The Swinbrook Terror

By Charles

This book is the third and final volume in the William of Widford trilogy. The previous books are Skeleton in the Sope House and Mission to a Distant Land. After his career as a special agent of the Crown, William has retired to West Oxfordshire, hoping for a peaceful life as a country gentleman. He is suddenly confronted with a series of mysterious and terrifying attacks at first on livestock and then also on people. His investigations to find the culprit are interrupted by being recalled to the royal service to investigate suspected treason and espionage. He is eventually successful and settles back into his quiet life to write his memoirs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Feb 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491892954

Charles

Charles Lansford Nickerson has a Masters of Arts in History from the University of Northern Colorado and a BS in History from Iowa State University. He is also a Veteran of the United States Air Force, where he served as a Missile Combat Crew Member. He also taught History in Christian Schools for 10 years. He has previously published two acclaimed Poems. Irene Jean Nickerson is a graduate of Ankeny Christian Academy in Ankeny, Iowa. She is currently a student at Central College in Pella Iowa.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Introduction

My name is William of Widford and I was born in the village of Swinbrook in the Hundred of Chadlington in Oxfordshire on St. Dunstan’s Day, 19th May in the year of Our Lord 1490, almost five years after the Battle of Bosworth, which had placed Henry Tudor on the throne of England as King Henry VII. My father was John of Widford, a local landowner. When I was eight years old I was admitted to Westminster School in the County of Middlesex. I was in my sixth year at the School, when I discovered a skeleton behind a wall panel. The panel was from the Old Sope House, which had become incorporated in the Old School House in the year of our Lord 1421. Much of the woodwork had been used to build the New School House, when that was constructed closer to the Abbey forty years later. With the help of the School Master’s daughter Joan, I tried to identify the skeleton. We began to suspect that it was in some way connected with the theft from King Edward I’s Treasury in Westminster Abbey. This theft had been committed in the year of Our Lord 1303, by a gang led by one Richard Puddlicote or Puddlicott. The perpetrators had been captured and executed and their leader’s skin was nailed to the door of the Abbey treasury as a warning to future potential thieves. However, a considerable portion of the loot had never been retrieved.

As part of my investigations I travelled to Italy and discovered some important clues in Rome. A rogue band of Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem was also searching for the treasure to use to finance an uprising against King Henry V II; they kidnapped Joan to force us to reveal what we had discovered. I rescued her and once we were back in Westminster we found much of the remaining treasure, a hoard of gold plate, in a house in the Sanctuary, which had once housed Caxton’s printing press. We returned the gold to the Royal Treasury and, as a reward, the Lord Treasurer sponsored me for a place at King’s Hall, Cambridge. Before I went up to King’s Hall I was betrothed to Joan.

While I was at Cambridge I was abducted by vengeful Hospitallers, assisted by Nicholas FitzEdwin, an old enemy from Westminster School and now at Clare College, Cambridge. Both Nicholas and I were taken to the Hospitallers’ citadel at Rhodes, where we were imprisoned. We became friends and escaped together, but were captured by Barbary Corsairs and sold as slaves in Tunis. After two years we escaped to Sicily, bringing with us Fatima, our master’s daughter, with whom Nick had fallen in love. Fatima was baptised, taking the name of Theodosia; Nick and she wed in Sicily. We returned home in the year of Our Lord 1509; during our absence His Grace King Henry VII had died and been succeeded by His Majesty King Henry VIII. We went back to Cambridge, to complete our studies and the following year we were both successful in our disputations for our Tripos, England had seemed peaceful under Henry VII, but beneath the surface Yorkist conspiracies had abounded, often supported by foreign monarchs. To counter these, a body of intelligencers, royal secret agents, had been established. Following our Tripos disputations we met a royal intelligencer, Sir Robert Curzon, who persuaded us to become agents for the King, while at the same time we should study Common Law at Lincoln’s Inn.

Once we were employed by the Crown we saw reports from King’ Henry VII’s agents, some of which were dated only a few days after his accession. He clearly had had the intelligence network in England all ready to start working; it had almost certainly been reporting to him while he was in exile, I always strongly suspected that it had originated in a pre-existing network of Lancastrian agents, probably set up by John Morton, Bishop of Ely, before the bishop fled to France on the collapse of the Duke of Buckingham’s revolt against King Richard III in the year of our Lord 1483. The Italian humanist and scholar, Dominic Mancini, who visited England in the year of our Lord 1482, described Morton as ‘trained in party intrigue’. In France Morton quickly joined the group of exiled Lancastrians, who supported Henry Tudor as Pretender for the Throne of England. Whatever intelligence network Morton and Henry Tudor might already have devised, they must have refined and extended it while at French royal court, following the example of King Louis XI of France. King Louis was known as The Spider, because of his extensive web of informants inside his realm as well as outside it. When he died in the year of our Lord 1483, his web of agents was continued by his successor Charles VIII.

