Tales of the West Riding (6 page)

At first the Trial went well for the accused; Strafford was too strong, too clear-headed, too able in speech—perhaps even too innocent of treason—to succumb to the ill-supported charges which he had to answer. The assembly broke up in uproar, the King and Strafford laughed gleefully at each other across the hall.

“He is singing psalms of thankfulness,” said Slingsby to Sir William next morning, smiling all over his honest face.

“Aye, but it will not serve him,” said Sir William.

“How? Do they dare not to acquit him?” cried Slingsby, indignant.

“Dare they let him escape them?” thought Sir William, but he was too wary to utter such a dangerous thought aloud, merely smiling vaguely and shaking his head.

And indeed a Bill of Attainder had already been put forward in the House of Commons, and before the Trial could end was passed quickly through its first and second readings. Even when the third reading passed, Strafford took it lightly, for (as emerged
from chance words here and there from Slingsby) he had the King's promise, written in a secret letter, that he should not suffer in life, honour or fortune. Unfortunately rumours of this letter escaped into London and beyond, and the country boiled. The King went to the Lords and made a foolish speech; it grew clear that King or no King, Parliament meant to have Strafford's head. The Bill passed the Lords, and required only the King's signature to make it an Act. What would happen if he refused his signature, men trembled to contemplate. Then Strafford wrote to the King, releasing him from his promise.

“Now that the Bill is passed, I must see all letters which leave the Tower, Mr. Slingsby,” said Sir William formally. “Those are my instructions.”

“Even this? Even a letter to His Majesty?”

“Even this,” returned Sir William.

It was a noble letter, and yet there was one sentence in it which made Sir William's neat grey curls stand on end.
My consent shall more acquit you herein to God than all the world can do beside,
wrote Strafford. No doubt it was true, Strafford alone could give release from a promise made to him; but imagine telling a King that he needed a subject's intervention between himself and his God! Even Sir William, staunch Parliament man as he was, thought this going rather far. The letter was, of course, in Strafford's own hand, and the very writing, square and strong, so different from the elegant penmanship approved at Court, was enough to vex King Charles, a man of refined taste, by its look of obstinacy.

A most anxious and exhausting weekend followed. Would the King sign the Bill of Attainder? The Tower guards were doubled, a new Constable was appointed, Sir William hovered about near the staircase to Lord Strafford's apartments all day, while Slingsby rushed madly in and out with continual suggestions for compromises, escapes, petitions and so on, all quite useless. Lord Strafford sent away his dinner untouched. Sir William, as was his duty, called formally upon his prisoner to remonstrate. Lord Strafford—the moment the King signed the Bill he would revert to plain Thomas Wentworth, but as yet his title held—was sitting by the fire, looking pale and for the first time anxious. He listened impatiently to Sir William's polite remonstrance, flipping his thumbnails, and at the close said only:

“You won't happen take twenty thousand pound to let me escape, Master Balfour?”

“Your lordship's supposition is correct,” said Sir William stiffly, infuriated both by the insult of a bribe and the bluntness with which it was offered.

The long day passed, the evening came. The King signed the Bill.

One of the King's secretaries came to tell Thomas Wentworth of this decision. Sir William allowed a decent interval to elapse after his departure, then entered to inform his prisoner, according to his instructions, when the execution (by axe) was to take place. Wentworth, sitting still in his chair by the hearth, wore a look of intense surprise and perplexity.

“Well! You've heard the news, Sir William?” he said in a puzzled tone. “What do you think of it, eh? I can't make head or tail of it. I'm not conscious of any fault in myself to deserve it. I made sure some compromise, a retirement from public life or such—”

“I fear you must prepare yourself for Wednesday,” said Sir William, omitting any form of address.

“
Wednesday?
Good God!” exclaimed Wentworth. His perplexity fell from him; confronted by a certainty so swift and terrible, he was all sentience, all anguish. “
Put not your trust in princes,
Sir William!” he cried bitterly.

“
For in them there is no salvation
,” concluded Sir William silently, enjoying a sentiment so much in tune with his own.

