Rebels and Traitors (2 page)

Gideon Jukes first publicly became a rebel when he put on a feathered suit to play a bird.

Few who knew Gideon later would have expected he started his defiance of authority by acting in a royal pageant. As his elder brother cruelly said at the time, the best thing about it was that Third Dotterel’s costume included a complete feathered head with a long beak, which hid the boy’s erupting acne.

They lived on the verge of political upheaval, but at thirteen adolescence overwhelms everything else. Gideon Jukes in 1634 knew little of national events. He was bursting out of his clothes with uncontrollable spurts of growth. He was obsessed with his ravaged complexion which he was sure repelled girls, his fair hair which at the same time attracted more female attention than he could handle, and the thunderous wrongs done to him by everyone he knew. He was convinced other people had luck in unfair abundance. He believed he himself lacked talent, friends, fortune, looks, likeability — and also that he had been denied any skills to remedy the situation. He was certain this would never change.

That year, he devoted himself to being obnoxious. His worried family railed at him, making his grudges worse. After one particularly loud and pointless family argument he decided to become an actor. His parents would be outraged. Gideon was bound to be found out. But there is no point in rebellion if nobody notices.

The Jukes were tradesmen, hard-working and comfortably off. John Jukes was a member of the Grocers’ Company of the City of London. His wife was Parthenope, née Bevan. His elder son was Lambert, his second Gideon, with fifteen years between them. Between Lambert and Gideon, Parthenope Jukes had borne nine other children. After Gideon there had been three more. None survived infancy.

So Gideon Jukes had grown up a younger son, separated by many years from his more fortunate brother. Lambert was also a grocer. As the eldest, he was in the English tradition his father’s pride and joy; he was clapped on the back by fellow members of the Grocers’ Company; he was greeted with familiar joshing by other grocers. Most importantly, Lambert would one day inherit the family business near Cheapside and their home, a substantial merchant’s house in Bread Street.

Lambert had entered into his apprenticeship the year Gideon was born; Gideon never had a chance of sharing and this imbued him with a hatred of unfairness. As soon as Lambert completed his indenture and became a journeyman, he strutted around the family house and shop as if he already owned them. Becoming a master grocer was a particularly smooth process when your family had been in the fraternity for the past two centuries; Lambert seemed fair set to be an alderman before Gideon left puberty.

Lambert was a large character too. London apprentices were rowdy, opinionated youths, who revelled in their uniform of leather apron and short hair. They took to the streets in boisterous crowds whenever there was a chance to demonstrate their opposition to anything. King Charles gave them plenty of opportunity. Lambert had been thrilled by apprenticeship life, and long afterwards, if the lads took to the streets for a riot, he liked to be there.

Lambert Jukes was a big, fair-headed tough, always popular and strong enough to roll a barrel of blue figs one-handed, which he would do all along Cheapside, aiming at butter wenches. He had large numbers of friends. He could have had many lady friends, but being known as a good steady fellow, he cast his eye over the prettiest, then settled for Anne Tydeman. She had stayed on his arm for a long time, but Lambert had now reached twenty-eight and after letting Anne sew her trousseau linen resignedly for years, he declared he was ready to marry her. That was more cause for despair in his younger brother.

In truth, Lambert kicked Gideon around no more than any elder brother would; Lambert had no need to be jealous and he was by nature reasonable. Only a churl would have taken against him. It was pointed out to Gideon at home that he was fortunate. His father encouraged him; his mother excused him; even his brother tolerated him. Gideon saw none of this, only his own bad luck. As soon as Lambert brought a wife home, Gideon knew, his own position must deteriorate. No chance of being a cuckoo in the nest: he had been tipped over the edge of it while still squirming in his shell.

He was due to leave home in any case. His father was fussing over arrangements for his apprenticeship. It would be with another member of the Grocers’ Company, who would take the youth into his home and business for about seven years. In his current irritating phase, Gideon waited until almost the last moment, so that his father was under the greatest possible obligation. Then he refused to do it.

That was bad enough. Soon his great-uncle stepped in and blew up an even greater typhoon by suggesting that Gideon should
not
be a grocer.

The Jukes brothers were moulded by the aromatic trade of their father. As children they had mountaineered over barrels of dates and currants. They bartered for other boys’ spinning tops with pieces of crystal sugar — the fine dust that surrounded sugar loaves when they arrived in their chests — and they swapped caraway comfits for conkers. Gideon had been scarred for life by falling off a delivery cart. His memories were dominated by a kitchen redolent with allspice and nutmeg. He was a toddler when he first learned the difference between cinnamon bark and a blade of mace. A good baked pudding would suffuse the whole house, buffeting anyone who opened the front door. It would linger for three days if nothing else was baked — but something always was.

His brother Lambert’s very name recalled the moment his mother felt her first birth pang, which had happened most inconveniently when she was moulding the decorations for a Simnel cake.

There I was, mopping up my waters with a pudding cloth. I knocked the pestle and the ground almonds right off the table — my hands were so oily from the paste, I could not open the door to call for the maid. Now I feel queasy if I ever look at marzipan balls —’

And how was the cake?’ young Gideon would ask gravely.

‘Not one of my best. I had quite forgot the zest of orange.’

‘And it had squashed balls!’
Gideon would mouth at his brother, making this not just obscene but personal. In reply Lambert rarely did worse than throwing a cushion at his head.

They ate well. Generations of Jukes had done so, ever since their first member of the Grocers’ Company set up a home and business just off Cheapside. The certainty of good dinners in the Jukes home had attracted Bevan Bevan, Parthenope’s uncle, who dined frequently with them while making irritating claims that
he
had organised their marriage. John rejected any idea that he owed his wife to anyone else. Most Jukes men assumed they could win any woman they liked simply by expressing an interest. Historically they were right.