Less than a year after his accession, King Henry VII appointed Morton Archbishop of Canterbury and a year later created him Lord Chancellor. In the latter post he proved a shrewd extractor of ‘benevolences’ with his famous Morton’s fork, telling his Commissioners of Taxes If the subject is seen to live frugally, tell him because he is clearly a money saver of great ability, he can afford to give generously to the King. If however, the subject lives a life of great extravagance, tell him he, too can afford to give largely, the proof of his opulence being evident in his expenditure. A man of such an ingenious mind, some people would say warped mind, was clearly well suited to building up a network of secret intelligencers. The costs of the royal intelligence service appeared in the Treasury account rolls, but were described euphemistically as the expenditure of the King’s special diplomatic agents.

The intelligence service was continued and indeed greatly expanded by His Majesty King Henry VIII. We were sent on a number of investigations and missions at home and abroad on the orders of Cardinal Wolsey acting for King Henry VIII. Our most important and final foreign mission was in the year of our Lord 1528, when we were sent to India to try to set up trade links with Babur, the Mughal Emperor; this was in order to break the Portuguese trade monopoly, which had been established by a papal bull from Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope. We succeeded in our mission, but were captured by the Portuguese on our journey home. Thanks to the help of Hussain, John and the rest of our loyal servants, both English and foreign, we eventually escaped and returned to England in the year of our Lord 1531, with the treaty. Babur had died while we were prisoners of the Portuguese, but the treaty was honoured by his eldest son, Humayun, who had succeeded him. I subsequently learned through various channels that fearless English merchant adventurers had been encouraged by the news of the Mughal treaty and were now flouting the Portuguese embargo and coming home with cargoes of exotic eastern spices, silks and other goods, which they sold at a substantial profit in England and in Northern Europe.

Cardinal Wolsey had died in disgrace shortly before our return. Thomas Cromwell, who had been his protégé, had managed to avoid Wolsey’s fall and had replaced him as His Majesty’s chief counsellor. He appreciated the value of our work and retained us in the royal service. Cromwell was a devious and ambitious man, who maintained power by collusion with the King’s almost insane fear of treason linked with his obsessional desire for a son to confirm the continuance of the Tudor dynasty. We were increasingly expected to spy on innocent individuals, who for some reason had offended His Majesty or had aroused his suspicions. Cromwell’s right-hand man in all of these activities was the totally unscrupulous and corrupt Richard Riche.

Two years after our return Riche received a knighthood and was appointed Solicitor General. Although he was a Roman Catholic, Riche was the leading enforcer of Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy, in which Parliament declared that King Henry VIII was the supreme and only head on earth of the Church of England, rather than the Pope. In April of the year of our Lord 1534 Sir Thomas More refused to swear allegiance to the Act; four days later he was a prisoner in the Tower of London, where he was joined a few months later by John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

The following January Henry VIII formally took the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England. He appointed Cromwell his Vicar General and Vice-Regent in Spirituals, with the responsibility of setting up commissions to visit and report on the religious houses. Within a year, this had led to the Act of Dissolution of Lesser Religious Houses, which affected three hundred and four houses; two hundred and twenty were seized immediately by Richard Riche for the Crown. For a long time many of the smaller religious houses had totally failed in their role of providing free care and education for the local people. It was all they could do to train a few novices. It was therefore hoped by many of us that the monies raised from the expropriated monastic property would be used to support existing schools and colleges and to found new ones; it was over this subject that Anne Boleyn made an enemy of Thomas Cromwell, who was instrumental in channelling most of the money to the Crown. He was well aware that the King, who now wished to be known as His Majesty, had aspirations of playing a leading role on the Continent of Europe, including trying to win back the territories which English Kings had held in France a century before. Most of the money was expended on displays of splendour at court to impress foreign ambassadors and in raising armies and involving them in foreign conflicts. His Majesty’s father had carefully avoided both of these highly costly activities and had left the country solvent. Despite the considerable funds raised by sale of the property of the suppressed religious houses, His Majesty’s profligate expenditure seemed likely to render England impoverished.

In June of the year of our Lord 1535 More and Fisher were charged with high treason and were put on trial. In the trial Richard Riche