Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris: Spinning dark intrigue at Covent Garden theatre, 1767–1820 9781526129130

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However, this career was only one of many: Harris became a philanthropist, a confidant of George III, a suspected sexual predator and a brothel owner in the underworld of Covent Garden. He was deeply involved in Pitt the Younger’s government, working as a ‘spin doctor’ to control the release of government news. While novelists created elaborate storylines with fictional intriguers lurking in the shadows, Harris was the real thing.

Warren Oakley is a former research fellow of the Folger Institute, Washington DC, and visiting fellow of the Houghton, Harvard University

Cover image: John Opie, Thomas Harris. (Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Reading)

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

ISBN 978-1-5261-2912-3

9 781526 129123

OAKLEY

In this lively recreation of the dangers and delights of late Georgian London, Harris’s career intersects many of the hidden worlds of the eighteenth century, including the art of theatre and theatre management, the activities of the Secret Service, radical protest and sexual indulgence. This volume brings together a hoard of newly discovered manuscripts to construct his numerous lives, and will interest cultural historians, specialists in theatre history and anyone intrigued by how someone so influential could have disappeared from the historical narrative.

Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris

This is the first biography of Thomas Harris (1738–1820), who presided over one of the most eventful periods in the history of the English stage. He was the man who controlled Covent Garden theatre for nearly five decades, one of only two venues in London allowed by law to perform spoken drama. Surprisingly, he has been almost unheard of until now. Uncovering his life and work provides new insights into landmark events in London’s history.

WARREN OAKLEY

Thomas ‘J u p i t e r ’ Harris Spinning dark intrigue at Covent Garden theatre, 1767–1820

Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris

Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris Spinning dark intrigue at Covent Garden theatre, 1767–1820 WARREN OAKLEY

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Warren Oakley 2018 The right of Warren Oakley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 1 5261 2912 3 hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of figures page vi List of tables viii Acknowledgements ix List of abbreviations xi 1 2 3 4 5

Introducing Thomas Harris The king of clubs ‘Plausible’ Jack and the Royalty adventurers When sorrows come, they come not single spies Selling a life Appendix 1: Glossary of historical figures Appendix 2: Exploring the caricatures Appendix 3: Covent Garden versus Drury Lane   in the season 1794–95

1 67 97 123 171 197 203 205

Bibliography 207 Index 227

Figures

1 Johan Joseph Zoffany, [Thomas Harris]. (Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Reading) 2 John Opie, Thomas Harris. (Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Reading) 3 Detail from Thomas Rowlandson, Melpomene in the Dumps; or, Child’s Play Defended by Theatrical Monarchs (1804). (Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) 4 Theatrical Amusement or Tossing-up for the Young Roscius! (1804). (Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Call number: TCS 61) 5 The Young Roscious Weighing the Managers Gold (1805). (Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Call number: TCS 61) 6 Receipt from Thomas Harris to George Rose, 28 April 1790, PRO 30/8/229. (Courtesy of the National Archives, Kew) 7 The Triumphal Entry of the Red Kings by Wisdom & Justice with the Expulsion of their Black Majesties (1768). (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) 8 [Matthias?] Darly, View Colman in the Lap of Mother Shipton (1772). (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) 9 James Gillray, The Theatrical War (1787). (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

6 23

35

37 37 49 79 88 108

Figures 10 ‘Plan of Covt Garden Theatre and the adjacent Houses Burnt down – Tuesday Sepr 20th 1808’, LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/07. (Courtesy of the Woburn Abbey Collection at the London Metropolitan Archives) 11 Detail from John Opie, [Elizabeth Inchbald]. (Courtesy of Lord Egremont, Petworth House, Sussex)

vii

140 180

Tables

1 Appearances by Covent Garden personnel in British Museum satirical prints, 1771–1819 2 Breakdown of financial receipts for Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres for the season 1794–95

204 206

Acknowledgements

The fragments of Harris’s life have been blown far and wide around the world. The pursuit of them has only been possible through the great generosity of many people. The Anthony Denning Award from the Society for Theatre Research (London) gave life to this project and a research fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Institute (Washington DC) propelled it forward. I look back on my time at the Folger with great fondness; its archives promised fresh discoveries at the turn of every page. I am also indebted to Harvard University for their award of the Joan Nordell Fellowship which enabled me to complete my research using the marvellous holdings of the Houghton Library. As I steeled myself to complete Harris’s story, the Michael Meyer Award from the Society of Authors Authors’ Foundation (London) gave me much more than financial assistance. And, last but not least, a considerable research allowance from the University of St Andrews, while working there as a teaching fellow, allowed me to pay for the extravagance of reproducing a number of images from British archives. One of the rewards of writing this book has been the making of new friendships and the strengthening of old ones. Prof. David Fairer encouraged me heartily at every stage, Prof. Robert Jones helped to chase funding, and Dr Graham Nelson gave me an editorial perspective. At the Folger, I had the pleasure of working with a number of colleagues including Carol Brobeck, Erik Castillo, Alan Katz and Dr Georgianna Ziegler. And at Harvard, Monique Duhaime, Susan Halpert, Micah Hoggatt, Dale Stinchcomb and Emily Walhout took great care of me with good humour. This book has also benefited from many people showing kindness to a stranger. Among those who offered help in response to my speculative questions were Kristen McDonald (Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University), Martha Kennedy (Library of Congress), Pam Clark and Allison Derrett (Royal Archives), Sally Harrower (National Library of Scotland), Anna Haward (Tower Hamlets Archives), Tony Mitchell (Uxbridge Local History Society), Robert Noel (Lancaster Herald,

x

Acknowledgements

College of Arms), Marcus Risdell (Garrick Club), John Whitaker (Wakefield Museum), Liz Hore (National Archives, Kew), Prof. Martin Butler and Prof. Andrew Stott. The knowledge that was shared with me sometimes led to moments of enlightenment, and at other times to crushing disappointment. Both were equally important for this aspiring biographer. I would especially like to thank Lord Egremont for allowing me access to the private quarters of Petworth House, along with Andrew Loukes for arranging my visit. The fifteen hours of travelling to look at a portrait previously owned by Harris was most definitely worth it. My biggest debt of scholarly gratitude is to Prof. Greg Clingham whose kind words gave me the courage to persevere until the end. And the end came when Matthew Frost at MUP finally released me from the decade of work on Harris. I am also grateful for the permission of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to reproduce material from the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle. This book is dedicated to the King and Queen of the Oakley household – Jack and Aida.

Abbreviations

Add. MS Additional Manuscript (in BL) BDA Highfill, Philip H., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93) BL British Library, London DNB Lee, Sidney, and Leslie Stephen (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1885– 1900) FL Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC HL Houghton Library, Harvard University LMA London Metropolitan Archives, London NA National Archives, Kew NPG National Portrait Gallery, London ODNB Matthew, Henry C. G., and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) RA Royal Archives, Windsor Castle TM Theatre Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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Introducing Thomas Harris

The eclipse In the corners of the daedal city, some Londoners had retreated into the world within. Years before – in the darkness of Fountain Court, just off the Strand – William Blake had chased visions of celestial flight and muscular toil. And Thomas De Quincey had walked the same streets wrapped in the fantasies of opium, like so many others after him. The spectacles offered at Covent Garden theatre had grown leaden and dull in comparison. As if to confirm its place in the mundane, the theatre would open its doors for what might become the last time. Potential buyers were invited to inspect the theatre’s lots, its costumes and props, before the sale billed for 10 September 1829. The patchwork of fabrics that had clothed London’s greatest clown – Joseph Grimaldi – hung alongside the cashmere togas and scarlet robes that had sublimated John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus. Now, it must have seemed like the theatre would only bring in money broken up as bric-a-brac for Thieving Alley, with the costumes offered as old clothes at Rag Fair. The theatre was to be ripped apart and everything sold, even the gas pipes supplying the chandeliers. There was to be no rebirth. But the auctioneer did not simply invite theatregoers wanting to purchase memories of a time when the Garden was able to command the imaginative life of London. This opening of the theatre’s private spaces also revealed an abundance of the opulent and the curious. There was the velvet settee from the King’s box upon which the numerous paramours of the Prince of Wales had reclined in anticipation. For the right price, there was ‘a very handsome silk balloon and car’ used in entertainments when the country had marvelled at man’s first flight, in a world where anything suddenly seemed possible.1 That sentiment returned for the crowds of idlers who scanned the sale notices pasted upon the theatre’s walls. With such plays as Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Sheridan’s The Rivals and O’Keeffe’s Wild Oats,

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this place had defined what it was to be Georgian. But the costly shows at Covent Garden had failed to provide enough business, despite it being one of only two venues where Londoners could see actors perform and hear them speak. Since the rebuilding of the theatre in 1809, some seasons had exceeded expectations, but it became impossible to clear even a shilling from regular drama.2 Harassed by spiralling debts as early as 1819, the then proprietor’s son, Henry Harris, ‘did not know in the morning when he rose whether he should not shoot himself before the night’ – troubles that ended in the ignominy of having to assault a bailiff to escape arrest on the night of the King’s ceremonial attendance.3 The situation reached crisis point in July 1829 as a failure to pay rates and taxes prompted the magistrate’s warrant, the tax-collector’s possession and the threat of the sale.4 And as the auction loomed, over 700 people – from the highest-paid stars to the carpenter’s boys who swept the workrooms – stared at a bleak winter.5 Covent Garden theatre was partly a victim of circumstance, as it found itself on the wrong side of the tracks. The years of success were lost forever, along with roads, streets and squares, as John Nash’s revolutionary Regent Street ploughed through the capital’s landscape, creating a new, modern London. This street was no more than 120 feet wide, but it succeeded in keeping two different worlds apart. Running from Portland Place to Charing Cross, Nash’s royal mile gouged a line between the affluent, spacious, neoclassical squares to the west and the narrow streets and hovels to the east.6 The triumphant opening of the first stretch, in the late summer sun of 1819, allowed those prosperous owners of carriages in the West End to skirt and avoid some of the darkest areas of London. Those wishing to roam the city from the ramshackle east would become frustrated and baffled as the redevelopment blocked their way, providing a barrier of containment.7 On the wrong side of Regent Street, Covent Garden theatre became separated from the rich patrons of drama, those of taste and fashion, and trapped in a labyrinth of fog and dirt with its confined courts and alleyways. Wading through the quagmire of those streets one October day, a stranger – the Prince of Pückler-Muskau – saw only ‘the restless and comfortless throng of the spirits of the damned’ as the people passed him by.8 And dim, obscure retreats always attract those people who wish to remain hidden, or wish to evade capture. In the late 1820s, the area around the theatre became a dangerous place in which to stray. One writer – who wisely chose to remain anonymous given his knowledge of the subject – beseeched the Home Secretary Robert Peel to act against a neighbourhood that ‘swarms with Brothels where no law extends’ and its theatre, a ‘place of rendezvous for

Introducing Thomas Harris

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the most abandoned prostitutes’. ‘Swarms of lads’, he claimed, ‘carry on the infamous occupation of Catamites [and] infest the streets at night. When old and unfit for their beastly traffic, they act as panders and live by extorting money … sometimes from the totally innocent who cannot bear to see their names in the police reports.’9 And if a respectable family managed to escape harassment by hurriedly entering the theatre, they became less fortunate if they unwisely chose cheap seats high in the theatre’s auditorium. This was a lawless territory where ‘the dregs of Soho and their paramours’ cornered their targets.10 Of course, theatre, crime and prostitution had been bedfellows throughout the previous century. With their informers to identify known offenders, constables had been employed as early as the 1770s to prowl the avenues leading to the theatres and to make visits to local alehouses where the pickings were examined and shared.11 Decades later, men still knew that brushing against desirable bodies – who held out invitations at theatres – risked a cut pocket and a missing watch, money or silk handkerchief. Now, though, official attitudes seemed to be hardening. Becoming an issue of national importance, a parliamentary inquest into the downfall of the Garden would hear that ‘a lady cannot show her face at table next day, and say she has been at the theatre’. The inquiry would compel one shareholder to defend his character as a gentleman by denouncing the idea that he could own a house of ill fame.12 In this age of suspicion, the wax seal placed upon official letters from the theatre, while proudly displaying the royal coat of arms, could not have been more apt: ‘Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense’ or ‘Shame on him who thinks this evil’.13 In such surroundings, the court abandoned the Garden, followed by those who paid handsomely to ape the lifestyle of the aristocracy. By the mid-1820s, the ‘coarseness’ and ‘brutality’ of the Garden’s audiences – combined with the ‘resort of hundreds of those unhappy women with whom London swarms’ – had led ‘the higher and more civilized classes’ to find refuge at the Italian opera.14 While the bon-ton were no longer willing to leave home to visit the theatre, the auctioneer was hoping that they would visit the theatre to take parts of it home – even in the bleak aftermath of the financial crisis of 1825 with its stock-market crash, bank runs and widespread panic.15 This chance to invest in theatrical property was not only the disposal of a place once cherished, now abandoned; it was also the sale of a life, the life of its creator, Thomas Harris. He had made this world-famous theatre and had been its protective guardian for two generations, from 1774 to 1820; but he had also doomed it to failure. The Garden’s safety net of loans and mortgages unravelled after his death, leaving only a tightrope for those less skilled in the acrobatics of business. His ability

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Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris

to inspire confidence in investors became the Garden’s greatest liability as their courage vanished as quickly as the life in Harris’s frail body.16 Despite having been the father of this theatre, there was only one trace of Harris in the auction catalogue amongst the contents of royal boxes and star dressing rooms. His portrait, whose kind gaze had looked down upon the performers in the superior green room, was mentioned as just another lot (number eighteen) on the second day, next to the jumble of sundry dressing stands, deal tables, lamps and mirrors. The indifference, marked by a blank space in the catalogue entry where the artist’s name should have appeared, would have shocked those who remembered Harris’s importance. His bold and noble landmark, with its pure, clean neoclassical lines and its immense Doric columns rising to a dizzying height, was a majestic presence in the early nineteenth-century city. Described only twenty years before the auction as ‘the most beautiful Theatre in the Universe for the reception of the inhabitants of the capital of the world’, the Garden had been the immoveable centrepiece of Britain’s celebration of its imperial might.17 Still, the theatre’s power of attraction was based on more than architectural grandeur. Its charm for Londoners had always been less tangible, an indefinable power to call forth expressions of affection for their nation, an affection that was normally unspoken. When Admiral Nelson returned home as ‘the Hero of the Nile’, he naturally chose the theatre for his public appearance and to receive the adulation of London. With thunderous bursts of applause and ‘repeated huzzas’ – heard as far away as the surrounding streets ‘where the general joy spread with rapture’ – the theatre gave its people the opportunity to honour the bravery of Britain’s Navy. That night, the loudest ovation was reserved for the departure of Nelson, with the sight of this anxious son using his one ‘remaining arm’ to support his infirm father as they left the box together.18 Back then, Harris was known as ‘Jupiter’ – the supreme deity of the ancient Romans, the ruler of gods and men – by those who knew his allpowerful influence with its ability to raise and dash personal fortunes. The influential impresario had even possessed both royal patents that allowed the performance of scripted drama in the metropolis, one for the Garden and the other for Drury Lane theatre only a short walk away. As the monarch of performance, Harris controlled the Garden’s hugely powerful space as the world was made and remade upon his stage.19 His enthralling shows influenced how Londoners understood their nation and its military contests, political controversies, attitudes to sexuality, fashions and obsessions. After Harris, no other individual would possess such a power to mould the theatrical landscape; no other

Introducing Thomas Harris

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venue would exert such sustained attraction. In the dying days of his era, London spawned a community of ramshackle minor theatres each vying for custom. Covent Garden theatre eventually became overwhelmed by their popular brew of circus novelties – the feats of equestrian acrobats, prizefighters willing to take on all comers, groups of dancers performing the latest minuet on slack ropes high above spectators, and naked jugglers using all parts of their anatomy.20 The slight regard given to Harris in the auction catalogue was one reminder of his rapid disappearance from history. After the death of David Garrick – Drury Lane’s actor/manager from 1747 to 1776 – artists had dreamt about giant, fantastic monuments to remember him; yet Harris’s bones quietly crumbled to dust in an obscure country graveyard. For him, there would be no ascent to heaven chiselled into stone, only a sentence giving notice of his death, lost amidst newspaper advertisements for bankruptcy auctions, cosmetics and quack medicines.21 However, he could not be forgotten because he had never been known with any certainty. No one had even been able to tell if Harris’s low, hoarse whisper of a voice was caused by consumption or was merely the affectation of a man wishing to seem profound and unfathomable.22 William Henry Ireland – in increasingly extravagant flights of fancy – had wondered about what it would be like to speak to him, to have his confidential advice, to use his Knightsbridge residence, and to join his inner circle at one of those Saturday afternoon dinners where business was discussed over wine.23 Even a real friend, the urbane Royal Academician Joseph Farington, struggled to uncover the exact details of his life. Like others, he used a journal to hoard scraps of information about the enigmatic Harris. In 1796, with evident satisfaction, he reported the groundbreaking discovery that ‘Harris … was Son to a Soap Boiler in Holborn. He is 55 or 6 years old.’ It was a revelation that went straight into his diary.24 Whether Farington was right or not, nobody seemed to know. Certainly, Anthony Pasquin’s Poems (1789?) – in ‘The Children of Thespis’ which provides portraits of London’s major theatrical figures in one volume, three parts and 261 pages – glossed Harris’s token oneline appearance with the note that he was ‘formerly an eminent slopseller’, a dealer in slops, that coarse, cheap clothing supplied to ordinary seamen.25 When one writer demanded of Harris ‘Oh! happy man, where and when were you born, and what kind star shed its influence on your birth?’ he expressed the frustrated curiosity of the city.26 Placed together, Farington’s estimate and Harris’s obituaries would eventually provide a selection of ages at death ranging from seventy to eighty-two. As for his origins before taking over Covent Garden theatre, they too have remained hidden, until now.27

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Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris

After nearly two centuries, looking for Harris can seem like searching for a past irrevocably lost. Only two portraits can possibly bring him to life (Figures 1 and 2). These paintings have been put forward as likenesses, one as a child and another as an elderly man. Compare them and it is possible to trace the features of the manager in the boyish face, maybe too easily. In the first – attributed to the German artist Johan Joseph Zoffany – a small boy looks out of a formal full-length oil painting, a form favoured by the early eighteenth-century nobility as an imposing illustration of their status.28 It is a picture that demands to be admired. With aristocratic poise and self-assurance, he stands in the spotless finery of a frock-coat, silk waistcoat, frilled shirt, breeches and shoes

FIGURE 1  Johan Joseph Zoffany [Thomas Harris]. (Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Reading)

Introducing Thomas Harris

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with ornamental silver buckles. His gesture is towards the landscape beyond, encouraging us to admire the country estate that he will one day inherit. Beside him, a small spaniel, his childhood companion, leaps to attention; it is eager for the chase, suggesting that the young Harris is ready for manhood and a life of country sports.29 But is this really a rare glimpse of him? Is its acceptance by university archivists, Zoffany’s early biographers and the descendants of Harris undeniable?30 This celebration of the power and authority of an aristocratic family cannot be taken at face value. After all, could this fine, silken figure have emerged from the hot, dirty atmosphere of a small-scale soap works, with its steaming pans of whale and seal blubber? Farington’s belief in Harris’s lowly origins has been vindicated by records in the Court of Chancery which list his profession as a ‘Soap Boiler’.31 As for how Harris arrived at the Garden with a small fortune to invest in a theatre, while also acting as a guarantor for a further £5,000 of another investor’s share, success in this business has supplied historians with an easy explanation – as suggested by a 1774 trade directory that lists a soap-maker in High Holborn with the same name.32 But, if you had told those exhausted workers who toiled in the stench of small-scale soap factories about such prosperity, they may have gazed back in amazement. Fortunes were not easily made in this line of work. Fiercely taxed almost to extinction, the soap-boilers had to protest against the so-called tax upon washing, and they bitterly hated the excise officers who painstakingly weighed, measured and meddled at every stage of the process as if their own money was at stake. This officer was in control de facto with the freedom of the business, having a scale of fines to punish transgressions as he saw fit – potentially rising to £100 – and the authority to confiscate all soap and soap-making materials during the 1770s. As a lucrative source of income for the State, an intricate and extensive collection of rules were designed to prevent any of the soapboiler’s trickery in trying to create soap without declaring it – to the extent of demanding that even the soap tubs had to be covered and locked, with the keys in the possession of the excise officer.33 Moreover, Holborn in the middle of the century did not present a show of prosperity. Behind the rows of modest shops along the main thoroughfare were rotten buildings festering in dirty courts, places where the homeless huddled for warmth upon dunghills and where soap works plied their messy, noisome trade without opposition.34 If Farington was right – and a Thomas Harris was indeed born in High Holborn’s Hand Alley – then such wealth as appears in this portrait could only have been dreamt about by his family.35 Image-conscious gentlemen with new-found wealth sometimes concealed a shameful past by displaying portraits that rewrote their family history.36 And some thought that Harris was capable of such a

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deceit. Seeing him strutting around the Garden in his showy dress as its new, young manager, they sneeringly called him ‘Pot-ash’ – one ingredient in the manufacture of soap – and the ‘Macaroni Soap-boiler’.37 In his fine suit of clothes, he looked like those pretentious noblemen who returned from a tour of the Continent dressed in extravagant French frills. In his flamboyant dress, he may have given the impression of being a fashionable man of high birth, but they knew better. And it was easy to taunt, insult and humble a man from such a lowly trade. Move closer and the picture again supplies more questions than answers. Whatever the age of this boy, Harris as a youth could not have been painted by Zoffany who only arrived in London in late 1760, when the would-be impresario was twenty-two.38 And the quality of the composition injures Zoffany’s reputation with its stiff pose and a ghostly third hand – just visible surrounding the one outstretched – betraying an unsuccessful first attempt. It is a blunder that perhaps points to another, inferior artist. After careful scrutiny, it is impossible to identify without doubt either the painter or his subject, or ascertain anything for certain about Harris’s life. The perverse pursuit of the mysterious Harris is to enter the world of the magic lantern where images become visual puzzles, spectres and illusions, with little that can be taken for granted. Search for him elsewhere, and the rewards will be small.39 Today, he has become a shadowy figure, unheard-of beyond a clique of specialist theatre historians. And only recently has his importance – and undeserved obscurity – registered in such circles, leading to the description of him as ‘a manager of astonishing longevity and influence … whose theatrical labour cannot easily be tracked through textual or visual archives’ in the Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre.40 When looking at the fragments of his life, some academics have created abusive fictions. The assumptions that he was a sexual predator who attempted the rape of playwright Elizabeth Inchbald – and an upstart who understood finance but knew little about the finer points of drama – show how his life desperately needs to be told and rescued.41 As every one of the Garden’s playwrights knew, Harris nurtured the talent of his authors, supplied them with ideas for plots and worked with them to craft scripts. He directed rehearsals, gave the final decision about whether a play would appear – sometimes bravely at the last minute – and carefully judged its effect from the cover of the slips. And his advice brought success.42 But instead of admiration, insults have been hurled at his memory. He has been called ‘testy, prickly, grasping’ and ‘tight-fisted’; ‘implacable, irritable and violent’; and, worst of all, intellectually ‘flatfooted’.43 Back in the late eighteenth century, it would have been wise to have shown him more respect. At the zenith of his power, Harris’s enjoyment

Introducing Thomas Harris

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of kingly influence was not bound by the theatre’s walls. As a devoted servant to George III and his ministers, he nurtured an easy intimacy with the King and with it came support for the supremacy of the Garden. One of the theatre’s dramatists, who lurked unseen in the private lobby outside the royal box, noticed the closeness between the two men. In a moment tailor-made for the satirical cartoonists, the diminutive and delicate Harris offered a ceremonial hand to the jowly and corpulent ‘farmer George’ who towered above him, helping him to descend the stairs from his royal box. To Harris’s alarm, his hand gave no safety and the King tumbled headlong in one quick movement, landing upon the floor of the passageway. Upon recovering himself, George said with laughter, ‘Slippery times, Harris! Slippery times; we must look to our feet.’44 The King’s good-natured willingness to appear foolish may have surprised a stranger unfamiliar with the two men’s rapport; his willingness to turn this misfortune into a topical joke that made light of the threat of revolution, even more so. Here was George at ease in the company of a subject whose love for royalty he was conscious of, a subject who became transfixed and rendered speechless by the news of Louis XVI’s execution.45 As a mark of his loyalty, the businessman would sacrifice a deal to avoid ‘the possibility of incurring his Majesty’s displeasure’. Instead, he looked for ‘an explicit assurance of His Majesty’s gracious approbation’ to guide him.46 In the early 1790s, King George was a regular visitor to the Garden, with its spectacles showing how Britannia ruled the waves, followed by raucous renditions of a heart-warming ‘God Save the King’ by everyone in the auditorium. On such nights, the audience enjoyed their only chance to gaze at the majesty of the royal family dressed in plush velvets, delicate satins, intricately woven muslins and ‘a great profusion of diamonds … beautifully displayed’.47 Harris’s relationship with the King flourished as he frequently visited this sanctuary, and refused to call at the other playhouse in Drury Lane which he eyed suspiciously as a home for seditious radicals under the management of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, playwright and Member of Parliament. Only in theory were both theatres an extension of the court, always ready for the ‘Command of Their Majesties’ for a particular play. The glamour of a royal visit, which attracted huge crowds and ensured that the theatre’s bills for that month could be paid, seldom came to Drury Lane in this decade. George stayed away for four years and Sheridan made scant effort to welcome him, or to compete with the Garden’s patriotic pageants.48 The Lane was only a short walk from the Garden – down Bow Street and left into Little Russell Street. For the King and Queen Charlotte, however, the insolent Sheridan and his theatre belonged in another country. Simply through its

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Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris

association with him, the Lane seemed a centre of revolutionary menace while the events in France moved towards their bloody conclusion. While Sheridan’s supporters cried ‘Huzza’ at his entertainments that seemed to goad the King’s authority, the Tories felt that he was deliberately staging certain plays to incite revolutionary violence. His shows began to attract radicals with a cause to shout about, and little to lose. And as audiences called for the revolutionary anthem ‘Ça Ira’, Sheridan’s theatre became the stuff of nightmares.49 What would happen next? Actors would be dragged from the theatre and hung from lampposts, the throats of musicians would be slashed open, and the frenzy of violence would spill into the streets, butchering and burning its way through London – as imagined in the Morning Herald, one Thursday in March 1792.50 When the King condescended to be entertained at the Lane in May 1800, the Queen’s belief that Sheridan was ‘a man so totally void of principle’ was already ingrained.51 That night, George did not only have to endure the hypocrisy of Sheridan fawning over the royal family while guiding them to their private box with a candle to light the way. He also had to stand firm against the shock of two slugs fired from the pistol of a bungling assassin in the pit, one of which was shot, claimed the newspapers, ‘only about a yard too far to the left’. After his capture, James Hadfield stubbornly refused to offer any reason for his actions. It seemed as if merely to enter the Lane placed its spectators under the influence of Sheridan.52 As the bane of the King’s government, ‘Citizen Sheridan’ could be overheard inviting listeners to admire the ideal of liberty at the heart of the French Revolution. When pressed, though, he never invited danger by saying how far it should be pursued. For him, courting controversy was merely a means to an end, a way to arrest people’s attention and gain support for parliamentary reform and Irish independence. As a sign of his commitment to Ireland, the place of his birth, he had even tried to negotiate with the government on behalf of Arthur O’Connor – the head of the United Irishmen who had plotted to liberate his country with force.53 Yet Sheridan’s resistance to authority was also a consequence of his restless unpredictability, his unwillingness to toe the line and meet expectations whether in politics or in the business dealings of Drury Lane. In some ways, he anticipated another famous Irish dramatist, Oscar Wilde, in his enjoyment at being provocative, shocking listeners with perverse viewpoints against what was accepted or expected. Sheridan gave a famous example when catastrophe struck and the Lane spectacularly caught fire only years after being rebuilt at a huge cost. At the height of the blaze, he chose to sit at the nearby Piazza coffee house, drinking and watching the reflection of the fire play upon the window

Introducing Thomas Harris

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panes. When a friend remarked on his calmness, he reportedly joked: ‘A man may surely take a glass of wine by his own fireside.’54 Being such a witty dog did nothing to dispel the impression that he lacked the sobriety and diligence necessary to manage one of the King’s theatres. Harris spent as many hours worrying about Sheridan’s next move – and how it might affect the Garden – as the government did intercepting Sheridan’s letters, reading his correspondence with France and monitoring his association with convicted traitors at home.55 Both watched him warily. In the hope of pinning him down to a fixed line of conduct, Harris even tentatively signed an agreement with him designed to set some ground rules and ensure that each man – the only two in charge of a patent theatre in London – would avoid doing anything that might harm the other’s business interests. This pact for their ‘mutual advantage’ included certain rules of engagement, such as ‘joint regulations’ on the hiring of actors, designed to stop one man acquiring an advantage over the other. Sheridan made Harris nervous, but both men needed each other to ensure that outsiders could not compete with them – the worst possible scenario. For Harris, the most important promise was to ‘constantly unite our efforts and act in concert to maintain the quiet monopoly which we have purchased in our patents’.56 When he continued to fret that Sheridan was using his friendship with the Prince of Wales to gain an edge over the Garden, he could only write in exasperation: ‘To be sure that Sheridan!! – Burke us’d to say that Mr. Pitt was “the sublimity of mediocrity” – Sheridan certainly is “the sublimity of Botheration”.’57 Arranging a meeting with him often led to a trial of patience for Harris. When he did grace the Garden with his presence, it was usually at the wrong time of day. Before arriving one afternoon, he had wiled away the time with James Tregent. He had chanced upon the watchmaker in Hart Street who, by coincidence, had seen Harris upon business only minutes before. When Sheridan eventually opened the manager’s door, he found Harris in a passion, just as Tregent had described him. ‘Well sir,’ said Harris, ‘I have waited at least two hours for you again. I had almost given you up, and if –’ ‘Stop, my dear Harris, I assure you these things occur more from my misfortunes than my faults. I declare I thought it was but one o’clock, for it so happens that I have no watch, and to tell you the truth, am too poor to buy one. But when the day comes that I can, you will see I shall be as punctual as any other man.’ ‘Well then, if that be all, you shall not long want a watch, for here are half a dozen of Tregent’s best.’ Pulling back the drawer revealed the plain white enamel dials of their open faces. Inside, Tregent had hidden their

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baroque movements, those ornate plumes and swirls of gilt brass that gave animation to the turn of each wheel. As Sheridan expressed surprise at their appearance, it may have been that Harris was willing to go along with the pretence if it meant taking one means of excuse away from the man who continually frustrated him. ‘Choose any one you like, and do me the favour of accepting it,’ he told him.58 In life, Harris did not need to worry: only after death could Sheridan triumph. While the memory of one man has been left to decay, the other has been summoned back to life many times by literary historians and biographers. In part, Sheridan has been kept alive because history regards him as having been everything that Harris was not. In fits of infatuation, writers have presented a devil-may-care ‘adventurer’ whose ‘brilliant mind’ could never be shackled by the day-to-day drudgery of running a theatre. Imagining his office ‘littered with unpaid bills and a “funeral pile” of manuscripts he had promised to consider but never read’, as well as empty claret and port bottles, there is almost an admiration of such a carefree attitude to life and money, with irresponsibility a virtue. He has also been praised for having ‘an unpurchasable mind’ – someone who asserted his independence in Parliament while fighting against the King’s Tory establishment and even refusing to dance to his own party’s whip. Sheridan, with an appetite for adulation both in and out of the House, would have surely preened himself at the thought of such attention. He even tried to upstage the Lane’s most celebrated actor and manager of the eighteenth century or any century, David Garrick. At his funeral, in the chill of a February morning at Westminster Abbey, Sheridan with a stately gait was every inch the chief mourner. Wearing an immense train of black velvet which had to be supported by six pages, and ‘refusing to utter a word for grief’, he became the chief performer at the ceremony.59 In contrast, Harris escaped attention in later life by encouraging others to think of him as unworthy of notice, as conservative, sober, sensible and self-effacing. While Harris modelled himself upon Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke, powerful because ‘seldom seen’, Sheridan was the clownish skipping Richard II who made himself a common sight for the entertainment of others. If Harris’s approach to life will never lead to celebrity, neither will it lead to spectacular failure. One consequence of Sheridan’s carelessness – appearing at his theatre in a blaze of drunkenness merely to pocket the takings and dodge employees begging for their wages – was to bring the Lane quickly to the brink of ruin.60 Harris had to be more shrewd to survive in this tempestuously fickle business. Rather than exhibiting Sheridan’s delight in being conspicuous and playing to the public, Harris knew the value of quiet obscurity. Without it, he recognized that he would become a target for

Introducing Thomas Harris

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every loud-mouthed braggart who paid his pennies for the gallery. Plus, discretion was necessary to cultivate alliances with some of the people whom Sheridan sought to alienate. The art of gentlemanly courtesy was central to who Harris was, with its flair for expressing respect, being considerate and showing due deference towards aristocratic patrons. When one of the Garden’s leading tragedians finally met the reclusive statesman only months before his death, he noted the old gentleman’s strangely old-fashioned charm with ‘ceremonious and graceful manners’ that seemed out of place in the busy, thrusting, self-interested age of the Regency.61 This actor, William Charles Macready, was unaware that such formal manners had been essential for cultivating relationships in the last century with the patrons who had helped to finance the theatre and to influence the legal process in its favour. Harris’s need of such help came in 1810 when he was challenged by clamorous speculators who were petitioning the Crown for the right to compete with him. They included a wealthy group headed by the Lord Mayor of London – Thomas Smith – with ambitious plans for a new London Theatre Royal.62 Harris’s allegiance to the King was repaid with preferential care and protection. The latter’s secret assurance was communicated confidentially by a go-between, and was therefore deniable if it ever became common knowledge. In a letter to his son full of triumphant relief, Harris gave a hint of the King’s favour, while not daring to name him or his agent in a message placed in the hands of the Post Office: ‘Our warm fr[iend] B— was here yesterday –– Says the K is heartily with us – & tells B. that he has done all he can for us &c &c – but of on this we must not speak nor depend.’63 The rival petitions, as a matter of course, failed under the Attorney General’s withering glare in the chambers of the Privy Council. Harris would feel gratitude for ‘the protecting power & justice of the Throne’ on many other occasions.64 Bolstered by this patronage, Harris’s authority spread far and wide to encompass Britain’s second theatrical city, Dublin, and England’s provincial circuits. While seated in the windowless space of his office at the Garden, he was able to peer inside every significant theatre in Britain as his agents gathered information and sent their news by post. His web of intelligence even extended across the Channel.65 Reading the letters from his agents, he considered setting up an English theatre in Paris as well as taking entertainment to the captive audience of homesick troops garrisoned at Gibraltar, one of the potentially profitable outposts of empire.66 At home, he offered help to provincial managers who struggled to survive as they trudged from one market town to another, to strut before a thin or uncontrollable audience. Away from the metropolitan glamour of London, to thrive meant to play to crowds only slightly better

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than those at Hull – where they jumped on stage and assaulted the actors, shouted out language ‘as would be indecent in a brothel’ and interrupted plays by drunkenly singing ‘God Save the King’ before vomiting from the stage box onto the spectators below. Failure meant that one travelling company was forced to starve their dog and sell its skin to help pay for their travel.67 With generosity hard to find, Harris released copies of the latest London hits to a select few, at a time when such scripts were closely guarded. He also gave them opportunities to employ star performers for part of a season. In return, he was guaranteed a regular supply of promising new actors and actresses.68 William Holland, whose erotic merchandise was hidden away in the drawers of his printing house, could scoff at the Garden’s recruitment of provincial players by selling images of tiny actors with a talent as small as their Lilliputian size.69 But Harris knew that Londoners paid handsomely to scrutinize pretty or charismatic debutantes in lead roles. And, for performers with potential, all roads would eventually lead to the Garden. In 1780, Tate Wilkinson – the head of one of the largest circuits encompassing York, Leeds, Wakefield and Doncaster – was deeply infatuated with the young actress Elizabeth Inchbald who was for him ‘a goddess, not a mortal’. And yet he begrudgingly relinquished her, releasing her from articles, for the simple promise of Harris’s ‘friendship’.70 Wilkinson, along with the other scouts and nurserymen of the Garden’s future stars, was allowed to enter Harris’s vast stockroom of materials. Inside could be found an invaluable hoard of manuscripts and musical scores, exotic embroidered silk costumes that sparkled in the candlelight, finely painted scenes of places that could be imagined both on earth and in the infernal regions below, and simple pieces of joinery that created the magical illusions of pantomime when viewed by an appreciative expert eye.71 For such managers, thoughts of Harris roused feelings of fearful respect through an appreciation of being in his debt for past kindnesses, and the suspicion that with an ability to wield such generosity came the power to be equally malevolent. Under Harris’s omniscient eye, some managers used his name as a threat to subdue unruly actors, warning them that ‘Mr. Harris should be made acquainted with the circumstances’.72 Managers knew that this friendship with Harris also brought certain obligations. When Elizabeth wanted to leave the Garden for Bath theatre only months after arriving, her biographer James Boaden claimed that such an escape was never possible: ‘The two managers were such close friends, that unless Mr. Harris really wished her away, Palmer would not have dared to take her.’73 For the proprietor of Manchester’s Theatre Royal – Thomas Ward – Harris was not someone to betray for the sake of a few guineas. Rather

Introducing Thomas Harris

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than financially profit from allowing one of his performers to be coaxed away by Sheridan, and thereby break a prior agreement with Harris, Ward promptly dispatched a warning which exposed the conspirators. Ward had no choice in the matter, as he nervously wrote to Harris: ‘All this, as I hinted above, is between ourselves – as I consider myself in a great measure bound from your frequent kindnesses to me, to guard you against any manoeuvre tending to your prejudice.’74 Unlike some of the senior actors at the Garden, who considered themselves to be irreplaceable and took the liberty of calling him ‘Tommy Harris’ behind his back, Ward wisely felt the need to be more wary.75 Still, such relationships were not merely a matter of business for Harris. He also prized the loyalty and dependability that close professional ties could bring, in sympathy with his staunch royalism. Those employees who could be relied upon to work hard for the benefit of the Garden, and to care about his best interests, were rewarded with warm paternal affection. The young playwright Thomas Dibdin was valued by Harris for being ‘too good a fellow to talk about agreements’ when the manager was in need of a favour. And in return, Dibdin remembered with fondness the firm handshake, accompanied by an enthusiastic ‘Good boy! Good boy!’ from the man whom he thought of as his father after being abandoned by his own. In later life, he recalled with nostalgia ‘the best of the golden days of good Mr. Harris, and glorious Covent-Garden’.76 Another of Harris’s stalwarts, John O’Keeffe, paid tribute to the unstinting financial help he received both as a widower struggling to raise two children and later as a writer slowly losing his sight. After Harris’s death and the departure of his son, the Garden’s new management was not interested in honouring the past and made use of a legal technicality to contest the pension of twenty pounds given to the grateful O’Keeffe each year.77 Grimaldi’s lament, apocryphal or not, showed a nostalgic appreciation of his old friend Harris. The year before the threat of the 1829 auction, the famous clown – now hounded by debt in retirement and crippled by rheumatism after years of acrobatic tension upon the Garden’s stage – entreated manager Charles Kemble to allow the use of the theatre for a benefit night. After receiving a tardy refusal, Grimaldi could only say ‘Oh! My poor old master, Mr. Harris; God bless him! Had he been still in possession, I should not have asked such a favour a second time.’78 A father to many The Garden was only one of Harris’s families. With at least five sons and two daughters, he needed to ply every social connection as he looked to safeguard their futures.79 In 1813, he sensed an opportunity when the

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Prince Regent appointed a new governor-general of India, the Earl of Moira. With colonial patronage now placed in new hands, Britannia’s expansion into the East suggested new horizons for his family. Writing to the Prince’s private secretary, Colonel McMahon, Harris inquired whether his ‘dear friend’ could act as a go-between and mention his sons in conversation before the Earl departed for the colonies. One son, Charles Harris, was ‘1st Judge of the provincial court of appeal’ in India; the other, Major Thomas Charlton Harris, was Deputy Quarter-Master General located at the Pune district.80 Despite choosing his most humble turn of phrase, and approaching the subject carefully in a roundabout way, Harris had reason to be confident that chancing his arm would meet with a hearty response. ‘Mac’ had already helped one of Harris’s sons, the ‘Young Rascal’ George, to rise through the ranks of the Navy. As thanks, Harris passed on regular reports from their captain of the frigate The Belle Poule, never failing to include George’s ‘most grateful remembrances’ to his patron.81 Harris began with the latest news from the War of 1812 with America: My dear frd In a letter recd on Saturday from our gallant Captain, I am commanded to tell his worthy patron Col.n McMahon that thro’ his influence the Belle Poule now enjoys the best of all stations, & that during the very short time he has been on it, he has already captur’d two american Briggs, & re-captur’d an English one – this the Capt.n calls training on his brave Crew to the nobler exploit of capturing one of their boasted American Frigates – on which he seems most resolutely bent – & I do believe the Young Dog will never return into Port without bringing one in with him, or that he has expended his last meal of Beef & biscuit.82

Months earlier, George had been on another ocean, on another part of the globe, in another conflict, thrilling readers of the London Gazette Extraordinary with accounts of his victories in Indonesia in the reduction of Java.83 As they read about his storming of the fortifications of Madura, while desperately outnumbered and peppered by enemy cannon fire, it was as if one of the Garden’s own nautical melodramas was being played out in the distant heat of the East Indies. And the conclusion to that nautical episode involved George in a high-level diplomatic coup – a conspiratorial move befitting the intrigue of a Covent Garden drama. Described as a ‘master-stroke of policy’ by one Rear-Admiral, George managed to persuade the Sultan of Madura to desert the French and attach himself to the British interest, effectively concluding the conquest of Java.84

Introducing Thomas Harris

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Even if George’s reports seemed a touch fantastic, as many did in this State newspaper, his faith in his men and his gratitude for their fearless bravery seemed very real. In praising their exploits in the Gazette, everyone learned of Lieutenant Roch’s devotion to the ship’s company and the cause – an officer who was ‘speared twice by two natives, when resolutely endeavouring to wrest the colours out of the hands of a French officer, who was killed in the fray’. All the same, news of George’s ‘desperate gallantry’ (as Harris called it with a tinge of pride) did not stop his father from worrying that ‘he might meet with something more than his Match’. At sea, the die was cast as soon as the enemy appeared upon the horizon; no amount of courage could overturn the superior battery that a larger vessel could wield. When newspapers became full of the ‘several late unaccountable losses of our Frigates’, Harris could only admit that it caused ‘no inconsiderable sensation in this Family’.85 Wanting to emulate the Garden’s heroes who put England’s enemies to the sword, George rose to post-captain in charge of His Majesty’s ship, the Sir Francis Drake. His career was rewarded with one of the highest honours given to men of his rank who distinguished themselves against Napoleon’s forces – the Companion of the Most Honourable Military Order of the Bath.86 It was as much a reward for Harris’s petitioning of the most powerful man in England in 1815, the Prince Regent, as it was for George’s accomplishments. Harris’s letter to the Prince – which portrayed himself as kneeling ‘with heartfelt gratitude’ as his ‘Royal Highnesses most zealously devoted, dutiful and obedient servant’ – in some ways showed how powerless he had become after the Regent had wrenched power from his unstable father.87 As the old regime of George III decayed, Harris slowly faded as the man of the last century. Following years of the Prince’s rancorous opposition to the King abetted by Sheridan, Harris’s son was repaid with the bare minimum of the Order’s third class, instead of the second class that his father had asked for. And perhaps it had been necessary to enlist Mac’s persuasive help to achieve even that. The award was not simply a form of knighthood, albeit of the lowest kind; it also distinguished George as a suitable companion for the aristocracy, a feat achieved by the son of someone who had escaped the soap works. The Order of the Bath must have quietly thrilled Harris because of the status it gave George, along with the possibility that the approval he had worked so hard for would live on in his son. As George stepped up to receive his award, he moved closer to the society that his father held dear, a society that Harris had paid court to, night after night for a lifetime at the Garden. He had worked tirelessly at gaining acceptance from the nobility while aware that, for all of his political

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connections, he could never be one of them. While the royal family were entertained at the theatre, he would drink wine with the King’s page and favourite attendant, ‘little Ramus’. Like Harris, Ramus was another diminutive servant to whom the monarch listened intently. ‘By traffic with Mr Ramus’, noted one court record, ‘a Manager may get any play commanded by the King.’88 George’s successes, like those of his brother Henry, were made possible by his education at the Garden, under the instruction of a father who displayed great concern for everyone, even those beneath the notice of other managers. O’Keeffe recalled that Harris, after labouring through three hours of rehearsals, would stand in the centre of the stage, put his hands into his coat pockets and invite everyone – performers, composers, carpenters, tailors, scene-men, lamp-men, scene-shifters, door-keepers, treasurers and writers – to tell him about their worries.89 By installing his son Henry at the Garden, Harris ensured that the spirit of his management would live on. Henry, his ‘ever dear Boy’ and ‘dear Hal’ to his Bolingbroke, was chosen to be the heir to his empire and given the role of writing pantomimes and afterpieces. This was Henry’s theatrical education, producing those short comic pieces performed after the main business of the night, where profits for the season were won and lost.90 Comforted by his help, Harris doted upon this son in a jocular way that was as much brotherly as fatherly, as when Henry went against good advice and persisted in staging a play that was thought to be woeful. Safe in the knowledge that the old man was right after it backfired, Harris playfully teased his son’s youthful impetuosity. ‘Henry bears it not like a Philosopher,’ he laughingly told his old friend John Palmer, ‘but like a Man just escap’d from a House on Fire.’91 Grimaldi remembered how Henry, continuing his father’s custom, gave everyone a sense of importance.92 In this spirit of togetherness, pantomimes became a group effort. It had always been an entertainment forged by the sweat and toil of a company of acrobats and backstage helpers who physically struggled together to create the magic of elaborate routines. But now, it became an entertainment that everybody could heartily commit to, claim ownership of, and be proud of. It was an enlightened style of management for the players who were viewed by audiences as little better than vagabonds, vagrants and sturdy beggars – people who did no work and who were tolerated by the public. And pantomime actors were regarded as the lowest of their profession – illbred, ill-behaved and uneducated. When Tate Wilkinson described his pantomimists as ‘well-behaved honest people’ who were never drunk, he was battling against the prejudice of the nation. Performers aware of their own importance refused to act in pantomimes and looked down

Introducing Thomas Harris

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upon those who did, the scapegoats for their own fragile sense of selfworth. One sure way of insulting an actor was to ask him to perform a walk-on part in a pantomime, something managers tried to avoid by engaging anyone off the street for a shilling a night.93 The respect and thoughtfulness shown by Henry to his pantomime players lived long in the memory. Grimaldi later recalled how Henry would place a pint of wine in every dressing room each night, to dull fears before walking on stage and to ease fatigue after leaving it.94 It may be that, as the auction bills were pasted upon the walls of Covent Garden, the greatest legacy of Thomas Harris was not to be measured in stone or counted by the number of chandeliers and velvet drapes for sale. The physical monument of the theatre was not necessary to remind those people who had benefited from his kindness. And as this kindness was reborn in his children, it brought more than laughter from audiences entertained by another victorious pantomime. It also decided the fate of one Indonesian island and its forts during the struggle with Napoleonic France. Captain George’s triumphs in charge of the Drake were founded upon the naval ideal of a ship’s crew as ‘a family united’, with both officers and men ‘risk[ing] their lives to assist each other’. And, as one veteran serving at the same time knew, such a brotherhood was never achieved by browbeating and the austere authority of the lash, especially when many sailors were forced into service by a press-gang and held a brooding sense of injustice from the start.95 Camaraderie was only achieved by the captain’s tempering of power with clemency, charity and understanding. It may be that Lieutenant Roch’s fate was cast as soon as George observed his father with the marvelling eye of childhood. Even Harris’s illegitimate son, Edwin, found a father to depend upon.96 For someone less tender-hearted than Harris, the mother’s actions would have blighted the relationship between father and son, as he gazed at the child’s face and saw the outline of Jane Lessingham’s. After moving into a grand three-storeyed villa on Hampstead Heath built by Harris as a token of his commitment, Jane soon fell into the arms of the august magistrate Sir William Addington, and then deserted him for a young actor engaged at the Garden. One can only guess at the depth of Harris’s regret when Edwin’s mother began to lavish attention upon one of the actors, especially one who was ridiculed for having the grace and talent of a teapot. He may have heard that Addington spat curses and abuse  whenever Jane was mentioned in conversation, and been consoled by the knowledge that she brought no one lasting pleasure.97 He was forced to admit that, whatever the eccentric Jonas Hanway claimed about his ability to save fallen women, some women

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refused to be saved. And despite the short-lived nature of his time with Jane, Harris continued to pay long after. Ten years after her death, the Hampstead house was still draining his finances while he continued to feel the pull of responsibility towards their three children: Charles, Thomas Charlton and Edwin.98 Despite his mother being a woman to make men curse, Harris thoughtfully shaped a career for Edwin in the Navy by calling on highranking friends at the Admiralty. On his twelfth birthday after the spring that brought his mother’s death, Edwin became old enough to begin a career at sea. For the romantic imagination, the Navy promised a life of excitement and danger. And children eagerly fantasized about the carefree life of freedom upon the high seas without having had Edwin’s childhood with its dazzling stage heroes and flag-waving triumphs. Harris’s theatre loved the Navy and its tars loved his theatre, with sailors returning to their second home while on leave with money in search of release, entertainment and the embrace of female company in the galleries.99 The brutal reality of life at sea was very different, of course, from such boyish romance or the stage adventures of the devilmay-care Jolly Jack Tar who fought three men at once and remained unscathed. Samuel Johnson once quipped: ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of getting drowned.’ And the risk of drowning was just one among many, along with disease, shipwreck and enemy fire.100 By sending Edwin to sea, Harris did not abandon him to sink or swim. Neither did he view it as an opportunity to remove the social embarrassment of an illegitimate son fathered with a notorious actress. Making no secret of their kinship, Harris pictured distant waters and plotted each stage of Edwin’s career as carefully as a coxswain, with compass in hand, navigating his ship through hostile waters. When Edwin could no longer be placed in the trustworthy hands of Captain D’Auvergne following his retirement from The Narcissus, Harris arranged for the eighteen-year-old to join a frigate, The Pearl, with Captain Russel. ‘I am extremely happy’, wrote Harris in a letter glowing with paternal concern, ‘because Capt. Russel is well acquainted with my old and very intimate fr[iend] Mr. Geo Jackson (late Secretary of the Admiralty) who assures I may depend on every proper attention being shown to Edwin.’101 With friends like Jackson (who became the Judge Advocate of the Fleet) and George Rose who would become the treasurer of the Navy, Harris confidently held his own cat-o’-ninetails, with a reach as great as the authority of the Admiralty. It guarded against Edwin becoming expendable cannon fodder, or being left to

Introducing Thomas Harris

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satisfy the appetites of the crew.102 It is a pity that it could not protect Edwin from himself. Still, charity did not begin and end at home. If one of Harris’s contemporaries had written a description of him, it could have used a word invented just before his birth – ‘philanthropist’. This word was coined to describe the man who embodied a new ideal of the eighteenth century, a man who radiated fellow-feeling and savoured opportunities to help the less fortunate, whoever was in great need. Harris’s response to the plight of British sailors imprisoned in Napoleonic France was to turn the Garden’s last night in summer 1811 into a benefit for these men. As shocking tales circulated around the country about stoic captives thumb-screwed and beaten, and chained by the neck and feet in fetid French dungeons, his gesture resonated with Londoners who packed into the theatre.103 Men of sensibility were prompted to think about their countrymen overseas while watching Hamlet’s harrowing contemplation of whether to suffer ‘the whips and scorns of time’ and ‘Th’ oppressor’s wrong’ or to end all such troubles. Measuring the success of the evening, Harris found that the takings were nearly four hundred pounds up on the previous night.104 It was an achievement for the slowest period of the year when theatregoers usually escaped the oppressive heat of summer trapped by the reflective surfaces of the stone city. For a man who remained a mystery to all but a select few, Harris touched the lives of many people, even helping to bring children into the family offered by school. A regular subscriber to the St Paul’s charity school with its beginnings in Hart Street, Harris was spurred on to make a lasting contribution to the education of local children by donating land from his estate, near Uxbridge, to establish the School of Industry for Girls.105 Two years later, in 1818, the large Georgian windows of a single-storey building illuminated ninety local girls seeking their only opportunity for education. In threadbare and ragged clothing, these children were spared with great reluctance by parents who relied upon their help to scrape an existence within the rural landscape. In return, these children were taught reading, writing, arithmetic and needlework – the rudimentary skills needed to obtain a place as a servant with the possibility of regular food, shelter and a small salary. While such hopes were distant for many, these children still felt the immediate comfort of warm clothing bought from the profits of their own needles as local patrons supplied the school with work, to convey the blessings of a life of honest industry. Harris’s charity may have been one result of his experience of personal loss. In 1802, he had been taught an unforgiving lesson in the fragility of life for children. His fifteen-year-old daughter, Eliza, had died at

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home, in his arms. As he helped her to climb the stairs, she had expired inexplicably, innocuously, without warning. Both Harris and his wife Charlotte had been confident that their daughter was soon to be well again. After that, how was it possible not to feel the distress of charity? Without the comfortable home that Eliza had enjoyed, even robust, street-hardened children would struggle to survive. He had seen that around Covent Garden.106 Certainly, Harris knew that such girls, as they approached adolescence, had less upright and more dangerous ways of surviving. They might enter the school of Venus. Such unfortunate girls fell prey to the ‘mothers’ who guarded monstrous broods in ramshackle garrets overlooking the theatre. Even when these women ‘in a state of almost perfect nudity and drunkenness’ were hidden by the darkness of the capital, their screams still punctuated the ceaseless rumble of the city. After recruiting more constables and pasting official warnings on every street corner, in the vain hope of driving these undesirables out of the parish, the Covent Garden authorities still confronted the highest concentration of brothels and bawdy houses in London.107 The problem was such that London’s prostitutes became known as ‘Covent Garden nuns’, whether they lived there or not. And some with a grudge against Harris had claimed, both in the courtroom and in the newspapers, that he called upon this underworld when force was necessary to settle a dispute and all else had failed. His associates included the keeper of ‘a bawdy house in the neighbourhood of the Theatre’; men later hanged for rape, robbery and murder; and the owner of two brothels in Blackfriars Road who lived ‘not by women, but by children, prostituting themselves’.108 Such claims were never proven, but they hung in the air unchallenged – and they are instructive in providing one perspective on Harris. He was marked by the tension between striving to be honourable – in anticipation of that quiet respectability valued by the Victorian middle classes – and the need to be pragmatic, with the necessity of engaging with the realities of life around Covent Garden. Viewing the image of Harris as the placid, venerable gentleman of business (Figure 2), it is difficult to suspect him of profiting from desperate women. But if a lounger, leaning upon one of the columns of Covent Garden piazza, had caught sight of him gently ambling towards the theatre in the early nineteenth century, he may have seen Harris’s proprietorial glance towards two buildings dedicated to serving all of the appetites, including the sexual.109 One was the Shakespeare tavern. It carried an air of notoriety for those grey-haired libertines who remembered it as the stamping-ground of John Harrison, ‘the Pimp General of All England’ and the inspiration for Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, the

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FIGURE 2  John Opie, Thomas Harris. (Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Reading)

directory of prostitutes that sold throughout London until the end of the eighteenth century. The Shakespeare was well known to those old rakes who had been familiar with its seedy back rooms, a place where the touch of ladies from the list was enjoyed by James Boswell. Boswell later recalled with great satisfaction how he had ‘sallied forth to the Piazzas in rich flow of animal spirits and burning with fierce desire’ and had toyed with ‘two very pretty little girls’ at the Shakespeare. It was an experience to make him fantasize about being an infamous highwayman surrounded by his adoring doxies.110 The other building was a bagnio where gentlemen could escape London’s cold streets and enjoy the heat of a Turkish bath as it seeped

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into their bones, followed by the different kinds of warmth provided by a meal, wine and the company of a prostitute. Like all bagnios, for a fee, it offered streetwalkers and their clients a place to retire after reaching an agreement.111 It was, most likely, haunted by two prostitutes immortalized by the 1788 List, whose names were deliciously suggestive of the theatre world which operated nearby: Miss Sarah S–dd–ns, who was ‘well known under the Piazza’, famed for being ‘up to every movement in the art of giving pleasure’, and willing to ‘oblige … in any way’; and the tall, elegant and genteel Miss T–wnsd–n, who attracted with a beautiful complexion and fine blue eyes and was ‘particularly partial to that meal where four haunches are served up at once’.112 The bagnio would have seemed an obvious acquisition for the entrepreneurial Harris. After all, the theatre attracted gentlemen of the town intent on an evening of entertainment, which in turn attracted women of the town in search of customers. Harris’s bagnio (number ten in the Great Piazza), with its freshly whitewashed walls, never came under official scrutiny, and with good reason. Stop a theatregoer who was about to enter the pit door and engage him in conversation, and it would seem that Harris was largely seen as a pillar of respectability with ‘universal integrity’ as the only biographical notice of him at the time put it.113 Harris was discreet too about what happened behind the window blinds of his buildings, windows that stared blankly upon the activity of the piazza. One can imagine a stranger to the pleasures of the Garden walking past number ten without having the curiosity to pause, and to listen for the sounds within. And, for John and Henry Fielding – the chief magistrates at the Bow Street office only six doors down from the theatre – bagnios did not cause a problem, but perversely provided one solution. Parish authorities were most concerned about the nuisance that packs of destitute women were causing upon the streets as they committed sexual acts in public with the willing, and loudly jeered, grabbed and even assaulted the unwilling.114 As a sign of the anxiety caused by this ‘open lewdness’, the law threatened retribution that was murkily sinister in its lack of definition. Offenders might not simply face a fine or imprisonment, but also ‘such infamous punishment as to the court in discretion shall seem proper’.115 This showed a willingness to let the capricious outrage of the people decide the viciousness of the fate, like the pillory where the law simply held the criminal in place as the mob decided on the severity of the pain inflicted, which in extreme cases included mutilation, the loss of sight and death. In this atmosphere, the Fielding brothers had decided to wink at the activities of bagnios around Covent Garden while recognizing the need – first and foremost – to keep ‘Whores within Doors’.116

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Also to Harris’s advantage was the difficulty of proving anything legally in Georgian London. For him to have fallen foul of the law, prosecutors would have needed to establish that disorderly men and women were blatantly frequenting the bagnio for whoring. They would then need to identify him as the owner of such a bawdy house.117 Possibly as a way of confusing the issue of ownership, and avoiding implication, Harris organized a basic sequence of payments. The Duke of Bedford, who owned a large part of Covent Garden, leased the property to Harris in 1792. Harris then used the rear of this cavernous building to extend his theatre, and sublet the front to Daniel Brewer for an annual rent that made use of his nefarious activities.118 Aware that silence was safety, Harris did not disclose the use made of number ten when plans of the area were drawn up for him in 1808, and which were passed on to the Duke’s Office.119 Not everyone was tight-lipped. One clue as to what happened there was divulged in a moment of thoughtlessness by Harris’s architect, Robert Smirke. In 1818, in another plan submitted to the Bedford Office in preparation for a new lease agreement for the ground upon which the theatre stood, Smirke annotated a rough sketch of the area to reveal the use made of the house on the south side of the piazza. When the Office produced a neat copy of Smirke’s sketch for the sixth Duke’s perusal, to accompany a new contract with Harris, the label ‘bagnio’ vanished from the plot of number ten.120 Of course, some bagnios were more respectable than others. One owner tried to prevent his house from being used by the doxies and molls of Covent Garden by not allowing women to enter after midnight.121 Nonetheless, as it was located within ‘the great square of Venus’, it would be naive to believe that the steaminess of Brewer’s bagnio was perfectly innocent, especially as official documents (including the one from Harris) coyly failed to acknowledge the use of the building.122 Consider too that Harris collected a rent from this building only slightly less than that which he received from the Piazza coffee house next door, which had much larger premises and where business was brisk. Judging by his calculations, he believed that the bagnio could be hugely profitable for the right keeper, and profits were not made through being selective about who could enjoy a bed together. If you are trusting enough to suppose that all of the sums received from Brewer are recorded in the surviving account books of the theatre, then it seems that Harris made little or no profit on the lease. Moreover, after he had paid the many different taxes, there would most likely have been a deficit.123 Strangely, for a man who has been described as the embodiment of miserliness, such business deals were rarely only about

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the money. Instead, the bagnio in the 1790s gave him a different type of opportunity – the chance to extend the theatre for its survival. Hemmed in by tottering rows of taverns and shops, Harris saw that a larger, bolder theatre could be made using number ten.124 But with the Bedford Office doggedly committed to protecting the Duke’s revenue – which meant keeping the size, structure and use of his properties unchanged – Harris’s only opportunity was to acquire the leases of Brewer’s bagnio and others like the Piazza coffee house as they became available, and then expand into the backs of those buildings while keeping their façades and front rooms intact.125 These shop fronts eventually hid the Garden’s saloons as well as the workrooms of painters and carpenters, those spaces for the secret work of theatre.126 By doing so, Harris was forced to accept the ownership of a bagnio, a potential financial loss and the dishonour that could accompany knowledge of his involvement in a trade that was difficult to reconcile with a social conscience. He accepted all of this to satisfy an all-engrossing ambition of a rarer kind than cupidity. We shall never know if Harris’s decision to give benefit nights for the General Lying-in Hospital at Bayswater – one of the many charitable institutions that provided shelter for pregnant girls unable to care for themselves – was an attempt to calm his conscience. Perhaps it was merely good business practice in supporting a place safely out of the city that would take those pregnant girls who needed care and had the potential to embarrass. The newspapers merely commended ‘the benevolence of Mr. Harris’ in helping ‘a multitude of unhappy objects … much in need of such timely succour’.127 In the land of illusion orchestrated by him – where the heroes of pantomime travelled across the world in a leap and vanished in a haze of confusion – he was able to drop out of sight in ways which were less magical and more worldly, but just as effective. The art of being seldom seen After the first flush of youthful swagger as the Garden’s new manager, Harris became an inscrutable figure to those outside of his network of friendships, even though his theatre held a fascination and served as a centre for trade and commerce. The theatre needed everything that was to be found in the outside world to create the illusion of real life. Everyone in Covent Garden with a service to offer – watchmen, bow-street officers and attorneys; carpenters, bricklayers and house painters; colliers, rat-catchers and chimney sweeps; drapers, mercers and shoemakers; haberdashers and hairdressers; bakers and vintners – knew the value of being able to enter the stage door. None of them knew enough about  Harris, though, to satisfy inquisitive customers, and only a few

