Rebels and Traitors (6 page)

Gideon had always known that Robert Allibone was sceptical of authority. All through his apprenticeship Gideon had spotted that their shop sold some inflammatory material. The master never involved his apprentice. Seditious almanacs’ were only ever printed by himself; they were kept in a locked cupboard and were quietly passed to customers who knew in advance what they were buying. Gideon now started reading them.

Once they moved to Basinghall Street, Allibone’s yearning for reform became more open. ‘Print brings knowledge. What we publish can show the people their rights and liberties.’

He had chosen his new premises deliberately to bring him amongst others of a like mind. Basinghall Street seemed close to respectability as it wound around the Guildhall and several livery company halls. But Gideon soon realised that their narrow shopfront was less important than their even more ramshackle back door. Behind where he and Allibone worked and civilly served aldermen with tide tables and news-sheets, accessible through adjoining yards and over a wall with convenient footholds, lay Coleman Street. This was a hotbed of radical printers and several extreme religious groups had meeting-places there. This was where the women preachers gathered and gave soaring sermons to their free-thinking sisters, and occasional free-living brothers. Coleman Street also contained the Star Tavern, which was to become famous as a haunt of Parliamentarian conspirators.

Gideon felt he was living at the turn of an extraordinary period. All generations complain about the government, but he felt a distinct tingle that this would be different.

Nobody really intended to start a civil war. Most past wars had been fought against foreign aggressors. Others were to decide who should be king, not whether a ruler was a bad king — though if he
was
a bad king that helped to validate any usurper. In a highly unusual gesture, Scottish King James had acknowledged that he was invited to succeed Queen Elizabeth by his new English subjects. His son Charles never entertained any such concept; Charles believed God had given him authority, which none could question. Puritans and other Independents, who talked to God directly, heard a different message. Why would the Lord have chosen a rickety, ill-educated, devious autocrat, married to a manipulative foreign Catholic, a man who was at once desperate to be loved and yet had an impressive flair for causing offence? While earnest subjects tried to find a compromise, a compromise the King never thought necessary, the nation slipped by a series of shunts and bumps into armed conflict. Since there were neither foreign aggressors nor pretenders to the throne, people called it a war without an enemy.

It was never foreseen that the struggle would turn into a revolution. Everyone was clear that it was treason for subjects to take up arms against the king. On both sides there was horror of the coming bloodshed. On both sides there were many who hoped to preserve the peace.

There was, initially, a junto’ of aristocrats setting up to challenge the King’s authority after he took back their traditional powers and privileges to grant to his own favourites. The earls of Northumberland, Warwick, Bedford, Hertford, Pembroke, Leicester and Essex were men of land and lineage whose ancestors had held great power; they were also backed among others, by lords Saye and Sele, Mandeville and Brooke. These plotted secretly how to wrest back influence the King had taken from them. They all owned homes in the country where they were out of reach of the court, and also houses in London between which they could flit like sociable moths, right under the King’s nose. Their family trees were so interconnected they could scarcely be untangled to draw them on paper, as intricately linked by blood and marriage as lace, with a web of younger brothers, stepsons, sons-in-law, even bastards. They were patrons to others, further down the social chain yet educated and energetic — lawyers, secretaries and men of business — who would eventually be significant in the House of Commons. The junto members were Presbyterians and puritans; they loathed the bishops’ influence in secular affairs. They cultivated their own links with foreign states. Some had considered escaping to the New World to form a godly commonwealth more to their liking. But instead they were colluding with friends, and although it was treason to invite a foreign army into England, they formed an alliance with Scotland which would have very long-term consequences.

The King became embroiled in dispute with the Scots. They were to feature frequently and often cynically in events. Back in 1637 in Edinburgh, a kerbside cabbage-seller called Jenny Geddes had flung her stool at the head of the Dean of St Giles Cathedral, bawling in protest when he used the hated new Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Two years later, encouraged by the English earls’ junto, the Scots rebelled in arms against the King’s imposition of High Anglican bishops. They were pacified. In 1640 they rebelled again.

Desperate for money to finance an army, the King summoned a Parliament for the first time in eleven years. Gideon barely remembered the last time this happened, though he paid attention now. He could not vote. He did not own freehold property.

New members were returned after a hotly contested election. They insisted they would only grant the King funds
after
discussing abuses of royal prerogative. The King testily dismissed this ‘Short Parliament’ after only three weeks.

The Scots invaded England. The King raised some troops, a rabble who were soundly thrashed. Advancing south, the Scots demanded £850 a day merely to keep a truce. In November the bankrupt King caved in and summoned the ‘Long Parliament’. It passed an act that it could sit in perpetuity and it was to last for almost twenty years.

This time members were determined to take control. The King’s closest and most hated advisers, the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud, were impeached: accused of treason and thrown into the Tower of London. Other royal supporters fled. Radical members of the House of Lords were imposed as Privy Councillors. Of course there was no way to force the King to follow their advice.

To Gideon, this was a heady period, when it seemed reform could not be stopped. Strafford was tried and executed. Ship Money was declared illegal. The hated Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber were abolished. The seditious pamphleteers, Burton, Bastwick and Prynne (author of
Histriomastix,
the book which had libelled the Queen for performing in masques), were pardoned.

In August the King travelled to Scotland to negotiate peace. In November he set out for home. During his absence, members of the House of Commons had taken a detailed audit of their complaints. An emergent reformer called John Pym compiled a
Grand Remonstrance,
a daunting state-of-the-kingdom review. The Remonstrance would be read out to the King in full by messengers from Parliament; they would need vocal stamina. A bitter compendium of over two hundred clauses listed every possible grievance in church and civil life. Singled out were unjust taxes, with an enormous list of land encroachments, distraints of trade, monopolies and fines. The most impassioned outcry condemned the evils of the Star Chamber, which had organised censorship.