“They're never with you at the crunch,” said the doomed man.

After the execution, when all the unpleasant details were over and the crowd dispersed, Slingsby came to Sir William about some small chattels of the Earl's which had been left in his apartments.

“Thomas Wentworth's goods are all forfeit,” said Sir William sternly.

“I wished merely for some small remembrance of him,” said Slingsby, almost in tears.

“Well, come then.”

They went up the stairs together.

“He was a grand man. Warm-hearted, generous, fearless, a great administrator. He set things straight. He held all matters clear and unforgotten in his mind. Thorough he was, indeed; is that a fault?” said Slingsby as they climbed.

“Parliament called him a tyrant, and I stand on that,” said Sir William.

“But why should his enemies pursue him without mercy? Why not allow him to live privately, far from public business?”

“Well, stone dead hath no fellow, as they say,” said Sir William. He spoke cheerfully, for it was an immense relief to him to know he would never hear Lord Strafford's carping again. “But can you wonder? He thought himself always right, others always wrong, and did not hesitate to say so. Never satisfied. Always denigrating, always on the grumble. Never anything pleasant, always something unpleasant, to the ear. No allowance made for the frailties of human nature, except his own. So he had scarce any supporters of his person; he had vexed them all. His harsh carriage brought him to the axe, believe me.”

“He was a Northern lad,” said Slingsby, frankly weeping. “It is our custom in Yorkshire to speak our mind.”

They entered the room together. It looked very empty, for such furniture as belonged to the Tower had already been removed for the use of another prisoner. A shaft of sunlight struck through the narrow window across the floor. The door hung awry.

“Aye, he was a Yorkshireman,” said Sir William grimly. “They like to disagree.”

“He was right about the hinge, choose how,” said Slingsby.

“The malice of the soul,” wrote John Trevisa in the fourteenth century—though I believe he translated the passage from an earlier writer in Latin—“the malice of the soul is more in a woman than in a man.” I do not like to think that this is true, but certainly the story of Rosa Beaumont and Joe Booth seems at first sight to be an illustration of the statement. Although Rosa spoke to Booth only three times from their meeting till the day of her death, she ruined his life, made it continually bitter to him; it is possible too that in some small measure she was responsible for the disaster which presently overtook the whole Yarrow valley.

It all began one pleasant summer Sunday afternoon in the mid-eighteen-forties. A great many people from down the valley were standing along the hillsides gazing across the calm sunny waters of the Ling reservoir. Water—soft, limeless water—is an absolute essential for textile processes, and the hills and moors of the millstone grit Pennines with their heavy rainfall are admirable gathering grounds. Accordingly a few years earlier all the Yarrow Valley millowners had eagerly supported this big reservoir project. To build an embankment across the narrow head of the steep valley, just below the confluence of two strongly tumbling streams, with two culverts and a wooden channel to carry the outward flow straight down the valley, seemed a simple way of securing for them the regular and powerful water supply they all required for their cloth manufacture. A bill for the construction of eight reservoirs was presented in Parliament and passed; commissioners were elected, land acquired, the embankment constructed; a “drawer” appointed to regulate the outward flow of water by appropriately placed valves.

The area and content of this Ling reservoir were found to be so satisfactorily large that the building of any further reservoirs
was dispensed with; Ling was enough. The manufacturers whose mills were strung down the long valley towards the neighbouring town of Annotsfield paid rates to the Commissioners for the use of the water and were well pleased with their bargain.

