The King's City

by Don Jordan

  Women who worked in Restoration theatre had a social licence not granted to other working people: they could lead a bohemian existence. Like Behn, they could have sex outside marriage, or, like Elizabeth Barry, they could have children out of wedlock and yet retain their reputation, if only of the professional kind; there was undoubtedly a personal price to pay. Women in the theatre attracted a great deal of critical attention from the (male) satirical writers in the newssheets. Actresses who played characters of easy morals or with a healthy interest in sex, so reasoned the anonymous commentators, must like those characters have the morals ofalley cats. In contrast, Mary Saunderson, who married her fellow actor Thomas Betterton, was known to lead a blameless, rather gentle life.

  Despite the hazards of the profession, Barry went on to have a very successful career as a single woman in seventeenth-century society, amassing fame and money, investing wisely, never marrying and retiring from the stage in 1709. Behn’s career in the theatre survived several changes of monarch. Lauded by expert critics, she was nevertheless lambasted by those who saw not the skill of her writing but the unorthodoxy of her life. A product of her times, she was criticised both for copying and stealing from other writers (a common enough practice since Shakespeare s time and before), and for the bawdy nature of her plays. Given the circle in which she mixed and the audience for which she wrote, it is difficult to see how she could have survived without giving her audiences what they wanted. John Dryden defended Behn’s professional reputation, though her private life was constantly picked over. Her long-term relationship with John Hoyle, a lawyer and rake who was tried and acquitted of sodomy in 1687, did not help her reputation, though it did help financially.

  A passionate defender of the House of Stuart, Behn would die a few years after the aceession of William and Mary. In the new strait-laced atmosphere her witty carnal plays were out of fashion and she herself in poverty. But from 1670, with the appearance of The Forc’d Marriage, until 1687, she had played a major role at the centre of the often rough and vulgar, yet supremely vibrant, artistic life of London.

  Not everyone in London society was enamoured of the licentious nature of the stage. The same year The Forc’d Marriage was produced, John Evelyn – as good an example of religious rectitude as one could hope to find in Restoration London – accepted an invitation to see a play put on at court, Mustapha, written by Lord Broghill. Evelyn rarely went to the theatre ‘for many reasons now, as they were abused to an atheistical liberty; foul and indecent women now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act, who inflaming several young noblemen and gallants, became their misses, and to some, their wives’.10

  Evelyn went on to list those of noble birth who had been ensnared by women of the theatre, ‘to the ruin of both body and soul’. They were the Earl of Oxford (ensnared by Davenant’s wife), Sir Robert Howard (ditto Mrs Uphill), Prince Rupert (Mrs Margaret Hughes), the Earl of Dorset, and one who Evelyn coyly refers to as another greater person than any of them’. This, of course, was the King, seduced by Nell Gwyn. Not since its adoption of secular rather than religious themes in Elizabethan times had the theatre embraced so lustily the lubricious. Given the sexual politics of the times, it was not thought strange that women were seen always to be ensnaring men and not the other way round. The men were noble by birth and so could only be tarnished by the debased influence of women, who were still seen as a corrupt or corrupting force through their sexuality. Samuel Pepys, who knew the theatre as well as any man in London, expressed the hold the actresses had over the young bloods who tried to woo them, when he called at the King’s House for his friend Mrs Knepp:

  I did see Becky Marshall come dressed, off of the stage, and looks mighty fine, and pretty, and noble: and also Nell, in her boy’s clothes, mighty pretty. But, Lord! their confidence! and how many men do hover about them as soon as they come off the stage, and how confident they are in their talk! Here I did kiss the pretty woman newly come, called Pegg [Hughes] that was Sir Charles Sidly’s [Sedley’s] mistress, a mighty pretty woman, and seems, but is not, modest.11