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knew him by sight. To avoid unnecessary contact with the busy, hustling life of London, Harris employed a network of superintendents.128 At the head of this group at the beginning of the century stood the immovable obstacles of James W. Brandon and Edward Barlow. They would decide whether a stranger would gain an audience with him, or not. Brandon was a gift to the caricaturists, instantly recognizable with his swollen, pock-marked face, monstrously bulbous nose and perpetual scowl.129 However, it was not necessary to witness his disturbing silhouette upon the dimly-lit alleyways, with its exaggeration of his grotesque burly form, to see that he was no laughable or droll figure. There to maintain order amongst the theatre’s rakehells, he had built a reputation as someone who could not be touched – legally, physically or emotionally. Dibdin received it as the ultimate compliment when, at a performance of one of his sentimental plays at the Surrey theatre, he saw tears pass down Brandon’s ‘iron cheeks’.130 Even his red, mottled complexion seemed to have been caused by the endurance of an austere life, rather than by years of heavy drinking. Having begun life as a house servant before Harris took control, Brandon could be found leading the constables, with a cudgel in hand, to remove disturbances from the theatre. He would haul all offenders before the sitting magistrates in nearby Bow Street, from the gangs in the upper gallery who threw lumps of iron into the depths of the pit below, to the wags who put on false noses shaped like giant phalluses to make indecent proposals.131 His exploitation of one of Harris’s weaknesses, through expressions of devotion such as the naming of his daughter ‘Charlotte Harris Brandon’ after his manager’s wife, was seen by the authority conferred upon him.132 After many years of service, Brandon was eventually given carte blanche by Harris, feeding a self-importance that was as plain-spoken as the crude lines that captured him in satirical prints. Surveying the map of his kingdom – the large chart that recorded the occupants of each box for the night – he controlled the bookings and payments from the most affluent and influential visitors to the theatre. While enjoying this freedom, much of the finances passed through his hands as he supervised the backstage staff and managed the day-to-day running expenses.133 ‘Pray keep a wary Eye on all that may pass’ was the key instruction to his other superintendent, Edward Barlow, whose official title was the theatre’s ‘inspector and auditor of accounts’.134 As with Brandon, Harris confided in him when he needed to share a knotty or delicate problem, such as when the actions of the ‘unaccountably mysterious’ and mischievous pettifogger Mr Utoph threatened both ‘malignedly to ruin us’ and the very survival of the theatre.135 The trust acquired by Barlow stemmed from a similar emotional leverage upon Harris; it was

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the reward for years of tigerish loyalty. When one man made the mistake of questioning Harris’s honesty, Barlow expressed the quick anger of a man who felt compelled to protect an old friend. On that occasion, he railed against the ‘illiberal and unjust’ treatment of his ‘Dear and worthy friend’ – and with righteous indignation claimed ‘I feel the insult to my friend severely. After an intercourse of above 27 years, it was distressing to me to see for the first time his probity doubted.’136 His words were not empty attempts to curry favour. After he promised that his son would be taught how to ‘respect and esteem’ the theatre’s proprietor, that promise was redeemed every day after dinner when the child was prompted to raise his glass of wine with the toast of ‘Mr Harris, and success to Covent Garden Theatre’.137 With his uncompromising, monochrome sense of honour, Barlow regarded Harris as a man of integrity. When in need of someone to carry out his private instructions, or conduct contractual negotiations in his name, or be his troubleshooter and get the business done, Barlow was sent.138 There was much to recommend him when Harris had to leave, travelling long days along country post roads in search of a spa that might cure his breathlessness. Barlow grabbed problems by the scruff of the neck, sometimes by physically dragging people who had caused a problem to the door of Harris’s office where they were told to wait.139 He possessed those qualities that became the Dickensian stereotype of the veteran of the armed forces, with that pride in ascetic self-discipline, good order and attention to fine detail. Life was to be methodical and everything was to be shipshape. For Barlow, the one great evil was ‘slovenly careless inattention’, especially where money was concerned. Wastefulness maddened him, compelling him to write to Harris frequently such as when ‘Rich Genoa Velvet at a Gu[inea] a yard’ was used to refurbish the theatre ‘when Manchester at 8 s[hillings] would have answered the purpose as well’.140 Harris must have hoped that these pragmatic qualities, necessary for survival at sea, would rub off on Edwin who had spent his early years in the care of Jane. He allowed Edwin and his friends to treat Barlow’s house as their home with the possibility of its steady influence. When calculating the cost of cutting ties with the theatre, Barlow placed the highest value upon Edwin’s friendship. ‘What gives me more real anguish than any personal inconvenience I may encounter’, he wrote to Harris, ‘is that by doing so I remove myself from all intercourse with a Gentleman I esteem and value so sincerely as do you.’ After Edwin betrayed his mother’s nature in yet another reckless escapade at twenty-six – in a career that revolved around the sailor’s four habits of drinking, gambling, whoring and fighting – it was to Barlow that he went for sobriety and shelter. Barlow’s willingness

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to forgive his faults gave Edwin a refuge from threats to his safety, his father’s anger and the cold rejection of those whose good opinion he had lost.141 It would not, it seems, protect Edwin from his eventual imprisonment as a debtor at the King’s Bench, marriage to a woman who could not write her own name, or estrangement from his father.142 Dropping through the cracks of society, and no longer able to stir abroad, his end had been foreseen by Harris with a mixture of disquiet and renunciation.143 Brandon and Barlow shared little else besides their hard-bitten personality and tendency to make grand gestures of loyalty. As the ever-faithful Barlow worried about the theatre’s finances, his letters to Brandon – to impress upon him a sense of obligation – were met with silent, unconcerned bravado.144 But did Harris, during increasing periods of absence, nurse suspicions that Brandon was careless, knavish and unscrupulous? One anonymous writer felt the need to make him aware that he was ‘placing the most implicit confidence in Servants, and having that confidence abused’. Dated only days before his death, the letter was written to inform him about the lavish lifestyle of two brothers who were employed at the theatre as it drifted towards financial ruin. It claimed that they owned a mansion, expensively furnished with silver plate that was polished by two servants, as well as a landscaped garden with the extravagance of both a hothouse and a greenhouse. And it had all come from the proceeds of a ‘conspiracy’ to defraud him.145 Whether Harris came to believe this or not, he would lament in private that his situation was like the fable of the bear and the bees – a sting to be endured because of the danger of antagonizing the theatre’s community, those workers upon whom he had become dependent.146 We will never know if the anonymous letter was actually sent, or how it afterwards came to be in Barlow’s possession. It could be that Barlow was alarmed enough, by Brandon’s refusal to provide receipts for expenses claims which were rising at an unrelenting rate, to compose this letter to Harris. It certainly contained an insider’s thoughtfulness about the vulnerabilities in how money was handled at the theatre. Perhaps Barlow had dictated it and then had second thoughts about sending it, or maybe Harris’s subsequent death made it pointless. Nevertheless, the bitterness would continue to fester. As Brandon refused to reduce his claims or pay back fourteen years of benefit costs amounting to £1,155, Barlow petitioned the management and tried to make himself heard. Brandon instead preferred to keep matters between himself and his brother John, the treasurer. Only after John’s death came the revelation that his son, the pride of his ageing father and destined for a career in law, helped him in his struggle to keep careful records.147 With it came the possibility that

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someone bewildered by the myriad of financial transactions, like John, could have been easily hoodwinked by his brother. The successors to the Harris family, the management team headed by Charles Kemble in the 1820s, gradually uncovered the financial irregularities. Their first warning that something was wrong – when cleaners, porters and charwomen came to their door desperate for wages months in arrears – may not have been Brandon’s fault. It may have been just impossible to pay everyone when nervous investors, frightened by the news of Harris’s death, had suddenly called in debts large and small.148 But Kemble’s team came to believe in Brandon’s deceit as the evidence mounted that he had used every fraudulent ploy possible to profit personally from the theatre’s boxes – from printing and selling his own admission tickets, to pioneering the concept of the booking fee by charging members of the public for the privilege of buying a place in an empty box.149 His death brought the most damning evidence. When Lord Belfast came to renew the lease on his private box, it became clear that the pugnacious old servant had audaciously charged him one rate, declared another, and pocketed the difference amounting to hundreds of pounds each year.150 Harris had been warned by those roguish servants who lived by their wits for the entertainment of his audience. They had become a cliché, plotting and scheming ever since the beginning of theatre. When audiences laughed at the audacity of Subtle, Face and Dol Common in revivals of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, it was with a recognition that those characters were nothing new, and could be found in every wellto-do household. Masters were resigned to the risk that when they were not stealing your silver and lace, servants were seducing your son or daughter.151 Yet delegation was a necessary evil in such a big community as the Garden, a necessity that Harris usually turned to his benefit. As Barlow bitterly recognized, people who were given power at the theatre were seen to make the unpopular decisions and gained ‘the Honor of the abuse’, while Harris enjoyed ‘all the advantage’.152 This tactic of encouraging others to enforce law at the Garden was something that Henry Harris learned from his father. And it was relied upon when a pantomime nearly ended in a fatal accident. The pantomime’s main character was Harlequin, a swift, mercurial blur of colour. His outstanding trick was a spellbinding disappearance. As a tour de force, he made a death-defying leap from a springboard to a flap cut high in the scenery at the back of the stage. Propelled through the flap, he appeared to jump through the moon, or an upstairs window at the very least. With his safety placed in the hands of habitually drunk carpenters who were notoriously testy, the stakes were high. Another

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Harlequin luckily escaped with only wounded pride when he attempted to accelerate through a trick flap that remained locked, breaking only the scene to pieces.153 Paulo ‘Little Devil’ Redigé was not so lucky. Memories of Redigé’s fatal accident haunted Tom Ellar as he nervously steeled himself to make the show-stopping vault in the winter of 1818–19. Instead of being caught backstage, Redigé had fallen to his death after bursting through the opening. The acrobat, who always seemed more than human upon the stage, showed how delicate the human body was after landing head first upon a protruding iron screw.154 Unnerved earlier in the day by rumours that the carpenters were not going to catch him either, Ellar’s mind had tried to imagine what such an end would be like. He feared the worst after banging upon the scene to make sure that the men holding the carpet were in position, and received no reply. Now alive to the consequences of having failed to tip those men who were conscious of their power and its potential to procure drinks, he eventually made the dive with a protective arm outstretched. Hitting the hard, wooden boards backstage, his fears were painfully realized. Carrying a broken hand, he had to haul his damaged body through the rest of the performance. Journalists enjoyed flattering Ellar by telling him that he was a disembodied spirit with legs that ‘twinkle rather than dance’, but they were not aware of the strains and dangers placed upon his flesh and bones every night.155 Hearing of the accident and the threats of the carpenters, Henry Harris passed the problem to the last stage-manager of his father’s reign, John Fawcett – a blunt, forthright man whose charitable friends likened him to a pineapple, ‘rough outside, but full of sweetness within’.156 Fawcett, a seasoned performer, knew the Harris’s management technique well. He lined up all of the carpenters on stage. ‘If Mr. Ellar would undertake to say he believed the accident had been brought about willfully, you should every one be discharged on the spot.’ Ellar was then allowed to enter from the wings. Nervously cornered without the Harlequin’s power of escape, his only reply was, ‘I can not believe it was intentional.’ Still convinced that it was no accident, he later whispered ‘the fellow has a wife and half-a-dozen children dependant upon him’ to a concerned Grimaldi.157 Fawcett, for the management, had dutifully shown concern for the performers’ welfare and had given the injured player an opportunity for satisfaction, a chance to settle the score. And, shrewdly, Ellar was seen to have the final say. By placing him in charge of the situation, this tenderhearted performer was left exposed at centre stage with an unpleasant decision to make, one with ugly consequences. Everyone knew that these temperamental workmen could cut up rough and paralyse a production

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if they felt aggrieved. The slightest provocation had in the past led to the strings of the pantomime machinery being cut and destroyed in one night, ‘the kettle-drums perforated, and all the cloth on the entrance doors to every avenue hacked to pieces’.158 And if such anger ignited the feelings of their friends on the outside, the next audience could swell with trouble, whether they had a case or not. The safest course of action, for Henry and Fawcett, was to offer encouragement from the wings while someone else walked the tightrope of management. For Thomas Harris, to operate unnoticed and unobserved was not to be insignificant, but to exercise power without interference. After all, nothing could be gained by challenging a Londoner’s sense of his right to preside over the entertainment. And John Bull, as the nation’s subjects collectively came to be known, could be as dangerous and difficult to predict as the name suggested. ‘Mr. Bull is not a gentleman to be drubbed into any other man’s way of thinking,’ one writer proudly claimed.159 When Harris became embroiled in scandal and his authority was tested, he would expertly edge away from confrontations and the publicity they created. His responses were quietly discreet with a concern to quieten affairs.160 The vacuum created by Harris left his stage-manager, an actor with a small share in the business, to confront the glare of the public and to employ his skills to appease them. One of them, John Philip Kemble, faced London in 1809 during an unprecedented sixty-seven nights of rioting in the theatre and its surroundings.161 As rioters fought through the crowd of constables, firemen and prizefighters hired to control them, the actors could only cower behind the threat of water cannons which poked through the stage curtains.162 Night after night, the auditorium became a ‘theatre of war’ as spectators fantasized about hanging Kemble from a gibbet while thrashing the other servants of the theatre into submission using bullwhips.163 In the midst of anarchy and noise likened to the chaos caused by a thousand drunken sailors, banners were unfurled proclaiming Harris as the people’s champion against the despotic Black Jack Kemble.164 One portrayed Kemble as the murderous Macbeth desperate to avoid the blame for his own treacherous actions when confronted by Harris as the ghost of Banquo returning to accuse him. As the riots continued, the mob even accused Kemble of buying the approval of newspapers, unaware of the influence over the daily press exerted by his partner.165 After Kemble’s attempts to pacify the crowds failed, he was humbled upon the stage, vilified in print and terrorized by night-time attacks. In one of these attacks, before the hour of eleven on the night of mischief in November, it seemed as if the threats scrawled upon the banners in the auditorium were about to be executed. A mob of around

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300 marched a mile north, from the theatre to Kemble’s house in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. Raising ‘the most horrible yells’, they surrounded the house. After breaking the windows and throwing the mud and filth of the street against the front of the house, the crowd surged forward to force open the door.166 Two evenings later as large bodies of men began to roam the streets again, threatening to plunge the capital into lawlessness once more, the Home Secretary had to mobilize troops to protect Kemble and his property.167 Despite being subjected to all of the anger that the Garden’s audiences could lob, it was the reception given to his brother’s heavily pregnant wife that finally forced Kemble to realize the foolishness of trying to reason. As Maria ponderously moved on to the stage, she was met with a ‘shout of savage violence’, chants of ‘No little Kembles! No more little Kembles!’ and pelted with half-eaten apples and oranges.168 With the auditorium in such chaos, the only hint of Harris’s presence came when Kemble retreated from the stage to one of the side boxes, hidden from view, to receive instructions.169 Some Londoners tried to account for Harris’s disappearance through the story that the great impresario was near to death, bedridden, semiconscious and pitifully unaware of his surroundings.170 The real cause was less sentimental. At seventy-one, Harris could ill-afford to be recognized upon the streets and suffer the fate of Charles Kemble who had been roughly knocked about by the crowds at the Stock Exchange.171 He knew too that it was pointless trying to negotiate in person with those street-dwellers who swelled the numbers of the rioters – the abusive fishwives and feral apprentices who created their own entertainment by congregating around the theatre’s entrances to abuse the actors and anyone else who appeared well-dressed. Instead, away from scrutiny in the spa town of Bath, he considered ways to regain control of the theatre, unseen and unknown. Modern historians who accuse ‘the hubristic’ John Philip Kemble of causing the problems, just like the rioters did, can be forgiven because Harris was accomplished at escaping attention.172 This was no mean feat during the dawn of a mass-market celebrity culture that enjoyed peering into the private lives of others. One foreigner, who was able to appreciate the strangeness of everyday life in the city, was amazed at ‘the continual intrusion of the newspapers into the affairs of private life’; for him, it was one of the oddest customs. ‘A man of any distinction not only sees the most absurd details concerning him dragged before the public’, he wrote, ‘but if anything really worth telling happens to him, it is immediately made public without shame or scruple.’173 Clearly, Harris was an exception, and in other ways too. He remained elusive, evading capture in the lines of the engraver, while London’s caricaturists reworked the latest events and

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their celebrities to satisfy the public’s love of humiliation. Artists in the filthy, tumbledown lanes of Covent Garden lived by making fun of figures who had suddenly become infamous or famous, gleefully stretching faces and bodies to monstrous proportions. And their monstrous images had the potential for huge embarrassment. With some the size of posters, they were pasted up anywhere and everywhere – brothels, workshops and boarding houses – providing victims in gaudy colour for the cheap enjoyment of onlookers. And the successful ones papered London’s streets, being copied around 2,000 times before the copper engraving plates were rubbed smooth.174 Astonishingly, a search of the vast hoard of 9,740 caricature prints in the British Museum, the collection of around 5,350 at the Library of Congress and the holdings of the Morgan Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the theatre collection at Harvard, reveals only three indisputable images of Harris after he became manager in 1774.175 The frontman John Philip Kemble had to look at – at least – fifteen images of himself during the 1809 riots alone that made grotesque fun of his angular face with its hook nose.176 Harris’s only appearances came in prints that encouraged London to laugh at his problems while trying to engage the actor William Henry West Betty. Betty was the biggest draw of the new century, a theatrical phenomenon. Londoners were gripped by mass hysteria and placed life and limb in jeopardy just to catch sight of him. None of the greatest and most challenging parts in the English language – from Hamlet to Richard III – seemed beyond this cherub-faced thirteen-year-old who could command a remarkable fifty guineas a night.177 As theatregoers nursed sore heads and delicate ribs after another undignified scramble for seats, Thomas Rowlandson playfully considered the reactions of Harris’s temperamental stars when upstaged by a mere child. In his scene Melpomene in the Dumps (Figure 3), no one survives unscathed. One of the leading ladies, Sarah Siddons, reclines majestically and moodily to berate Harris, the ‘First Monarch’. Behind them stands the towering figure of Kemble who tries to placate the colossal dignity of his sister. She reminds them of her past glories by adopting her aweinspiring pose as the Tragic Muse from the famous full-length portrait of her painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds twenty years before.178 She wears a flowing white dress in an attempt to appear statuesque, like a piece of living sculpture. But the sight of the matronly Siddons, pretending that she is still the graceful, beautiful and commanding figure of her prime, provided Londoners with the chance to snigger. Now, Rowlandson suggests, she can only make an impression because of her sheer size in his comic society of large and small. The immensity of this print – a poster

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FIGURE 3  Detail from Thomas Rowlandson, Melpomene in the Dumps; or, Child’s Play Defended by Theatrical Monarchs (1804). (Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

intended for display – makes the point forcefully. Even the Harris figure is over six inches tall. But if this artist aimed to reveal laughable insights into Harris’s situation, then the caricaturist flaunted his ignorance. His ridiculous Harris is needy and childlike, feebly endeavouring to wield authority while holding an upturned hat in the attitude of a beggar and dressed shabbily in patchwork trousers. Other copies, coloured differently, take the joke even further. One at the British Museum gives him bare calves through flesh tones, while another at the Houghton daubs him like someone who has just trudged through the overflowing gutters of Holborn.179 That Harris was trapped by his past, forever an impoverished

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soap-boiler from the lowest of society, is slyly suggested by the print behind them showing actors in various attitudes. Its title ‘Propogation of a Lye’ refers to the creation of emotion by the actor’s art, yet the final word also described the waste liquid that oozed away from the soapmaker’s vats as the liquid fat slowly solidified into soap. Would Harris have recognized himself in these pictures, or would anyone else have been able to? If John Opie’s portrait is to be trusted – an artist with a reputation for creating perfect likenesses – then perhaps Rowlandson’s elderly man with the small frame and the gentle gaze came closest to capturing him. But in comparing Rowlandson’s Harris with the other two imposters (Figures 4 and 5), it seems that there was no clear consensus about what he actually looked like. Or at the very least, a set of easily recognizable traits were not understood or circulated. Do not be fooled by the obvious similarities such as the pointing hand, and the commonplace clothing and style of hair. The slavish repetition of such characterless features showed that what was distinctive about Harris was not common knowledge. Moreover, the colouring of his dress in The Young Roscious reveals this Harris to be a bad copy of the one from Theatrical Amusement from the previous month – an imitation not owned by either its engraver or printer beyond ‘Charles del. et Sculp’. At most, these caricaturists must have had only glimpses of Harris to work with, while peering into the shadowy recesses of the royal box. In contrast, the fame of other men, who had shared secrets with Harris, spawned caricatures with lives of their own. Take Pitt the Younger, who was always the ridiculously thin, gangly youth; the delicate adolescent with the snootily upturned nose. Or Sheridan who became the man with the manic stare whose lumpy, brandy-faced complexion struggled to contain all of the flesh within.180 But not so for Harris, who escaped being fixed as a caricature, or so it would seem.181 These jokes at his expense relied upon Londoners first recognizing his well-known companions – the stars of the satirical print such as Betty in his famous frills – and then identifying Harris through association. As Harris competes with Sheridan to place Betty in golden shackles in The Young Roscious, he claims ‘If my Gold be not so Weighty, you will find it of a more pure quality!’ This did not simply draw attention to the notoriety of Sheridan’s finances, the swindler who might even pass ‘gold’ of dubious value. In contrast to Sheridan’s heavy ostentation and crude showiness, Harris is a man of quality not quantity. He operates in a world not so easily appreciated, a world for an expert eye like those in the Assay Office. The real Harris could find a perverse satisfaction in his relative obscurity because the ability to exert a power undetected was even more important to him in another life.

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FIGURE 4  Theatrical Amusement or Tossing-up for the Young Roscius! (1804). (Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Call number: TCS 61)

FIGURE 5  The Young Roscious Weighing the Managers Gold (1805). (Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Call number: TCS 61)

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Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris Secret Service

The British Secret Service – known as the SS around the Home Office – was set in motion by a cabal of intriguers at the birth of modern espionage. Among them were George III, William Pitt the Younger, Treasury officials George Rose and Charles Long, and Thomas Harris.182 Inside their headquarters, a row of undercover agents waited to be posted around the world – with destinations from Sweden to Constantinople. In the attempt to disguise them, they had been placed in rough hemp sacks which were tied up around their necks, as if clumsily gift-wrapped. Or, at any rate, this is what the artist Charles Williams thought. In his print Secrets upon Secrets (1806), a clownish yokel stares at them through a window while admitting with wonder, ‘I can’t think in my heart what [they] be about … tis nation hard [they] wont let I into the secret.’ Those who thought of themselves as urbane and sophisticated might fantasize about such activity, or find comfort in mocking the ridiculousness of trying to keep anything secret. However, when the State chose to keep them in ignorance, didn’t they all become dumbfounded country bumpkins with their noses pressed against the glass? Like much in his life, Harris’s role in the SS worked upon the principle that other people’s ignorance was power. His activities have only left behind cryptic notes on discoloured paper. Take one letter – on a matter of urgency – that Harris wrote to Charles Farley before the actor left for Paris in the late summer of 1814, a trip financed by the manager himself: Bellemonte Dear Farley

Thursday 7th July

We shall be undone if we do not provide something very powerful for our opening. If we are able to make any advantage of the late wonderful transactions in Paris – it must be done then (at our opening) or not at all – I suppose you are preparing for your excursion to Paris – & I am glad of it – having no doubt that you will pick up something serviceable, & that you will find much amusement & information in the French theatres – I wou’d have you (as soon as you can) see Mr. Williams (alias Anth.y Pasquin) living at No. 3 Camden Place, Camden Town – he is just return’d from Paris, where he was theatrically employ’d by us – he is desirous of consulting with you on all that he has done – & besides will give you some recommendations & information that may be of much convenience & assistance to you during your journey & your sojourn in the great city –

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I wish much to see you before your departure – will it be convenient to you to take a dinner with us here on Sunday next – Ever most truly yours T. Harris –183

Harris’s letter revealed his eagerness to direct Farley’s movements around Paris and its theatres. Farley was his reliable inventor of ballets, pantomimes and stage tricks, the bankable father of Mother Goose and Aladdin. He was the very man to observe how the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy was being celebrated on the stage, and then to carry back some ideas for the Garden. Harris was as much troubled by the lack of anything fresh with which to start the new season with a flourish, as he was impatient to celebrate the ‘wonderful transactions’ over the Channel. As ever, he was looking for ways to celebrate a royalist cause and turn a profit at the same time. And with the removal of Napoleon, along with the threat of imprisonment for Englishmen on French soil, an opportunity had opened up. Harris was eager to dispatch him – Farley had to go, this July and August, while the country continued in a state of uncertain calm. As Farley discovered, this was no simple business trip. Years of conflict had left an indelible mark on the countryside, while the English had only ceased to be the enemy three months earlier. Riding towards the capital, he noticed the gangs of soldiers who had enough fight to show their love for Napoleon and their hatred for the English. His first experience of Paris was the stench of the seething dead in mass graves outside the city wall. Within, the statue of Napoleon ‘crowned by fame’ continued to look down upon the people. The Emperor’s lingering presence was also felt in the theatres, with little of the pre-revolutionary brilliance having survived. Farley would have been on a fool’s errand had he gone there solely as a theatrical scout, or to school himself in performance. War had not been a father to their opera, or to their ballet. ‘It was worse than any London Theatre would have been. … Went home quite disappointed and somewhat angry,’ he wrote after one night’s entertainment. Their circus spectacles had the power to impress though, like ‘the Woman on the Rope’ at Tivoli gardens who climbed at least sixty or maybe eighty feet in the air amidst an explosion of fireworks; but such sophistication could have been seen most nights at London’s pleasure gardens.184 Some of the most useful objects he would carry home were not memories, but books of national dress – the exoticism of French, Swedish, Russian and Italian costumes.

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But did Harris’s letter that July include code – ideas insinuated darkly – for the writer and recipient alone? Some of the words from this precise man of business are vague and ambiguous – and are perhaps meant in more ways than one. What exactly did he mean by hoping that Farley would pick up ‘something serviceable’ and find ‘much information’? And in sending him to see Anthony Pasquin, what exactly had the latter been doing in France at so sensitive a time, and what was the ‘information … of much convenience’ to be exchanged? Never did a man so need an alias as Pasquin, a dirty fellow in more ways than one.185 Even the muck-raking journalist John Taylor called him ‘worthless and despicable’, someone with a character as foul as his dress who could ‘disgrace’ a room just by entering it. Taylor could only speculate that Pasquin’s disfigured moral character had been formed by the fists and boots of a Bow Street tavern, just as his clothes carried the filth of its floor. One night, after provoking the disgust of a company there, Pasquin had been told to apologize on his knees – which he refused to do. After being beaten, he crouched upon the floor ‘partly from weakness and partly from fear’ and said all that they had demanded. For his trouble, his head was kicked with such force as to drive his teeth from their sockets. Many others, whom he had terrorized around Covent Garden, would have liked to have done much the same. To have called him a hack would have underestimated his inventive ability to blackmail actors and painters with the threat of ridicule in the press. The judge Lord Kenyon had other choice words for him. Describing him as a man who did not deserve the protection of the law, he had hoped that a way could be found ‘to prevent all such unprincipled and mercenary wretches from going about unbridled in society to the great annoyance and disquietude of the public’. Add to this Pasquin’s roaming of the English-speaking world as a political agitator for anyone’s hire – whether in London, Dublin, Boston or New York – and Harris’s connection with him takes an even darker turn.186 One of Pasquin’s letters to Henry Harris has survived, mentioning his search for pantomime plots in all of the old Parisian bookshops, as well as his offer to the celebrated Grimacier de Tivoli on the Garden’s behalf.187 Moreover, Pasquin was not unfamiliar with the stage as a selfstyled connoisseur of the Continental – his Pin-Basket to the Children of Thespis (1797) provides potted histories of the European stages, including a list of the Parisian places of entertainment for that year.188 If his voluminous multi-part poems on the state of London theatre are taken as a guide, his knowledge of its performers, writers and managers had a satirist’s acute awareness of the personal weaknesses to ridicule. And he had knowledge enough not to make an enemy of Harris. As the scourge of the stage, his theatrical poetry had only ever mentioned

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Harris in one line – about how the manager’s ‘pence’ had kept the ‘follies’ of his writers ‘in tune’ – combined in his collected Poems (1789) with an editorial note which stressed Harris’s ‘many instances of kindness’ and generosity towards Frederick Pilon during the playwright’s lifeending illness.189 And yet, to suppose that Pasquin was purely Harris’s theatrical eyes and ears, when he had never acted or written a play for the London stage, would have overlooked his usefulness as a well-travelled political mercenary in this volatile, new State. Whatever the roles of Pasquin and Farley, their status as theatrical agents for a world-famous royalist theatre must have smoothed their passage. To obtain passports, they were asked to identify themselves under the scrutiny of the King’s officials at Calais harbour. And Farley was later granted an hour’s conversation with Monsieur Rénée who held an appointment under the new government, and who gave ‘much information’. Before returning, Farley had worried about leaving a paper trail behind. He was detained in Paris waiting for letters expected from Harris, but which had failed to arrive. Growing frantic with each passing day – ‘Still No Letters!!’ – he attached a supreme importance to them, along with the unavoidable suspicion that they had been taken en route.190 But to have broken their seals, in the search for clandestine business, would have been to accept a challenge. Similarly, when the account books of the theatre record a payment to an ‘Agent’ in Paris, such as the sum of fifty pounds to a Mr Baldwin, it teases and defies the reader. Was such a payment simply for a copy of the latest Parisian play scribbled down by one of Harris’s Continental contacts and destined for translation by Elizabeth Inchbald?191 Or, was it for a different kind of information as the Service’s Alien Office nervously watched events at the heart of postrevolutionary France? Was Baldwin part of that international network of anonymous agents who identified each other through the secret token of three small red flowers?192 To plumb the depths of the SS, it is necessary to step inside the Home Office. Above all else, the Home Office housed a group dedicated to the protection of the King and his government whose efforts intensified with every spasm of anxiety caused by events in Paris. They waited in expectation of the worst – an uprising at home. Harris’s involvement coincided with the years of the French Revolution when the Office received a steady stream of correspondence alerting them to the watchful unease in London. Anything out of the ordinary, that stirred suspicions of social unrest, led to letters from self-styled patriots. Every week brought information about the discovery of papers under coffee house tables that called for revolution; or about seditious pamphlets slipped

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under the doors of public buildings; or about lodgers who received strange messages from overseas; or about sightings of carts filled with rifles not destined for an army barracks; or about threats made upon the King’s life by those invoking the scourge of God and swearing that ‘King George is not my king, nor his laws will I fear’.193 These discoveries were reminders about just how exposed and defenceless the King and his ministry were – reminders about how illusory their control was over the city, over the mass of organized chaos. One note that was forwarded to the Office worryingly included confidential knowledge about the King’s future movements. It had been slipped under the door of a coffee house near Westminster Bridge under the cover of midwinter darkness. It was an invitation to take up arms and join an ambush while the King was at his most vulnerable, travelling through the city.194 Another report that year, from an agent at large, was equally disturbing. Its uncertainty hinted darkly at danger outside ten Downing Street: An ill dress’d Man was walking before Mr Pitt’s Door yesterday between eleven & twelve, waiting or watching, I don’t know which, or how long. Some mischief is certainly intended on Wednesday or Thursday next.195

As Harris and the others knew well, it was a war waged through urban intelligence. In response to the threats, SS agents crept unannounced into every significant town in England. William Blake called these men ‘Satans Watch-fiends’, notorious for their obduracy in conducting the movements of surveillance.196 They kept watch upon printers whose penny pamphlets were thought to encourage discontent. They intercepted and opened letters from writers deemed to be dangerous. They infiltrated friendships between people on the watchlist, and they hovered around crowds where the huddled masses called for more rights, or for more bread. When having nothing upon their hands, these men lounged upon street corners on the lookout for anything suspicious – such as a handbill casually dropped upon the pavement. Anyone hounded by the spy network would agree that ‘in such men as generally fill that detestable office everything is to be feared, from their cunning, their falsehood and their malice’. ‘Mr Spy’ was a term of abuse.197 For all of the dangers posed by lone assassins and small bands of men intent on revolution, the government was acutely aware that the printed word posed the biggest threat to national security in the 1790s. In the struggle for hearts and minds, it was seen potentially as the difference between a contented nation cheerfully toasting the King’s health and an unstable one where Westminster would burn. Print would make or break

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the nation depending upon who could reach the biggest audience. The government’s challenge was to place its message into as many hands as possible, while suppressing those publications deemed to be dangerously radical or republican.198 As the King explicitly commanded his courts to punish – with the full venom of the law – anyone caught handling ‘wicked and seditious writings’, the radicals engaged in subterfuge. The most dangerous publication during the years of the French Revolution – the sensational Rights of Man by the outlawed Thomas Paine – was slyly slipped to customers under false covers, helping to boost its circulation in England to near 50,000 copies in just two months. Messages attacking the government’s response to events in France were nailed up along turnpike roads with the stealth of the modern-day graffiti artist.199 The most audacious ploy used the name of Pitt’s confidant in the SS to distribute the scandalous Morning Post, free of charge. Newspapers with an MP’s name attached went without postage – it was unremarkable – but using George Rose’s name was too brazen to escape attention. The whistle-blower promptly sent a letter that made up the mountain of correspondence in 1794: Dr Sir The Morning Post is the most impudent Seditious Paper which comes out. In order to circulate this paper for ill purposes, whenever there is one more impudent than ordinary, they are sent all over the Country. Yesterday the Postmaster of Foots-Cray (Busby) received a Packet containing five or six directed to George Rose Esq. in order to go free, which has been done before. I directed Busby to write to Mr. Rose, & take the liberty to inform you of it.

Yours sincerely Cha: Townshend200

In the daily struggle to control the news, it was not unknown for a subscriber to a radical London journal to find that a Tory newspaper had been delivered to him instead, courtesy of the Clerks of the Road.201 Where the radicals employed invention, the government used money. The ministry paid for the mass printing and binding of royalist critiques of the Revolution, such as Examen de la constitution de France de 1799. Amounting to thousands of copies, these titles were then promoted in government-funded journals and sold at cost in bookshops around London.202 Like the printing press, this government machine had many moving parts working in sync. Into this contest to be heard stepped Harris. Operating at the centre of the government network as one of its paymasters, Harris’s influence

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has left little trace beyond the appearance of the government’s message in newspapers and periodicals. Without attracting attention, he helped to manipulate reactions to the State and its activities at a time when unrest was blunt and direct and always threatened to find a voice through anarchic violence. Controlling the release and presentation of government news, Harris’s career introduced the age of the political ‘spin doctor’. While others – including Sheridan – sought to promote political ideas through fundraising and writing for the press, only Harris executed ‘spin’ in the true sense of the word.203 He was at the heart of dark intrigues, in a position to influence the masses while operating without the knowledge of outsiders. He was in a different sphere to Sheridan whose every move was in the malignant gaze of the public eye. The butt of satirists’ jokes, Sherry became known as ‘Joseph Surface’, the archvillain from one of his own plays – and shorthand for someone whose ploys were transparent, fooling no one.204 Unseen, Harris exerted control over what the public saw upon his stage, the newspapers they read in the coffee houses and the opinions that they held. And with newspapers providing the only glimpse of what was happening in the world at that moment, Londoners consumed and exhausted the information. To belong to this London of a million strangers was about reading the same reports, and arguing about the same incidents, as everyone else that day. To achieve this sway over public opinion, the majority of London’s newspapers – those with the biggest circulation – had been in Harris’s pocket at one time or another during the 1780s and 1790s. His list included the Morning Chronicle, Public Ledger, St. James’s Chronicle, London Evening Post and the Whitehall Evening Post, amongst others. The Morning Herald, one of London’s bestsellers, was another. It was owned by Henry Bate Dudley who had been given one of Tregent’s gold pocket watches as a gift. On the day that Sheridan had admired the selection of timepieces in the manager’s drawer, Harris was about to choose one for Bate Dudley. It was intended as a handsome and constant reminder of his loyalty to Harris as a friend. While Dudley’s scandal sheets specialized in the beating of public and political figures – with the printed word used as an extension of his fists that he was equally ready to employ – he was no stranger to Harris’s government money, with regular payments to ‘the Morning Herald’ and ‘H. B. Dudley’ recorded during 1790 and 1791. It was the government’s recognition that Dudley had the power to ‘influence the nation’s affairs through his newspaper’.205 One print, A Baite. For the Devil (1779), described him as ‘A Government Runner, of Falsehood a Vender’ as well as ‘A Managers parasite, Opera Writer’. Perhaps the attraction of his opera scripts for Harris was based upon more that their theatrical merit.206

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Acting as an ‘auditor’, Harris personally calculated and transferred payments to newspaper owners which, during one particular five-month period, amounted to at least £1,500.207 In return for Harris’s ministerial guineas, and other people’s secrets in this celebrity-hungry culture, the newspapers praised Pitt’s administration and concealed its scandals. However, these payments were more like compensation than profit for most editors, as disgruntled Londoners sought a literary champion for their grievances against the government. As one under-secretary wryly observed, ‘as soon as Government has any influence over a paper printed in this town, the sale of it decreases and an Englishman will like no newspapers that does not shew him he is ill governed and on the brink of ruin’.208 Harris – by passing money from Rose and Long to third parties – carefully prevented those payments from being traced back to their source, which was essential to prevent the outrage of the Opposition and an official investigation.209 In Parliament, Sheridan would again place himself in opposition to what Harris and the ministry stood for. He would show his resentment of their power over the press – the power to silence, to restrict information and to keep the methods of government secret. Sheridan presented himself as a crusader for a free press, a press that could release the masses from the slavery of dark ignorance by illuminating the corruption of their masters. He addressed Parliament and implored its members to act: Give me … but the liberty of the press, and I will give to the minister a venal House of Peers – I will give him a corrupt and servile House of Commons – I will give him the full swing of the patronage of office – I will give him the whole host of ministerial influence … and yet armed with the liberty of the press, I will go forth to meet him undismayed; I will attack the mighty fabric he has reared with that mightier engine; I will shake down from its height corruption, and bury it beneath the ruins of the abuses it was meant to shelter.

The noble liberality of his sentiments and his rousing eloquence may have deserved the burst of ‘Hear! Hear!’ that echoed around the chamber. Sheridan’s friends, however, did not subsequently stand and plead for his proposal. His argument may have been a worthy one, but it was also embarrassingly naive. To ask anyone to consider a free press – whatever that was in the age of Harris – was like asking them to consider a far-off world that no one had actually seen. It was like asking them to consider a distant planet like Neptune – accepted through a leap of faith, but only comprehensible in the most abstract terms. To add insult to injury in the debate, William Windham even insinuated that Sheridan was the corrupt one in the pay of the press; the possible reason why pressmen hailed him in the street like one of their own. Clearly, Sheridan was

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someone about whom the world knew too much, much that could be used against him, unlike Harris. If Sheridan was referring to Harris as his adversary who had raised a ‘mighty fabric’, he never named him. His anonymity remained intact. Sheridan could only offer a spectral foe to the House.210 As for how Harris saw himself, it may well have been as a second Tiberius Caesar, if such an unassuming man could have entertained such a fantasy. The imprint of Harris’s official seal, upon legal documents, bears a resemblance to the profile of that notorious ruler of Rome.211 This image stamped into the sloppy medium of hot wax is enough to seem familiar, yet too ill-defined to make identification certain. It was the perfect emblem for a man who guarded his privacy with great jealousy – a quality that had defined old Tiberius in the chronicles.212 Harris’s most likely method of meeting Tiberius would have been through Ben Jonson’s controversial play, Sejanus His Fall, which was reprinted and rewritten during the eighteenth century. If Harris had thumbed through a copy – with the shadowy presence of Tiberius inside – it might have given him moments of recognition.213 Tiberius is the expert intriguer who has effortless control while lurking on the edge of events as an insignificant ‘servant of the Senate’. He is politically dominant, but never the centre of interest. As a spymaster, he keeps a ‘strict watch’ upon events from a distance. And crucially, Jonson’s Tiberius is not simply a consummate rhetorician with a heart that lies a thought further away from his lips when compared to other men. He is also a ruler who can manipulate language to promote an official version of events. This is exactly what Harris dedicated himself to, both inside and outside of the theatre. But Sejanus is no mere Machiavellian textbook. It has the power to prick the conscience of a man like Harris with a moral dilemma that was inescapable for someone in his position.214 Namely, to what lengths should the State go to maintain control of the political message? The imprisonment of subversive writers without a fair hearing? The destruction of books like Paine’s Rights of Man? Tiberius may have claimed that ‘in a free state (as ours) all men ought to enjoy both their minds and tongues free’, but the Senate is quick to order the burning of books during a show trial that accuses one author of sedition. Everything considered, to have a high regard for Tiberius, or to see yourself in the outline of the legend, was best implied only through the indistinct medium of wax. If Harris’s involvement in the dark arts of government raised uneasy questions, it was surely tempered by an appreciation of Rose’s political philanthropy. As a lover of the theatre, Rose’s frequent visits to the Garden gave Harris plenty of opportunities to admire plans for the

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improvement of the country.215 Rose attracted admiration through his idealism of compassion without punishment, and his belief that giving the poorest an opportunity to work could change their lives. Rose’s ideas, about providing the poor with the financial aid and education that would eventually allow them to provide for themselves, changed Harris’s life too.216 The School of Industry, which Harris helped to create, was Rose’s philosophy in action. For the paternal manager, there was much more about Rose to esteem. Amid strident calls in Parliament to curtail the cost of poor relief which was thought to have become out of control, Rose instead recognized that not all of those dependent upon the State were idle, undeserving or thoughtless in such a precarious world.217 This advocate of the poor supported outdoor relief against the claustrophobic terrors of the workhouse, seen by him as ‘punishment by imprisonment’. He argued for a minimum wage. He fought for apprenticeships. And he spoke out against the rising cost of food, a problem exacerbated by the Corn Law of 1815 that suppressed cheap imports to maintain grain prices for farmers; but which, after dire harvests, made the most basic food unaffordable for the most vulnerable. He was conscious of how the spectre of starvation dogged the steps of the ragged poor. Other ministers would continue to ignore their plight, even after the pains of hunger led to a week of window breaking that targeted the houses of MPs.218 While mulling over possible recruits, Rose had taken notice of Harris. The gatherings organized by the brewer John Mayor – a government man from the world of London trade, a man cut from the same cloth as Harris – gave them opportunities to meet.219 There, Rose might have discovered that, for someone about whom little was known, Harris knew many people. He could call upon the press, from the ink-stained hands grubbing in miserable courts to the mightiest of booksellers, the Robinsons of Paternoster Row. With Barlow sent on regular journeys with puffs and payments, he might return with new manuscripts from either the Robinsons or the Longmans, or another print merchant who was a willing go-between. Harris also came into regular contact with those playwrights and actors who, to supplement their meagre and sporadic earnings, wrote newspaper reports celebrating the government’s achievements.220 And the table at Mayor’s home had introduced him to one important ally – the Tory newspaper hack Taylor – who would become the owner and editor of the True Briton and the Sun, the bedrock of support for the ministry. In the words of Harris, Taylor became someone ‘constantly ready at your post for our service, as if you had no concerns whatever of your own’.221 That Harris was also the brother-in-law of Thomas Longman – a shareholder of the

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Public Ledger, St. James’s Chronicle and the London Evening Post, and an investor in the theatre – was an added bonus, allowing him to cast the net of influence over a wide area.222 More crucially, when the Treasury’s poor judgement about whom to employ could cause embarrassment, Harris could be relied upon to be silent about any activities that would need to be disowned, if detected. He had been moulded by the society of Freemasonry with its elaborate rituals protected by a code of silence.223 To be a Freemason was to obey one central command: betray not our distinguishing marks and characteristics to any stranger; not to your nearest and dearest relation, nor most intimate and confidential friend. … You will keep a strict guard over your discourse, looks, and gestures; so that the most piercing eye, the quickest ear, or the most penetrating observations may not possibly discover what ought to be concealed.224

That his SS activities are only betrayed by the negligence of Rose, who failed to burn a small number of accounts and receipts bearing Harris’s unmistakable signature (Figure 6), is an indication of the agent’s selfdiscipline.225 Moreover, only one clue to the rewards enjoyed by him has survived: a Crown list for 1796 records that a ‘Mr Harris pays no assessed taxes’.226 With such revenue essential for the war against Napoleon, Pitt had become more enterprising. Not content with taxing the number of windows and clocks within the theatre, even the wearing of hair powder by performers was taxed and added to a bill that threatened to collapse the Garden.227 It seems that help from Rose, along with financial accommodation from the fifth Duke of Bedford, spared Harris’s embarrassment after his decision to purchase the grand Bellemonte estate, near Uxbridge, while recovering from the lavish redevelopment of the theatre.228 But the theatre’s books continued to record assessed tax payments, as if to hide the favour from the Garden’s other minor investors.229 Such speculation becomes persuasive with the revelation that, many years later, Harris would pass fictional accounts off as genuine ones when under immense financial stress. His involvement in the SS can illuminate a number of mysteries surrounding Harris’s life, not simply his escape from the caricaturist’s ill humour at a time when many of them looked for ministry money.230 It may also explain how he secured the Garden’s future through contributing thousands of pounds of revenue, while the takings fluctuated wildly from one night to the next. Harris had to admit to his landlord – the Duke of Bedford – that the ‘Proprietors’ had ‘advanced five thousand guineas from their private fortunes’ to service the debt from a lavish rebuilding of the theatre in 1809, despite enjoying ‘profits’ that were ‘greater …

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FIGURE 6  Receipt from Thomas Harris to George Rose, 28 April 1790, PRO 30/8/229. (Courtesy of the National Archives, Kew)

than were ever known in any Theatre’. These donations were disguised by bewildering and contradictory account books.231 Alfred Bunn would claim that Harris had lived in ‘splendid style’ upon the fifty-acre estate of Bellemonte because of profits from the theatre. However, this remark sadly reveals more about Bunn, a romantic bankrupt, than about Covent Garden theatre.232 Bunn had tried in vain to keep Harris’s empire afloat in the 1830s and nostalgically admired a past that never truly existed. The first person to grapple with the Garden’s accounts – after its lifeline had ended with Harris’s death and Henry had retired from the management – became so incensed as to demand that the cryptic

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‘contradictory’ ledgers ‘be brought before the Court for inspection’. Henry Robertson’s frustration as the theatre’s conscientious new treasurer was understandable as he pored over thousands of bewildering pages of numbers that gave no clear information about where revenue had come from, or about debts, or even about which bills had been paid.233 To make matters worse, Harris had come to see the Garden’s assets as his own after making so many deposits, creating more confusion. An astonished Robertson rudely discovered that the theatre no longer owned one of the lucrative boxes, the one occupied by Lord Holland; the yearly rent had been signed away to the bankers Stephenson & Remington of Lombard Street to repay one of the theatre’s debts, as well as a private debt of Harris’s amounting to £4,000.234 As more of Harris’s murky deals were brought to light, it must have become obvious that he had not wanted to record everything on paper. One such deal included a gift of the ultimate prize to the banker Mr Coutts, whose company had held money destined for the government’s spy network in an official SS account.235 Three small, glinting silver disks were handed over to him, each one giving free admission to the theatre for eighty-five years. As Harris filled the Garden with more and more spectators who paid no entrance money, what he gained in return is not known because this transaction, like many others, was not recorded.236 Striving to manage complex debts, while having less and less money to use, he was forced to become inventive with the theatre’s finances while carefully leaving no textual traces. Instead, he relied upon his memory and those of the people he confided in: his son Henry, the Brandons and Barlow. Later, when the baffled Robertson felt ‘the disgrace’ of ‘unsettled claims’, and became a prey to swindlers who refused to pay debts, Brandon was unsurprisingly silent given his profiteering, and Henry was evasive.237 When Robertson eventually took the books to court in a dispute caused by Harris’s schemes, the Lord Chancellor had to gloss over his own failure to understand them in the hubbub of competing claims about what the theatre was worth, and even about how much profit had been made in just two seasons. ‘The whole machinery was continued for the purpose of deceiving,’ he concluded, with the father and son turning the cogs.238 Only a skilful inventor of theatrical tricks, like Charles Farley, could have hoped to portray Harris’s life with its subterfuge, sleight of hand and surprising escapes. But first, Harris had to fight for possession of the theatre. His life at the Garden would have a violent birth.

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Notes 1 Thomas, Theatre Royal Covent Garden. Catalogue of the Valuable Properties […] which will be Sold by Auction, by Mr. Thomas, in the Saloon of the Theatre, on Thursday, the 10th Day of September, 1829, pp. 23, 24, 32, 33, 45, 55, 56. Maty’s A New Review (1784), V, 218–19 noted that [Allan] Keegan in the Strand had made a silk balloon for the theatre with the same dimensions – ‘of four feet in diameter’ when ‘filled with inflammable air’ – as one successfully sent to Flanders. 2 For the overall trend of decreasing receipts, with some fluctuation, see Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, appendix 13. The lowest recorded amount is £41,029 2s 1d for the season directly before the proposed auction, 1828–29. 3 Pollock (ed.), Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 139; Nelson and Cross (eds), Drury Lane Journal, p. 25. 4 The ‘Arrears of Poor & Parochial Rates’ amounted to £1,126 8s 8d along with ‘Land & Assessed Taxes’ of ‘between £500 & £600’; BL Add. MS 29643, fo. 67 (v.); and Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXV, 79. 5 Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, pp. 186–7. 6 Nash’s remodelling of London’s road network is graphically illustrated by C. & J. Greenwood, Map of London; also see Summerson, The Life and Work of John Nash Architect, pp. 76–83, 87. For the endurance of this social separation, see Booth, Map Descriptive of London Poverty 1898–9 (in 12 Sheets) which shows the close proximity of areas of poverty to the east of Covent Garden. 7 In Report from the Select Committee on the Office of Works and Public Buildings, Nash claimed ‘my purpose was that the new street should cross the Eastern entrance to all the streets occupied by the higher classes, and to leave out to the East all those bad streets’, p. 74. 8 Butler (ed.), A Regency Visitor, p. 46; ‘wie die ganze City, einen fast unheimlichen Anblick darbietet, der dem rast – und trostlosen Gewühle verdammter Geister nicht ganz unähnlich erscheint’, Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen, II, 64. 9 Anon. to Robert Peel, 27 May 1829, NA HO 44/18, fos 426–7. 10 Gilliland, Elbow Room, p. 11. For a comic portrayal of solicitation in the saloon of Covent Garden theatre, see Egan’s Life in London, pp. 172–8. 11 Sir John Fielding to David Garrick, 11 November 1773, FL W.b.490, fos 21–4. 12 Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, nos 3089, 2023–4. 13 LMA F/WST/047, box 4, no. 27. 14 Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, nos 1360, 1387, 1521. Butler (ed.), A Regency Visitor, p. 83; ‘Was den Fremden in den hiesigen Theatern gewiß am meisten auffallen muß, ist die unerhörte Roheit und Ungezogenheit des Publikums, weshalb auch, außer der italienischen Oper, wo sich nur die höchste und bessere Gesellschaft vereinigt, diese Klasse nur höchst selten und einzeln die Nationaltheater besucht [...] Ein

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zweiter Grund, der anständige Familien abhalten muß, sich hier sehen zu lassen, ist die Konkurrenz mehrerer hundert Freudenmädchen [...] wo sie alle ihre Effronterie schrankenlos zur Schau tragen’, Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen, II, 118–19. 15 Altorfer, Koehler and Duckenfield (eds), History of Financial Disasters, I, 161–2. 16 TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fos 81, 112, 125. 17 Clipping annotated ‘M. C. Sep. 21’, FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 18. 18 See newspaper clippings for 18 and 19 November 1800 in FL Scrapbook A.4.7, unpaginated, with italics and capitals from text. 19 For the recording of the epithet, see Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 143. In Rowlandson, Free Opinions on the Pay of Young Roscius, one character laments the appeal of the child actor Master Betty: ‘We are dish’d by Jupiter, Cut up by a mere Infant’; the oath can be interpreted as an allusion to Betty’s employer. As the authoritative Boaden acknowledged in Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, II, 343: ‘his [Harris’s] power was not a matter that could be disputed … during his life the management vested solely in him – the stage manager acted under his authority’. Boaden was closely connected to the theatrical world of Harris’s period and maintained a close friendship with J. P. Kemble. 20 A selection of such entertainments is represented in the anonymous print, Spirits of the British Drama; obscene forms of theatricality are suggested by Rowlandson [The jugglers]. On the employment of pugilists within London theatres in this period, see Speaight (ed.), Professional & Literary Memoirs of Charles Dibdin the Younger, pp. 48–9, 154. 21 For example, compare the undated ‘Design for a Monument to David Garrick by Greenwood (the Scene Painter)’ in FL W.b.476 with the notice dated 3 October 1820 in FL Scrapbook A.4.14, unpaginated. 22 Public Characters of 1802–1803, p. 288. 23 BL Add. MS 30346, fos 198–9; BL Add. MS 30348, fo. 213. 24 See Garlick and Macintyre (eds), The Diary of Joseph Farington, II, 526; III, 702. 25 Pasquin (pseud.), Poems by Anthony Pasquin, II, 147. 26 Gilliland, Elbow Room, p. 27. 27 See, for example, Monthly Magazine, 50 (1820), 381; The Annual Biography and Obituary, for the Year 1822, p. 389; Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, p. 577. On Harris’s early life, no additional information is added to Farington’s discoveries by the DNB or the ODNB; even the BDA, VII (1982), pp. 137–9, adds only slight speculation. 28 On the functions of portraiture, see Shepherd, Clarissa’s Painter, pp. 11, 138. 29 Public Characters of 1802–1803, p. 288, notes ‘his love of field-sports’ in later life. 30 This picture has been loaned as a portrait of Harris to the University of Reading’s Special Collections by Lady Elizabeth Longman, née Lambart. This image was first reproduced and identified as one of ‘a pair of portraits … representing a brother and sister named Harris’ in Manners and Williamson,

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John Zoffany, p. 164 and image unpaginated. Only the girl was identified further as having married into the Longman family, a reference to Thomas’s sister Elizabeth Harris (1740–1808) who appears in Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, III, 114. Tellingly, Manners and Williamson admitted that they had not seen the originals before making their tentative claims. 31 BL Add. MS 33218, fo. 1 (v.). 32 See the following: Briggs, A History of Longmans and their Books, p. 77; Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXV, 75; The New Complete Guide to All Persons Who Have Any Trade or Concern (1774), p. 229. Whitehall Evening Post, 17–19 July 1770, reported that Harris was ‘bound for 5000l.’ as guarantor for another investor, Colman. 33 On the manufacture of soap and its taxation in the period, see Burn, The Justice of the Peace, II, 114–17; Musson, Enterprise in Soap and Chemicals, pp. 24–6, 30; Ashworth, Customs and Excise, pp. 28, 88, 92, 102, 238–43. 34 White, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 113. 35 Register of baptisms for the parish of St Andrew, Holborn, 9 May 1738, LMA P82/AND/A/001/MS06667/009. In the same year, another Thomas Harris was baptised at St Giles in the Fields, Holborn, but this record does not give a location for the parents; LMA P82/GIS/A/02. 36 Shepherd, Clarissa’s Painter, p. 228. 37 The Managers: A Comedy, pp. 5–6; Westminster Magazine, 1 (1773), 89. 38 One register for the Hillingdon parish in Middlesex, the location of his family vault, records the burial of Thomas Harris of ‘Wimbledon, Surry’ on 6 October 1820 at the age of eighty-two (LMA DRO/110/023). 39 As an instructive example of the erasure of Harris from history, McEvoy’s Theatrical Unrest fails to acknowledge him. As a digest of much recent academic work on London theatre during the long eighteenth century (pp. 35–66) including one chapter on the OP riots at Covent Garden (pp. 49–66) – without a new consideration of primary sources – it illustrates the danger of repeating the mistakes of earlier historians. 40 Taylor, ‘Theatre managers and the managing of theatre history’, p. 73. He goes on to write that ‘Harris has received no significant scholarly attention’ since a book chapter by Cecil Price in 1972. While this is an overstatement, he nonetheless rightly draws attention to Harris’s undeserved obscurity. 41 Donkin, Getting into the Act, pp. 87–90, 98, 112, 122, 136; O’Quinn, ‘Scissors and needles’, pp. 110–12. The reductive portrayal of Harris, as someone solely preoccupied with the calculations of business, can be traced back to Pasquin (pseud.), Poems by Anthony Pasquin; here, in relation to the playwright John O’Keeffe, the reader is told that ‘Harris’s pence keep his follies in tune’, II, 147. 42 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 219–25, 237–8, 273. After looking at the number of successes in the staging of new plays at the Garden – when compared to the failures at Drury Lane – Milhous and Hume in ‘Playwrights’ remuneration in eighteenth-century London’ rightly claim

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that ‘clearer evidence of Harris’s competence and Sheridan’s incompetence would be difficult to find’ (p. 24). 43 Price, Milhous and Hume, Italian Opera, pp. 56, 61; Kahan, Bettymania, p. 48; Donkin, Getting into the Act, p. 26. 44 Dibdin, The Reminiscences, I, 244. 45 O’Keeffe, Recollections, II, 145. 46 TH to Robert Burton, 8 March 1791, NA HO 42/18/105, fos 252–3. 47 Reports from FL Scrapbook A.4.7, clipping annotated ‘22 Jan 1796’, unpaginated. 48 Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism, p. 29; Taylor, The French Revolution, pp. 172, 176; Taylor, Theatres of Opposition, pp. 166–7. 49 Taylor, Theatres of Opposition, pp. 6, 158, 173. 50 Morning Herald, 29 March 1792. 51 Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770–1812, III, 223. 52 Details of the King’s visit, the assassination attempt and Hadfield’s interrogation from Eminent Barrister (pseud.), The Trial of James Hadfield for High Treason, p. 13; Aberdeen Journal, 26 May 1800; Portsmouth Telegraph, 26 May 1800. 53 O’Toole, A Traitor’s Kiss, pp. 259–60, 274–6, 327, with Sheridan’s title from p. 299; Taylor, The French Revolution, p. 175. 54 Quoted in O’Toole, A Traitor’s Kiss, p. 430. 55 Ibid., pp. 283, 286; John Hurford Stone, 26 November 1792, NA PC 1/19/27. 56 Agreement between R. B. Sheridan, T. Harris, J. P. Kemble, A. Graham, 25 September 1803, TM PN2596.L7.C8; BL Add. MS 42720, fo. 5. 57 TH to Henry Harris, ‘Bellemonte, Tuesday’ [20 March 1810?]; and 23 [March?] 1810; TM PN2596.L7.C8. 58 Kelly, Reminiscences, II, 356–7. 59 Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, pp. 34–5, the legend of Sheridan’s mourning (p. 34); O’Toole, A Traitor’s Kiss, pp. 199, 352–63. 60 Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, p. 35. Milhous in ‘Reading theatre history from account books’, p. 115, notes that ‘he succeeded in turning a fabulous cash cow into a financial basket case’. 61 Pollock (ed.), Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 148. 62 On the petitions, see Nicholson, The Struggle for a Free Stage, pp. 189–224; Literary Panorama, 7 (1810), col. 1188; New Monthly Magazine, 25 (1810), 181. 63 TH to Henry Harris, 23 [March?] 1810, TM PN2596.L7.C8. ‘B—’ was probably a ‘Mr Braun’, the King’s go-between at Windsor as mentioned in a newspaper cutting dated 26 September 1808 in FL Scrapbook A.4.9, unpaginated. 64 TH to Col. McMahon, 20 October 1811, reproduced within Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770–1812, VIII, 187–90 (quotation from p. 190). 65 For the recording of payments to Harris’s agents in Paris, see FL MSS W.b.441, fo. 37; W.b.442, fo. 165; W.b.444, fo. 155.

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66 O’Keeffe, Recollections, II, 295–6; Ranger, Under Two Managers, p. 60. 67 Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, IV, 210–12; Worrall, Harlequin Empire, p. 15. 68 One witness at the 1832 inquiry bemoaned that ‘30 years ago’ new stars were constantly discovered in the provinces, ‘but we never hear of them now’. The witness failed to connect this change to the loss of Harris’s influence (see Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, nos 3257–8). For Harris’s relationship with provincial theatre, see: Mathews, Memoirs of Charles Mathews, I, 209–10; Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, II, 94, III, 33, 105; Dickens, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, II, 114; TH to Miss [Sarah] Smith, 10 August [1805], HL TS 941.5F, II, 164–5. 69 Oakley, A Culture of Mimicry, pp. 77–9; A Cart Load of Young Players on their Journey to London. 70 Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, II, 57, 97. 71 On the lending of such materials to the provinces, see TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fo. 70; Bernard, Retrospections of the Stage, II, 306. 72 T. W. Manley to Junius Brutus Booth [March] 1818, quoted in Archer, Junius Brutus Booth, p. 49. 73 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 139, 158. 74 Thomas A. Ward to TH, 15 October 1804, TM PN2596.L7.C8. 75 Dibdin, The Reminiscences, I, 230. 76 Ibid., I, 298, 312, 398; II, 244. 77 O’Keeffe, Recollections, I, 362–3, II, 19–20, 384–6; Henry Robertson to Miss [Adelaide] O’Keeffe, 27 January 1826 and 16 May 1826, BL Add. MS 29643, fos 55 (v.), 56. 78 Dickens, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi […] Revised by Charles Whitehead, II, 186. 79 His children included Charles, Thomas Charlton (d. 1819), Edwin Charlton (1771–1816), Henry (1782?–1839), George (bap. c.1787–1836) and Eliza Maria (1787–1802). These last three children – with Henry Harris, the eldest – were most likely the result of a marriage to ‘a Miss [Charlotte?] Newton’ as listed in The Annual Biography and Obituary, for the Year 1822, p. 400. There are informal records of at least one other daughter: in 1804, Farington notes that he was accompanied by ‘a Son & daugr. of Mr. Harris, the Proprietor’; Greig (ed.), The Farington Diary, III, 27. And in Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 60, she notes in 1782 that she ‘heared Mr. Harrises Daughter was Married’ but does not provide further details. 80 ‘I mention’d having two Sons in India, of both I receive the most flattering report – the name of the eldest is Chas Harris, he is 1st Judge of the provincial court of appeal & circuit in the centre division on the Fort St George Establishment – The other is call’d Major Thomas C. Harris, Master Gen: & Com. of Prov. … he is on the Bombay establishment’; TH to Col. McMahon, 7 March 1813, RA GEO/MAIN/20464. For details of the career of Thomas Charlton Harris, see Mandlik (ed.), Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay, I, xiv.

