Rebels and traitors

Chapter Eighteen — London: May, 1643

Bad men bearing dubious offers always appear at the right time. So, once again, Bevan Bevan correctly chose his moment to manipulate his great-nephew, Gideon Jukes.

Bevan understood Gideon's situation. A young man of twenty-two, newly created a company freeman and recently cheered by military success, would be looking around for a woman. Unlike Lambert, a lively lad from puberty, the younger Jukes brother was a straightforward and still naive bachelor. Despite his heritage as one of London's merchant class, Gideon did not canoodle with other men's wives or flirt with their daughters. He had never engaged with lewd women in back-alley taverns, let alone visited the notorious brothels that lay over the river in Southwark. Even if he secretly considered that, Gideon liked the easy life; he was too frightened of discovery. He still cringed at the fuss over his dotterel escapade. For him, marriage was the only solution.

Bevan knew, too, that Parthenope and John Jukes were leaving Gideon to find his own wife. The dangerous times made them cautious. They wanted him to be happy, but it seemed less urgent to push Gideon into marriage than when they had begged Lambert to wed Anne Tydeman after courting her for years. Anne and Lambert now lived in the family home; if Gideon married, it raised tricky questions about how far his parents should go in setting him up. The Jukes always claimed their sons were equal, but in families equality can be elastic.

Although it was a decade since Bevan regularly dined at the Jukes table, once in a while he still arrived on the doorstep. He expected his slice of roast beef and demanded more gravy with it, as if he were the family patriarch. Then when John Jukes angrily stomped out to the yard for a pipe, Bevan — who was less mobile with his gouty legs — would push back his chair and pontificate on how Lambert and Gideon should manage their lives. Gideon was generally at home to hear it. Bevan seemed to have studied his pattern of behaviour.

'Don't leave it so long as I did! Marry while you have the spirit to manage your wife and brood.'

Startled by the idea of a brood, Gideon merely raised his eyebrows and scuttled off to join his father beside the burnt-out house-of-easement, where they gloomily enjoyed their tobacco and waited for the uncle to depart.

Undeterred, Bevan next brought his wife, Elizabeth, and her wide-eyed unmarried niece.

The niece, Lacy Keevil, was a relative through Elizabeth's previous marriage. 'Up from the country' — which only meant from Eltham — Lacy had been taken into the Bevan household to help with their rumbustious children. She seemed to know when to hang her head shyly among strangers. 'More to her than she shows!' Lambert muttered, conspiratorially. Gideon liked the sound of that.

He stared at Lacy Keevil. She looked too anxious to be dangerous. For her years — sixteen — she had a rounded, mature figure. Her rather ordinary face was a blank, with no signs of character to worry him, but she had exotic almond-shaped eyes that drew male attention, including his.

Proffered a paper of his mother's jumbles, Lacy treated Gideon as a special acquaintance. He fell for it. He knew he should be more wary; indeed, his previous lack of success with women made him wonder at his sudden popularity now. Still he let himself believe that Lacy had a sweet, shy personality to which he was keenly attracted, and that his looks and urbane charm had captured her heart. He decided he could handle the situation himself, so he confided in no one which meant nobody ever joshed him, 'What looks and charm?'

'Ask yourself what she wants,' Lambert's wife Anne alerted him, after she sensed tensions between the girl and her relatives. 'Why are Bevan and Elizabeth parading this puss about?' The hint came too late for Gideon.

A few days later Bevan turned up 'by chance' in Basinghall Street. Immediately his uncle broached marriage, Gideon threw himself at the idea. Already committed, he consulted Robert Allibone, who saw the case was hopeless so merely replied that he did not know the girl.

Because the match had been engineered by Bevan Bevan, Gideon's parents opposed it on principle, but their opposition spurred him on.

'He will never change,' wept his mother.

'He will never learn!' raved John.

Gideon would learn, and perhaps even change, though not yet.

Gideon Jukes and Lacy Keevil were married in early May, 1643. It was a large family wedding and differed little from such celebrations in peacetime. The bride was dainty and subdued. The groom felt racked with nerves. Killjoys grumbled into their handkerchiefs that the couple were making a mistake; the young fools should have waited until the war ended. Others retaliated that at a wedding in wartime, guests ought to make a special effort to be cheerful.

