The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  The musicians at the St Cecilia’s Day feast in 1687 had already noticed the shrinking opportunities for music at court. The withdrawal of England’s misanthropic new King to Kensington and Hampton Court meant ‘that the face of a court, and the rendezvous usual in public rooms, was now quite broke ... The gaiety and the diversions of a court disappeared.’7 Henry Purcell still received court commissions for anthems and birthday odes,* but fashionable life centred increasingly not on the court, but on the town. London, fortunately, was a musical place. Samuel Pepys had noticed virginals perched on boats rescuing furniture from the Great Fire. Songsheets were sold on the streets; men put their heads together to sing in taverns and barbers’ shops; fairs deafened visitors with ‘the harsh sound of untuneable trumpets, the catterwauling scrapes of thrashing fiddlers, the grumbling of beaten calves’s skin, and the discording toots of broken organs’. If that description was anything like the truth, it was no surprise that men and women outside the court were keen to hear professional musicians. And commercial opportunities for musicians were already growing before the Revolution. The coal merchant Thomas Britton had been one of the pioneers, cramming audiences into the loft over his yard and charging 10 shillings for the concert seasons where Londoners first heard the music of Vivaldi and Corelli. York Buildings, advertised in the Gazette in 1689, was London’s first commercial concert hall, and for a while, as the music-loving Roger North reported, ‘the resort of all the idle and gay folk of the town’. Other venues served a wider musical audience. The Dog and Duck at Lambeth charged one shilling for admittance to Wednesday concerts. Roger North visited the Mitre near St Paul’s and found it ‘a nasty hole ... filled with tables and seats ... a side box with curtains for the music, 1s a piece, call for what you please, pay the reckoning and welcome gentlemen’.8

  Inevitably, commercialisation changed the musical scene. Old monopolies were swept away. There had once been two companies of musicians in London, but their last attempt to enforce a closed shop ended in the 1670s. It was a new musical world, and was recognised as such. Roger North called it another revolution. He, of course, mourned the passing of the old. He could remember his father leading his whole ‘family’ out into the Suffolk woods to play for their own pleasure, butler and eldest son sawing away together on their old-fashioned viols. Commercialisation ended such innocent pleasures. Gentlemen gave up music because they could not keep up with professionals, while the professionals hurried from concert to concert, under-rehearsed, often drawn by appearance fees more than love of the music.

  Commercialisation, however, was having much the same effect on many aspects of life in a town whose whole ‘study and labour’, as Tom Brown’s ‘Indian’ remarked, ‘is either about profit or pleasure’.9 In 1680 Dudley North had been astonished by the spread of coffee houses. By the end of the century there would be 500 of them, catering to every imaginable group of Londoners, Whig or Tory, virtuoso or gambler. All over town new opportunities for pleasure were emerging. There were sword-fights and boxing matches to watch at Hockley-in-the-Hole. There were famous eating-houses, not yet called restaurants – Pontack’s was one, while Ailesbury met Jacobite friends at Lockett’s. On the outskirts of town, pleasure gardens drew in both the idle rich and the holidaying middle classes. James Miles and Thomas Sadler developed the spa at Islington, offering not only medicinal waters,* but company, drink and a purpose-built music room which would later develop into Sadler’s Wells. Cuper’s Gardens, across the river from Somerset House, was opened in 1691. ‘Cupid’s Gardens’ it would soon be dubbed, with a downmarket clientele of ‘young attorney’s clerks and Fleet Street sempstresses with a few city dames, escorted by their husband’s prentices, who sat in the arbours singing, laughing, and regaling themselves with bottle-ale’.10 For still rougher pleasures, there were the great Fairs, with their booths of tumblers and acrobats, puppets and variety shows.

