. He flicked the whip at my chest, bringing a welt. “Well,” he said, “this one may need gelding.” He lowered the whip to slash at my thigh and I grabbed his fingers, squeezing them until they popped. I lifted him up and hung him by his coat from a high hook on the stable wall. Two of his men, weighted down with sword and cuirass, rushed at me, and I put them to ground like stranded kettle fish.

Suddenly, a loud field-ready voice cried, “Hold, hold!” and a stout, middling man with a red-winded face strode into the yard, pulling ’prentices and guardsmen roughly about, and with a great waving of arms made the sentries raise up their pikes. The bluejay I had hung on the wall was rescued and the crowd was soon scattered to their posts.

“Now, then,” threatened the stout man, standing on my toes. “What mean you to come and beat my men? I’m Llwewelyn, captain at arms, and I will have your head on a pike before you can finish a prayer. What say you?”

At hearing his good Welsh name I handed him the letter from Corporal Jones and waited while it was read. After a few surprised words, the captain embraced me as though I were a son truly lost and only just found, and I was that day taken into the king’s guard.

I drilled with pike and musket that summer through. Fitted with gorget, breastplate, and helmet, carrying a pike twenty feet long, five feet greater than other sentries, I made a fair impression upon the citizens of Whitehall. Posted at the palace gates where the stream of traffic was greatest, I wore a coat of scarlet with boots special-made to lift my height above seven feet. Men, and not a few women, would come to King’s Gate of an evening to gawk at me.

One night I was placed with a Cornishman, himself seven feet tall, on the stairs of the banqueting hall for the king’s summer’s-end feast. There the Cornishman and I were paired at the north entrance flanking the great ladies and lords that did pass through. Soon, before us stood the king himself. A man of smallish stature, not above five and a half feet, with sad eyes and a tripping tongue, he admired and examined us with pride. His queen came behind and with her own hand tied upon our breastplates two ribbons of red and gold. Afterwards, whenever the king was to go to Whitehall, whether to banquet or bait or receive men of great importance in his privy galleries, there stood the Cornishman and I.

We sentried beneath ceilings painted of men and women naked as newborns, flanked by hangings of silvered thread and carvings of alabaster and gold. Our cuirasses and helmets were kept from blackening by the king’s own armory squires. Our matched pikes of the finest ash were tied with the ribbons of favored court women who traipsed about us like cats in a granary, winking and gesturing for our notice, vying for a glance and a promising smile.

October brought open rebellion in Catholic Ireland, where it was proclaimed that British settlers were cut down by the thousands. Londoners came to call the slaughter the Queen’s Rebellion, for it was she they blamed for encouraging popery and open revolt. There was bloody action in the streets and even into Westminster Hall from citizens who feared the king himself was secretly a Catholic, bringing the well-remembered horrors of the Inquisition back to Protestant England. The king’s guards were called out to quiet the town and bring order again.

We broke dissent in Old St. Paul’s Church, where Puritan zealots gathered to try to turn away gaudy merchants who had filled the church naves with their goods, using the very baptismal font as a money counter. We chased the riotous preachers from the cathedral into the courtyard, where booksellers sold their wares to every rogue with a coin, and took the good ministers in chains to the Tower. We routed gangs of marching outlaw ’prentices, seeking only charitable pay and a relief from endless taxes which the king’s pleasures demanded, into the stinking alleys and public houses, where they sought shelter, and into houses where trap doors and ferret closets could hide a desperate man with a dirk or striking stick.

We raided the fomenting Cradle and Coffin Inn in St. Giles off Drury Lane, bastion of dissenters who wanted no hint of popery in their places of worship. And plucked deserting soldiers, sickened from the misuse of their own, from the Red Lion Inn over Fleet Ditch, and the Blood Bowl near Water Lane, where it was said a man a day was robbed and murdered.

In every public house and shop we searched, there followed offers of money and ale to turn away and look elsewhere. Our exemplar in this regard was the king himself, for he took bribes from every country in Europe to keep his armies from joining one royal dynasty over another. The money, for pride, I would not take when many of my fellows did; but a man will take drink when he is thirsty, and comfort when a welcoming cubby is made under a woman’s skirts. It was a short step then from guard to garrison lout, and I made time in gaming, baiting, and cockfighting. There were fairs and shows in every street. Giant women and dwarfish men were paraded on Fleet Street with baboons and dancing dogs. At the Eagle and Child Inn a monstrous ox grown nineteen hands high was shown for a coin.

