MRS. SIDDONS AS MRS. HALLER.
[CHAPTER VII.]
SARAH SIDDONS.
On the 13th of June 1755,[50] when Garrick and Mrs. Cibber, Yates and Mrs. Pritchard, Woodward and Mrs. Clive, were the leaders in the Drury Lane Company,—while Barry and Mrs. Bellamy, Ryan and Mrs. Woffington, were among the "chiefs" of Covent Garden, Sarah Kemble was born, the first of twelve children, at a public-house, in Brecon, in which town, exactly a score of years later, was born her youngest brother, Charles.
By both parents she belonged to the stage. Her mother's maiden name was Ward. This lady's father had been a respectable actor[51] under Betterton, and was a strolling manager, when the hairdresser of the company, a handsome fellow, poor, of course, and a Roman Catholic, eloped with and married the manager's daughter. His name was Roger Kemble. He was an actor too; love, at first, had helped to make him a very bad one. Fanny Furnival, of the Canterbury company, drilled him into the worst Captain Plume[52] that ever danced over the stage; but Mrs. Roger Kemble, a woman who illustrated the truth that beauty is of every age, used in her latter days to look at the grand old man, and assert that he was the only gentleman-like Falstaff she had ever seen.
Mr. and Mrs. Kemble were "itinerants" when the first child of their marriage was born,—a child who made her début on the London stage long before her father;—the latter playing, and playing very well, the Miller of Mansfield, at the Haymarket, in 1788, for the benefit of the wife of his second son, Stephen. When Roger carried off Miss Ward, her father with difficulty forgave her,—and only on the ground that she had, at all events, obeyed his injunction,—not to marry an actor. "He will never be that," said the old player of the Betterton era. With which remark, his discontent was exhausted.
Her grandsire acted under Betterton and Booth; her parents had played with Quin;—she herself fulfilling a professional career which commenced with Garrick, and ended with her performing Lady Randolph to Mr. Macready's Glenalvon;—when I add to this record that she saw the brilliant but chequered course of Edmund Kean to nearly its close, and witnessed the début of Miss Fanny Kemble,—the whole history of the stage since the Restoration seems resumed therein.
Roger Kemble's itinerant company, as his children were born, received them as members. They played,—Sarah, John, Stephen, Elizabeth,—almost as soon as they could speak. Sarah's first audience compassionately hissed her, as too young to be listened to; but she won their applause by reciting a fable. At thirteen, she played in the great room of the King's Head, Worcester,—among other parts, Ariel, in the "Tempest," her father, mother, sister Elizabeth, and brother John acting in the same piece. For the next four or five years, there was much of itinerant life, till we find her at Wolverhampton, in 1773, acting in a wide range of characters, from Lee's heroines to Rosetta, in "Love in a Village." In the latter case, the young Meadows was a Mr. Siddons, who had acted Hippolito in Dryden's "Tempest," when she played Ariel. In her father's company she was always the first and greatest. She played all that the accomplished daughter of a manager chose to play, among her father's strollers,—and she attracted admirers both before and behind the curtain. The Earl of Coventry[53] and sundry squires were among the former. Among the latter was that poor player, an ex-apprentice from Birmingham, named Siddons, between whom and Sarah Kemble there was true love, for which, however, there was lacking parental sanction. The country audiences sympathised with the young people, and applauded the lover, who introduced his sad story into a comic song, on his benefit night. As he left the stage, the stately manageress received him at the wing, and there greeted him with a ringing box of the ears.
This led to the secession of both actors from the company. Mr. Siddons went,—the world before him where to choose; Sarah Kemble,—to the family of Mr. Greatheed, of Guy's Cliff, Warwickshire. "She hired herself," says the Secret History of the Green Room, published in the very zenith of her fame,—"as lady's maid to Mrs. Greatheed, at £10 per annum." "Her station," says Campbell, "was humble, but not servile, and her principal employment was to read to the elder Mr. Greatheed." She probably fulfilled the double duty,—no disparagement at a time when the maids of ladies were often decayed ladies themselves.