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81 As well as the following letter, see the correspondence from TH to Col. McMahon in the Royal Archives: 7 February 1813, RA GEO/MAIN/20408; 24 March 1813, RA GEO/MAIN/20501. 82 TH to Col. McMahon, 7 March 1813, RA GEO/MAIN/20464. 83 Notices of George Harris’s role in the capture of enemy vessels can be seen in London Gazette: no. 16552 (December 1811), pp. 2409–10; no. 16752 (July 1813), p. 1387; no. 16760 (August 1813), p. 1541; no. 16819 (November 1813), p. 2412; no. 16905 (June 1814), p. 1159; no. 16907 (June 1814), pp. 1215–16; no. 16998 (March 1815), p. 589; no. 17133 (May 1816), p. 828; no. 17134 (May 1816), p. 854. For his account of the battles in the reduction of Java, see London Gazette, no. 16552 (December 1811), pp. 2409–10; London Gazette Extraordinary, no. 16563 (January 1812), pp. 120–1. 84 Marshall, Royal Naval Biography, supplement I, 290, gives an overview of the career of George Harris. 85 TH to Col. McMahon, 24 March 1813, RA GEO/MAIN/20501. 86 London Gazette, no. 17061 (September 1815), p. 1877. 87 TH to the Prince Regent, 6 January 1815, National Library of Scotland MS 1046, fo. 128. 88 O’Keeffe, Recollections, II, 130; BL Add. MS 33218, fo. 7 (v.). 89 O’Keeffe, Recollections, II, 101–2. 90 TH to Henry Harris [1818?], TM PN2596.L7.C8. As evidence of Henry’s authorship, BL Egerton MS 2311, fo. 169 lists a payment to him ‘for his Pantomime of Harlequin Asmodeus’ performed in the 1810–11 season. 91 TH to John Palmer, 17 November 1807; TH to Henry Harris [1818?]; TM PN2596.L7.C8. 92 Dickens, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, II, 195–6. 93 Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, III, 20–1, IV, 221–4; Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 153–4, 157–8. For a discussion of class status, see Straub, Sexual Suspects, pp. 151–73. 94 Dickens, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, II, 195. 95 Childers (ed.), A Mariner of England, pp. 161–2. 96 The baptism record for Edwin Harris, dated 10 April 1771 in St Pancras Old Church, Camden, lists the parents as ‘Thomas Harris’ and ‘Jane Harris’; see LMA P90/PAN1/005. That this entry is for Harris’s son is corroborated by a combination of both the burial record for Edwin Charlton Harris dated 20 February 1816 (LMA P81/JN1/111) and an entry in the Hampstead manor minute book (1809–24) as listed in Baker, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume IX, p. 69. 97 On Lessingham, see: Taylor, Records of My Life, pp. 15–18; Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies, p. 112; BDA (1984), IX, 251–4; Baker, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume IX, p. 69. The last notes that she bequeathed the property on Hampstead Heath to Thomas Harris, a circumstance that gives weight to Taylor’s claim that the Covent Garden manager built the property for her. For Harris’s receipt of rent from this property in 1795, see BL Egerton 2294, fo. 1 (v.).

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98 On the financial responsibility for the Hampstead house, see FL MS W.b.436, fo. 51. 99 The relationship between sailors and the theatre discussed in Bernard, Retrospections of the Stage, II, 128–32; Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, p. 271. 100 Quoted in Davis, ‘British Bravery’, p. 127. 101 TH to Capt. [Philip] D’Auvergne, 17 December 1789, NA PC 1/116/15, fo. 15. 102 Sainty, Office-Holders in Modern Britain, p. 134; Hill, The Prizes of War, p. 64. 103 Sturt, The Real State of France, in the Years 1809–10, pp. 124–5. 104 BL Add. MS 31975, fo. 188 (v.). Entry for 24 July 1811, a benefit night for Charles Farley, lists takings of £156 6s 6d; entry for 25 July 1811, for the ‘Benefit of British Prisoners in France’, produced takings of £533 5s 6d. 105 BL Egerton MSS 2299, fo. 111; 2305, fo. 140; 2306, fo. 139; Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXVI, 127; Redford and Riches, The History of the Ancient Town and Borough of Uxbridge, pp. 235–8. 106 Monthly Mirror, 14 (1802), 360; Brewer, London and Middlesex, IV, 543. 107 Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXVI, 226; Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 59, 109, 123, 125. 108 Blackguardiana, unpaginated; FL MS T.a.66, pp. 176–7; FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 65, with italics from text. 109 Ownership of the leases upon these two buildings can be seen in, for example, ‘Plan of Covt Garden Theatre and the adjacent Houses Burnt down – Tuesday Sepr 20th 1808’ in LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/07; TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fo. 77. 110 Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies, p. 200; Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 33; Pottle (ed.), Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, pp. 263–4. 111 Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 32, 141. 112 Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1788), pp. 83–5, 97–8, with italics from text. 113 Public Characters of 1802–1803, p. 289. 114 For the problem of street disorder and the Bow Street response, see Henderson, Disorderly Women, pp. 108, 123; Gray, Crime, Prosecution and Social Relations, p. 105. The location of the Bow Street office in relation to the theatre is taken from BL Maps.Crace XIII, item 48. 115 Burn, The Justice of the Peace, III, 99. 116 Quotation from Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 123. 117 Ibid., pp. 108, 123, 156–7. 118 See ‘Plan of Covt Garden Theatre and the adjacent Houses Burnt down – Tuesday Sepr 20th 1808’, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/07; and BL Egerton MSS 2297–2305 for evidence of payments from Brewer to Harris, and from Harris to the Duke of Bedford. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXVI, 89, provides information on Daniel Brewer’s activity and reputation, but wrongly claims that he ‘gave up the business’ in 1792.

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119 The ‘Plan of Covt Garden Theatre and the adjacent Houses Burnt down – Tuesday Sepr 20th 1808’ in LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/07 records the use of other premises taken over by Harris including a coffee house and a tavern. 120 Compare the draft in LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/11 with the neat copy attached to the lease dated 1 May 1818 in LMA E/BER/CG/L/043. For the identification of this building as a ‘Brothel’ next door to the Piazza coffee house, also see cutting dated 20 September 1808 in FL Scrapbook A.4.9, unpaginated. 121 Henderson, Disorderly Women, p. 32. 122 Sir John Fielding quoted in White, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 361. 123 An analysis of the BL Egerton accounts for July 1798 to July 1808 shows that out of the total yearly income of £275 from the bagnio (£120) and the Piazza coffee house (£155) (2297, fo. 142 v.; 2299, fo. 148 v.; 2301, fos 160 v., 161 v.), Harris paid the following each year subject to some fluctuation: £220 rent to the Duke of Bedford (2299, fo. 149); landlord’s tax on both properties, including £6 for the bagnio (2303, fos 159 v., 160 v.; 2305, fo. 122 v.); and £30 for fire insurance on both properties (2306, fo. 2). Also, Harris would have attracted miscellaneous taxes upon these properties, such as window tax and the duty upon fire insurance. 124 On the rebuilding of the theatre in 1792–93, see: Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXV, 91–3, plate 45a; Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXVI, 89; Leacroft, The Development of the English Playhouse, p. 138. 125 Harris’s need for secrecy is illuminated by the reaction of the Duke’s agents to the discovery that he had expanded the theatre into the site of another of the Duke’s properties (the Shakespeare tavern) without informing them. See ‘Remarks and Abstract of the Value of sundry Properties of the Duke of Bedford situate in Hart Street Bow Street and Covent Garden if it should be required to be added to the rebuilding Covent Garden Theatre – destroyed by fire in September 1808’, fos 7, 8 in LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/07 as well as the following manuscripts in LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/08: Henry Harris to Thomas Pearce Brown, undated; Edward Barlow to Messrs Brown and Gotobed, undated; ‘Mr Gubbins’ report on the Rent of Covent Garden theatre & the Insurance on the Shakespeare’; TH to William Adam, 22 June 1809; Edward Barlow to Thomas Pearce Brown, 26 June 1809. In Browne’s General Law List for the Year 1799, John Gotobed, ‘15 Norfolk-street, Strand’ is listed as an attorney and the ‘Deputy Recorder of Bedford’ (p. 68). 126 See ‘Old Plans’, no. 2, undated, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/10; along with ‘Plan of Covt Garden Theatre and the adjacent Houses Burnt down – Tuesday Sepr 20th 1808’, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/07. 127 Cutting dated [12?] June 1799, FL Scrapbook A.4.7. 128 TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fos 74–5, 108. BL Egerton MSS (2298 onwards) reveal insights into which employees acted as supervisors and passed on payments from the management. For example, ‘Paid Mr. Barlow for

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Stamps’ for the printing of advertisements in newspapers (2298, fo. 143); ‘Paid Mr. Sloper for Carpenters &c.’ (2298, fo. 2); and ‘Paid Mr. Townsend for the attendance of Officers’ (2300, fo. 39). In Browne’s General Law List for the Year 1799, ‘John Townsend, Duke’s-row, Pimlico’ is listed as one of the ‘Police Officers’ at the Bow Street office (p. 18, italics from text). 129 For examples of James Brandon’s appearance in satirical prints, see George and Isaac Cruikshank [Clifford versus Brandon]; and The Theatrical House that Jack Built, pp. 8–9. 130 Dibdin, The Reminiscences, II, 157. 131 See the following: O. P. The Interesting Trial at Large of H. Clifford, pp. 12–13; Clifford for Ever!, p. 10; clippings dated 1795, FL Scrapbook A.4.6, unpaginated. 132 Brewer, London and Middlesex, IV, 543; BDA, II, 308. 133 See the box bookkeeper’s chart [post 1808?], tipped into FL Scrapbook A.4.8; BDA, II, 306–8. 134 TH to Edward Barlow, 1818, TM PN2596.L7.C8; TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fo. 70. Kahan in Bettymania wrongly claims that Barlow, as a captain of the First Dragoon Guards in Coventry, put down a riot in 1802 and was rewarded with the role of MP for the area, before becoming ‘treasurer’ of Covent Garden theatre (pp. 46–7). This is a misidentification – Francis William Barlow was MP for Coventry (1802–05). The correspondence of ‘Edw.d Barlow’ and TH on theatrical matters between 1793 and 1820 (TM PN2596.L7.C8; LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/08), along with the recording of regular salary payments to Barlow in the Egerton MSS, illustrates his long career at the theatre. However, O’Keeffe in Recollections, II, 311, calls him ‘Captain Barlow’. 135 See the following correspondence in TM PN2596.L7.C8 with underlining from text: 3 November 1809, 12 May 1810, 18 [March?] 1818, and the letter to James W. Brandon dated ‘Monday 23rd’. 136 Edward Barlow to Thomas Pearce Brown, 26 June 1809, LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/08, with underlining from text. 137 Edward Barlow to TH, 18 August 1793, TM PN2596.L7.C8; O’Keeffe, Recollections, II, 311. 138 See the following: Edward Barlow to TH, undated, FL Scrapbook A.4.3; Edward Barlow to TH, August 1795 and TH to Edward Barlow, 23 October 1804, 6 April 1805, 3 November 1809, 7 June 1811, [16 January?] 1812 in TM PN2596.L7.C8. 139 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 255, 281. 140 Edward Barlow to TH, August 1795, TM PN2596.L7.C8. 141 Edward Barlow to TH, 18 August 1793; TH to Edward Barlow [13 November 1797] in TM PN2596.L7.C8. 142 Edwin’s fate has been established through the correlation of the following: NA ADM 6/94, fo. 55; NA ADM 107/19, fo. 120; LMA P81/JN1/111, p. 51; admittance record for the King’s Bench prison, February 1810, NA PRIS 10; LMA DL/T/090/007, p. 39. In the last reference, none of the

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Harris family are recorded as witnesses. Also see Syrett and DiNardo (eds), The Commissioned Sea Officers of the Royal Navy 1660–1815, p. 203. 143 TH to Edward Barlow [13 November 1797], TM PN2596.L7.C8. 144 [Edward Barlow] to James W. Brandon, 22 April 1820, 2 May 1820, TM PN2596.L7.C8. 145 Anon. to [TH], 14 September 1820, FL Scrapbook A.4.14, with underlining from text. This letter, which bears no postmark or any other evidence of having been sent, was annotated by the compiler of the scrapbook: ‘In Barlow’s papers from Durrant Feb 1831’. While the letter refuses to name the conspirators explicitly, the contextual evidence – along with the reference to two brothers, ‘one a money taker at the Boxes’ – points to the Brandons. 146 H. F. Brown to [Edward] Barlow, 21 September 1821, TM PN2596.L7.C8. This letter addressed to Barlow, but which bears no postmark, refers explicitly to the letter dated 14 September 1820. 147 [Edward Barlow] to James W. Brandon, 22 April 1820, TM PN2596. L7.C8; HL MS Thr 149 (9); TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fos 62, 86, 147. By March 1822, Brandon’s debt had risen to £1,331 2s 6d; see TM PN2596. L7.C8 Folio, fo. 86. 148 TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fos 71, 125. 149 Henry Robertson to the editor, Morning Post, 1 September 1823. 150 W. Notter to Lord Belfast, 20 June 1825, BL Add. MS 29643, fo. 44 (v.). 151 For a popular fictional treatment of these fears, see Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. 152 Edward Barlow to TH, 18 August 1793, TM PN2596.L7.C8. As an illustration, see the method of enforcement in [Harris], A Table of Forfeits. 153 Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, pp. 387–8. 154 For Redigé’s accident, see Speaight (ed.), Professional & Literary Memoirs of Charles Dibdin the Younger, pp. 114–15. 155 Marshall, Lives of the Most Celebrated Actors and Actresses, pp. 119–20; Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, p. 218. 156 BDA (1978), V, 199. 157 For this reconstruction of Ellar’s accident and its outcome, see Dickens, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, II, 163–6. 158 Dibdin, The Reminiscences, II, 244–5. 159 The Rebellion, p. 40, italics from text. 160 See Milhous and Hume, ‘Theatrical custom versus rights’, pp. 93, 109–11, 120–1, which recounts the episode of the actors’ rebellion of 1800. The performers leaked material to newspapers and published a seventy-sevenpage booklet to encourage public outrage for their mistaken sense of unfair treatment. Harris, however, avoided publicizing the problem by refusing to respond personally in the same way. Pieces from knowledgeable writers who were hostile to the actors did appear in journals and newspapers, but they could not be traced back to Harris. Instead, it is certain that he was involved in the scribal annotation of the actors’ pamphlet with copies sent

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to a small number of distinguished figures who had the power to stifle the insurrection, with possibly even one sent to the King. 161 See Chapter 4. 162 Covent Garden Theatre!!, pp. 15–16. 163 The Rebellion, pp. 19, 28, with italics from text; English Discipline for Meddleing Servants * An English Mans Motto is Genorosoty and Forgiveness. 164 The banner ‘Harris will but Kemble won,t’ [sic] is represented in George and Isaac Cruikshank, Acting Magistrates Committing Themselves and reported in The Times, 22 September 1809. 165 The Rebellion, pp. 20, 40, 52. Boaden is the only historian to observe the unfairness of rioters directing the blame at J. P. Kemble, considering his relatively small financial stake in the theatre; see Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, p. 539. 166 FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 118. 167 Baer, Theatre and Disorder, pp. 161–2; Richard Ryder to the Field Officer in Waiting, Foot Guards, 6 November 1809, NA HO 65/1, unpaginated. 168 The Rebellion, p. 29; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 7 October 1809. 169 Covent Garden Theatre!!, p. 41. 170 The Rebellion, p. 50; FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 101. 171 The Rebellion, p. 83. 172 For the vilification of J. P. Kemble, see Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, p. 26. In Baer’s account of the riots in Theatre and Disorder, Harris makes only a negligible appearance. 173 Butler (ed.), A Regency Visitor, pp. 81–2; ‘Eine sonderbare Sitte in England ist das stete Eingreifen der Zeitungen in das Privatleben [...] sondern er wird auch, arriviert ihm irgend etwas der Rede Wertes, ohne Scheu damit ausgestellt und ad libitum beurteilt’, Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen, II, 116. 174 Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 233. 175 Calculations of print numbers for 1770–1820 inclusive, with figures rounded to the nearest ten. James Gillray’s The Theatrical War (1787) is not included in the total of Harris images, as an identification is not beyond doubt. Therefore, compare Harris’s three appearances – during the decades of his management – with the ridicule of James Brandon five times in the space of ten years, or Henry Harris who was lampooned in four images in just under six years (see appendix 2). In searching for Harris, the catalogues of a number of noteworthy sales of caricature prints have also been consulted, from The Notable and Extensive Collection […] of J. Barton Townsend of Philadelphia (1919) to The Draper Hill Collection of James Gillray Prints & Drawings (2001). 176 Two articles by Baker that discuss a selection of caricatures generated by the OP conflict – with a consideration of how graphic satire ‘became an active agent in Georgian anti-authoritarian protest’ (‘The OP war’, p. 81) and ‘situated the OP war within narratives of racial conspiracy’ (‘Jewishness and the Covent Garden OP war’, p. 36) – solely focus upon the

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construction of Kemble at the expense of Harris. For Baker, caricaturists targeted ‘authoritarian rule’ as ‘symbolised by the actor–manager John Philip Kemble’ (‘The OP war’, p. 82). In doing so, he unintentionally emphasizes how Harris’s avoidance of the attention of caricaturists has influenced the direction of the historical narrative – leading to a partial history of the theatre – especially when priority is given not simply to such material, but to such material from the narrow range of the British Museum holdings. 177 Kahan, Bettymania, pp. 13, 49, 157. 178 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784), oil on canvas. 179 See BM Satires 10318; HL TS 941.5F, VI, 380–1. 180 See, for example, Gillray’s Pizarro Contemplating Over the Product of His New Peruvian Mine. 181 The background of The Rival Richards or Sheakspear in Danger includes a figure who is little more than a doodle, whom the artist tries to identify using the speech ‘They … will Harris me to Death’ (underlining from text). Harris or his son Henry may have been intended through this nondescript figure. 182 For considerations of Charles Long’s role as a paymaster within the Treasury, see Aspinall, Politics and the Press, pp. 78–9, 154, 163–4, 189, 209, 216, 351, 354. 183 TH to Charles Farley, 7 July 1814, with underlining from original, HL MS Thr 467, box 47. Letter contextualized using Corble (ed.), An Account of a Visit to Paris in 1814 by Charles Farley, pp. 9, 12, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32; BDA (1978), V, 152–7. The published version of Farley’s Visit to Paris, including a discussion of its provenance (p. 10), from TM PN2598.F3575; the original manuscript has yet to be located. 184 Corble (ed.), An Account of a Visit to Paris in 1814 by Charles Farley, pp. 19, 21, 23–4. 185 John Williams [pseud. Anthony Pasquin], 1754–1818. 186 For the portrayal of Williams, see Taylor, Records of My Life, pp. 159–61; Gifford, The Baviad and Maeviad, p. 179; as well as his entry in the DNB and the ODNB. 187 John Williams to Henry Harris, 13 June 1814, BL Add. MS 27925, fos 28–9. 188 Williams, Pin-Basket to the Children of Thespis, pp. 88–90. 189 Pasquin (pseud.), Poems by Anthony Pasquin, II, 147, 211. 190 Corble (ed.), An Account of a Visit to Paris in 1814 by Charles Farley, pp. 20, 27–8. 191 FL MSS W.b.441, fo. 37; W.b.442, fo. 165; Robertson (ed.), Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 219–26, 232. 192 Sparrow, Secret Service, pp. xii–xiii. 193 NA HO 42/23; HO 42/29; HO 42/30; quotation from HO 42/30, fo. 109. 194 NA HO 42/23, fos 293–6. 195 NA HO 42/23, fo. 676. 196 Worrall, Radical Culture, p. 6. 197 Emsley, ‘The Home Office’, pp. 544, 561.

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198 As Worrall recognizes in Radical Culture, ‘limiting the circulation of ideas in political assemblies and the press was the intended effect of contemporary legislation’ (p. 37). 199 Speck, A Political Biography of Thomas Paine, p. 108; NA HO 42/23, fos 116–17, 126, 635. As an indication of the danger of possessing Paine’s Rights of Man in 1795 with its presumption of guilt, when one United Irishman was stopped at Holyhead on his journey to speak with Horne Tooke and others, he burned this book in his possession before the arrival of a justice of the peace (Kent History Centre, Pratt MS U840/O144/12). 200 NA HO 42/29, fo. 538, with underlining from text. On the Morning Post, see Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England, p. 36. 201 Aspinall, Politics and the Press, p. 178. 202 For two examples of such publications – which amounted to 975 copies – see the SS accounts under the direction of Charles William Flint in NA HO 387/4/5. Examen de la constitution de France de 1799 (1800) was advertised in the Tory Oracle and Daily Advertiser, 10 May 1800; it was reviewed in both the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 5 (1800), 540–3, and Monthly Review 33 (1800), 438. Aspinall in Politics and the Press, p. 153, also includes examples of political pamphlets printed and circulated at the government’s expense in the 1790s. 203 To illustrate one of the first uses of the word ‘spin’ in the political sense, the OED quotes D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1823): ‘Many secret agents … were spinning their dark intrigues’ (III, 168; 1824 edition). 204 Taylor, Theatres of Opposition, p. 228. 205 On Harris’s payments to Dudley in 1790 and 1791, see NA PRO 30/8/229/2 (fos 216, 251, 256, 258, 286) and the earlier 1784 ‘Disbursements for Secret Service’ with the recording of £100 paid to Harris ‘for Mr. Bate Dudly [sic] in December last for the Morning Herald’ as reproduced in Aspinall (ed.), The Later Correspondence of George III, I, 118. For further information on Bate Dudley’s reputation and his receipt of government money, see his entry in the ODNB along with Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion, pp. 63, 64 (quotation). 206 See A Baite. For the Devil. His numerous comic operas included The Woodman (1791) and Travellers in Switzerland (1794), both performed at Covent Garden. 207 Figures calculated from NA PRO 30/8/229/2, fos 216, 258–9, with Harris’s title from fo. 319 (v.). 208 Antony Chamier to Sir Robert Murray Keith, 10 September 1778, BL Add. MS 35515, fo. 15. 209 For evidence of Harris as an intermediary, see, for example, NA PRO 30/8/229/2, fos 181, 195. When Rose was sued by George Smith for unpaid debts after the Westminster by-election, the counsel for the defence was keen to establish that such party expenses were not paid out of ‘the public purse’ in the hope of preventing a parliamentary inquiry; A Barrister (pseud.), The Trial of George Rose, p. 38.

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210 ‘Standing Order for the Exclusion of Strangers’ in Hansard, The Parliamentary Debates from the Year 1803 to the Present Time (1812), XV, cols 323–45; Sheridan’s speech from col. 341. William Windham, politician (1750–1810). 211 See the two indentures dated 4 March 1806, LMA E/BER/CG/L/043, fos 5, 6. Tiberius has been identified as the subject of a number of small intaglio engravings found on the crowns of seal rings in England; see, for example, BM object no. 1890,0901.94. 212 Shotter, Tiberius Caesar, p. 63. 213 Francis Gentleman, Sejanus, a Tragedy (1752); Thelwall, The Tribune, III, 301–3; Baker, Reed and Jones, Biographia Dramatica, III, 255. For subsequent details and quotations from the play, see Bevington, Butler and Donaldson (eds), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, II, 256, 295, 303, 307, 311, 320, 376. 214 Lockwood in Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age, p. 122, claims that Sejanus was ‘repeatedly offered as a lesson in political corruption’ throughout the eighteenth century. 215 Rose even attended a dinner in the company of Henry Harris to celebrate J. P. Kemble’s career on the stage and mark his retirement; An Authentic Narrative of Mr. Kemble’s Retirement from the Stage, pp. 39–40, 51. 216 Rose, Observations on the Poor Laws, pp. 23–4. 217 See, for example, Rose’s Observations on Banks for Savings, p. 20. 218 Rose, Observations on the Poor Laws, pp. 33–4, 36; Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?, pp. 321–2; White, London in the Nineteenth Century, p. 351. 219 Taylor, Records of My Life, p. 445. John Mayor (c.1735–1817) – not Joshua as stated by Taylor – was Tory MP for Abingdon from 1774 to 1782. 220 See TH to Mr [George?] Robinson, 6 November 1799, HL TS 940.6, III, 44–5; TH to Mr [Owen?] Rees, 28 January [1801?], HL Hyde Case 9 (3), fos 251–2; Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England, p. 42. 221 Taylor, Records of My Life, pp. 236, 445–6. Aspinall in Politics and the Press notes that Taylor was the recipient of ministry money paid by Harris (p. 164). 222 See Briggs, A History of Longmans and their Books, pp. 76–7; Aspinall (ed.), The Later Correspondence of George III, I, 118. Thomas Longman invested £10,000 in the theatre, 20 June 1785, as recorded in an undated MS within LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/05. 223 Harris’s membership of the Freemasons is illustrated by his involvement in the Masonic ceremony to bless the laying of the foundation stone of a new theatre in 1808 as recorded by Dibdin, History and Illustrations of the London Theatres, pp. 18–19; and Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, pp. 522–4. The Memoirs implies that this honour was given because of Harris’s membership when admitting that Kemble was ‘made a mason only on the preceding evening’, p. 523.

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224 The Principles and Practice of the Most Ancient and Honourable Society of Free and Accepted Masons, p. 82, italics from text. 225 The only accounts to survive on Rose and Harris’s SS activities are NA PRO 30/8/229/2, partial for 1788–93 and 1796; and those in the Windsor Archives George III Papers, for 1784, as reproduced in Aspinall (ed.), The Later Correspondence of George III, I, 116–18. Rose’s involvement was popularized by Pindar, The Convention Bill, p. 6. 226 NA PRO 30/8/229/2, fo. 319 (v.). 227 See Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes in England, III, 255–9; Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, pp. 145–209, for the introduction of this levy in 1795 which was recorded as ‘powder tax’ in the BL Egerton accounts. 228 For the redevelopment of the theatre and the financial difficulties caused, see Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXV, 91–3; and the manuscript dated 17 February 1796 and signed by Henry Holland in LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/06. The completion of the purchase of Bellemonte is recorded in BL Egerton MS 2294, fo. 77 (v.). 229 BL Egerton 2295 (July 1796–June 1797) records the payment of duties, rates and taxes, some of which are ‘assessed taxes’; for example ‘Paid half a years Land, Commutation, Window & House Tax … due Michas [Michaelmas] last’ (fo. 60, recorded in December 1796). A number of the account books were audited and signed by those figures entitled to a share of the theatre’s profits including Harris and George White as illustrated by MS 2305, fo. 156. 230 Dickinson, Caricatures and the Constitution, pp. 16–17; Gatrell, City of Laughter, pp. 537–9. 231 Transcript of TH to the Duke of Bedford, 10 June 1817, FL Scrapbook A.4.14, unpaginated. Milhous and Hume, ‘Theatrical custom versus rights’, claim that for the season 1798–99 ‘nearly £11,000 of the total “income” was paid in by Thomas Harris from unspecified sources, and some is hard to account for’ (p. 98). They also briefly consider his movement of ‘large sums into the treasury’ in ‘Theatre account books in eighteenth-century London’, p. 135. As an example of such a movement, see BL Egerton 2293, fo. 70 (v.). 232 Bunn, The Stage, I, 80; Morning Post, 9 June 1819. 233 Henry Robertson to William Henry Surman, 6 June 1823, BL Add. MS 29643, fo. 11 (v.). 234 Henry Robertson to Francis Const, 20 January 1825, BL Add. MS 29643, fo. 37. The BL Egerton manuscripts include both types of transaction: MS 2289, fo. 150, for instance, lists a personal payment for a lottery ticket and the sum of an occasional win alongside the transactions of the theatre. 235 It is apt that Coutts was a patron of Harris’s royalist Garden, bearing in mind that the bank of the same name controlled the royal purse, and from May 1795 even ‘held an official foreign secret service account for many years’; see Sparrow, ‘The Alien Office’, p. 382. 236 TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fo. 11. As an example of a transaction which was discovered and published many years after the event, it was reported

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in the Court of Chancery (1829) that Harris – with the consent of his son, Henry – had sold the possession of one of the theatre’s boxes for the period of twenty-one years to Sir Edmund Antrobus in exchange for £2,625; see The Law Journal for the Year 1829, VII, 83. 237 See Henry Robertson’s letters to: Henry Harris, 24 September 1823; Governor Penn, 4 November 1824; Ashfield & Wright, 28 May 1825, in BL Add. MS 29643, fos 19 (v.), 32, 43 (v.). 238 TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fos 147–8, 152.

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Harlequin invasion Thomas Cook spat blood and confusion onto the street outside of the theatre. Light-headed and blinded by the flow from the gash upon his head, he rested where he had been thrown to the ground. ‘Don’t kill him’ were the last words he had heard, shouted like blows. His ageing body of fifty-three years, which felt misshapen, had offered little resistance to the trauma inflicted by blunt weapons. William Flight, the scene painter’s handyman, was the first to offer help. Like Cook, he had been forced through a broken window, feet first, and had fallen into Hart Street below. But he had escaped the ferocity of the mob. Breathless and resting, both could console themselves with the thought that they were unlikely to have been the first men to leave or enter the theatre through Jane Lessingham’s dressing room window over the years, and unlikely to be the last. Both Cook and Flight had been part of a group of eight employed to keep possession of the theatre. They had barricaded every opening, even those which were thirty or forty feet from the ground. Keeping watch from behind the safety of stage boards that had been nailed against the inside of doors and windows, they had expected the attack. And on that Friday, 17 June 1768, it happened. They had been roused at six in the morning by the noise of angry demands, breaking glass, and doors attacked by lump hammers and iron crowbars. Laying siege to the theatre, the dregs of St Giles had poured into every hole rent in the fortifications. Numbering around forty men, they came from the filth around the Rats’ Castle in Dyot Street. Headed by Harris and his partner John Rutherford, they brandished sticks, bludgeons and hammers with a common purpose. Later described as Harlequins in rags who leapt in at every window, they made the grotesque violence of pantomime seem a very real threat. Cook was unlucky in  being the first one to encounter them – and foolish in shouting to

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Harris and Rutherford that ‘they were welcome to come in but the mob had no business’ as he watched the panel of one door split and break. These were not men to be persuaded from their course, as revealed by their later fortunes. Two of them, brothers named Stephens, would be convicted at the Old Bailey and dance the Tyburn jig – one of them for robbery and murder. Another, a well-known thief called Brookes, would be sent to the gallows as a rapist.1 Harris listened intently to all of this, as the reports echoed around the high-vaulted space of Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Like countless other plaintiffs who had sat in the Court of Chancery before him, Harris had come to rescue his hopes. He sat before the Lords Commissioners of the Great Seal – Sir Sidney Stafford Smythe of the Exchequer and the Honourable Henry Bathurst of the Common Pleas. It is doubtful that they had ever heard a tale like this one in Chancery, especially as they had only been in office a few months. While testing their inexperience, the accounts of the break-in provided great entertainment to the rest of the court. And it was heard with delight by anyone who chose to loiter, as crowds swelled and waned according to the attraction of this courtroom spectacle or another. Among those who laughed and gave a running commentary on the trial were the newspaper hacks covering the story. Those from the St. James’s Chronicle – one that Harris claimed was in his adversary’s pocket and with good reason – had already entertained readers with their extravagant claims. Days after the break-in, this newspaper reported that tenants living in the neighbourhood had been terrified ‘for several nights’ by the riot and disorder coming from the theatre, caused by Harris’s gang of known criminals. It told of their petition to Sir John Fielding in Bow Street and about how they had nervously counted the number of barrels carried into the playhouse, reckoned at more than sixty gallons of porter.2 In the courtroom, the attacks upon Harris’s reputation continued. Making the testimonies even more droll was the fact that it was Harris who had brought this suit.3 He was the injured party. Three years before, he had entered into a business arrangement with three other speculators – a wine merchant from Marylebone named John Rutherford, the actor William Powell, and George Colman who had built a reputation by managing Drury Lane during the absence of David Garrick.4 Together, they purchased Covent Garden theatre for £60,000. Three of them were to be ‘jointly and equally concerned’ in its management. Colman was to be ‘invested with the direction of the theatre’ – a vague concept that would come back to haunt everyone concerned – while Harris and Rutherford attended to the accounts and the treasury. It was intended as a loose alliance based upon friendly negotiation, with decisions taken

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as the need arose. As a safeguard against arguments, it had been agreed that any two of the proprietors could veto a decision made by a third. As time would reveal, this precaution was not enough as the spirit of debate and discussion had given birth to a written agreement with many ambiguities.5 And in the uncertainty, Colman had snatched control. He may have been so diminutive as to attract the stares of people in the street, but he assumed an unassailable authority at the Garden.6 The tone had been set at the first rehearsal of their first season. Harris and Rutherford had entered the auditorium and walked upon its vast stage with the pride of ownership and with an eye for any actress enlivened by their company. Their expectations turned to bemusement as they approached Colman seated upon the middle of the stage. Instead of introducing them to everyone as the Garden’s new benefactors, he jumped from his seat and stopped them short. With a show of ‘offended pride and enraged importance’, according to Harris, he told them to ‘go off the stage’ and not to ‘interrupt the business of the theatre’. Belittled and dismissed, they were free to take their seats wherever they thought fit, as long as they did not interrupt. Every subsequent rebuff from Colman, which stung the remembrance of that day, spurred Harris to assert his rights, his property and his title. For Harris, who had to watch with frustration as Colman assumed sole management of the theatre, it was theft.7 And as he came to realize, without a say about what happened upon the stage, it became impossible for him to govern the finances or even to protect his investment. As Harris was denied the ownership of his own business, his resentment quickly became rancorous. In moments of impotent anger, he vowed ‘G—d d—n his blood’, to ‘teaze [Colman] till he is weary of his life’.8 One of Rutherford’s friends relished the gossip, calling the managers ‘mortal enemies’ in a situation that was ‘really so hot, that you must take the will for the deed’.9 At one flashpoint, Harris sent a challenge to Colman: You are very welcome, Sir, to my life, if you dare any how to hazard the taking it. I am going out of town this evening, at six o’clock, and shall return tomorrow about that time. If I hear nothing from you then, know, that your ungenerous, unmanly behaviour has made me upon every occasion of life your enemy. Surry-Street, Friday noon, Oct. 30. T. HARRIS

To this, Colman replied that he dare not take another man’s life; but he would defend his own. His final line revealed the dramatist’s ability to fashion a smart riposte with enough cool condescension to keep Harris’s

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anger bright. With a show of calm, he wrote, ‘Your professed friendship or professed enmity … are equally indifferent to G. COLMAN.’10 It was self-assurance typical of a man who ‘from the perfect knowledge of his own mind, was convinced he was incapable of speaking an untruth’.11 Harris eventually lost all patience, with negotiation and with the magistrates, which led to the events of that June morning. And so, as the court heard, Harris later returned to the Garden mob-handed. This violent assault, however, became a short-lived triumph of twentytwo days. Relinquishing possession, Harris would again suffer the indignity of being locked out of the theatre which became a stronghold with the bulk of William Flight as its doorkeeper. And, on finally regaining entry through the door on Bow Street, Harris would be made to fear for his life. Sticks and bludgeons would be brandished over his head. Colman’s head housekeeper, Charles Sarjant senior, would tell his men ‘to mind what they were about’ and ‘to stand fast and be resolute’. Inside, Harris would frantically try to regain his freedom. While laying hold of the door-chain, several of Colman’s men would threaten ‘murder at almost every word’.12 Not even the venerable Sir John Fielding – the man who gave the final word on the law in Bow Street – could calm the situation. Many times, Sir John would order Colman to give up possession, and as many times Colman would refuse. Even threatening Colman with ‘the consequences’ could do little to blunt his abrupt resolution. Sir John could only take refuge in official procedure, and order his clerk to take down everyone’s declarations.13 As Harris sat in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, his momentary victory that June must have seemed pyrrhic for a second time over. Through the testimonies of Colman’s men, it was made to appear like an act of wilful destruction – the act of a housebreaker. Harris’s gang had wrenched open every door and drawer thought to contain anything of value, and had rifled through Colman’s private letters. Anything that had seemed worthless on first glance in the hunt for rich pickings, such as Joseph Younger’s prompt books and frayed pieces of costume, had been ripped up or strewn upon the floor in confused heaps like foul linen.14 Anyone who had met Harris’s partner, Rutherford, would not have been surprised by those strong-arm tactics and the frenzy of brute force that followed. Joining Rutherford in business had been Harris’s first mistake. In true Hobbesian style, Rutherford saw life as being controlled by the sheer force of his will – ‘he would lay down his life before he would tamely submit’ to another, he claimed in court.15 He embodied that reckless buccaneering spirit which shouted its last in his lifetime. A  walking caricature of the duellist, Rutherford would draw his sword first, and ask questions later. An adventurer who could easily

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take offence where none was intended, he needed little goading in this affair. His attempt to remove Colman, by insinuating to his face that he was neither a man nor a gentleman and then calling him out, had failed. Colman had refused. But when Captain Woodford Rice crossed Rutherford’s path, there were repercussions. Smarting under ‘the sneers thrown out against him in the public papers’, Rutherford chose Rice as his quarry and called him to account as a sympathetic friend of Colman’s. On open ground, away from interruptions and witnesses, Rutherford had fired his pistol and missed Rice ‘who stood full’; and ‘as soon as he had received the fire, discharged his own pistol into the air’. Their hearty reconciliation afterwards, spurred by a mutual admiration of each other’s willingness to risk life to defend honour, lasted merely some hours.16 Rutherford’s pact with Harris did not last much longer. Like the theatrical rakes in the old Restoration plays, Rutherford spent his money as freely as he risked his body. Having financed his share with capital that he could not repay, he was forced to desert Harris days after the storming of the theatre, that commitment of everything to their cause.17 Harris felt the abandonment keenly. For all of his faults, including his casual attitude to commitments, Rutherford had the drive and assurance to instil courage and optimism in his companions. Harris found himself ‘divested of that assistance and support, which a communication of opinions, as well as of sufferings, would else have afforded’.18 That autumn, his partner reappeared, having disembarked from a French vessel with typically brash bravado. Having sold his stake in the business, some of the money was used to give all of his friends a grand dinner at the new tavern in Bishopsgate Street. ‘This, I take it, is not the readiest way to repair his fortune,’ one of them remarked dryly.19 In court, Harris’s counsel was acutely aware that Rutherford’s withdrawal from the business dealt a major blow to their cause. As they came together to second-guess the defence’s arguments, by looking for the weaknesses in their own, they were painfully aware of Rutherford’s flight. It was a fact that could not be argued away, no matter how many times they scribbled down ‘let it not be said’ in their preparatory notes. Rutherford had sold his share to Henry Dagge of the Inner Temple and to James Leake, a stationer in the Strand, for £3,500 more than he had paid fourteen months earlier. It must have seemed as if the Garden – with its plays about libertines redeemed and rescued from the jaws of ruin – had taken care of one of its own. They knew too that Dagge was no fool and that he expected ‘Great Dividends’ in return for his investment. In spite of all this, Harris’s team needed to show that Colman had squandered money and made the business unprofitable, in order to

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strengthen their objections to his taking absolute control of the theatre. A loss of money had to be one consequence of Colman’s theft of their client’s property. ‘Mr. Colman shall not lay out or squander his partners’ money without their consent,’ was at the centre of their arguments. Only by proving Colman’s incompetence could they hope to obtain a ‘specific performance’ of the original agreement – based upon Harris’s ‘true construction’ of it – and file for damages.20 But as the arguments unfolded and the testimonies were heard, the financial details became lost in a trial which pitted Harris’s character against Colman’s. It was also a heavyweight contest between two barristers – Alexander Wedderburn, who would become lord chancellor, and John Dunning who had been the solicitor-general. Wedderburn, in Harris’s corner, was becoming known as an expert equity lawyer, a specialist for a case such as this. Having been trained in the Scottish courts, he brought new ways of looking at cases, a second perspective that his London opponents often did not anticipate. Moreover, he was well-spoken, and had polish – qualities that helped to convince listeners that his opinions were knowledgeable. To appear urbane, he had even taken lessons in elocution from Sheridan’s father to suppress his Edinburgh accent, a trace of which remained. It brought him the admiration of his countrymen for being ‘a d—d clever fellow’ who spoke ‘devilish good English’. He had become the standard-bearer for Scotland’s intelligentsia.21 However, this contest was a mismatch, as much as it would have been had both men been prizefighters. Dunning was a heavy, hulking figure who imposed himself upon an assembly. The polite described him as ‘ungainly’. The wags in the gallery unkindly remarked that he was a ‘Lusus Naturae’ – a freak of nature – who belonged suspended in a glass jar, like those collected by John Hunter. They joked that he had come lumbering in from Billingsgate, that world of the modern Atlas, where porters’ bodies groaned beneath monstrous loads. However, his command of their attention was not just due to his towering shape; if anything, his personality made him seem more physically intimidating than his size merited. The comparison with Billingsgate was prompted as much by his unflinching, robust temper as anything else. A pugilist in debates, he used wit like a jab in the act of pounding an opponent into submission. His colleagues described him as ‘the most abusive advocate’ they had ever heard; to oppose him in a debate was to suffer ‘severe chastisement’ in the form of ‘a violent attack’. Those foolish enough to heckle him would be given ‘a good dressing’, like the party of macaroni fops who once tried to prevent him from speaking in a debate at the House of Commons. All in all, there was little that was refined about Dunning. While showing no sympathy for his poor health, the bluestocking Hannah More was

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repulsed by his ‘insufferably bad’ manner in ‘coughing and spitting at every three words’. And yet, in this decade, Dunning could ask for £300 merely for an appearance. If at times vulgar, he could easily carry an audience along with him, using his impudent wit to keep them jogging along upon his shoulders. An entertainer, he became known as ‘Orator Hum’ which punned on his difficulty in breathing and his ability to ‘humbug’, to impose upon others through tomfoolery.22 In contrast, Wedderburn appeared cold and aloof in public. Such a man, who has great knowledge, might cut the figure of a conceited pedant even without being set against someone as ebullient as Dunning. Lacking the warmth and forcefulness of this larger-than-life character, Wedderburn held his slight frame in a stiff attitude which some saw as pomposity. Choosing his words with precision, his whole manner seemed guarded and stilted. He seemed to weigh and consider every phrase before speaking, to give his words the maximum effect. Carefully pronouncing them, Wedderburn toiled to disguise the fact that he hailed from Auld Reekie. In the attempt, he had even avoided the company of other Scotsmen, as if afraid of catching some contagious disease by shaking hands with them. This may have been a typically cautious move when your livelihood depends upon being heard and understood by impatient Englishmen. But someone with such a calculated manner can easily appear calculating. It did not help to dispel the impression that there was something dishonest and sneaky about him. He awakened long-held, ingrained prejudices about scheming, treacherous Scotsmen who were on the make. They only had to visit the theatre to see a companion for him in the form of Sir Archy Macsarcasm from Love a la Mode. That ‘proud, haughty Caledonian knight’ – who was both sly and covetous – was said to have been modelled on Wedderburn himself. As Sir Archy slowly dragged out each syllable, while shamelessly flattering everyone to their faces, it was mimicry at its cruellest. For those who understood the joke, Wedderburn’s polite reserve seemed not only cautious and measured, but also sinister. Most damningly, one writer remarked that there was ‘something’ about Wedderburn ‘which even treachery cannot trust’.23 Decades after his death, his name would remain synonymous with one stereotypical trait of the Scotsman – ‘cunning’.24 Scratch the surface of polite London society and the distaste for everything Scottish would have been apparent, a jaundiced view that united Englishmen irrespective of class, education or profession. Upon being introduced to the erudite Dr Johnson, Boswell felt the need to admit in self-deprecating fashion, ‘I do indeed come from Scotland; but, I cannot help it.’ And as Boswell knew, it was usually best not to advertise

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the fact, if possible. At the Garden, he had witnessed the humiliation of two Highland officers who had been hissed at and pelted with apples as the mob in the upper gallery roared out ‘No Scots! No Scots! Out with them!’ Picking quarrels and affronting Scotsmen was a patriotic duty. Such foreigners were unwanted outsiders who – as John Wilkes, the man of the people, bluntly put it – visit and ‘never go back again’.25 Rabid anti-Scottish sentiment had been nursed in the hearts of Londoners throughout the century, kept alive by one grievance or another. Around the time of the trial, it was fuelled by the hostility towards George III’s late favourite – the Earl of Bute – who was a contender for the most unpopular man of the 1760s. This powerful politician was a man of straw, endlessly ripped apart in the imaginations of Londoners. Hounded by the hatred of the public, he was even a target for assassination threats. As Wedderburn’s prominence grew through Bute’s patronage, it bolstered the belief that ‘these damn’d Scotchmen creep into every corner’ with an ever-increasing number leaving behind a land of famine to prey upon London.26 Such hostility was chafed by his professional success – hostility which stiffened with every caricature print of those bastard Scotsmen, with prejudice as rigid and stubborn as the fixed lines of each engraving. At the height of his fame, Wedderburn was portrayed as Sawny Wetherbeaten in one image from 1792 – a view of him as the stereotypical Scotsman that captured the abuse of the ale house.27 In this eighteenth-century cartoon, destitution is etched upon the gaunt, rawboned features of Wedderburn’s angular face. With bare legs and feet, he is primitive, savage and destitute. Leaning against a scratching post, his feral nature finds company amongst farmyard animals. And his wild, demonic gaze betrays his treacherous nature along with the declaration, ‘I would sell my king & my God for Gold.’ This threat was meant to evoke the disloyalty of the Scottish Jacobites during the uprising of 1745. Connoisseurs of the caricature would have also recognized the similarity between Wedderburn’s garb and the costume of the Jacobin sans-culottes, those desperate republicans without breeches from the poorest parts of Paris.28 In the 1790s, when England would lurch from one invasion scare to another, Wedderburn became the embodiment of the enemy within, those traitors who ardently wished for Napoleon’s arrival. As Sawny Wetherbeaten, his demonic stare was meant to instil fear. It would be naive to assume that only those who hated Bute, and cheered the tub-thumping patriotism of Wilkes, would have eyed Wedderburn with mistrust; or that centuries of chauvinism were not aroused somewhere in the hall by his voice; or that it did not lurk in the back of many minds and register on some of the faces listening, becoming a sour comment on Wedderburn for all to see. As the poet

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Charles Churchill put it, Wedderburn hid behind his usual mannerisms – such as waving his hand while speaking and stroking the bands hanging from his collar – but it was impossible for him to distract attention away from the fact that he was a ‘Prater of the northern race’ with ‘Guilt in his heart, and famine in his face’.29 It was not just Churchill, a member of the London literati, who could not trust a Scotsman; and for Wedderburn, his whole purpose was to persuade others to have faith in his point of view. The burden of these associations must have had added weight considering what was being fought over. Covent Garden theatre was a foundation stone of English culture and a centre for the expression of patriotic pride. It was part of every Englishman’s heritage; the place where he could enjoy the ridicule of the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish, and feel assured of his superiority.30 It was where audiences sang ‘Rule Britannia’ with gusto – and whoever orchestrated them, did exactly that. For a Caledonian barrister to assume control of its fate always promised resistance in the crowd, with the peril of having his argument frowned upon as weasel words from a foreigner and an interloper. As if that was not enough, Wedderburn realized that he had to combat prejudice against his client in what would become a matter of reputation. One aim of any eighteenth-century courtroom was to reveal the true mettle of a man, whether he was a defendant facing the gallows or a plaintiff looking to enforce a contract. And Chancery was no different in principle with the rights of each participant resting upon his integrity and honour. In trying to present Harris as a man worthy of Covent Garden theatre, Wedderburn knew full well that there were problems, perhaps insurmountable ones. The whole mystery of a manager Pondering before his opening address, Wedderburn recognized how easy it would be for Dunning to present his client as flash, foolish and more interested in the sexual favours of actresses than in business. A laughing stock who had been bewitched by one woman in particular, and who would do anything to please her. A dupe who had risked everything for this third-rate actress. A man whose rash involvement with this wellworn woman of the town had shown how unfit he was to manage the theatre at the centre of the capital of the world. Wedderburn was conscious of the need to dismiss this argument about Harris and Jane Lessingham. ‘Mr Colman has had the art to hold up in Pamphlets Mrs. Lessingham: It is no dispute about this, that, or t’other actress,’ he wrote in preparation.31 She had been one of the many girls who, unburdened by the moral conscience made famous by Richardson’s

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Pamela, had naturally drifted towards the sex trade of Covent Garden in the 1760s, hurried along by the short-lived attentions of admirers. The worldly-wise saw her as ‘a lesson against the influence of beauty devoid of moral principles’. Changing her name as often as her partner, she might have introduced herself as Jane Hemet, or Stott, or Lessingham, as she roamed around the coffee houses. Some feverishly imagined that Harris had been finally overwhelmed by the sight of her legs, after she invitingly raised her petticoats before him in his first flush of excitement as the Garden’s proprietor. And the appeal of the newly powerful Harris for her was understandable, after the wasted years of minor roles at different theatres.32 Their relationship was forced out into the open when Colman fought dirty for public opinion by adding to the squibs, satires and pamphlets hawked about London. And as Harris complained to Colman, ‘You have one argument, and only one, which is for ever in your mouth’ – the one about Lessingham. This tale had provided as much entertainment in the coffee houses as those lewd prints stained by the countless, grubby hands of its customers. It was about how Harris had lost all sense at the sight of Lessingham’s shapely thighs, employing her as an actress and then demanding special treatment for her. With the insanity of a lover, he had looked at Lessingham and seen the leading comic actress of the company. Others only saw someone to be hired by the night who could not remember how many men had paid for the pleasure; a faded beauty who eked out an existence as a bit actor, shamelessly giving audiences a glimpse of her body while raising cheap laughs. When Harris quietly steered Colman to one side and asked for a private dressing room for her, to save her from the squabbles and sharp elbows of a crowded garret, the manager became defensive. When she refused the minor role of Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice – and Harris carried away the cast book to strike out other roles that he thought were ‘improper’ before inserting a list of others for her – Colman became incensed at the insolence of the man. Viewed through a cold, analytical eye like Wedderburn’s, it was easy to see how business decisions had become personal for Harris, and how Colman’s management of an actress had become an affront to his client which was repeated with every new playbill pasted up outside the pit door. Viewed through the heated imaginations of members of the hell-fire clubs who came together to taste claret and erotica, it was a story that could have come straight out of one of their favourite books, Hall-Stevenson’s Crazy Tales – a collection about ‘Miss-demeanours’ and ‘Miss-doings’. Their fantasy about how Lessingham had used sex to manipulate a willing victim found expression in one engraving which showed her leading Harris

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by the nose using a piece of string tied to her ankle. That she did not have to rely solely upon her body to bring men to heel was shown by her persuasion of the Garden’s audience after the story broke. Hissed at by every part of the auditorium upon her appearance, she made a solicitous speech which ‘brought them all over to her side’.33 Such skilful negotiation must have strengthened the belief that she was more than a match for any man. Years later, when her history was laid bare, it was confirmed. Married at sixteen under a special license from the Bishop of London, Jane became impossible to trust for her husband, Captain John Stott. The ensuing trial for adultery ended with the judge’s condemnation ringing in her ears: ‘Unmindful of [your] conjugal vow, and not having the fear of God before [your] eyes, but being instigated and seduced by the devil, [you] did commit adultery with one or more strange person … and was by such criminal conversation begot with child.’34 This verdict upon her past was a fair prediction of her future. Leaving her early marriage behind, she survived by masquerading as the ‘wife’ of a long line of men. After deserting the poet Samuel Derrick in the squalor of Holborn’s Shoe Lane, she eventually chose Harris as a ‘husband’.35 That he fancied her to be perfect for the role of Berinthia in The Relapse suggests that he may not have been as innocent and gullible as London suspected. In Vanbrugh’s original play, Berinthia is the arch-temptress sensitive to the weaknesses of men, expertly able to seduce them against their better judgement. She panders to one man’s fantasy – causing his relapse into unfaithfulness – by pretending to resist him. Perhaps Harris had fantasized about being that man who carries Berinthia to bed while she cries out in a soft, breathless whisper, ‘Help, help, I’m ravish’d, ruin’d, undone. O Lord, I shall never be able to bear it.’36 When Colman used the press to make a show of Lessingham and her beau, Harris refused to lower himself by discussing his intimate affairs, suggesting that there was neither ‘wit or decency, good breeding’ or ‘humanity’ in such ‘scurrility’ and ‘aspersions’. Refusing to dirty his hands, he merely asked Colman to think about his own ‘situation’ – a hint at his unseemly affair with a woman who had been seduced and abandoned by the actor Henry Mossop. Despite the risks of such silence, Harris was conscious that in one sense the truth was immaterial – whatever that was in a town devoted to endless speculation and spin. Most important was what the public believed to be true, and over that he felt harassed and helpless. With every new report and satire in the St. James’s Chronicle and elsewhere, Harris feared being ‘grosly misrepresented’ in a way that might forever fix him as a caricature in the public’s imagination. Words in print had their own authority. He could

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only lament that ‘when once the public are impressed with a falsehood, it takes some time to undeceive them’.37 He was not alone, however, in smarting from the attacks of the press. Colman became a miniature tyrant, a tiny ‘Sovereign of this Kingdom’ strutting about the stage who demanded grovelling obedience. ‘Do as I command thee, and be silent – It is my Will,’ he thundered, in one mock play about the dispute.38 But by adding his name to an attack, Colman was able to use his reputation, one nurtured by the great Garrick himself, to drub his opponent. Harris could petulantly assert that this reputation was ‘rickety’ – just the opinion of one friend about another – but he was a stranger to London’s theatre world, unknown and unrespected.39 His vain attempts to win over the Garden’s performers had shown him that much. He had tried to persuade them of the merits of his case by reading the agreement to them; he had even tried to buy the loyalty of two actors with the promise of better contracts that amounted to blank cheques. But as Wedderburn had to admit, only Colman knew how ‘to draw all into obedience to himself’.40 The idlers, huddled over Colman’s claims in the candlelight of the Slaughter’s coffee house, might believe every word, or might not care about what was believable in their enjoyment of every disgraceful detail. For all of his contributions to the pamphlet war, Harris felt at the mercy of Colman’s lies, trumpeted  with the help  of the press. In the months leading up to the trial, Harris was given an education about the sway of the press with its power to ridicule and parade anyone through London’s streets, much like a criminal carted around the town to the jeers and laughter of the mob. In feeling so vulnerable, Harris saw one resource for the future. The Lessingham affair was not the only problem with Harris’s suit when popular caricatures of each warring party threatened to bleed into the courtroom debate. The battle between Harris and Colman had been before the public for so long that it had created its own narratives. One of them – The Triumphal Entry of the Red Kings by Wisdom & Justice with the Expulsion of their Black Majesties (Figure 7) – showed how Colman had repelled Harris’s harlequin invasion. With the help of Justice who brandishes her sword and carries the scales of the law, Harris is removed from the theatre. Fame sounds her trumpet and, with her wreath of laurels, hovers above Colman as if to crown him as the victor. Athena, in battle dress, stretches out her hand to touch him with wisdom. Harris, whose ass-ears are caressed by the sensual Lessingham, slinks away moodily. Lessingham – or ‘Mrs Losing-game’ – is a female satyr, an embodiment of sheer animal instinct. An upturned skirt reveals her legs, one of which is marked with the word ‘LUST’.

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FIGURE 7  The Triumphal Entry of the Red Kings by Wisdom & Justice with the Expulsion of their Black Majesties (1768). (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

While being led by the nose, Harris in turn holds Rutherford’s string, a noisy fool wearing a cap and bells. In the crude lines of this engraving, a boy squats over A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman and An Epistle to G. Colman to give his opinion of Harris, if one was needed. Lying on the ground is the actor Charles Macklin wearing the head of a ram. This ‘Black Knave’ would take centre stage at the end of the trial in the attempt to turn the tide in Harris’s favour. But this was yet to come for those Londoners who were introduced to Harris as the ‘King of Clubs’ with the trefoil on his coat. Such a pun could be laughed away in court, but there was one portrayal that might sink Harris’s case, or so Wedderburn feared. Harris’s past as the soap-boiler, knowing nothing about running a theatre, would look very shabby when placed against Colman’s.41 Knowing what was to come, Wedderburn had to limit the damage of the depositions about to be read aloud in Colman’s favour. Dunning had reams of statements from the Garden’s workers that all amounted to much the same thing; when giving their testimonies, Colman’s men had dutifully recited from the same script. According to them, Harris and Rutherford were completely ‘unacquainted with management’.