There were ready fights to be had on any corner or crossroads, as most men were frayed with the threat of street war. A cap cocked back or a bitten thumb would bring bands of Catholics and Protestants together, knives drawn and keen for butchering. The Parliament threatened to impeach the queen for her Catholic ways. The queen in answer told the king, “Go and pull those rogues out by the ears or never more see my face.” My post was moved to Commons that winter to keep the Parliament men in mind of their king.

It was nigh on Christmas on a bright, cold day that I stood guard at Commons, nursing a head from too much drink. The evening before had been a pitiful show. An ancient bear, too old to fight, had been mauled in the Southwark baiting pits by a pack of young hounds. Blinded and matted with gore, the bear struggled to die on its hind feet but its owner gave the prod to anyone who would beat it down again so the hounds could better tear at its flesh. A terrible rumbling had taken up in my ears to watch that bear shaming every man-jack of them with his courage and his refusal to die on his back. The prod was in my hand before I had given a thought to it, and I stripped the bear baiter’s backside to mincemeat before I was held down by ten of my fellows and hastened from the ring. The roar was still in my head that morning as I gazed out of blood-hazed eyes at a young woman, standing before our sentries preaching.

She had come for weeks offering prayers for our blackened souls, and because she was small and henlike, I had given her not a thought. She was only one of many women who shouted or pleaded or spoke in strange tongues of the sinfulness of the king and his men. Newgate Prison had been flooded with these dour preaching shrills and they were of more sport to the courtiers that came to watch them rant than were the murderous scum waiting to be hanged. The guards posted with me soon made their own sport with her. Ripping the maiden’s cap from her hair, they fondled her with their hands, yet she stood upon her little stool, speaking of love and fragrant sacrifices to God. All the while she gave no heed to the men molesting her but looked above their heads to the highest rafters as if to watch a brace of nesting doves. Believing in that moment that no merciful act goes without punishment afterwards, I batted away the men and told her to go home to her husband or father.

She reached out and, placing her palm upon my breastplate, said, “Is not my Father the same as yours?”

The weight of a guard’s armor is over forty pounds. It can shield the flesh from jab of pike or disgorged ball from musket fire. Heavy mace and war hammer can break the bones beneath the metal, but it takes a timely, well-aimed thrust between the plates to pierce a man’s vital innards. A pain began to sear my chest, as though burned with Greek fire, and for a time, I know not how long, I counted the gray-green channels in her eyes. There was no artifice about her, only her steady gaze which spoke to me like cannon shot that everything I had done, every journey, every effort, every path I had taken until that moment, was worthless.

A guard called out, laughing, “Watch yourself, Thomas. The girl’s a witch.”

I pulled her hand from my chest and told her roughly to go away or I would chain her and carry her to Newgate. She left that day but she was back again the next. And came every day after, preaching, not to my men, but solely to me.

It soured every pleasure. Alehouses, gaming dens, baiting pits, they were all the same. And truth be told, it had all come to smell of rot. A whore though she washes herself in scented water still stinks of her daily trade. My eyes were now open to good men put in chains, tortured, and hanged. Men who desired only a chance to die in bed and not in a war in some foreign place. Men who wanted to pray without the shadow of bishops peering over them, coming between their souls and God. Men who asked the Court to give them better rights than the dogs that were fed at the king’s table. Nights I dreamt of the baited bear and the hounds, and though I kept my eyes from her, I came by measure to listen to the girl with the gray-green eyes.

The winds filled with ice, and though we had a coal barrel at the sentry, she would not share our warmth and chose instead to shiver alone inside her thin woolen cloak. Her words passed through blue, quivering lips, but the weaker her body, the stronger her voice. Odds were laid for when she would fall off and die of the frost, but the men did not impede her and took to calling her Lady Dampen. Her eyes followed my coming and going until I felt them like chainmail around my neck. But her voice was a kind of harp that vibrated in time to my blood. I had seen the faces of dying men in prisons and streets, and in the face of my brother, Richard. And for every one of them, brave, mad, or bad, a corner of fear lived in every eye. But in her eyes there was none; only a certainty of which she spoke.

Once she fainted and I carried her to cover, wrapping her in my cloak. I asked for her name, which she gave in sounds like waves over sand: Palestine. She clasped my hand to her face and said, “This world will soon be swept away.”