  One effect of this vigorous new town life was soon remarked by contemporaries. Its pleasures were available to anyone who could afford the price of admission: a penny for a dish of coffee, a shilling for music at the Mitre. The new town was open to all and its meeting places dangerously mixed ranks (and sexes). Henry Compton joined the club of botanists at the Temple Coffee House. Aristocrats befriended the musical coalman Thomas Britton. Roger Morrice was shocked by Islington Spa, which attracted crowds of ‘a hundred or more coaches in a morning, that have in them young women generally of all conditions ... and as great a concourse of young gentlemen. It is a nursery of all kind of debaucheries’, he wrote, ‘sufficient to corrupt a whole kingdom, and the company and debaucheries increase daily.’11

  The divided church had lost much of its power to regiment behaviour; speculation eroded social strata; gambling tossed its victims dramatically from wealth to poverty and back again. And the new town also broke vital boundaries. At the gambling table or in the coffee house, ranks were no longer clearly segregated. Indeed, rank was no longer the only criterion by which a man (or woman) could be judged. Guy Miège found that in London, ‘anyone that without a coat of arms, has either a liberal, or genteel education, that looks gentleman-like (whether he is or not), and has wherewithal to live freely and handsomely, is by the courtesy of England usually called a gentleman’.12 The luxury and vanity cried up by Nicholas Barbon and others would also contain, in London, a devastating potential for social change. In the country no one could ape the marks of wealth – landed estates belonged to the landed gentry. But London worshipped a new God, fashion, whose favours were easier to counterfeit. ‘People ... are generally honour’d according to their clothes,’ Bernard Mandeville would write of the town society which emerged after the Revolution. ‘From the richness of them we judge their wealth ... It is this which encourages everybody, who is conscious of his little merit, if he is any ways able, to wear clothes above his rank.’13 Clothes bestowed rank in London, and clothes could be bought or hired. Hence the accelerating whirl of fashion as society’s leaders struggled to stay ahead, and hence the crowds of ambitious would-be gentlemen who furtively washed their collars on Saturday night, packed St James’s park on Sunday, adopting the manners, the wigs, the accents of the nobility, and introducing themselves ‘with the title of Captain, though they never so much as trailed a pike towards deserving it’.14 Such simulations could easily be unmasked in the country, where every villager’s parentage was known. In London, though, ‘obscure men may hourly meet with fifty strangers to one acquaintance, and consequently have the pleasure of being esteem’d by a vast majority, not as what they are, but what they appear to be’.15

  Small wonder that London would be both celebrated and condemned, in the decades after the Revolution, as a place of transformations. ‘In point of society,’ Guy Miège observed, ‘here learned and unlearned, high and low, rich and poor, good and bad, may fit themselves anywhere. And, to get a livelihood, or raise himself in the world, this is the most proper place.’16 It was to London that men and women flocked, leaving predictable lives behind in search of the wealth, the fortune, the pleasure and possibility with which the capital suddenly seemed pregnant.

  Colley Cibber, the volunteer of Nottingham, was one who came to London to make his fortune just after the Revolution. He arrived with little money in his pocket and no interest in the safe administrative job his father had secured him. Perhaps nowhere better exemplified the changes taking place in London than that temple of transformations, the theatre. Colley Cibber could imagine ‘no joy in any other life than that of an actor’.

  To a stagestruck young man, low (or no) pay and constant uncertainty were no deterrent so long as he had ‘the joy and privilege of every day seeing plays’. And so Cibber stood in the wings to admire the tragedienne Elizabeth Barry,* and Mrs Verbruggen, a brilliant comedienne and mimic. Like everyone else, he fell in love with Anne Bracegirdle, London’s romantic darling, who so enchanted the theatre that ‘scarce an audience saw her that were less than half of them lovers’. Best of all, perhaps, he watched the great T
homas Betterton in his seminal Hamlet in which, replacing histrionics with chilling control, Betterton ‘opened with a pause of mute amazement, then rising slowly, to a solemn, trembling voice, he made the ghost equally terrible to the spectator as to himself’.

