Rebels and Traitors Read Online Free

tricky moment in history.
    The Triumph of Peace
was being presented to a King who certainly ruled without conflict. He had dismissed his truculent Parliament six years before. Now, though, his independence had an end-date for he had made himself penniless. To set the moment in context, that year of 1634 would see the notorious witchcraft trials at Loudun, the first meeting of the
Académie française,
the opening of the Covent Garden piazza in London, and the charter for the Oxford University Press. North America was being colonised with permanent settlements. Europe, from Scandinavia to Spain, was a theatre of blood, rape and pillage in what would come to be known as the Thirty Years War. The previous year, Galileo Galilei had been tried in Rome and forced to recant his opinion that the earth went around the sun; he now languished in the prison where he would die. In London the world revolved around King Charles. In England, without apparent irony, its ruling couple could be hailed in song by Shirley as
    ‘… great King and Queen, whose smile

Doth scatter blessings through this Isle …’
    The masque celebrated the King’s and Queen’s recent return from Scotland. There, causing as much offence as he possibly could to his strait-laced and suspicious Scottish subjects, King Charles had been crowned monarch of two kingdoms. He had worn ostentatious robes of white satin and had outraged the fierce Scottish Kirk by using a thoroughly Anglican ritual, conducted by a phalanx of English bishops in jewel-bright robes. This display was not designed to win the hearts of sober Presbyterians. Although always convinced of his personal charm, King Charles saw no reason to show diplomacy to mere subjects. Why should he? He was accustomed to uncritical praise — for instance, the nauseous blandishments he was about to hear in Shirley’s masque, calling him
‘the happiness of our Kingdom, so blest in the present government…’.
Perhaps only lawyers could have endorsed this. Even some of those paying for the masque may have choked on it.
    There were three kingdoms, in fact, some more blest than others. It was never thought necessary to have a coronation for the Irish, even to offend them. They were seen as savages, whose best land English monarchs and their favourites greedily plundered — more recently, an investment opportunity even to the well-off English middle classes. The Welsh skulked in a mere rocky principality; they were allowed the traditional honour of their own Prince of the Blood, even though, as was also traditional, they never saw their sovereign’s eldest son. The Prince of Wales was not quite four years old and so not allowed to stay up to watch
The Triumph of Peace.
Peace would play little part in his early life.
    On returning from Edinburgh, King Charles and his enormous entourage had been ceremonially welcomed back by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London. Gideon had gone to watch. Borne in the civic procession was the traditional naked sword — which might be prophetic. The staged welcome, with bare-headed reverence from the leading citizens, colour, vibrancy, noise, and crowds of applauding onlookers penned behind street rails, had similarities to the masque which the flattering lawyers then offered at Whitehall. It may have helped the monarch to believe that life was one great pageant of admiration, with himself its adored centre. But the grudging boy in the dotterel-suit was starting to wonder.
    Bulstrode Whitelocke, the go-getting lawyer who had arranged
The Triumph of Peace,
knew what he was about. The royal family lapped up such entertainments, oblivious to the obscene expense. This masque cost twenty thousand pounds, at a time when a well-to-do farmer with his own land might earn two or three hundred pounds a year and a cobbler was paid sixpence a day — but must supply his own thread. Apples were three for a penny and ribbon was ninepence a yard. You could buy a horse for two pounds, or