On a January morn, the king rode to the House of Commons to demand the surrender of five Parliament men who had given him quarrel. His birds had flown, though, and empty-handed he returned to Whitehall Palace, pursued by mobs of screeching women and men, threatening to pull him from his coach. He sent out his royal guards with lance and flintlock to compose the people, but we were pelted with rocks and chairs. Barricades were built and chains pulled across streets and byways to hinder our progress. We were a few hundred against six thousand Londoners made drunk upon the newly born idea that a country can rule itself without the shadow of a crown, and on that day the word “liberty” was on every tongue. The king soon left London, the queen making haste for Holland.

I was ordered to march with the king north to Cambridge. Along the way we passed bands of men lining the roads, calling out to us, “Brothers, come join us! Leave the tyrant behind and become a new citizen.” And for the first time, for many of the soldiers in the ranks, it mattered not that we were Welsh, or Irish, or Cornish; it mattered only that we were men who could make our own destinies without the consent of a king. Until that time, a man’s only country was that expanse of wilderness large enough to encompass his own clan, his own family profit. But there, on those dirt pathways, just as Palestine had prophesied, were the makers of a unified homeland, a whole England.

The king traveled to the port of Hull, where the gates of the city were locked against us. The royal troops then packed up and went to York, where we encamped until the spring. We were then closer to the borders of Scotland than to London, and with every mile, with every rough conscription, dragging a son or husband from his home or thieving food from poor yeomen, I became more and more resolved to leave the king’s ranks. I could not eat or sleep or take a step without the best part of myself rebelling against the base acts of a titled few.

A few good lords, attending the king at York, begged him to come to terms with Parliament. It was there I first saw Lord Fairfax, officer of the field and greatly admired by all the men for his strength and wit in a fight. He addressed the king directly, saying that if he did not work with Commons, a bloody civil war would surely follow. The king gave him his back, and Fairfax, a fiery man for all his good honor, addressed the royal troops, calling them to serve in glory the people of England. And so I, being sixteen and of age to serve in Parliament’s army, laid down my pike of ash with all its brightly colored, foolish ribbons and made my way back to London. My friend, the tall Cornishman who had stood next to me at the banqueting hall, stayed with the king, and when next I saw him, it was across a field of battle. He would die at the siege of Basing House, a cannonball his final pillow.

I married Palestine Ross in the last days of June and together we made ready for war. We set up in small rooms off Fetter Lane, close to the chapel where her father preached and where I went to be baptized into faith. The gathering storm was there in that temple and in chapels all through London. The pulpit words were little fires that scorched the hearts of all who listened. And like upright brands, with our heads aflame, we carried the light to anyone who would listen. Those who did not, we put aside in Newgate Prison. At night before sleep, my wife sang psalms and encircled me with gentle arms.

I worked for months in a carpenter’s pit, planing timber for Parliament’s navy until my arms outgrew my coat. In late summer I took leave of my wife. Giving her what coins I had, I left with Parliament’s troops under the command of Lords Fairfield and Essex. Their orders from Commons: to rescue the king from himself.

We were a ragged, out-of-step band of thousands, ’prentices, tradesmen, and untested soldiers. But in two months’ time we were drilled and marched and preached into good order. A new pike was given to me, and I learned the facings, doublings, and wheelings of field battle, all the while chanting, “How great be my God.”

I fought first at Edgehill at October’s end and killed my first Welshman, who, knowing me for a countryman, died cursing me to Hell. His words, spoken in Welsh, worked like acid until I imagined I wore his curses like pagan markings on my naked skin. Then came the killing of Cornishmen, Lancashiremen, Cheshiremen, and again more Welshmen, in countless, endless numbers, and I learned the torment of being known as a traitor to my own country. In overwhelming numbers the Welsh fought for the king, for the royal house of Tudor first took root in the harsh and spirited soil of Wales, and its men would not be severed from their pride except through the biting edge of a sword.

Battles were won and lost and won again. Men less base than I died drowning in their blood while merciless plunderers lived and gained in fortune. For every man that joined the fight, three would creep away under cover of night to far-flung counties. Soldiers gambled on the sly and kept time with the baggage whores that posed as washerwomen. Order slipped from the ranks like water down a chain.

In May of sixteen and forty-three we joined with a cavalry troop at Winceby and broke the Royalists’ ranks, taking eight hundred of the king’s men. Chief among our cavalry leaders was a tall, wiry man who charged his group of horsemen as though it were one body. His clothes, ill-fitting and coarse, hid limbs of hammered iron. So tight was his discipline that his men were taxed twelve pence for swearing and put in stocks for drinking. And for raping a woman, though she be the Whore of Babylon, hanging with a short rope. His voice, sharp and piercing, carried a mile or more across the battlefield, and it became the tuning gauge to all our rallying cries. His name was Oliver Cromwell.

