Of INK, WIT and INTRIGUE Ebook and Paperback both available worldwide.

Chapter One - Infant to Young Scholar

CHAPTER ONE

INFANT TO YOUNG SCHOLAR

All Fools’ Day, Ditchley Manor, Oxfordshire 1647. I cried out, freed from the confines of my mother’s womb. Exhausted, she lay upon her bed over blooded linen sheets. Two women had attended her during this perilous ordeal and I was straightway taken and swaddled by Midwife Sarah.

‘Sarah! Sarah! How, towards the end, I came to loath your very being, your vigilant dexterity having ensured my survival and continued existence. How I now wished you had faltered and secured John Wilmot’s infant mortality.’

The courageous lady lying-in was Anne Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, a staunch Protestant and a woman of immeasurable strength and fortitude. She was pretty of face but strong willed and with a gritty determination to succeed throughout her long years.

Anne St. John, for that was my mother’s maiden name, was the eldest daughter born to Sir John St. John of Lydiard Tregoze in the county of Wiltshire. Her first betrothal in 1632, her eighteenth year, was to Sir Francis Henry Lee of Ditchley, known as Harry. This happy and fruitful union, during its seven years, celebrated the birth of a daughter and a son. After Harry’s tragic death from the virulent smallpox in 1639, his widow, who was pregnant with his child, gave birth to a second son. She remained a widow for five years until in April 1644 she married Henry Wilmot, First Earl of Rochester, who was to be my father. He was handsome, brave and alluring to the female sex and soon won my mother’s love and affection. She unhappily saw little of him, he being a prominent royalist officer, and as our King’s faithful ally he was all too frequently engaged in aiding the cause.

In September 1651, four years after my birth, my heroic father accompanied Charles, the eldest son of our executed King, in his flight from Worcester and England after Cromwell’s victorious army trounced the royalists. Father’s enforced exile abroad left my mother overseeing alone her three sons, her darling daughter, Eleanor, having died in infancy. During these troubled times, as a young child, I listened intently to tales of Cavaliers’ courage and their daring in the bloody conflicts at Edgehill and Naseby and so learned that their defeat in the latter of these had sealed this country’s fate.

As a boy, in the gardens and orchards at Ditchley, I enacted fantastical battles riding on the swiftest black horse, dressed in the grandest clothes and wearing a handsome, large brimmed hat adorned with golden feathers. My silver spurs flashed in the sunlight against my horse’s heaving, sweating flanks. I gloried in many a victory won by this fearless royalist. In truth, my only real fears were of the long and arduous sermons preaching religious horrors from the pulpit of our nearby church.

The Countess employed Francis Giffard, a local rector and fervent man of God, to take charge of my early education at home. Giffard’s potent Protestant preachings of damnation, hell’s fires and the evils of sinful thoughts and deeds so terrified me that when darkness fell they fuelled my imagination beyond my control, their damnable legacy holding terrors until I came to embrace death itself.

When I was nine years old I too was exiled, accompanied by Reverend Giffard, to commence my further education at Burford. This pretty, small town is built on the long slope of a hill where at the bottom stands the Grammar School with the River Windrush running close by and the parish church of St. John the Baptist within a stone’s throw. In this house of God, in May 1649, after his defeating of the Levellers nearby, Cromwell imprisoned three hundred or more of those brave mutineers after murdering three of their company pitilessly; Corporal Perkins, Cornet Thompson and Private Church.

A few brutal older boys at the school mercilessly taunted my young fellow pupils and me, as fresh boys to the school, and treated us roughly. Although I had my share of harsh punishment during the day, at times when the tutors were not in attendance, I was fortunate indeed having lodgings in the town so was mercifully excused the evil night terrors perpetrated on the resident younger boys. The bruising and battering of their bodies was all too evident as they sat looking pale and in pain on the hard wooden benches of the classroom. Alas, they were too terrified to speak of their agony and courageously endured their lot. Mr. John Martin, our headmaster, turned a blind eye to the oppressive régime meted out by these few, he believing such treatment would make sober and God-fearing men of the younger boys. His conviction was evidently ill founded, it having nurtured such malicious souls.