THE VIZARD MASK
Fiction
Fitzempress' Law
King of the Last Days
The Morning Gift
Daughter of Lir
The Pirate Queen
Non-fiction
The Stately Ghosts of England
Road From Singapore
THE VIZARD MASK
LONDON NEW YORK SYDNEY TORONTO
This edition published 1994 by BCA
by arrangement with Michael Joseph Ltd
First Reprint 1994
Copyright © Diana Norman 1994
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
The moral right of the author has been asserted
CN 1432
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent
Author's Note
There was a Restoration actress called Peg Hughes and she was the first woman to play Desdemona on stage. She became Prince Rupert's mistress and bore him a child, Ruperta. I have adapted and elaborated what little is known about her life to my purposes, including in it a few - though by no means all — of the humiliations imposed on those real-life first actresses.
William III, while still a very young Prince of Orange, was made roaring, door-battering drunk during his first visit to England.
The King Philip War as it was called, between the New England settlers and the Indians in 1675, is said to have cost proportionally more lives than any war fought by Americans since.
Judge Jeffreys's treatment of the rebels is true to the record, though I've swopped the trials' locations here and there. He died in the Tower.
Aphra Behn's title should be more than that of the first woman to earn her living by her pen. Oroonoko was translated into French and German and became popular in France during the French revolutionary period. In England it was reprinted repeatedly during the eighteenth century and, along with the play adapted from it by Southerne, helped form part of the literature of the abolitionist movement which became a political force a century after Aphra's death.
Like all women who break out of the stereotype she was subjected to the process that begins with detraction and ends in oblivion. The nineteenth century, when she was mentioned at all, found it necessary to apologize for her. By the beginning of the twentieth she had all but disappeared. An article in 1913 by a Mr Ernest Bernbaum declared that she never went to Surinam, never spied on the Dutch for Charles II - despite evidence in the State Papers that she did - virtually, that she didn't exist.
The lines on her tombstone in the east cloister of Westminster Abbey are typical of the smart, uncaring age she lived through and are said to have been written by John Hoyle:
Here lies proof that wit can never be Defence against mortality.
A more accurate memorial is in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own where she points out that genius is a succession: 'Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the shade of Eliza Carter ... all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.'
Incidentally, there is no evidence for the fight between her friends and the Chapter of Westminster Abbey over that same tomb.
But she should have been buried in Poets' Corner.