Despite the deprivations in trade, everyone flaunted finery. Money was available. Gideon had a new ash-coloured jacket with a subdued sheen, over full knee-britches, all fastened with gold buttons — several dozen of them in the suit. Lacy wore carnation taffeta which, as her Aunt Elizabeth said rather loudly, she filled extremely well. On the traditional walk to and from church, they were both sweetly excited and beaming with happiness. It was impossible to wish them anything but joy and long life together. That did not stop thin smiles among disparagers.

The feast took place at a neutral venue, chosen because neither family could agree who should host. It was the Talbot Inn, a large coaching inn in Talbot Court off Gracechurch Street, within smell of the Thames.

As the wedding party in their lustrous tissues went into the courtyard where long, laden tables waited, Gideon suddenly felt alien. The feast was for him, yet he observed the elegant procession as if he were no part of it.

Standing back in a gateway while guests chose their seats, his brother met an acquaintance, a younger man than Lambert, perhaps only a couple of years older than Gideon. Lambert introduced him: 'Edward Sexby son of Marcus Sexby, gent — absolutely sharp and straight, and valiant for our cause. He was apprenticed to Edward Price, of the Grocers' Fraternity' That was all the accreditation a man could need with the Jukes; Lambert in his jovial way invited Sexby to the wedding feast.

'It is not his party!' whispered Lacy crossly, the sweet new bride suddenly furious.

'Dear heart — your first quarrel with your in-laws!' Gideon was mildly pleased at how it smacked of domesticity. Lacy returned a cold stare, calculating that her new husband might be trickier to manage than the Bevans had promised her.

A buzz of rancour rose, as two very different families, intent on despising one another, took up positions over succulent chicken, pigeons and legs of roasted pork. The Jukes brooded over Bevan Bevan's past sins and his relatives' fecklessness, bitterly noting poor manners and shamelessly expensive gloves. The Bevans decried the sermon and the wedding breakfast, which the Jukes had provided. The Jukes led a large, loud contingent of cousins, friends, stockmen and errand boys, maids past and present, past maids' children, and present maids' sisters who were hopeful of becoming maids future. They also brought two tiny, extremely ancient ladies, hook-shouldered Aunt Susan and Good Mother Perslowe, who were no relation at all, but always attended family parties. By contrast, the Bevans and Keevils seemed oddly light on guests. Lacy's parents were absent, though presumably Elizabeth had invited them, and the journey from Eltham, at less than ten miles, should not have been prohibitive.

Parthenope Jukes seated herself in state at the head of the table squashed alongside Elizabeth Bevan (nee Keevil), a large-boned, low-bosomed, florid-faced woman whose significance Gideon had missed when his great-uncle married her. He now understood: all tradesmen's widows in the City of London were well-to-do, for they inherited one-third of their husband's effects automatically, another third if they were childless as Elizabeth had been in her first marriage, and perhaps the final third too if they had persuaded their man to leave them everything. Beyond that, printers' widows had a special position: exceptionally, a print business passed from deceased husband to widow, together with prized membership of the Stationers' Company. When the late printer Keevil was carried off by illness, he left Elizabeth with attractive assets. Bevan had always 'lived on his wits' — or lived off his relatives' as John Jukes redefined it.

'Bevan must have employed fantastic footwork to displace her journeyman!' Gideon sneered to Robert Allibone. It was more or less traditional that a printer's widow continued the business through her husbands' apprentices — generally remarrying one of the journeymen. They had the right to be affronted if she chose elsewhere.

Allibone smiled wryly. 'Ah! You did not know that I served my time with Abraham Keevil?' Gideon swallowed, thinking he had committed some faux pas, but his friend gently ended his suffering: 'Oh, the dame had her eye on me, but I was always set on Margery!'

The matriarchs had drawn up battle lines, using fashion for weapons. Elizabeth Keevil made much of the fact that her olive-green satin had been bought at the Royal Exchange. Parthenope scoffed at the Exchange galleries as dangerously newfangled, while she cruelly noticed how the low-cut gown's pearl-bedecked elbow-sleeves hung so far off Elizabeth's shoulders they gripped her fleshy arms like a straitjacket, hampering her use of cutlery. Wielding her own fork daintily, Parthenope gazed on her family's resplendent outfits; in theory religious Independents shunned ornament, but a wedding was a matter of status and a wedding where they loathed the bride's family called for even more dash. Parthenope herself was in dark old-gold damask that had used up a year's profits from imported peppers. Anne wore a white petticoat, embroidered with maroon flowers and foliage, under a scalloped-edge gown that she had pinned back for easier movement; alone of the women she had put on a coif beneath her hat, which modestly hid most of her hair. Lambert and his father had let themselves be buttoned into their best black silks; John had become frail recently, but Lambert was as solid as a slab of slate.