John groaned every time Bevan visited, but Bevan had promised to be a patron to Gideon. Bevan’s will would generally be mentioned about the time in a meal when Parthenope served a quaking pudding or an almond tart. For over a decade, as his great-uncle gorged on the spiced Jukes cuisine, it was expected that Bevan would leave Gideon an inheritance. A bachelor for fifty years, he had had no other heir. Then with no warning he married Elizabeth Keevil, a printer’s widow. From the moment they entered the marriage bed — or, as the Jukes always reckoned, from a couple of months beforehand — Bevan began prolifically fathering children of his own.

‘Let him dine at his own table from now on!’ snarled John, through a mouthful of ‘Extraordinary Good Cake’. ‘A little more ginger next time …?’

‘I think not!’
retorted Parthenope, tight-lipped. The set of her jaw was just like Gideon’s.

Bevan politely kept away, especially after strong words passed between him and Parthenope. But once Gideon started to resist his father’s plans, it was Bevan Bevan who added a fuse to the gunpowder by suddenly offering to pay for an apprenticeship with a printer his wife knew. John and Parthenope saw this as the ultimate treachery.

Robert Allibone, the printer, genuinely needed assistance with his business. Gideon was proposed to him by Bevan as a bright, honest boy who was keen to learn and would stay to a task. No mention was made of his troubled behaviour.

Bevan’s intervention caused uproar. Gideon, of course, found it exciting to be at the centre of the quarrel. Parthenope had already spoiled two batches of buttered apple pudding, and John accidentally set fire to the house-of-easement in their yard while gloomily taking too many pipes of tobacco as he brooded. The half-built house-of-easement had never been in use, because it was a long-term project of the kind that remains a project. Nonetheless, John had been able to sit in the roofless structure enjoying quiet philosophy and flaunting at their neighbours, none of whom had one, the fact that the Jukes were constructing their own dunny. Now they must continue to throw their slops into the street and to have their nightsoil collected by sinister men with carts who tramped foul substances into the hall floorboards. John Jukes, who was only allowed to smoke out of doors, had to sit on an old molasses barrel, grimly contemplating the burnt ruin as he blamed Bevan for seducing Gideon to an alien trade.

Gideon complained rudely: ‘It is the loss of the project that matters to you most!’

‘You are an ill-mannered boy’ was his father’s mild reply. ‘Yet you are mine, dear child, and I must bear my disappointment.’

When Parthenope noticed that John’s mole-coloured britches had been irretrievably singed in the blaze, another tempest started, during which Gideon stormed out of the house close to tears. That was when he ran into Richard Overton, a casual acquaintance with a yen for causing trouble, who told him that bit-parts were being offered in a court masque.

This was a fine way to offend everyone. The Jukes saw the devil in theatricals, and royal entertainments were the most perverted. As respectable traders, they solidly opposed the debauchery and idleness of courtiers; like many Londoners, they were even starting to oppose the King himself. These were the years when King Charles struggled to rule without a Parliament. His methods of financing himself grew ever more contentious. People in business viewed his ploys as interference. Even at thirteen, Gideon knew this. Royal monopolies were the sorest point. Whereas once patents had been granted only for new inventions, now all kinds of commodities were licensed only to royal favourites, who charged exorbitant prices and grabbed huge profits. Selling salt and soap had always been the prerogative of the grocers, so that rankled; beer was a staple and so was coal for Londoners. The City had also been outraged by Ship Money, the King’s hard-hitting tax for the navy, not least because this tax was devised to finance a war about bishops, a war they disapproved of. John Jukes declaimed the cry of one Richard Chambers who had been imprisoned and fined for his part in a protest strike: ‘Merchants are nowhere in the world so screwed and wrung as in England’.

‘Screwed and wrung!’
had chanted the Jukes sons, who had an ear for a catch-phrase.

The family also held Independent views in religion. They belonged to one of the puritan churches that lurked down every side street of the City parishes; Gideon was of course taken there every Sunday. John contributed to the fee of a radical weekly lecturer who was frequently in trouble with the Bishop of London for his unorthodox preaching. The Jukes believed in freedom of conscience and freedom of worship. People who never bowed the knee in church were sceptical of a civil ruler who expected his subjects to kneel to him. ‘If God does not require ceremony why should a king?’ They feared that Charles Stuart, encouraged by his French wife, was trying to impose Catholic rituals upon them, and they hated it. They homed in on Queen Henrietta Maria as an object of hate because she loved theatre and masques. Theatres, every Londoner was certain (because it was true), were haunts of prostitutes and rakes.

So if there was one thing Gideon could do to upset his family, it was listening to Richard Overton and volunteering to take part in a masque — a masque, moreover, which the lawyers from the Inns of Court were to present to the King and Queen.

He had never acted before. Nevertheless, he came cheap, so he secured a very minor part as one of three dotterels, small quiet birds of the plover family. He was young and naïve enough to be embarrassed when his two acting companions, slightly older boys, made jokes that among dotterels it was the female bird who engaged in displays while the male tended the nest.

Gideon’s own sense of humour was more political; he was smiling satirically over the masque’s title, which was
The Triumph of Peace.

Rehearsals were brisk. During them, Gideon soon realised that he was a player in a work of numbing obsequiousness.
The Triumph of Peace
had been written by the popular poet James Shirley. It relied on spectacle rather than a fine script. All anybody wanted from it was flattery for the King, with gasps of delight at the rich costumes and at the complex engineering of the stage machinery.