Rebels and Traitors Read Online Free Page A

a blind one for half as much. Brought up to know the value of money, Gideon goggled at this extravagance. Twenty thousand pounds lavished on one night’s court entertainment could only mean enormous royal favour was expected in return. Would the King understand the bargain?
    Gideon began to see why the Queen’s love of such theatricals had attracted scabrous comment. As this procession was wending its colourful way along Whitehall to the Banqueting House, everything about it — including its staging on Candlemas, which was a Catholic feast day — looked like deliberate defiance against William Prynne, the puritan author of a fanatical tract called
Histriomastix: the Players’ Scourge (or Actor’s Tragedy).
Prynne had an obsessive hatred for the theatre. He denounced the Queen, who had shocked England by importing French actresses to take part in court masques, at a time when women did not appear on the stage. Worse, it was said that Henrietta Maria had scandalously danced in these masques herself.
    William Prynne, who was a lawyer, had been tried in the hated Star Chamber, which ruled on censorship. He was sentenced to a ferocious fine, the pillory and prison; he was doggedly continuing his activities from jail and would eventually be tried a second time, have his ears lopped and his forehead branded ‘SL’ for Seditious Libeller. He was already deprived of his Oxford degree, and expelled from Lincoln’s Inn, the very Inn whose more grovelling members had contributed to
The Triumph of Peace.
    Few of the satin-clad lords and ladies probably gave much thought to the imprisoned campaigner as the crowds gasped with delight at
‘Jollity
in a flame-coloured suit’ and
‘Laughter
in a long coat of several colours, with laughing vizards on his breast and back, a cap with two grinning faces, and feathers between’. But as they stamped their cold feet outside in Whitehall, Lambert Jukes and his uncle were discussing Prynne sardonically. Bevan had an intimate connection with literature nowadays. Those who love books love free ones best of all. Through his new wife, the printer’s widow, Bevan obtained reading material which — since the widow was extremely well-off — he had leisure to peruse.
    ‘Have you read this
Players’ Scourge?’
asked Lambert.
    ‘Nobody has read it,’ scoffed Bevan Bevan flatly ‘No man has a life long enough. We use this book to prop up a dilapidated court cupboard that has lost a foot. It is more than a thousand pages of bile! This is a mighty cube of invective, expelled like foul air from the posterior of one who professes never to visit the playhouse —’
    ‘Difficult, when the theatres are closed due to plague.’ Lambert sounded pleased to find this flaw.
    Bevan eased his bulk, trying to get comfortable on his lame leg. He and Lambert were squeezed into a dark corner opposite the Horse Guards Yard, to which Bevan had led them by a back route up from the river, passing through the woodyard, coalyards, and other palace offices. ‘They say Prynne’s book is a very conduit of foul-mouthed, narrow-minded, fearsome flame-throwing spite which the crazed author has gathered over seven years —’
    ‘And he calls the Queen a whore?’ Lambert was always direct. From their position, they could see the tall windows of the Banqueting House; within its warmth, persons who called themselves quality were pressed against the glass panes, craning out at the spectacle. The King and Queen would be among that richly dressed throng. From time to time a jewel flashed on the white neck of one of the ladies, whose high-waisted gowns with puffed sleeves and snowflake collars were like costumes for fairies in just such a masque as they were preparing to watch.
    ‘A
notorious
whore,’ concurred Bevan.
‘Not well advised!’ Lambert sniggered.
    As the torchlit procession continued past them, they watched many strange phenomena. To antique music representing birdsong, came a man-sized owl accompanied by a