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  Yet at the same time the suspicion that Anne’s family connections might have informed her outlook made her a potentially dangerous figure for the new regime, and so her first duty, upon the birth of John, was to safeguard her family estate of Ditchley Park. Given the Parliamentarian rapaciousness for repossessing property that belonged to its enemies, it was a task that required a mixture of guile, political intelligence and immense personal strength. Anne Wilmot had all three. Contemporary portraits of her, including one by Peter Lely, show a woman not without a certain stately glamour, with an aristocratic mien that her son inherited; but they also reveal a set expression that implied dissatisfaction with the laborious business of portraiture, and possibly even with the inevitable extravagance of such an ornamental process.

  If the king’s situation was delicate around the time of John’s birth, it worsened later in the year. Cromwell initially appeared not to have had any intention of executing Charles I, nor even of permanently imprisoning him. Instead, it was more likely that Cromwell hoped for political and religious reforms that would have given Parliament autonomy and turned Charles into little more than a puppet ruler. A more humble or even pragmatic king might have accepted Cromwell’s terms and bided his time for a resurgence in royal fortunes when Cromwell, always a divisive figure, either died or fell out of favour. Yet Charles, with all the hereditary arrogance conferred upon him by the divine right of kings, was impatient, and in November 1647 he fled his guards and began plotting a further series of alliances and intrigues with the aim of his restoration to the English throne and a final defeat of the Parliamentary forces. Cynically, he offered the Scots Presbyterianism in England in exchange for their support, which he believed would swing the balance of power to his side.

  He had miscalculated, and the results would prove fatal.

  For the average man or woman in 1647, more concerned for their and their families’ livelihoods than with the ideological, spiritual or political concerns of the day, the jostling for power going on at this time seemed impossibly remote, but its repercussions affected everyone. The first civil war was a bloody and prolonged conflict, turning families against each other and resulting in well over 100,000 deaths—​a vast number in a country with around six million inhabitants.

  The sides were unevenly matched, to say the least. The Royalists were a muddled, disorganized band who dealt in privilege rather than harsh realities, whereas the effcient New Model Army of the Parliamentarians—the ‘Ironsides’—was made up of a coalition of Puritans and radicals and dissenters. Their success was down to the revolutionary idea that it should be skill at arms, rather than social background, that determined rank and leadership. Against their superior numbers and equipment, the gentlemen amateurs of the Cavaliers were doomed.

  While battles had raged across the country, a vacuum had been created in which strange and unlikely people could flourish in the new ethos that was developing. Chief among these was Matthew Hopkins, the self-described ‘Witchfinder General’, who, in the period between 1645 and 1647, put hundreds of women on trial for suspected witchcraft, of whom at least 300 were hanged. (It is estimated that, of all the executions of this sort that took place between the early fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries, he was responsible for nearly half.) They were tortured in various enterprising ways, including searching for ‘the devil’s mark’, which could be something as ordinary as a birthmark or mole, and throwing them into streams tied to chairs to see if they floated. The results were typically fatal either way.

  It is highly likely that Hopkins was both sexually deviant and financially corrupt, pursuing his career more out of a desire to enrich himself than to save the country from an onslaught in supernatural visitation. His actions were tolerated by Parliament, albeit with some unease at his methods, in part because Hopkins was operating within the area of the strongest Parliamentary and Puritan influence, East Anglia. As Hopkins presented himself as a God-fearing man who was accomplishing the Lord’s work, an overstretched Parliament was not inclined to look too closely into his barbaric actions.

  Contrary to subsequent rumours that he was executed as a witch himself, Hopkins died peacefully at home in August 1647. Looked at in retrospect, it seems absurd and bizarre that, in the year John Wilmot was born, Hopkins would have been practising such an archaic and barbaric rite. Yet England was a divided place. Simultaneously, it was home to such thinkers and philosophers as Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan would soon become a key work, but it still clung to superstition and fear. The unknown could be exploited by anyone who saw that the world was changing and that the old order was about to be overthrown forever.

