Lane, J. (1952). The Sealed Knot. Looe, Cornwall, House of Stratus, Stratus Books Ltd.

A fascinating book because Lane, although still firmly Royalist, casts as her main characters an aesthetic poet and scholar, so beloved of many Cavalier Romances, who betrays the Sealed Knot he created; and a womanising drunkard (his best friend) who rapes his sister in a fury, and proves an ineffectual spy. Broderick (the action adventure hero) is described as "He was selfish, inordinately vain, and when injured utterly remorseless" (140).

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The basic premise is that Sir Richard Willis creates the Sealed Knot to raise money for an uprising, aided and abetted by his friend, the reckless and lower class yeoman, Broderick. Sick, and desperate to keep his mistress,Willis sells them out, and ends up praying that Charles does not return. The last seen is Broderick returning for his sister Diana to marry her, and sweep her into a future in which General Monck has forced open the gates of London and welcomed back the King. The book concludes, "The King was coming home, but not through the agency of this once dear society, rather despite it." (231)

 

Willis is a romantic, who believes, "Why, when such numbers of loyal gentlemen throughout England yearn for a restoration, did they not rise for their King?"(in 1655). (3) For him money is the answer. So he is very vulnerable when Morland "made Sir Richard see hmself as a romantic dreamer" (34) It doens't help that Hythe and Villiers see it as hopeless, or that others point to the use of foreign troops as alienating Royalist supporters.

 

 

The book is impressively snobbish, sometimes in period "In an age when the closest relation if noble was addressed as 'my lord,' this yeoman accosted his betters by their surnames only" (17) or Compton's declaration that the people of London are "a parcel of mechanics. They will talk, my lord, but they will not act." (102) which is a rather odd thing to say given the previous decade. Villiers adds, 'in lofty contempt, "I suppose," remarked Villiers in lofty contempt, "that their weapons will be tailors' bodkins and butchers' cleavers." (102) which is a very typical insult from the previous decade.

 

and sometimes not at all, as when Wilis enters a company of "cits", and finds "all were ostentatiously dresses and had in their behaviour that arrogance of mere wealth... The gentlemen of the company... wore breeches for all the world like petticoats, trimmed with ribbon loops not only at the waist but down over the side-seams, and some had lace frills spilling over their knees... their long hair was carefully curled and a few of the more daring had adopted this new fashion of hair-powder...

Their female companions little City misses in their teens, were quite as ornamental...Their sleeves were slashed, their young faces smeared with paint like a whore's, their shoes had enormous roses... and while some wore huge lace collars like their gallants, others had their gowns cut so low in front that half the flattened bosom was exposed." (54-54)