  Women who worked in the theatre faced the double prejudice of being considered whores because of their profession and wanton sluts because of their sex. While some women employed in the playhouses, in particular the orange sellers, were often little more than prostitutes, availed of by rakes including the King and his brother, the same could not be said for the majority of female actors. The satirist Robert Gould, who made his reputation by writing particularly harsh satires, even by the standards of Carolinian invective, played on the prevalent misogyny in his verse on women and on the theatre:

  How oft, into their closets they retire,

  Where flaming Dildoe does inflame desire12

  In early 1671, one of the most successful sirens of the London playhouses, a woman not unknown self-mockingly to revel in the title of whore, retired from the stage. Nell Gwyns career had lasted a little more than six years, during which she acted in only ten plays. Yet in that short time and in a modest corpus of work, she had become a great star and captured a king. She had stopped acting once before, in 1669 when she became pregnant by the King. Charles put her up in a fine house in Lincoln s Inn Fields, where she gave birth to a boy she christened Charles. But Nell missed the adulation of London audiences and was determined to have one last hurrah in front of her crowd. She returned to the stage with The Conquest of Granada, written by John Dryden and Sir Robert Howard. The play, an overblown effort in two parts written in rhyming pentameter couplets, ran at the King’s House between December 1670 and February 1671. With its heroic deeds and tragic tone, the play was not a successful vehicle for Nell’s talents. It was probably her last outing on the stage.

  To celebrate Nell’s retirement, Charles leased a more imposing house for her at the western end of Pall Mall. No. 79 was very grand, as befitted a mistress of the King. It backed onto St James’s Park, from where John Evelyn saw Nell leaning over her garden wall talking to Charles in a Very familiar’ manner.13 Nell was soon pregnant again. On Christmas Day she gave birth to a second son, named James. Once settled into her new domestic arrangements, Nell transferred her comic talents to ridiculing her rival, the King’s premier mistress Louise de Kérouaille. On one occasion she asked the French ambassador for a present from Louis XIV on the grounds that she served Charles II better than did Louise.

  In Nell’s absence the world of the London theatre did not stand still. In November 1671 the most revolutionary theatre in England opened on land that had once belonged to Dorset House, formerly the London mansion of the Bishop of Salisbury, and then of the Sackville family, Dukes of Dorset. The house was destroyed in the Great Fire and not rebuilt. The Duke’s Men obtained part of the land beside the Thames on a 39-year lease. The company’s plan was to fulfil Sir William Dave riant’s long-cherished dream to build London’s finest playhouse. Davenant did not live to see his dream made real. He had died three years before at home at his theatre in Lincoln Inn’s Fields. During his sixty-two years, Davenant had accomplished a great deal, moving with great professionalism through different literary periods, adapting as he went. He developed English opera and introduced moveable scenery to the English stage. He helped reintroduce serious drama by Shakespeare and others, even daring to abridge and rewrite works to fit with contemporary taste and his vision of the British monarchy, for which he was an ardent apologist. He was buried at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey on 9 April 1668. It was left to his widow and the company’s actor-managers Thomas Betterton and Henry Harris to carry on. They raised £9000 and the Dorset Gardens Theatre, also known as the Duke of York’s Theatre, was built.

  The first remarkable thing about the new theatre was that it was beside the Thames. Patrons no longer had to make their way through London’s grimy streets. Now they could take a boat and alight at the theatre’s private jetty. From there they walked across a pleasant river-front terrace from which they could admire the theatre’s imposing baroque front, its fashionable brok
en pediment holding the crest of the Duke of York. Then it was up a few steps into an entrance loggia created by an overhanging first floor supported on Tuscan columns. Finally, the patrons entered a grandly decorated interior. The carvings over the proscenium arch were by no less a figure than Grinling Gibbons,

  The architect is unknown. Robert Hooke’s name has been mentioned, though the swagger of the broken pediment and the participation of Gibbons point to Sir Christopher Wren. The theatre’s real magic was hidden backstage, where all the apparatus Davenant could have dreamed of was in place to have clouds drift, thunderstorms crash and people fly through the air. Dorset Gardens was designed to bring to London theatre as spectacle. This it did; memorable early productions included a musical version of The Tempest, in which Ariel was able to break free of his imprisoning tree and fly.14 The theatre was a fine memorial to an energetic, resourceful and inventive impresario.