Parthenope and Anne had acquired their finery not at the Exchange but in the traditional city way: knocking on doors to request special arrangements. This procedure for favours could be a fiction. When pleading gentlewomen called to negotiate bargains in grocery, Lambert would either charge the normal price or underweigh the goods. 'Putting a thumb on the scale is a usual grocers' trick!' Elizabeth whispered to the bride, managing to suggest that Lacy's marriage would be continually marred by such treacherous wiles.

Perhaps using the pennies he had saved, Lambert had hired two sackbut-players. The men were far from virtuosos; their primitive trombones were soon dreaded by everyone.

As the meal progressed, Bevan began talking politics. Covert signals failed to silence him. 'There is always an uncle who must cause trouble!' hissed Parthenope under cover of handing a vegetable tureen to Anne.

Gideon and Lacy had not exchanged wedding rings. Bevan denounced this as religious extremism, then latched onto Anne Jukes as a target. He referred scathingly to her foray into Westminster with the female petitioners. 'Shall we be seeing your wife as a she-preacher next, Lambert?' Lambert, moving around the company like a large benevolent lord, calmly raised a tankard to his great-uncle, oblivious of insult. Anne pretended not to hear, until Bevan's next jibe: 'I hear that rebel wives in the City are donating their jewels to Parliament's war chest!'

'I am glad to know,' snapped Anne. She was forthright and fearless, which offended Bevan all the more. 'They shall have my wedding ring tomorrow. Lambert and I need no pagan symbols.' In an undertone, she scoffed to her mother-in-law, 'He is not even drunk.'

'Not yet!'

Fortunately Elizabeth Bevan missed this, since she was frazzled at the separate table where her children were being fed. She purloined the bride to help her control them. In the decade of her marriage to Bevan, Elizabeth had been constantly pregnant. Although it had not stopped her parading bare breasts and forearms today like a decadent royal maid-of-honour, under her stays she was big-bellied again at nearly forty. There were five surviving offspring, all squealers and snivellers; Arthur, aged seven, was a particularly repugnant child.

Anne Jukes felt obliged to leave her food and assist. Childless throughout her own marriage, Anne knew herself to be an object of both pity and disapproval, as if the situation was her fault. The long wedding sermon, with its emphasis on marriage for procreation, had been torture. Now other people's insolent children would be dumped on her.

'Why thank you, my dear!' Elizabeth simpered. 'Do not let naughty Arthur throw syllabub on your good gown. Come, Lacy, resume your place of honour — '

The Keevil brood eyed her balefully. Anne Jukes, who came from a jolly, good-tempered brewing family, squared up to them. In their home these children ran amok like little princes, governed only with cajoling and bribes. But as the delinquent Arthur now raised his bowl to hurl it 'accidentally' over her embroidered skirts, Anne grasped his shoulders and lifted him right off the wooden bench; she dumped him down in front of her like a slop bucket. He was still small enough to be manhandled and Anne's kneading of her much-admired white manchet rolls had given her sturdy arms. 'Now, Arthur. We have thanked God for providing this fine feast. If you have no wish to eat, you may stand on a stool in a corner like a school dunce, and there wait for all the company to finish.'

Amazed, Arthur thought of screaming. Silently, she dared him. He thought better of it.

Anne reflected that before she took herself to Westminster with the female petitioners, this brat would have got the better of her. Since she began joining in demonstrations, she had acquired quiet resolution. For two pins she would have told Elizabeth just where she went wrong domestically… As she took charge of the young Bevans, who were lace-collared like miniature royalty, she thought with some pleasure of her new rebel character.

'Your daughter-in-law is so good with the little ones!' murmured Elizabeth Bevan, as the delinquent Arthur slunk back to his seat while Anne firmly tied napkins around his sulky siblings' necks. 'So good for one who is barren!'

Anne, who had the finest instincts in Cheapside, looked up and saw it said.

Then Anne Jukes let her surly gaze dwell speculatively upon the bride. Elizabeth Bevan understood; Lacy's aunt stilled, suddenly cold in her heart.