  The most obvious representative of the old order was, of course, Charles I. After the doomed second civil war of 1648, in which a series of Royalist-oriented rebellions failed to come together as a unified force, it became clear to the Parliamentarians that the continued presence of a scheming and untrustworthy Charles as king could only lead to further trouble. The increasingly zealous Cromwell, tiring of his inability to impose his will on the country, was said to have remarked in a fit of rage: ‘I will tell you, we will cut off the king’s head with the crown on it.’ This proved prophetic, carrying echoes of Henry II’s similar comments about the similarly troublesome Becket, centuries before. After Colonel Pride’s purge of the Rump Parliament, what had been unthinkable just a couple of years before​—​the trial of the king of England for treason—​now became a reality.

  For Wilmot, the news of the king’s imminent trial, and inevitable execution beyond it, were ghastly tidings indeed. Had an arrangement been reached with Cromwell that would have allowed Charles to continue as king, even in the most limited circumstances, then there is little doubt that Wilmot could have returned to England, albeit under close watch and the inevitable suspicion that all of the Royalists faced. As it was, he had little to do in France but await the horrible news. It is impossible to know whether he had any grand but foolhardy scheme to return to England in an attempt to save the king. Even if he did, wiser heads or practical considerations prevailed, and Wilmot remained at the French court.

  Charles’s trial proceeded much as his enemies wished. Cromwell ensured that the ‘traitorous’ king would be found guilty by a carefully selected kangaroo court of 135 amenable judges, with fifty-nine of them happy to sign the king’s death warrant. This was exactly what Cromwell had wanted; convinced that his victories meant that he had divine right on his side and that Charles was a man ‘against whom the Lord had witnessed’, he was content to ignore more mundane considerations in pursuit of his single-minded desire to seize absolute power.

  The only surprise came in Charles’s behaviour while on trial at Westminster Hall in January 1649. After his earlier arrogance and fecklessness, he proved his regal nature at the end. Accused of being ‘guilty of the blood that hath been shed in this war’ and a ‘tyrant, traitor and murderer’, he calmly refused to accept the court’s jurisdiction, saying that his right of kingship was divinely ordained ‘by old and lawful descent’ and that all his accusers represented was ‘a new unlawful unauthority’. Refusing to plead, he made a mockery of the court convened to try him, to the fury of his accusers.

  Found guilty essentially of being king, he was beheaded with a single stroke of the axe on the freezing morning of Tuesday 30 January 1649. The cheering and jubilation traditional at public executions were absent. Instead, one spectator described how ‘there was such a groan by the thousands present as I never heard before, and desire I may never hear again’. Perhaps it only then dawned on those assembled—​Royalist, Parliamentarian, Presbyterian or of no party—​what uncertain and troubled times awaited them.

  For the exiled Charles II, as the Scottish Parliament proclaimed him on 6 February, and his circle, his father’s death was a bitter shock. Having escaped England at the height of the Civil War in 1646, he had roamed Europe, heading first to his mother in France and then, in 1648, to The Hague, where his sister Mary and brother-in-law Willia
m were living, in a vain attempt to elicit military support from them. He had the poisoned chalice of kingship to contend with, which seemed to be little more than a thankless bauble. The price for his return to Britain with Scottish support was to accept Presbyterianism as the national religion, something that the new ‘King’ Charles, who was leaning towards Catholicism, was reluctant to countenance. The alternatives were either to waste his time at various European courts, or to return to England in arms and attempt to oust Cromwell and the Commonwealth and regain his crown and country. The immediate attractions of the latter were stymied by his lack of an army, while allying himself with any of the great powers of Europe, pro-monarchist though most of them undoubtedly were, raised the terrible spectre of England being invaded by a foreign army—​and of Charles, if he was to be restored to power, having to pay them off. Principles and the divine right of kings alone were not enough.