  ‘Pity it is, [added Cibber in his theatrical reminiscences] that the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that presents them; or at best can but faintly glimmer through the memory, or imperfect attestation of a few surviving spectators.’17

  Theatre in the 1690s was topical and fast-moving. A new play at Drury Lane or Dorset Garden did well to survive six nights. Playhouses also carried the powerful attraction of forbidden fruit. The arrival of women on stage had been the scandalous innovation of the Restoration. Anne Bracegirdle was the subject of perpetual gossip, while Charlotte Butler had to endure one popular song which began Butler, Oh thou Strumpet Termagant. (It was not surprising, perhaps, that sooner or later Delarivier Manley would gravitate towards that refuge of shocking and witty women, the theatre. Her first play, The Lost Lover would be put on in 1696). Theatre was also changing, Colley Cibber discovered, under new commercial pressures. The exclusive court audience of the 1660s was being diluted by more diverse spectators. Among the ‘men of quality’ the traveller Guy Miège found on Drury Lane’s crowded green benches was

  ‘abundance of damsels that hunt for prey [who] sit all together in this place, higgledy-piggledy, [and] chatter, toy, play, hear, hear not ... The galleries ... are fill’d with none but ordinary people, particularly, in the upper one.’18

  In 1695 the United Company (formed from the original Restoration troupes, the King’s and the Duke of York’s) split into two rivals which vied to outdo each other in new plays, bigger stars and better effects. It was commercial spectacle, not fine acting, which pulled in the crowds. Stage machinery had been introduced after the Restoration; now no show was complete without lifting scenes, backdrops on rollers and wings sliding in and out on grooves. The impresario Christopher Rich was only dissuaded from buying an elephant when he was told he would have to demolish the theatre to get it on stage. ‘Plays ... were neglected,’ complained Colley Cibber, who found few opportunities in all this for his own ambitions, ‘actors held cheap and slightly dress’d, while singers and dancers were better paid and embroidered.’19 Plays were cut to accommodate musical interludes. Every penny had to be spent on show.

  If the commercialisation of theatre in the 1690s was of little benefit to Colley Cibber, however, it offered striking new opportunities for an underemployed musician like Henry Purcell.

  The United Company owned two buildings: Drury Lane, which it used for straight plays, and Dorset Garden, a spectacular playhouse on the river which had belonged to the old Duke of York’s company. With its deep stage and magnificent exterior, Dorset Garden was superbly suited to musical theatre, and in 1690 the Company determined to stage there a series of spectacular entertainments to rescue its shaky finances.

  Henry Purcell had already made one excursion into music theatre with his tragic opera Dido and Aeneas, staged at Josias Priest’s girls’ school in Chelsea soon after the Revolution and then quietly forgotten – perhaps because it carried uncertain political overtones.* In 1690 he was approached by Thomas Betterton to write music for an old play called The Prophetess, which Betterton planned to revamp with musical numbers and dances choreographed by Josias Priest, who as well as running a boarding school was also London’s leading choreographer, or ‘hop-merchant’. The result was Dioclesian, ‘the vocal and instrumental music done by Mr Purcell [which] gratify’d the expectation of Court and City, and got the author great reputation’.20 Dioclesian also whetted the producers’ appetite for more. Their next show, King Arthur, appeared in 1691. The writer this time was John Dryden, Catholic convert and disgraced poet laureate,* who had since collaborated on some theatre songs with Purcell and come out believing that ‘we have at length found an Englishman equal with the best [composers] abroad’. Thomas Betterton’s prologue satirised the speculative boom:

  ‘Our House has sent this day,

  T’insure our new-built vessel, call’d a play.

  No sooner nam’d than one cries out, These stagers

  Come in good time, to make more work for wagers!’21

  King Arthur was another stage spectacular, and again it pleased the crowds. For the next year, 1692, the management planned the most awe-inspiring, the most lavish show London had yet seen. Again, Purcell would be the composer. ‘On Monday,’ recorded the diarist Narcissus Luttrell at the end of April, ‘will be acted a new opera called the Fairy Queen: exceeds former plays: the clothes, scenes and music cost £3,000.’22

  The curtain lifted to ‘gardens of fountains ... vast quantities of water falling in mighty cascades ... strange birds flying in the air’. The Fairy Queen was like nothing London had seen – or heard. For The Fairy Queen was also Purcell’s chance to show that he had fully absorbed Draghi’s lessons of symphonic structure, new colour and instrumentation. He did so with the very first notes – a dramatic flourish of kettle-drums followed by a call of trumpets, as if Purcell wanted to show the whole town that he had mastered the new musical language. At Stationer’s Hall that autumn he would confirm the progress he had made when he premiered his own Ode to St Cecilia’s Day. He had, indeed, brought English music ‘to a greater perfection in England than ever formerly’.23