As the afternoon passed, the meal became less formal. People came and went around the inn courtyards. Gideon found it awkward to converse with his new wife while all eyes were upon them. He had been at enough weddings to know that soon relatives would start chivvying him with lewd advice. At his side, the inscrutable Lacy politely smiled at everything he said, and as the day continued, Gideon realised that had she been an ink-seller, he would have found her too meek to trust.

He noticed that the sackbut-players, with quarts of drink inside them, were slightly more tuneful.

He saw Robert Allibone saunter away towards the stable-yard, so made excuses and followed him. Always diffident in company, Robert was prone to sneaking off by himself to read. When Gideon first appeared, he had been studying a pamphlet, but he pushed the paper inside his doublet quickly. Side by side, they pissed on the dungheap.

'What's the news?'

'It will keep. I will not spoil your wedding day'

Neither was in a hurry to rejoin the feast. Allibone addressed his friend with mock-solemnity: 'As your good groomsman, I should ask if you know what is expected of a husband?'

Gideon chuckled bravely. Few men who had been London apprentices needed an eve-of-wedding lecture. 'Lambert is threatening to lurk at the bedside with instructions… My father said: eat all that is set in front of you and always give your wife the victory in quarrels. My mother warned me not to spit in the hall, nor wear boots in the bedchamber, nor bring home a dozen ducks on laundry day — all needing to be plucked, glazed and roasted — not even though the purchase price was a great bargain.'

'Your father did that!' marvelled Robert, with admiration.

'And still lives,' Gideon confirmed.

It seemed a moment for confidences. Bevan and Elizabeth had set him wondering, so Gideon asked about the mysterious debt owed to Allibone by the Keevil estate. Robert's face clouded. 'It was an alphabetical debt.'

'Well, recite it.'

'Oh you know my distemper with stockholders…', 'Keevil held shares in the English Stock Company?' During his apprenticeship, Gideon had absorbed the history of printing in London. He knew how William Caxton had first set up in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, producing legal and medical texts, then Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, moved to Fleet Street, to be close to his lawyer customers. From early days the principle applied that authors should not attempt to make a living from writing; their role was merely to keep printers and booksellers in business. Over time, the stationers who provided raw materials — vellum and paper, ink, skins for binding — had gained control of book production. Only their liverymen could print, bind and sell books. The Stationers' Company was self-governing, so entry to the trade was always tightly controlled by insiders. Allibone believed it led to abuse. Under Queen Elizabeth, censorship bit. New books had to be approved by Privy Counsellors and archbishops; the Stationers' Company kept a register of licensed books and allocated to its members the right to print them. This system could be benign, giving work to less prosperous printers — or it could be corrupt. Robert Allibone called it vile.

Stationers' Company involvement was formalised further in 1590, when the English Stock Company was created by the Crown. The money was provided by a hundred and five shareholders. Those shareholders accumulated copyrights in books, copyrights which they passed to their heirs, heirs who were not necessarily printers — and almost never authors. Increasingly, shares in the English Stock and possession of licences went into the hands of booksellers rather than printers.

By the time the civil war began, the Stationers' Company was officially joint-partner with the Crown in imposing censorship and that was Robert Allibone's main grievance. 'A monopoly,' he raged. 'As surely as those on beer and soap that we deplored when the King sold them. Our own company, which ought to have been the first to protect our livelihoods, was coerced and corrupted, cozened and cheated into doing the King's and Archbishop Laud's will for them. The vicious system stank then and it still does. The Stationers' Company did the dirty work of censorship for Star Chamber. When Star Chamber was abolished, we believed the mire was cleansed, but now Parliament has its own machinery, the Committee for Printing- oh Lord, how I hate them! — and the same old lackeys are attempting control. But they will not succeed. The people have tasted enjoyment of a free press. There is no going back.'

'Where in all this,' inserted Gideon quietly (he was dogged in discussion), 'was your quarrel with the late Keevil and my uncle Bevan?'

Allibone spoke tersely. Abraham Keevil was my master. He taught me well. He was, I rue it, a holder in the English Stock and as a benefit he acquired a licence for printing the ABC primer, which is compulsory in every school.'

A very great bringer-in of cash, Robert.'

Assuredly lucrative.'

'And good work — we want the people to read… So then?'

'Keevil caught some plague or pox. His lads, being barely supervised, lacked the capacity or the application for such a large commission. He and I struck a verbal agreement for me to print copies.'