One black evening, on a night with no moon, I huddled under my cloak as I ate my supper of bread and meat, both gone green with age. A man came out of the darkness and asked if he could share my fire. I knew his voice at once to be Cromwell’s and I gladly made room for him next to the warmth of the flames. I had heard his voice earlier as he went from soldier to soldier, stoking courage, giving solace, offering prayer. He was one of the few officers to ever do so and was greatly loved for it. We spoke of humble things: our homes, our wives, the pleasures of a man’s work far from the battlefield.

He asked me my age and if my father yet lived, a question for which I, sadly, had no answer. After a time, he rose to go but stood for a moment within the circle of light. He gestured out towards the many campfires filling the surrounding field in the thousands and said, “I know well the horrors of killing a countryman. Prayer and steady fasting give some comfort and yet will only serve to temper the pain. Your agony, which shows clearly on your face, gives the true measure and worth of your conscience.”

He nodded and gripped my shoulder fondly for an instant, as he might have done for one of his own family, and said, “Somewhere out there is my own son just your age, Thomas. I would not ask another man’s child to risk death and not my own.” He walked away, and I pondered on how many Royalists’ sons had paid other men, poor and untitled, to fight their battles; and it came to me in that moment that I would have followed Cromwell into the sea if he had asked.

Cromwell’s name, and leadership, soon became the banner for victories, and in June of ’forty-five his cavalry joined our infantry for the battle at Naseby, which brought thirteen thousand of our men against seven thousand of the king’s. We faced one another across a dry valley of heath, the sky a blue bowl above us. A strong northwest wind rattled the banners and trappings behind us. I was placed on the front line of pike hard by the right flank of Cromwell’s men. I could see Cromwell on his mount, his face filled with a savage joy. He was singing psalms and once even laughed. His darting eyes found me, and saluting me, he cried out, “Have you said your prayers, Thomas, for yourself, as well as for your enemies?”

I nodded, proud that he addressed me directly in front of the troops. His horse reared, nervous for battle, and bringing the horse to heel, he exhorted me, saying, “Never forget that God calls those he loves most to do that which is most hard. I remember it always, as should you.”

He spurred his horse about as the king’s nephew Prince Rupert began the charge and engaged the battle. And though the prince broke our lines first, Cromwell did win the day, capturing three thousand prisoners, most of them Welsh. Within a fortnight they would be paraded in the streets of London, hanged, or jailed. But I was no longer a Welshman; I was of no country anymore but that which embraced Cromwell.

The general had seen my way with a pike at Edgehill, piercing a horse and rider together like a spitted cod, so he elevated me to corporal, enlisting me into his New Model Army. Through town and countryside he fought, taking bread and praying with his common troops. He would always make time especially for me, giving me words of encouragement and, when needed, correction. Once he gave me, with his own hand, a prayer book which I carried under my breastplate, its weight like a shield over my heart.

His was the spirit borne up by the Holy Word after which we followed, like magpies upon the red-tailed hawk. Any Protestant man who had fought for the king but desired to pledge for Parliament was welcomed as a brother, regardless of birth. Those that were popish bred were reformed, or swept to dust.

We fought until the king was captured and brought to Commons as a betrayer to his own people. Even from his prison, Charles Stuart plotted with every foreign land, Catholic or Protestant, taking money, arms, and men to win back his throne. He went to his trial believing he had never done wrong, regretting only that he had not first hanged the dissenters and queried them afterwards. The king was tried as any common man and sentenced to death, Cromwell’s name writ largest upon the warrant.

In sixteen forty-nine, in the biting winter of January, scaffolding began to rise before the banqueting hall like the shell of a great beast. A master builder had been paid two shillings a day to build the stage from which the king’s head would fall. Ropes had been hammered into the planks to tie him down should he resist. The high executioner swore he would never ply his trade on a neck that had carried a crown, and the crowds became sullen waiting for Commons to begin killing the Stuarts.

In the blue dawn of January 26th, I was called by Cromwell to Westminster Palace. I was led through a dark warren of rooms and found the general alone on his knees, praying. Seeing me, he rose and gestured for me to come nearer. There was only one candle in the chamber, but I could see the breath curl from his lips like gray mist from a northern sea. The man had been at prayer, yet there was no aspect of Godly play about his face, merely the steady glint of eyes that had long gazed upon a lock and had only just discovered the key.

