Dancing, another art which Puritans were later accused of detesting and therefore curtailing, was also known at the Protectoral Court although it came later, and was less subject to Oliver’s personal patronage. Whitelocke, on his mission to Sweden, assured Queen Christina that dancing was by no means forbidden in England, and as a proof of what he said, his gentlemen-in-waiting taught her ladies some new steps. During the Interregnum the standard book of dancing instruction for the next half century, The English Dancing Master, was published, and the publisher’s wife kept a dancing-school. The Puritan attitude to dancing was always rather to condemn the lasciviousness induced by it, than dancing itself.17 This hovering possibility of vice accounted also for their much more unequivocal condemnation of the theatre, where it was the lewd atmosphere of the place, rather than the actual fact of a representation, which had originally incurred their wrath and the condemnatory legislation. But even theatrical entertainment was tolerated in a sense by the Protectorate. Where the original ordinances had not succeeded in putting an end to performances, the dismantling of several theatres had done much more to quell the irresponsible thespians of the reluctant Commonwealth. Even so, banned performances of a sort continued at the Red Bull Theatre, with occasional hazards such as the marching away of all the actors by soldiers, bearing their clothes on their pikes; pieces known as “drolls” understandably became shorter and sharper, to cope with the possibility of interruption. Other plays were given privately at the noblemen’s houses, principal among them Holland House, safely tucked away in Kensington two or three miles away from the centre of London.18 Like illicit gambling parties, or stills of alcohol in other societies, theatre somehow continued, because the desire existed.
But the emergency threw up two expedients quite apart from the fact that women came to act increasingly instead of boys as the old repertory companies were dispersed. One was the cunning use of play-readings, as opposed to representations, to satirize the Government. Here the tolerant personality of the Protector was seen: no action was taken towards these pieces of deliberate provocation, although as all such pamphlets were advertised in newspapers licensed by the Government, they can hardly have been unaware of the development.19 They could be bought for 6d. each or less in St Paul’s Churchyard, where the famous Humphrey Moseley had his bookshop at the Prince’s Arms for over thirty years. But on Cromwell’s accession to power, poets and writers generally felt a more liberal atmosphere must result, under one man, than had been prevalent under a Puritanical junta. For one thing, he was a man known to like his pleasures:
Do you not hawk? Why may’nt we have a Play?
Both are but recreations …
Permit’m both …
So ran the bold dedication by Edmund Rookwood of The Queen or the Excellency of her Sex, described as “an excellent old play”, but probably the antiquity was as suspect as that of the so-called translations of Greek plays, in which the satire grew stronger as the translation grew looser. A play named Orgula or the Fatal Error was not alone in having a tyrant as its central character – in this case actually named the Lord Protector.
The second expedient was to have even more important consequences than this by-product of censorship, and that was the introduction of the art of opera into England. The favourable treatment accorded to masks and musical entertainments generally, by Cromwell and the Government, as opposed to the irrevocable hostility towards a proper play, was not lost on the more enterprising spirits of the age. In 1649 Sir Balthazar Gerbier had set up successfully an establishment at Bethnal Green to teach the young music, dancing and declamation for “scenes”. In 1653 when James Shirley wrote the text for a mask for Luke Channell, a dancing-master, with music by Christopher Gibbons and Matthew Locke, the mask was not only performed privately at the school, but a performance was also seen by the Portuguese Ambassador. It was in 1656 that Sir William Davenant, an ebullient impresario and poet whom many people claimed including himself – for Shakespeare’s natural son, conceived the notion of capitalizing on this dichotomy in the governmental attitude, and producing something like the operas then being seen in Italy. It is possible that he actually hoped to be made Oliver’s own Master of the Revels – an accusation made against him after the Restoration.20 Certainly, in all his preparations for his first performance, which was to be at Rutland House, sequestered home of the Catholic Dowager Countess of Rutland, in May 1656, he was extremely careful to conciliate those in power, and explain just why opera would prove of such inestimable value to the community.
A wily memorandum was despatched to Thurloe,* ( * Although bound with the January 1657 papers in the CSP Domestic, Sir Charles Firth makes it earlier.22) Secretary to the Council. Opera, it submitted, consisted essentially of “moral representations” which served to abate the public melancholy; otherwise this melancholy might well turn to sedition. Opera also kept the wealthy in London, where they spent their money, to the general good of the community. These arguments, if not precisely those which have been used to justify the expansion of English opera in the centuries to follow, were evidently sufficiently cogent at the time to relax the Government’s guard. The First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House as it was known, a selection of musical entertainments, ending up with a series of songs relating to “the Victor” i.e. the Protector, was essentially a ballon d’essai. When no swift nemesis of arrest followed, the first full-length English opera The Siege of Rhodes was given that same year in August, with a proscenium and five scenes, and John Webbs’s designs from Chatsworth; much use was also made of crowds and armies, despite the restriction of actual singers to seven, due to the cramped conditions of the stage. After the Restoration, The Siege of Rhodes came to be presented with what was felt to be annoying frequency. Said one weary rhyme:
For the Siege of Rhodes all say
It is an everlasting play.21
But the languors of a new age could not rob it of its historic position as the first opera on the English stage.