'You were independent?'

'I had set up alone, having inherited a little money. Keevil knew I would produce the job in timely fashion and decently done. It was an important contract for me. I believe it was a relief to him, too, to share the work with a man he trusted — as he did, for he had trained me. Then his illness finished him.'

Gideon worked out what had happened: 'On Keevil's death, his widow reneged. She placed the job elsewhere.' He wondered whether Robert's preference for Margery was relevant to Elizabeth's action.

'She took it back; organised the staff herself; stole my profit. Perhaps in the chaos of grief,' Robert conceded dryly, though at the time, he had become so aggrieved he had threatened a complaint to the Stationers' Company. 'I had the right of it. Elizabeth knew that. So Bevan Bevan was sent waddling around to see me, silkily proposing we should settle the matter with a fifty pounds down-payment and seven years' use of an honest apprentice…'

'You were robbed there!' laughed Gideon.

'So true. At the time it seemed my only hope of compensation!'

Their privacy was at an end. Bevan Bevan staggered out to the courtyard, his white cambric shirt billowing through gaps between the buttons on his scarlet suit. He had grown larger than ever, so his vast thighs were close to splitting the grandiose spangled seams of his bright britches.

'Go in to your bride.' Robert encouraged Gideon with a light push. 'Leave me with the spouting leviathan.'

So Gideon slipped away while Bevan began another slurred tirade against Parliament. Afterwards, Gideon guiltily acknowledged that he had seen the angry glint in Robert's eye. He sensed that his friend was keen for something stronger than argument. Perhaps it had to do with the pamphlet he had put away.

But this was no time to linger. As soon as Gideon returned to the feast, he was gathered up, chivvied and badgered, for his bride was by now waiting in the wedding chamber and he must hasten to her. The quicker he went of his own accord, the less danger that he would be escorted by a throng of tipsy, titillated onlookers. His mother kissed him, shedding a tear. Lambert tagged after him, playing the wise older brother.

'Let me at it, Lambert; this is one thing I must do for myself — '

Lambert blearily cited the musketeer's drill: 'Just ram home and withdraw your scouring stick.'

What? Shivering inside his new shirt, Gideon walked upstairs, aware of every creak in the treads. Downstairs he could hear good-humoured cheers and knew his health was being drunk. Sackbuts hooted hoarsely. 'That is just the rude advice I would expect from a Blue Regiment pikeman.'

Leaning on the lowest baluster, Lambert continued, 'Draw forth your match, boy. Blow the ash from your coal and open your pan…'

'Plug your mouth, fool; you have the drill all arsy-versy'

'Pray the weather be fair, so your weapon will fire — Nay, in the heat of engagement, brother, there is no more to it than this simple order: prepare, present and give fire!'

Groaning, Gideon quickly turned a corner out of sight. In his embarrassment, he opened the wrong door. Fortunately that room was empty.

Some kind soul had indicated the bridal bedroom with a wreath of flowers, hung on a nail outside. Still flustered, he grasped the handle and marched straight in. Lacy's almond eyes glared at him, above a dark coverlet. His new wife had just learned that husbands never knock. 'They cannot be changed!' her aunt had scoffed. Elizabeth should know, thought Lacy, with a hardness that would have astonished her new husband.

Gideon crossed to a chest beneath a window where he sat to pull off his shoes and stockings. He was unknotting the thin, tangled ties of his shirt when a commotion below distracted him so much he opened the leaded casement and leaned out. The noise brought Lacy to his side and they hung over the sill together. Parthenope, weeping with laughter, looked up and waved them impatiently back to their bower, though not before Anne shouted: 'Bevan Bevan has been put in the horse-trough by your friend Allibone!'

Gideon barked with laughter. 'Well that has done for the scarlet suit at last!' Anne gazed up at him fondly. Lacy, she thought, would be well served in her wedding bed, whereas lovemaking with Lambert made his wife feel like a damp sheet being flattened in a mangle…

Gideon turned to his bride. She was behind him again, kneeling on the bed, pulling off her nightgown over her head with both arms. The only other naked woman Gideon had ever seen was Mother Eve in a picture. He had pored over the woodcut — yet it bore little relation to real anatomy.

Lacy glared at him. Her long chestnut hair went right down to her

… She could sit on it. Gideon closed his eyes.

A man may look at his wife.

He opened his eyes again, now fully to attention for what he had to do.