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And through their ignorance – or perhaps ill will – they had done their damnedest to ruin the theatre by hindering Colman at every turn. In contrast, Colman had the rare knowledge, skill and tireless perseverance to make the Garden a success. He never went into useless expense or wasted any money, insisted the scene painter and the dresser of the theatre. Moreover, he was a ‘gentleman’ of ‘independent fortune’ others had said, with the implication that he was above worrying about money and the double-dealing necessary to make ends meet.42 Considering that Harris had given his name to guarantee the loan that enabled Colman to invest in the first place, it added insult to injury.43 Nonetheless, such testimonies were compelling when they came from men chosen for their impeccable character which was a remarkable achievement in this business. One of them, Thomas Hull, was the Garden’s consummate professional. He would boast at the end of his career that ‘he had missed the prompter’s call but once in 54 years’ while in bed with a violent fever. He brought dignity to comedy; he was the actor to deliver gentle humour with an ‘honest sincerity of expression’. His gravitas would drive one campaign, to establish the Covent Garden Theatrical Fund for distressed actors, which would become his enduring achievement.44 While Hull was a persuasive witness in the staging of Colman’s worthiness, Garrick needed no introduction to the court. For Dunning’s records, he had described Colman as ‘a man of literature and a good judge of Dramatic Performances’. This oracle concluded that ‘he knew of nobody so capable and fit to be manager as Colman’.45 As Wedderburn opened the proceedings, he tried to pre-empt what Dunning would say to discredit Harris, and so address what he called ‘the wickedness of misrepresentation’ where his client was concerned.46 In trying to turn the weakness of Harris’s position into a strength, he first of all asked ‘who are the parties?’ Then he introduced Colman as ‘a wit’, Harris as a ‘soap-boiler’, Dagge as ‘belonging to the law’ and Leake as a ‘stationer’.47 This was an admission that Harris was only a businessman unlike Colman, a man of talent and intellect in an unusual sphere of activity. But did this matter? Wasn’t the Garden a business, Wedderburn asked, and weren’t all of these men expert ‘judges’ of accounts and how to lay out money? To make his argument stick, he needed to dispel the mystery surrounding the stage, that secretive world hidden behind the brilliant surface of make-believe. The magical flight of the harlequin may have been something to wonder at; but the routine, day-to-day activities that made it possible were truly arcane to most Londoners. It was necessary to enlighten everyone in the hall, to draw back the curtain which shrouded the theatre’s operations and concealed its workings

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from the public. To demystify the management of the theatre, it needed to be translated into the commonplace, the mundane and the banal. In this way, Colman’s achievements would not be the result of genius, inspiration or anything else that could not be explained. The Garden’s high priest would be cut down to size. ‘Is genius necessary to conduct a playhouse?’ was Wedderburn’s next question. ‘No. Good sense is all that’s necessary. A manager’s role is to conduct regular rehearsals,’ he bluntly replied. ‘Does that require genius? Diligence and punctuality will do! This, with civility to the customers, is the whole mystery of a manager!’ As for what to perform, the treasurer’s books, the prompter and even the old actors can tell a manager about which old plays have always brought the most money, he claimed. And as for who to cast, the town will quickly tell you its favourite actors and who it wants to see. However, Colman’s success was not due to his attentive observance of such rules; Wedderburn was not prepared to allow him even that. Covent Garden had been rescued by its pantomimes, he insisted, not by great dramatic art. That the public followed this nonsense was the secret of his good fortune, not ‘skill, genius, wit, judgement’ or ‘superior knowledge’. He then took Colman to task. At the outset, he conceded that Colman was ‘honest’. ‘Would any honest man desire complete power?’ he then mused. ‘An honest man, that has it, will choose the consent of the people whose money he lays out. An honest man, that has it not, will not usurp it. Mr. Colman – honest. How can we be sure that he is always to be honest?’ With every use of the word, it sounded increasingly hollow. It was a rhetorical ploy from the ancient world that Wedderburn would have discovered as a schoolboy at Dalkeith, a way of assassinating someone’s character straight out of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. He continued to chip away at the certainty of Colman’s integrity. ‘If there are no curbs placed upon him, he might do the most absurd things,’ Wedderburn speculated. With the authority that he assumed, ‘he might take the whole wardrobe up to Monmouth Street, and sell it; he might dismiss the principal actors and actresses, and instead of representing plays, exhibit nothing but bears and wild beasts’. It was a scenario to keep Harris awake at night. ‘Mr. Colman is a man of judgement,’ he continued. ‘But nobody is sure of not being lunatic. Suppose that misfortune to happen. The mischief he may do!’ It was a strange speculation to make; and yet it turned out to be an accurate prediction. Colman would spend his last days in an asylum in Paddington, tormented by what his son described as ‘the wildest flights of morbid fancy’. Possibly there was a flicker of this future

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in his behaviour, in his need for control and the fervour with which he held on to it.48 One man, other than Harris and Rutherford, believed that he had suffered because of it. The straight-talking Charles Macklin felt that he had been left out in the cold. The great Shylock had been overlooked in favour of mere novices and ‘under Actors’ because of daring to speak his mind to Colman. Advising caution, Macklin had told him ‘not to plague or fret himself by contending with his fellow proprietors, for … if he persisted in managing in Defiance of their power … the law would fall heavy on him for damages’. Macklin ‘directly advised [him] not to Embarrass and plague himself about a contention for the sole power’. By speaking with that ‘freedom and sincerity in which one friend ought to speak to another’, he saw their friendship slowly turn to coldness and reserve. The split came when Colman stalled the negotiations to renew Macklin’s contract, breaking a verbal agreement. Macklin could guarantee big audiences at any theatre with his legendary malign Shylock which had once caused George II to have a sleepless night. But the actor became ‘an enemy to the state’. Sensing the breach, Harris invited Macklin to dine so that they could digest their mutual resentment over wine. Their friendship grew with each conciliatory move from Harris and every offer of an exclusive contract. It is easy to see why he was welcomed as an adviser and a friend by Harris. The elderly firebrand – someone who had learned the art of management from the great Colley Cibber himself – could speak with authority about how to run a theatre.49 And more importantly, in the months after Rutherford’s disappearance, he told Harris about the justice of his case, hitting it home with the confidence that comes with self-belief. One early biographer told how Macklin got involved with as much enthusiasm ‘as if he had been the solicitor’.50 As for his reward, he took personal validation from people’s admiration, even avoiding others who could claim a superiority over him.51 The pleasure of schooling Harris would have been reward enough when his student’s easy complaisance was well-suited to feeding his vanity. The friendship forged by the lawsuit lasted until the actor’s death with Harris indulging Macklin with the freedom of the theatre where he barked orders from the front row of the pit. The wild Irishman was a force of nature, as those timid players who had heard him shout ‘speak louder, Sir, I cannot hear you’ could well testify. His stare could freeze. When he spoke with his impatient growl, you were forced to listen. One acquaintance, John Taylor, described his intense relief when he was threatened by an evening visit from Macklin

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and the old actor failed to appear, saving him from a trial of patience. ‘I should have been obliged to acquiesce in the propriety of all I was to hear, or expose myself to the violence of his temper,’ Taylor reflected. Impatient of contradiction, ‘the least opposition’ was ‘an unpardonable insult’ that spurred his abuse. In the increasingly polite London of the 1770s, Macklin was a throwback to an earlier, more combative time. He liked to describe himself as having been born ‘in the last year of the last century’. Now, middle-class Londoners were becoming ever more sensitive to the feelings of others in order to appear to the best advantage in company. He gave as much attention to this fashion for politeness, with its desire to please, as to the dainty way of walking adopted by the macaroni fops around town. The indelible mark of ‘M’ upon his hand had fixed him in another time. Decades earlier, he had been branded as a punishment for the manslaughter of another actor, Thomas Hallam – an episode brought up again by The Triumphal Entry. In an argument over a costume wig, Macklin had, in a fit of choler, thrust his stick through Hallam’s eye, puncturing his brain.52 Luckily for Colman, old age had dampened Macklin’s nature as Dunning made free with the actor’s character – in the attempt to ridicule his patrician authority – as the depositions were read in Chancery.53 One account told how Colman had flatly refused Harris’s request to employ Macklin. With tempers running high, Colman’s deputy had even flown into a rage and sworn that ‘while he had any property in the theatre, Macklin should not be engaged’.54 Wedderburn, with a show of disgust, made the most of the actor’s reputation to deride Colman. ‘Managing does not consist in turning away actors at the head of their profession, out of pique or resentment, because they dine with the plaintiffs,’ he observed. ‘Or because upon oath they give their opinion that his Management is not good.’55 Macklin waited to hear the effect of his testimony, the last one to be offered in court, the climax.56 Having been interrogated on behalf of both parties, Macklin anticipated the effect of his statement to be read aloud by Dunning. In having asked him to give evidence, it is difficult to understand what Colman was hoping to hear from someone who had become openly and ‘balefully hostile’ to him.57 It is certain that Macklin took his opportunity, just as he would on many other occasions. ‘Innately convinc’d of his strength and capacity’, the courtroom was his ideal stage.58 He lived for each legal tussle, and waited in anticipation of the next bill of indictment from Chancery. In a few years’ time, he would successfully prosecute a party of men who had tried to drive him from the stage. Lord Mansfield would commend him by saying ‘You have met

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with great applause today: – You never acted better.’59 That moment would become the culmination of his career as a self-educated legal orator which began with his own defence at the Old Bailey. Branded at the end of that initiation, he had received a painful insight into the court’s power to stamp an identity upon a man. On this day, he would provide resistance on Harris’s behalf. Macklin’s deposition attempted to offer a new perspective upon the dispute and the characters of its main players.60 In trying to persuade the judges to understand his friend differently, Macklin also encouraged them to question what they knew about Colman. He tried to cast doubt upon Colman’s pristine reputation as an expert – trained and proved by experience – against which Harris had seemed like an eccentric amateur. In muddying the waters, Macklin was not so unsophisticated a speaker as to try to daub Colman crudely. After all, cutting all ties with Colman would leave him with only one venue in London where he could ply his trade, the one where Garrick would have to be courted and endured. In giving his thoughts about both parties, Macklin approached each character as an actor would a role, looking for the complexity of the person in a world where no one is infallible, where there are no moral absolutes and where no one can be taken at face value. In challenging the dismissive portrayal of Harris and Rutherford, he told the court about what he had been led to believe before becoming acquainted with these two men. In the daily talk around the theatre, Macklin had heard them turned into ridicule, dismissed as ‘The Foreign, the Strange, and the Intriguing Managers’, meddling with business that did not concern them. They were called ‘The Idle Managers’ and ‘The Gentlemen Managers’, seeing work as beneath them while still wanting everyone to defer to them. Macklin even admitted to using such names himself in common conversation as he was swept along by the others, Colman’s ‘zealous Partizans’. Moreover, the rumour circulated that Harris and Rutherford talked and behaved as if they had a right ‘to make amorous Advances to every woman’ belonging to the theatre ‘whom they fancied’. These were candid admissions that warned Harris about one of the dangers of obscurity, of being little known when hankering after a power that needed the allegiance of others. More to the point, they asked the judges to think about whether a jaundiced eye had clouded their thoughts. Building on his theme, Macklin then gave a sketch of his dealings with Colman which planted doubts about the manager’s reputation. Macklin claimed that it was sheer pique – hurt pride at hearing the truth that he could not manage the Garden in defiance of Harris’s wishes – that led to Colman’s ‘cool and shuffling Behaviour’ and to the rejection of the actor’s services. So much for Colman’s astute business sense when

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one key decision had been driven by emotion, Macklin implied. He had suffered from Colman’s spite through ‘incivilities and unwarrantable acts’, he claimed – but he did not elaborate, leaving such acts for the court to imagine. And he had endured all of this from a man who had no right to behave so. As someone who took great pride in his discernment of legal matters, Macklin could not resist repeating his decided opinion that ‘Harris … had a controlling power in the management of the theatre’ and that a legal battle could never be won by Colman. There was one final revelation for the court. In the summer of 1768, Colman had tried to cut his partners out of the business. In a ruthless move, he had negotiated with Samuel Foote for the use of the Haymarket, a small theatre that was only licensed for the summer season. Knowing that the patent was the Garden’s valuable asset and that it allowed him to set up anywhere in London, Colman had looked to open the Haymarket for the ensuing winter without Harris or Rutherford. This bold plan would have thwarted Harris by letting him have the Garden’s building and nothing else. In response, Harris had talked about sending an envoy to the second theatrical city – Dublin – to invite its leading performers to the Garden. But this had been only a playful suggestion, Macklin added, a way of laughing at Colman’s foolish, ‘Romantick’ ‘plan of taking the actors away to Foote’s’. In playing down this counter-attack, Colman might seem all the more capricious, unpredictable and untrustworthy. Colman’s glowing reputation, which had been deployed so carefully in court, was in danger of seeming contrived. In this invitation to unpick Colman’s fame, the trial offered Harris more of an education than simply instruction in theatre management. These days of enlightenment shaped his future in other, less obvious ways. In his struggle to wrestle power from Colman, he had felt resistance to being heard, mindful of the advantage that someone like Colman had over him, a worthy of the stage who could call upon the regard of the public. In forcing him to confront the nature of public opinion, and Colman’s ability to marshal it, this courtroom was one staging post in Harris’s course towards Pitt’s ministry. Irrespective of the outcome, this legal challenge had shown him how it was possible to steer the sentiments of London. At the conclusion of proceedings, the judges were reluctant to give a decision in favour of either party. This was despite the best efforts of Wedderburn and Macklin – and the labour of Dunning who had kept the court entertained by his ‘uncommonly severe’ treatment of the plaintiff in a speech which lasted nearly three hours and considered the gentlemanly Colman’s ‘unnatural connection’ with Harris, a man whose associates were rapists, thieves and even a bawdy-house keeper.61

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The judges merely dragged Harris back to 1767 and upheld what he had agreed to, condemning everyone involved to repeat the last three years. The contract could not be torn up, they insisted. ‘Mr. Colman do continue in the conduct of the theatre,’ they decided, ‘subject, however to the advice and inspection of the three other managers, but not to the absolute control.’ Anything else would be ‘an absurdity in terms’, one of them claimed, ‘and something like Trinculo’s delegated power to Caliban in The Tempest – “You shall be King, and I’ll be Viceroy over you”’.62 Harris had braved ridicule and invested what remained of his credit to free himself from a situation which had broken down, seemingly beyond repair. His frustration can only be imagined after this refusal to arbitrate, or even to intervene, in a decision that directed him to discuss his problems with Colman, work together and embrace cooperation. Macklin had earlier given such advice for free, unheeded. The old actor could feel that his legal expertise was vindicated after telling everyone concerned that they ‘shou’d pass an Act of Amnesty in their own minds’ and resolve ‘for the future to bear & forbear, to conciliate mutually on every occasion’.63 The judges with the legal power in Chancery had given Harris the right to offer advice to his partner, but that was not the same as having the power to prohibit any of his decisions. That bargaining chip of the indenture was the only part of it that the judges had frowned upon. ‘As to any damages the defendants may think they are entitled to,’ the judge continued, ‘they are to apply to common-law, which will be better and more accurately ascertained by a jury, than by a determination of a Court of Equity.’64 Needless to say, Harris would not be the last man to leave Chancery feeling cheated after trusting in a better outcome. Instead of damages, based upon a belief that the theatre had lost £10,000 in just one season under Colman, he had found that recourse to the law was expensive and rarely satisfied its paymaster.65 An acceptance of the verdict came in the following months as events placed their dispute in a new light. It was rumoured that Harris eventually felt able to give ground as his relationship with Lessingham began to flounder. As for Colman, it may be that the death of his wife softened his attitude to business. Whatever the reasons, the public were only informed that ‘all the differences between the Managers of Covent Garden Theatre are settled. They met together without the interposition of any other person, shook hands, dined at Mr. Colman’s, and put a final stop to all the proceedings at law.’66 Harris accepted the position of Caliban to Colman’s Trinculo. While not howling at the wind, he was taught that misfortune acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, that is until 1774.

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Swimming down the gutter of time One Friday evening in February, Colman was making his way towards home, down Bridges Street deadened by the cold. He was stopped by a shout, from someone calling out from the darkness – ‘You villain, draw your sword, you have abused me behind my back.’ Here was a giant of a man holding a knife with the intention of running him through. This was what happened in pantomime, not on street corners. ‘I have carried this knife to dispatch you for a twelve-month past.’ The invitation to draw was now more threatening; it seemed an excuse for murder. Stepping out of his way, Colman talked of improprieties, following the gentleman’s guidebook to disputes. ‘If I have done you wrong, when properly called on I will give you any satisfaction a gentleman has a right to ask,’ he tentatively offered. As anyone versed in politeness knew, the duel was about buying time, cooling a situation and giving everyone time to compose themselves and reflect. Colman’s face hit the stone pavement, felled by the force of the blow. On trying to regain his feet, his skull was jolted for a second time. And that was the end of it. A few men had rushed to his rescue, realizing that it was an assault not a disagreement with one man poised to use a blade. Badly bruised, Colman was carried home, and his attacker was allowed to escape. Preventing murder did not have to involve wrestling a man all the way to the Bow Street office and spending hours with the magistrates. After the flurry of newspaper reports on this ‘extraordinary’ attack, with its claims and denials, the assailant faded into anonymity.67 Life continued to inflict blows upon Colman. His elevation, newminted by the law, brought him more attention from those who resented his rise. Like-minded malcontents set to work. One writer, going by the name of Nicholas Nipclose, vented his spleen on ‘tiny George’. Cementing the Garden’s reputation as the theatre of frivolous spectacle, he claimed that Colman’s pantomime shows made no sense. They were peculiar, outlandish and odd – a strange jumble of ‘Gods, devils’ and ‘ostriches’ that revealed the extent of the manager’s mental disorder. Nipclose knew why Colman was allowed to impose upon the public: he was ‘Fenc’d with a shield of subtle legal cunning / Kindly produc’d by shrewd, sarcastic Dunning’.68 It was criticism with the aftertaste of sour grapes, a sensation that Harris had become acquainted with. However, the most biting satire upon Colman came in the lines of an engraving. All through the trial, the burins had been sharpened with the intention of gouging a lump out of him. Like Nipclose, one artist attacked Colman for trying to appeal to a mass market, for dumbing down and providing

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amusements only fit for children. One pantomime in particular had drawn huge sums to the Garden with its spectacular stage effects such as a view of the world rising from the depths of the stage orchestrated by the frightful, otherworldly figure of Mother Shipton. First performed on Boxing Day 1770, Mother Shipton returned to the house fifty-six times that season. The response to this entertainment from Darly’s print shop in the Strand was a palpable hit (Figure 8). While such criticism may have been an attempt to define the purpose of this national theatre, it took the form of a personal attack. Darly imagined Colman seated upon the knee of Mother Shipton with his legs dangling in a childlike fashion and a toy made of coral and bells by his side. He is spell-bound by the sight of Harlequin dancing upon the ruins of Shakespeare and Jonson. The viewer’s attention is arrested by the focal point of Harlequin’s wand held upwards, its erect position

FIGURE 8  [Matthias?] Darly, View Colman in the Lap of Mother Shipton (1772). (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

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clearly phallic. Darly is encouraging his patrons to read the scene as one of perverse sexual excitement as Mother Shipton cries ‘Oh my Coly my Coly oh my Coly my Deary’. The plate’s subtitle – ‘A better Subject Satire never whipt on’ – adds to the atmosphere of deviant sexual pleasure, as does the bundle of pens at Colman’s feet that resembles the rod of birch twigs found in erotic prints.69 These hints at carnal flagellation, a vice thought to have originated in the punishments of the nursery and the schoolroom, played upon the idea that Colman’s stature was an indication of his immaturity. He was a man who had never developed beyond being a boy, as his shows proved. Even with the motifs of erotica, this is a print to excite laughter and revulsion, not desire. Old Mother Shipton is grotesque; her arm is draped over him in an embrace that is both motherly and sinister. The scurrilous idea of Colman being made a good boy by the correction of this mother was sure to amuse anyone who had suffered at his hands. While being caressed by Mother Shipton, Colman was bereft of the embrace of his wife. She had been the mistress of his household, a woman with an ‘uncommon sweetness of Temper’.70 With openhearted affection, she had provided him with a haven that closed the door upon the outside world of business. The loss of her came at a time when the stress of running the theatre, and the mounting troubles that it brought, began to unnerve and weaken him. The world had turned, and not for the better. In 1773, he seemed to attract one dispute after another. Macklin, Sir John Fielding and the would-be assassin from Bridges Street, were among the men who sought to chastise him publicly. It was not even possible to take the air of a summer’s evening at Vauxhall Gardens without being dragged into a brawl. His reluctance that night to defend the honour of his companion, the actress Mrs Hartley, led to jeers that he was so small as to be able to hide under the petticoats of a woman.71 Along with the personal attacks and the huge demands upon his mental strength, this year brought him another warning about his health. He became dangerously ill of a fever while staying at Bath. The trip was meant to recuperate him through bathing his ailing body in the medicinal waters, to dissolve away the sickness that had stayed with him after being ‘suddenly seized with a fit’ months earlier.72 But it must have seemed that the exhausting pull of the Garden was inescapable while he remained manager. His decision came in March 1774. It was reported that ‘Mr. Colman … sold his share of the patent and property of Covent Garden Theatre to Messrs. Harris and Leake, his Co-Patentees, for 20,000 guineas’.73 To congratulate Harris would have been premature. It took until July for Colman to sign over his share to Leake; at which point, Leake then

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sold his original stake to Harris. It would edge Harris into a controlling position – with a third of the business – from which the aspiring Jupiter could gradually acquire a bigger interest. Whether Colman avoided dealing directly with Harris or not, it was apparent to the London Chronicle that ‘the resignation of Mr. Colman is at last effected by the rest of the Patentees’. In the same column was a notice about a corpse that had been washed up by the tide near the Isle of Dogs, so much defaced as to be hardly known.74 Colman had been dispatched as effectively. In watching this ebb and flow of London life, it is curious to see who and what endures, and what perishes. Swimming down ‘the gutter of Time’, one piece of flotsam survives while another sinks without trace, to use Laurence Sterne’s analogy.75 One part of a person’s life is remembered, while another is forgotten. This chapter of Harris’s life is a timely reminder. Little material from that prepared for the trial by Colman’s counsel has leaked out from the Court of Chancery records, now nestled in the National Archives. Anyone looking for an official record of the trial at the British Library will find only half of it – the depositions for Harris. Those testimonies that cast infamy upon him, and tell of his desperate actions, seem to have found little life outside of the courtroom. It may simply be one of those quirks of fate that Sterne pondered; or maybe not, considering Harris’s suppression of so much damaging and sensitive material at other stages of his life. Beyond the mouldering records of Chancery, the first-hand accounts of that early morning in June only exist in a rough, hurried transcript of the trial held in an American library.76 Nevertheless, the annals record that Harris became the manager of Covent Garden theatre in 1774. This launched him into two new societies. He was first introduced to the company at the Garden and the predicaments faced by every theatre manager at the end of the season. He discovered that actresses, heated by the summer, had a tendency to abscond with lovers. One of them, only identified by the press as ‘Mrs. B. of Covent Garden’, had at least left her husband a letter before taking flight: Mr. B. I request you will not trouble yourself to pursue me, as I never will live with you more. My debts, which do not amount to above 800l. you shall not suffer for. Pray be good to the children. Adieu for ever.77

It was business as usual. As recompense for the daily difficulties of managing players – who had a natural disposition to abscond, mutiny and cause quarrels – his new position gave him an introduction to the royal court, and his political rise began. He was invited to celebrate the King’s official birthday, along with Garrick, Colman and Foote – those

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gentlemen ‘who either have presided, or now do preside, over the entertainments of the public’, the press explained. To be summoned to attend the King at St James’s Palace was the ultimate social honour. Amongst the most elevated company – men of the first rank from all over the Continent – it would be an opportunity to see and perhaps address the King. It would be a chance to observe those ladies who dazzled in the finest silks while the guns of the Park gave a celebratory ovation to the man who had come all the way from the soap-boiler’s huts in Holborn. Unlike the King, Garrick did not request the pleasure of Harris’s company, preferring Colman’s instead for the journey to St James’s. But even without the honour of travelling in Garrick’s bespoke carriage, while surrounded by his servants paying homage in their new liveries, Harris was still riding high.78 To stay there, ‘King Harris’ – as Colman the Younger sneeringly called him – would have to meet the challenge of another man who sought to escape his past.79 Notes 1 The primary sources for this reconstruction of the break-in are: FL MS T.a.66, pp. 168–78; NA C24/1782, fos 1, 2, 19, 32, 35, 36; Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, p. 47; Whitehall Evening Post, 17–19 July 1770. The National Archives holds the Court of Chancery interrogatories and responses, from Hilary term 1770 onwards, prepared for the trial. The Folger manuscript is a transcript of depositions presented by both parties in the ensuing trial – Harris, Dagge, and Leake v. Colman and Mrs. Powell – which commenced on 16 July 1770. 2 Middlesex Journal, 14–17 July 1770; St. James’s Chronicle, 18–21 June 1768; Foss, Memories of Westminster Hall (1874), I, 84. For claims of newspaper support for Colman during the dispute, see Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, p. 2; Page, George Colman the Elder, pp. 159–60. 3 Harris’s bill of complaint, Colman’s answer and Harris’s subsequent replication (February–September 1769) can be found in NA C12/1024/36. 4 ODNB entry for George Colman (the Elder). On Rutherford’s address, Roach’s Authentic Memoirs is specific, giving it as ‘Newman Street’, p. 104. 5 However, Page’s claim in George Colman the Elder, p. 144 – that their agreement was ‘a document almost unique in its absurdity and ambiguity’ – is an overstatement as can be seen by its reproduction with commentary in Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, pp. 11–14; Colman (the Elder), A True State of the Differences, pp. 15–16. Quotations from Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, pp. 11, 12. 6 ‘As I walk along the street, I hear the men and women say to one another, there goes a little man! – In a word, it is my irreparable misfortune to be, without my shoes, little more than five feet in height,’ Colman (the Elder), Prose on Several Occasions, I, 22–3, italics from text.

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7 Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, pp. vii, 14–15, with italics from text; Kirkman, Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, II, 7–8; also see Lloyd’s Evening Post, 1–3 August 1768 for this perspective on the dispute. The claim that Harris viewed the actresses in this way appears in Page, George Colman the Elder, p. 150. 8 Page, George Colman the Elder, p. 161. 9 Parkes and Merivale, Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, I, 207–8, 213. 10 Extracts from letters reproduced in Colman (the Elder), A True State of the Differences, p. 27; capitals from text. 11 O’Keeffe, Recollections, II, 29. 12 Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, p. 45; FL MS T.a.66, pp. 108–10. 13 FL MS T.a.66, pp. 116, 120–1; BL Add. MS 33218, fos 76, 77. 14 FL MS T.a.66, p. 172. 15 FL MS T.a.66, p. 40, and BL Add. MS 33218, fo. 32 where Rutherford’s character can be gauged by his account of the dispute. 16 Colman (the Elder), A True State of the Differences, pp. iii–iv, 23; Parkes and Merivale, Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, I, 204. 17 In FL MS T.a.66, James Hutchinson’s deposition states that Rutherford ‘quitted England about the 30th June 68’ when ‘a Debt of £2000 or upwards became Due’ along with ‘another Debt or Sum of £3000’, p. 178. Also see Parkes and Merivale, Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, I, 212. 18 Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, p. 1. 19 Parkes and Merivale, Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, I, 217. 20 BL Add. MS 33218, fos 1 (v.), 2, 2 (v.), 3. The notes of Harris’s legal team are preserved in MS 33218 and state that ‘the scope of the action is to reduce him [Colman] to a true construction & specific performance’, fo. 3. This contradicts the report in London Evening Post, 19–21 July 1770, that claimed ‘the plaintiff’s bill was “To dissolve the contract originally entered into by the parties”’. For the details of the sale of Rutherford’s share, see Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXV, 75–6. 21 See ODNB entry for Wedderburn; Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors, VII, 380. The full list of legal advisers for each team was published in Middlesex Journal, 14–17 July 1770. 22 On Dunning, see: ODNB entry; Public Advertiser, 10 October 1770; Page, George Colman the Elder, p. 182; Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors, VII, 85, 181; Copeland (ed.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, II, 198–9; Johnson (ed.), The Letters of Hannah More, p. 42; Whitehall Evening Post, 17–19 July 1770; Orator Hum. For an image that gives a sense of Dunning’s stature, see Francesco Bartolozzi, The Right Hon. John Dunning (1790), which is based upon the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (NPG, D7395). 23 ODNB entry for Wedderburn; Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors, VII, 375–6, 382, 401; Bonnell (ed.), James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, III, 2;

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Macklin, Love a la Mode, pp. 6, 13; A Scotsman’s Remarks on the Farce of Love a la Mode, pp. 4, 11; Bartley, Teague, Shenkin and Sawney, p. 239. 24 Campbell, Lives of the Lord Chancellors, VII, 338. Matthews (ed.), The Diary of Dudley Ryder, provides one summary of the stereotype from early in the century: ‘They seem to be men very fit for business, intriguing, cunning, tricking sort of men that have not much honour or conscience’ (p. 88). 25 On anti-Scottish prejudice, see Waingrow (ed.), James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, I, 269; Pottle (ed.), Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, p. 71; Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, p. 589; Fitzgerald, The Life and Times of John Wilkes, II, 262. 26 Jodrell, A Widow and No Widow, p. 27. In Bonnell (ed.), James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, III, 63, there is a conversation between Wilkes and Johnson where they joke about Scotland being ‘a land of famine’, which Boswell claims to be a common misconception. 27 Sawny Wetherbeaten. Wedderburn would be a good illustration of White’s claim that ‘above all they were envied for their success’; London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 94. 28 In Gillray, A Democrat – or – Reason and Philosophy, the connection is made explicit with the Francophile MP Charles James Fox dressed as a sansculotte and performing a Highland fling. 29 Churchill, The Rosciad, p. 5, with italics from text. 30 For a survey of the theatrical portrayal of the home nations in the second half of the century, see Bartley, Teague, Shenkin and Sawney, pp. 166–241. 31 BL Add. MS 33218, fo. 3, with underlining from text. 32 For these details on Lessingham, see The Managers: A Comedy, p. 5; Taylor, Records of My Life, pp. 15–18, with quotation from p. 17; The Ring. An Epistle Addressed to Mrs. L------------m, p. 5; BDA (1984), IX, 251–4. 33 St. James’s Chronicle, 6–9 August 1768; Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, V, 207–8; Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, p. 54; The Managers: A Comedy, pp. 5–6; Colman (the Elder), A True State of the Differences, pp. 16, 19–21, 26–7; Taylor, Records of My Life, p. 16; FL MS T.a.66, p. 155; The Triumphal Entry of the Red Kings by Wisdom & Justice; Parkes and Merivale, Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, I, 217. 34 ‘John Stott, Esq. against Jane Stott’ in Civilian (pseud.), Trials for Adultery, VI, 16. A sensational account of Lessingham’s career appeared in Westminster Magazine, 1 (1773), 88–9. 35 Taylor, Records of My Life, pp. 15, 18. 36 Colman (the Elder), A True State of the Differences, p. 22; Vanbrugh, The Relapse, p. 56. 37 Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, pp. i, 1–2, 14, 54. 38 The Managers: A Comedy, pp. 8–9. This portrayal was also reinforced in Kenrick (attrib.), An Epistle to G. Colman from W. Kenrick, p. 3; and later in Kirkman, Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, II, 7–8, 16. In the 1779

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publication Coalition, a Farce, such tyranny is lazily transferred to Harris as ‘Harrass’ (p. 16) in a portrayal that failed to resonate. 39 Harris, A Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, pp. v–vi. 40 FL MS T.a.66, pp. 164–5, 205; BL Add. MS 33218, fo. 5 (v.). 41 For this last portrayal, see The Managers: A Comedy, p. 6. It seems that Harris’s ignorance of theatrical matters was spread around town by Colman’s men, as claimed in FL MS T.a.66, p. 204. Page’s belief in George Colman the Elder – that Harris needed Colman to ‘initiate’ him ‘gradually … into the ways of the theatre’ (p. 145) – shows how this portrayal has endured. 42 The depositions in favour of Colman recorded in FL MS T.a.66; direct reference to pp. 149, 150–1, 154. 43 Whitehall Evening Post, 17–19 July 1770. 44 See ODNB; BDA (1982), VIII, 34–6; Candid and Impartial Strictures on the Performers Belonging to Drury-Lane, Covent-Garden, p. 56. 45 FL MS T.a.66, pp. 145–6. 46 Hearings at Chancery opened with the plaintiff’s senior counsel stating their case while having a knowledge of the depositions for both parties; see Bohun, The Practising Attorney, pp. 225, 237. Wedderburn’s opening address is reconstructed from the notes of Harris’s counsel in BL Add. MS 33218, fos 1 (v.), 2, 2 (v.), 3, 3 (v.), 4, 9; and Bingley’s Journal, 28 July 1770. 47 In the period, the term ‘a wit’ was understood to signify ‘a person of great mental ability; a learned, clever, or intellectual person; a man of talent or intellect’, OED. 48 BDA (1975), III, 419; Colman (the Younger), Random Records, II, 287. The intensity of Colman’s character, and his susceptibility to anger when frustrated, is also vividly portrayed by his son (I, 260). 49 Details and quotations from: FL MS T.a.66, pp. 205–6, 208, 218–20; NA C24/1781 (Hilary term, 1770), fos 21, 22, 25; NA C24/1784 (Easter term, 1770), fo. 5; ODNB. Macklin’s admiration for Harris is expressed in Kirkman, Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, II, 16. 50 Cook, Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Comedian, p. 271, with italics from the text. Appleton in Charles Macklin: An Actor’s Life adds that Macklin offered to help Harris by collecting depositions for the trial (p. 146). 51 [Holcroft and Hazlitt], Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, I, 186. 52 Taylor, Records of My Life, p. 250; [Holcroft and Hazlitt], Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, I, 187; Pasquin (pseud.), Poems by Anthony Pasquin, II, 127; Appleton, Charles Macklin: An Actor’s Life, pp. 30, 32–3. 53 Macklin was in London when the case was heard – and the London Evening Post, 21–24 July 1770, notes that when Dunning ridiculed the testimony offered by his opponents, he made an attack upon Macklin and ‘in the instant of his sarcasms on that gentleman, begged his pardon the next moment’. It is also worthwhile to remember Macklin’s eagerness to appear in the courtroom; he had conducted an action himself in court and would do so again in 1775.

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54 FL MS T.a.66, pp. 57–8; BL Add. MS 33218, fo. 47. 55 BL Add. MS 33218, fo. 9. 56 Macklin’s substantial testimony (listed as ‘addit.l Interrys’) forms the climax of the trial’s depositions as recorded in FL MS T.a.66, pp. 200 ff. 57 Quotation from BDA (1984), X, 18. 58 Pasquin (pseud.), Poems by Anthony Pasquin, II, 128. 59 Cook, Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Comedian, p. 272; Kirkman, Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin, II, 256. 60 For the details of Macklin’s testimony, see FL MS T.a.66, pp. 204–14, 221–3; NA C24/1784 (Easter term, 1770), fos 4, 5, 8, 10. 61 Whitehall Evening Post, 17–19 July 1770, with italics from text. 62 Verdict adapted from London Evening Post, 19–21 July 1770; Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, V, 211. 63 NA C24/1784, fo. 6. 64 Verdict from London Evening Post, 19–21 July 1770. 65 Middlesex Journal, 13–16 April 1771. 66 London Evening Post, 9–12 November 1771. 67 Episode adapted from Daily Advertiser, 9 February 1773; Lloyd’s Evening Post, 5–8 February 1773; General Evening Post, 6–9 February 1773; St. James’s Chronicle, 6–9 February 1773. Beyond the initials used in one newspaper report, the only mention of the assailant’s identity appears in Ellis (ed.), The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768–1778. Burney claims that ‘the famous Mr. Penneck’ attacked Colman ‘upon suspecting his having a penchant for a Miss Miller, an actress’, II, 9. This conjecture about Penneck’s motivation is not supported by any other source. 68 The Theatres: A Poetical Dissection, p. 14, with capitals from text. 69 Peakman, Lascivious Bodies, pp. 236–54, presents flagellation literature as one literary trend of the eighteenth century, catering for an audience that enjoyed erotic prints on the same subject. 70 Troide (ed.), The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, I, 144. 71 BDA (1975), III, 413. 72 London Chronicle, 30 Nov–3 Dec 1771; London Evening Post, 3–6 April 1773. 73 London Chronicle, 3–5 March 1774. 74 Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXV, 5; London Chronicle, 1–3 March 1774. 75 Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, IX, 36. 76 BL Add. MS 33218 is a neat copy, but of the proofs for the plaintiffs only. The existence of this manuscript has dominated and skewed twentiethcentury attention to the trial, as illustrated by Page, George Colman the Elder and Tasch, The Dramatic Cobbler. Beyond Chancery records, FL MS T.a.66 holds the only extant record of the depositions given in court for both sides, written as a rough copy. The two versions of the proofs for the plaintiffs are not identical. 77 Craftsman, 4 June 1774.

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78 Middlesex Journal and General Evening Post, 22–24 June 1775; Morning Chronicle, 23 June 1775. As reported in the General Evening Post, 3–5 June 1777, Harris returned to the royal court two years later. 79 George Colman (the Younger) to Col. McMahon, 3 October 1811, reproduced in Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770–1812, VIII, 156.

3

‘Plausible’ Jack and the Royalty adventurers

Enter the East End It was a brave soul who wandered east past Houndsditch and the Minories, the arc of roads that terminated at Tower Hill and marked the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of the East End darkness. Houndsditch was the boundary of civilization for the city, following the course of an ancient ditch outside of the London Wall that had festered with waste and dead dogs in time immemorial. In the psyche of those Georgians who rode not walked, it still divided the mannerly from the monstrous – avoided by all who respected their characters or their clothes. It was not just the discomfort and nausea that they avoided, caused by leaving paved, brightly-lit streets behind to plunge into the squalor of poverty with only the flicker of an occasional torch as a navigation point across the confusion of mud. For those who had the stomach to negotiate the crazy lanes – which melded the swell of mud with greasy effluent from tanneries, chandlers and saltpetre works – there was always the menace of taking a wrong turn.1 The appearance of the Ratcliffe Highway murderer was years in the future, the Ripper of Whitechapel even more so. However, the reputation of the distant and dangerous East preceded them both. Bars and locks with deadbolts gave some reassurance to those living near the Thames as the ships disgorged its sailors and lumpers. Every man, who had a wife or daughter to keep safe, needed to secure all of his windows and doors before dark.2 Little had changed since Ned Ward witnessed how a life of captivity at sea created monsters ‘who had little more to show they were Men, than that they Walk’d upright’. With a leer of fascination, he had watched how a woman could not walk past them ‘but they fell to Sucking her Lips, like so many Horse-Leaches; and were ready to Ride her in the open Street’. After years of discipline under the lash, these streets gave them a taste of freedom. They roamed around Tower Hill in gangs, looking for the release offered by violence. With the impatience of a frustrated will, they carried cudgels for the satisfaction of hitting

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something, anything, within reach.3 If the brothels and taverns failed to satisfy them, they could grab at other violent pleasures safe in the knowledge that the next ship waited, with a destination which might be the West Indies, or Greenland, or anywhere in between. Those dwelling on the north side of the Thames scavenged what they could from these men who washed in and out with the tide and a pocketful of pay. Around Tower Hamlets, there seemed to be a liquor shop or tavern at every turn, with one moralizer having the statistics to show that it was the worst area in the whole of London for those haunts of ‘vagrants, thieves, and every class of criminal’. As a night-time hole for housebreakers, footpads, weary prostitutes and drunks wandering abroad, each tavern offered more than gin. Inside was the promise of darker forms of entertainment than could be found in the sterile squares of the polite west, and most of them were ways of fleecing cullies and gulls. To seek pleasure was one thing; but when this pursuit threw together crews from different nations – each one an incomprehensible challenge to the other – there was always the expectation of violence that flickered and erupted in the dismal lanes.4 There was a singular disturbance in Wellclose Square, just off Leman Street, on the Boxing Day of 1785. Into the murkiness of that late afternoon marched John Palmer, the light glinting from the silver ornamental braids of his Freemason’s livery and the golden symbols of the square and the compass upon his breast. The Drury Lane actor, known as ‘Plausible Jack’, was not alone. Along with him came a full procession in the regalia belonging to the Duke of Cumberland’s Lodge. Flashes of illumination came from a large gold compass, an inscription plate and a polished brass circumferentor held aloft. At the head of this column were bricklayers, carpenters and labourers who observed the solemnity of the rite by carrying their crowbars in military fashion. Following the ceremonial stride of the company were magistrates, constables, headboroughs and the local beadle, to give the group an official appearance and to give a warning against any interference. Even a full band of musicians came to add to the sense of occasion. Reaching the chosen ground, Palmer laid a block of stone and his son deposited a white flint bottle beneath it, for posterity. It contained a copy of the speech which was to be read by John Morgan, the Recorder of Maidstone, whose magisterial voice was to approve of the affair despite having no jurisdiction in the Hamlets. In the bright uniform of the Freemason, he read Palmer’s words aloud: The First Stone of a Building, Intended for a Place of Public Entertainment, was laid by John Palmer, comedian, In the presence of a numerous Party

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of Friends to the Undertaking … The Ground selected for the Purpose Being situated within the Liberty of the Tower of London. It has been resolved, that in honour of the Magistrates, the Military Officers, and inhabitants of the said fortress and palace, the edifice when erected shall be called The Royalty Theatre. Sanctioned by authority, and liberally patronized by subscription. It will be the constant effort of the manager of this Theatre to exclude every thing indecorous; and encourage every thing laudable on his boards. To render the mimic art subservient to rational amusement, that time unemployed may not be misspent; and by exhibiting the amiability of virtue, to allure the spectators of the Drama to the practice of it as the only means of promoting private, social, and public happiness. Devoted to such purposes only, may the Royalty Theatre Meet with public encouragement!

Then the crowd cheered and applauded, the band played and the procession retired to the Coal-Exchange tavern for dinner.5 Reading about the event in the newspapers the next day, it would have been difficult for Londoners to know exactly what Plausible Jack was up to. He was a real-life comic character who would tell you a barefaced lie with the perfect timing of an expertly delivered joke, one to be laughed at and forgiven. Years earlier, Sheridan had based ‘the downright acted villainy’ of Joseph Surface upon him, a pantomime villain before the role was even thought of. Coming from ‘the regions of pure comedy’, and becoming one of Drury’s attractions under Sheridan’s management, Palmer seemed to have no conscience; but it was of no consequence. His audacious fictions were often completely transparent – such as pretending that his ridiculously young mistress was his daughter in order to warn off others as the protective father – and all the more loveable because of it. With his nickname taken from a character in Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer, Plausible Jack was famous for being implausible. He was willing to be the walking joke of the age – the man who tries to assume the elegance of the aristocrat, with a measured step and elaborate grace, but does not get it quite right. The lord was a ‘leaden shilling’, to use Wycherley’s words. The son of a bill-sticker in Drury Lane, Palmer was ‘constantly acting the man of superior accomplishments’ and it was never quite believable. Charles Lamb would lovingly remember him as the gentleman with the slight infusion of the footman, both on- and off-stage. The whole idea of Palmer as the impresario of Tower Hamlets would have been a deliciously droll one. The man, who had made the study of refinement his life’s work, nimbly treading through dirty Rosemary Lane to visit its low traffickers before bowing gracefully to the savages of Saltpetre Bank in the attempt to civilize and cultivate them. Was his appearance in the East End that day merely another jest, or a wager that meant something to a select few? After all, some people would bet upon anything, such as the time it would

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take a naked man to run around St James’s Park with his hand serving as a fig leaf. Perhaps Palmer’s masquerading as a grandee of Freemasonry, to announce a new theatre in such a forsaken part of London, was so outlandish as to make sense only as such a ruse?6 Had those readers put down their newspapers and unfolded John Rocque’s map to find the location of Wellclose Square, it would have intrigued them even more. By taking Cable Street and a right turn into Leman Street, the Square was only a short distance from an immortal spot. It was now home to a collection of haphazard brick buildings, seemingly put together without purpose or design, and disfigured by decades of misuse as a warehouse. But those buildings had once been Goodman’s Fields theatre. Its name could still fill Londoners with awe and reverential wonder. The fact that many of them were too young to have attended on that night, in October 1741, simply added to its mystique as the theatre where David Garrick was seen by the world for the first time. It was the place where Garrick had risen – the best actor who had ever been, Palmer would say. Garrick’s fame was the guide that Palmer had followed to navigate London, and which had led him to the Square – if it was possible that Plausible Jack could have been so idealistic. His admiration was shared by many of the Royalty troupe. Palmer’s companion, Charles Bannister, attended a club called the School of Garrick whose members could all proudly boast that they had acted with him. The Royalty’s artist, William Capon, would paint scenery in the buildings of the old Goodman’s theatre while pausing to preserve the fresco on its ceiling in a series of sketches. But, for Palmer alone, this place also reminded him of personal doubts that might be purged by the Royalty’s success. In his early attempts to become an actor, he had repeatedly auditioned for Garrick at Drury Lane, only to be met with no encouragement and no affirmation. In one account, Palmer remembered the crushing verdict from the oracle that his ‘voice was bad’ and his figure ‘worse’. In presenting himself as the second coming of the spirit of Goodman’s Fields, Palmer seemed to have a personal point to make, a way of laying the past to rest. His appropriation of the legend of Goodman’s Fields would reveal itself in the architectural modesty of the Royalty with its anonymous front that failed to advertise the spectacles within. It would be shown by Palmer’s plan to stage Garrick’s farce – Miss in Her Teens – on the opening night, along with his determination to give nightly eulogies to the great man.7 However, Goodman’s Fields had an association with something greater than one man; it had been the location of the last stand against the patent theatres – a stand that had ended after the first minister, Robert Walpole, acted against it.8 For Harris, the choice of the Royalty’s location did not bode well. But was Palmer really about to defy the two big theatres?

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To have places of public entertainment besides Covent Garden and Drury Lane was nothing new. There was Sadler’s Wells theatre near Pentonville, just off the Islington Road; Astley’s Amphitheatre on Westminster Bridge Road in Lambeth; and the upstart Royal Circus, across from Astley’s. These warily kept their distance as outposts of the city, and fought shy of competing with Harris. The patrons of the Garden who came to see actors perform Shakespeare, Dryden and Otway were unlikely to suffer the ordeal of being jolted for miles through the patience-sapping mire just to view horsemanship in Astley’s drafty wooden hut; or to see pugilism, dancing dogs or pantomimes at one of the others. The only serious contender was Sadler’s Wells when it evaded the law with its burlettas where stories were told through songs and mute action.9 But Sadler’s was only a seasonal treat beginning every Easter Monday when Londoners could breathe the fresh spring air along countryside lanes before the singing, tightrope dancing and acrobatic surprises. Harris and Sheridan might bemoan their lot, and complain that London’s apprentices searched far and wide for novelty.10 But in the heart of London and the no man’s land surrounding it – neither city nor country – the spoken word belonged to them. Palmer’s words at the laying of the first stone only hinted at his intentions. On that December day, the battle lines were not drawn along with the outline of the building sketched out in the dirt. Instead, the commemorative speech engaged in sleight of hand that gave a glimpse of the truth, a ploy that would be followed until the opening of the Royalty in the summer of 1787. In true ‘Plausible Jack’ style, however, he gave away a little too much by pointing everyone’s attention to the theatre’s place ‘within the Liberty of the Tower of London’ and by dedicating the venue to its inhabitants. Given Palmer’s reputation, Harris should have been inquisitive about the position taken by the Lord Lieutenant Governor of the Tower. Plausible Jack, it seems, had suggested to the Lord Lieutenant that he exercised a supreme power within his jurisdiction, an idea which the Lord found agreeable. Palmer also persuaded investors that the streets ruled by the Tower of London formed a separate republic, a world apart from the rest of the city. And with the consent of the Lord Lieutenant, the Royalty scheme was set in motion.11 Palmer had claimed that the Royalty was ‘sanctioned by authority’. But he was trying to dismiss the immovable law with a graceful wave of the hand. The patent privilege now owned by Harris had been established over a century earlier by Charles II as a reward for two courtiers, Davenant and Killigrew, who each wanted to set up their own acting company. Through successive quirks of fate, both patents had finally found the same home – and both had been inherited by Harris upon

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taking control of the Garden, despite only needing one.12 Becoming venerable and unassailable with the passage of time, the patents were bolstered by successive acts of Parliament. So that, as Mr Anstruther would point out in Parliament, the King himself could not have presumed to do what Plausible Jack intended.13 Under the current law, should the King have acted in a play ‘for hire, gain or reward’ without the sanction of Harris’s patents, he would have been ‘deemed to be a rogue and a vagabond’ and fined fifty pounds for each offence – or spent weeks in a Newgate cell if unable to pay.14 No amount of Freemason finery, with its claim to aristocratic patronage, could change that. Neither could a licence from the magistrates similar to those held by Sadler’s Wells and Astley’s Amphitheatre. On that December day, Palmer had anticipated some of the other accusations that would return time and again like the customers to the liquor shops in Well Street. Moralizers held firm to the belief that playhouses like Palmer’s brought taverns, disorderly houses and sharpers along with them. They imagined it as a sluice for all of the ‘depravity’ of ‘the most fearful neighbourhood in London’. As one advocate of the Royalty wryly observed, ‘one would imagine, from the objections, that the morals of the neighbourhood were of the purest order’. These people needed a missionary and Plausible Jack announced himself as the master of a new college of virtue where time could never be misspent. It was a courteous riposte to the view that the Thames poor should only know profitable toil, whether through making saltpetre, twisting hemp in the rope walks or loading ships. It was a way to appease those who feared their seduction away from the productive work that helped the Navy to dominate the globe.15 But Palmer’s speech revealed whose support he was really courting – and it was not that of the moralizers or the East India Company. Like all popular revolutions, this theatrical one would depend upon the will of the public, ‘the people of that part of the town’ who were ‘under the necessity of long walks on winter nights, through dirty streets and lanes of pickpockets, to benefit by the morality of Shakespeare’. Palmer’s call was to Spitalfields, Bethnal Green and Wapping. And his campaign would be waged by the muck-raking scandal sheets of the World against the moral loftiness of the St. James’s Chronicle and the Whitehall Evening Post financed by the government.16 Still, he was not made welcome by everyone in that part of London. With life around the Square a kind of steady chaos, it was feared that the Royalty might cause a tipping point by attracting every whore, bully, highwayman and thief east of Holborn.17 As handbills appeared everywhere announcing the opening night, 20 June 1787, residents around Wellclose Square came together, driven and fearful. Had they

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known the identity of Palmer’s business partner, they would have been even more alarmed. Undisclosed to the public, his name did not appear on official documents when it was dispensable or when it might have been seen by someone other than Palmer and himself.18 He was the Reverend William Jackson, known as Dr Viper. He had been last seen in the clutches of a demon about to be cast into the flames of hell, according to one satirical print. Invincible against damnation and public humiliation, he had resurfaced in Bloomsbury at the Buffalo tavern. Palmer had known all about him a decade before, imitating him in a play at the Haymarket, even down to his baroque style with black frogs embroidered into his coat. Jackson was a gift to the mimic with ‘a pleasing softness’ that ‘hung upon his tongue’ and a smile ever at his command ‘which he admirably suited to the men he had to deal with’. Perhaps it was the persuasive arts of a man who ‘loved his bottle and his friend’ that had charmed Palmer and led him into a partnership with someone ‘on whom no reasoning being, acquainted with the town, could have been supposed to rely’. Londoners’ belief that Jackson was without a conscience would be confirmed by his end in 1795. In Dublin’s Court of King’s Bench, he would be convicted of leading a conspiracy to enable the French to invade Ireland. Secret Service agents, sent to observe the trial, would have the satisfaction of witnessing the physical collapse of Jackson in the dock before the sentencing for high treason. His death from the poison corrosive sublimate would be reported as a suicide, but not lamented. But before all of this, he was sharpening his skill by practising on Palmer, ‘the dupe of the Viper’.19 In response to the rising sense of alarm, Justice John Staples went to the King’s Arms tavern to hear the residents of Tower Hamlets. In the meeting that followed, they begged him to use his ‘utmost Endeavours, by every legal means, to prevent all unlawful Exhibitions and performances’ at the Royalty.20 But there was no need. Staples was already in someone’s pay, someone who pulled the strings of the law. And with Harris singled out by Palmer as the most active opponent of the Royalty, this was the only likely explanation for the Justice’s arrival. In time, Palmer’s suspicions would focus upon Harris as the strategist who instructed Staples on how to conduct himself ‘to suppress and ultimately ruin’ the Royalty. It would be Harris who encouraged informers, and had the information ‘ready cut and dried’. It would be Harris who procured a house for Staples from where he could deploy spies.21 No stranger to the advantages of obscurity, Staples had taken a shop in nearby Rosemary Lane. This thoroughfare came alive with the anarchy of the Rag Fair every day from two o’clock in the afternoon until darkness descended. It was where the down-at-heel could buy a

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suit of clothes for fourteen pence, or dip into a sack for an old wig at a penny a dip. Whereas constables and magistrates had wanted to close this illegal, messy gathering for decades, Staples chose to hide among its activity. It promised him the opportunity to disappear in an unlikely place, amid the flurry of traders in old shreds and patches; ‘the very Scum of the Kingdom in a Body’, as Ned Ward had claimed. To issue his warrants against the performers, Staples hid behind the mass of oily and rotten coats, breeches, gowns and petticoats piled up along the length of the street and hung from every eave. Remaining inside his shop, he spoke of the ‘waggrants’ and ‘waggabonds’ infesting the city and directed his runners, including Fletcher who normally plied his trade as a thief-catcher. The World would claim that the authority of Staples was just as dubious – the man from nowhere who presented himself in Tower Hamlets as one of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace. After being identified as the enemy of the Royalty, this newspaper would mock him as ‘the essence and the quintessence of law’ whose whole knowledge came from The Attorney’s Pocket Companion. But he would sorely test Palmer’s motto Vincit qui patitur – he conquers who endures – chosen to adorn the proscenium arch.22 A time of the novel By four o’clock, every adjoining street – every lane, avenue and alley – had ground to a halt. They came in tim-whiskys, buggies, curricles and carts from Bow, Mile End, Wapping and Blackwell; while West End carriages entered the struggle at Charing Cross. Curiosity had urged them to force their way through the tight, crowded streets in their hurry to see the capital’s latest sensation. The archaic roads, however, were unable to cope and belonged in an earlier time, not in Palmer’s city of novelty. Lines of carriages trailed all the way back to Wren’s arch at Temple Bar as travellers saw no more than the top of the playhouse in perspective. The hacks of the World watched this rage for the Royalty and described the mishaps of those unfamiliar with the streets around Wellclose Square. One Amazonian lady who ‘resolved to mob it, and to see the thing at all events’ was forced to grapple with various men in Whitechapel before being claimed by the ooze of the thoroughfare. Many others became immobile victims, trapped by the mud. Six aldermen got no further than the pump at Aldgate where they became stuck and were carried away, carriage and all. One gentleman, who had set out early in the morning, had the reins of his horses cut to pieces and his own head broken, ‘the only parts of the entertainment he saw or felt’.23

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Some fared better. Their enthusiasm which had been held up, knocked and cuffed was eventually vented upon the doors of the theatre. As the doors were forced open, others climbed in through the windows and all distinction of people and places was lost. They were rewarded with the dazzle of a brilliant white interior, illuminated with gold leaf and glass chandeliers. In the hunt for a seat, those with modest ambitions would have the greatest chance of success. A long climb led to two vast galleries, the highest blessed with a ceiling of clouds that gave the semicircular sweep of benches the illusion of being limitless under a favouring sky. Both of these galleries dwarfed the pit and the few small boxes below, even without looking down at them from such a giddy height. Palmer had designed his theatre with the pockets and the pleasure of the local people in mind. From these galleries, they were truly the gods of the stage, enjoying a clear view of every part, even from the last seat, without having to stoop or contort their bodies. While they gazed around, the sight of any woman in the audience attracted attention after such a competition of muscular strength. It was only possible to speculate whether any of the informers of Justice Staples had managed to get in: ‘one of those valuable secrets which time alone can disclose’, the World claimed the next day.24 Those fortunate enough to have squeezed in would witness Palmer’s defiant challenge to Harris. The evening’s entertainment was As You Like It, followed by Miss in Her Teens. This not only played to the strengths of the troupe, with Palmer able to display his fine movements as the strutting Captain Flash. It also proclaimed that the Royalty was part of the Establishment with Palmer the heir to a tradition stretching all the way back to Shakespeare. That night, the new pretender dressed himself in the robes of State, and then decided to bare all in a speech that he had prepared for the end.25 Appearing as the master of ceremonies after the curtain had fallen, Palmer begged to trouble his well-wishers with ‘the peculiar circumstances’ of his situation. He then launched into a tirade, denouncing Harris and the others who held a stake in the theatres of the West End. They made ‘no kind of objection’, he claimed, until ‘a large expense had been incurred, and this house was completely ready for opening’. Then, Palmer continued, ‘they published extracts from different Acts of Parliament, along with their resolution to put them in force’. He even claimed to have been served with a notice – while exhibiting the offensive piece of paper – to inform him of their intention to prosecute any actor appearing in any play at any unlicensed theatre, contrary to the statutes. For the benefit of those slyly taking notes, he then promised to give that night’s profits to the London Hospital. It was a last-ditch way of

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evading the law, while standing for disinterested goodness against the dirty idea of profit at Covent Garden. He hoped that they would ‘neither deem benevolence a misdemeanor, nor send us, for an act of charity, to hard labour in the House of Correction’. In a closing flourish of humility with a burdened heart, one that Joseph Surface would have been proud of, Palmer became choked with emotion: ‘I forbear to enlarge upon [the] subject: my heart is too full – I have not words to express my feelings. I shall be ever devoted to your service. Until it is announced, that this house shall be again opened with a species of entertainment not subjecting me to danger, I humbly take my leave.’26 With that, the theatre was closed – for good, it seemed. It was to become an expensive folly of £18,000, surrounded by the slums.27 Two days later, the London newspapers were a cause of further humiliation. Along with Palmer’s advertisement requesting Royalty shareholders to attend a meeting ‘on business of consequence’ that ‘will not admit interruption’, there appeared a letter from Harris to John Quick.28 Quick – the original Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer and Bob Acres in The Rivals – was relied upon by Harris whenever he needed a country booby or a ‘crusty old guardian in a brown suit and a bob wig’.29 As the foolproof comic who could slot in anywhere and support the star turn, his absence would often leave Harris scrambling. In panic, he once wrote, ‘If you knew half the plagues & trouble occasion’d by your absence, in settling the business for the next fortnight – I am sure you would leave your present foolish pursuits & join us in the ensuing Week.’30 Having been born and raised in Whitechapel, Quick knew how to mimic its rough edges for comic effect. With the potential to be a perfect foil for Palmer’s stage politeness, he had been approached as someone with a sentimental attachment to the East End who might be interested in appearing at the Royalty. But now that Palmer’s scheme was stillborn, Quick declared his loyalty to Harris in the press. At Quick’s request, the Public Advertiser and others printed Harris’s letter to him which revealed that the Garden’s manager had always opposed the Royalty. It was a way of refuting Palmer’s claim that the underhanded Harris had first turned a blind eye, and then condemned the enterprise when at the point of no return: Bristol Wells, Sunday 22d April. My dear Quick Your obliging and very friendly letter ought not to have been accompanied with any apology. … And now for your Wellclose Square Theatre. I am a good deal concerned to perceive, you are become a real warm partizan of it, by this time. I suppose you all confess (for it must always have been known),

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that nothing but an Act of Parliament can legalize its opening. Will you, one of the heads of a profession in itself as liberal as that of law, physic, or any other, degrade, vagabondize and, as far as you are able, ruin all Theatrical property, and in most certain consequence all its dependants? Such must be our inevitable fate, when unprotected by legal monopoly, and Royal and Parliamentary sanction. … I feel it would be disingenuous not to confess to you, that my absolute inactivity arises from a conviction, that an attempt so palpably in the face of all legal authority can not succeed. You say ‘it is talked of from Temple-bar to Woolwich, and is the prevailing topic’. I don’t doubt it, but don’t let that deceive you. … If even no one Magistrate should be enough actuated by duty to stand forward in the support of the law, yet the whole scheme is always at the mercy of any single individual who thinks himself illtreated by the property – and pray tell me, how long will such a foundation carry a theatre? I have written so much to you, because I esteem you, and see you are falling in error; but of this I shall be happy to convince you when we meet, – till when, and always, I am, your’s, Tho. Harris.31

Was it Harris who had really contrived the appearance of this letter in  the news? Palmer thought so.32 It neatly defended the integrity of the Garden’s manager against the charge of ‘duplicity’, without Harris having to admit the need to clear his name. In a glimpse of the future, Harris broadcast his message far and wide without being caught as the messenger. It was a way to avoid addressing the public when there was the danger of being seen as a profiteer while denying the people their pleasure, and reducing Palmer and his countless children to beggary. One letter writer advised that ‘if Mr. Harris has common sense, he will not be led into the war of words, that Mr. John Palmer’s sapient counsellors are eager to involve him’.33 Of course, there was no need for Harris to argue when the press was ready to speak for him. Editorials, which followed Quick’s letter, asked whether it was Harris’s responsibility to write to criminals to inform them that they were breaking the law. After posing the question, they concluded with Harris’s magnanimous offer to the Royalty troupe – the free use of the Garden and its wardrobe for any three nights during the summer, if this would afford them any relief. While showing his benign authority as someone who could bestow favours, the gesture might have nudged readers to ask whether he was more sinned against than sinning. Palmer sneered that it was like offering a bottle of champagne to alleviate his misery before shutting the prison door upon him. As for the actors, they saw it as a brazen attempt to shame them, and replied in kind using an advertisement that appeared in most of the London papers. In it, they claimed to be ‘truly sensible

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of his tender regard for the profession, by his several advertisements, proclaiming them rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars’. They ‘unanimously Resolved to return Mr. Harris their sincere and unfeigned Acknowledgements, for his very kind and disinterested Offer, published … in the World, Morning Post, Herald, Gazetteer, &c. offering them the use of his Theatre … “if they had merit sufficient to attract public notice”’. And, after declining ‘the offer so very generously made’, they informed him of ‘the unprecedented noble behaviour of Mr. Palmer’ who had ‘agreed to continue their respective Salaries [for] the season’.34 When Harris wanted the services of one of the Royalty actresses in the following summer, it would take both a generous offer and his most conciliatory manner. In presenting ‘his comp[liments] to Mrs. Wells with his best thanks for her constant attention & exertion for the service of the Theatre during the last season’, he chose to forget about her moonlighting for Palmer.35 These events caught the quickening imagination of James Gillray, before he had found fame as the bête noire of the government with his grotesque and surreal fantasies. His satire made the whole Royalty affair seem farcical and laughable (Figure 9). In a mock-epic battle, Palmer is shot down from his miniature tower by someone who resembles

FIGURE 9  James Gillray, The Theatrical War (1787). Is there a rare appearance by Harris? (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

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Harris in the pose of a duellist. As if to prompt Londoners to identify the Garden’s manager, his henchman steps upon a wash-tub from the theatre’s wardrobe in the attempt to hurl a bar of Castille soap in Palmer’s direction.36 While using the soap as a missile, he absurdly shouts ‘I am a Gentleman, you Vagabond’. It was meant to encourage Londoners to view the law as an object of ridicule while it supported such a distinction. For Gillray, who had experienced life as a wandering player, the whole situation may have touched a nerve.37 His sentiment chimed with Palmer’s sense of the inane injustice of being treated like a criminal just because Harris had two patents that came from the King’s jesters.38 Without such protection, Palmer had no legal right to work as an actor in London. If he took the risk, he became a vagrant and a beggar in the eyes of the law, someone to be whipped or jailed – one of those masterless men only fit to be abused and kicked through the streets, always vulnerable to its whims and violence.39 The injustice must have made Harris’s letter sting like an outrageous insult, with its claim that acting was a profession suitable for a person of noble birth like law or medicine. Palmer’s situation inspired a new crusade which would have been a noble and idealistic one had it not come from the ruins of his moneygrubbing venture. He tried to speak out against a society which stigmatized his brethren. He demanded public dignity for actors along with the freedom to work without the dangers of abuse and imprisonment. It would eventually compel Palmer and Bannister to turn their backs upon their usual employer, Drury Lane theatre, and to forfeit their regular salaries.40 Their failure to change society would mean the death of theatre, or so Gillray prophesied. As the bodies of Comedy and Tragedy float lifelessly in the foreground of his image, Astley welcomes everyone to his circus to see the feats of General Jacko – the rope-dancing monkey – and the intellectual brilliance of the Learned Pig. Their motto ‘we shall all play’ takes the Royalty’s ideal of equality and turns it into the nightmarish prospect of men reduced to mere performing animals. However, in the view of one writer for the St. James’s Chronicle, the demands of the Royalty adventurers attacked more than people’s prejudices against actors. They threatened the two foundation stones of British society – the royal prerogative and the idea of property.41 After all, the Garden was the King’s chosen theatre, a symbol in stone of his ability to confer the honour. It mattered little that the patents held by Harris were relics of a bygone age when the monarch could grant monopoly rights on the creation and sale of everything, even on the power to fine someone for swearing. Right down to the pins and buttons of trade, everything had been covered with 700 patents by 1621.42 But it was

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also true that Harris was not the last survivor of the patent world. The East India Company still held sway over the lands and waters east of the Cape of Good Hope with the consent of the Crown and Parliament. But the mystique of royal power belonging to Harris’s patents had long been rubbed away as they had passed, like used banknotes, through a long succession of hands before reaching him. Still, success for Palmer would create a dangerous precedent, and not simply regarding ‘the Sacredness of Monopolies and Charters’ as claimed by the Chronicle. The inviolable right to one’s goods and wealth was what Palmer sought to sabotage. If ‘freedom’ was the most prized idea for John Bull, then surely ‘property’ was the most coveted. Thieves ran the risk of the death penalty for goods worth little more than twelve pence. In this ‘bloody code’, the number of capital crimes rose to over 200 by the end of the century with many of them intended to protect ownership. Harris had paid handsomely for his share of the patents; whether he used his own money or not was irrelevant. Nevertheless, he was discovering that the ownership of the patents brought limitations, leaving him feeling defeated. His power as the theatrical master of London had become restricted by certain obligations over which the patents had no influence. Despite owning a spare, dormant patent, his life’s ambition – to establish a new theatrical venue in London alongside the Garden – had been continually frustrated. It was exactly what Palmer had the audacity to attempt, albeit without the grandeur. The Royalty scheme must have aggravated an old grievance for Harris, stirring indignation while realizing his fears of a competitor.43 Harris aspired to redesign the cultural landscape through creating a new entertainment complex to dominate the metropolis. It showed an awareness of the money-making potential of the capital’s alternative delights – its gambling dens, ballrooms for masquerades, and pleasure gardens with their secretive retreats, all of which seduced the idle and the curious to spend their shillings and guineas. During Harris’s time at the Garden, London had been captivated by the dazzling shows of James Cox’s automata where bejewelled clockwork machines came alive, as well as by James Graham’s Temple of Hymen with its ‘celestial bed’ for hedonistic couples hoping to reach new heights in sexual ecstasy. Both had burst into the consciousness of Londoners before becoming starved of attention. The key to success, it seemed, was variety and a constant supply of novelties. With that in mind, Harris hoped to redraw the map of London pleasure with a site to cater for every aristocratic taste and vice. As details were picked up by the press, it seemed as if Harris’s imagination played upon all possibilities. Beside the quiet road to Knightsbridge, in what one newspaper claimed was a forty-acre site,