  Stepping into Davenant’s shoes, Betterton and Harris saved the London theatre from oblivion, fulfilling his dreams of satisfying the audience’s demand for magic. His productions might be frowned upon today but in their time they were looked upon as dazzling and daring. Betterton saw with Davenant’s eyes how the proscenium arch provided a window through which the audience could view a world of illusion. As in Shakespeare’s time, the actors had an apron stage on which to be close to the audience, but behind them were painted scenes which could be quickly changed to transport the London audience to fanciful and foreign places.

  Within three years, the King’s Men were to open a rival palace of wonders, a brand new Theatre Royal on Drury Lane, incorporating all the mechanical devices first introduced by Davenant to the London public at Lisle’s tennis court. But it burned down the following year, leaving the Duke of York’s Theatre as unquestionably the premier playhouse in London.

  * Charles’s mother Henrietta Maria and Louis XIV were descended from Henry IV of France, their grandfather.

  † The Fon were the majority group of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey, modern-day Benin.

  ‡ A reference to the fashion for women to attend the theatre wearing masks.

  CHAPTER 19

  TRADING IN PEOPLE AND MONEY

  On 24 January 1672, John Dryden forsook his usual haunt, Will’s House in Russell Street, Covent Garden, and went into the City to Garraway’s Coffee House. What took him there was a novelty: an auction of furs from Canada.1

  Usually, Hudson s Bay traders sold their products directly to London traders, who in turn sold them on to the continent, where there was a great demand for ail varieties of pelts in cities such as Brussels and Paris. The trappers sent to Europe a wide range of small pelts ranging from beaver to Arctic and red fox, timber wolf and lynx. Demand in London was more modest than on the continent, beaver skins – from which were made winter coats, hats and rugs – being the sole commodity on offer. The lack of choice in the sale at Carra wav’s belied the central role played in the fur trade by the North American beaver pelt; while the European beaver was being hunted to extinction, the soft fur of the belly of the male beaver, caught in winter, was particularly prized in the making of felt. This single property made the North American beaver the mainstay of the trade.

  Prince Rupert looked in on the auction. His patronage of French traders four years before had not led to the discovery of the fabled North-West Passage but at least it had paid off with the establishment of a lucrative trade. Unlike early attempts to establish the slave trade in Africa, in North America there was no adversary like the Dutch to contend with, for at this stage the English and French were yet to come into direct conflict on land.

  While the Hudson’s Bay Company flourished, a group of London merchants raised a large sum of money to refloat the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, which had again gone bust, this time because of the failure of the war with the Dutch of 1665-7. Since then the Dutch had renewed their efforts to keep English trading at a minimum, imposing a greater naval presence off the African coast. The Company of Royal Adventurers felt the pinch so much that it subcontracted part of its trade to a new entity named the Gambia Company. Thanks to results that were far from encouraging, a decision was made to re-energise the original company with new shareholders and new capital. If the sugar and tobacco colonies across the Atlantic were to thrive, then so must the West African slave trade.

  In the middle of the seventeenth century, London’s population across the social classes comprised a consumer society. The new joint stock companies and the slave trade developed hand in hand with this new consumerism, and sugar and tobacco were the major cash crops driving London’s prosperity. Tobacco had come first, growing in popularity from early in the century. In towns and villages across England, children were seen puffing on their pipes. The addiction grew throughout the century until campaigners complained about the habit. Sugar was introduced slightly later, with production on an industrial scale lifting off around 1640 in Barbados. Between 1600 and 1700 annual imports of sugar would more than double.2 Sugar fed an increasingly sweet-toothed population, being used in coffee, tea, cakes, syllabubs, mulled wine and more.