  Eventually Charles, wearying of his long confinement, took action to regain his throne by entering into a Faustian pact, signing a treaty with the Scottish Covenanters—​a Presbyterian movement that was implacably opposed to Cromwell—​at Breda on 1 May 1650. This treaty compelled him to recognize the Solemn League and Covenant, which promoted Presbyterianism as the national religion, and to acknowledge the Kirk of Scotland in England as well, which might have led to a struggle between his own instincts and the necessity of maintaining his crown. However, after the Battle of Dunbar in September 1650 saw the Scottish lieutenant-general David Leslie’s ill-trained and fractious coalition of Royalists and Covenanters annihilated, there was little hope left. Charles, who had arrived in Scotland on 23 June, took personal command of the army, but to little effect. The Battle of Worcester the following year was the final roll of the dice, and despite Charles’s bravery and quick-wittedness in his eventual escape, it proved to be a last hurrah. The Commonwealth was now the established order in England, and anyone who took sides against it did so at their peril.

  As the country tore itself apart, Anne Wilmot was faced with great personal difficulty. Keeping Ditchley Park out of the clutches of the Commonwealth, which was keen to reward its supporters with the redistributed property of the former regime, would have been a difficult task for any woman living on her own, and it proved a constant struggle for Anne and her agent John Cary to retain her estates, which also included property in Buckinghamshire from her earlier marriage. There had been a 1650 ruling by the Committee for Compounding (which had been established in 1643 by Parliament in order to confiscate the property of Royalist supporters) that all of her husband’s property was forfeit to the government; this she fought on the grounds that her estates had belonged to her previous husband rather than to Wilmot. She might have stated that she had ‘many fears’ as to her lack of experience at managing land, but her pragmatism and toughness, as well as her contacts with still influential figures such as Clarendon and the former MP for Aylesbury and John’s guardian, Sir Ralph Verney, ensured that she managed to retain her properties, despite her and Wilmot’s Royalist connections. Anne had found herself in a changed world, and it was one in which her family had to tread carefully.

  There were many remarkable things about Cromwell’s Common-wealth, even before he wielded absolute power and founded the Protectorate. Chief among these was the way in which religious freedom, the bedrock of this new English identity, was tolerated only if it was the right sort of religion. Catholics were persecuted, but this was nothing new. Where Cromwell distinguished himself was in all but obliterating the Anglican Church, first, by forbidding ministers to practise, and second, by the heavy-handed way in which churches throughout the country were robbed and desecrated. This had begun in the Civil War and continued throughout the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Clergymen would be prosecuted for blasphemy and ejected from office for a variety of offences, ranging from the reasonable (fornication, drunkenness and fighting) to the absurd (Morris dancing or public reading of the Book of Common Prayer). Things were so bad by 1656 that the diarist John Evelyn wrote of a collection organized by the Presbyterian minister Thomas Manton ‘for persecuted and sequestered ministers of the Church of England, whereof divers are in prison’.

  It was not just the clergy who faced a dictatorial regime. Press censorship had begun in 1647 and sought to abolish any potential sedition in pamphlets or other documents. Personal morality was also central to the work of the Commonwealth, and the Adultery and Fornication Act of 1650 made ‘the abominable and crying sins of adultery, incest and fornication’ punishable by death, with any unfortunate children resulting from these couplings automatically disinherited. Clearly this sort of bastardy was widespread enough at the time to warrant legislation. Offences of fornication or brothel-keeping attracted stiff prison sentences, whipping and branding (tellingly, there was only one successful prosecution for adultery recorded, indicating that there was a public distaste for conviction in these cases). Activities such as bear-baiting and cockfighting and all vaguely pagan rituals were suppressed, theatres were closed and their trappings disposed of, and Christmas, itself associated with ‘carnal and sensual delights’, was officially cancelled. Punishments for stepping out of line were severe: whipping was common for such minor infractions as playing football, a fine was imposed for going for a walk on Sunday and not observing the Sabbath, and imprisonment for swearing was normal.