Recently, however, the great containing embankment had been behaving ill. Steep and stone-faced within, on the outer side this wall was covered in grass and earth and sloped more mildly down to the fields far below. Its top, eight feet broad, formed an agreeable promenade this sunny afternoon, except that here and there the surface had sunk a little—in one place indeed it had sunk a good deal. On this promenade were walking at present a good many of the original commissioners with their wives and families; they paused, prodded the earth with their walking sticks, and pointed to a tiresome small stream emerging, on the left as one looked down the valley, fifteen or twenty yards below the foot of the embankment. This stream, it appeared, was alleged by the drawers of the reservoir to be the cause of the subsidence in the embankment. It was evident that workers from Yarrow, Yarrowfirth and Yarrowfield, the villages down the valley, had heard rumours of defects in the embankment, for there they all were in their Sunday clothes, standing on the steep slopes whose bases formed the sides of the reservoir, their children scrambling and screaming along the rough paths, threatening at any moment to fall into the water but somehow always being hauled back to safety at the last moment by irate mothers.

Among the commissioners on the embankment stood Rosa Beaumont and her father. Most of the men came and had a word with them, not only because Thomas Beaumont owned the largest mill in the valley, was a magistrate and an influential member of the reservoir commission, but because of Rosa's outstanding attractions. A tall, finely made girl, with a brilliantly pale complexion, glorious blue eyes and a mass of vivid red-gold hair—it was said, in the phraseology of the day, that her hair was so long, so abundant, that she could easily sit on it, and this was in fact true—Rosa was also agreeably social; she had a witty tongue, talked well, and knew how to flatter the opposite sex by deferential agreement at the right moment. She dressed in good taste, had a ringing laugh, enjoyed superb health and had been well educated (for a girl of that period) in a very expensive
boarding-school in London. It was a downright shame, said the men, that such a handsome, lively girl should be tied to her mother's bedside. Mrs. Beaumont, a plain large-boned woman with fine eyes, of a good East Yorkshire family, had done something to her spine as she slipped on the steep steps from the hillside down to Mill House, returning probably from one of her errands of charity. So there she lay, had lain these last many years, on bed or couch, with her daughter and a maid to look after her. (Not that these filial duties seemed to keep Rosa away from many social enjoyments, however, observed the women acidly.) The women indeed generally liked Mrs. Beaumont; the men thought her rather dreary, and commended her husband's decorous fidelity, with their tongue perhaps a little in their cheek.

For as regards Thomas Beaumont, they did not much care for him—short and bald and pompous and thinking rather more of himself than was necessary even if his family had lived in the valley for two or three generations and owned land. (They privately jeered a little at his finicky way of speaking.) At the same time they had to admit that he was a shrewd man of business, he'd enlarged Beaumont Mill, built a new dyehouse across the river, and a row of cottages halfway down the hillside just beyond his own mansion, for his workers. Yes, there was more in Thomas Beaumont than met the eye; must be. His gold watch chain had cost a pound a link. Pity he had no son to carry on the name and the business. He'd be marrying off his daughter to some suitable up-and-coming young manufacturer, no doubt, said the Yarrow Valley men, directing their sons' attention to Rosa. Not that it needed much directing; her looks and her tongue drew plenty of young men around her. But to please Rosa and her father both, a young man would need to have all his wits about him; Rosa was no fool and her father doted on his daughter.

Now as the commissioners talking to her father, growing heated in argument, began to use technical phraseology incomprehensible to Rosa, her attention strayed, and glancing around for somebody more interesting she saw two persons standing near as if wishing to join the conversation. “Persons” was the suitable word—suitable, that is, for the use of Rosa, who had all the class
feeling of the period—for they were obviously working men, dressed in their pathetic Sunday best. One was old, bent, grey, gnarled, weatherbeaten; the other, by his likeness obviously the son of the first, a tall strong young man. They had no business to be standing on the embankment, of course, thought Rosa, slightly tossing her head.

“Father,” she said in a low tone, touching his arm.

Not averse to leaving the argument, for like everything else connected with Ling, he thought crossly, it had become irritating, Mr. Beaumont turned to her. Rosa with a glance indicated the father and son. To her surprise, Mr. Beaumont brightened, and took a step towards them.

“Well, John! Well, Joe!” he said.

“My father would like to have a word with you about this here wall,” said the young man. “To tell you what he thinks, like.”

“Well, he should know better than anyone else, I suppose,” said Mr. Beaumont. “Come on now, John; let's have it. What's making the wall sink, eh?”