  In 1672, the reformed Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa was named simply the Royal African Company. The new company merged the Royal Adventurers with the Gambia Company, and again its leading light and patron was the Duke of York. At first, the company assumed that its greatest profits would come from gold, but it was quickly recognised that the easier, more profitable, trade was in slavery.

  The lure of profits from slavery transcended all social boundaries. From the start, royalty, aristocracy and the world of commerce invested in the Royal African Company. The governor and largest shareholder was James, Duke of York, The Duke literally left his mark on the slaves. Those not branded RAC, for Royal African Company, were branded DY, for Duke ofYork, on either the chest or the forehead. Many of the Company’s investors also had a financial interest in the Hudsons Bay Company and the East India Company As with its forerunners, a royal charter gave the Royal African Company monopoly rights to trade along the eastern coastline of Africa. Directors included premier London merchants John Portman and William Pettyman, and the aristocratic plantation owner Anthony Ashley Cooper, a senior member of Charles’s government, promoted shortly before the reorganisation of the African Company to Lord Chancellor and made the ist Earl of Shaftesbury.

  Other investors included William Ashburnham MP, famous for investing in many different ventures including the theatre. Ashburnham had been born without a penny but thanks to family connections obtained the senior position of cofferer in the king’s household.* In contrast to the courtier Ashburnham was George Cock, a high-living Newcastle-born merchant who had made his money as the agent of an English trading company in Danzig. Cock went on to supply the navy and was not averse to siphoning off prize money that should have gone to the Exchequer. Samuel Pepys and his benefactor Edward Montagu also invested. The most unlikely of all the investors was a dead man. Sir Martin Noell had been a colourful figure who had cornered a near monopoly on the salt market, had farmed taxes and made illicit profits from transporting Irish, Scots and English Royalist prisoners as slaves in Barbados during the Cromwellian era, and had even turned to piracy. His executors, holding his estate on behalf of his relatives, invested in the new company.3 Sir William Coventry too was listed as a shareholder, though as the Duke of York’s secretary, he may not have been investing his own money. In all, there were 120 founding shareholders. Many more invested later.

  The honour of making the company’s first voyage went to Captain Abraham Holditch, commander of the Charles. In 1672 he transported 149 Africans to Barbados. Thirty slaves died on the journey; the other 119 were safely delivered. Four more company ships made the voyage that year. They faced fierce competition: Dutch, French and Portuguese ships also made the journey to pick up slaves in Africa and take them across the Atlantic. The following year, trade picked up for the company. From then on, each year the company sent an average of t
wenty-three ships packed with Africans to the colonies.

  There were other ways of making money in the slave trade apart from becoming a direct investor in the Royal African Companys voyages, or in the plantations worked by the slaves. John Eyles built up a successful London business based on the slave trade by doing neither. Along with his younger brother Francis, John ran the family business, Eyles and Co. The brothers came from Devizes in Wiltshire, where their father was a wealthy haberdasher. Once in London, they quickly made their mark. John became a collector of alnage (cloth) taxes, a position he bought for £9000. The buying and selling of such official positions was a deeply corrupt practice that bedevilled London’s revenue collection, causing great difficulties for the Exchequer. Though the Eyles brothers were Baptists, they were in good standing with the monarchy. One reason for this was certainly that the Duke of York received a large proportion of the slavery profits the Eyleses helped to realise.

  Eyles and Co. was essentially a service company, providing members of the Royal African Company with facilities and financial assistance. Planters often had to buy slaves and other provisions before they received payment for their sugar. The Eyles brothers provided the necessary credit. When the planters’ sugar reached London, Eyles and Co. sold it, took their fee for the transaction, subtracted the money they had advanced, plus interest, and passed on the remainder to their clients. Servicing die sugar industry at each step of the way made the Eyles family very wealthy. Eyles and Co. was able to build grand headquarters on Leadenhall Street, close by those of the East India Company. John Eyl es became Lord Mayor of London, founded a merchant dynasty and bought Southbroom House and its estates in his home town of Devizes.†