Bless’d with Success, thus have their first Essays

Reform’d their Buildings, not Reform’d their Plays…

Never was Charity so Ill Employ’d,

Vice so Discourag’d, Vertue so Destroy’d;

Never Foundation so abruptly laid,

So Much Subscrib’d and yet so little Paid.

–FROM DANIEL DEFOE’S ATTACK ON THE OPERA HOUSE IN HAY MARKET, THE REVIEW, NO. 26, 3 MAY 1705

The Kit-Cat Club is now grown Famous and Notorious, all over the Kingdom. And they have Built a Temple for their Dagon, the new Play-house, in the Hay-Market. The Foundation was laid with great Solemnity, by a Noble Babe of Grace. And over or under the Foundation Stone is a Plate of Silver, on which is Graven Kit-Cat on the one side, and Little Whigg* on the other. This is in Futuram re Memoriam, that after Ages may know by what Worthy Hands, and for what good Ends this stately Fabrick was Erected.

–JACOBITE JOURNALIST CHARLES LESLIE, THE REHEARSAL OF OBSERVATOR, NO. 41 (5/12 MAY 1705)

BROAD AS IT WAS COMPARED to the town-houses hemming it in on left and right, the part of the Opera House fronting on the Hay Market could not contain a whole theatre. As anyone would discover who entered into one of its triad of massive arched doorways, this was only a lobby. The auditorium proper, and the set-shops and backstage spaces, were all under a mountainous roof that loomed in the interior of the block like a mountain-range over an Alpine town, and threatened to bury the adjoining houses under an avalanche of roof-tiles someday. Tonight the roof was hidden by darkness, occasionally blushing a lambent red as a bonfire flared on the street below, and betraying the presence of silent watchers posted on its roof. It over-shadowed a stretch of Hay Market running some two hundred feet from Bell Inn on the north (rumored to contain a secret subscribers’ entrance, used by the Kit-Catocracy) to the even narrower and darker alley of Unicorn Court on the south (which, for those brave enough to follow it all the way to its dead end, gave access to the backstage). Overall this was neither the grandest nor meanest fabrique in London and one could easily go past it without a second glance; but it happened to be the place where a lot of Jacobite Tories had lit bonfires tonight. The squadrons of un-uniformed Tory cavalry that had roved through the district to intercept messages between Marlborough House and the Kit-Cat Clubb, or Marlborough House and Leicester House, had converged hither, and turned their attention inward, toward the fires they had lit and the carriage they had brought to bay, which was rumored to contain the Electoral Princess of Hanover, here in London to spy and to cabal with Whigs incognito. Not a one of them noted the sentries on the high dark roof of the Opera, who, for the last several minutes, had been busy with signal-flags. Those faced not towards the imbroglio in the Hay Market but west toward certain parks and undeveloped parcels of land, not far away, which in recent days had turned into strangely well-ordered Vagabond-camps.

“Money, and all that comes with it, disgusts me,” said Father Edouard de Gex, speaking apparently to his own boots. For he had planted one to either side of the head of the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, and clamped her head between his ankle-bones, forcing her to look up into his face. “Within living memory, men and women of noble birth did not even have to think about it. Oh, there were rich nobles and poor, just as there were tall and short, beautiful and ugly. But it would never have entered the mind of even a peasant to phant’sy that a penniless Duke was any less a Duke, or that a rich whore ought to be made a Duchess. Nobles did not handle money, or speak of it; if they were guilty of caring about it, they took pains to hide it, as with any other vice. Men of the cloth did not need money, or use it, except for a few whose distasteful duty it was to take in the tithes from the poor-box. And ordinary honest peasants lived a life blessedly free of money. To nobles, clerics, and peasants-the only people needed or wanted in a decent Christian Realm-

coins were as alien, eldritch, inexplicable as communion wafers to a Hindoo. They are, I believe, an artifact of the pagan necromancers of the Romans, talismans of the subterranean Cult of Mithras, which St. Constantine, after his conversion to the True Faith, somehow forgot to eradicate, even as the temples of the idolaters were being pulled down or made over into churches. The makers, users, and hoarders of money were a cult, a cabal, a parasitical infestation, enduring through many ages, no more Christian than the Jews-indeed, many were Jews. They convened in a few places like Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, and Seville, and spun round the globe a web or net-work of links along which money flowed, in feeble and fitful pulses. This was repugnant but endurable. But what has happened of late is monstrous. The money-cult has spread faster across what used to be Christendom than the faith of Mahomet did across Araby. I did not grasp the enormity of it until you came to Versailles as an infamous Dutch whore, a plaything of diseased bankers, and shortly were ennobled-made into a Countess, complete with a fabricated pedigree-and why? Because you had noble qualities? No. Only because you were Good with Money-a high sorceress of the coin-cult-and so were adored by the same sort of degraded Versailles court-fops who would gather in abandoned churches at midnight to recite the Black Mass.

“It was then that I formed my resolve to burn you at the stake, Eliza. It is to me what the Holy Grail was to Sir Galahad: an ambition that has sustained me through many trials and journeys. Oh, by itself, to see you slowly consumed by fire would be only an idle pleasure. Do not imagine I am so self-indulgent. Burning you, Eliza, was to be the climax, the catharsis of a great Work of purification. England was to fall to the armies of the Most Christian King, and the Dutch Republic was to fall next. Not just you but many were to have been consumed in autos da fe that would have illuminated the face of Europe as these bonfires do the Hay Market to-night. It was to have been the end of heresy-the heresy of the so-called Protestants, of the Jews, and, most of all, of the money-cult. Great canvases and frescoes would have been painted of the event, by the Michelangelos of a new age, who would work not for money but for the glory of God. These paintings would have been vast tableaux of countless figures; but in the center of all, taking pride of place, would have been you, Eliza, bound to a stake in Charing Cross, burning. During my voyage round the world, when I was sick or cold or exhausted, and my faith began to fail, I would think on this, and find new strength. The love of it beckoned me ever onward, even as fear of it drove Jack like the crack of a whip at an ox’s ear.”

All during this curious discourse, Eliza was trying to saw away, with her dagger, at the ox-hide strap that served as the hinge of the carriage door. This was difficult to achieve without a continual movement of the shoulder that must have been obvious to de Gex, and so she was trying to go about it subtly. Which meant slowly. He was evidently in no hurry to get on with her auto da fe; but she feared he was now drawing to some conclusion, and about to set fire to her carriage, or something. So she asked him a question. “It is just the opposite of what one would think, given your passion for Alchemy-who would’ve phant’sied you’d such an antipathy for money?”

De Gex shook his head sadly, and took his eyes away from Eliza’s for the first time in a long while. The light of a bonfire glittered in the oily blade of his dagger, and caught his eye; he gazed into it, and twiddled it idly as he went on: “Of course some Alchemists are charlatans, seeking wealth; they are a mockery of people like you, sharing your avarice, wanting your artifice. But can you not see that Alchemy is the avenging angel to destroy your heresy? For what value shall your money have, if gold may be made as easily as straw?”