The next opera, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, was altogether more magnificent and took place at the larger Cockpit. But once again the choice of subject was a sign of Davenant’s desire to curry favour from those in power. Not only was the very title violently chauvinistic, in line with what were supposed to be Cromwell’s own feelings concerning the New World, but incidents were taken from a recent English translation of a work by the Spanish priest Las Casas, which had actually been dedicated to Cromwell. So English opera was born out of a mixture of cunning and compromise, under the benevolent auspices of a music-loving Protector, as seen by the fact that immediately after the Restoration Davenant hastened to produce a series of straightforward plays. In the meantime, with his emphasis on the high moral tone of his work, he could be thankful that Cromwell and the Council of State did not share the views of one disgruntled satire on the subject of the new form of entertainment:
The people have named it an opera
But the devil take my wife
If all the days of my life
I did ever see such a Foppery.23
In the case of literature, it hardly seems necessary to state that a regime which employed three major English poets was not inimicable to the art as such. A list has been compiled of those writers existing during the Commonwealth period who were more or less cordial adherents, including Milton, James Harrington, Aubrey, Robert Boyle, Dry den, the young John Locke and Edmund Waller; those less favourably inclined, such as Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Fuller, Abraham Cowley and Isaak Walton were nevertheless able to co-exist peacefully.24 Although an age of governmental news censorship, it was clearly not an age when the precepts of literary censorship were intended to be practised; more noticeable still was the general attitude of writers under the Commonwealth that Cromwell himself could be regarded as a benevolent court of appeal. Cowley himself had expressed, albeit irreverently, the Puritan regard for poetry in a prologue to one of the satirical plays of 1650:
Though other Arts poor and neglected grow
,
They’ll admit Poetry, which was always so …
But with the coming of the Protectorate, the age-old instinct of the writer towards individual patronage, combined with a justified feeling that Oliver himself was not hostile to their cause, led to greater optimism: Alexander Brome analysed the hoped-for new relationship thus in 1653:
Wit shall be cherisht, and Poets find a friend …
Were’t for Homer, where’s Achilles now?
Let Soldiers then protect, while Poets praise
Since that which crowns the brows of both is Bays .. ,25
Nor were the hopes of would-be Homers disappointed by the actions of the Protectoral Achilles. It was due to the personal magnanimity of Cromwell that the Cavalier poet John Cleveland was released, having been arrested on suspicion by a Major-General; in his petition to the Protector, Cleveland merely asked with dignity that “he should no longer be persecuted for his previous loyalty to the King”, but despite the absence of the self-abasement noticeable in certain petitions to Oliver, and the fact that Cleveland had constantly libelled Oliver, he was promptly released. No doubt Cromwell agreed with Cleveland’s prediction: “your Highness will find that mercy will establish you more than power though all your days of your life were as pregnant with victories, as your twice auspicious 3rd of September.” Cromwell also treated the ageing George Wither with consideration. Wither had once enjoyed an enviable reputation as a lyric poet but had now degenerated into something between a panegyrist and a pamphleteer: as he himself rather endearingly admitted, his fame had “withered”. But apart from the fact that Wither received a clerkship in the office of the Chancery Court, on one occasion Cromwell permitted him to read aloud an extremely long and uninspiring discourse called A Declaration to these Nations. At the end the Protector merely said most courteously that it resembled his own feelings as closely as the reflection of his face in the mirror (which happened to be hanging in front of him at the time).26 Such politeness to literary folk was more than prince-like.