He studied me from the shadows before saying, “Thomas, I can see you’ve greatly changed from the boy who shared his campfire with me. You have the look about you now of a resolute man.”

I nodded to him that this was so.

“And your wife?” he asked. “She fares well?”

“Aye,” I answered, remembering that Cromwell’s own beloved wife had been gravely ill for a time.

“It is said,” he began but paused, as though considering something of gravity. “It has been brought to me that she speaks openly of her doubts that Charles Stuart should be put to death.” His eyes were downcast, his words carefully chosen, but I had no doubt of his fearsome attention in waiting for my answer. For the first time in the years of serving him during the war, through all the battles won and lost, through all the trials and intrigues that placed him as the man destined to rule the new England, I felt the prickling of dread, not for myself, but for Palestine.

I said, “My wife, as ever, keeps with our cause. She is free to reveal her mind, I believe, as we now have no fear of tyrants. Is that not so?”

He stepped nearer so I could see the measure of his gaze boring into me. He asked, “Do you upon your life love your country?”

I answered him that I did.

He moved closer still and asked, “Do you have love for me as well?” Again I answered him, yes.

There was a rustling sound as he gathered his cloak tighter about his shoulders. The room became an empty cave for the beat of twenty and then he asked sharply, “What is it in the field of battle that is both threat and remedy?”

“A man’s sword,” I answered.

“Yes, a man’s sword. Men are like swords, Thomas. We are all instruments of God. Remember you, before the battle at Naseby, I spoke that God will love him best that takes the hardest path?”

A shallow morning light had slipped into the room and with it a kind of creeping disquiet, draping over my head like a cowl. I remembered well what he had told me before the battle. He had said God would call those he loved most to do that which is most hard. Cromwell, who had beaten a royal army through the iron of his will, leading mountains of men to their oblivion, had chosen the hardest path. But he had come to believe that God would love him all the more for it and follow after him, like Cromwell’s own legions of troops, spreading glory to the earthly victories along the way.

His face, now lit from the strengthening sun, was quiet, but in his eyes was a question of faith, like the gaze of Abraham upon his son as he wielded the knife over the burning altar, ever willing to make fragrant sacrifices to the Lord. He dismissed me from his presence and I thought then that he had only wanted from me a renewed pledge of loyalty.

In the winter of ’forty-nine, the great hall of Westminster was the place of judgment for Charles Stuart. A man like any other, he walked before his judges wearing no crown and carrying only a silver-headed cane. Fifty judges found him guilty of setting his countrymen to bloody civil war. He was proclaimed a tyrant and sentenced to death.

The king’s prison was St. James Palace, where I had been sent as guard with others loyal to Cromwell. Smaller than Whitehall and close to the hall of judgment, it could be better armed with fewer men; and better spied-upon, for the king had once before been spirited away by Royalists, and he never gave up hope for ransom or escape. It was the weakness of the man that he could not see that his great adversary was not of the Royalist cloth: Cromwell could not be bribed or bullied.

I had been placed on the outer parapets as sentry. But on a cold and windy day I was placed directly outside the Stuart’s chamber. I stood guard with a man I did not know but who had proven himself at the battle at Naseby. His name was Robert Russell.

We followed our prisoner at every waking hour: at his prayers, at his rounds through the gardens, at his meals, where we stood hard by and counted every knife afterwards. It was at my dawn council with Cromwell that I was told I would accompany the Stuart king on his final walk to Whitehall.

The few days before he was to die, Charles Stuart accepted his fate and kissed his children good-bye. Once, rising from his prayer altar, he stumbled, and I caught his arm. He thanked me and, straightening his vest, said, “I have known you before, Corporal.” He looked me up and down and, gesturing to my sleeve, said, “You were my royal bodyguard once. The coat you wear is the same crimson as before, and yet it comes to me that the lining has changed.” He raised one eyebrow, his lips curling. “Yes, yes, the lining is quite changed.”

At midnight before the morning of the execution, I was awakened from my sleep by a colonel of the guard and brought, with Robert Russell, to an outer courtyard. There waiting were three other men, soldiers of Cromwell’s New Model Army. We drew our cloaks against the blistering cold and followed without a torch to a far door, bolted from the inside. Upon a knock it was opened, and we were led down into the bottommost part of the castle. We gathered in a vaulted room where tapers had been lit, and the colonel left us to stand awhile. Soon two men, cloaked and hooded, came into the chamber and I could see in an instant that the taller man was Cromwell. The smaller man was his son-in-law and fellow soldier, Henry Ireton.

