CIGARETTE PAPERS

Southland Times, Issue 21894, 21 December 1932, Page 8

CIGARETTE PAPERS

A KING’S REVENGE. On the night of December 21, 1669, between fifteen and twenty of the king’s guards, under the command of Sir Thomas Sands, waited in Suffolk street, London, for the coming of Sir John Coventry, who was expected to pass on his way home. Coventry, speaking in a Parliamentary Committee of Ways and Means, had made a remark about the fondness of Charles 11. for the theatre, slyly asking if the monarch was interested in the actors or the actresses. This remark annoyed the King and when Coventry in the early hours of the morning saw the force approach him in Suffolk street, he divined its purpose quickly. Snatching a torch, he put his back to the wall and fought his assailants with sword and flambeau. He disabled O’Brian and several other opponents, but was finally overborne by superior numbers and disarmed. Then the guards slit his nose to the bone and left him. Andrew Marvell referred boldly to the incident in his “Instructions to a Painter”: While the King of France with powerful arms Gives all his fearful neighbours strange alarms, We, in our glorious bacchanals, dispose The humble fate of a plebeian nose. Which to effect, when thus it was decreed, Draw me a champion mounted on a steed; ' And after him a brave brigade of horse Armed at all points, ready to reinforce His; this asssault upon a single man. * * * ♦ ’Tis this must make O’Brian great in story And add more beams to Sands’s former glory. Parliament in its fury took special measures to deal with the principal actors, behind whom was the King. They were banished, and a special clause m the Act prevented the King extending a pardon to them. In adddition, to prevent a recurrence of the affair, the cutting, maiming and disfiguring of any man was made a felony without benefit of clergy and punishable by death. The Coventry Act, as it was called, remained on the Statute Book till 1828 when it was repealed. It is a curious circumstance that nine months before the attack on Sir John Coventry, his uncle, Sir William Coventry, threatened a revenge similar to that taken by Charles. Pepys records that Sir William understood that Killi—grew, the dramatist, intended to present him on the stage, and he wrote to the writer declaring that if any of the actors “did offer anything like representing him, he would not complain to my Lord Chamberlain, which was tqok weak, nor get him beaten as Sir Charles Sedley is said to have done, but he would cause his nose to be slit.” One wonders if this inspired the form of the King’s revenge. —CRITICUS.