Forsaken, wanders o’er the heath, &c., &c.
The picture was somewhat over-drawn, but there were thousands who believed it to be true to the very letter.
CHAPTER VII.
(1746.)
he players and the playwrights were zealous Whigs throughout the rebellion. The Drury Lane company to a man became volunteers, under their manager, Mr. Lacy, who had asked the royal permission to raise a couple of hundred men, in defence of his Majesty’s person and Government. To attract loyal audiences at a time when the public could not be readily tempted to the theatre, ‘The Nonjuror’ was revived, at both houses. Two players, Macklin and Elderton, set to work to produce plays for their respective theatres, on the subject of Perkin Warbeck. While Macklin was delivering what he wrote, piecemeal, to the actors, for study, and Elderton was perspiring over his laborious gestation of blank-verse, the proprietors of the playhouse in Goodman’s Fields forestalled both by bringing out Ford’s old play, which is named after the Pretender to the throne of Henry VII. Macklin called his piece ‘Henry VII., or the Popish Impostor.’ This absurd allusion to Perkin was a shaft aimed at the actual Pretender. The Whigs approved of both title and play, and they roared at every line which they could apply against Tories and Jacobites. THE PLAYERS. At both houses, occasional prologues stirred the loyal impulses or provoked the indignation of the audience. At Covent Garden, ‘Tamerlane,’ which was always solemnly brought out when the popular wrath was to be excited against France, was preceded by a patriotic prologue which Mrs. Pritchard delivered in her best manner, and Dodsley sold the next day, as fast as he could deliver copies over the counter of his shop in Pall Mall. Rich and his Covent Garden players did not turn soldiers, but he gave the house, gratis, for three days for the benefit of a scheme that was to be to the advantage of the veterans of the army; and this brought 600l. to the funds. The actors sacrificed their salaries, and charming Mrs. Cibber sang as Polly, in the ‘Beggars’ Opera’ more exquisitely than ever, to prove (as she said) that, ‘though she was a Catholic, she was sincerely attached to the family who was in possession of the Throne, and she acknowledged the favour and honour she had received from them.’ On the night when the first report of the victory at Culloden was circulated, Drury Lane got up a play that had not been acted for thirty years, ‘The Honours of the Army,’ and Mrs. Woffington, as ‘The Female Officer,’ ‘new dressed,’ spoke a dashing prologue. A night or two later, Theophilus Cibber wrote and delivered a prologue on the Duke of Cumberland’s victories. At Covent Garden were revived two pieces, by Dennis: ‘Liberty Asserted’ and ‘Plot and no Plot.’ Genest says of the first piece that it was revived ‘for the sake of the invectives against the French; and “Plot and no Plot,” for the sake of the cuts on the Jacobites,—at this time almost every play was revived, which might be expected to attract, from its political tendency.’
The minor, or unlicensed, theatres tempted loyal people with coarser fare,—to the same end, keeping up a hostile feeling against the French and the Jacobites. Observe with what quaint delicacy the matter is put in the following advertisements.
SADLER’S WELLS AND THE NEW WELLS.