Cromwell swept off his hood, saying, “Every man among you has been tested and found steadfast: in zeal, in loyalty, in courage and godliness. But there is not one man here that does not have blood on his hands. Not even myself. We have fought together, friends, and God has found us worthy. There is but a single obstacle to a final victory, and that is the death of one man.” He paused, holding up a finger. “One man who at his death on the morrow will give us the liberty we seek.”

The finger, held upright, wavered and in turn pointed to each of us. “But who will be the liberator? Who will be the one who frees us from the tyrant? By God, I would do it myself but for the people saying it would be to crown myself king.”

Motioning to Ireton, Cromwell took from his son-in-law a set of small wooden stakes. “Let God decide, then. We will choose in lots as the Testament prophets did. The first to draw the short lot will be headsman.”

There was a heavy silence in the room as each man waited to take his turn. Each one of us had in recent days been counseled alone by Cromwell, asked by him if we loved God and England. We had only to look in Cromwell’s eyes in the torchlight of that chamber to know that to be loved by him in return was to be forfeit to his cause. The first man reached out with shaking hands to take up a stake, and came up long. And so did the next man, and the next. It was down to Robert and myself, and when Robert reached for the two remaining pieces, he came up short. His face knotted, first in surprise and then in terror. He had killed his share of common Englishmen in battle, but to kill an anointed king was to pull the sun down from the sky, leaving a void for anarchy, bloodshed, and damnation to fill.

Cromwell turned to me, holding the last piece, and waited silently for me to reach out and take it. He clasped my arms in his two hands and said, “I had prayed that it would be you, Thomas. I have often dreamt it so.” And with that I offered myself to be Robert’s second on the killing platform, and thus it was decided who would wield the ax.

We were sworn to silence and returned to our beds, where we waited for first light. For hours I heard the ragged, labored breathing of Robert Russell as he readied himself to be both the savior and villain of all England, and thus the world. At dawn we were led to Whitehall and secreted in a closet off the banqueting hall, waiting for the time of execution. Charles Stuart was brought to the hall in the morning but could not be taken to the block as Parliament was meeting urgently for a bill banning kingship forevermore. They had only just remembered that after killing the present king, his son could one day seek the crown for his own. It was two of the clock before the king stepped, with his chaplain at his side, before the thousands gathered to watch.

Robert and I donned masks, but the Stuart knew at the instant who we were. And he knew, as Robert stood nearer to the block, that it would be he who would deliver the blow. The king bore himself with steady dignity, wearing two shirts together so he would not shiver and be thought a coward. He spoke to those gathered, citizens and soldiers of London, some words of defiance. Unrepentant in his sovereignty, he said, “I go from a corruptible crown to an incorruptible one.” He turned to Robert and asked calmly, “How will I tie back my hair?” His locks, though quite gray, were long to his shoulders and he did not want the headsman to miss the mark.

The moment stretched into the wretched silence of waiting death; the crowds remained hushed and expectant. In all of the dreadful hours before dawn, the terrible imaginings of the execution, Robert never believed that the king would turn and, with studied grace, speak directly to him. I stepped forward and said quietly, “Sir, you must tuck it into your cap.” He nodded and did as I directed. Then he turned to face the mob and prayed awhile with his chaplain. When he had finished, Colonel Hacker, the man who had summoned us to Cromwell, motioned for the prisoner to approach the block. Again the Stuart paused and, turning to me, asked, “Can the block be set no higher? I would kneel at the block and not be made to lie down upon the boards.”

For all his self-possession, there comes a time when the presence of the void looms too great and a quaking begins in the limbs. I said, “Sir, we have no time. It cannot be made higher.”

He nodded and lay prone upon the boards as one would lie down for a long sleep. Robert had not yet pulled the ax from its hiding place, but I could see its blade winking beneath the straw. There was no quick movement from him then as there should have been to pick up the ax; no setting of the feet in readiness to hoist the heavy shaft, bringing the blade down neat and true. A gentle moaning came from the man on the block and a pleading whisper. “For pity’s sake. Do it now, do it now.”

But Robert, filled with the immensity of the act he was about to do, had turned to standing stone. And so I pulled the ax swiftly from the straw and within five steps was beside the block. For pity’s sake, and for pity’s sake alone, did I, in one rapid movement, draw back, bringing down the ax with a clean and heavy stroke. And, with no accompanying words of the rights of men or the rule of governments or of wars won and lost, the head that had ruled as king fell from its body and lay staining the harsh and glistening boards beneath our feet.