Bulstrode Whitelocke, the go-getting lawyer who had arranged The Triumph of Peace, knew what he was about. The royal family lapped up such entertainments, oblivious to the obscene expense. This masque cost twenty thousand pounds, at a time when a well-to-do farmer with his own land might earn two or three hundred pounds a year and a cobbler was paid sixpence a day — but must supply his own thread. Apples were three for a penny and ribbon was ninepence a yard. You could buy a horse for two pounds, or a blind one for half as much. Brought up to know the value of money, Gideon goggled at this extravagance. Twenty thousand pounds lavished on one night's court entertainment could only mean enormous royal favour was expected in return. Would the King understand the bargain?

Gideon began to see why the Queen's love of such theatricals had attracted scabrous comment. As this procession was wending its colourful way along Whitehall to the Banqueting House, everything about it — including its staging on Candlemas, which was a Catholic feast day — looked like deliberate defiance against William Prynne, the puritan author of a fanatical tract called Histriomastix: the Players' Scourge (or Actor's Tragedy). Prynne had an obsessive hatred for the theatre. He denounced the Queen, who had shocked England by importing French actresses to take part in court masques, at a time when women did not appear on the stage. Worse, it was said that Henrietta Maria had scandalously danced in these masques herself.

William Prynne, who was a lawyer, had been tried in the hated Star Chamber, which ruled on censorship. He was sentenced to a ferocious fine, the pillory and prison; he was doggedly continuing his activities from jail and would eventually be tried a second time, have his ears lopped and his forehead branded 'SL' for Seditious Libeller. He was already deprived of his Oxford degree, and expelled from Lincoln's Inn, the very Inn whose more grovelling members had contributed to The Triumph of Peace.