Even while it was in draft, secret copies of the Grand Remonstrance circulated in Coleman Street. In next-door Basinghall Street, Robert Allibone quoted with relish
: ‘“Subjects have been oppressed by grievous fines, imprisonments, stigmatisings, mutilations, whippings, pillories, gags, confinements, banishments.
’”

Gideon snatched the copy.
‘“After so rigid a manner as hath not only deprived men of the society of their friends, exercise of their professions, comfort of books
’”
-
ho! ho! —’”
‘“use of paper or ink, but even violated that near union which God hath established between men and their wives, whereby they have been bereaved of the comfort and conversation one of another for many years together, without hope of relief…
”
- Comfort of books -
this is excellent for our trade, Robert!’

‘We shall see …’ Allibone was rightly cautious. Printers would soon be summoned to the bar of the House of Commons to account for seditious material, and in coming weeks an order would be given to collect certain books from stationers and burn them. The conclusion is good.’ Allibone retrieved the paper.
‘“That His Majesty may have cause to be in love with good counsel and good men”…’

Gideon pulled a face. ‘Why not simply say they hate the cut of his beard?’

Revolts come and go but young men remain the same. At twenty Gideon Jukes was obsessed with beard and whisker design. With fair hair and equally fair skin-tones, the current fashions made him look from almost any distance as if he had a long upper lip and a pointed chin. He had let his hair grow down to his shoulders, an unsuccessful experiment to show he was no longer an apprentice, but was tormented by whether or not to remain clean-shaven.

Robert had been beardless as long as Gideon had known him, his chestnut hair clean, trimmed and parted centrally. For all the usual reasons, Gideon wanted more dash. He had been brought up to aim for a plain appearance — but, having given much thought to this, he knew women would not be tempted to adventure by a demurely respectable look.

‘I saw King Charles once.’ Gideon chose not to mention that he had been acting in a masque at the time. (One thing was sure; he could not have a courtier’s beard.) ‘His Majesty smiles to right and left — but does not see or listen.’

‘He must hear this.’

And if not?’

‘I fear he will rue it.’

And I fear we shall all be hanged,’ replied Gideon, the pragmatist. It did not hold him back from supporting the Remonstrance.

When the King arrived home from Scotland, surprisingly, he was received with fervent rejoicing. He entered London in procession and enjoyed a four-course feast in Guildhall. This did not go down well with Robert and Gideon nearby in Basinghall Street. Church bells pealed and the fountains ran with wine. There was divisiveness, however. The King dined in his majesty with the House of Lords; the Lord Mayor and alderman, though his hosts for the event, were allowed only to form an audience in the upper gallery. The House of Commons was snubbed entirely; none was invited.

The Scottish Presbyterians had been pacified, but the Irish Catholics rebelled, fired by resentment towards the many English settlers. Horrific stories of massacre and mutilation circulated.

Is this true, or invented to arouse passions?’ Gideon demanded as he read the details, all eagerly believed by the public, who were appalled and terrified.

‘Oh, we must publish and let the people judge,’ his partner answered.

Gideon was silent for a moment. He remained an idealist. ‘People will believe these stories
because
they are printed.’

A few printers provided reasoned comments but most were selling sensational stories. The King viewed Ireland as a conquered province full of savages. Now came sickening accounts of the revenge taken by these downtrodden people: the Lord Justice forced to hide in a hen-house, a bishop’s family found shivering in rags in a snowdrift, an immigrant Englishwoman hanged by her hair from her door, a bulky Scotsman murdered and rendered into candles, allegedly hundreds of thousands killed, pregnant wives and young daughters raped, babies spitted on pikes, children hanged. Official reprisals followed. Horrors carried out by the King’s forces were then reported, horrors on a scale that even shocked veterans of the brutal war on the Continent. The soldiers’ terrible deeds were cited as illustrations of the King’s personal cruelty.

Amidst terror that Irish rebels would cross to England, bringing such atrocities with them, men of conscience carefully read the news-sheets. Many were turned into supporters of Parliament by their revulsion for the royal power that had caused, encouraged, tolerated and apparently remained unmoved by the inhuman events.

The
Grand Remonstrance
was passed in the House of Commons by a majority of only eleven, after a tense all-night sitting. Gideon had begun to take serious notice of what Parliament did. Where Robert had the hard attitude of a man who had been knocked about by life, Gideon was open, fresh and eager to receive new ideas.

People began to issue petitions of their own, many sent from remote parts of the country. All the London apprentices, thirty thousand of them, signed one. They then flocked around Parliament, armed with staves, oars and broomsticks, but were cleared away by the Westminster Trained Bands, for ‘threatening behaviour’. They moved on and mobbed Whitehall Palace. This was when Queen Henrietta Maria was said to have looked out and christened the lads with their short haircuts ‘Roundheads’. The apprentices took it up eagerly. Meanwhile staider demonstrators flowed down the Strand to Westminster, members of the lower and middle classes from one shire after another, beseeching Parliament to urge the King to abandon his evil counsellors, as if people believed all the country’s ills were the fault of bad men who had bamboozled him.

The abolition of the Star Chamber and official censorship directly affected printers. Robert and Gideon were furiously busy. News-sheets erupted onto London streets, giving reports of Parliamentary debates. They were cheap, and the public devoured them. It was the first time in England that detailed political material was available without crown control. The first tentative pamphlets were followed by a rash of competing
Mercuries, Messengers
and
Diurnals.
Many were printed in and around Coleman Street. Robert and Gideon produced their share.