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he imagined a temple to high life. There was to be a grand assembly hall with its own orchestra leading to a superb suite of rooms for balls, masquerades and ridottos. This labyrinth would transport everyone to the social whirl of Bath while catering for the privacy of select coteries, whether for tea or supper or secretive parties where country estates could be lost on the turn of a card. This sanctuary was to be set within illuminated pleasure gardens where everyone might indulge in tricks of the fancy. Vauxhall and Ranelagh would be outshone. The centrepiece was to be a third winter theatre for spoken drama – The Prince of Wales’s – only possible through the spare patent held by Harris.44 Unlike Palmer who had set his sights squarely on the riverside masses, packing them in with cheap tickets, Harris saw profit in exclusivity. With the exception of the opera house, places of public entertainment in London tried to appeal to everybody who had the entrance fee. One of the fantasies sold to them was that anyone might become refined and genteel should they visit such modish amusements, or enjoy such tasteful pleasures. When visiting these places, where everyone from the royal family to apprentices and servants would attend, part of the attraction for many was the seductive promise of being able to rub shoulders with the beau monde.45 While it suited highborn rakes who liked to slum it, this invitation to all inevitably brought problems. After touring Vauxhall Gardens in 1712, the voice of the Spectator claimed that ‘he should be a better Customer … if there were more Nightingales, and fewer Strumpets’. More recently, Vauxhall had come to represent the villainy of being open to everyone, strumpets included. By the mid-1770s, it had its own lock-up in an effort to control the pickpockets, the violence and those who liked to riot on the closing night of the season.46 In contrast, Harris took his lead from Mrs Cornelys, historically known as one of Casanova’s former lovers and a hostess for hire. Her ‘fairy palace’ at Carlisle House was open to her ‘protectors’ and closed to the general public. Through refusing orders, and pricing her subscription tickets at three guineas each (available only from her office in Soho Square), she sought to restrict admission. These tickets allowed them to enter her ornamental ‘Desert’ that promised limitless space, and privacy for the intrigues of masqueraders. By 1778, just after Harris’s plan had become known around the theatres, Cornelys had briefly relocated to the ‘White House’ near Vauxhall. Its subscribers could escape from the pleasure garden rabble to where, according to one advert, ‘none are to be admitted but subscribers, who must be people of rank and fortune’.47 Harris was similarly attuned to the spirit of the times as expressed by the feelings of the social elite. He saw a commercial opportunity as the nobility retreated to private clubs where people could be excluded

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who were not familiars and where alliances between families could be strictly controlled.48 With the plan in its infancy, he first took control of the opera house, called the King’s theatre, in the Haymarket. In partnership with Sheridan – which kept his competitor close – he planned to capitalize upon this aristocratic haven with its private boxes, subscription culture and cliques.49 With its modest brick facade that presented an indifferent face to the street and told the passer-by that there was nothing of interest for him, the handbills above its archways hinted at the lavish assemblies inside. Its prices also discouraged certain people from attending, with a first gallery place costing as much as the most expensive public seating at the Garden in the 1770s. Through late-night entertainments at a ‘superior price’, Harris sought the rewards of even greater exclusivity than the opera house had offered before. And by introducing plays on certain nights, he wished to attract those ‘higher class of People who on account of many inconveniences seldom frequent the Theatres’.50 And in a bold move, it was reported that ‘as Theatrical Entertainments … have been the Amusement of the Great, the young Nobility of both Sexes will join in the Exhibition, sometimes by themselves, and sometimes in Concert with one or two of the Performers’.51 Strutting the boards had always delighted those rakish peacocks like Richard ‘Hellgate’ Barry, the seventh earl of Barrymore. But for Harris’s enterprise to attract more than the odd eccentric or libertine throwback would require a space sealed from the outside world, for safety’s sake. As Jane Austen would recognize in Mansfield Park, such debutantes of the stage who sought ‘a little amusement’ placed themselves in an ‘extremely delicate’ situation. For a daughter to become caught up in the fantasy of a play, and fall into an ‘excessive intimacy’ with anyone undesirable, was one sure way to ruin a family.52 And with the unwanted attention of an audience and publicity, there was also the danger of being seen as an actress – sexually available and promiscuous. Yet the thrill would prove too tempting for some of Austen’s characters. With the collapse of this opera house plan – sunk by bad debt, unrealistic expectations and Sheridan’s growing preoccupation with Westminster politics – Harris received encouragement to become bolder from the architect Henry Holland.53 Holland offered land near Hyde Park Corner, behind Grosvenor Place, for their entertainment palace, somewhere ‘more accommodated to Persons of Rank and Fashion than can now be effected at any other Place of public Entertainment’. To finance the enterprise, shares were offered for sale, both in the Garden and the new venture.54 But one difficulty would continue to deny Harris’s ambition when everything else seemed to be in place. After taking legal advice, it was mooted that the lease for the land beneath Covent Garden

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theatre included an injunction preventing him from using his second patent to show plays at another venue. The clause denied his vision of what was possible. Designed to protect Bedford’s rental income against the prospect of a competitor, the counsel Francis Hargrave could only advise Harris to sue for the Duke’s generosity.55 It merely confirmed his earlier fears of ‘difficulties’ in ‘conveying any right in the patent’; this plan ‘being derogatory to the interests of Covent Garden Theatre’.56 When asked for his opinion about the Knightsbridge project, the King was reported as saying, ‘I understand Mr. Harris means to open it by virtue of a dormant patent; in which case it is not in my power to oppose the undertaking, was I even inclined to do it.’57 In business, however, there were more important things than the consent of a king. Even Holland’s desperation, in leaving blanks in their agreement for Harris to fill and name his own terms, eventually made no difference.58 The legal impasse remained. Resigned, Harris would later justify his failure, perhaps disingenuously, as a magnanimous act in the face of the economic realities of supply-and-demand London. In a letter to Barlow, he would claim: You must recollect that I had taken some ground, & had obtain’d his Majesty’s consent for the erection of another Theatre, but being convinced that two Theatres, being under one direction must infallibly ruin all the others, I desisted.59

In calling Harris a ‘knave’ and a ‘monopolist’, Palmer’s men only felt their own sense of injustice. However, both wore the same restraints against the trespass of ambition. They were doomed to the same fate, determined by the same factors over which they had insufficient command. Locked into a situation where only two playhouses could exist in London, they discovered that the survival of Covent Garden and Drury Lane had been arranged decades before, along with the controls preventing any addition. Nevertheless, it did not stop Palmer from reopening the Royalty theatre, thirteen days after its closure. With catches and glees, burlettas, pantomimes, and poetry recitals, Palmer offered a cornucopia of entertainment with the determination to open every night during the summer.60 While avoiding spoken drama and the letter of the law, he tried to stay true to the spirit of his original intention – a theatre for the East End. With force and the audience’s help, his actors belted out songs – about ploughing the seas without fear of the unfathomed deep – against the painted majesty of a British man-of-war in full sail.61 If the sons of Neptune, the gods of the night, were in raptures at this view, they were made to feel ‘tremblingly alive’ by another. It was

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enough to redeem Palmer’s promise from that December day, that ‘time unemployed’ would ‘not be misspent’. In the blood-and-thunder Don Juan, Palmer struck terror into the audience’s souls by showing how a life of cruelty led to damnation. ‘Bound in chains’, its villain was placed in the clutches of a horde of demons. Even kneeling before Pluto, with a face riven by fear, was in vain. Hurried away, he was thrown into the flames under a sky of thunder, lightning and fire. There was to be no pity for a wretch devoid of pity himself. The silent, expressive movements of Palmer, who clawed at the air in desperation and writhed in the attempt to escape, were ‘terrific’. It was ‘true sublimity’ – an ‘awful lesson’ that ‘must tend to the improvement of the mind’, insisted the press.62 And if the fires of hell failed to enlighten his audience, the glimmering landscape of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’ may have. The tolling of a bell announced Palmer’s entrance as he moved forward to inspect moonlit gravestones and deliver his verse. This introduction of the beauties of Gray’s verse to the tars, scrubs and lumpers became one of the surprise hits of the year. While the critics admired the ‘intellectual improvement’ of the audience through ‘refined pleasure’, many others around Wellclose Square would have keenly felt the pains of ‘chill penury’ and a ‘destiny obscure’ as described in the poem. The entertainment was a dram of gin for the consolation it offered to the gallery. At its end, the poet considers his own obscurity, and the possibility of being forgotten without ‘some kindred spirit’ to ask about his fate.63 However, no one who had spent an evening at the Royalty would have been unaware of Palmer’s situation. The stage became a platform where he condemned his enemies. Amusements that were seen as pleasing nonsense – such as pantomimes and glees – were refashioned into new forms of deft satire. Anger was turned to imaginative uses, whether in the burletta Apollo Turn’d Stroller where the spiteful Justice is outwitted by a group of ‘strolling vagabonds’, or songs where the law is laughed to scorn.64 A catch for three singers made the point: Be ware of catch-poles, Warrants and dark holes. You’re a vagrant; that’s a fact. Stop, stop, let me look at the act. No; I’m a gentleman. I beg your pardon; You’re only such in Covent-Garden.65

Using mockery, the Royalty rebels defiantly stood their ground inside a theatre of protest. It provided a place where radicals and malcontents could rally as the entertainments found a sharper edge. ‘Go Rose and

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Burn’ took a swipe at George Rose and the Treasury, and became a favourite song to charge the atmosphere.66 It suggested that Palmer knew his enemies. With the passing weeks, attending the Royalty seemed like a way to claim the same rights as those enjoyed by the royal family – the right to command, patronize and enjoy a performance without interference. For what are princes and dukes ‘to ourselves – our noble selves?’ shouted the Public Advertiser in mockery of the World’s editorials.67 While this was a question to enliven many who visited Drury Lane theatre, the Royalty threatened an original kind of danger. It began to challenge the Establishment, both theatrical and political, in a part of London where poverty could lead to desperate acts. Harris had helped to create a new theatrical monster as the idea of theatre beyond the Garden and the Lane, once unthinkable, now took hold. The catch and the glee With shattered health and ruined fortune, Palmer walked the streets around the King’s Bench prison.68 It must have seemed like excessive force as he was seized by as many as fourteen or fifteen runners.69 Taken, he was told to go with them to the Prince of Wales alehouse at the end of St George’s Row. His Worship, Mr Justice Hyde, would see him as soon as he had settled some bagnio licensing business that was before him. Palmer replied that he was already in the custody of the King’s Bench, and that ‘he did not conceive he had done wrong’. The Bench was the debtor’s prison south-west of London Bridge, and first appeared to the sight as a twenty-five-foot brick wall topped with iron spikes. Prisoners like Palmer, who had the potential to earn their way out of debt, were given permission the live within ‘the Rules’. This was a carefully defined area surrounding the Bench, listed street by street, where anyone could be easily located by their creditors – or, like Palmer, by the magistrate.70 He had found work at the nearby Royal Circus. Starring as Henry du Bois in The Bastille, the burletta had caught the popular excitement and seemed unstoppable in that early winter of 1789. Staging plays about the French Revolution was risky, however, at this time of uncertainty about the outcome. The Examiner of Plays had dissuaded the Garden from doing so. But the Royal Circus was not recognized as a playhouse by the authorities, and so was exempt from such coercion.71 The success of The Bastille seemed certain to antagonize the authorities. And Palmer was an old offender for whom they had waited patiently. His fall, from Royalty manager to journeyman actor, had taken a matter of months. Justice Staples had waged his campaign against the East End

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theatre, but he could not take all of the credit. Without plays to perform, Palmer’s ingenuity had become exhausted in trying to invent nights of entertainment from scratch, with one new spectacle after another.72 Even with the creative efforts of Carlo Delpini, an expert pantomimist and master clown, the takings fell short and the tangled finances took a stranglehold. In April 1788, Palmer had hoped to revive the theatre by another grand reopening, ‘provided an unfortunate partnership’ could be ‘dissolved’. The most unfortunate aspect of his partnership with Dr Viper was his partner’s absence. Jackson’s vanishing added to Palmer’s woes when the consent of both men was needed to release money to the mortgagees.73 Adding to these trials, Staples had repeatedly tried to prosecute the players using informers from the backrooms of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. As the scourge of the vagrant, his persistence made the Royalty’s existence seem like a personal affront. He interrogated anyone who had been in a play and spoken without musical accompaniment, and without the excuse of singing or performing a recitative. At least six of the Royalty’s stars had been called before him and either sent to the bridewell or released on bail. Delpini’s crime was saying ‘roast beef’ on stage.74 But where imprisonment was concerned, Palmer had managed to evade Staples’s diligence. It would give rise to the legend of Palmer, the law-breaker who outsmarted the authorities. In one story, his trickery confines the magistrates under lock and key in an upstairs room of a tavern while he slips away. Palmer ‘was to be caught before he could be locked up’, they boasted.75 Now, reaching the alehouse on St George’s Row, his liberty was about to be threatened again. He was the first to arrive in the tap-room, followed by one of the sceneshifters from Drury Lane, the proprietors of the Circus and finally ‘the tremendous Justice Hyde’. Before proceeding to business, Hyde ordered half-a-crown’s worth of brandy and water, and then took a hearty pull from the glass. In the examination that followed, his star witness claimed not to have heard any music while Palmer acted in The Bastille, not even a harpsichord. Hyde was about to write the commitment, as a matter of routine, when Barlow arrived. The treasurer of Covent Garden theatre had ‘happened to pass, by mere accident’, reported the Argus with heavy irony. He had a proposal for Palmer – he could walk free ‘on condition that the Circus shut up that night’. He also had terms for the owners – ‘Don’t perform any more this season, and all is at an end.’ On ‘good authority’ claimed the newspaper, Barlow made no secret that Harris and Sheridan were ‘the joint prosecutors of Palmer’. And at the tavern, there was only one voice of complaint. ‘Will Mr. Sheridan take the means of bread from a man in prison with nine children?’ someone asked.

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‘Let them go to the parish.’ If the Argus is believed, the Circus was closed that night. If one of Astley’s singers is trusted instead, Palmer was committed to the county bridewell in St George’s Fields, across the road from the King’s Bench, and the show continued without him.76 Uncertainty about how Palmer fared did not stop the Argus from confidently predicting the future of theatre in London. To suppress anything heightens its value for the public, claimed the newspaper, which ‘must in time make its fortune for ever’. This belief that censorship led to its own form of revenge would be echoed by later writers who had the benefit of hindsight. In the nineteenth century, Boaden suggested that the Garden had sowed the seeds of its own downfall in victory against the Royalty. It would have been better to wink at an East End playhouse rather than ‘drive it into exhibitions of another nature’, he thought.77 Because they had been denied the right to stage regular drama, the Royalty and others came up with novelties that would inspire the music halls and the blood-tub theatres with their sensational melodramas.78 In doing so, Palmer helped to give birth to the greedy speculators who would crowd around Harris years later. If Harris had allowed the Royalty to compete with him on the same terms, it would have had ‘no prospect of ever becoming a place which even persons of a decent class would frequent’. ‘Curiosity’ might have attracted them for a season, but ‘permanent patronage’ could not have been expected.79 By accepting these views, it is possible to see how Harris made the future in unforeseen ways. His efforts to protect the Garden were his undoing, and perhaps not for the last time. Notes 1 Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, pp. 75–115, gives an overview of the efforts to order, pave and light the streets of the City of London and Westminster. On the fear of entering the East End, and some of the dangers of negotiating its lanes, see World, 22 June 1787; Gazeteer, 7 July 1787. 2 Smith, The Ground of the Theatre, p. 17. 3 Ward, The London Spy, I, 323–4, with italics from text. 4 For an investigation of taverns in this area at the end of the century, see [Colquhoun], Observations and Facts Relative to Public Houses, pp. 7, 19, 27, 32, 44, appendix, with quotation from p. 19. While taking a novelistic approach to the Ratcliffe Highway murders, James and Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree (2010 edition), nonetheless provide some insightful historical details including the effect of the influx of sailors on the area and the racial tensions this caused (pp. 6, 141–2, 168–9). 5 General Evening Post, 27–29 December 1785.

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6 For this portrayal of Palmer, see Park (ed.), Lamb as Critic, pp. 65–6; Deelman, ‘The original cast of The School for Scandal’, p. 258; Roach’s Authentic Memoirs, pp. 29–30; Kelly, Reminiscences, I, 327–9; Taylor, Records of My Life, p. 314; BDA (1987), XI, 172; A Sketch of the Theatrical Life of the Late Mr. John Palmer, pp. 5, 39–40; Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, pp. 31 (with italics from text), 222; Wycherley, The Plain Dealer, p. 14; [Lamb], Elia, pp. 319–20; Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, I, 154–7. 7 William Capon, ‘Theatre Great Alie Street Goodman’s Fields where Garrick first appeared in London’ (pen and watercolour, 1801); William Capon, ‘An Exact Representation of the ceiling over the Pit of the Theatre in Great Alie Street Goodman’s Fields’, FL W.b.481; World, 21 June 1787; Walker’s Hibernian Magazine (December 1787), 647; A Sketch of the Theatrical Life of the Late Mr. John Palmer, pp. 6, 9, 12; BDA (1987), XI, 162; [Royalty theatre elevation and map]. 8 Benedetti, David Garrick and the Birth of Modern Theatre, pp. 30–1. 9 On the beginnings of the burletta at Sadler’s Wells, see Holman, ‘The Sadler’s Wells dialogues of Charles Dibdin’, pp. 155–6. 10 After Astley erected a small venue in Wych Street, Drury Lane, Harris complained in a letter to Col. McMahon, 20 October 1811, reproduced in Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770–1812, VIII, 187–90. 11 European Magazine and London Review, 11 (1787), 413; Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, I, 154. A clipping from FL Scrapbook A.16.2, fo. 215, illustrates the confidence of Palmer’s investors in the right of their cause despite mounting opposition: ‘Resolved, That the thanks of the subscribers be returned to Mr. Palmer … for the honourable manner in which he has discharged the trust reposed in him by the subscribers.’ 12 On the origin and movement of these patents, see Sheppard, Survey of London, XXXV, 1–8. 13 ‘Debates in the Fifth Session of Parliament’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (1788), 415. 14 See the wording of the 1737 Licensing Act in Thomas (ed.), Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788, pp. 207–9. 15 Smith, The Ground of the Theatre, p. 14; Case of the Theatre, in Well Street, pp. 7, 8, 10. 16 Quotation from Morning Chronicle, 29 August 1787. For an editorial against Palmer, see St. James’s Chronicle, 3–5 July 1787, reprinted in Whitehall Evening Post, 5–7 July 1787; for the acceptance of government money by these two titles in 1788 and 1790, see NA PRO 30/8/229/2, fos 124, 216, and Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England, p. 26. 17 According to one contemporary source, these fears would be realized; see Worrall, Theatric Revolution, pp. 81–2. 18 Case of the Renters of the Royalty Theatre, pp. 1, 3. 19 A Peep Below Stairs a Dream; Oracle, 6 May 1795; Morning Post, 20 August 1776; Taylor, Records of My Life, p. 414; Adolphus, Memoirs of

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John Bannister, I, 156, 159; Ridgeway, Lapp and Schoales (transcript), A Full Report of All the Proceedings on the Trial of the Rev. William Jackson, pp. 117–18, 131, 139–40; NA HO 387/1/2–3. Corrosive sublimate was the sublimation of mercury to create a powder form which could be dissolved in water. 20 The minutes of this meeting are from LMA MJ/SP/1787/07/111. 21 World, 23 June 1787; London Chronicle, 23–26 June 1787. 22 FL Scrapbook A.16.2, fo. 223; Ward, The London Spy, I, 333; Pennant, Of London, p. 286; Rowlandson, [Rag Fair]; Pasquin (pseud.), Poems by Anthony Pasquin, II, 34, with italics from text; World, 27 August, 12 October 1787; London Chronicle, 19–21 June 1787. In fact, Staples is listed in Browne’s General Law List for the Year 1787, as a justice at the Whitechapel office (p. 142). He reappears in Browne’s List for 1799 as one of the justices appointed at the nearby public office on the High Street, Shadwell – one of eight such offices (including Bow Street) for the prosecution of the law in London (p. 19). 23 World, 21, 22 June 1787, with italics from text; Public Advertiser, 3 September 1787. 24 World, 19 April, 21 June 1787; FL Scrapbook A.16.2, fos 206–7; London Chronicle, 19–21 June 1787. Gentleman’s Magazine, 57 (June 1787), 536, noted that ‘the upper gallery of the Royalty Theatre will, on the most accurate computation, contain 640 persons; the second gallery will contain 1000; the pit 360; the front boxes 198; the side boxes 396’. Such proportions, with the majority of the seating within the galleries, were also commented upon by the World. 25 Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, p. 205; World, 21 June 1787. 26 Palmer’s speech, with slight adaptations, taken from European Magazine and London Review, 11 (1787), 413. The newspaper advertisement of the intention to prosecute can be found in FL Scrapbook A.16.2, fo. 206. 27 Case of the Theatre, in Well Street, p. 1. 28 See, for example, World, Morning Chronicle, Gazetteer, 22 June 1787. 29 London Magazine, 1 (January 1820), 66. 30 TH to John Quick, 17 September [1797?], HL TS 937.3, III, 48–9. 31 Harris’s letter, with accompanying editorials, from Public Advertiser, Morning Chronicle, Gazetteer, 22 June 1787, with typography of quotation from Morning Chronicle; also see Morning Chronicle, 25 June 1787. 32 Claim from Palmer’s open letter in reply; World, 23 June 1787. 33 Morning Chronicle, 25 June 1787. 34 World, 23 June 1787, with capitals and italics from the text; the letter also appeared in the Gazetteer and the Morning Chronicle. 35 TH to Mrs [Mary] Wells, 13 June 1788, HL TS 941.5F, I, xx–xxi. 36 George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, VI, 438, suggests that the first assailant may be George Colman’s son even though there is no evidence (in the picture or otherwise) to link him with this dispute. The

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second ‘is probably George Colman’ himself, she writes. However, the items of service associated with him – the Garden’s wash-tub along with the ‘Rush Lights for C. G. Thea’ hung from his belt – make this identification doubtful. After all, Colman left Covent Garden’s management in 1774 and by 1776 he had agreed to take charge of the Haymarket theatre. 37 Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 262. 38 London Chronicle, 23–26 June 1787. 39 On the legal treatment of those deemed to be ‘Rogues and Vagabonds’ prior to 1814, see Rose, ‘Rogues and Vagabonds’, pp. 3–4. Straub, Sexual Suspects, goes as far as to suggest that actors in this position were ‘socially constructed, at least potentially, as outlaws’, p. 160. 40 World, 20 September 1787. Bannister returned to Covent Garden in September 1788 (BDA [1973], I, 261) while Palmer would return to Drury Lane in September 1790 (BDA [1987], XI, 170). 41 St. James’s Chronicle, 3–5 July 1787. 42 Hill, The Century of Revolution, pp. 31–2. 43 ‘One point in particular has lately weigh’d extremely in our Opinions which is an Apprehension of a new Theatre being erected for some species or other of Dramatic Entertainment’ – TH and R. B. Sheridan, 25 November 1777, in Price (ed.), The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, I, 116. 44 Judging from extant sources, the project evolved from 1777 until its abandonment in 1791 when Harris began negotiating the sale of the dormant patent to Drury Lane theatre. Details taken from Public Advertiser, 13 February 1778; Morning Post, 2 March 1778; FL Scrapbook A.4.2 (clipping annotated 12 July 1782); Whitehall Evening Post, 13–15 August 1782; Henry Holland to TH, 10 April 1783, 3 November 1782, FL W.b.104; [Harris], A Plan for the Improvement of Theatrical and Other Public Entertainments, 22 March 1784, FL Scrapbook A.4.3. The proposed site was near to Powis House, one of Harris’s residences in the 1780s and 1790s; Greenacombe (ed.), Survey of London, XLV, 95. 45 Oakley, A Culture of Mimicry, p. 114; Coke and Borg, Vauxhall Gardens, p. 2. 46 Spectator, 20 May 1712; Coke and Borg, Vauxhall Gardens, pp. 193, 196. 47 ODNB entry for Teresa Cornelys; HL MS Thr 697 (series I, no. 53); Morning Post, 9 June 1777; Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, pp. 123–4. 48 On the ‘replacement of public leisure venues with private ones’, see HallWitt, Fashionable Acts, p. 121. 49 On its audience, see Price, Milhous and Hume, Italian Opera, p. 9; HallWitt, Fashionable Acts, pp. 18, 59. 50 TH and R. B. Sheridan, [To the Proprietors of the Drury Lane and Covent Garden Theatres], 25 November 1777, in Price (ed.), The Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, I, 117, 119. 51 Public Advertiser, 13 February 1778. 52 Austen, Mansfield Park, pp. 99, 121. 53 The numerous factors that caused this failure at the King’s theatre have been explored in Price, Milhous and Hume, Italian Opera, pp. 55–61; Woodfield, Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London, pp. 194–232.

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54 [Harris], A Plan for the Improvement of Theatrical and Other Public Entertainments, p. 1, and pamphlet dated 29 September 1784, FL Scrapbook A.4.3. 55 Francis Hargrave, ‘State of Facts in respect to the Lease of Covt. Garden Theatre’, draft dated 7 April 1790, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/03. This script, which is not wholly legible, concludes with the following postscript: ‘Mr Holland will be pleased to observe that as Mr. Macnamara’s Object is the Securing the Rent to his Grace, Mr. H. will be pleased to point out the mode in which that can be done – if liberty is given to the Lessees to use one of the patents elsewhere – without a possibility of risqué […] would not insist upon both patents being attached to Cov. Garden theatre’ (p. 6). 56 Henry Holland to TH, 10 April 1783, 3 November 1782, FL W.b.104. 57 Adapted from the report in Morning Herald, 27 August 1782. 58 Henry Holland to TH, 10 April 1783, 3 November 1782, FL W.b.104. 59 TH to Edward Barlow, 12 May 1810, TM PN2596.L7.C8. 60 Clipping dated 9 July 1787, FL Scrapbook A.16.2, fo. 210 (v.). 61 For example, see ‘The British Sailor’ in The Catch Club, p. 18; General Magazine and Impartial Review (November 1787), 331. 62 General Evening Post, 27–29 December 1785; General Magazine and Impartial Review (August 1787), 162; Don Juan; or, the Libertine Destroy’d, pp. 8, 23; European Magazine, 12 (August 1787), 140; Morning Chronicle, 15 August 1787. 63 An Elegy, Written in a Country Church-Yard; General Magazine and Impartial Review (October 1787), 275; World, 5 October 1787. General Magazine and Impartial Review (November 1787), 326–9, reprinted Gray’s elegy accompanied by an image of Palmer’s performance. 64 Apollo Turn’d Stroller, p. 17. 65 ‘Catch’ in The Catch Club, p. 10, with my italics to differentiate voices. ‘Catchpole – a bailiff, a fellow of the lowest order of villains, who go about to distress unfortunate people, under various pretences’; Potter, A New Dictionary of All the Cant and Flash Languages, p. 22. 66 World, 10 August 1787. 67 Public Advertiser, 3 September 1787, with capitals from text. 68 Undated clipping, HL TS 318.1. 69 The episode of Palmer’s arrest taken from Argus, 12 November 1789. 70 Hamilton, Doctor Syntax, pp. 204–5, 209. 71 BDA (1987), XI, 169; Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, pp. 25, 27; Taylor, The French Revolution, p. 42. 72 As an illustration of this difficulty, the Morning Chronicle, 14 August 1787, advertised a benefit for ‘Mr. Bannister’ which vaguely promised ‘a variety of entertainments’ on the night. 73 Quotation from World, 5 April 1788. On Jackson’s move to Paris to escape the Royalty’s creditors, see Gurney (transcript), The Trial of William Stone for High Treason, p. 181. Case of the Renters of the Royalty Theatre illustrates the financial problems and addresses the difficulties caused by not having Jackson’s consent and not knowing his intentions (pp. 5, 8).

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74 FL Scrapbook A.16.2, fos 212, 219; Morning Chronicle, 20 July 1787; Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 28 July 1787; St. James’s Chronicle, 11–13 October 1787; World, 4 August, 12 October, 5 December 1787; Morning Post, 14 January 1788; General Evening Post and London Chronicle, 29–31 January 1788; BDA (1987), XI, 168–9. 75 Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, p. 206, with italics from text. 76 Humphreys (ed.), The Memoirs of J. Decastro, Comedian, p. 125. 77 Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, p. 208. 78 On the rise of minor theatres in nineteenth-century London, and their penchant for sensational melodrama, see Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, pp. 33–41. 79 Adolphus, Memoirs of John Bannister, I, 154–5.

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Fire! Fire was the stuff of night terrors for inhabitants of the eighteenthcentury city. In the popular imagination, the arsonist crept around unseen and undetected, alone and in the dark. He was as unpredictable as the destructiveness he would unleash. Thomas Gray, the poet so admired by Palmer, found it difficult to sleep. Tormented by a sense of helplessness, he was convinced that ‘all of us (here in Town) lay ourselves down every night on our Funeral Pile ready made, & compose ourselves to rest’. Even if the bed was not set alight deliberately, Gray knew that there was always a ‘drunken Footman’ or a ‘drowsy Old-Woman’ with ‘a candle ready to light it before the morning’.1 Fire. Sheridan understood its mastery of the mind. His welcome to the crowd, who came to marvel at the interior of his new Drury Lane theatre in 1794, was designed to calm their nervousness. On the first night of drama, an actress stepped downstage to introduce to the audience what could not be seen – four huge tanks of water weighing heavily upon the theatre’s roof – and claimed with a playful smile that she could drown everyone in a minute. With Sheridan’s typical showmanship, a safety curtain was then raised – a pioneering measure to stop any flames onstage from reaching the audience – and revealed a sight to reassure the disordered nerves of the most neurotic spectator. An artificial lake filled the stage with water flowing from the tanks high above. A bridge was mechanically lowered over the sweep of water while an actor rowed in a boat underneath accompanied by the music to ‘The Jolly Young Waterman’. Sheridan then ordered the iron curtain to be dropped once more, at which point it fell with the smoothness of a length of cloth. In the final part of his carefully choreographed scene, ‘several men then came forward with sledge hammers, and beat the curtain, to convince the audience that it was iron’.2 Everyone could rest assured that they were safe in Sheridan’s hands.

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His belief, that the hysteria caused by fire was as dangerous as fire itself, would be confirmed years later at Sadler’s Wells theatre. Rather than a taste of rural escapism, Londoners instead confronted their fears. The evening began in the usual way, before a lively audience intoxicated by holiday spirit and cheap wine. At the height of the performance, however, a number of belligerent drunks were intent on causing trouble and someone let out a cry of ‘Fight! Fight!’ in the auditorium. It was misheard, creating a ripple of alarm, and then a stampede crushing eighteen people to death. In the desperation to escape when blocked by a mass of people, several flung themselves from the gallery, either jumping directly into the pit or on to the chandeliers which then gave way, shattering upon those underneath. Some ‘rushed hopelessly into the densest part of the crowd and were suffocated’ while ‘others were trodden under foot’ by the mass panic surging towards the exits, claimed Grimaldi’s first biographer.3 Fire tormented the popular imagination because it was a real and ever-present danger. And once started, how far a fire would reach, and in what direction, was anyone’s guess. It was rare for a Londoner not to spend at least one night, as Elizabeth Inchbald did in the midwinter of 1788, nervously packing clothes after being disturbed by a fire in the same street.4 Disconcertingly, as Gray was aware, people still read in bed by candlelight when drunk, or thoughtlessly left linen to dry by the fireside, or forgot about pans that furiously bubbled upon abandoned stoves.5 The consequences could be colossal, erasing whole areas of the closely packed metropolis. Following the neglect of one barge-builder, Wapping – with its maze of slum housing huddled beside the Thames – vanished from the map. On that occasion, a pitch kettle had been left to boil over, spreading fire to barges lying at low water. The fire then reached the huge, airy warehouses holding tons of sugars and the East India Company’s store of saltpetre, the chief ingredient of gunpowder. The ensuing explosions, likened to the bursts of a volcano, spat fire an incredible distance overhead, with the shock felt as far as Limehouse, Tower Hill and Mile End, forcing firemen to retreat. In the narrow streets of Ratcliffe, the wind whirled destruction and houses were consumed by the hundreds. The fire’s path was only stopped when it reached a thin line of open ground on the outskirts, known as Mr Shakespeare’s Rope Walk, where cords of hemp were twisted together to furnish ships. A swathe of the city was left behind where it was no longer possible to trace where the different streets had run.6 In this year of fire, 1794, Harris also experienced the loss caused by its casual destructiveness when a blaze at Smith’s floor cloth manufactory, behind his home at Knightsbridge, eventually engulfed his stables and outbuildings.7

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Fire became such a common misfortune that it spawned its own criminal, the opportunist who listened for reports of fire and then hurried out to steal anything of value amidst the chaos. Possessions strewn in the street were taken as frightened householders struggled with bundles containing all kinds of belongings – linen, portraits and silver plate – in their haste to escape. Another sort, who had the advantage of respectable clothing and a sober, kindly face, would offer to help by taking cherished objects to safety. It was a well-known trick but had a good chance of success nonetheless when desperate householders had to make a decision in an instant: either abandon everything to the flames except for what could be carried, or trust in the kindness of a stranger.8 And when these ‘good neighbours’ were pursued by the call of ‘Thief!’, how many would hear or be able to give chase in the middle of the noise and urgency? Such crime became so notorious and widely suspected that anyone caught removing property from the location of a fire risked arrest with the possibility of a death sentence, as one shoemaker – William Bembridge – discovered to his cost. After a night of drinking gin at the Russell coffee house, he staggered away from Covent Garden unconcerned by the warning noises of drums, trumpets and shouts of ‘Fire!’ He was one of many who had been roused in the early hours by the false dawn, and the crackling of flames heard as far away as the extremities of the Strand. With an unsteady gait and the determination of drunkenness, he struggled with a large deal box, under the impression that he had been asked to carry it from the coffee house along with its contents of six yards of cotton, eight shillings in silver and an assortment of clothes and shoes. Staggering around and letting the box fall from under his arm a number of times, where it smashed upon the ground, he eventually attracted the notice of a local watchman. When questioned, Bembridge blindly fumbled for answers, drowsily unsure about where he was taking the box, or why. A sobering wait of over a month in prison led to an appearance at the Old Bailey where the jury fortunately believed his story supported by his many character witnesses.9 The destruction of Covent Garden theatre While Bembridge was being interrogated in the watch-house, Henry Harris was searching for his own explanation in those early hours of 20 September 1808. The Russell coffee house may have survived unscathed, with Bembridge sent on a fool’s errand, but Covent Garden theatre had not been so fortunate.10 Henry had to break the news of its total ruin to his father. The fifteen miles of turnpike roads between

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the city and Uxbridge, as the high road to Oxford eventually tapered into narrow country tracks, was enough to make his father reliant upon letters when away from the Garden – those scribbled messages from James Brandon or Barlow in response to urgent instructions or to questions about the theatre’s fortunes.11 This time, such news could not be told by a note. Having rode on horseback to deliver the news in person, Henry dismounted and approached the cool stillness of Bellemonte House. Entering, and nervously edging towards the subject, Henry first explained that the ceiling of the wardrobe had fallen in. Using such a trivial matter to broach something so grave and critical showed an awareness that, at seventy years of age, his father could not be taken by surprise. Knowing that the subject needed to be introduced carefully by degrees, Henry must have connected the night before to a previous occasion when fire had broken out at the Garden. Then, over sixteen years before, the theatre’s wardrobe had ignited in the middle of winter when unattended candles and coal stoves were perpetual hazards. Luckily, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the building was then busy with preparation and the alarm was quickly raised before the stock of expensive clothes was damaged.12 The scorched ceiling of the wardrobe had been a constant reminder of its neglect, leading to the likelihood of its fall. ‘Well,’ Harris replied calmly, ‘that’s all my fault. I was the cause of it not being repaired.’ ‘But that is not all, for the walls have fallen in so that we cannot play.’ ‘That is bad.’ Harris calculated the cost. ‘It would have been better for us if it had been a fire, as we might have recovered.’ ‘Then,’ after prompting his father to recognize the one comfort to be had from the news, ‘you have your wish.’ ‘Are there any lives lost?’ Henry had left London at the height of the blaze when the theatre’s complete destruction had been confirmed, but before the vaulted passage connecting the piazza to the theatre had collapsed, taking many lives. Unknown to him, a stack of chimneys from the nearby Shakespeare tavern had fallen, bursting through the covering of this passageway and burying the firemen underneath. Inevitably, with fire responsible for many of the horrors of the Georgian age, worse was to come. The ensuing days brought reports of unidentifiable bodies drawn out from the rubble. Many were skeletal, conveyed to Covent Garden bone-house in the vain belief that they could be identified after being consumed by the shower of fire, or scalded beyond recognition by the steam and torrents of boiling water that had poured down from the burning walls.

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Details of the gruesome fates of would-be heroes, who had stepped forward from amongst the thousands encircling the theatre, came day after day. There were tales describing how their skin had ‘crumbled off with the touch, like paper that had been steeped in water’ and about how their flesh had ‘dropt literally from their bones’. One ‘unfortunate man’ was brought into the Piazza coffee house ‘where he anxiously called for water to allay his smart, which being brought to him, he rubbed his hands with it, when they are said to have dropped from his arm’, claimed the Morning Post. This newspaper also considered the grisly mystery of three gentlemen dressed in nankeen pantaloons and flimsy cotton shirts: ‘Their apparel appeared untouched, although the whole of the[ir] bodies from head to foot was so scorched, or rather scalded, that the flesh literally hung, and seemed ready to drop.’ With so many bodies lying on the streets, a swarm of pickpockets gathered to rifle through the clothing of the dead, provoking the anger of a lynch mob and the need for the Horse Guards to restore order. The local watch-houses became so full that many of the thieves were taken to Drury Lane theatre along with the many mangled corpses waiting for identification, forcing the living to confront the victims of their grim profession. The number of those killed and maimed would rise to around fifty, leading to the rueful conclusion that ‘there has not been any domestic catastrophe more fatal for many years’. News of all this was to come. In response to his father’s concern about possible fatalities, Henry could answer, ‘There were not.’ ‘It is well. I can rebuild a theatre, but I cannot restore men’s lives,’ Harris replied. And so he learned of the fire that would irrevocably change his life and the fortunes of his theatre. But did this conversation – recorded in a handwritten report within an obscure nineteenth-century scrapbook – really happen?13 One detail makes it persuasive. Harris and his son would have feared structural collapse as the worst possible misfortune – a fear that might surface as a reflex to the mention of a disaster. And some Londoners thought that the Garden’s timeworn shell, apparently held together by the nostalgia of its theatregoers, had been ready to drop for years without the necessity of a shock. It became one marker on the map of risky London where, every so often, a building collapsed taking the lives of those people passing under its eaves.14 In this friable city, one writer viewed its theatres as representing the universe of Lucretius in action, a world composed of architectural atoms jostling in an unstable, uneasy union.15 The likelihood of a collapse played upon the mind of the artist Thomas Rowlandson. His nightmarish fantasy – Chaos is Come Again! (1791) – presented the disintegration of an auditorium with the

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chilling sight of people falling from a great height, desperately clinging to debris as it falls upon bodies writhing in agony, their faces contorted with panic. The upper gallery, like a galleon tossed by the movement of the building upon the sea of people below, gives a sense of the scale of the potential disaster. Rowlandson captured the people’s uneasiness – the fear that they could pay for their entertainment with their lives.16 The Garden came to represent that rotten centre of the city despite being relatively new in comparison with those parts of old London which fell upon people’s heads with alarming regularity. However, since opening in 1732, it had not aged well. Generations of Londoners had treated it with a rough love, nearly shaking its mouldering walls to pieces with stamping feet and applauding hands, forcing builders into making stopgap repairs nearly every summer. Making the situation worse, Harris had weakened the load-bearing walls by making an alteration here and a change there, in the struggle to funnel as many people as possible into the theatre’s bulging sides.17 And with no insurance to cover a structural collapse, unlike that for fire, Henry’s news did bring a financial blessing in disguise. Even so, this tale provides an important warning: in researching the mysterious episode of Harris and the Covent Garden fire, little is known for certain. Nevertheless, a fiction can suggest new lines of inquiry to uncover the circumstances surrounding the fire and its cause – a cause which is still unknown. For instance, did this writer try to hint that Harris was aware that the theatre was structurally unsafe, and that a fire would offer a valuable chance to rebuild? Was Harris’s ‘wish’ for a fire meant to stir up those rumours about who had started it – and why – that had swirled around the charred ruins? The probability of accidents The newspapers agreed that Harris had maintained the calmness and composure of an English gentleman upon hearing the news, just like his partner John Philip Kemble who had stared with dignity at the majesty of the fire during that grim night. Whether it was the numbness of the initial shock or not, it did not last. In the morning, while walking around the remains of the theatre, Harris’s stoicism faltered like his footing as he stumbled over the ruins and heard about the human suffering. For an exhausted Kemble, the breaking point came as he shaved the haggard lines of his face in the mirror, a face exposing decades of the actor’s labour. No longer the ‘automaton actor … ill chizell’d stiff eldest son of Formality’ as satire had styled him, his reflection jolted the realization that, at fifty-one, he would have to begin the world again.18 With typical eccentricity, the fire had demolished everything except the stone Doric

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columns on Bow Street – now blackened and supporting nothing – and James Brandon’s offices on the corner of Hart Street with their interiors eerily suspended in mid-air, as resolutely defiant as the man. Despite having lost his investment of £22,000 and having nowhere to perform, Kemble was most distressed about the property which had perished within the theatre.19 There had been a wardrobe with ‘costumes of all ages and nations accumulated by unwearied research, and at an incredible expense’, along with a store of scenery, ‘the triumph of the art, unrivalled for its accuracy’. He had also lost a library of scripts, some of which had been painstakingly edited by him, as well as a vast collection of scores composed by George Frederick Handel, Thomas Arne and others. As Harris’s stage manager, with a scholarly obsessiveness that aspired to bring realism to the stage – whether it was the Roman world of Julius Caesar or the primitive Scotland of Macbeth – those materials had been the triumph of his art.20 With an air of resignation, Kemble would write a terse, matter-of-fact note in his journal later that day: This morning, between four and five o’clock, a fire broke out in Covent Garden Theatre which, in less than two hours time, consumed it to the ground. We have [?] not been able to discover the cause of this misfortune.21

The fire should not have been a cause of great surprise. Despite housing irreplaceable treasures, there was a merciless inevitability about a theatre catching fire, forcing managements to stake their money as a gamble upon how many years of profit could be made before everything went up in smoke. The Garden was built upon an acceptance of risk with people like Harris and Kemble playing the odds. In the huge lottery of London life, investment in a theatre was as much a game of chance as risking your money upon the spin of a roulette wheel – and Harris had once capitalized upon this attraction. With the whole of the city seemingly addicted to play and eager to bet upon the outcome of anything, Harris had enticed the public to loan money to him in the mid-1780s by presenting it as a wager. He had given them opportunities to invest in tontine schemes, presented in newspapers as an innovative form of theatre finance.22 In essence, investing in such a scheme was a wager upon how long you would live – the opposite of life insurance which began in the eighteenth century as a grisly book on how soon someone would die.23 In return for contributing to the Garden’s loan, each investor received an annuity that increased every time another investor died, with the share of the dead divided amongst the living. The last man standing then received all of the profits. Clearly, whoever gave his money to the theatre tempted fate. When Harris bought into the

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Garden years earlier, he had also gambled upon survival – the theatre’s against the threat of fire – but the odds were against him. An outbreak was simply a matter of time, and an evil of modern life to be stoically accepted without too much questioning or attempting to lay blame.24 Theatres were notorious tinder boxes, with a vast honeycomb auditorium made of the thinnest board and the lightest fabrics that allowed sound to travel, and where gentlemen smoked with the carelessness of wine in the comfortable warmth and glow of precarious candlelight. As the crush of people heated the dry air that circulated through the vast space, it flowed between the huge oiled canvases that set the scene on-stage. As those immense paintings were hauled around with the friction of frayed ropes dragged through pulleys, all that was needed was a spark to turn everything into fuel for an inferno. Incredibly, in this touch-paper environment, wadding was fired from pistols and gunpowder was routinely lit to thrill audiences with the sights and sounds of war. Backstage, the situation was even more perilous, as carpenters and painters worked surrounded by wood shavings, the fumes of turpentine and naked flames. Regardless of probabilities, rumours always followed the misfortune of fire, especially when there was the temptation of making money by defrauding the insurers – those traders who were willing to be duped to maintain the public’s confidence in them.25 When flames towered above Drury Lane just months after the Garden was destroyed, suspicions burned with intensity. Those disgruntled actors who were owed wages, and had to confront life with no livelihood, believed that the fire gave Sheridan a convenient escape from his crushing responsibilities and self-inflicted debts. As the distrust circulated, new details were added to confirm his guilt. The timing of it, Friday in Lent, meant no play or rehearsals, and so nobody to interfere. And Sheridan hardly seemed concerned as he watched the fire, drinking and joking with friends at the Piazza coffee house. And who actually set the theatre alight? A man muffled up in a large, heavy overcoat was seen to enter the theatre by the door in Russell Street, around ten o’clock. Upon a signal given, the door opened, he entered and the door closed suddenly upon him.26 The manager of Drury Lane was an easy target for scandalmongers; the venerable Harris was not, after decades of nurturing a reputation for being remarkable only as an admirable servant to the public and a safe pair of hands. However, Londoners were unaware that this quiet, unassuming man could choke scandals in their infancy while they listened to newspaper reports read aloud in coffee houses that immediately denied any foul play and portrayed Harris as the victim of an unforeseeable fate. Broadsheets passed around the city were quick

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to anticipate and quash the theory that the theatre had been wilfully set on fire. ‘No blame is imputable to those who resided in the house, and had the care of it,’ announced one. Yet no one knew how the fire had started, or where. Despite illuminating an expanse of London from Temple Bar to Charing Cross with the lurid intensity of early daylight, those ‘floating flakes of fire’ had failed to shed any light upon the cause or those culpable. Many believed it had been caused by wadding shot from pistols during the main play Pizarro – those paper pellets described sensationally by the press as ‘fire-balls’ – which had then become nestled in the flies and the wings, slowly smouldering. For those who thought this impossible, a more likely cause was an oil lamp left burning behind the scenes, or a candle left in one of the dressing rooms near curtains. For others, it was a moral certainty that the uncivilized mob, who hurled abuse from the dizzying height of the cheap seats in the shilling gallery, had something to do with it. One man who might have been able to explain the mystery, the stage carpenter William Addicott, was tight-lipped under the weight of expectation. He was someone who had worked late at the Garden that night until half past eleven o’clock – leading to speculation that the fire had broken out in the mechanist’s workroom – and he was one of the first on the scene. Under the scrutiny of an impossible number of people crammed into the stale air of Covent Garden’s Britannia coffee house, he became a poor last hope. In giving his statement to Anthony Gell, His Majesty’s Coroner for Westminster presiding over the inquest into the deaths of twelve men, Addicott avoided incriminating himself. He only offered the vague speculation that the fire had ‘begun about the centre of the house’ and that ‘it was impossible for him to ascertain the cause’. In exasperation, the Examiner, which loathed Harris and the Tory establishment he represented, had to admit: ‘There scarcely appears any possibility of ascertaining with the least certainty the actual cause of the conflagration.’27 Similar inquests were held around the city in houses, taverns and hospitals, wherever a mangled body had come to rest after being carried in a coach or in the hopeful arms of a well-wisher. At these temporary courtrooms, in the haze of tobacco smoke, spectators with a ghoulish curiosity had the chance to savour every detail. As witnesses gave evidence with either hesitation or the surety that came from a fireman’s colourful uniform and badge of authority, the facts concerning the fate of the dead were slowly uncovered from the rubble. Relatives who wanted answers about how the fire had begun, however, would become frustrated. Juries unerringly came to the same verdicts of accidental death, swayed by officials keen to restrain anyone in search of someone to blame.

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In the inquest upon the death of one volunteer who had ventured too near to the fire, coroner George Hodgson was eager to confine his jury ‘to the question of by what means the deceased came by his death’, and to silence any questions about the fire beyond that. The jurymen were warned to attend only to the exact incident that had caused the death – in this case the unexpected collapse of a wall and a ceiling as the theatre disintegrated. Leaning forward to guide them at the Dolphin public house in Bloomsbury, he observed that the death was ‘obviously accidental’, in his expert assessment. And with each juror having viewed the distorted body of the dead man at the beginning of proceedings, Hodgson addressed a group haunted by the sights and smells of death, some of whom were no doubt queasily unsteady and vulnerable to being pointed in a particular direction. A verdict of accidental death was given and the Pandora’s box of speculation, about who was responsible for the fire, was kept firmly shut. Like the others, this verdict only served to provide good copy for the Morning Post, to be read and then thrown away at the end of the day. Had the jury known about Harris’s network of friends in the judiciary – among them the Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales, William Garrow – the extent of his silent influence over proceedings would have been an interesting topic to ponder later on the streets. Instead, the newspapers reported that ‘there was one good result from this public and minute inquiry, which was, that it would be seen that there was not the slightest blame attributable to those who had the management of the Theatre’. Considering the one topic that had been suppressed, the claim was hugely ironic. To publicize that the Garden’s management were naive victims of the fire themselves, rough estimates were leaked to the press to show that arson was a ridiculous idea when an insurance claim would cover only a fraction of the rebuilding, leaving a financial hole as large as the ruinous crater in the centre of London. With Harris eventually having to find as much as £250,000 with as little as £44,500 from the building insurance, it must have seemed that the usually pragmatic businessman had suffered a rare lapse of judgement.28 He must have had a short-sighted belief that the old playhouse would stand for another seventy-odd years, or so the press implied. In reality, it had been difficult to find any underwriter in London – including the leviathan known as the Sun fire office – with nerve enough to insure the theatre for any more than £20,000. It had forced Harris to spread the liability by taking out small policies with different companies.29 Aware that the grand total of these was still not enough, he had placed his faith in a system of safeguards with the hope that these practical steps would avert the disaster threatened by a stray spark.

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James Brandon was in charge of these safeguards after everyone had drifted away at midnight. With his lordly stride, he usually made a tour of the public areas and the labyrinth of backstage corridors and rooms until satisfied that all lights and embers were extinguished, internal doors were locked, and performers who lingered were reminded about the hour. He made sure that any gunpowder necessary for the next night was safely placed in the isolation of the cool cellar. Checking that all entrances were secure, he would then leave for his house nearby, passing responsibility to the watchman, an old-timer who knew the rogues around Covent Garden and owned a dog with enough ferocity to deter its casual housebreakers. He was given the task of patrolling the theatre and making a circuit every hour with a candle to illuminate the vast, dark spaces in the search of anything untoward. The chair provided for him beside a fire, though, often proved more attractive during the long nights. With watchmen having a tendency to fall asleep, Harris had listened to the expert opinion of his master builder, Henry Holland. While working to redesign the theatre, Holland had been challenged by the Associated Architects with the apparently impossible task of finding ways to stop the spread of fire.30 Among the crazy proposals sent his way were three which promised to contain its brutal force, if not stop it as an accident of life. These schemes worked on the principle that it was air, not fire, that caused the problem as it silently kept flames alive and moving through each tightly packed, rickety building.31 To test an invention by David Hartley – the fire plate – Holland had quietly worked upon two terrace houses in the square, Hans Place, on the edge of the Chelsea parish. He knew these houses inside out, having built them as part of a self-contained world, Hans Town. Hans was a shiny, modern town that was surrounded by open fields and looked weirdly out of place, as if fashionable London had been taken apart, white brick by white brick, and rebuilt in the middle of nowhere. Like a modern test site, it was isolated, or as isolated as it was possible to be while staying in touch with the capital. With its deserted rows of as yet unfinished and empty buildings, it functioned as Holland’s secret test site.32 In one experiment, he had encased a room in iron plates, filled it with a tar barrel, pitch boards and a mass of combustible fuel, and set the room alight. For nearly two hours, as long as he had dared to leave the fire to its own devices, the plates withstood the flame’s bite with only superficial charring beyond the spot where it had been started.33 Most importantly, the fire had not spread to other rooms. While such an expensive and time-consuming solution could never be adopted to insulate the mass of houses in London’s yards and courts – or even an entire theatre – it was used selectively by Harris in the following season.

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It gave him the potential to segregate outbreaks in the most vulnerable parts of the theatre such as the workrooms in the space between the auditorium ceiling and the roof.34 Trying to turn the odds in his favour, Harris had also implemented other ideas from Holland. He had built a thick party wall to protect the Garden from the many coffee houses and hotels in the adjoining piazza, and he had placed a reservoir of water on an upper floor with a pump in the office of the treasurer. But on that one night in September, all of Holland’s ingenuity and effort, as well as Harris’s caution, had been in vain. Nevertheless, some people still thought that Harris had profited from the fire, rather conveniently. Unchecked by the verdicts at the inquests, dark insinuations were peddled by newspaper hacks who felt that they had nothing to lose by crossing him. There was much smirking in disbelief at the thought that the fire could bankrupt the grand impresario and cripple the other stakeholders. For them, this so-called disaster offered an escape from a looming financial crisis that was otherwise inescapable. ‘Much will be gained by being proprietors of a conflagration,’ not least the cost of pulling down the old theatre, one writer claimed. After all, the shaky pile was in dire need of demolition. And how much would Harris’s patent have been worth with the expense of building a new theatre and with no insurance payment from a fire? On the subject of the thumping financial loss, another observed that it was ‘quite ridiculous to talk of the first cost of a worn-out garment’. Harris had made himself comfortable in his for decades. Any sympathy that Londoners may have had for Harris quickly ebbed away – to be replaced by anger – when the doors of his new, rebuilt theatre opened on 18 September 1809, just before the first anniversary of the fire. Faced with an increase in admission prices and restrictions to where they could sit in their own theatre, Londoners’ animosity gave momentum to the belief that the owners ruthlessly pursued profit, and were willing to do anything for it. Burning people in a fire that no one could explain was one thing, asking John Bull to pay a few pennies more for a seat in the pit was quite another, and it enraged him.35 Given courage by the hostility, one group dared to publish what many had been thinking: We are thoroughly convinced that they [the management] will soon be placed in a better condition than that in which they were before the conflagration; and that would be a matter of especial wonder in the history of all the tradesmen we ever heard of, whose houses were burnt down by accident.36

It was a sly suggestion made possible by italics, the equivalent of a nudge and a wink in the printer’s art. Unable or unwilling to name anyone in

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particular, this slur stained the reputation of whoever the reader viewed with the most contempt, casting a shadow that would stubbornly hang over the Garden. With this pamphlet being sold throughout the city, from Piccadilly to Poultry, its message was scattered far and wide, and the mistrust endured. Nearly twenty years later, James Boaden, an august biographer who usually avoided scandalous rumours, asked his readers to connect the dots between these circumstances: The sum recovered on the policies of insurance was … no inconsiderable part of a fund by which to commence another building. Calamity, too, gives a claim upon the liberal, more promptly obeyed than the call of unsuffering speculation. Mr. Harris knew one side of the theatre to be unsound, and he was confident that in a very few years the proprietors must have raised a new pile exclusively from their own funds.37

Such intriguing details had failed to attract official scrutiny. In 1808, there was no presumption that a fire created the scene of a crime, with all of the forensic investigation that this now entails. Of course, each fact about that night is trivial by itself and no cause for a criminal trial. Still, had someone examined the cinders of the fire, it may have kindled the belief that the rumours contained some truth. Consider the evidence. Sifting through the ashes As the mass of rubble continued to seethe in the days after the fire, everyone conceded that nothing could have been done to alter the theatre’s fate once the alarm had been raised by a young girl sleeping in one of the doorways. ‘For had all the engines in London been suffered to play upon the burning pile at once, little benefit could have been derived’ – this was the sentiment around the city.38 And yet, the army of volunteers had only been given a chance to fight the fire when it was too late. Waiting outside of the fortress of doors locked and barred against them, they could only watch with frustration as the flames slowly illuminated the theatre’s windows and smoke poured from the vents in its roof with an ever-greater intensity. And with every passing minute, any prospect of saving the Garden became more and more remote. When Harris’s men appeared, their response seemed at best bungling and incompetent, and at worst deliberately obstructive. The sight of Brandon – that indomitable man of granite always to be relied upon to take command – may have given those around him momentary confidence that the fire had met its match. However, as the firemen steeled

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themselves in expectation, his bunch of keys failed to fit any of the locks; those he had spent nearly a lifetime locking and unlocking. Eventually forcing the doors open that led to the treasury, the firemen then had further reason to panic. With shaking hands, they tried to connect the theatre’s tank of water to its engine with the hoses stored close by, but found that none of the brass couplings would fit together. All of the hoses brought by different groups of men, from the different fire offices, proved useless too. Newspapers later skimmed over the blunders, claiming that they had been caused by ‘confusion and agitation of mind’ after being awoken in the dead of night to confront an unnerving spectacle.39 Still, Brandon would not have been distracted that night by a fear for his family; they were safely away from his apartments adjoining the theatre, residing in semi-rural Barnes in Richmond upon Thames.40 The publisher George Smeeton concluded that the uselessness of the theatre’s water reservoir was ‘of little consequence’ when every engine in London put together would have failed to quench such tremendous flames.41 Futile or not, this tank in the treasurer’s office contained the only supply of water to be found in Covent Garden and the nearby streets that night. Hours before, the water main had been cut off with the intention of laying down a new one. A stream of complaints, with more regularity than the flow of water, had at last compelled the parish authorities to take action. But with the outbreak of this fire, their sense of civic duty had unwittingly caused a frantic scramble for water. During the desperate search, one group rushed to the engine makers Hadley and Simkins in nearby Long Acre, an artery of London running parallel with Covent Garden. Fire engines were pushed out of their yard, along the road, and down into Bow Street by the crowds. They were small but filled in readiness, providing jets of token resistance against the force of the blaze. In contrast, it took nearly an hour and a half to supply water to the great engines of the main offices, those run by the Sun, Phoenix and Union insurance companies. By the time they whirred into life, the clocks had struck six and the situation had changed; both water and effort were then directed towards containment and the saving of buildings that clung around the disintegrating theatre. In this endeavour, the firemen were helped by the brick boundary raised by Harris to protect the theatre from the outside world, but which now protected the world from his theatre. Without it, the fire would have continued its unyielding march through one side of Covent Garden, until held back by the rectangle of streets – formed by James, Hart, Bow and Russell – that enclosed the area around the theatre. A distrustful cynic, who suspected arson, may have pointed to the timing of the fire, coming only hours after the water supply had been

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stopped. If someone had wanted to destroy the theatre, it made success a certainty. It was quite a coincidence, if you believe in coincidences. Maybe it was only that. For an arsonist to have acted so quickly, so as to take advantage of such an opportunity, flew in the face of scientific opinion. In early examples of psychological profiling, the incendiary was not seen as a creature of impulse or someone spurred on by a rush of excitement to create something as uncontrollable as himself. He bided his time, carefully planning and scheming. For one writer, ‘premeditation’ was a distinctive feature of the crime: ‘Perhaps there is not another … which requires such an apparatus of preparation, or which lies so long brooding in the mind.’42 But Harris had long nursed frustrations. He had known that his small, snug theatre was built for another age and could never stand alone as a profitable business without his murky deals and dodges that added thousands of pounds to the treasury. A rough count of heads crammed into the first night of the Christmas pantomime, and the turnover at the end of every season, had told him that.43 As stunted as his ambition, the old theatre had had nowhere to grow. It had become imprisoned by the neighbouring taverns and shops of Bow Street with their bay windows like so many limpets bound to its side. Among the assortment of businesses, there was a fruit-seller, printer, bookbinder and even a soda-water manufacturer making that new stimulant for the new century. Harris had tried everything to make the most of the room available to him in the old place. He had hired one architect after another to rearrange the public areas, the saloons and the auditorium, to gain a slightly larger capacity. With every rebuilding, like that in the summer of 1792, he was fired with the hope that a good season would bring more money than his capital would make in interest at the bank.44 With that aim, he had taken the leases of surrounding buildings from the Bedford Office as soon as they had become available, annexing the space to create a crazy sprawl as the theatre expanded wherever it could.45 After years of makeshift changes that tinkered with the margins of profit but brought no magical transformation, he had reason to fantasize about clearing away the theatre and all of the rubbish that entwined it – to start again. Moreover, his keen sense of competition with Sheridan intensified with the opening of the new Theatre Royal Drury Lane in March 1794. Its grand stone facade announced a huge, purpose-built venue with an estimated seating capacity of 3,919, and a moneymaking potential to make Harris suspect that the Garden was too small to compete. In response, he could only enlarge the Garden to earn £150 more each night, claimed one newspaper.46

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Had Harris seen Sheridan’s account books in those early days, his fears would have been realized. Had some modern writers seen them, they would have changed their belief that the Georgian public hated and stayed away from large theatres – an easy assumption to make after Sarah Siddons’s now famous description of the Lane as ‘a wilderness of a place’.47 However, Kemble’s time at the Lane had taught him that ‘the public will tell you they like small theatres … they lie’.48 Even when its novelty had lost some of its lustre, the new Lane still outperformed the old Garden. In the following winter, during the 1794–95 season, audiences deserted Harris. His reliance upon the great Shakespearean plays, usually attracting a solid crowd of enthusiasts in the pit, saw them lose value dramatically. Theatregoers, with room to stretch and sprawl, merely paid in £131 6s to see Romeo and Juliet in October – and Macbeth in the following month only brought in £77 12s 6d, to everyone’s embarrassment. Considering that his daily operating costs amounted to £195 at the turn of the century, such figures were a disaster. His season was only saved by the patronage of King George whose affection for Harris was more constant than Londoners’ affection for the Garden. The royal family attended six nights and helped to bring in £2,674 11s.49 Such visits must have had an air of charity. To prevent the need for such help, and to place the long-term future of the Garden in his own hands, Harris knew that something would have to be done. But what? To continue buying up leases and converting the properties into new rooms for the Garden could only achieve so much around the edges of the site. And it risked the wrath of the Duke of Bedford’s chief agent, the zealous William Adam, whose role was to protect the revenue of the Bedford estate by making sure that each property remained intact and in good order. Harris would find himself on the wrong side of the hard line followed by Adam when the fire brought to light the conversion of the Shakespeare tavern, another of the Duke’s properties. With it came the threat of the Bedford Office to withhold some of the funds needed for rebuilding the theatre. Adam’s attitude was only to be expected when the Duke’s income came from leasing land as a collection of small properties, each home to a productive business, instead of allowing it to be swallowed up by a theatre struggling to turn a profit. And for Harris, to test the patience of the Bedford Office was dangerous when he needed help, as he often did. The theatre’s future became as dependent upon Bedford’s generosity as upon its popularity with the public. As the Garden lurched from one hardship to another, it meant that the ground rent had to be continually renegotiated or put off.50 Here, though, was a bond of kindness that Harris chafed under,

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almost with a sense of the humiliation of servitude, especially when humbled by the need to sue for Bedford’s understanding while feeling that the sixth Duke withheld it.51 That Harris could suffer this, a man whose deference towards aristocratic patrons was usually heartfelt and without thought, gave the measure of his intense discomfort. To be set free, Covent Garden theatre needed to be placed upon a new footing; or a modern super-theatre, reliant only upon its own powers of attraction, needed to be built. That the Bedford Office would consent to a new theatre was an easy assumption for Harris to make, supposing that the old one and the buildings surrounding it were destroyed or beyond repair. In the event of Bow Street being wiped clean, Harris could dream of thrashing out the financial small print – with new, favourable terms from the sixth Duke – before work began.52 The Duke would be prepared for such negotiations, all too aware of Harris’s complaints about the difficulties of making it pay. Bedford had only to visit Drury Lane, which also stood upon his land, to confirm Harris’s view that the old Garden was a poor relation. Yet, for anyone to have pointed a finger of suspicion at Harris, alive to the possibility that the fire was a means of escape for him, an awareness of timing would have been needed. When the fire erupted, the leases of those eight Bow Street buildings that had so frustrated Harris were coming close to their end. With two exceptions, that would expire in 1819 and 1828, none of them had more than five and a half years to run. A couple only had six months. If Harris wanted to take them over to create a palatial venue dominating the whole area, the time was right and the clock was ticking. With the Duke’s approval, the land was there for the taking. Complaints from the homeless, about their loss of a few months’ ownership, would be a small price to pay and could be settled with a paltry few pounds.53 But did Harris have enough knowledge about this being the moment for a new beginning to give him a motive for arson? We do know that after the fire he helped to compose a map of Covent Garden, with details of each lease, that revealed more inside information than that possessed by the surveyor for the Phoenix fire office (see Figure 10).54 Harris’s plan noted the owner of each lease surrounding the theatre along with its expiry date and the amount of rent paid. This flaunting of knowledge is as arresting as the bright orange line, as vivid as the day it was painted, that marks the area destroyed by the flames. With knowledge being power, Harris was someone who knew the business of his neighbours. And what he could not find out for himself, his close friend Henry Holland – who had been the surveyor for the Bedford Office – would have known.

