Rebels and Traitors by Lindsey Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

unfortunately left in a veal olive; it splintered into the unwary printer’s hard palate.
    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.

Chapter Four

London: 1641-42
    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,