  ‘The music and decorations are extraordinary ... very entertaining’, gasped the Gentleman’s Journal. Only the producers were disappointed. Musicals have always been risky, and this was no exception. ‘The expenses in setting it out being so great,’ it was reported, ‘the Company got very little by it.’ Among audiences, though, enthusiasm for The Fairy Queen was universal. Even by comparison with earlier spectaculars,

  ‘This in ornaments was superior ... especially in clothes, for all the singers and dancers, scenes, machines and decorations all most profusely set off; and excellently performed, chiefly the instrumental and vocal part compos’d by the said Mr Purcell and dances by Mr Priest. The court and town were wonderfully satisfied with it.’24

  Perhaps there was more than one reason for the Fairy Queen’s success, however. Its first performance on Monday 2 May offered relief from grim political news. The Revolution was again under threat. ‘The reports of an invasion being now so hot’, wrote Evelyn in his diary three days later, ‘alarmed the city, court & people exceedingly ... An universal consternation what would be the event of all this expectation.’25

  X

  ‘REPORTS OF AN INVASION’

  A huge French fleet had assembled at Brest. Troops massed at La Hogue and at Le Hâvre-de-Grace, while Jacobites spoke openly of the King’s return. The declaration which King James put out to accompany this build-up was hardly conciliatory. Anyone who paid taxes to William’s regime was guilty of high treason. Pardon was available only to those who returned to their duty immediately, and for a long list of senior politicians there would be no forgiveness at all: neither for Sunderland (now back in England serving his new master), nor for Carmarthen or Nottingham, for Archbishop Tillotson, Gilbert Burnet, or George Treby. Nor had James forgotten Harry Moon; there was specific exception for all ‘who offered personal indignities to us at Faversham’.

  James thought the declaration ‘much more indulgent than could reasonably have been expected, considering the provocations [he] had received’.1 In England it prompted panic. Even moderates began subtly to adjust themselves to another change of régime. John Evelyn saw a picture of the Prince of Wales that spring and gushingly noted it ‘very much resembling the Q his mother & of a most vivacious countenance’.2 Perhaps the best William could hope for was the indifference the English had shown his predecessor. For he was no more popular now than he had been at the Coronation. To his foreignness, his surly manner and dubious legitimacy he could now add an interminable, luckless war, and taxes such as had never been known before – estate owners were paying four shil
lings in the pound on their land. The war in Ireland had continued for more than a year after the Battle of the Boyne, with William failing to take Limerick by siege, and disorder mounting in the countryside before the Treaty of Limerick finally brought the conflict to an end in October 1691. Elsewhere, the régime seemed no better able to settle its three kingdoms. In January 1692 there was an outrage in Scotland when Macdonalds slow to swear the oaths of allegiance were massacred at Glencoe. It was not directly William’s responsibility, but he had an unfortunate habit of batch-signing documents in which he had little interest. In that way he passed an order from his Scottish Secretary of State, John Dalrymple, that ‘if the Glencoe men could be separated from the rest of the Highlanders, some examples might be made of them’. Maclain of Glencoe had, in fact, taken the oath – albeit a few days late – but Dalrymple happened to be pursuing a private feud against the Macdonalds and ordered his troops to entrap them. At best, the injustice and brutality of Glencoe revealed William’s disinterest in those affairs which did not directly further the struggle against Louis. Gilbert Burnet, a Scot himself, reckoned the atrocity ‘the greatest blot in the whole reign’.3

  A few days before Glencoe, political London received a different kind of shock. John Churchill, former friend of King James, now Earl of Marlborough and the husband of Princess Anne’s confidante, Sarah Jennings, rose on 21 January to dress the King as usual. By midday he had been dismissed from all his posts and banished from court on suspicion of plotting with the King in exile. Churchill’s sacking triggered a crisis at court, which Princess Anne immediately departed in high dudgeon.* The rift with Anne, now heir to the throne, was bad enough for the régime, but the underlying problem was worse: an increasing number of English politicians were hedging on the Revolution by laying off risk abroad.