FIGURE 10  ‘Plan of Covt Garden Theatre and the adjacent Houses Burnt down – Tuesday Sepr 20th 1808’, LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/07. (Courtesy of the Woburn Abbey Collection at the London Metropolitan Archives)

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Looked at in this sinister light, the fire seems less like an accident and more like an act of demolition that targeted just one street. The northern end of Bow Street was sacrificed; on the opposite side of the theatre, Covent Garden piazza was saved. The party wall, built by Harris to protect his theatre from threats outside, had restrained the wild power of the inferno and controlled its direction, keeping it away from the expensive piazza. The fire had raged against the wall and it had moved no further. The piazza, that hectic centre of commerce next door, was the monument to Bedford’s dominance in this part of the city and a huge source of his family’s wealth. If it had burned, the theatre would have become a minor part of a much bigger wasteland and Bedford – upon whom Harris relied for bailouts – would have taken a huge financial hit. And through the efforts of the antagonistic Adam, Bedford may have decided that such a blank canvas had no room for the indulgence of a loss-making new theatre. Even for Harris, whose life was one gamble after another, that risk would have been too great. Betrayed and abandoned Days after the fire, as workmen searched through the rubble looking for salvage, Harris picked over the bones of his situation and discovered that he needed the Duke more than the Duke needed a theatre. The sixth Duke, John, was unlike his elder brother in that he had never treated Harris with the same amiable generosity. Now their weak relationship quickly soured. Harris looked to him for financial help, and was left feeling punished. He fumed as one decision after another from the Bedford Office went against him, making him feel like a man who could not be trusted, a man of no honour.55 Whether they indeed saw him in this way or not was never openly discussed. But that did not stop Harris from hoarding grievances and a sense of being roughly treated and abandoned at his most vulnerable. And he had good cause. While in desperate need of funds to pay workmen, the Office withheld the lifeblood of insurance payments while they investigated the changes that he had made to the Duke’s properties before the fire – such as changes to the Shakespeare tavern – to see if he had devalued them and to see whether he was a fit tenant for the future.56 Harris’s puzzlement, as years earlier the Office had been told about these changes in principle, turned to anger with other news.57 The parcels of land on Bow Street were offered with rents doubled or trebled so that the £940 demanded each year by the Duke as the old theatre’s landlord became £2,013 as Harris weighed the cost of his bold project. And, with no respite in sight, the agreement with the Duke included the proviso that the rents would

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increase further with each new negotiation caused by the expiry of a lease. With Bedford’s charges, the total cost of the new Theatre Royal ballooned to an eye-watering £250,000. Later, Harris would bitterly reflect that ‘not the smallest assistance of any kind’ was granted, or ‘a shilling of rent abated, even while the late Theatre lay in ashes’. Instead, letters were fired and threats made when payments were not on time.58 It would have been easy for him to agree with Charles Greville’s opinion that ‘a more uninteresting and weak-minded, selfish character does not exist than the Duke of Bedford’.59 But, with his knowledge of the political world, Harris should have foreseen the Duke’s lack of patience towards him and his royalist theatre. As a radical Whig, Bedford had fostered a close friendship with opposition MP Charles James Fox – a man who viewed the King as an enemy and a despot, and referred to him in conversation as ‘Satan’. For Fox, it was personal. In being a Foxite, John was no different from his brother who had treated Harris kindly. But the current Duke would come to share Fox’s bitterness towards the monarch after a short-lived political career. Despite the hostility of the King, Bedford had sneaked into the Cabinet in 1806 – as the Irish viceroy to Fox’s foreign secretary – as events took an improbable turn and George was forced to accept a coalition government. However, this ‘ministry of all the talents’, as it became known, only survived a few months before the King plotted its downfall. George’s resolute opposition to their one key policy – that of Catholic relief championed by Bedford – neutered the Foxites, causing the coalition to crumble and disband. Bedford’s achievement was turned into public humiliation.60 After the death of Fox, Bedford collected thousands of pounds for a monument to his defeated friend, at the same time as Harris floundered. Bedford’s public display of largesse did not help to construct a new theatre, but it did help to create a marble monument for Westminster Abbey. It also created a bronze statue in Bloomsbury Square where Fox surveys the Duke’s land with an imperious gaze. Seated in consular robes and holding a copy of the Magna Carta, Fox’s statue is as much a symbol of defiance against the absolute rule of kings as the remembrance of a man. Ultra-radicals would come to recognize Bedford as someone sympathetic to their cause.61 Without his help, business took its toll on Harris. Retreating to the hideaway of Bellemonte, he sent Henry to conduct his business and with it the never-ending pursuit of money to finance the build. One note to Adam admitted ‘My Son Henry will be happy to wait upon you at any time you can appoint – would to God I were well enough to do so myself!’62 Plagued by respiratory illness most of his adult life, Harris’s retirement in old age brought little surprise, even when his sprightliness and energy

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had, until recently, propelled new plays on to the stage.63 However, the choice of Bellemonte may have been to escape the innuendos and open taunts of London – as doubts were raised about his character – as well as a reaction to being cut adrift by friends and associates. Upon his country estate, Harris became an outcast who accepted exile away from the London society that he had helped to shape. There, he was able to rest and save his faint voice because there were few people to confide in as his old associates cast him from their minds as easily as the many good turns he had done for them. When Henry passed on his father’s wish ‘to be particularly remembered’ to a business acquaintance, it was just a formal courtesy and not to be taken literally.64 The greatest betrayal came with the return of September and the opening of the new theatre. After devoting his life to the King’s Tory government – through decades of intrigue, the negotiation of secret deals with the press, and the promotion of the State at his theatre – Harris discovered that politicians had the shortest memories. The Pittite ministry headed by Spencer Perceval left him to the mercy of the baying crowds of rioters who shook the rebuilt theatre to its very foundations. The opening of this new Theatre Royal was supposed to have been Harris’s time of triumph. Instead, terror was brought to the Garden as rioters held the new venue to ransom, enraged about the changes he had made. To try to recoup some of the colossal cost of the new theatre, much of which he did not have, Harris made slight adjustments to the admission prices; a ticket to the pit, for example, was sixpence more. Inside, he added twenty-six private boxes by reducing the cheapest seating of the gallery which was then transformed into a claustrophobic space nicknamed ‘the pigeon holes’. The new, lucrative boxes were rented to the aristocracy, giving them exclusive ownership for a season, and giving that part of the theatre the air of an expensive private club. The rest of the income would have to come from record attendances in the new, mountainous venue. But those Londoners, who frantically elbowed their way into the pit on that first night, demanded a return to the past. They called for the old prices and the old freedom to sit anywhere, instead of being banished from a swathe of the auditorium. With their orders came an explosion of anarchy. And with it came more proof of the people’s ‘brutal love of mischief’, seen by one foreigner as a peculiar trait of the English.65 The lavish interior was attacked with knives, fists and boots; seats were ripped apart, the linings of doors cut, windows and mirrors smashed. In the attempt to carry on, actors who braved the brightly-lit stage found that standing still and being ‘caught in a soliloquy’ was an experience akin to being trapped in the pillory at Charing Cross, deafened by a bawling mob and pelted with coins, rotten fruit and worse.66 After the first night,

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James Brandon had to inspect the trails of blood, pass through the broken doors and pick his way through the shards of glass covering the corridors. He would do so again – and again – as the riots resumed each night for nearly three months, frustrating all attempts at performance. The events would become known as the Old Price (OP) riots. Why the government refused to stamp out the disorder quickly and decisively is a mystery.67 Supporters of the OP riots were also baffled, at a loss to explain why they were allowed to do what they pleased, with central London at their mercy. ‘We can guess no reason for the toleration of such riotous proceedings in a metropolis so civilized as ours,’ claimed one writer who gleefully recorded the chaos.68 The lack of concern from the government during these riots – effectively turning their backs upon Harris – may have been the most damning judgement upon him and the fire. In his desperation, Harris had called upon his influential connections and lobbied for help. His plea for the military to put down the riots was met, however, with hesitation from the most powerful men in the country. Perceval, the Prime Minister; Lord Liverpool, the secretary of state for the Home department; Sir Vicary Gibbs, the Attorney-General; and the Lord Chamberlain who was responsible for the regulation of theatres, all knew about his appeal.69 Even so, the only appearance of a soldier – with his bayonet fixed and ready – was in a satirical print which imagined what Harris had hoped for, teased him with it, and made merry at his loss of influence with the ministry.70 Gibbs felt that the use of force could trigger civil unrest that might become uncontrollable. George Rose, one of Harris’s closest friends who commanded the ear of government, occupied his own bubble of indifference. It seems impossible that Rose failed to discuss with Gibbs the one topic that gripped London’s attention when the two men spent an autumnal weekend together enjoying country sports at Gibbs’s retreat on Hayes Common. Yet, two days after his return, Rose nonchalantly wrote in his diary that there was ‘nothing worthy of notice’ while events paralyzed the Theatre Royal and the city’s inhabitants, from Covent Garden piazza to Surrey Street, cowered inside their homes as rioters spilled out into the streets. Ordinary Londoners were robbed of their peace of mind. Fearful for their ‘own private security’ and ‘apprehensive that these terrifying disturbances [would] not terminate without bloodshed’, the householders petitioned Lord Liverpool for action, but without success. In contrast, Rose glowed with complacency after riding through London’s streets in the carriage of Lord Bathurst, even writing afterwards that he had never before witnessed ‘such perfect order and decorum’ in the capital.71 Gibbs, though, was uncomfortably aware that the conflict was ‘a disgrace to

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the country’ and that the rioters thumbed their nose at the ministry’s authority, even on the night of the jubilee of George III, 25 October.72 The government’s decision to leave Harris to shift for himself seems like an even greater reproach with knowledge of who steered the riots, and why. Many of those who proudly wore the tin letters ‘O’ and ‘P’ in their hats, as a sign of their opposition to the Garden’s management, may have liked to believe that they were simply disgruntled customers fighting for a fair admission price, in which the government had no right to interfere. But this was not so. Something more profound was scheming against Harris in the corners of the Crown and Anchor tavern on the Strand, the home to every malcontent and enemy of the Tories in the capital.73 To reveal those who conspired against Harris shows how their attempt to topple the Garden, a national institution, had the seeds of a national emergency. The rank and file of OP rioters were organized, deployed and supported by a committee of the most notorious, battlehardened radicals; and for the government, the most menacing. Following the French Revolution, such radical voices had made the government nervous. As all of the old certainties became brittle with the dawn of the new age of liberty, the British ministry had become sensitive to every brickbat and stone thrown in angry dissent and listened intently for assassination plots. Fears of an attack by a mob powerful in number had led them to take repressive steps, such as the suspension of habeas corpus and the use of ‘ex officio information’. These measures, voted for at critical points following the execution of Louis XVI, had given the British government unlimited powers of arrest and had allowed them to lock up and silence people suspected of sedition without trials to examine the charges in a court of law.74 A number of those veterans who haunted the Crown and Anchor had been imprisoned, or had their life threatened, or had to flee the country at one time or another. Together, they could tell you about most of the prisons in London where suffering sharpened discontent. John Bone – a partner in the Strand bookshop that became a sanctuary for radical thought where any political pamphlet could be bought and any political opinions traded within its back rooms – had spent time in Cold Bath Fields house of correction at Clerkenwell. Known as the ‘English Bastille’ because of its political prisoners and its ability to inspire terror, Cold Bath Fields was a test of endurance where the bodies of inmates ‘ulcerated with frost’ and men died of hypothermia. John Horne Tooke, the radicals’ ‘High Priest’ whose keen and arch eyes gave a flicker of the glory days now obscured by old age and the pains of rheumatism, had seen the inside of the King’s Bench prison, and Newgate, and even the Tower of London. His disciple Sir Francis

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Burdett, that campaigner for reform in Parliament and an admirer of Napoleon, would be committed to the Tower in the spring following the OP riots. Weeks later, the plain-spoken William Cobbett would be committed to Newgate because of a seditious libel that appeared in the Political Register accusing the government of ‘tyranny, cruelty, and injustice’. These were the men who anchored the radical cause in London, along with two others. Francis Place – a tailor from Charing Cross who took pride in sobriety and robust common sense – became its political strategist, meticulous record-keeper and the man who gave advice to the inner circle. Thomas Tegg, a scurrilous printer of satirical pictures and the scourge of the aristocracy, was its link to the crew of London publishers.75 In theory, when these men had decided upon their message to the people, there was someone to print it and shops at which to sell it; but it was never that easy. Every radical pursued his own dream of political liberty and became caught up in endless arguments at the Anchor about how to make a new England. Some were fired by the thought of educating the working classes about their political rights, in the hope of an uprising against an unjust and corrupt parliamentary system. Some were driven by the thought of more votes for more people, at a time when rotten boroughs meant that MPs could be returned upon the command of only one landowning aristocrat. Others fought for a Parliament with greater transparency, which could be held to account, instead of allowing parliamentary privilege to conceal what happened there. But, every now and then, a source of inspiration, or an opportunity for change, united them. Back in the 1790s, it had been the idea of a network of clubs spanning the country to coordinate action for ‘Universal Suffrage and Annual Parliaments’ that had drawn many to the London Corresponding Society (LCS), including Horne Tooke and Place.76 More recently, the men of the Crown and Anchor had rallied around Burdett and organized his campaign as a candidate for Parliament. As a public show of their strength, this committee had attracted over five thousand votes for him and had elected Burdett to the Westminster constituency with a huge majority. In doing so, they could claim to represent the mood of the nation because of the sheer number of eligible voters in Westminster, those rate payers described by Place with satisfaction as a ‘parcel of people who were nobody, common tailors, and barbers’.77 Now, two years later, members of Burdett’s election committee gathered with others to gain control of public opinion once more in the City of London as they mounted a terror campaign against Covent Garden theatre. This ‘formidable and dangerous’ company included Bone, Horne Tooke, Burdett, Cobbett, Place and Tegg. It was a who’s who of

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leading radicals. Taking notice of Harris’s distress, their cause became the OP riots.78 For these men, it was about more than the right to enjoy a night at the theatre, however valuable that may have been to some. The riots were a chance to protest against the State and to shout about their discontent.79 Usually, it was foolhardy to stand up and demand certain rights as an Englishman, or to cry that the liberty of John Bull was being taken away by those in control of the country. To do so risked imprisonment for sedition; or even worse, as could be testified by Horne Tooke who had been threatened with high treason after his involvement in the LCS. This occasion, however, was different. Generations of Londoners had secured the right to air their grievances in theatres, whether it was over a change in admission prices, or a play that they felt was insulting, or an actor who had displeased them. As Lord Mansfield had famously claimed, ‘every man that is at the Play House has a right to express his approbation or disapprobation instantaneously … that is a right due to the Theatre – an unalterable right – they must have that’.80 Those sitting in the cheap seats of the gallery saw the theatre as the kingdom of John Bull, that master of ceremonies who ruled over the entertainment and could ‘damn’ any performance so that it would have to be abandoned.81 And now, radical London became animated and recognized that this ancient right could achieve much more.82 And with enough numbers, there was the possibility of making the government, even the whole country, listen. Shaking banners that declared ‘Opposition, persevere, and you must succeed’ – and throwing handbills into the pit with the order ‘Conquer or die’ – the rioters’ anger became directed at the Garden because of its importance to the State.83 And Harris was a government man – a man who must live to please – for whom they had little sympathy. For those on the outside looking in, Harris’s theatre had the power to cause resentment to fester. To them, it was a ‘powerful political engine’, a propaganda machine belonging to the government where ‘reform’ was never mentioned.84 If anyone was in doubt, let him go to the Garden, that ‘common sewer … of loyalty’ where ‘a base born, abject people’ grovelled before a ‘little, sceptred and tinselled creature’.85 Railing against the system, the agitator John Thelwall had feared for his life for daring to preach, amongst other things, that the patent theatre manager was ‘a slave’, that each of his actors was a ‘slave’ and that every writer for his stage was ‘a slave’. They had been placed in chains, forced to dance to suit the ‘political purpose’ of the ‘predominant faction’.86 To perform – at the Garden – was to serve the State. How could it have

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been otherwise when its star actor, Kemble, was known to radicals as ‘the Great Dramatic Tory’?87 And when its entertainments were censored by the Lord Chamberlain who scrutinized every new script before performance? Occasionally, Harris did accept a promising piece from someone who was known to hold dangerous, liberal ideas. But while in control of exactly what was spoken on his stage, he could take the idea and spin it in his own way. He could afford to ‘forget the man, and promote the interests of the piece’ – according to the grateful playwright Thomas Holcroft – even if the partisan audience could not.88 The Garden was, after all, where royalty, aristocracy and the ministry took their seats beneath the warmth of Harris’s attention and the gilded splendour of the royal coat of arms. Its patriotic spectacles were applauded by the King and his men with a self-congratulatory air that claimed the nation’s successes as their own.89 Taking a place in one of the boxes was as much about joining this social gathering, and supporting the Tory ministry, as it was about being entertained. When the Prince of Pückler-Muskau noticed how ‘party spirit’ – the love of a political party – brought Regency high society together, he might have been describing Harris’s theatre twenty years earlier. Certainly, Barlow had talked of the Garden as a ‘Government establishment’ that took its cue from their prevailing sentiment.90 During the OP riots, all of that changed as the Westminster mob took control. This triggered the release of pent-up frustrations as the theatrical dispute slowly became about something more. In the rioters’ view, losing the right to enter certain areas of the people’s theatre – those parts taken up by new, private boxes for the Tory faithful – was in keeping with a government that attempted to deny the civil and political liberties of its subjects. And why should the rise in admission prices – making a decent seat in the theatre unaffordable for many – come as a shock when the Tories allowed the cost of everything to escalate in this time of war? The rumbling dissatisfaction with the management of the theatre became amplified into a deafening protest against the management of the country, and it attracted everyone and anyone with a hunger for some sort of indefinable change, something felt knotted within the gut. Some rioters proudly wore the colours of a Burdett supporter, a blue coat with a blue handkerchief tied around the neck. Like Burdett before them, they recalled the Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights as birthrights protecting the people’s liberty and limiting the powers of a king bound by the laws of the land. Pitt’s ministry had given magistrates the power to disperse meetings of fifty people or more in 1795, in anticipation of an urban uprising; but anger still brought the OP rioters together. As dissatisfaction swept through the streets, it grabbed hold of others who had never even visited

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a theatre. Meetings were held at the Trader’s Hall on Snow Hill to call for ‘the Liberties of Englishmen’ to be recognized in light of events at the Garden; meetings that became ‘literally crammed’ with many ‘unable to obtain Admission’. People also gathered in Bedford Street, described by one government man as an area ‘saturated with mischief’ that gave ‘life to the dormant sharks’. Posters appeared demanding the return of old prices for everything – bread and beer, clothes and shoes, newspapers – as the OP cause gained an unstoppable momentum. One newspaper reporter, with some edginess, found it ‘impossible to compare these tumultuous proceedings to anything but the furious excesses of the Parisian mob at the origin of the French Revolution’.91 Was revolution in the air? The capital did seem to be stumbling towards it, and still the government failed to act. Harris, however, had one last throw of the dice. While away at Bath – and having the time to reconsider his options as the fashionable spa town became lulled by the approach of winter – he decided upon the strategy of arresting and prosecuting the rioters at the quarter sessions.92 Unlike the immediacy of a knock-down blow from the military, this would take a long effort while slowly whittling down the number of rioters and their resistance. In his favour, he could rely upon the muscular Brandon to wade in and make the arrests with the help of reinforcements, the Garden’s watchmen and constables. And once the rioters were committed to the cells at Bow Street, he could influence the outcome with the help and advice of William Garrow who later did not have to pay for his evening’s entertainment at the Garden.93 If the battle could not be won in the theatre, it could be resumed in court with legal expertise from the Crown, so thought Harris. After making the decision, his absence from the Garden caused its own problems. His informers had been watchful, but they could only supply so much of a complex, ever-changing picture. He knew about the malign influence of the OP committee and that it included the mischiefmaking John Gale Jones, a former LCS member and one of Burdett’s associates, who liked to parade around with provocative banners and had, unsurprisingly, come to the attention of the authorities on more than one occasion in the past.94 Still, there was much more that was unknown, about which Harris’s imagination could only speculate without rest. Was Henry coping? How might Kemble react if tipped over the edge? Was James Graham shirking his responsibility as a magistrate? How was it possible to stop the radical paper, the Statesman, from encouraging the lawlessness?95 And, most importantly, did his plan have an effect? Tormented by curiosity, he was all too aware of his distance from London. He was forced to write to Barlow, first asking ‘Can you

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yet congratulate me on the suppression of the late disturbances?’ before firing an anxious volley of questions: Pray had we any Council attending for us [at] the Quarter Sessions? – & Was there any Council employ’d against us? – Is Humphrys clever and active? – Who is our chief consulting Council? – I wish Garrow to be consulted as much as possible – How is Mr. Kemble in his Health do you hear?

Knowing the weakness of his character, he was right to worry about John Philip Kemble, telling Barlow ‘do watch him’.96 Even when basking in the adulation of an audience, tension twitched beneath the grave, stately surface of Harris’s stage manager. Now, Kemble had come to rely upon laudanum – opium dissolved in alcohol – to soothe an increasing number of complaints as nervous tension racked his body. His voice, once so commanding, had become so weak that it failed to make contact with the now-distant gallery, with only odd words audible as if buffeted by the wind. In the exertion, he was not helped by the nearly constant din made by OP supporters as they shouted, blew horns and beat sticks against the walls.97 If Harris had experienced the cauldron of rioting that tested the nerve of the toughest performer, he would have been more troubled. Another of his questions to Barlow – ‘Do you think Mr. Kemble will be insulted when next he appears on the stage?’ – was so ridiculous that it could have been a sly joke between two blue-coated rioters before another night of mercilessly hounding Kemble.98 To have asked it, as the uproar was reaching its climax in the beginning of November, showed a naivety that was perhaps created by Barlow and others protecting Harris from a knowledge of the full anarchy of the riots. Or it may have been that Harris had too much confidence in his scheme to prosecute the rioters while the pit continued to be ‘like a troubled sea’ agitated by a tempest of anger.99 Either way, he failed to grasp the full danger posed by this swell of people, and to fathom the depth to which they would drag the theatre. That much would become apparent as events moved towards the courtroom and the endgame. Trial by jury As soon as the weak December sun started to climb towards the murky horizon of Westminster houses, they began to arrive at the Court of Common Pleas with an anticipation of victory.100 The mass of OP supporters surrounding the court became so closely packed together that when the doors were thrust open, their impatience hindered their progress. Edging slowly forward, they filled the courtroom, which was

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crowded ‘almost to suffocation’. Most of them, however, could get no nearer than the outside walls of the court, such was the interest in the outcome of this show trial that would either save the theatre or vindicate the rioters. Inside, dotted amongst the anonymous crowd, were some notable faces. Place was observing proceedings, along with John Philip Kemble, Brandon and Henry Harris.101 But, for all of the scheming of Henry’s father – through discussions with the Crown, the urging of prosecutions and the putting together of a legal team – this trial was not of Thomas Harris’s making. It had been brought by one of the OP committee, Henry Clifford, who was more than a match for Harris’s plotting and Brandon’s bluster. And the charge was false arrest. Clifford was a man of ungovernable temper, who was thought to know no bounds whether in the baiting of authority or the consumption of spirits in the company of Burdett and Horne Tooke. He was distinguished as a hard drinker at the Anchor, where his features gradually settled into stubborn disdain with every glass. At such times, resentment of the disadvantages that he laboured under became legible upon his face – that of being Irish, and Catholic, and the second son of a second son when the aristocratic code gave title and property to the eldest. As much as anything else, this last circumstance set him against the Garden and what it represented. Walter Scott recognized that Clifford was someone to beware of: I hate mobs of all kinds, but I fear disciplined mobs, especially with such leaders as Clifford, who has just knowledge enough to keep him within the verge of law, talent enough to do mischief, and no capacity whatever to do the least good.102

Scott would employ his observation of people in the creation of the bestseller Waverley; though in describing Clifford, he had underestimated him. As a barrister of some fame, who combined intelligence with intemperance, Clifford had more than ‘just knowledge enough’. His astute move in bringing this trial, albeit with the advice of the OP committee, would show that Brandon had misjudged him too. After Brandon’s ham-fisted attempt to arrest and charge him, Harris’s finely wrought plans would unravel. On the night in question, Halloween, Clifford had been in the theatre raising malicious spirits. To unknowing observers, he had stood quietly in the pit with the only visible sign of his support for the riot being the letters ‘O’ and ‘P’ in his hat, a gift from someone behind him which he had good-naturedly accepted. To Brandon, who knew Clifford by sight and by reputation, each nod, wink and whispered message was an

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instruction to the mob as Clifford pulled the strings of disorder. Brandon, under instructions from Harris to remove and prosecute the ringleaders, saw his chance to make the arrest safely when Clifford left the rowdy pit at the end of the performance, and made his exit through the corridor. Brandon had seen many times how constables had tried to remove rabble-rousers from the pit, only to be beaten back and receive smart cracks upon their heads from cudgels.103 Now was the time for action. ‘That is Clifford, take him,’ he called out. ‘Why?’ asked the constable Samuel Taunton, ‘he has been doing nothing. I have watched him; he has been very peaceable all night.’ ‘Never mind, that’s Clifford; take him, damn your eyes! Take him and mind that you take care of his hat.’104 Taunton and his companion, another Bow-street runner, felt powerless to resist. Without having the need to lay hold of him, Clifford graciously agreed to follow the constables to the office at Bow Street. It was, for him, a moment of composure brought by the realization that they had played into his hands. After marching him the short distance to appear before the magistrate James Read, Taunton became embarrassed, unsure about what to accuse Clifford of. Read called for Brandon, who appeared after a few minutes. ‘What is the charge?’ Read asked. ‘Mr. Clifford had worn an “OP” in his hat, and had made a great noise in the theatre,’ Brandon replied, satisfied that this one accusation was enough to condemn him to the cells. The many prosecutions in the weeks before had caused his careless presumption; but Clifford was a much different case. He was not like those rioters taken from the gallery, the labourers and unemployed servants who were vulnerable when threatened with the law and easily dispatched. Neither was he someone who had acted rashly and violently like those thugs who had assaulted the constables.105 ‘Is there any other charge against him?’ ‘No.’ Perhaps Brandon was confident that Harris’s authority over men like Read made explanations unnecessary. ‘Then you are discharged.’ ‘He was very noisy and riotous …’ ‘Give Mr. Brandon the book and let him swear to it. But I warn him against it,’ interrupted Clifford, slipping easily into the familiar role of the advocate. ‘You are discharged, sir.’ Before leaving, Clifford made a bow towards the magistrate as a mark of professional respect. As he approached close to Brandon, his parting shot was spoken in a confidential tone: ‘I dare say I should not have been brought here, if you had known me.’ ‘I have known you for some time.’106

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Nonetheless, Brandon would come to know Clifford better after being accused of false arrest and imprisonment as the OP campaign for freedom and justice took a new turn. Clifford’s counsel would argue that his detention had been illegal because he had not been arrested red-handed, in the act or ‘flagrante delicto’. Brandon had pounced while Clifford was leaving the scene of the riot and only a magistrate’s warrant could give him the authority to do that. In case this legal loophole proved unreliable, the backup for Clifford’s team was that their client was peace-loving, and had only been at the Garden as a bemused spectator, along with the suggestion that he had been chosen for more sinister, political reasons. Upon the strength of these arguments rested a claim for £100 damages. However, more was riding upon this decisive battle of wills when the events of that night were brought before the jury. Harris needed to have this case thrown out of court, and brand Clifford as an agent provocateur in the process, to boost his chances of securing convictions in the future. Defeat would sabotage his plans, and all of his pending prosecutions would be in danger of becoming null and void. Those posters with their large, authoritative print – about how the disturbances were ‘in the highest degree, illegal’ and ‘an offence against the laws of their country’ – would become laughable.107 For Burdett’s men, success for Clifford would have huge significance too. It would deal a blow to the State’s ability to silence its people, and it would push the boundaries of free speech. Their grand claim, that they were the masters of public opinion with a man in Parliament, would seem very real with their hold over the Garden, that site of royal power where thousands of voters congregated for every performance. In this contest, Harris’s reluctance to sanction witnesses for Brandon’s defence was a problem when the truth of the matter often rested upon the persuasive look or aspect of someone giving evidence. The tight-lipped Harris knew that to do otherwise was perilous; it would give Clifford’s team an opening to interrogate the theatre’s management, to delve into its business, and to place the Garden on trial. And to have asked someone to give evidence on the Garden’s behalf would have compromised his safety; in effect, giving the partisan crowd in court a face at which they could direct their hate. When one of Clifford’s barristers wished that the managers would consent to enter the dock, ‘so that the whole of their conduct’ might be ‘decided upon by a Jury’, it was a hopeless wish for a gullible opponent.108 With the weight of opinion against him, Harris needed an unfair advantage. To achieve this, he was led by government policy. In those cases which the ministry felt could not be lost, they wisely decided not

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to ask the public what they thought. They appointed a judge who would follow the government’s instructions and had the commanding presence and intellectual muscle to bend the will of the court. A special jury, not a common one, would be appointed by the Crown from a select register of professional jurors who were regarded as ‘sure’ men, men to be depended upon to reach the right verdict. Richard Carlile exposed this policy of ‘packing’ a jury with the government’s friends, and claimed ‘it produces, in effect, a mock trial before a mock jury of twelve men selected to bow to the nod of the judge’; and Jeremy Bentham asked around the time of this trial, ‘What are jurors, in all such cases, but mere puppets?’109 It was an issue that the weekly newspaper The Black Dwarf railed against, time and again, in the following years with a sensitivity to its own vulnerability as the laws against seditious libel continued to bite. Typical of radical unease, one of its correspondents in 1818 drew attention to the rumours of judicial corruption that circulated through hearsay but lacked definitive proof, claiming ‘as lately as within the memory of some friends of mine now living, it was the constant practice in the City for the Attorney on the part of the Crown to give two guineas instead of one, to those Special Jurymen who brought in their verdict in his favour’.110 On this December day, Clifford’s case was to be heard by Sir James Mansfield, a senior Crown official and the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. A man of bull-headed force rather than finesse, it was reported that – every morning while on the circuit – he rose at five to kill something before breakfast. His compelling knowledge of the law, however, was said to unnerve the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Eldon, whenever the two men met professionally.111 The benches next to Mansfield were to be filled by twelve special jurors called from the wellheeled West End as well as those distant parts of the city that provided an escape for the gentry, such as Kensington and Hammersmith. Living behind imposing facades of Portland stone, these men were not reliant upon the fee and unlikely to be vulnerable to greater bribery. Rather, these were men of conviction with a firm belief in the principles of government. In the courtroom, their names were called once, and then twice. During a tense wait of minutes for Henry and Kemble, only five appeared. It should have been a surprise that so many had answered the call. A copy of the longlist of forty-eight jurors and their addresses – looked over as a matter of course by both counsels who each had the opportunity to strike twelve objectionable people from the list – had been passed on to Place. With some urgency only days before the trial, he had sent the list to the printer William Glindon for one hundred copies to be made on large sheets.112 Presumably, this register then became a hit list, handed to supporters who could exert pressure upon the potential jurors. With

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feelings running so high, just to be identified as an enemy of the OP cause was hazardous enough without facing small mobs willing to use violence or more sophisticated means of dissuasion. As a precaution, these jurymen had been chosen to create safety in numbers. The majority of them could be found living close to each other, in small clusters, north of High Holborn and Oxford Street: four lived in Wobourn Place, just off Russell Square; three dwelled, like Kemble, in Great Russell Street; and another four resided in or around Harley Street. But when the whole city seemed to be against them, knowing that a neighbour was in the same position surely mattered little. This time, the direction of the law took the path of least resistance and Clifford’s counsel – Mr Serjeant Best – was quick to ask for the vacant places to be filled by common jurors, and to fill the places with spectators from the courtroom if necessary. To prevent an adjournment, and perhaps with some trust in his own ability, Mansfield begrudgingly agreed. One witness after another then appeared for Clifford – including Bone in a defiant mood – many of whom claimed to have enjoyed a quiet night at the theatre, oblivious to any mayhem. With the result becoming increasingly uncertain, the government’s message was thumped into the consciousness of the court. Before Mansfield’s summing-up, his opportunity to incite the jury to do his bidding, Brandon’s chief advocate made it clear how ‘the law should be laid down by those who are the Judges of the land, and the law should not vary from day to day, according to the various opinions … of Jurymen’.113 Then, Mansfield weighed in with his commands. Wrestling with the passionate support for Clifford, the judge made little secret of his disdainful view that their champion was ‘guilty of a conspiracy’: It seems to me, therefore, that the outrages which have been committed at this theatre are illegal in the highest degree, and that whoever has partaken of them is answerable to the law, and may be severely punished.114

Mansfield impressed himself more than his listeners, and the jury returned a verdict after only a few minutes. As their decision was announced, it was relayed instantly to the thousands gathered outside by a burst of shouts and applause from the gallery. Inside, ‘verdict for the plaintiff – damages five pounds’ was all that could be heard or understood for some time as spectators rushed out to communicate the news as if the result touched them personally and mattered just as much to others, cheering as they went, and exclaiming ‘Clifford for ever’. In the icy air, they hugged themselves with the sentiment that a true ‘British jury’ will always rise against ‘a gross infringement on British liberty’.115 In court,

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an obdurate and irate Mansfield, with his husky voice raised to a growl to cut through the noise, claimed that the decision could lead to the ruin of the country and ‘every species of misery’ including ‘the subversion of the present Government’ and the end of the law.116 Most did not care: the Garden had become their theatre. Later, the Cruikshank brothers imagined the scene as Brandon, Kemble and Mansfield left the court. An exasperated Brandon can only curse – ‘Oh Damn the OPs’ – in an image reproduced to exploit the moment.117 After they had escaped the jeering crowd, a despondent Henry and Kemble were left with no consolation. In presenting the jury’s decision, the foreman had given no reason for it, and the Garden’s management were left with nothing to work with. ‘The only thing I could collect unanimously from the Jury was, that we should find a verdict for the plaintiff, upon the ground that he was not legally apprehended,’ the foreman said, much to Mansfield’s irritation.118 In reply, Mansfield could only mutter to himself, ‘but why was he not legally apprehended?’ In the absence of an explanation, the legal position of both the OP supporters and the Garden’s management remained as cloudy as ever, with questions left unanswered. Did Clifford’s behaviour, like that of many others, make him guilty of participating in a riot or not? Had he only escaped punishment because the arrest had come too late, after the event? It may have been that, for the jury, an agreement upon the decision alone was difficult enough when the topic of the riots raised a multitude of passions; everyone in the city had a deep-seated opinion about it, stoked by weeks of newspaper coverage. But Harris must have felt, like Mansfield, that the reticence of the jury was a deliberate ploy to stall for time through withholding the information that was needed to secure convictions. With the help of the jury, Clifford’s case could have been used to prosecute other rioters by showing the grounds on which someone could be arrested and at what point they could be taken. But without these terms of engagement, Harris was left waiting, unable to act, with the situation still unresolved. Burdett’s men had played him at his own game, and won. The last laugh In celebration, the Garden’s audience danced upon the pit benches – causing such a cloud of dust that to remain in the theatre was to brave suffocation – and they filled the air with handbills declaring the ‘facts’ of the case. When not danced upon, the benches were fractured by kicks and the pieces lobbed at the actors.119 It was possible to avoid the

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choking dust by entering the streets outside, but not the rough festivity or the noise. In one avenue leading to the pit, forty or fifty people danced a special jig known as the ‘OP Dance’ with a raucous appetite to commemorate the win, while two fifers played to them; that is, until a small Bow Street patrol arrived with the intention of bringing order. The constables immediately surrounded one of the fifers, raising him from his feet with the intention of carrying him to the Brown Bear public house nearby where there would be less danger of confrontation. As their feet sank into the mire, a woman lurched from the drunken crowd, biting the hand of one officer and doggedly refusing to release him. When they got into the road, all three – the fifer, the officer and the woman – fell down together, rousing the roaring defiance of the crowd. A violent scuffle ensued in which they writhed in the mud, their clothes torn to rags as the mob grabbed handfuls. Despite the heroic efforts of the officer to get to his feet with a firm grip still in place, he was left sitting in the mud, defeated. The musician made his escape, upon the shoulders of the mob, to the upper part of the street.120 The mud-caked fifer survived to goad authority another day. Many did not enjoy such a privilege for long. The humiliation suffered by the ministry over the OP affair sharpened its pursuit of zero tolerance against those writers and printers who were known to them. It would show an awareness that the OP conflict had been a creative rebellion fought with handbills and posters as much as with fists and sticks. They knew that the battle had been won through those ‘numerous slips of paper … daily hawked about the town’.121 And if the streets were becoming unmanageable, regaining control of the press seemed an easier proposition. Those radicals with anything inflammatory to say would become prey to the Attorney-General’s sustained campaign against seditious writing. In the months following Clifford’s trial, both Cobbett and Gale Jones would face prosecution over comments published about the mistreatment of army personnel.122 In the wake of this crackdown, Rowlandson would imagine a secret society – funded by SS money with Vicary Gibbs as its leader – whose members would huddle and pore over the press each day looking for hints of libel against the government.123 Whether such a society was fanciful or not, there became a distinct sense of unease about the threat of surveillance as the number of prosecutions for seditious libel gained momentum. As radical commentators weighed the myriad ways in which the State could cast its net for intelligence, even the rising popularity of Bank of England notes at the expense of coin – with shopkeepers demanding the names and addresses of the bearers – might provide an opportunity to collect information in bulk as to

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personal movements and activities. With such details, it was difficult, claimed the Black Dwarf, ‘to anticipate the use an arbitrary ministry might turn [them] to’.124 Through punitive measures against the producers of incendiary print, the ministry would try to stop any further disorder at its source. But what did the future have in store for some of the other players in the OP drama? On Thursday 14 December, in the week following the trial, John Philip Kemble would be humbled again.125 He would be sent to the Crown and Anchor and surrounded by hundreds of OP men at close quarters. Chastened, he would face an OP committee chaired by Clifford, the toast-master slouching with self-satisfaction who was aware that Kemble had to sue for their help. Kemble would be applauded for his humility and willingness to do the right thing, but it would fail to mask the gloating displays of victory as most of the committee drank to the cause, shouted and danced in high spirits. There, he would have to sit and listen to their demands dictated by Place, and agree to put them to Harris and the others, thankful just to settle the dispute. Clifford’s toast would be to ‘The Liberty of the Subject’, drank to great applause. As yet another indignity, that night Kemble would have to ask for forgiveness from the Garden’s stage, and would be made to feel like a servant of the audience. The final terms of peace would include changing a number of the private boxes into public ones, the return of the old admission price to the pit, the dismissal of Brandon and the end of all legal action from both sides. Legal advice from Lincoln’s Inn would bring Kemble more unpalatable news. As a new theatre had been built, there was no way that Harris could be made to honour their original agreement – from before the fire – which had entitled Kemble to purchase the Garden outright on his partner’s death. Romilly, Hart and Bell would claim that the changes to the property had ‘done away the Effect of the covenant’, allowing Harris to dispose of the property ‘for the provision of his family’.126 It meant that a Harris, most likely Henry, would call the tune for the rest of his days there. To be confirmed as an attendant on the Harris family would make Kemble search for an alternative future. After playing out the rest of the season with the comforts offered by opium and bouts of drunkenness, he would no longer see the Garden as his home. While he would not choose the life gleefully imagined by OP supporters as best suited to his talents – that of hiding behind gravestones in lonely churchyards at night to terrify yokels by jumping out to perform Hamlet or Caliban – he would choose relative obscurity for a time, playing one small theatre after another at places like Bath

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and Bristol. It may have been a yearning to return to that life before London, before the Garden had drained his energy, and before the coughing of blood and the pains of gout. He would come back for a short spell – just months after Clifford’s death from the ravages of alcoholism – before retiring for good.127 The actor’s fame, though, would outlive the agitator’s. His bitterness would also endure. When Place began to spend time diligently documenting the social history of London, he would ask Kemble if they could exchange their unwanted pamphlets and papers on the OP riots, duplicates and the like. Perhaps to hide his true feelings after being caught unawares by the request, Kemble would agree. But while Place would send the copies from his personal archive, with a reminder of their agreement, his former adversary would never reply. Like Kemble, Brandon would smart at the hands of the OP supporters after the trial. He would become the scapegoat whom the rioters could not forgive, even after peace was agreed. Approaching the audience with new-found meekness and humility – an achievement that surely cut against the grain for someone like him – his dismissal would come in a hail of sticks and oranges. Even a hand-bell was thrown. Not even Henry’s attempts to address the audience, which risked an outbreak of fresh violence and only got as far as ‘Gentlemen, you know Mr. Brandon is only a servant of my father’s’, would save him.128 One handbill brandished that night would show the level of blame given to the main contenders for the mob’s hate – an unidentified Harris (either father or son), Kemble and Brandon – with the old servant being the most despicable of the three: To H— —s, quoth K— —e, ‘I question much whether Two such Rogues, or such Asses were e’er met together!’ ‘Stop, K— —e,’ cries H— —, ‘I can’t let that pass; You, I own, are a Rogue: I am but an Ass.’ With an Oath exclaims B— —n, ‘All then must agree, What’s halved between you, is united in me.’129

With the settling of the dust, Brandon’s fortunes would quickly rise again. He would soon return through the stage door, becoming someone upon whom Harris again depended and eventually amassing a personal debt of £1,331 2s 6d, mostly from failing to pay anything towards production charges for years of his own benefit performances. The arrival of Charles Kemble, to negotiate the takeover of the Garden in the 1820s, would prompt Henry to offer to pay off the debt – ‘the only way to prevent the loss’, or so he would claim. The gesture would be provoked by

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the prospect of Brandon’s dismissal. In his concern to keep the elderly servant at the theatre, Henry would write with tireless loyalty: I am convinced that confined to his place of box, book, and housekeeper, his services are invaluable to any theatre, his zeal and attention being constant and unremitting.130

But was Henry’s anxiety a sign of affection, or fear? Brandon’s preservation became something to be achieved at any cost – and fondness only stretches so far, particularly with a character as difficult to love as him. With his knowledge of past dealings at the Garden, Brandon became someone to keep content, an old man to appease and indulge. And if this meant shutting him up in a place that he came to view as his home, so be it. That would suit both of them. But what did Brandon know about the fire? This we will never know. As for Thomas Harris, if he was haunted by the suspicions that he had profited from the fire, or if he was wounded by his abandonment, his low whisper of a voice would reveal little. His countryside retreat beside the winding river Colne became an obvious haven for a man seeking forgetfulness. He would become a visitor to the Garden only on rare occasions. Directing operations from the countryside of Middlesex, he would use the legally trained Henry as his envoy, no longer visible as the centre around which the community of the theatre revolved. As his ‘Substitute’, Henry became the messenger who would communicate his father’s decisions, whether on the reading of submissions, the casting of plays or the negotiation of performers’ contracts.131 Perhaps it was illness, or a lack of energy in old age, that would shrink Harris’s life inside the boundaries of Bellemonte House; or maybe it was pride, a refusal to bow to those Tory loungers who had held his friendship so cheaply. Nevertheless, Henry would respond to one personal betrayal. He would write to remind the owner of the Monthly Mirror – Thomas Hill – of old friendships thrown away, as the periodical tried to reignite public anger after a hard-fought peace had been established at the Garden: Sir Having formerly had the Pleasure of dining with you, & knowing your Intimacy with Mr. Kemble & your long acquaintance with my Father, I am induced to write to you on the Subject of the Article in your Mirror of last Month, relative to the Annual Boxes at Covt Gardn theatre, which I cannot but suppose from its mischievous Tendency to have been inserted without your Knowledge … Every thing was considered as finally settled – When in your Monthly Mirror the Contrary is hinted at & the Proprietors treated as ‘Egregious Fools’.132

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Having spun the sword of the press for decades, Harris’s fate was death by a thousand cuts. The press had always been a challenge to anyone who sought control. It was a piecemeal industry with a quick turnover of small entrepreneurs who bought and sold for any number of motives, and not simply for personal advantage or profit. But whatever support or consensus of opinion that Harris had managed to shape in the last century counted for little as newspaper owners came and went, and loyalties were forgotten. Even Bate Dudley – the owner whose presence provided a rare, lasting connection to that world for Harris, and whose power had been able to draw a steady supply of government money for more than two decades – had since departed London. With this loss of influence, Harris’s disappearance would enter its final stage. His life would become painfully moulded into one resembling that endured by Tiberius Caesar – reclusive, increasingly isolated and with time to contemplate the loss of his good reputation which he prized above all else.133 Sitting thoughtfully in the privacy of his study, he would also have the time to calculate the daily cost of the riots and to brood upon problems that he would never conquer. Never fully regaining control of the Garden, he would become exposed to the vicious economic inflation of the Napoleonic War years when he needed record profits. Waiting many years, as desperation took hold, he would again try to raise the prices. The instant disgust of the audience would provoke boos and hisses, prick memories of the past and lead to the idea being abandoned once more, this time quickly.134 But the money would still have to be found, somehow. Notes 1 For how the incendiary was imagined in the period, see Philanthropos (pseud.), Reflections Occasioned by the Frequency of Fires, pp. 9–10; Thomas Gray to William Mason, 1 December 1759, in Toynbee and Whibley (eds), Correspondence of Thomas Gray, II, 654. 2 Recollections from Leeds Mercury, 4 March 1809; Literary Panorama, 6 (1809), col. 92. The new Drury Lane opened on 12 March 1794. 3 Dickens, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, II, 36; Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, pp. 193–6. 4 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 218. 5 Common causes of fire in the period are listed in Philanthropos (pseud.), Reflections Occasioned by the Frequency of Fires, pp. 22–4. 6 Lloyd’s Evening Post and London Packet, 23–25 July 1794; London Chronicle, 24–26 July 1794.

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7 On the fire at Powis House, Harris’s seventeenth-century mansion, see clipping dated 8 February 1794, FL Scrapbook A.4.6; Whitehall Evening Post, 13–15 February 1794; World, 25 April 1794. 8 The ploy is nicely illustrated by Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, pp. 269–72. 9 Reports of arrest and trial from clippings dated 24 September 1808, 29 October 1808, FL Scrapbook A.4.9, unpaginated. 10 Unless specified, details of the 1808 fire and its context are taken from the following, listed in order of publication date: Morning Post, 21–23 September 1808; Morning Chronicle, 21–24 and 30 September 1808; Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 24 September 1808; Examiner, 25 September 1808, 621–2, 624; newspaper clippings from FL Scrapbook A.4.9; Smeeton, Smeeton’s Authentic Statement. 11 Owen, Owen’s New Book of Roads, pp. 10–11. 12 Clipping dated 16 February 1792, FL Scrapbook A.4.6, unpaginated. 13 Dialogue taken from FL Scrapbook W.a.40, unpaginated; originally published in Monthly Mirror, 4 (1808), 387. 14 On risking one’s life as a pedestrian in London, see Butler (ed.), A Regency Visitor, p. 87; ‘Da der Eigentümer also nur auf neunundneunzig Jahre Besitz im basten Falle rechnen kann, baut er auch so leicht als möglich, und dies hat zur Folge, daß man öfters in den Londner Häusern seines Lebens nicht sicher ist. So fiel denn auch diese Nacht, ganz nahe von mir in St James Street, ein gar nicht altes Gebäude plötzlich wie ein Kartenhaus ein und nahm auch die Hälfte des andern noch mit sich’, Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen, II, 137. 15 Rejected Addresses, pp. 85–6, 89, 91. 16 Rowlandson, Chaos is Come Again! 17 On architectural changes and their weakening of the fabric, see, for example, clipping dated 4 October 1808, FL Scrapbook A.4.9, unpaginated. 18 Quotation from Pasquin (pseud.), Poems by Anthony Pasquin, II, 230. 19 Financial detail from Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXV, 77. 20 Boaden heard Kemble’s lament during a visit of condolence; Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, p. 516. A selection of Kemble’s research can be seen in FL MS W.b.577. 21 BL Add. MS 31975; comment written across the journal’s space for 20–22 September 1808. 22 [Harris], A Plan for the Improvement of Theatrical and Other Public Entertainments, and pamphlet dated 29 September 1784, FL Scrapbook A.4.3; clipping dated 1785, FL Scrapbook A.4.4, unpaginated. 23 On the beginnings of life insurance, see White, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 182. 24 As one wag put it in 1812, you might as well ask ‘Who makes the quartern loaf and Luddites rise?/Who fills the butchers’ shops with large blue flies?’ Rejected Addresses, p. 3.

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25 Philanthropos (pseud.), Reflections Occasioned by the Frequency of Fires, p. x; Holland, Resolutions of the Associated Architects, p. 17. 26 Leeds Mercury, 4 March 1809; Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, II, 358– 60; Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, pp. 204–5. 27 Examiner, 25 September 1808, 622. On the political affiliation of this newspaper – and its eventual support of the OP cause against the theatre – see Baer, Theatre and Disorder, pp. 46, 108, 109, 110. 28 Figures from RA GEO/MAIN/21577; transcript of TH to the Duke of Bedford, 27 May 1817, FL Scrapbook A.4.14, unpaginated. At the time of the fire, the total amount of insurance on the theatre was only £40,000, not including the cover on other properties leased by Harris to extend the original site of the theatre, as in the case of the Shakespeare tavern; see MS report no. 795731 dated 29 September 1808, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/08. 29 For a list of the policies, see MS report no. 795731 in LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/08. The duties paid into the stamp office by the Sun fire office in a list for 1825 and 1826 – as recorded in LMA CLC/B/192/F/025/ MS38874 – dwarfed all those of its rivals. Pearson in Insuring the Industrial Revolution claims that large concerns were commonly insured with several firms because ‘all fire offices imposed ceilings on the amount insured on any one risk’ (p. 301). In addition, a number of London insurance offices specialized which would have limited Harris’s options – the Hand-in-Hand, for example, insured ‘houses only’ while the Union was ‘for Goods only’; see The Royal Kalendar […] for the Year 1795, p. 232. 30 See Holland, Resolutions of the Associated Architects; Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXVI, 40. 31 Holland, Resolutions of the Associated Architects, pp. 18, 25. 32 Ibid., pp. 19–20. For obvious reasons, Holland’s tests do not seem to have been reported in the press until after the event; at any rate, such pre-test reports are not present in the Burney Collection of newspapers housed in the British Library. Croot, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume XII, pp. 48–51, describes the development of Hans Town. 33 Holland, Resolutions of the Associated Architects, pp. 57–66. 34 FL MS W.b.436, fo. 27 – an account book from the theatre for the season 1793–94 – records a payment of £95 to Mr Hanson for ‘Fire Plate’. 35 Of course, these disturbances known as the OP riots were sparked by a number of issues, not simply an increase in admission prices; see Baer, Theatre and Disorder, pp. 22, 26–7. However, the poster Old Prices for Ever Huzza! shows that this issue was at the heart of the dispute. 36 The Rebellion, p. 80, with italics from text. The rumour that the theatre had been wilfully set on fire – with little or no financial loss to the owners – is touched upon in Smeeton, Smeeton’s Authentic Statement, p. 13; The Rebellion, pp. 66, 80; Morning Chronicle, 22 and 30 September 1808; clipping dated 4 October 1808, FL Scrapbook A.4.9, unpaginated. 37 Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, p. 519. 38 Smeeton, Smeeton’s Authentic Statement, p. 5.

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39 Ibid., p. 10. 40 Clipping dated 20 September 1808, FL Scrapbook A.4.9. 41 Smeeton, Smeeton’s Authentic Statement, p. 5. 42 Philanthropos (pseud.), Reflections Occasioned by the Frequency of Fires, p. 10, with italics from text. 43 In Reason Versus Passion, p. 35, raw totals for the amounts received and paid – attributed to the Garden’s treasurer Richard Hughes – show that in the four seasons leading up to the fire, the theatre operated at a loss in two of them. 44 See the manuscript sent to the Bedford Office with the title ‘Mr Harris’, dated 17 February 1796, and signed by Henry Holland; LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/06. 45 Clipping dated ‘Aug 1796’, FL Scrapbook A.4.6; ‘Old Plans’, no. 2, undated, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/10; ‘Plan of Covt Garden Theatre and the adjacent Houses Burnt down – Tuesday Sepr 20th 1808’, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/07. This primary material can be contextualized with Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, XXXV, 88–93; Leacroft, The Development of the English Playhouse, pp. 128, 138–9, 315. 46 Clipping dated 1796, FL Scrapbook A.4.7, unpaginated. 47 Quotation from Kelly, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, p. 199. For the discussion at the 1832 inquiry, of the relationship between the size of a theatre’s auditorium and the popularity of the venue, see Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, nos 295, 601, 1521, 2366, 3022, 3694–5. Modern writers who repeat the idea that large auditoriums were impractical and unpopular in this period include Hume, ‘Theatre as property in eighteenth-century London’, p. 41; Milhous and Hume, ‘Playwrights’ remuneration in eighteenth-century London’, pp. 26–7; Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, pp. 68–9; and O’Toole in A Traitor’s Kiss who claims that this version of Drury Lane theatre was ‘disastrously expensive and unworkable’, p. 431. 48 J. P. Kemble quoted by the actor Charles Mathews in Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, no. 3022. 49 A financial breakdown of the 1794–95 season, for both theatres, appears as Appendix 3 accompanied by the criteria used in such calculations. Harris’s estimate of the daily operating costs, ‘exclusive of any Interest for the capital, and of all sums paid to Renters, Mortgagees &c &c’, is from FL MS W.a.137. 50 There is much evidence of Harris’s attempts to renegotiate the terms of his lease in response to proprietorial or financial problems. See, for example, MS dated 17 February 1796, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/06; MS dated 29 September 1808, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/08; the account from the Bedford Office by Christopher Hardy, 10 January 1831, LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/12. 51 For instance, see the transcript of TH to the Duke of Bedford, 10 June 1817, and the accompanying correspondence in FL Scrapbook A.4.14, unpaginated.

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52 MS dated 29 September 1808, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/08, records the eventual negotiations involving TH, J. P. Kemble and Adam after the fire. 53 An exception was when the owner of the lease on the Struggler’s tavern – which had considerably longer to run, until 1819 – made a claim at the Court of King’s Bench to recover rights to the site. Harris’s advocate, William Garrow, tried unsuccessfully to make light of the claim, described by him as a ‘few months interest’; FL Scrapbook A.16.3, fo. 111. One account by the lessee Donne – Law and Justice Against Oppression! – claimed that the theatre’s owners assumed that his land could be easily seized. 54 Compare the neat version of the ‘Plan of Covt Garden Theatre and the adjacent Houses Burnt down – Tuesday Sepr 20th 1808’ in LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/07 – the title on the reverse side is in TH’s handwriting – with BL Maps.Crace XIII (no. 48) produced by the surveyor D. Davis (dated 20 September 1808). 55 TH to William Adam, 22 June 1809, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/08. 56 On this episode, see ‘Remarks and Abstract of the Value of sundry Properties of the Duke of Bedford situate in Hart Street Bow Street and Covent Garden if it should be required to be added to the rebuilding Covent Garden Theatre – destroyed by fire in September 1808’, fos 7–8, in LMA E/ BER/CG/E/08/10/07 as well as the following manuscripts in LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/08: Henry Harris to Thomas Pearce Brown, undated; Edward Barlow to Brown and Gotobed, undated; ‘Mr Gubbins’ report on the Rent of Covent Garden theatre & the Insurance on the Shakespeare’; TH to William Adam, 22 June 1809; Edward Barlow to Thomas Pearce Brown, 26 June 1809. 57 On Harris’s efforts to consult the Bedford Office, see ‘The Proposal of Thos. Harris Esq.’, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/03; MS dated 28 September 1791, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/05. 58 RA GEO/MAIN/21577; transcript of TH to the Duke of Bedford, 27 May 1817, in FL Scrapbook A.4.14: ‘Our rent has been raised from £900 to more than £2000 per an.’ 59 Strachey and Fulford (eds), The Greville Memoirs, IV, 247–8. 60 On Bedford, Fox and the ‘ministry of all the talents’, see the ODNB entries along with Mitchell, Charles James Fox, pp. 222, 224. 61 Penny, ‘The Whig cult of Fox’, pp. 100, 103; the ‘Reform’ section in [Hone], The Political House that Jack Built, unpaginated. 62 TH to William Adam, 22 June 1809, LMA E/BER/CG/E/08/10/08. 63 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, II, 357, repeats the idea that Harris’s health deteriorated around this time and claims that ‘a paralytic disorder’ eventually ‘conducted him to his grave’. 64 Henry Harris to Thomas Pearce Brown, undated, LMA E/BER/ CG/E/08/10/08. 65 Butler (ed.), A Regency Visitor, p. 244; ‘Diese Roheit des englischen Publikums ist in der Tat sehr eigentümlich’, Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen, II, 447.

