Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque, and the English Seventeen ...

As the verse says, Davenant published the preface before leaving for America. In 1649 he had been appointed firstly Treasurer of Virginia, then Lieutenant-Governor of Maryland and, finally, one of sixteen members of the Council of Virginia, by the young king, Charles II. However, his vessel was boarded by the Commonwealth Navy in the Channel, and he was captured as a royalist spy and imprisoned. While imprisoned, first on the Isle of Wight and then in the Tower, he occupied himself with continuing to write Gondibert, and he published the first two books, with the incomplete third book, together with the preface, and commendatory poems by Waller and Cowley in London in 1651.

He was nearly executed for treason, but people of influence, like Bulstrode Whitelocke, who knew him from the Inns of Court, interceded for him, and eventually, he was freed and allowed to live in London under licence. Once free of imprisonment, he married the widow of Doctor Cademan who had treated him for syphilis. She died a few months later, having brought him a little money but also four stepsons. Although he had spent the money that might have gone to the widow’s sons, he did make himself responsible for the boys after her death. Shortly afterwards, he was again imprisoned in the Tower, this time for debt, but he petitioned Cromwell, who pardoned him, and he was freed. With the luck that seemed to follow him all through his life, he was allowed to go to France, where he married a wealthy French woman, Henrietta-Maria du Tremblay, and brought her back to London. She bore him nine sons, eight of whom outlived him, and after his death in 1668, she managed the theatre business on their behalf until they were of age. Her money not only enabled him to live fairly comfortably but also to afford to put on entertainments during the Interregnum in which he used his experience of the theatre and the masque stage to show painted scenes. The kind of knowledge he drew on, of painted scenery and its possibilities, which he would have gained from the work of Inigo Jones and John Webb, is examined in the next chapter.