In such a climate a genuine literary and artistic society was able to flourish in London. Milton gathered round him in Petty France a little circle, including those eminent Protestant immigrants, Samuel Hartlib and John Dury, and his former pupil Cyriack Skinner. Typical of that gathering, as of Commonwealth society, was Catherine Viscountess Ranelagh, sister to Lord Broghill and Robert Boyle, whose sons had been tutored by the poet. Catherine Ranelagh won golden opinions from even the most critical of the Puritans. To Milton, no friend of the fair sex, not only was she “a most exemplary woman”, but after she departed from her husband’s Irish estates, he grieved to her son that his mother had stood in the place of him of “all kith and kin”. Hartlib in his correspondence regularly referred to her as “the excellent” or “the incomparable” Lady Ranelagh.27
Living in Pall Mall, that pleasant suburb of Westminster, and close to the poet’s own dwelling, “Sister Ranelagh” as she was known to her huge array of brothers and sisters (she was the seventh child out of fifteen) presided over them with firmness and distinction. It was in her house that Robert Boyle finally went to live and there he died – a week after the death of the sister whom he had “so conspicuously” loved and whose loss his early biographer thought had much contributed to his demise. Indeed of the Boyle ladies, John Aubrey enquired whether it was actually lawful to refer to “the female branches” of such a family, “whose virtues were so masculine, Souls knowing no difference of sex”. Sister Ranelagh’s own circle in her salon included theologians such as Pierre de Moulin. Having taken lessons in Hebrew from a Scot, she was rewarded by having his next book dedicated to her; he had admired her proficiency, he said, particularly considering “so many abstractions she was surrounded with”; it was a fitting address for an intellectual matriarch. But Catherine was also much concerned with the affairs of this world. Hartlib gives a nice vignette of her encouraging the invention of a novel form of sick-bed, by which an immobile invalid could be nursed by one person alone and the bed head or foot raised without hurting him. She told Hartlib: “Methinks every contrivance tending to the ease of the sick, or the welfare of mankind, under any part of that curse he groans under, may be an exercise of love …” For all she knew, it was a good deal better to invent a sick man’s bed than a martial engine. Thus was the blood of Robert Boyle mingled with the spirit of the philanthropist. In many ways, with her evident virtues and her enquiring spirit, Catherine Ranelagh incarnated the wellborn liberal-minded Puritan lady. Such a person was known to and well received by the Protector. Catherine could petition, back in Ireland, for the eight motherless children of a transplanted peer, ending “Your servant in the Lord Christ”. Unfortunately her virtues had not preserved her from marital troubles: one of the last letters the Protector actually signed was of intercession on her behalf with her husband. At Oliver’s death, Catherine’s letter to her brother was among the fairest and the most moving tributes.28
The house of the composer Henry Lawes provided on the other hand a natural bridge between those pillars of the Protectoral society, and the more retired ex-Royalists. Withdrawal, even despondency, remained the keynote of much of noble society throughout the Interregnum, an atmosphere of reserved waiting, although whether for the next life or the Restoration was not always quite clear. Even Sir Francis Russell, Henry Cromwell’s father-in-law, could share such moods, despite his closeness to the centre, writing to Henry in 1656: “My lord, when you are weary of this world, do but send to me and we will turn melancholy together, for I do profess I do long for nothing more than a retirement.” The words rang of the old Elizabethan lamentations, although there was now perhaps rather more in the age to promote such fashionable gloom, at any rate for the aristocracy. There were references to the retreat of “noble persons” from London (to the unhappy detriment of trade), although their number increased when the regulations against ex-Royalists residing in the capital lapsed in October 1655. Those who remained led private lives. Already when Lady Frances Seymour married Lord Molineux at Essex House in 1652 the ceremony was not only deliberately intimate, but the epithalamium commented upon the fact with approval:
Twas wisely done to debar common eyes
From violating the solemnities.
The imprisoned Lauderdale was reported to have “gottin a superiority of mind that all the regions of meteors cannot disquiet … indifference, untroubledness, not making tragicall complaints, however tragicall his sufferings can be”. It was a point of view Sir Henry Slingsby would express in a devotional poem of much beauty, when under sentence of death for plotting against the Protector:
Death’s doom to sensual Ears sad tidings brings
For death’s the King of fears and fear of Kings
But to a Mind resign’d a welcome
Guest And only convoy to a Port of Rest.29
But other former Royalists met the challenge of the earthly pilgrimage which they were still expected to fulfil, in equally resigned but more cheerfully commonplace manner. The old nobility came to Lawes’s house for music lessons; Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, visiting London to pursue her husband’s estates, did not fail to pay visits; the younger Puritans, such as the Philips’s mingled there also. In July 1652 Lawes arranged a concert for the tenth anniversary of the Earl and Countess of Bridgwater; he had known the Earl since boyhood, for as Lord Brackley he had acted the role of the Elder Brother in Milton’s Comus, to his sister Alice Egerton’s Lady, for which Lawes had composed the first music. Bridgewater, a gentle charming man, had been arrested in April 1651 and imprisoned briefly in the Tower but released on bail and his own bond for .Ł10,000, not to work actively against the State. His wife was Newcastle’s daughter and through his sisters’ marriages he had many strong Royalist connexions. He was now typical of many who withdrew into gracious inactive neutralism, retaining his old admiration of Milton, to the extent of even acquiring a copy of his First Defence of the Commonwealth. But he preserved his distance and his dignity by inscribing the boo
k personally Liber igne, author furca dignissimi.
Another literary circle which flourished under the Commonwealth was in principle at least all female, although men such as Henry Lawes had visiting rights. Katherine Philips, the lady known as “the Matchless Orinda”, founded a Society of Friendship which for a brief period at least included other classical-sounding ladies such as Rosania (in real life Mary Aubrey) and Luscasia (Anne Owen).30 Orinda herself, in her family history, provided an excellent illustration of the withdrawal which it was possible for the uncommitted to make under the Protector’s easy rule. She came from an industriously Cromwellian family: her husband, who was some thirty-five years older than herself, occupied himself with the politics of the period and went his own way. Kinships by marriage or blood included Philip Skippon, her mother’s third husband, and Oliver St John, her uncle by marriage. She herself preferred to ignore such developments and devote herself to literature and her friendships: she wrote that her strongest desire was to retreat where “no quarrelling for crowns” would disturb her peace:
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