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66 FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 14, with italics from text; Farquharson (transcript), The Speech of Sir Vicary Gibbs, p. 7; Baer, Theatre and Disorder, p. 33. 67 Baer in Theatre and Disorder claims ‘the question of why the government did not intervene more forcefully to help him [J. P. Kemble] thus needs answering’ (p. 92) before offering some speculative explanations (pp. 92–9). 68 The Rebellion, p. 52. 69 Sir Vicary Gibbs to the Earl of Dartmouth, 24 October 1809, Dartmouth Papers, Staffordshire Record Office, D(W) 1778/I.ii/1738; Baer, Theatre and Disorder, p. 98. 70 See George and Isaac Cruikshank, King John and John Bull (November 1809). 71 ‘Memorial from a part of Covent Garden Parish’, 23 October 1809, NA HO 42/99/868, fos 868–70; Harcourt (ed.), The Diaries and Correspondence of the Right Hon. George Rose, II, 388, 410–11, 419. 72 For descriptions of the theatre on jubilee night, see FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 95; Examiner, 29 October 1809, 696; Stockdale, The Covent Garden Journal, pp. 216–18. 73 On the Crown and Anchor as a meeting point for radicals, including those involved in the OP affair, see Hone, For the Cause of Truth, pp. 26, 30, 158, 165, 171, 173; Baer, Theatre and Disorder, pp. 131, 145, 147. Secret Service correspondence in NA HO 42 frequently recognizes this tavern’s importance for republican malcontents; see, for example, HO 42/30, fo. 230. 74 Gatrell, City of Laughter, pp. 486–7. 75 Biographical details from ODNB, along with the following on Bone: note dated 3 November 1809, BL Place Coll., Set 59 (2), unpaginated; Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph, pp. 41, 59; White, London in the Nineteenth Century, p. 408; White, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 456. Further details on Cobbett from: Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph, pp. 76–8; Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 498. As an indication of Place’s influence as a confidential adviser, he notes in a diary entry for 29 December [1810?]: ‘in the evening to see Mr Cobbett … met there Ld Cochrane, Cochrane Johnson [sic] … Clifford & another person – after some general conversation Cobbett took me up stairs, where we had some further conversation respecting his being prosecuted for a libel by the Atty Genl – I agreed with Cobbett that he ought to conduct his own defence if brought to Trial’; BL Place Coll., Set 59 (1), unpaginated. 76 Thale (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, pp. xv, xvi, xxi. 77 Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph, p. 55. 78 On the OP conflict as a political one involving members of the Westminster committee, and others sympathetic to the radical cause who used the Crown and Anchor, see minutes of meetings (for example, 7, 13, 23 November 1809) in BL Place Coll. Set 59 (2), unpaginated; William Pleydell-Bouverie to Jacob Pleydell-Bouverie, 16 and 18 December 1809, Wiltshire and Swindon Archives, 1946/4/2B/34; clipping dated 4 November, FL Scrapbook A.16.4,

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fo. 113; Morning Post, 9 October 1812; Stephens, Memoirs of John Horne Tooke, II, 373–4; Hunt, Memoirs of Henry Hunt, II, 385–7; Hone, For the Cause of Truth, pp. 183–5 (quotation from p. 185, italics from text); Russell, ‘Playing at revolution’, p. 17; Baer, Theatre and Disorder, pp. 26–7, 115–16, 122, 129, 147. Baer rightly concludes that ‘based on patterns of attendance it would seem that the OP Committee was dominated by members of the Westminster Committee’ (p. 122). 79 Worrall in Theatric Revolution touches upon the idea that these riots were concerned with both specific grievances against Covent Garden theatre and ‘a more generalized political struggle’ (pp. 58–9) as does Russell in ‘Playing at revolution’ who claims that the riots were a ‘means of directing attention to wider political issues’ (p. 18). 80 Morning Chronicle, 22 September 1809. 81 There are many examples of short-lived theatrical riots – with many different causes – from the long eighteenth century; O’Toole, A Traitor’s Kiss, notes five riots that occurred at Drury Lane theatre alone (p. 115). Russell, ‘Playing at revolution’, concludes that the OP riots were ‘part of a long established tradition’ (p. 20). 82 Rioters’ awareness of operating under this protection is illustrated by shouts of ‘No Magistrates, no Police in a Theatre!’ as reported in a clipping dated 19 September, FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 13. In a similar spirit, Bull (pseud.), Covent Garden Theatre!!, claimed that, during the riots, ‘the most illegal acts have been committed by the Police, who have forcibly seized and dragged persons from the Theatre for doing what they have a right to do – expressing their disapprobation’ (p. 5). 83 Stockdale, The Covent Garden Journal, pp. 157, 192. 84 Constitutional Review, 11 October 1809; Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, no. 970. Even though George Colman (the Younger), in the role of ‘Examiner of all theatrical entertainments’, only admitted the censorship of the word ‘reform’ in the parliamentary inquiry of 1832, the point remains valid for the period of Harris’s management. 85 Pigott, A Political Dictionary, pp. 135, 148. 86 Thelwall, The Tribune, III, 309. On the fate of Thelwall, see Johnston, Unusual Suspects, pp. 23–33. 87 A Genuine Collection of O. P. Songs, p. 16; Tegg, The Rise, Progress, and Termination of the O. P. War, p. 93. 88 [Holcroft and Hazlitt], Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, II, 71, 206–7; III, 270. 89 Dibdin, The Reminiscences, I, 244, provides one example of the King’s proprietorial manner while watching a patriotic spectacle that he had helped to shape after making suggestions to Harris. The aristocrats who attended the royal family on such nights were commonly listed in the newspapers of the next day; see, for example, clipping dated 22 January 1796, FL Scrapbook A.4.7.

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90 Butler (ed.), A Regency Visitor, p. 194; ‘Alle wahre Bildung ist meistens nur politischer Natur, und der politische Partei— wie der modische Kastengeist gehen auch auf die Gesellschaft mit über’, Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen, II, 350. Edward Barlow’s statement, 25 June 1821, HL MS Thr 149 (9). In A Traitor’s Kiss, O’Toole contrasts Drury Lane as ‘the Opposition’s theatre’ belonging to the Whigs with the Garden as the government’s, ‘especially in the long period after 1783 when William Pitt the Younger became prime minister’ (p. 117). 91 Clippings dated 23 September, 12 and 28 October in FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fos 25, 57, 101; George and Isaac Cruikshank, King John and John Bull; Liberty of the Subject, with italics from text; Old Prices for Ever Huzza! On Burdett and his supporters, see Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph, pp. 53, 70. 92 Unless specified, the material on Harris’s course of action is based upon TH to Edward Barlow, 3 November 1809, TM PN2596.L7.C8. 93 The government’s belated legal support for the management can be seen in Gibbs’s judicial review on 20 November 1809 on behalf of the theatre, which was an attempt to gauge the necessary grounds for prosecution; reported in Farquharson (transcript), The Speech of Sir Vicary Gibbs. For Garrow’s receipt of free orders as a friend of the Harris family, see TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fo. 104; Memorandum of 10,993 Orders (1829), FL Scrapbook A.4.17, unpaginated. 94 As well as in Harris’s letter to Barlow, Gale Jones is listed as an opponent of the management in Reason Versus Passion, p. 60. On Jones, see Thale (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, p. xviii; Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph, pp. 66–7, 78. 95 The use of the Statesman can be seen in the minutes of the OP committee dated 23 December 1809, BL Place Coll., Set 59 (1), unpaginated; its role in the support of the OP cause is discussed by Baer, Theatre and Disorder, pp. 110–12. This newspaper was also involved in the collection of a fund to defend those prosecuted by the theatre; see clipping dated 4 November, FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 113. 96 TH to Edward Barlow, 3 November 1809, with underlining from text, TM PN2596.L7.C8. 97 Biographical details on Kemble taken from clipping dated 5 October 1809, FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 42; ODNB. 98 TH to Edward Barlow, 3 November 1809, TM PN2596.L7.C8. 99 Quotation from clipping dated 6 November, FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 115. 100 Unless specified, the trial and the events leading up to it have been recreated using the following, listed in the order of appearance: Clifford for Ever!, pp. 3–4, 7, 10, 26–7; O. P. The Interesting Trial at Large of H. Clifford, pp. 3–4, 13, 15–16, 25; George and Isaac Cruikshank, [Clifford versus Brandon]; Farquharson (transcript), The Speech of Sir Vicary Gibbs, pp. 18– 19; Blanchard and Ramsey (transcript), The Whole Proceedings on Trial of an Action Brought by Henry Clifford, pp. v, vii, 16, 19–22, 25, 29, 46, 51, 63– 4, 68, 92, 104–5, 107–11, 115–17. All subsequent quotations are referenced.

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101 For the attendance of Place, see Baer, Theatre and Disorder, p. 120; for the attendance of Kemble and Henry Harris, see O. P. The Interesting Trial at Large of H. Clifford, pp. 3–4. Kemble’s attendance at court is also suggested by George and Isaac Cruikshank, [Clifford versus Brandon]. 102 For the details of this portrayal, see Gillray, Counsellor O. P.; Vassall, Further Memoirs of the Whig Party, pp. 56–7; Russell, ‘Playing at revolution’, p. 17; Baer, Theatre and Disorder, pp. 145–7; ODNB; Scott, Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott, I, 156, with italics from text. 103 Such treatment reported in clipping dated 21 September, FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 15. 104 Conversation reconstructed from Stockdale, The Covent Garden Journal, p. 123; Blanchard and Ramsey (transcript), The Whole Proceedings on Trial of an Action Brought by Henry Clifford, p. 92. 105 Baer, Theatre and Disorder, pp. 85, 100, 137. 106 Conversation reconstructed from Blanchard and Ramsey (transcript), The Whole Proceedings on Trial of an Action Brought by Henry Clifford, pp. 21–2, 46. 107 See, for example, the poster ‘Whereas great Riot and Disturbances have taken place at Covent Garden Theatre for the avowed purpose of compelling the Proprietors to lower the prices of admission’ dated 10 October 1809, FL PN2596.L7 C3 L6. 108 Blanchard and Ramsey (transcript), The Whole Proceedings on Trial of an Action Brought by Henry Clifford, p. 116. 109 On special juries, see Bentham, The Elements of the Art of Packing as Applied to Special Juries, pp. 30–4, 85, 203, which was partly written in the same year as Clifford v. Brandon. Carlile and Bentham quoted in Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph, p. 219, with italics from text. 110 Black Dwarf, 21 January 1818, col. 44. 111 Details on Mansfield taken from DNB and ODNB. 112 Francis Place to Mr [William] Glindon, 1 December 1809, BL Place Coll., Set 59 (1), unpaginated. As a way of authenticating Place’s information, the five special jurors who attended the trial – according to Clifford for Ever!, p. 3 – also appear on this list. 113 Blanchard and Ramsey (transcript), The Whole Proceedings on Trial of an Action Brought by Henry Clifford, pp. 63–4. 114 Ibid., pp. 104, 105. 115 O. P. The Interesting Trial at Large of H. Clifford, pp. 3, 27. 116 Blanchard and Ramsey (transcript), The Whole Proceedings on Trial of an Action Brought by Henry Clifford, p. 117. 117 George and Isaac Cruikshank, [Clifford versus Brandon]. 118 Blanchard and Ramsey (transcript), The Whole Proceedings on Trial of an Action Brought by Henry Clifford, p. 116. 119 On the resurgence of violence in the theatre after Clifford’s victory, see Baer, Theatre and Disorder, pp. 32–3. The handbill – ‘facts’ – is included in BL Place Coll., Set 59 (1), unpaginated.

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120 Report from Morning Chronicle, 16 December 1809, FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 170; The New Grand O. P. Dance. 121 Clipping dated 17 October 1809, FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fo. 69, with italics from text. There are surviving examples of counter-propaganda from the theatre’s personnel – such as the handbill Who is Brandon? in HL TS 313.1.5 (p. 23) – but these sank under the weight of the print against them. 122 Townsend, The Lives of Twelve Eminent Judges, I, 257, 260. Between 1808 and 1810, the Attorney-General initiated forty-two actions for seditious libel, compared with just fourteen in the years 1800–07. 123 Rowlandson, Libel Hunters on the Look Out. 124 Black Dwarf, 28 January 1818, cols 60–1. 125 Biographical details on Kemble taken from the following, listed in order of appearance: entry for 14 December 1809, BL Place Coll., Set 59 (1); FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fos 164, 167–8; Stockdale, The Covent Garden Journal, pp. 132–7; Baer, Theatre and Disorder, p. 35; RA GEO/MAIN/21571–80; BDA (1982), VIII, 358, 360, 365; Broad Hints at Retirement, an Ode to a Tragedy King, p. 13; Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, p. 576; cover of BL Place Coll., Set 59 (1), unpaginated. 126 RA GEO/MAIN/21571–80. 127 For Clifford’s death on 22 April 1813, see Baer, Theatre and Disorder, p. 247; ODNB. Kemble resigned from managing and acting at Covent Garden theatre at the end of the 1811–12 season and he returned for a first performance on 15 January 1814; BDA (1982), VIII, 358, 360. 128 Clippings dated 15 December 1809, FL Scrapbook A.16.4, fos 164–6; episode referred to in Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, p. 547. 129 Cutting from Splitting the Difference; or, the Ready Reckoner, FL Scrapbook A.16.4. 130 TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fos 86–7. For the defence of Brandon’s character, also see Henry Harris to William Harrison, 21 July 1823; and Henry Harris to J. S. Willett, 1 August 1823, in FL Scrapbook A.4.15, unpaginated. 131 See Henry Harris to ‘My dear Madm’, 22 July [n. d.], HL TS 941.5F, III, 312–13; Henry Harris to Mrs [Frances?] Alsop, 10 September [1815], HL TS 940.6, IV, 124–5; TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fo. 144. Henry’s role as his father’s agent, with a 1/12 share of the business, is also documented in RA GEO/MAIN/21576. 132 Henry Harris to Thomas Hill, 23 August [1810], HL MS Thr 467, box 47. On the subject of this letter, see Monthly Mirror, 8 (1810), 63. 133 Shotter, Tiberius Caesar, pp. 3, 61, 62, 70. 134 See clipping dated 21 July 1815, FL Scrapbook A.16.5, fo. 83.

5

Selling a life

It was said that Harris was insolvent, and the theatre could no longer pay its rent. During those lean days of 1817, the treasury was only surviving through trust, with everyone believing that the Garden was too important to fail. With that in mind, the story put about the piazzas made Harris feel vulnerable and exposed. And when he heard that it had come from the Duke of Bedford, he feared the worst. From such an authority, rumours could become self-fulfilling, leading nervous creditors to demand the return of their money – demands that he would not be able to fulfil. For Harris, such a slur against his reputation – as a dependable and trustworthy man of business – was slander. His keen sense of resentment against the sixth Duke, which had festered during the rebuilding of the theatre, meant that those reports nettled him all the more. In response, Harris wrote a letter to Bedford that dripped with anger. Accusing him of being a malicious gossip, he claimed that his behaviour amounted to ‘persecution towards a tenant’. Harris’s fame for politeness nurtured through decades of business – with its careful consideration for the feelings of others while never betraying sentiments that could upset – became in danger of being forfeited through this one moment of impotent anger. It was, for someone who carefully deferred to aristocratic patrons, a huge reversal of character and one that he quickly regretted and tried to excuse. More surprisingly, for someone as guarded as Harris, it betrayed an anxiety about the future while under the strain of those last years. His fit of indignation was understandable, however, considering how he had struggled and succeeded in making regular payments to the Bedford Office and to his other major creditors, a fact that he made known to the Duke. In turn, Bedford felt ‘satisfaction’ at being able to ‘acquit’ himself ‘wholly of the charges’ that Harris had ‘thought fit to bring against’ him.1 He was unrepentant. Their disagreement had far-reaching consequences. Harris took risks that, in retrospect, seemed to outweigh the financial gains. Weeks later

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in September, he committed the first of a number of deceptions. For £2,625, which was only a fraction of the Garden’s debts and liabilities, he committed fraud. He gave away one of the desirable private boxes to Sir Edmund Antrobus and his friends for twenty-one years. But rather than make it known to the shareholders and the others who owned a part of everything, Harris directed John Brandon to record a fictitious payment of rent in the books each year.2 To conceal by design such dealings from other shareholders was fraudulent behaviour; to hide the liquidation of such property from other creditors was grounds for bankruptcy proceedings, especially when ‘the trader’s solvency’ and ‘honesty’ were all-important considerations.3 And Harris could not make an irrefutable case for one or the other. Such behaviour showed a return to the old habit of approaching a difficulty by ignoring legal and moral niceties. It also showed a shrewd appreciation of the value of his name. Having the reputation of a man who honoured his agreements, none of his partners looked for such sleights of hand. Fraud offered him an escape route, as its success was dependent upon appearance and the good opinion of others. Harris, like those who relied upon shady dealings to manage their debts, understood that ‘appearance is every thing in London’, as one popular author put it.4 For a short time, such practices helped him to evade the long shadow of the Fleet prison, only walking distance from the theatre down the Strand. If a debtor lost the patience of his creditors by obstructing the law, or was thought likely to abscond, or simply owed money to people with a vindictive nature, he naturally risked imprisonment. And, to initiate bankruptcy proceedings, the trader’s debt needed to be as little as £100 owed to one person or firm – along with the suspicion that he had unreasonably evaded ‘his creditors’ just demands for repayment’. At the start of an action, a potential bankrupt would have forty-two days to surrender himself to interrogation by the assignees ‘under the penalty of death and of forfeiture of his estate’. Along with the loss of everything that he owned – except for the clothes he was wearing – came a loss of ownership over his life, one way or another. If Harris defined himself by the control that he exerted over what people knew about him, then the bankrupt’s fate – of having to relinquish all ‘books, papers, and writings’ relative to the business – threatened to undermine his very sense of self.5 The Fleet, along with the King’s Bench in Southwark, housed most of the unreliable spenders of other people’s money. And there were many of them. When the curiosity of the Prince of Pückler-Muskau led him to visit the King’s Bench in the 1820s, he was greatly surprised. He saw ‘a perfect isolated world in miniature – like a not insignificant town, only

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surrounded by walls thirty feet high’. With its ‘cookshops, circulating libraries, coffee-houses, dealers, artisans of all kinds, dwellings of different degrees, even a marketplace’, he found that ‘nothing [was] wanting’. It was strangely cheerful in its busyness, in the way that prisoners carried on their normal lives with gusto. There was even a raucous game of tennis taking place, surrounded by attentive spectators who had placed a wager on the outcome.6 But this was only the view of a tourist seduced by the novelty of this home to some of the richest debtors, ‘those with access to funds that their creditors couldn’t reach’.7 Only the wily, with money hidden away, could avoid the evils of prison. For a bearable existence, prisoners needed an endless supply of ready cash to pay wardens, turnkeys and suppliers. Those able to pay, like Lord Thomas Cochrane who was imprisoned for fraud in 1814, could afford a room on the third floor with a view of the Surrey and Kentish hills, at a distance from the putrid air and drunken chaos below. With fees for just about everything, including ‘commitment fees’ of 10s 2d just for the honour of being admitted as a Bench prisoner, it was a lucrative private business and one where inmates were unprotected against every kind of swindle. The King’s Bench Marshall – William Jones – earned a net income of over £3,500 each year, enough to live like a lord. It was, therefore, dire need that drove the ceaseless activity of the King’s Bench with its hectic hustling as inmates scratched a living from the dirt of the marketplace. While being fleeced during their stay and only released when they could satisfy their creditors, it was easy to believe that some inmates had spent decades inside because of owing only a few pounds.8 For those without money, there was raggedness, hunger and confinement in suffocating squalor without the possibility of freedom; or, even worse, starvation without a shelter. In such conditions, a high number of England’s imprisoned debtors died – with one estimate of 442 people in the space of just thirteen years. Weakened by the ‘total deprivation’ of everything necessary for life, they became victims of the insanitary conditions that bred disease. When Members of Parliament investigated in 1814, they choked upon the stench of open sewers, the piles of dirt heaped up behind the prison, and the urine collected in tubs for the scavengers. One story in particular, about Samuel Roysen, deeply troubled the ministers. It showed the terrible consequences of abandoning prisoners, when some had little hope of survival. Arriving at the King’s Bench at the beginning of a bitter February, Roysen was lodged in the same room as a Mr Audley. Days later, Roysen became ill with a high fever and retired to his bed. Despite Audley’s attempts to persuade the turnkeys to help Roysen, they took no notice

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and no one came to see him. Audley’s frantic pleas to be removed from the room, for his own safety, were also ignored; for his trouble, a third inmate was thrust into the foul atmosphere of the cell. Without medical assistance or food, Roysen languished for two weeks and then died. What happened next was even more disturbing for those ministers who heard Audley tell the tale. Until Roysen’s burial, Audley would have been trapped – forced to watch the cadaver rot and decay in a cell only eleven feet by fifteen, and to breathe the contagious air – had another prisoner not taken pity and given him permission to shift his bed into another room. After the removal of the corpse, the lingering smell was so nauseating that myrrh and frankincense had to be burnt to mask it. Besides neglect, other evils stalked these gaols. If the romance of prison life had ever existed – with its friendly camaraderie between prisoners as they sipped glasses of liquor and condoled each other – it was certainly dead by this time. Instead, prisoners preyed upon each other in their lawless neighbourhood. Violence and extortion were provoked by desperation, especially after midnight when officers abandoned the prison. It was surrendered to darkness and to mob rule after the crier had called out ‘strangers, women, and children, all out’, and the officers locked the doors behind them. This was the time when skulls were fractured and bodies were bruised and punctured. To take part in the prison’s rough pleasures also risked life and limb as drunken disorder reigned. And if a debtor died, the incident was buried through a procedure that was chilling in its simplicity and its potential for abuse. Twelve prisoners were, supposedly, taken at random. They were given a shilling each to inspect the body and to report upon the cause of death to the coroner. Then, that was the end of the matter.9 As Londoners drifted in and out of prison – whether through ill-luck, visiting inmates or to buy and sell – the stark reality became common knowledge. In one calculation for 1793, upwards of 2,000 were imprisoned for debt in the country with high concentrations in London; some of whom had to wait a year before their case was heard, as the cogs of the legal machine turned slowly.10 And what was not known from experience, or from reading one of the shilling pamphlets hawked around the streets, could be discovered from the lurid stories told in London’s taverns. For some, just the thought of confinement could bring despair and the release offered by the cut-throat razor. The financial downturns and disasters of the early nineteenth century caused many men to suffer the madness that led to the murder of wives and children, and then suicide. Those debtors with more of an instinct for survival, however, would eke out a half-life, a twilight existence. They would venture outside only under the cover of darkness which gave the comfort

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of anonymity, and some protection. Bailiffs who followed the law could only capture their prey during the daylight hours. Debtors who survived in this way were called ‘once-a-week men’ or ‘Sunday-men’, only to be seen on this one day of the week when bailiffs were again barred from arresting them. A debtor might escape the prison’s walls, but he would not enjoy his liberty. If a gentleman in such difficulties tried to continue a normal life, he would be tormented. His doors would be surrounded by creditors at dawn. And if he managed to slip away, ‘a hundred eyes’ would be ‘sure to watch him … upon the parade and to meet him in every direction, and to follow him with a vindictive perseverance that never tires’. ‘The same ferocious pursuit’ of ‘the hunted debtor’ would be repeated each day.11 These were the potential consequences of failure for Harris. As early as 1811, he was looking to rid himself altogether of his ‘precarious & hazardous concern’ while worrying about his ‘numerous creditors’ who were ‘pressing very seriously for their heavy debts’. Even then, he was trying to find a way to ‘extricate’ his family, with the recognition that he would have long since joined ‘so many others to the walls of a prison’ had it not been for his Majesty’s ‘unceasing favour’.12 After so many secret deals that had stripped the theatre’s assets – deals that only helped to maintain the movement of money in and out of the business – he was still in urgent need of more funds. He could never hope to repay the outstanding debt from the rebuilding of the Garden. Time had hastened to 1819, and it was still stubbornly in excess of £60,000. Since the opening, he had made great headway in reducing it; but with failing health at eighty-one, time was swiftly running out. And the Garden’s income was becoming precarious. The yearly receipts had fallen dramatically, only scraping past the £72,000 mark, down from a comfortable £89,972 only four seasons earlier.13 Without swift action, a huge debt would be left to Henry, one that he might never have an opportunity to pay. Harris knew that his own name was reliable currency; others remained confident in his promise to pay the bearer. Henry’s metal, on the other hand, was untested. Creditors might panic.14 Harris and his son faced a unique collection of circumstances that threatened a common, predictable outcome. Every day, speculators were listed as bankrupts in the newspapers, suffered the public indignity of having every personal possession auctioned, and then stood in fear of being imprisoned depending upon the outcome. Harris had spent much of his time looking into the distance on top of the observatory on the highest point of the Bellemonte estate. The sight of the future, and Henry’s likely fate, persuaded him to take an extraordinary step.

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To clear the debts before his death, Harris accepted the destiny of the bankrupt and placed everything but the theatre into the hands of George Henry Robins, to be auctioned in the summer of 1819. His estate at Bellemonte – complete with pleasure grounds, orchards and even an ice house – was to be sold in June, followed by his library of plays in July. His bold move was intended to raise vital funds while his honour and creditworthiness continued to shelter the Garden. With that in mind, Harris tried to maintain the public confidence in him by claiming that the auctions were simply caused by a need to move to Brighton for his convalescence. It may have been famed for its health-giving spa water, as well as its fashionable hot and cold baths filled by the sea, but Harris would not end his days there. Instead, he would retire to a small cottage on Putney Heath.15 In a curious irony, this cottage was walking distance from the landmark of a lofty brick obelisk built to commemorate the ingenuity that triumphed over the threat of fire. It commemorated Hartley’s efforts to save lives through his invention of the ‘Fire Proof House’ nearby. His method of insulating rooms with sheets of iron and copper had even been admired by George III who, decades earlier, had breakfasted in the house while Hartley set fire to the room below him.16 By the time of Harris’s arrival, the excitement caused by this solution – that promised more than was ever possible – had long since passed. But the monument to Hartley must have pricked Harris’s remembrance, and made it impossible for him to shun the memories of 1809 in spite of the distance travelled. In the auction, Bellemonte failed to capture the public’s interest and it was withdrawn after failing to meet the reserve price. Similarly, Harris’s library failed to animate the city and his collection of plays ‘went at very low prices’. With some boredom, one writer dismissed the sale by observing ‘with the exception of a few Old Plays, the articles were such as may be met with in every bookseller’s shop in London’.17 Considering that these were the plays that Harris had introduced upon the stage, their popularity should have been a cause for flattery. Instead, his library was damned as trivial because of its lack of rarities; it was a collection that could have come from anywhere. But the third and final sale of Harris’s belongings excited the public’s attention because it unlocked one intriguing part of his life. The sale of the last century ‘Catalogues! Catalogues!’ the audience demanded, as the auctioneer appeared on the rostrum.18 To increase their frenzy, the wily Robins threw a small number into the crowd, what remained of the 2,000 copies.

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Crammed into his Auction Mart, they lurched and swayed wherever one promised to fall. In the ensuing scramble, many were nearly ‘upset’ – knocked from their feet – in the contest to obtain one. Cockney George was nothing if not a showman who could work a crowd. Resplendent in his bright red waistcoat, he was part salesman and part ringmaster whose stage was only a few doors away from the Garden. In time, he would become famous for selling everything and anything including such novelties as a Burmese throne and carriage, an Anatomical and Zoological Museum, an ivory model of the Taj Mahal, and even Lundy, that granite island in the Bristol Channel.19 On this day, Monday 12 July 1819, he presented something similarly unique – the first collection of theatrical portraits in England with the bulk of the pictures for sale, seventy-one lots advertised in all.20 The most remarkable thing about them, however, was their owner. Harris’s personal life had become a mystery to all but a select few. These paintings placed an intimate part of his life on public display and revealed one facet of the man whom Londoners knew only by name. Until now, this collection had been hidden away inside his private gallery in the grounds of Bellemonte, and only enjoyed by those close friends with an invitation.21 Many of the pictures were the result of his generosity towards a struggling painter. Harris had commissioned Gainsborough Dupont – the nephew of the famous artist – to paint his actors in their most famous roles, but only when he had no other work.22 It was, perhaps, a triumph of kindness over judgement. Some of Dupont’s work was not the most skilful; he often had difficulty in painting hands, and noses and lips were sometimes too thickly painted.23 But Harris’s main concern as a collector was not the appreciation of fine art, although he had been a patron of the Royal Academy.24 It was not artistry, but the subject that mattered the most to him. While not the finest examples of portraiture, these were pictures to delight his fatherly love for the theatre, and the people he loved or admired within it. When Harris visited Thomas Dibdin and saw a portrait of him within a few days of it being hung, the old man’s reaction was telling. Seeing this picture of his ‘boy’, Harris told him that it was ‘in the wrong place’ and that it should be sent to Bellemonte ‘immediately’. It was an order that filled Dibdin with pride at the thought of the company he would keep, ‘the theatrical talent of the last century’.25 At the auction house, it was suddenly possible to appreciate that these paintings had a value for Harris different to the estimates placed upon them. These once-cherished canvases now became part of Robins’s sideshow where sentimentality counted for nothing when a price was to be found.

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They were displayed for anyone to gawp at through an eye-glass, for anyone to pass judgement upon. Those who delighted in the misfortune of others saw an attempt to shun the debtor’s gaol, noting that the dirty neglect of the paintings were sure signs of want. Those interested in art appreciated the brushwork of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johan Zoffany, John Opie and Dupont, amongst others. Theatregoers saw the most famous actors of the eighteenth century in their most famous roles. Had Harris been there, he would have seen one record of his life – a celebration of his achievements as the Garden’s manager. But that was a life of long ago. In old age at Bellemonte, Harris had surrounded himself with these ghosts of the past, many of whom had died after being captured in oils. The time had come for Robins to bring everyone to attention with a smart rap of the gavel, and to make them do his bidding. Curiosity was on tiptoe. With the fall of silence, he addressed the audience with his customary patter: Ladies and Gentlemen, I have merely to inform you that this fine collection of Theatrical Portraits [is] to be sold this day without any reservation whatever: you will therefore purchase them at your own prices; but when you recollect, that such an opportunity will not occur again, I hope that the liberality of your biddings will be a proof of the high estimation with which you hold this – unrivalled – gallery of Portraits. The reason for Mr. Harris’s disposal of these pictures, is simply this: he has disposed of his seat called Belmont; and the house he has now taken at Brighton, is of so small a compass, that it does not afford him room sufficient to place six of them. However, in parting with these ‘old Favourites’ collected together at a vast expense, upon the score of friendship, and out of respect for their talents, he has not done it without much reluctance and sincere regret … It really is one of the finest collections of Theatrical Portraits ever submitted for sale in this country; in fact, there never was anything like it … We shall now, Ladies and Gentlemen, commence the sale of this unrivalled and matchless collection.

No doubt when the sale began, Robins used those tricks for which he would become infamous, such as picking bids ‘off the wall’ and having accomplices make fake bids to inflate certain prices. He also had a reputation for turning a blind eye to the public whenever a dealer showed an interest. He could orchestrate the dance of bidding to suit his own needs, or those of his customers. Halfway through this sale, though, Robins became aware that some bids were falling short. His complaint to the crowd, that he was ‘not selling these pictures but giving them away’, was more than mere patter as another one was knocked down. At the end of these bouts of modest bidding, the total reached £726 19s 6d, drawn mostly from the pockets

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of the Earl of Egremont, and the actor Charles Mathews who wanted his own theatrical gallery on Highgate Hill.26 Disappointingly, it was only a fraction of what Harris needed to stabilize the Garden’s fortunes. Perhaps Leigh & Samuel Sotheby on Waterloo Bridge Street would have been a better champion for his cause. For some, this auction only confirmed their suspicions that Robins had little knowledge about what he was selling, or how best to present it. Some bidders who thought of themselves as connoisseurs smirked at how he had placed the least valuable pictures in the most conspicuous positions. And that he had made no effort to clean them up, or to replace their chipped and broken frames, giving them the appearance of bric-à-brac. They shook their heads with self-importance at the entries in his slovenly catalogue which confused one artist with another, and placed the right actor in the wrong role. One entry even described its subject, the early eighteenth-century actor Benjamin Johnson, as ‘on the stage in 1962’.27 Knowing his limitations, Robins had added a disclaimer in the small print that stated ‘any Errors in this Catalogue shall not vitiate the Sale’.28 Harris’s choice of Robins was perhaps a decision based upon feeling rather than sound business sense. After all, Harris could have related to this self-made man of commerce whose deep-seated passion for the stage had spurred him to save Drury Lane theatre from the financial mess left behind by Sheridan.29 Moreover, Robins was a brash self-publicist who added to the theatricality of the piazza. When the stage needed a salesman, he was the obvious man. His single biggest success of the day came with Zoffany’s portrait of the famous Garrick which went for £73 10s. Harris’s ownership of this picture was understandable; any manager would have wanted to claim an affinity with him, such was his reputation. Garrick’s championing of Shakespeare had been one of the great successes of the previous century, both financially for him as the manager of Drury Lane and artistically as the leading actor of his generation. As one of the most painted faces of the eighteenth century, he was instantly recognizable even forty years after his death. But, as part of this picture’s appeal in the saleroom, very few people had seen him like this. Instead of showing Garrick in a wig and costume performing one of his popular roles, Zoffany had created an intimate portrait, bare-headed and closely shaven. To explain this, Robins told an entertaining story about how the artist had concealed himself behind a door leading to Garrick’s bedroom. Knowing that Garrick shaved his head nearly every afternoon at a certain time, Zoffany had the perfect opportunity to spy and capture him. In some ways, this picture summed up the whole sale. It gave spectators access to a secretive private life that they could never have seen otherwise.

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One portrait, lot thirty-eight, contained more than Robins’s customers could have known – even those elderly wags who had heard the stories. Painted by John Opie, it showed a handsome woman seated in a red chair (Figure 11). Onlookers would have been struck by the warmth of her sandy complexion heightened by her rich auburn hair and the touches of rouge upon her lips and cheeks. With such artifice, she seemed to have kept the bloom of youthfulness in middle age. But the crowd was also made to feel that she was not simply an object of beauty. Her dress, a black jacket with a heavy white scarf, was solemn and masculine. Instead of allowing a flourish of self-display, her wavy hair was restrained by self-discipline and formality. Her inquisitive gaze was thoughtful, as if trying to place the spectator under scrutiny.30

FIGURE 11  Detail from John Opie, [Elizabeth Inchbald]. (Courtesy of Lord Egremont, Petworth House, Sussex)

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Her name was Elizabeth Inchbald. She had once been an actress recruited by Harris from the provinces and celebrated for her beauty. Now in her sixties at the time of the sale, she was the leading female playwright of her generation, famed for her intellect and her witty observation of the human character.31 In painting her, Opie had given a glimpse of what she had been, as well as the sight of what she had become. Harris bought the picture immediately upon seeing it in 1807 when the artist’s death opened the doors of his studio for the clearance of his work.32 When she was told about the purchase, it became a red-letter day. Amelia Opie’s news brought the thrilling revelation which Elizabeth noted down twice in her private diary and which became the headline for that week’s page. Harris’s gesture of admiration helped to resurrect their friendship, after he visited Elizabeth’s lodgings to gauge her reaction.33 In the following years, he watched over this portrait – bathed in the flush of coloured light from the stained-glass windows of his mimic hermitage – much to her delight.34 In turn, Elizabeth kept one of Harris’s letters for over twenty years as her beauty faded like the ink, and she became ‘quite alone’. She preserved it during days when she feared to venture outside in the knowledge that to return home would cause crushing melancholy, ‘from the certainty of seeing no companiable Creature’.35 Mrs Inchbald and the casting couch ‘I durst not trust my feelings, and passed your door. I wish you knew my whole heart! But it has sensations that are too keen, and is obliged to take refuge in stubborn silence, or reasoning, or (if you will) compelling itself to apathy … Shall I take places for the new opera at D[rury] L[ane] on Saturday? Will you go?’ These were the lines that Elizabeth kept as the ink faded and the paper yellowed. Such impassioned lines seem out of character for a man whose days were controlled by the dry demands of business. Yet, while being conducted as business between manager and actress, their relationship often reached towards something more as Harris guided the work of his aspiring authoress.36 His attachment to her endured through decades. When faced with the smouldering ruins of the theatre, it was to Elizabeth that he immediately went for comforting words, and to confirm the worst.37 No one else would hold such power over him after seeing her audition in 1780 as the beautiful Euphrasia from Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster: a cross-dressing role where she appeared in disguise as the page Bellario.38 As an audition piece for someone who had risked his business for Jane Lessingham, it was a wise choice. Like Lessingham before her, Elizabeth knew the value of her tall, lithe, boyish figure, even choosing to appear at masquerades in male

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costume ‘with a loveliness that could but interest’, according to James Boaden.39 As the latest belle at the Garden, she became conscious of the time Harris spent studying her appearance, whether to find fault with her hair or simply to laugh at the spectacle of her dressed as Wat Dreary, one of the down-at-heel highwaymen from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. Tellingly, in the first few months of her employment, she was ‘surprised with a new Dress’ to give her beauty the maximum effect in the role of Lady Frances Touchwood. Dressing Elizabeth to enhance her prettiness may not have been solely for the enjoyment of the crowd, as hinted at in her diary.40 Whether Harris deserved his reputation of being susceptible to female beauty or not, she was certainly aware of her influence upon him.41 That she was ‘conscious of the beauty of her person’, as one old friend claimed, is revealed by her recording of encounters where men took more than ordinary notice of her. She thrived upon attention. Upon hearing that she was mentioned in the Morning Post’s ‘list of Actors calld Beautiful’, she sent for a copy and proudly saw herself included. She was also conscious that ‘the success of an actor depends on the partiality of a Manager’, even before arriving at the Garden.42 Consequently, to cast her as a vulnerable actress, alongside Harris as a disturbing predator eager to exploit his position of authority, would underestimate the power that she could consciously exert.43 It would also simplify a complex relationship with dark recesses that are only faintly illuminated by the evidence that has survived. Her approach to that first meeting with Harris is perhaps best gauged by her letter that autumn to Tate Wilkinson, her former manager. After Wilkinson reluctantly parted with her – at one point he absolutely refused her request to leave – Elizabeth wrote to him with her news.44 With the safety of distance between them, she felt free to toy with his emotions. In a letter that could have been written by Kate Hardcastle – the scheming coquette from She Stoops to Conquer – Elizabeth presented herself in a fit of blushing bashfulness designed to revive his affection. On the road to London, she wrote: Sir Your Letter arrived safe and oh tis well it did, for too sure had it fallen into any hand but my own, blasted forever must have been my fair fame – I have not done Blushing at the contents yet – however, as it has contributed to the Beauty of my Complexion, you may send me such another when it suits you – but pray let me get to London first [or?] stain the purity of this Sweet Retreat – I am so very happy in my retirement that I have not even a Wish to come even to you … every one of my acquaintance says Mrs. Jackson’s Little Boy Lays between Mr. Lewis & you, which means in the English owes its Being to one of you. You perhaps may judge to which –45

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Despite the many diaries that she has left behind – with their short, cryptic messages – this letter is rare for its flaunting of bawdy playfulness. However, her admission a few months later that she wrote ‘a Comical Letter to Mr. Harris’ suggests that this mischievousness was not addressed to Wilkinson alone.46 Such epistles would have surprised someone familiar with her reputation in middle age as the austere authoress who toiled to gain financial independence and recognition as a woman of letters. If so, comfort can be taken from the fact that she encouraged endless speculation during her time in London, where one opinion about her contradicted the next. Some described her as being ‘cold as ice’. For others, she was an exceptional beauty – with a face ‘Beautiful in effect, and beautiful in every feature’ – who could cause men to expire in the raptures of lovemaking. And for every person who recognized that she was stubborn, headstrong and feisty, another saw her as hesitant and charmingly childlike as she stuttered uncontrollably when nervous.47 Had they been able to read her diaries written during her later ascetic life, only her unpredictability would have been apparent. While living in a single room, with the shutters closed to deny the world, she experienced moments of childlike abandon – such as wandering the streets at night with her friend and her ‘little boy’ to enjoy the illicit thrill of rapping at doors and running away.48 To try and decipher these cryptic notebooks with their tiny, cramped handwriting is to confront the difficulty of piecing together the life of someone who did not want to be known. She even chose to commit her manuscript memoirs, along with old letters, to the flames rather than publish them. Her decision to reduce them to ashes was prudent, if the reactions of publishers who read the manuscripts (with their revelations about Harris no doubt) can be taken as a guide. In ‘a well-remembered competition between the publishers’, Phillips of St Paul’s church yard offered her £1,000 without seeing a single line of them, but then flatly refused them. One major publisher after another nervously declined the manuscripts, including the Longmans ‘from timidity’. Her response to questions about when they would appear – ‘Would you have me mur-dered?’ – may not simply have been to whet the curiosity of her listeners. The possible consequences can be gauged by the reaction of her friend Dr Poynter to the question of what to do with the scripts: ‘Do it NOW — — 4 volumes destroyed.’49 Her final decision, ‘from a reluctance to give pain’, partly responded to a peculiarly modish anxiety. In a revealing confession, she told her close friend John Taylor, ‘I have had my Memoirs in four Volumes for years lying by me … yet though you charge me with loving money, I

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never hesitated when I conceived my reputation was in the balance.’50 For the middle classes, ‘respectability’ was becoming a way to assert one’s worth that was only possible through jealously guarding one’s privacy.51 Sheridan’s popular play The School for Scandal presented the importance of concealing your affairs from the world; their exposure was an ordeal for his characters to endure and for his audience to laugh at, uneasily. And to command respect for having moral excellence was no easy task in a society that thrived upon scandals where other peoples’ reputations were murdered. In the 1790s, readers savoured the gossip columns – to be found in such titles as the Sun and the Star – that hinted at people’s shame using initials and euphemisms. For Elizabeth, there may have been no real alternative but to burn this intimate record of her past, whether or not it was too hot to handle because publishers were unwilling to make an enemy out of Harris. By the time that she had started to write her memoirs in 1795, she had already traded celebrity for privacy after becoming disillusioned with the life of an actress. But in retreating from the public eye, she whetted the curiosity of London and suffered the same fate as Harris. Gossips and hacks endlessly wondered about her. In particular, their imaginations played upon the different ways in which she might have been first seduced. A biography appeared in the Thespian Magazine that fantasized about Elizabeth being a newly arrived country girl in London, irresistible, vulnerable and alone. In it, she escapes from the entrapment of one lodging house after another, under the menacing leers of ‘a corpulent elderly woman … a procuress’ and a coachman who tells everyone to ‘make the most of her’. Boaden, her first genuine biographer, had to warn his readers against using Elizabeth to heat their imaginations, aware that such tales were popular. When she arrived in London seeking fame, she had not been sixteen, or a friendless stranger, or ‘in the greatest danger of becoming a prey’ to the wicked desires of men, he bluntly told them.52 However, try as Boaden might to give her past an air of respectability, the life of a player was synonymous with notoriety. And Elizabeth, as a pretty debutante, had attracted the wrong kind of attention. As the new face at Covent Garden and an unprotected actress, the streets of London had been dangerous for her. After an appearance as one of the beauties surrounding Harlequin, a group of men had lurched out of the darkness of a January night and grabbed hold of her as she went home. Being pursued by strangers – either furtively at a distance, or by admirers who used physical force to make her walk and talk with them – had been a constant danger. On one occasion, she was even followed from the street, up a flight of stairs, to the door of her apartment. Even indoors, it was sometimes difficult for her to find safety. She only managed to

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evade the embrace of one theatre manager – Bristol’s James William Dodd – by snatching at a basin of hot water and dashing it in his face. In the press, she was not so fortunate, however, with one wag arousing the appetites of his readers by imagining how her husband had ‘long fed’ on her ‘Norfolk dumplings’.53 Even after she had established herself as a playwright with a flourish of successful afterpieces in the 1780s, Anthony Pasquin could still dismiss her claim to intellectual accomplishments with the insinuation that the actress could stimulate the sensual and the sexual, even in her writing: Tho’ unskill’d in the true fabrication of tenses, She tickles our weakness, and talks to the senses; For Venus is titt’ring, and Priapus smiles, As the Queen of Voluptuousness Nature beguiles.54

For Pasquin, who prized himself on the art of satiric flagellation, she might not understand the masculine mysteries of grammar, but she could raise more than a smile. The appreciation of the writer was impossible to separate from the fantasies projected upon the body of the actress. As a regular on the stage, she fell prey to the expectations of men who viewed her as just one more face amongst the heaving swell of humanity who made sex their commodity in Covent Garden. Her sister Debby was one of those women who joined the warm crush of bodies in the theatre at night, giving gentlemen the pleasure of touch while they fantasized about the players on stage.55 Other women hawked erotic prints, or themselves, or girls dressed up as their innocent wards from the countryside, around the local taverns. And it was assumed that actresses were naturally promiscuous, or that their profession had made them so, demanding as it did the ability to fall in love with different men on-stage each week. Just being in the green room was dangerous for a man guarding his virtue, like Samuel Johnson who once told Garrick ‘I’ll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk-stockings and white bubbies of your actresses excite my genitals.’56 Elizabeth was no Peg Woffington, an actress who became a byword for promiscuity. Yet, in a profession that demanded barefaced brazenness, it was Elizabeth’s conspicuous difference that made her fascinating. As Samuel Foote might have said about her, there was ‘no stage varnish, none of your true strolling brass lacker’ on her face.57 In a line of work infamous for its sinners who had hardened under an audience’s glare, she was strangely unsophisticated, naïve and out of place. Her admirers talked of her naiveté and ‘unworldliness’ in the same breath as her spotless  virtue, giving her a ‘singular’ charm.58 Her displays of

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embarrassment, sometimes caused by the triviality of untidy hair, encouraged men to fantasize about her unassailable modesty and purity. It was a challenge that both animated and frustrated Harris, if reports can be trusted. It was rumoured that he said in annoyance, ‘That woman, Inchbald, has solemnly devoted herself to virtue and a garret.’59 In doing so, Elizabeth inadvertently tapped into the growing appetite for fresh-faced virginity. To feed the desires of his audience in that first season, Harris cast her as the incorruptible lady stalked by the bestial Comus in an adaptation of Milton’s mask.60 Of course, a Georgian rake might have had any number of weaknesses, all of which London catered for – whether it was a desire for expensive glamour such as that provided by the courtesan Kitty Fisher festooned in diamonds, or an itch to see naked women wrestling upon the dirty floor of a tavern. But, as any reader of Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies could tell you, the longer a lady existed upon the town, the lower her price; and those who had newly arrived, commanded the biggest sums.61 Londoners understood the life of a desirable woman in the terms presented by William Hogarth’s series of mass-produced prints, A Harlot’s Progress (1732). Her life was a narrative of decline, with her value and allure dwindling as her career moved in a downward spiral. With her girlish artlessness – a real-life Miss Prue – Elizabeth was the embodiment of a particular kind of desirability. And when she began to solicit Harris’s attention, she became a natural target for rumours. In calling upon him at his townhouse in Knightsbridge, in carrying letters to him through the park, and in seeking his regard and his conversation in the green room, she added to his reputation.62 Malicious observers did not have enough charity to suppose that Harris preoccupied her thoughts merely because she was an actress waiting for new parts, or an aspiring dramatist desperate for his good opinion about her latest manuscript farce. And Elizabeth quickly invited animosity through a haughtiness that placed a higher value upon herself than other new actresses from the provinces were willing to accept. She radiated disdain when forced ‘to walk’ in the pantomime as ‘gape-seed’, sometimes choosing instead to defy Harris’s authority and watch rehearsals in a sullen mood from one of the boxes.63 She accepted financial forfeits to avoid having ‘to walk’ on-stage, an unpleasant duty which evoked another kind of walking, the life chosen upon the streets by Debby.64 When she was offered the role of Sukey Tawdry, one of the prostitutes in The Beggar’s Opera who is amoral in her pragmatism, she saw it as an insult and one that was too close to home. She returned the part, quit in a fit of pique and risked losing Harris’s goodwill.65 Still, in a world that demanded give-and-take to cast a different play nearly every

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day, Elizabeth’s self-regard was viewed as conceit and it caused friction. The ‘Queen of Sheba’ one of Harris’s deputies called her – a woman who demanded the respect due to a monarch, yet whose only value was as a tempting body. One actress who was overshadowed by Elizabeth’s arrival – Miss Ambrose – whispered around the green room that her rival had sold her body to gain an advantage. The tale, passed around in hushed tones, was that Elizabeth had spent the night at Harris’s, as if in mockery of an actress who was above being a whore. As a reward for this insinuation, Ambrose’s long career at the Garden ended days later.66 As for any other reaction from the taciturn Harris, he refused to give one. After the story became common knowledge around the theatre, Elizabeth could only puzzle at his silence when he passed by her.67 His cold distance may have been a generous gesture towards her, a way to quell the rumours and offer some silent comfort. Or it may have been provoked by his mortification at again having his most intimate affairs turned into gossip. It must have brought a chastening remembrance of Jane, and of how easy it was to become a laughing stock through mixing business with pleasure. Either way, it was easy for communication between them to break down when she became equally aloof. During the early months of their relationship, she would play the coquette and confess in her diary, ‘Mr. Harris asked me what I wanted of him but I would not tell him’; and she would in turn struggle to grasp the significance of his words until later events gave her a moment of understanding.68 In trying to relate to him, her short-sightedness – which would worsen through years of writing by dim candlelight – was more than physical.69 He groped towards intimacy with her, paying court to her, making sudden appearances at her door and teasing her at the theatre with an affection that was more than managerial. In reply, she indulged in fits of temper that led to his retreat into cool formality. Their relationship would follow a familiar pattern of a playful rapprochement, an outburst of ‘high words’ from Elizabeth caused by a grievance at the theatre, and then a truce, with the shaking of hands on one occasion.70 Her frustration, when she felt slighted by the management, led to explosions of anger. She argued, scolded, stamped and almost tore her hair out when Harris opposed one of her ideas for a play and ‘dared not venture it’.71 That their relationship slowly hardened into a professional one was as much a symptom of Elizabeth’s ambition as it was of Harris’s later recognition of her worth as a playwright. And in being drawn to someone as combative as Elizabeth, Harris must have recognized the echoes of the past and the need for caution. Players needed firm guidance; and to command unqualified respect from the rabble of a company, a manager needed high principles and

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irreproachable conduct, traits that Harris eventually became known for. At the very least, he had to be seen to be fair without favouritism. The resentment caused by Lessingham had made that clear. To chase Elizabeth risked the return of that prurient laughter at the manager who treated the green room as his harem, and yet was tricked by wily actresses. Moreover, it risked placing himself in an association with the lowest comedian in London, ‘that son of mischief’ Richard Wilson, and the messy and grubby life of casual relationships associated with men like him.72 At the Garden, Wilson had rekindled his old friendship with Elizabeth which had begun during their bohemian days together as part of a strolling band of performers in Scotland.73 Within weeks of her arrival at the Garden in that autumn of 1780, he had proposed marriage – and being discreet was not one of Wilson’s very few virtues.74 As a measure of his character, he would be shamed by the newspapers as ‘brazen-faced’ and ‘lost to decency’ in the following summer. For those who did not see, or could not believe what they had seen, the columns became filled with outrage at his performance as Mrs Peachum in a cross-dressing burlesque of The Beggar’s Opera at the Haymarket. At the point where Mrs Peachum rants at her daughter for being promiscuous, he lifted up his petticoats to show the audience exactly what the young ‘hussy’ was interested in.75 Because of such vulgarity, Wilson was useful to the Garden as someone to entertain the lumpen mass of humanity high in the cheap seats of the gallery; but that was as far as Harris’s connection with him went. In observing Wilson’s closeness to Elizabeth during those first few months, it may be that she suffered greatly in Harris’s regard. It was commonplace to assume that a person could be known by the company he or she kept in London. And Harris would build his own reputation – as sober, sensible and someone who looked after business – by distancing himself from the likes of Wilson and his companions. If concerns about his reputation did make him hesitate in urging his desire, then it has led to one of life’s ironies with his name tainted by an infamous story about his relationship with Elizabeth. Written by Taylor, and published in 1832 when neither of them could respond, it has cast a long shadow. For feminist writers intent on showing the exploitation of women in the theatre, the story has been too good to question. They have used it to transform Harris into the black-cloaked villain of Victorian melodrama whose word could command helpless actresses; someone who had to be forgiven by those desperately hoping for his patronage, like Elizabeth. One historian even takes Elizabeth’s decision to perform in The Mogul Tale as showing her identification with the harem women of the play who struggled ‘to please [an] arbitrary master’.76 Taylor’s story accused Harris of an escapade worthy of that arch-libertine Lord Byron

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who haunted the green room of Drury Lane and felt at home carousing with its actors and clowns. And it was a tale, without doubt, delicious enough for Taylor to have communicated confidentially to Byron.77 He claimed that Elizabeth had called upon Harris at Knightsbridge to discuss one of her manuscripts. The manager, however, wanted a ‘conversation’ in the eighteenth-century sense of the word: When the consultation was ended, Mr. Harris, who was a handsome man, and had found so little difficulty among the theatrical sisterhood under his government, thought that he might be equally successful in an attack on Mrs. Inchbald; but, instead of regular approaches, he attempted to take the fort by storm, and Mrs. Inchbald found no resource but in seizing him by his hair, which she pulled with such violence that she forced him to desist. She then rushed out of the house, and proceeded in haste and under great agitation, to the green-room of the theatre, where the company were then rehearsing. She entered the room with so wild an air, and with such evident emotion, that all present were alarmed. She hastily related what had happened as far as her impediment would permit her, and concluded with the following exclamation: ‘Oh! If he had wo-wo-worn a wig, I had been ru-ruined.’78

And so Harris was resisted, with his passion only raising the laughter or the disbelief of scandalmongers. But the difficulty of judging the authenticity of this story is troubling, another baffling part of the bewildering relationship between Elizabeth and Harris.79 Taylor boasted of being ‘favoured’ with Harris’s ‘confidence’ as well as an ‘uninterrupted’ intimate friendship with Elizabeth spanning decades – or as intimate as it was possible to be with her. Using crawling flattery, he could worm himself into any society in London.80 However, his revelation smacks of the newspaper hack’s mischievous love of sensation, and the talent for causing it honed in his former life as the editor of the Morning Post and the Sun. It may be that his ability to manipulate the facts for effect – a skill that Harris had encouraged in this one-time writer for hire – was eventually used against his old employer. Certainly, the tale would sound familiar to the readers who had enjoyed fantasies about how Elizabeth escaped those men driven mad by desire, with her body becoming all the more desirable through being beyond their reach. And it was a good one with an ending that revealed her beguiling, ingenuous nature. Moreover, those former friends who had fallen foul of Taylor’s oily charm, and been soiled by it, could give warnings about trusting his words. In the ultra-radical newspaper the Telegraph, one of them asked ‘Who is the man that is false to his friends … the slanderer of all merit, the panegyrist of all infamy?’ That ‘reptile’ Taylor. He may have been

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an insider who knew a secret about many, but Taylor was not averse to crawling through the dirt to besmirch and slander others when it suited his purpose.81 For the hopeless idealist who believed that it was possible to find out the truth about Taylor’s story, there was one man who held out hope – John Pritt Harley. Poor players heard no more One day in February 1841, Harley was opening the letters addressed to him at Covent Garden theatre. He had become the actor who could take on unpromising parts – such as one of the rabble of rogues in The Beggar’s Opera or Shakespeare’s Henry V – and make people laugh.82 In an odd twist of fate, the man who had become famous on-stage for being without morals was now acting as the social conscience of his profession. He was in charge of a theatrical fund for distressed actors, one of two established at each patent theatre. He was employed to read the applications to Drury Lane from those who had become too old or ill to work, or who could not find any during these hard times. And with both of the big theatres continuing to struggle, Harley had to set an increasing number of hours aside for these notes. These years were so dismal that the Garden was about to become an empty shell, leased to whoever would pay to use it for a political rally or a fundraising bazaar.83 As the current treasurer of the Lane’s fund, Harley had to read the stack of pleas, at pains to decide which ones had merit. Months earlier, he had heard how Ellar – the glittering Harlequin – had applied for help from Covent Garden theatre. Once ‘one of the five pantomimic wonders’, the fund had become his last resort. Crippled, with a ‘staggering, shuffling gait’, he had been condemned to a labour of idleness, reduced to picking up halfpennies from the floors of squalid beer-shops. Coal-heavers had entertained themselves by knocking him about and playing out the violence of pantomime upon his fragile body. Rescued by five pounds from the Garden’s fund, Ellar cried ‘It is true!’ as he folded up the reply with tears in his eyes, ‘Actors are the warmest hearted people under the sun.’84 But one of the letters now opened by Harley was different, a novelty asking for an unusual type of help. While not containing a tale about desperate old age, it was still sad and dispiriting for any actor to read. Signed ‘R. Halford’, it asked for information about some of the leading performers who had illuminated London in days gone by. The list included the stately Sarah Siddons, the rough-skinned John Fawcett who had puzzled over Ellar’s broken hand, and Charles Incledon whose singing voice had been as beautiful as his character had been conceited. Even Edmund Kean was there, who had been described in his heyday

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as the greatest tragedian of the nineteenth century. They had defined the stage for a generation, but the letter showed how quickly they had become distant memories, with the basic facts of their lives past recall. Most of them had died only a few years before, but even these dates had become difficult to find, leading to this letter to Harley as the custodian of the theatre’s records.85 It was a reminder of how the players of the Georgian stage had vanished with the sound of their words and the echo of the last applause. Time had been like the relentless machines of the modern Victorian world. Some of the eccentric devotees of the Garden’s golden period would visit the graves of its players, and try to conjure up the past. One of them would carefully preserve a leaf from the grave of John Philip Kemble as a sentimental keepsake, as if trying to preserve his memory in something concrete, something that would endure, however tenuous the connection.86 And if such things only remained where the stellar names of the past were concerned, what chance had ‘Jupiter’ Harris? Notes 1 Transcripts of correspondence from FL Scrapbook A.4.14, unpaginated: TH to the Duke of Bedford, 27 May 1817; the Duke of Bedford to TH, 30 May 1817; the Duke of Bedford to TH, 4 June 1817; TH to the Duke of Bedford, 10 June 1817. 2 TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fos 11, 116, 120, 138, 152. This fraudulent contract was issued by both Thomas Harris and Henry Harris; the associated activities of the father also strongly suggest his involvement. In a letter to William Harrison, 14 January 1822, Henry expressed his ignorance of the transaction; it was later used as evidence (fos 133–4) in the appeal case documented by this source. 3 Montagu, A Digest of the Bankrupt Laws, I, 53, 66–7, 77–8. 4 Quotation from Real Life in London, I, 47, with italics from text. 5 Montagu, A Digest of the Bankrupt Laws, I, 4, 414–15, 441; Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business, p. 36. 6 Report from the Committee on the King’s Bench, Fleet, and Marshalsea Prisons, p. 13. Butler (ed.), A Regency Visitor, p. 226; ‘Unter andern besah ich die Gefängnisse von Kingsbench und Newgate. Das erste, welches hauptsächlich für Schuldner bestimmt ist, bildet eine völlig isolierte Welt im kleinen, einer nicht unbedeutenden Stadt ähnlich, welche jedoch von ungewöhnlichen, nämlich dreißig Fuß hohen Mauern umgeben ist. Garküchen, Leihbibliotheken, Kaffeehäuser, Buden und Handwerker aller Art, schönere und ärmlichere Wohnungen, selbst öffentliche Plätze und Mädchen, auch ein Markt fehlen nicht’, Pückler-Muskau, Briefe eines Verstorbenen, II, 398. 7 White, London in the Nineteenth Century, p. 219.

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8 Duffy, Bankruptcy and Insolvency in London, p. 373 – using figures from the House of Commons Journals, 47 (1792) – records that one debtor had been imprisoned for forty-five years for a debt of under twenty pounds. 9 For this depiction of prison life, see Report from the Committee on the King’s Bench, Fleet, and Marshalsea Prisons, pp. 3, 4, 10–12, 14, 16; The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, pp. 2, 15, 19–20, 39, 51, 57–8, 72, with italics from text. Despite the gap of twenty-two years between these two publications, there seems to have been little change to conditions or procedures. The Report complains that problems identified back in 1791 had not been addressed (p. 11). 10 The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, pp. 24, 77. It notes ‘the total number of persons confined for debt in the different gaols of England, according to the latest statement thereof, were 1957, besides 100 crown debtors’, p. 77. As competing estimates, Duffy in Bankruptcy and Insolvency in London (p. 372) records that 632 were imprisoned in 1793 as debtors in the King’s Bench alone, while drawing upon a variety of sources including NA PRIS 4, nos 2–17; Hoppit in Risk and Failure in English Business (p. 46) estimates the average number of bankruptcies at 762.7 per annum for 1791–1800 while using data from the London Gazette and NA PRO B4/1–20. 11 White, London in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 216–19; The Debtor and Creditor’s Assistant, pp. 47–8. In 1825, a number of such loopholes were closed by 6 Geo. IV. Cap. 16 ‘An Act to amend the Laws relating to Bankrupts’ which included the provision that ‘Any Person appointed by the Commissioners’ may ‘break open any Place or Thing of the Bankrupt where he or any of his Property is reputed to be’; Gregg, The New Bankrupt Act, p. 27. 12 TH to Col. McMahon, 20 October 1811, reproduced in Aspinall (ed.), The Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770–1812, VIII, 187–90; quotation from p. 190. 13 TM PN2596.L7.C8 Folio, fo. 4; Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, appendix no. 13. 14 Despite Harris’s best efforts, Henry would suffer this fate in the months before and after his father’s death. Actions would come thick and fast from small tradesmen, such as the linen-draper Foulkes, and large firms such as the Gas Light Company; FL MS W.b.444, fos 153, 155–6. 15 The Annual Biography and Obituary, for the Year 1822, p. 400; Gentleman’s Magazine, 90 (October 1820), 374–5; Dibdin, The Reminiscences, II, 186. 16 Morning Post, 28 September 1776; Phillips, A Morning’s Walk from London to Kew, pp. 134–41; Malden (ed.), The Victoria History of the County of Surrey, IV, 81. The obelisk – originally around fifty feet in height – partly survives; the top part has since been rebuilt to a reduced size. 17 For details of the auction of Bellemonte and its library, see Morning Post, 9 June 1819; British Stage and Literary Cabinet, 3:32 (1819), 236–7. Also see Particulars and Conditions of Sale of a Highly Attractive Tithe-Free Residential Property Known as “Belmont” which describes the estate as it stood in 1867 with many features of the earlier property still in existence.