  This stood in stark contrast to some of Cromwell’s more lenient and liberal-minded actions. Tolerance for Jews was reintroduced for the first time since the mid-thirteenth century, allowing them to live and work freely. It is equally likely that the cynical Lord Protector saw the potential for using them as ‘able and general intelligencers’, useful in providing information about enemies both foreign and domestic in exchange for their new sanctuary. Although Cromwell—​a man who infamously demanded that he be painted ‘warts and everything’ in an apocryphal but pleasing story—​had no interest in literature, theatre or art, believing them to be tantamount to graven images, he did have a surprisingly strong interest in music, which was believed by the Commonwealth Parliament to convey a sense of moral purpose. He allowed the first English opera to be produced in 1656—​William Davenant’s The Siege Of Rhodes—​although it was described as ‘recitative music’ (music being permitted) rather than allowing that it had any taint of the theatrical.

  Likewise, although the immorality and drunkenness that would be found in taverns was anathema to the Puritans, who described them as ‘the great nurseries of mischief and impiety in this Common-wealth’, the difficulty in regulating them in any serious manner meant that, although hundreds were closed down, the vast majority continued to flourish untroubled by the government. The English love of a good pint of beer was evidently not to be disturbed by the transitory arrangements of a new political system.

  As there was now no chance of a military defeat of the Common-wealth, the rebellion had to be intellectual. The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 work Leviathan had been written over the previous decade and proved to be hugely controversial. Hobbes’s central argument was a complex and multifaceted one, a world away from the more simplistic views of God and man that the Commonwealth espoused. His point was that a social contract had to exist between government and its people, and that the best way of maintaining order and avoiding the chaos that would ensue via civil war or society’s breakdown would be to have the rule of an absolute sovereign, not necessarily the king but someone with the level of power that the monarch had traditionally wielded. Hobbes was a well-known associate of the Royalist court in Paris, where he had headed in 1640 when his treatise The Elements of Law had angered Parliament and made his continued presence in England untenable. There, he encountered Henry Wilmot and others, but the secularist and quasi-atheist sentiments that he described managed to enrage both Royalists and Commonwealth supporters alike. In that, at least, he managed to unite popular opinion. He returned to England in 1651, submitted himself to Cromwell’s council of state, and was allowed to live quie
tly in London without fear of prosecution on the understanding that he accepted Commonwealth authority. Nonetheless he, like many other perceived dissidents, was kept under close watch.

  While all this occurred, Henry Wilmot remained far away in Paris. Eventually, Anne Wilmot tired of coping on her own and, in 1653, sent her elder children over to De Veau’s Academy in the city. She herself followed early the next year, intending to see Wilmot and press him on his paternal and spousal obligations. Whether Wilmot and Anne and their family were reunited remains unclear—​some chronicles attest to a meeting in Brussels in that year, others talk of a fruitless search for an errant husband—​but it is likely that Wilmot, newly created Earl of Rochester and enjoying the dilettante life of the French court as best he could, did not want the encumbrance of a wife or children and made himself scarce. He had recently had some success with diplomatic efforts in Europe: he persuaded the German court to give Charles nearly £70,000, which was paid sporadically but nonetheless managed to keep the exiled court together for a few years.

  John, meanwhile, remained at home in Ditchley, living apart from both his parents and his brothers. He was occasionally visited by his mother’s extended families, including the St John and Lee clan, and by Verney, but the appeal of conversing with a small boy was limited. His early life was a fairly typical one for a privileged child, with wet nurses, tutors and various other parties ministering to his welfare. An early teacher of his was a Cambridge-educated clergyman, Francis Giffard, who was responsible for indoctrinating him in the ways of God and man, teaching him the Bible. It is too glib to say that the seeds of John’s lifelong engagement with religion began here, but a later letter that he wrote to his son Charles, in which he expressed his belief that the early days of the boy’s education would make him ‘happy or unhappy forever’, at least indicates an interest in spiritual and personal development that might have been inspired by his own experiences.