“The Duke’s Theatre” stood in Portugal Street, at the back of Portugal Row. It was pulled down in 1835 to make room for the enlargement of the Museum of the College of Surgeons. Before that it had been the china warehouse of Messrs. Spode and Copeland.[743] There had been, however, frailer things than china in the house in Pepys’s time. Here, the year of the Restoration, came Killigrew with the actors from the Red Bull, Clerkenwell, and took the name of the King’s Company. Three years later they moved to Drury Lane. Davenant’s company then came to Portugal Street in 1662, deserting their theatre, once a granary, in Salisbury Court. They played here till 1671, when they returned to their old theatre, then renovated under the management of Charles Davenant and the celebrated Betterton, the great tragedian. They afterwards united in Drury Lane, and again fell apart. In 1695 a company, headed by Betterton, with Congreve for a partner, re-opened the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It then became celebrated for pantomimes under Rich, the excellent harlequin. On his removal to Covent Garden it was deserted, re-opened by Gifford from Goodman’s Fields, and finally ceased to be a theatre about 1737, so that its whole life did not extend to more than one generation.
Actresses first appeared in London in Prynne’s time. Soon after the Restoration a lady of Killigrew’s company took the part of Desdemona. In January 1661 Pepys saw women on the stage at the Cockpit Theatre: the play was Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Beggars’ Bush.” The prologue to “Othello” in 1660 contains the following line:[744]—
“Our women are defective and so sized,
You’d think they were some of the guard disguised;
For, to speak truth, men act that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen,
With bone so large, and nerve so uncompliant,
That, when you call Desdemona, enter giant.”
The Puritans were now happily in the minority, and so the attempt succeeded. Davenant did not bring forward his actresses till June 1661, when he produced his “Siege of Rhodes.” Kynaston, Hart, Burt, and Clun, famous actors of Charles II.’s time, were all excellent representatives of female characters.
It was at the Duke’s Theatre, in 1680, that Nell Gwynn who was present, being reviled by one of the audience, and William Herbert, who had married a sister of one of the king’s mistresses, taking up Nell’s quarrel—a sword fight took place between the two factions in the house. This hot-blooded young gallant Herbert grew up to be Earl of Pembroke and first plenipotentiary at Ryswick.
The chief ladies at the Duke’s House were Mrs. Davenport, Mrs. Davies, and Mrs. Saunderson. The first of these ladies, generally known as “Roxalana,” from a character of that name in the “Siege of Rhodes,” resisted for a long time the addresses of Aubrey de Vere, the last Earl of Oxford, a wicked brawling roysterer, and a disgrace to his name, who at last obtained her hand by the cruel deception of a sham marriage. The pretended priest was a trumpeter, the witness a kettle-drummer in the king’s regiment. The poor creature threw herself in vain at the king’s feet and demanded justice, but gradually grew more composed upon an annuity of a thousand crowns a year.[745]
As for Mrs. Davies, who danced well and played ill, she won the susceptible heart of Charles II. by her singing the song, “My lodging is on the cold, cold ground.” “Through the marriage of the daughter of Lord Derwentwater with the eighth Lord Petre,” says Dr. Doran, “the blood of the Stuarts and of Moll Davies still runs in their lineal descendant, the present and twelfth lord.”[746]
Mrs. Saunderson became the excellent wife of the great actor Betterton. For about thirty years she played the chief female characters, especially in Shakspere’s plays, with great success. She taught Queen Anne and her sister Mary elocution, and after her husband’s death received a pension of £500 a year from her royal pupil.
In 1664 Pepys went to Portugal Street to see that clever but impudent impostor, the German Princess, appear after her acquittal at the Old Bailey for inveigling a young citizen into a marriage, acting her own character in a comedy immortalising her exploit.
In February 1666-7 Pepys goes again to the Duke’s Playhouse, and observes there Rochester the wit and Mrs. Stewart, afterwards Duchess of Richmond, the same lady whose portrait we retain as Britannia on the old halfpennies. “It was pleasant,” says the tuft-hunting gossip, “to see how everybody rose up when my Lord John Butler, the Duke of Ormond’s son, came into the pit, towards the end of the play, who was a servant to Mrs. Mallett, and now smiled upon her and she on him.”[747]