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18 The following details of this auction of his art collection are from Robins, A Catalogue of the Valuable Collection of Original Theatrical Portraits; Theatre; or, Dramatic and Literary Mirror, 2 (1819), 24–6, 38–40, 55–6; British Stage and Literary Cabinet, 3:32 (1819), 236–9; Theatrical Inquisitor, 15 (1819), 355–6. 19 See plan attached to the lease dated 1 May 1818 in LMA E/BER/CG/L/043; ODNB. 20 Ashton and Mackintosh, Royal Opera House Retrospective, p. 69; Hayes, ‘Thomas Harris, Gainsborough Dupont’, p. 222. During the sale, some of the advertised lots were split with items sold separately. 21 Dibdin, The Reminiscences, II, 356; Brewer, London and Middlesex, IV, 539. However, there is evidence that at least one of these portraits was circulated as an engraved print; see Mr. Cooke ‘from a Drawing in the possession of Thos Harris Esq.’ (1800), HL TS 941.5F, VI, 278–9. 22 Garlick and Macintyre (eds), The Diary of Joseph Farington, II, 329. 23 Hayes, ‘Thomas Harris, Gainsborough Dupont’, p. 226. 24 Pasquin (pseud.), A Critical Guide to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, p. i. 25 Dibdin, The Reminiscences, II, 356. 26 Figure calculated from prices listed in British Stage and Literary Cabinet, 3:32 (1819), 237–9. 27 Identification of the most likely candidate – the actor Benjamin Johnson (1665–1742); Robins, A Catalogue of the Valuable Collection of Original Theatrical Portraits, p. 3. The catalogue went through more than one edition. The National Art Library at the V&A Museum holds two copies; the erroneous date appears only in one. 28 Ibid., p. 2. 29 Robins in the DNB. 30 The canvas portrait measures 29½ by 24½ inches; Collins Baker, Catalogue of the Petworth Collection of Pictures, p. 90. Heath’s engraving – Mrs Inchbald (1806) – bears more than a passing resemblance to this portrait. It may be that he engraved the image from memory, while adding some fanciful touches, after seeing it in Opie’s studio (HL TCS 45). 31 As Backscheider’s figures show, Inchbald was a prolific playwright with only a few of her male contemporaries enjoying as much success; see ‘Retrieving Elizabeth Inchbald’, p. 601. 32 It is impossible to date Opie’s portrait with any certainty, and therefore ascertain the likely age of his subject. It is only mentioned in Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, III, 35, in entries for June 1807 that record Harris’s purchase. And, as Jenkins notes in I’ll Tell You What, she had been a long-standing friend of the family by this time: ‘she went to the Opies’ to see her friend Amelia, who held open house while her husband painted’ (p. 441). 33 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, III, 35, 37, 103, 110. 34 On Harris’s ‘mimic-hermitage’, see Brewer, London and Middlesex, IV, 539.

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35 Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, p. 511. The phrases ‘all alone’, ‘quite alone’ and ‘no creature called’ are recurrent in her later diaries – see, for example, Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 234, 300–2; III, 26–7, 103. Final quotation taken from Bodleian MS.ENG.MISC.e.143, fo. 32; however, the Bodleian material should be approached with caution – these letters from Inchbald to Taylor exist as copies in the hand of James Northcote (1746–1831). 36 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 245–6; II, 16–17, with italics and capitals from text. Although this letter – like much of her personal writing – is now missing, Boaden’s account is recognized as authoritative, based upon materials placed into his hands from her estate. He was, moreover, part of the same theatrical milieu as his subject. 37 Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, p. 487. 38 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 178. 39 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 117, 140. On one occasion months after her audition, she ‘sent to ask Mr. Harris for a Masquerade Dress’, but failed to identify the costume further; Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 219. 40 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 192, 196, 201, 217, 283, 335. 41 Taylor in Records of My Life repeated one common rumour about Harris, that he ‘was a very gallant man, and did not find the virtue of several of his fair performers impregnable’ (p. 224). Jenkins follows the perspective upon Elizabeth’s character in I’ll Tell You What, p. 510. 42 Quotations from Taylor, Records of My Life, p. 223; Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 29, 69; Elizabeth Inchbald to Tate Wilkinson, [1780], FL Y.c.1376, fo. 10. 43 For insinuations about Harris to this effect, see Donkin, Getting into the Act, pp. 89–90, 112, 122, 136; O’Quinn, ‘Scissors and needles’, pp. 110–11. 44 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 165. 45 Elizabeth Inchbald to Tate Wilkinson, [1780?], FL Y.c.1376, fo. 11, with strikethroughs from text. Letter can be contextualized and tentatively dated using Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, I, 93–4. 46 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 201. 47 Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, III, 38; Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 95, 127, 175–6, II, 234–5; Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, II, 56–9; Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, pp. 212–13. 48 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 269; Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 234, 251. 49 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 271. Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 2–3, with capitals from text; II, 63, 231, with italics from text. Taylor in Records of My Life, p. 229, tried to dispel the idea that Inchbald’s manuscript was too controversial for publication; instead, he claimed that it was fit for ‘the chastest eye … to peruse’.

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50 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 3; Bodleian MS.ENG.MISC.e.143, fo. 21 (v.). 51 In the OED, ‘respectable’ – ‘Of a person … a reputation for honesty or decency’ – is first dated from 1750. 52 Thespian Magazine and Literary Repository, 3 (April 1794), 138–9; Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 12–13. 53 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 218, 224, 243, II, 185, 237, 262; Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 28–9; The Theatres. A Poetical Dissection, p. 51, with capitals from text. 54 Pasquin (pseud.), Poems by Anthony Pasquin, II, 157. 55 In May 1781, Elizabeth wrote that she ‘gave an order [of admittance] for Debby’ and in the following September, she ‘heard Debby was at the Play’; Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 249, 276. For the suggestion of Debby’s participation in prostitution, see Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 265, 270, 307, 332–3; her involvement has been asserted in Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, p. 348. 56 For attitudes towards actresses and their sexuality in the period, see Straub, Sexual Suspects, pp. 106–7; Waingrow (ed.), James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, I, 146–7. 57 [Holcroft and Hazlitt], Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, I, 190. 58 Kemble, Records of a Girlhood, pp. 212–13; Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, III, 38. 59 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 127, 192, with italics from text. 60 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 190. 61 Gatrell, City of Laughter, p. 86. Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1773), pp. 100–1, 112–13; (1788), pp. 45–6. 62 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 197, 198, 201, 225, 226, 228, 247, 248, 250–1, 252, 274. 63 ‘Gape-seed – any thing that attracts the sight’; Andrewes, A Dictionary of the Slang and Cant Languages, unpaginated. 64 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 203, 214, 218; Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 138, 153–4. 65 In Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald (I, 280–1, 334), she writes ‘discharged myself’ with no reason specifically given, although the arrival of this part seems to coincide with disappointment about her salary. Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (I, 135), includes correspondence to her, from around this time, that reveals the matter of contention: ‘I am sorry Mr. Harris attempted to send you a character that you must, in justice to yourself, refuse.’ 66 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 154, 161; Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 41–3; Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, p. 116. 67 Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, II, 44. 68 Ibid., I, 282, 303. 69 Elizabeth’s myopia is noted in Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, III, 38.

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70 As an example of this pattern, see Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 275–82; the impact of her temper upon their relationship is illustrated at a later date (II, 280–1). 71 Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, II, 49, with italics from text; her ‘haggard’ temper is also discussed in I, 233, II, 8–9. 72 BDA (1993), XVI, 173; quotation from Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 46. 73 For the identification of this actor and his relationship with Elizabeth, see Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 39–40, 46, 68, 128; Museum of Foreign Literature and Science, 23 (1833), 666. Also see Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What, pp. 16–19. 74 ‘Mr. Wilson told me of mentioning his offer’, she wrote in 18 May 1781; Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald, I, 249. One of his letters, including a proposal, is reproduced in Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald, I, 128–9. 75 Oakley, A Culture of Mimicry, pp. 68–70, with italics from text. 76 See Backscheider, ‘Retrieving Elizabeth Inchbald’, p. 609. For examples of where Taylor’s story is accepted as a primary source for portraying Harris’s relationships at the theatre, see Donkin, Getting into the Act, p. 112; O’Quinn, ‘Scissors and needles’, p. 111. 77 On Taylor’s relationship with Byron, see Taylor, Records of My Life, pp. 426–9. 78 Ibid., p. 224. 79 Jenkins in I’ll Tell You What had to admit that ‘Mrs. Inchbald’s relationship with Thomas Harris is the most puzzling of all her connections’, p. 510. 80 Taylor, Records of My Life, pp. 223, 445–6. This claim in relation to Elizabeth is supported by other sources including Robertson (ed.), The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald and Bodleian MS.ENG.MISC.e.143. On Taylor’s ability to insinuate himself into any company, see Jerdan, The Autobiography of William Jerdan, II, 72. 81 Telegraph quotation from Barrell, ‘The reptile oculist’, p. 22, with italics and capitals from text; Taylor reflects upon this description of himself in Records of My Life, p. 385. The ODNB entry for Taylor describes Records as ‘full of gossip and discreditable stories’. 82 Biographical details from Wyndham, The Annals of Covent Garden Theatre, II, 136, 138, 147, 158. 83 Saint et al., A History of the Royal Opera House, pp. 20, 56. 84 Marshall, Lives of the Most Celebrated Actors and Actresses, pp. 118, 122, 124–5, with italics from text. 85 R. Halford to John Pritt Harley, 18 February 1841, FL MS Y.c.2595, fo. 12. 86 Annotated ‘From Grave (outside) of Kemble’, FL Scrapbook B.37.1a, unpaginated.

Appendix 1

Glossary of historical figures

Bannister, Charles (bap. 1741–1804) actor, singer and mimic. He was one of the original performers at the rebellious Royalty theatre in Wellclose Square. Barlow, Edward (fl. 1785–1821) loyal friend of the Harris family whose official title was ‘inspector of accounts’ at Covent Garden theatre. When in need of someone to carry out his private instructions, conduct contractual negotiations in his name, or be his troubleshooter and get the business done, Harris sent Barlow. Betty, William Henry West (1791–1874) child actor, the ‘Young Roscius’. Betty’s first appearance at Covent Garden theatre, at fifty guineas a night, was on 1 December 1804. For a matter of months, he had unqualified power to draw audiences to both patent theatres. Boaden, James (1762–1839) biographer, playwright and man of letters. With an intimate knowledge of the stage and its people, his biographies included Life of John Philip Kemble (1825) and Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (1833). He popularized Harris’s title of ‘Jupiter’. Bone, John (fl. 1795–1807) bookseller who exerted influence upon the Old Price (OP) riots. He was joined by fellow Westminster radicals: political writer William Cobbett (1763–1835), agitator John Gale Jones (1769–1838), tailor Francis Place (1771–1854), publisher Thomas Tegg (1776–1846) and reformist John Horne Tooke (1736–1812). Brandon, James W. (1754–1825) housekeeper and box bookkeeper at Covent Garden theatre, and one of the recognizable faces of the management for the OP rioters. As a long-standing servant of the theatre, he became responsible for maintaining order, controlling the booking of boxes and managing the day-to-day finances. His brother, John Brandon (fl. 1803–22), worked as the treasurer during the last years of the Harris management.

198

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Bunn, Alfred (1796–1860) theatre manager, librettist and friend of Henry Harris. During the 1830s, he purchased the leases of both Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres – and discovered the difficulties of making a profit after the Harris era. Burdett, Sir Francis (1770–1844) politician, radical MP for Westminster and disciple of Horne Tooke. After many of the OP committee had organized his campaign for Parliament in 1807, rioters in Covent Garden theatre echoed his sentiments and wore his colours in 1809. Clifford, Henry (1768–1813) lawyer, radical incendiary and one of the public faces of the OP committee. In 1809 at the Court of Common Pleas, he successfully sued James Brandon for false arrest and imprisonment. It became a turning point in the ‘OP War’. Colman, George, the Elder (bap. 1732–94) playwright, theatre proprietor and manager. In 1767, he formed an ill-fated business arrangement with Harris and two others to purchase Covent Garden theatre. After his struggles to maintain control, he sold his share in this theatre in 1774 and became sole proprietor and manager of the Haymarket theatre, before his descent into madness. Dudley, Sir Henry Bate (1745–1824) pugilistic newspaper editor, author of comic operas and recipient of Harris’s generosity. He became the editor of the Morning Post before founding the hugely successful Morning Herald in 1780. While his scandal sheets specialized in censuring public and political figures, he was no stranger to government money. He departed for Ireland – leaving his newspaper interests behind – in 1804. Dunning, John (1731–83) barrister and politician. The former solicitorgeneral was chosen by Colman as his primary counsel in the legal dispute with Harris at the Court of Chancery, 1770. Dupont, Gainsborough (bap. 1754–97) painter and engraver, nephew of the renowned Thomas Gainsborough. Despite lacking the skill of a firstrate portrait artist, Harris commissioned him to paint his leading actors in their famous roles for his collection. Ellar, Tom (1780–1842) ‘one of the five pantomimic wonders’, famous for his performances of Harlequin. He began performing at Covent Garden in 1813, where his body was placed under extreme forms of physical endurance. Farley, Charles (1771–1859) Covent Garden actor and inventor of pantomimes. Famous for Harlequin and Mother Goose (1806), Harris relied upon him for the creation of pantomimes and stage tricks.

Glossary of historical figures

199

Fawcett, John (1768–1837) actor, singer and Harris’s last stage manager (1818–). As Harris’s deputy, he was best likened to a pineapple, ‘rough outside but full of sweetness within’. Foote, Samuel (bap. 1721–77) playwright, mimic skilled in the art of ridicule, and patentee of the summer theatre at the Haymarket. He became implicated in the Covent Garden dispute as an ally of Colman’s. Garrick, David (1717–79) actor, theatre manager, playwright, the Roscius of the English stage and the champion of Shakespeare. As one of the great actors, and having successfully managed Drury Lane, he became acknowledged as an authority on the stage, and was revered. At his retirement in 1776, Drury’s new management was headed by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Garrow, Sir William (1760–1840) barrister who became the AttorneyGeneral to the Prince of Wales in 1807. Garrow was Harris’s legal adviser during the early nineteenth century; he was consulted during numerous legal disputes, including those caused by the OP riots. Gibbs, Sir Vicary (1751–1820) the Attorney-General during the OP riots. Though aware that the disturbances were ‘a disgrace to the country’, his response was largely inaction. Grimaldi, Joseph ‘Joe’ (1778–1837) pantomime performer and the greatest of clowns. Having made his name at the theatres of Sadler’s Wells and Drury Lane, the indefatigable Grimaldi joined Covent Garden in 1806 until his last performance in 1823. Harley, John Pritt (1786–1858) comic actor who became the treasurer of the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund for distressed actors in 1833. Despite his efforts for others, he died penniless. Harris, Henry (1782?–1839) Harris’s son and a writer of pantomimes for Covent Garden theatre. When Thomas Harris retired to Bellemonte (near Uxbridge) and supervised operations from there, Henry acted as his agent at the theatre (1809–20). He inherited his father’s share (7/12) and the management of the theatre in 1820; he resigned the management in 1822. Harris, Thomas (bap. 1738–1820) proprietor and manager of Covent Garden theatre – the most beautiful theatre in the universe for the inhabitants of the capital of the world – for nearly five decades. He was also a confidant of King George III, a Secret Service agent in Pitt the Younger’s government, a political ‘spin doctor’, a notable philanthropist and a bagnio owner who operated in the underworld of Covent Garden.

200

Thomas ‘Jupiter’ Harris

His children included Edwin (1771–1816) and George (bap. c.1787– 1836) who both distinguished themselves upon the high seas. Holland, Henry (1745–1806) architect, speculator, surveyor for the Bedford Office and an expert in fire risk. He attempted to form a partner­ ship with Harris to develop an entertainment palace at Knightsbridge in the 1780s. He redesigned Covent Garden theatre in 1792. Inchbald, Elizabeth (1753–1821) actress and playwright mentored by Harris, and noted for her beauty. After leaving Tate Wilkinson’s company in 1780, she spent the decade performing a variety of roles at Covent Garden theatre. By 1789, she had begun to concentrate fully upon her writing – specializing in adaptations of Continental plays – becoming one of the leading female writers of comedies and farces for the London theatres. Ireland, William Henry (1775–1835) dramatist, fantasist and forger of Shakespearean manuscripts. One of his forgeries – the play Vortigern (1796), supposedly by Shakespeare – was performed at Drury Lane. Jackson, William (1737?–95) former clergyman and journalist, known as ‘Dr Viper’ for his ability to destroy reputations. He was a silent partner in Palmer’s Royalty theatre scheme and absconded after its financial failure. Kemble, John Philip (1757–1823) one of the leading tragedians and the deputy manager of Covent Garden theatre. Poached from Sheridan’s Drury Lane in 1803, he oversaw stage business and was the public face of the theatre until 1812, with a 1/6 share of the business until 1820. The Kemble dynasty included two of Covent Garden’s stars: sister Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) and brother Charles Kemble (1775–1854) with the latter taking over the management of the Garden in 1822. Lessingham, Jane (1738/9–83) Covent Garden actress of disreputable character. She was cited as one cause of the legal dispute between Harris and Colman that culminated in the Court of Chancery trial in 1770. Of all the children that she gave birth to, three – Charles, Thomas Charlton (d. 1819) and Edwin (1771–1816) – were acknowledged and shown paternal care by Harris. Longman, Thomas (1730–97) publisher and bookseller ‘of Paternoster Row, London’, shareholder of a number of high-selling newspapers and an investor in Covent Garden theatre. Having married Elizabeth Harris (1740–1808), the business connections and finances of this brother-inlaw became useful for Harris.

Glossary of historical figures

201

Macklin, Charles (1699?–1797) veteran London actor, theatre patriarch and combative legal disputant. Presented as the ‘Black Knave’, he was involved in the conflict between Harris and Colman, leading to his testimony at the Court of Chancery trial, 1770. He was also the playwright of one of the most successful farces of the century, Love a la Mode. Mansfield, Sir James (1734–1821) judge and the intractable Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He was responsible for hearing the case of Clifford v. Brandon, a turning point in the ‘OP War’. O’Keeffe, John (1747–1833) playwright and author of the comedy Wild Oats (1791). Ever willing and versatile, even providing scripts for pantomimes, O’Keeffe became one of Harris’s stalwarts. As O’Keeffe’s sight failed, Harris helped him towards financial security through the gift of an annuity. Opie, John (1761–1807) portrait and history painter, married to Amelia Opie (1769–1853). He created likenesses of both Harris and Elizabeth Inchbald, the latter purchased by Harris after the artist’s death. Palmer, John (1744–98) Drury Lane comic actor, real-life comic character known as ‘Plausible Jack’, entrepreneur and eventual bankrupt. In 1787, he sought to open a new theatre – the Royalty – in the East End of London, in defiance of Harris’s patent privilege. Not to be confused with Harris’s friend, John Palmer (1742–1818) – the Bath theatre proprietor, postal reformer and MP. Quick, John (1748–1831) comic actor at Covent Garden theatre, the original Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer and a favourite performer of King George III. His correspondence with Harris was employed in the newspapers during the Royalty theatre controversy. Robins, George Henry (1777–1847) auctioneer. ‘Cockney’ George was chosen to auction Harris’s estate at Bellemonte, along with his library of plays and collection of theatrical portraits, in 1819. Rose, George (1744–1818) politician, Pitt the Younger’s election manager, political philanthropist and Harris’s friend. As a Treasury official during the 1780s and 1790s, he acted as an accountant for the Secret Service funds. Rutherford, John (1741?–81) duellist and short-term investor in Covent Garden theatre. Having joined Harris as an ally in the purchase of the theatre in 1767, the would-be manager sold his shares in the following summer.

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Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751–1816) long-standing English MP, charismatic player in the Whig party, antagonist of the royal family and the manager of Drury Lane theatre from the beginning of the 1776–77 season until 1810 when his connection with the theatre ended. Taylor, John (1757–1832) writer, newspaper editor and a trader in scandal. His Records of My Life (1832), while full of gossip and anecdotal stories, offers intimate details about the lives of those contemporaries he knew – including Harris, Inchbald, Jackson and Lessingham. Tregent, James (fl. 1770–1806) watchmaker par excellence. With his workshop in Leicester Square, he was watchmaker to the Prince of Wales, and to Harris. Ward, Thomas Achurch (1747–1835) actor and provincial theatre manager. Becoming the joint manager of the first Theatre Royal in Manchester in 1790 – until its closure in 1807 – Ward worked under the patronage of Harris. Wedderburn, Alexander (1733–1805) barrister and politician. The future lord chancellor was chosen by Harris as his primary counsel in the legal dispute with Colman at the Court of Chancery, 1770. Wilkinson, Tate (1739–1803) actor and theatre manager on the Yorkshire circuit, known as ‘the Wandering Patentee’, and lovesick admirer of Elizabeth Inchbald. As Harris’s northern counterpart, both men enjoyed close business ties while Wilkinson benefited from Harris’s patronage. Williams, John (1754–1818) satirist expert in the art of extortion, political propagandist and agitator. He was a man in need of the alias ‘Anthony Pasquin’. In 1814, he was employed in Paris under instructions from the Harris family. Wilson, Richard (1744–96) Covent Garden actor and the lowest comedian in London. This ‘son of mischief’ enjoyed a close friendship with Elizabeth Inchbald. Zoffany, Johan Joseph (1733–1810) portrait painter. Arriving in London in 1760, his reputation was bolstered through Garrick’s patronage, leading to his creation of numerous theatrical conversation pieces. He has been linked to one portrait of Harris in childhood; his intimate portrait of Garrick was subsequently owned by Harris.

Appendix 2

Exploring the caricatures

You can download satirical portraits of some of the main characters from this book for free from the British Museum’s website. These are the pictures that Londoners, at the time of Harris’s theatre, would have enjoyed. In Table 1, each picture is listed using an identification number from Mary Dorothy George’s Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires … in the British Museum. 1. To see them, visit this address: www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx 2. Click on the red link ‘advanced search options’. 3. Into the ‘Publication’ box type ‘Satires’ and click on the search result below. 4. Into the ‘Publication reference’ box type ‘10318’ [return]. 5. Copies of Rowlandson’s Melpomene in the Dumps will appear as thumbnail images to click on. 6. Repeat with a different identification number. If the appearance of someone is questionable, then the entry appears in square brackets in the table. With other pictures, ambiguities from George’s catalogue have been resolved, as when she merely lists a figure as ‘Harris’ without distinguishing between father and son. Entries in bold indicate that an image has not caricatured the individual, but has used his name instead, either partial or in full.

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TABLE 1  Appearances by Covent Garden personnel in British Museum satirical prints, 1771–1819 Subject

George, Volume V (1771–83)

Thomas Harris

George, Volume VI (1784–92)

George, George, Volume VII Volume VIII (1793–1800) (1801–10)

[7214].

10318, 11418.

George, Volume IX (1811–19) 11771, [12326], [12919]. [12326], 12327, [12919], 13376, 13378, 13380.

Henry Harris

James W. Brandon

John Philip Kemble

6311.

6769, 7590, 8011.

George Colman, (the Elder)

[5057], 5064, 5363, 5742.

[7214].

8730, 9086, 9417, 9436, [9570].

11430, 11434, 11436, 11527.

13041, 13375, 13376.

9916, 10317, 10318, 10319, 10321, 10322, 10457, 10458, 10459, 10635, 10764, 10796, 10969, 11413 to 11423, [11418], 11426 to 11429, 11431, 11434.

11771, 11772, 11773, 11935, 11941, 12829, 12918, 13371.

Appendix 3

Covent Garden versus Drury Lane in the season 1794–95

Overview When in competition with the new Drury Lane (a purpose-built venue with a much bigger capacity), the takings at Covent Garden were at times meagre with its season only saved by a number of hugely profitable nights, many of which coincided with the glamour of a royal visit. In comparison, Sheridan’s fraught relationship with George III was responsible for there being only one performance ‘By Command of Their Majesties’ at the Lane that season. Nonetheless, the Lane still managed frequently higher receipts. Mid-February through to the beginning of April, before the interval of benefit performances for its actors, was a period of dominance for the Lane with receipts of £400 and above on many nights. Such figures need to be placed in the context of the potential takings from a full house – Milhous and Hume estimate that, in the autumn of 1794, this ‘would have generated £570’ at the Garden and ‘a dizzying £770’ at Drury Lane.1 However, of course, the figures in Appendix 3 are only useful in the calculation of the minimum number of spectators on any given night: theatregoers paying annual rent for boxes, along with people on the theatre’s free list, would not have been included in the nightly receipts. Figures have been calculated from money taken on the night only, as  recorded in BL Egerton MS 2293 and BL Additional MS 31972. Receipts for benefit nights – including nights where tickets from theatre  personnel were accepted – have not been included because they largely depended upon the popularity of each recipient, and those nights  are difficult to calculate accurately. Similarly, ‘after-money’ – from  tardy patrons admitted after half price whose payments were added to the  following night’s receipts – has not been included in the calculations, for two reasons. Firstly, MS 31972 for Drury Lane does not include these figures, and such an omission makes it difficult to compare like for like with the Egerton manuscript where ‘the account

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of after-money’ usually averaged a negligible ‘two to three pounds’ each night.2 Secondly, in the context of Harris’s manipulation of accounts, it is difficult to verify that all such monies added later were bona fide payments for admission. Consequently, the following amounts are based upon seventy-seven nights for both houses up to 31 December; and, from 1 January, ninetythree nights for the Garden as opposed to ninety nights for the Lane. The averages have been rounded to the nearest pound. For readers wishing to compare the following figures with those in The London Stage, it is worthwhile noting that there are a number of errors in that earlier publication concerning the transcription of figures from the Egerton manuscript.3 TABLE 2  Breakdown of financial receipts for Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres for the season 1794–95 Covent Garden

Drury Lane

Season dates

15 September to 17 June

16 September to 8 June

Highest night

£518 0s 6d (royal visit, 20 April)

£500 18s 6d (12 February)

Lowest night

£60 3s 6d (13 February)

£97 6s 6d (7 February)

Total to 31 December

£17,694 15s 6d

£20,935 17s

Nightly average to 31 December

£230

£272

Total from 1 January

£16,529 16s 6d

£23,164 16s 6d

Nightly average from 1 January

£178

£257

Notes 1 See the article by Milhous and Hume, ‘Playwrights’ remuneration in eighteenth-century London’, p. 23. 2 Hogan, The London Stage, 1660–1800 […] Part 5: 1776–1800, I, xxxviii. 3 Ibid., III, 1688–1768.

Bibliography

Archival sources This biography is a mosaic of fragments from Harris’s life. A substantial part of this primary material came from scrapbooks compiled by theatrical connoisseurs – such as those by the topographer Daniel Lysons which are held at the Folger – and from ‘extra-illustrated editions’ of theatrical memoirs with their interpolation of clippings, published pamphlets, autograph letters, portraits and caricatures. In a number of cases, the repository has catalogued the scrapbook or the extra-illustrated edition, but not its contents. It is, perhaps, partly because of the perceived lack of importance of such legal and theatrical ephemera – something which this book tries to address – but also because of the way such ephemera was collected in the early nineteenth century, where it has been kept ever since, in situ. Bodleian Library, Oxford University MS.ENG.MISC.e.143 – notebook of James Northcote (copies of letters from Elizabeth Inchbald to John Taylor, 1789–1818) British Library, London Add. MS 27925 – letters addressed principally to Frederic Reynolds and family members, 1759–1839 Add. MS 29643 – letter book of Henry Robertson, 1823–29 Add. MS 30346; MS 30348 – papers and correspondence of Samuel Ireland, 1794–98 Add. MS 31972–31975 – professional memoranda of John Philip Kemble, 1788–1815 Add. MS 33218 – proofs for plaintiffs and counsel’s notes in the action of Thomas Harris v. George Colman, 1770 Add. MS 35515 – letters to Sir Robert Murray Keith, 1774–89 Add. MS 42720 – Sheridan Papers. Vol. I: correspondence, 1806–08 Egerton MS 2289–2311 – ledger of Covent Garden theatre, 1788–1813 Place Collection Set 59 (1 & 2) – papers relating to the OP Riots in Covent Garden theatre, 1809

208

Bibliography

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC Scrapbook A.4.2–.9; A.4.14–.17 – theatrical clippings (London, Covent Garden, 1770–1829) Scrapbook A.16.2–.5 – theatrical clippings collected by Daniel Lysons Scrapbook B.37.1a – theatrical clippings (Kemble family) Scrapbook W.a.40 – theatrical scrapbook/manuscript, c.1760–1821 T.a.66 – transcript of depositions in the action of Thomas Harris v. George Colman, 1770 W.a.137 – manuscript observations on A Statement of the Differences Subsisting Between the Proprietors and Performers of the Theatre-Royal CoventGarden, c.1800 W.b.104 – papers of Thomas Harris relating to a proposed theatre at Knightsbridge, London, in collaboration with Henry Holland, 1774–83 W.b.436; W.b.441–4 – manuscript records of Covent Garden theatre, 1793–94, 1817–21 W.b.476 – extra-illustrated edition (including mss) of Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 1780 W.b.481 – David Garrick, a collection of engravings, manuscripts and playbills, compiled c.1830 by James Winston W.b.490 – collection of six letters and one note arising out of Junius’s attack on Garrick, 1764–73 W.b.577 – John Philip Kemble’s scrapbook, manuscript, c.1787–1840 Y.c.1376 – autograph letters from Elizabeth Inchbald to various people, manuscript 1780–1810 Y.c.2595 (12, 13) – collection of letters and documents relating to Covent Garden theatre, c.1812–55 Houghton Library, Harvard University Hyde Case 9 (3) – extra-illustrated autograph manuscript: ‘A full and explanatory account of the Shaksperian forgery by myself the writer William Henry Ireland’ Theatre Collection TCS 45 – portrait prints of women, c.1700–1900 TCS 61 – miscellaneous caricatures of theatre personnel Thr 149 – Covent Garden theatre documents concerning finances and personnel, 1807–22 Thr 467, box 47 – correspondence of Henry and Thomas Harris with various people, 1811–32 and undated Thr 697 – James Winston papers, 1733–1871 TS 313.1.5 – Covent Garden theatre: scrapbook, 1808–09 TS 318.1 – James Winston, Royalty theatre scrapbook, 1800–28 TS 937.3 – extra-illustrated edition (including mss) of Life of David Garrick by Arthur Murphy and Garrick’s Private Correspondence ed. by James Boaden, 10 vols TS 940.6 – extra-illustrated edition (including mss) of James Boaden, The Life of Mrs. Jordan, 4 vols

Bibliography

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TS 941.5F – extra-illustrated edition (including mss) of James Boaden, The Life of John Philip Kemble, 8 vols Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone Pratt Manuscripts U840/O144/12 – official papers of Sir John Jeffreys Pratt as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 1795–98 London Metropolitan Archives, London EC1 CLC/B/192/F/025/MS38874 – Royal and Sun Alliance insurance group; Sun insurance office: policies DL/T/090/007 – Bishop’s transcripts, diocese of London, 1814 DRO/110/023 – Saint John the Baptist, Hillingdon; parish registers: burials E/BER/CG/E/08/10/03–12 – Bedford (Duke of), Covent Garden estate, legal correspondence and papers E/BER/CG/L/043 – Bedford (Duke of), Covent Garden estate, property records: leases F/WST/047 – West family; correspondence, accounts and general papers MJ/SP/1787/07 – Middlesex Sessions of the Peace; papers for 1787 P81/JN1/111 – Saint John at Hampstead, parish records, burial fee book, 1812–36 P82/AND/A/001/MS06667/009 – Saint Andrew, Holborn, register of baptisms, 1724–40 P82/GIS/A/02 – Saint Giles in the Fields, Holborn, register of baptisms, 1637– 1924 P90/PAN1/005 – Saint Pancras Parish Church, Camden; parish records National Archives, Kew ADM 6/94; ADM 107/19 – Lieutenants’ passing certificates, 1795 C12/1024/36 – Harris v. Colman, bill of complaint and answers, 1769 C24/1781–82 – Court of Chancery depositions, Hilary term 1770 C24/1784 – Court of Chancery depositions, Easter term 1770 HO 42/18/105; HO 42/23; HO 42/29; HO 42/30; HO 42/99/868 – Home Office: domestic correspondence, George III HO 44/18 – Home Office: domestic correspondence, 1773–1861 HO 65/1 – Home Office: Police Entry Books, Series I HO 387/1/2–3; HO 387/4/5 – Home Office: Secret Service accounts and papers PC 1/116/15 – correspondence from Thomas Harris, 1789 PRO 30/8/229/2 – William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham: papers (civil service salaries, Secret Service money, pensions) National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh MS 1046 – Melville Papers, Royal Navy, individuals, 1782–1842 Royal Archives, Windsor Castle GEO/MAIN/20408; 20464; 20501 – correspondence from Thomas Harris, 1813 GEO/MAIN/21571–81 – material concerning articles of agreement between Thomas Harris and J. P. Kemble, 1810

210

Bibliography

Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford D(W) 1778/I.ii/1738 – Dartmouth papers Theatre Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, London PN2596.L7.C8 – miscellaneous correspondence, Covent Garden theatre, 1790– 1821 PN2596.L7.C8 Folio – In the House of Lords between Henry Harris, Esq. and Charles Kemble, John Saltren Willett, John Forbes, Francis Const, William Harrison, and James Trotter, Esqrs (1829) Wiltshire and Swindon Archives, Chippenham, Wiltshire 1946/4/2B/34 – Radnor papers

Images Anon., A Baite. For the Devil (London: W. Richardson, 1779). —. A Cart Load of Young Players on their Journey to London (London: W. Holland, 1811). —. English Discipline for Meddleing Servants * An English Mans Motto is Genorosoty and Forgiveness (London: S. W. Fores, 1809). —. [Inside view of the Royalty theatre] (London: Bellamy & Co., 1787). —. Orator Hum (London: Charles Bretherton, 1782). —. A Peep Below Stairs a Dream (London: J. Wallis, 1784). —. Pizzaro a New Play or the Drury-Lane Masquerade (London: S. W. Fores, 1799). —. The Rival Richards or Sheakspear in Danger (London: S. Knight, [1818?]). —. [Royalty theatre elevation and map] (London: C. Brady at the Theatre, 1787). —. Sawny Wetherbeaten (London: W. Holland, [1792?]). —. Spirits of the British Drama (London: n. p., 1818). —. Theatrical Amusement or Tossing-up for the Young Roscius! (London: W. Holland, 1804). —. The Triumphal Entry of the Red Kings by Wisdom & Justice with the Expulsion of their Black Majesties (London: [J. Williams], 1768). —. The Young Roscious Weighing the Managers Gold (London: n. p., 1805). Cruikshank, George, and Isaac Cruikshank, Acting Magistrates Committing Themselves being their First Appearance on this Stage as Performed at the National Theatre Covent Garden (London: n. p., 1809). —. [Clifford versus Brandon] (London: [T. Tegg?], 1809). —. King John and John Bull (London: J. Johnstone, 1809). Darly, [Matthias?], View Colman in the Lap of Mother Shipton (London: M. Darly, 1772). Gillray, James, Counsellor O. P., Defender of our Theatric Liberties! (London: H. Humphrey, 1809).

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Index

actors financial insecurity 2, 13–14, 15, 107–8, 190 pantomime (attitudes to) 18–19, 186 and prostitution 24, 185, 186, 187 reputation of 18, 80, 107–8, 108–9, 114, 120n.39, 183–4, 188–9, 194n.41, 195n.56 Adam, William 138, 141, 142, 165n.52 Addicott, William 131 Addington, William (Sir) 19 Ambrose, Miss 187 Anstruther, John 102 Antrobus, Edmund (Sir) 66n.236, 172 Apollo Turn’d Stroller 114 Argus 116, 117 Arne, Thomas 129 Astley’s Amphitheatre 101, 102, 109, 118n.10 Austen, Jane 112 Mansfield Park 112 Bannister, Charles 100, 109, 120n.40, 121n.72, 197 Barlow, Edward 27–9, 30, 47, 50, 58n.128, 59n.134; 60nn.145, 146; 113, 116, 126, 148, 149–50, 197 Bastille, The 115, 116 Bath 14, 33, 89, 111, 149, 158, 201 Bathurst, Henry (second Earl of Bathurst) 68

Bathurst, Henry (third Earl of Bathurst) 144 Bembridge, William 125 Bentham, Jeremy 154 Best, Serjeant 155 Betty, William Henry West 34, 36, 37, 52n.19, 197 Bill of Rights (1689) 148 Blake, William 1, 42 Boaden, James 14, 52n.19, 61n.165, 117, 135, 162n.20, 182, 184, 194n.36, 197 Bombay 55n.80 Bone, John 145, 146, 155, 197 Boswell, James 23, 73–4, 93n.26 Brandon, James W. 27, 29–30, 50, 59n.129; 60nn.145, 147; 61n.175, 126, 129, 133, 135–6, 144, 149, 151–3, 156, 158, 159–60; 170nn.121, 130; 197, 198, 204 Clifford v. Brandon 150–6; 169nn.101, 112, 119; 201 Brandon, John 29–30, 50, 60n.145, 172, 197 Brighton 176, 178 Bristol 106, 159 British Library 90, 163n.32, 205 British Museum 34, 35, 62n.176, 203–4 Buffalo tavern, Bloomsbury 103 Bunn, Alfred 49, 198 Burdett, Francis (Sir) 145–6, 148, 149, 151, 198

228 Byron, George Gordon Noel (Lord) 188–9 Capon, William 100 Carlile, Richard 154 Charles II 101 Churchill, Charles 75 Clifford, Henry 151–6, 157, 158, 159, 166n.75, 170n.127, 198 Clifford v. Brandon 150–6; 169nn.101, 112, 119; 201 Cobbett, William 146, 157, 166n.75, 197 Cochrane, Thomas (Lord) 166n.75, 173 Cold Bath Fields (house of correction) 145 Colman, George (the Elder) 53n.32, 68–70, 71–2, 75–6, 77–82, 83, 84–91; 91nn.2, 6; 92n.20; 94nn.41, 48; 95n.67, 120n.36, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204 Colman, George (the Younger) 91, 94n.48, 119n.36, 167n.84 Cook, Thomas 67 Cornelys, Teresa (Mrs) 111 Corn Laws 47 Court of Common Pleas 150, 154, 198, 201 Court of King’s Bench, Dublin 103 Coutts, Thomas 50, 65n.235 Covent Garden theatre architecture 4, 26, 126, 128–9, 130, 133–4, 136, 138, 143 auction of (proposed, 1829) 1, 2, 3, 4, 51n.1 and commerce 26–7, 28, 59n.128, 65n.234, 192n.14 competition to 5, 11, 13, 14–15, 36–7, 101, 105–6, 106–7, 113–14, 117, 120n.43, 121n.55, 122n.78, 137–8, 164n.49, 205–6 destruction of (1808) 125–37, 139–41; 163nn.28, 34, 36

Index disuse 1–2, 190 entertainments 1, 9, 31, 56n.90, 63n.206, 88, 106, 129, 131, 138, 156, 182, 184, 186, 190 geographical situation 2–3; 51nn.6, 7; 136, 137, 139–40 and Navy 4, 16, 17, 20 Old Price riots 32–3, 143–50, 151–3, 155, 156–7, 158, 159, 160–1; 166nn.67, 78; 167nn.79, 81, 82; 168nn.93, 95 patriotism 9, 65n.235, 75, 148, 167n.89, 205–6 political affiliation 9, 64n.215, 143, 144, 147–8, 160, 167n.89, 168n.90, 205–6 and prostitution 2–3, 22–5, 25–6, 51n.10, 58n.120, 185, 186 rebuilding 26, 58n.125, 128, 132, 137, 138, 139, 141–2, 163n.28; 165nn.52, 58 receipts 2, 21, 51n.2, 57n.104, 65n.231, 137, 138; 164nn.43, 49; 175, 205–6 reopening (1809) 134, 143 Covent Garden Theatrical Fund 80, 190 Cox, James 110 Crown and Anchor (tavern) 145, 146, 151, 158; 166nn.73, 78 Cruikshank, George and Isaac 156 Acting Magistrates Committing Themselves 61n.164 [Clifford versus Brandon] 59n.129, 156, 169n.101 King John and John Bull 144 D’Auvergne, Philip (Capt.) 20 Dagge, Henry 71, 80 Darly, Matthias 88–9 View Colman in the Lap of Mother Shipton 88–9 debtor (experiences of) 2, 15, 29, 30, 48, 50, 63n.209, 90, 92n.17, 112, 115, 130, 159, 172–5, 176, 178; 192nn.10, 11, 14

Index Delpini, Carlo 116 De Quincey, Thomas 1 Derrick, Samuel 77 Dibdin, Thomas 15, 27, 177 Dodd, James William 185 Don Juan 114 Doncaster 14 Drury Lane theatre 4, 5, 9–11, 12, 53n.42, 68, 98, 100, 101, 109, 113, 115, 116, 120n.44, 123, 127, 130, 137–9, 161n.2, 164n.47, 167n.81, 168n.90, 179, 189, 190, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205–6 Dublin 13, 40, 85, 103 Dudley, Henry Bate (Sir) 44, 63n.205, 161, 198 Dunning, John 72–3, 75, 79, 80, 83, 85, 87, 92n.22, 94n.53, 198 Dupont, Gainsborough 177, 178, 198 East India Company 102, 110, 124 Ellar, Tom 31, 190, 198 Epistle to G. Colman, An 79 Examen de la constitution de France de 1799 43, 63n.202 Examiner 131, 163n.27 Farington, Joseph 5, 7, 55n.79 Farley, Charles 38–40, 41, 50, 57n.104, 198 Fawcett, John 31, 32, 190, 199 Fielding, Henry 24 Fielding, John (Sir) 24, 68, 70, 89 financial crisis (1825) 3 fire arsonist, the 123, 137 and Covent Garden theatre 125–7, 128–9, 130–7, 139–42 and criminal activity 125, 127, 130, 134–5, 136–7, 163n.36 inquests 131–2, 134 insurance (companies) 58n.123, 128, 130, 132, 134, 135, 136, 139, 141; 163nn.28, 29 perception of 123–4, 130

229 prevention 132–4, 136; 163nn.32, 34; 176 risk of 123–4, 129, 130; 162nn.7, 24 and theatres (other) 10–11, 123–4, 130 Fisher, Kitty 186 Fleet prison 172 Flight, William 67, 70 Folger Shakespeare Library 34, 90, 91n.1, 207 Foote, Samuel 85, 90, 185, 199 Fox, Charles James 93n.28, 142 Freemasonry 48, 64n.223, 98, 100, 102 French Revolution, the 10, 39, 41, 43, 115, 145, 149 Garrick, David 5, 12, 68, 78, 80, 84, 90, 91, 100, 179, 185, 199, 202 Miss in Her Teens 100, 105 Garrow, William (Sir) 132, 149, 150, 165n.53, 168n.93, 199 Gay, John 182 Beggar’s Opera, The 182, 186, 188 Gazetteer 108 Gell, Anthony 131 General Lying-in Hospital, Bayswater 26 George II 82 George III 9, 10, 13, 17, 18, 38, 42, 43, 54n.63, 61n.160, 74, 90–1, 102, 109, 113, 138, 142, 145, 148, 167n.89, 175, 176, 199, 201, 205 George, Mary Dorothy 119n.36, 203 Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires 119n.36, 203–4 George, Prince of Wales (Prince Regent) 1, 11, 15–16, 17, 132, 199, 202 Gibbs, Vicary (Sir) 144–5, 157, 168n.93, 199 Gillray, James 61n.175, 108–9 Theatrical War, The 61n.175, 108–9

230 Glindon, William 154 Goldsmith, Oliver 1 She Stoops to Conquer 1, 106, 182, 201 Goodman’s Fields theatre 100 Gotobed, John 58n.125 Graham, James (Temple of Hymen) 110 Gray, Thomas 114, 123, 124 ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’ 114, 121n.63 Greville, Charles 142 Grimaldi, Joseph 1, 15, 18, 19, 31, 124, 199 Hadfield, James 10 Hadley and Simkins 136 Hallam, Thomas 83 Hall-Stevenson, John 76 Crazy Tales 76 Handel, George Frederick 129 Hanway, Jonas 19 Hargrave, Francis 113, 121n.55 Harley, John Pritt 190–1, 199 Harris, Edwin Charlton 19, 20–1, 28–9, 55n.79, 56n.96, 59n.142, 200 Harris, George 16–18, 19, 55n.79; 56nn.83, 84; 200 Harris, Henry 2, 18, 19, 30, 31, 32, 40, 49, 50, 55n.79, 56n.90, 61n.175, 62n.181, 64n.215, 66n.236, 125–6, 127, 128, 142, 143, 149, 151, 154, 156, 158, 159–60, 169n.101, 170n.131, 175, 191n.2, 192n.14, 198, 199, 204 Harris, Thomas and auctions 2, 3–4, 5, 176–81, 192n.17; 193nn.20, 21, 27, 30 bagnio ownership 23–6, 57n.118; 58nn.120, 123; 199 and Bedford Office 25–6, 48, 57n.118; 58nn.123, 125; 112–13, 137, 138–9, 141–2, 163n.28, 164n.50, 165n.52, 171

Index Chancery suit 67–86; 91nn.1, 5; 92nn.20, 21; 94nn.46, 50, 53; 95n.56 children (see also separate entries for individuals) 15–16, 21–2; 55nn.79, 80 and Clifford v. Brandon 151, 156 and criminal underworld 22, 68, 85, 199 fraud 50, 65n.236, 172, 191n.2 Freemasonry 48, 64n.223 images of 4, 6–7, 8, 22, 23, 34–7, 61n.175, 78–9, 108–9, 203–4 King’s theatre, Haymarket 112, 120n.53 Knightsbridge scheme (Prince of Wales’s theatre) 110–12, 112–13, 120n.44, 200 mystery surrounding 5, 7, 8, 24–5, 26–7, 32, 33–4, 36, 38–9, 40, 43–4, 48, 49, 50, 53n.40, 60n.160, 61n.175; 65nn.225, 231; 128, 180, 189, 196n.79 origins 5–7; 52nn.27, 30; 91 ostracism 143, 144–5, 160–1, 166n.67 philanthropy 19, 21–2, 46–7, 57n.104 portraits (collection of) 176–81; 193nn.21, 27, 30, 32 posthumous reputation 8; 53nn.39, 40, 41; 188–9, 194n.41, 196n.76 press involvement 32, 38, 43–6, 47–9, 63n.205, 65n.225, 78, 106–7, 132, 153 and prostitution 22–6; 57nn.109, 118; 58nn.120, 123; 186 and provincial theatre 13–15, 55n.68, 202 relationship with Colman (the Elder) 53n.32, 68–70, 71–2, 75–6, 77–82, 84–6, 89–90, 91; 91nn.2, 5; 92n.20, 94n.41, 120n.36, 198, 200, 201, 202

Index George III 9, 13, 17, 18, 38, 54n.63, 61n.160, 90–1, 102, 109, 113, 138, 148, 167n.89, 175, 199, 205 Harris, Henry 18, 19, 30, 31, 50, 55n.79, 66n.236, 125–6, 127, 128, 142, 143, 149, 158, 159–60, 170n.131, 175, 191n.2, 192n.14, 198, 199 Holland, Henry 65n.228, 112–13, 120n.44, 121n.55, 133–4, 139, 200 Inchbald 8, 14, 41, 180–3, 184, 186–9, 193n.32, 194n.39, 195n.65; 196nn.70, 79 Lessingham 19–20; 56nn.96, 97; 75–7, 78–9, 86, 181, 187, 188, 200 Macklin 79, 82–5, 86; 94nn.49, 50, 53; 95n.56, 201 Rose 20, 38, 45, 46–7, 48, 49, 65n.225, 144, 201 Russell, Francis (fifth Duke of Bedford) 25, 48, 57n.118, 58n.123, 113, 121n.55 Russell, John (sixth Duke of Bedford) 25, 48, 57n.118, 58n.123, 138–9, 141–2, 165n.58, 171 Rutherford 67–9, 70–1, 79, 82, 84, 92n.17, 201 Sheridan 11–12, 15, 45–6, 101, 112, 116, 120n.43 residences Bellemonte, Uxbridge 48, 49, 65n.228, 126, 142–3, 160, 175–6, 177, 178, 192n.17, 199, 201 Knightsbridge, London 5, 120n.44, 124, 162n.7, 186, 189 retirement 125–6, 142–3, 161, 176, 178, 199 Royal Academy 177 royal court (introduction to) 90–1, 96n.78

231 Royalty theatre (opposition to) 103, 106–9, 115–17, 120n.43 Secret Service involvement 32, 38, 40, 41, 43–9, 63n.205; 65nn.225, 235; 85, 199, 201 Shakespeare tavern 22–3, 58n.125, 126, 138, 141, 163n.28 theatre patents 4, 11, 13, 85, 89, 101–2, 107, 109–10, 111, 112–13, 118n.12, 120n.44, 121n.55, 134, 147, 201 Harrison, John 22–3 Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies 22–3, 24, 186 Hartley, David 133, 176 Hartley, Elizabeth (Mrs) 89 Hastings, Francis Rawdon (second Earl of Moira) 16 Haymarket theatre 85, 103, 120n.36, 188, 198, 199 Heath, James 193n.30 Hodgson, George 132 Hogarth, William 186 Harlot’s Progress, A 186 Holland, Henry 112, 113, 121n.55, 133, 134, 139, 163n.32, 200 Holland, William 14 Home Office 38, 41–2 Houghton library, Harvard 34, 35, 37 House of Commons 45–6, 72 Hull 13–14 Hull, Thomas 80 Hunter, John 72 Hyde, Justice 115, 116 imprisonment (experience of) 21, 47, 115, 116, 125, 145, 172–5, 191n.6; 192nn.8, 9, 10 Inchbald, Elizabeth 8, 14, 41, 55n.79, 124, 180–9; 193nn.30, 31, 32; 194nn.35, 36, 39, 49; 195nn.55, 65, 69; 196nn.70, 79; 200, 201, 202 Mogul Tale, The 188 Incledon, Charles 190 Ireland, William Henry 5, 200

232 Jackson, George 20 Jackson, William (Dr Viper) 103, 116, 121n.73, 200, 202 Jacobite rising, the (1745) 74 Java (Indonesia) 16 Jenkinson, Robert Banks (Lord Liverpool) 144 Johnson, Samuel (Dr) 20, 73, 93n.26, 185 Jones, John Gale 149, 157, 168n.94, 197 Jones, William 173 Jonson, Ben 30, 46, 88 Alchemist, The 30 Sejanus His Fall 46, 64n.214 Kean, Edmund 190–1 Keegan, Allan 51n.1 Kemble, Charles 15, 30, 33 Kemble, John Philip 1, 32–3, 34, 35, 52n.19; 61nn.164, 165, 176; 64nn.215, 223; 128–9, 138, 147–8, 149–50, 151, 154, 155, 156, 158–9, 160, 162n.20, 166n.67, 170n.127, 191, 197, 200, 203–4 King’s Bench prison 29, 115, 117, 145, 172–4, 191n.6; 192nn.9, 10 Lamb, Charles 99 Leake, James 71, 80, 89–90 Leeds 14 Leigh & Samuel Sotheby 179 Lessingham, Jane 19–20, 28; 56nn.96, 97; 67, 75–7, 78, 79, 86, 181, 187, 188, 200, 202 Letter from T. Harris to G. Colman, A 79 Library of Congress 34 Lincoln’s Inn 68, 70, 158 London Bethnal Green 102 Billingsgate 72 Bishopsgate 71 Bloomsbury 33, 103, 132, 142 Bow 104

Index Bow Street 9, 24, 27, 40, 57n.114, 58n.125, 59n.128, 68, 70, 87, 119n.22, 129, 136, 137, 139, 141, 149, 152, 157 Charing Cross 2, 104, 131, 143, 146 Clerkenwell 145 Covent Garden 2–3, 21, 22–6, 34, 40; 51nn.6, 7, 8; 67, 76, 125, 126, 128, 134, 136, 137, 139–41, 157, 177, 185 Downing Street 42 Great Russell Street 33, 155 Hammersmith 154 Hampstead Heath 19, 20, 56n.97 Hans Town 133, 163n.32 Harley Street 155 Hart Street 11, 21, 67, 129, 136 Hayes Common 144 Holborn 5, 7, 35, 53n.35, 77, 91, 102, 155 Houndsditch 97 Kensington 154 Knightsbridge 5, 110, 113, 124, 186, 189, 200 Lambeth 101 Leman Street 98, 100 Limehouse 124 London Wall 97 Long Acre 136 Mile End 104, 124 Minories 97 Monmouth Street 81 Oxford Street 155 Paddington 81 Pentonville 101 pleasure gardens 39, 89, 110–11 Portland Place 2 Putney Heath 176 Ratcliffe 97, 117n.4, 124 Regent Street 2 Rosemary Lane (Rag Fair) 1, 99, 103–4 Russell Street 130, 136 St George’s Fields 117 St Giles 67 St James’s 91

Index Saltpetre Bank 99 Snow Hill 149 Southwark 172 Spitalfields 102 Strand, the 1, 51n.1, 58n.125, 71, 88, 125, 145, 172 Surrey Street 144 Temple Bar 104, 107, 131 Thieving Alley 1 Tower Hamlets 97–9, 100, 101, 102, 103–4, 106, 117n.4, 119n.22 Tower Hill 97, 124 Tower of London 99, 101, 145, 146 Wapping 102, 104, 124 Wellclose Square 98–9, 100, 102, 104, 106, 114, 197 Westminster 12, 42, 63n.209, 112, 117n.1, 131, 142, 146, 148, 150, 166n.78, 197, 198 Whitechapel 97, 104, 106, 119n.22 Wobourn Place 155 Woolwich 107 (see also separate entries for individual buildings and businesses) London Chronicle 90 London Corresponding Society 146, 147, 149 London Evening Post 44, 48, 92n.20 London Gazette Extraordinary 16–17 Long, Charles 38, 45 Longman, Thomas 47–8, 64n.222, 200 Louis XVI 9, 145 Lundy 177 Macklin, Charles 79, 82–5, 86, 89; 94nn.49, 50, 53; 95n.56, 201 Love a la Mode 73, 201 McMahon, Sir John (Col.) 16, 17, 118n.10 Macready, William Charles 13 Madura 16

233 Magna Carta 142, 148 Manchester 14, 202 Mansfield, James (Sir) 154, 155, 156, 201 Mathews, Charles 179 Mayor, John 47, 64n.219 More, Hannah 72–3 Morgan, John 98 Morgan library, New York City 34 Morning Chronicle 44 Morning Herald 10, 44, 63n.205, 108, 198 Morning Post 43, 108, 127, 132, 182, 189, 198 Mossop, Henry 77 Murray, William (Lord Mansfield) 83–4, 147 Napoleonic War, the 16–17, 19, 21, 39, 48, 74, 161 Nash, John 2; 51nn.6, 7 Nelson, Horatio (Admiral) 4 Newgate prison 102, 145, 146, 191n.6 O’Connor, Arthur 10 O’Keeffe, John 1, 15, 18, 53n.41, 59n.134, 201 Wild Oats 1 Old Bailey, the 68, 84, 125 Opie, Amelia 181, 193n.32, 201 Opie, John 23, 36, 178, 180–1; 193nn.30, 32; 201 Thomas Harris 23, 36 [Elizabeth Inchbald] 180–1; 193nn.30, 32 Paine, Thomas 43, 46, 63n.199 Palmer, John (Bath theatre manager) 14, 18 Palmer, John (‘Plausible Jack’) 98– 100, 101, 102–3, 104, 105–6, 107–9, 110, 111, 113–14, 115–17; 118nn.11, 16; 119n.32, 120n.40, 121n.63, 123, 200, 201

234 Paris 13, 38–9, 40, 41, 54n.65, 74, 121n.73, 149, 202 parliamentary inquiry prisons (London) 173–4, 192n.9 theatres (London) 3, 55n.68, 164n.47, 167n.84 patent privilege 4, 11, 13, 85, 89, 100, 101–2, 107–8, 109–10, 111, 112–13, 118n.12, 120n.44, 121n.55, 134, 147, 201 and legal sanctions 102, 107–8, 109, 114, 116, 117 Peel, Robert 2 Perceval, Spencer 143, 144 Phoenix fire office 136, 139 Piazza coffee house 10, 25, 26; 58nn.120, 123; 127, 130 Pitt the Younger, William 36, 38, 42, 43, 45, 48, 85, 148, 168n.90, 199, 201 Place, Francis 146, 151, 154, 158, 159, 166n.75; 169nn.101, 112; 197 Political Register 146 Powell, William 68 Poynter, Dr 183 press, the 16–17, 33–4, 42–6, 47–9, 59n.128, 60n.160; 61nn.173, 175, 176; 63nn.202, 205, 207, 209; 64n.221, 65n.225, 77–8, 107–8, 135, 154, 157, 160–1, 170n.121 (see also separate entries for individual titles) Public Advertiser 106, 115 Public Ledger 44, 48 Pückler-Muskau, Hermann (Fürst von) 2; 51nn.8, 14; 61n.173, 148, 162n.14, 165n.65, 168n.90, 172–3, 191n.6 Quick, John 106–7, 201

Index radicalism 10, 11, 32–3, 41–3, 45–6; 61nn.165, 172; 63n.199, 114–15, 144–58, 159, 163n.35; 166nn.73, 75, 78; 167n.79; 168nn.94, 95 Ranelagh Gardens 111 Read, James 152 Redigé, Paulo (‘Little Devil’) 31 revolution (threat of) 9–10, 41–3, 145, 149 Reynolds, Joshua (Sir) 34, 92n.22, 178 Rice, Woodford (Capt.) 71 Robertson, Henry 49–50 Robins, George Henry 176–7, 178–9, 201 Rocque, John 100 Rose, George 20, 38, 43, 45, 46–7, 48, 49, 63n.209, 64n.215, 65n.225, 114–15, 144, 201 Rowlandson, Thomas 34–6; 52nn.19, 20; 127–8, 157, 203 Chaos is Come Again! 127–8 Melpomene in the Dumps 34–6 Royal Circus 101, 115, 116, 117 Royalty theatre (Wellclose Square) audience 97–8, 99, 102, 104–5, 111, 113–15 closure (first) 106 entertainments (see also separate entries for individual titles) 100, 105, 113–15 foundation stone (laying of) 98–9, 101 interior 105, 119n.24 location 97–8, 99, 100, 102, 117n.4 opening 102, 104–6 opposition to 101–2, 103–4, 105, 106–10, 115–17, 120n.39 proscenium motto 104 reasons for 99, 102 reopening 113–15 support for 101, 118n.11 Roysen, Samuel 173–4

Index Russel, Captain 20 Russell coffee house 125 Rutherford, John 67–8, 69, 70–1, 79, 82, 84, 85, 91n.4; 92nn.15, 17, 20; 201 Sadler’s Wells theatre 101, 102, 118n.9, 124, 199 St. James’s Chronicle 44, 48, 68, 77, 102, 109 Sarjant, Charles (senior) 70 satirical prints 27, 34–7, 59n.129; 61nn.175, 176; 74, 78–9, 88–9, 103, 108–9, 144, 203–4 (see also separate entries for individual titles) Sawny Wetherbeaten 74 Scotland (perceptions of) 72, 73–5, 93n.26, 129 Scott, Walter 151 Secret Service 38, 40, 41–9, 50; 63nn.202, 203, 205; 65nn.225, 235; 103, 166n.73, 199, 201 Shakespeare, William 12, 81, 88, 101, 102, 105, 138, 179, 199, 200 As You Like It 105 Henry V 190 Julius Caesar 81, 129 Macbeth 32, 129, 138 Merchant of Venice, The 76 Romeo and Juliet 138 Tempest, The 86 Shakespeare tavern 22–3, 58n.125, 126, 138, 141, 163n.28 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 1, 9–13, 15, 17, 36, 37, 44, 45–6, 54n.42, 99, 101, 112, 116, 120n.43, 123, 130, 137–8, 179, 184, 199, 200, 202, 205 character 10–11, 12–13, 123, 130 Drury Lane theatre (management of) 9–10, 11, 12, 15, 37, 54n.42, 99, 101, 120n.43, 123, 130, 137–8, 179, 205–6

235 King’s theatre, Haymarket 112, 120n.53 Palmer (prosecution of) 116 Pizarro 131 posthumous reputation 12, 36, 54n.42 and radicalism 9–10, 11, 44, 45–6 relationship with George III 9–10, 17, 205 Harris 11–12, 15, 45–6, 101, 112, 116, 120n.43 Rivals, The 1, 106 School for Scandal, The 184 Siddons, Sarah 34–5, 138, 190, 200, 203 Smeeton, George 136 Smirke, Robert 25 Smythe, Sidney Stafford (Sir) 68 soap manufacture 5, 7–8, 36, 91 special juries 154–5, 169n.112 Spectator 111 Staples, John 103–4, 105, 115–16, 119n.22 Star 184 Statesman 149, 168n.95 Stock Exchange 33 Stott, John (Capt.) 77 Stuart, John (Earl of Bute) 74 Sun 47, 184, 189 Sun fire office 132, 136, 163n.29 Taunton, Samuel 152 Taylor, John 40, 47, 64n.221, 82–3, 183, 188–90; 194nn.35, 41, 49; 196nn.80, 81; 202 Tegg, Thomas 146, 197 Telegraph 189 Thelwall, John 147 Thespian Magazine 184 Tiberius Caesar 46, 64n.211, 161 Tooke, John Horne 63n.199, 145, 146, 147, 151, 197, 198 Townsend, John 59n.128 Tregent, James 11–12, 44, 202

236 Triumphal Entry of the Red Kings by Wisdom & Justice, The 78–9, 83 True Briton 47 Union fire office 136, 163n.29 Utoph, Mr 27 Vanbrugh, John (Sir) 77 Relapse, The 77 Vauxhall Gardens 89, 111 Wakefield 14 Walpole, Robert 100 Ward, Ned 97, 104 Ward, Thomas Achurch 14–15, 202 War of 1812 16 Wedderburn, Alexander 72, 73, 74–5, 76, 78, 79, 80–1, 83, 85, 93n.27, 94n.46, 202 Westminster Abbey 12, 142 Whitehall Evening Post 44, 102 Wilkes, John 74, 93n.26

Index Wilkinson, Tate 14, 18, 182–3, 200, 202 Williams, Charles 38 Secrets upon Secrets 38 Williams, John (alias Anthony Pasquin) 5, 38, 40–1, 53n.41, 62n.185, 185, 202 Wilson, Richard 188, 196n.74, 202 Windham, William 45, 64n.210 Woffington, Peg 185 World 102, 104, 105, 108, 115 Wycherley, William 99 Plain Dealer, The 99 Wyndham, George O’Brien (third Earl of Egremont) 179 York 14 Younger, Joseph 70 Zoffany, Johan Joseph 6–7, 8, 178, 179, 202 David Garrick 179 [Thomas Harris] 6–7, 8, 52n.30