King Edward I. and Queen Eleanor heaped many gifts on these sable friars. Charles V. of France was lodged at their monastery when he visited England, but his nobles resided in Henry's newly-built palace of Bridewell, a gallery being thrown over the Fleet and driven through the City wall, to serve as a communication between the two mansions. Henry held the "Black Parliament" in this monastery, and here Cardinal Campeggio presided at the trial which ended with the tyrant's divorce from the ill-used Katherine of Arragon. In the same house the Parliament also sat that condemned Wolsey, and sent him to beg "a little earth for charity" of the monks of Leicester. The rapacious king laid his rough hand on the treasures of the house in 1538, and Edward VI. sold the hall and prior's lodgings to Sir Francis Bryan, a courtier, afterwards granting Sir Francis Cawarden, Master of the Revels, the whole house and precincts of the Preacher Friars, the yearly value being then valued at nineteen pounds. The holy brothers were dispersed to beg or thieve, and the church was pulled down, but the mischievous right of sanctuary continued.
And now we come to the event which connects the old monastic ground with the name of the great genius of England. James Burbage (afterwards Shakespeare's friend and fellow actor), and other servants of the Earl of Leicester, tormented out of the City by the angry edicts of over-scrupulous Lord Mayors, took shelter in the Precinct, and there, in 1578, erected a playhouse (Playhouse Yard). Every attempt was in vain made to crush the intruders. About the year 1586, according to the best authorities, the young Shakespeare came to London and joined the company at the Blackfriars Theatre. Only three years later we find the new arrival—and this is one of the unsolvable mysteries of Shakespeare's life—one of sixteen sharers in the prosperous though persecuted theatre. It is true that Mr. Halliwell has lately discovered that he was not exactly a proprietor, but only an actor, receiving a share of the profits of the house, exclusive of the galleries (the boxes and dress circle of those days), but this is, after all, only a lessening of the difficulty; and it is almost as remarkable that a young, unknown Warwickshire poet should receive such profits as it is that he should have held a sixteenth of the whole property. Without the generous patronage of such patrons as the Earl of Southampton or Lord Brooke, how could the young actor have thriven? He was only twenty-six, and may have written "Venus and Adonis" or "Lucrece;" yet the first of these poems was not published till 1593. He may already, it is true, have adapted one or two tolerably successful historical plays, and, as Mr. Collier thinks, might have written The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. One thing is certain, that in 1587 five companies of players, including the Blackfriars Company, performed at Stratford, and in his native town Mr. Collier thinks Shakespeare first proved himself useful to his new comrades.
In 1589 the Lord Mayor closed two theatres for ridiculing the Puritans. Burbage and his friends, alarmed at this, petitioned the Privy Council, and pleaded that they had never introduced into their plays matters of state or religion. The Blackfriars company, in 1593, began to build a summer theatre, the Globe, in Southwark; and Mr. Collier, remembering that this was the very year "Venus and Adonis" was published, attributes some great gift of the Earl of Southampton to Shakespeare to have immediately followed this poem, which was dedicated to him. By 1594 the poet had written King Richard II. and King Richard III., and Burbage's son Richard had made himself famous as the first representative of the crook-backed king. In 1596 we find Shakespeare and his partners (only eight now) petitioning the Privy Council to allow them to repair and enlarge their theatre, which the Puritans of Blackfriars wanted to close. The Council allowed the repairs, but forbade the enlargement. At this time Shakespeare was living near the Bear Garden, Southwark, to be close to the Globe. He was now evidently a thriving, "warm" man, for in 1597 he purchased for £60 New Place, one of the best houses in Stratford. In 1613 we find Shakespeare purchasing a plot of ground not far from Blackfriars Theatre, and abutting on a street leading down to Puddle Wharf, "right against the king's majesty's wardrobe;" but he had retired to Stratford, and given up London and the stage before this. The deed of this sale was sold in 1841 for £162 5s.
In 1608 the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London made a final attempt to crush the Blackfriars players, but failing to prove to the Lord Chancellor that the City had ever exercised any authority within the precinct and liberty of Blackfriars, their cause fell to the ground. The Corporation then opened a negotiation for purchase with Burbage, Shakespeare, and the other (now nine) shareholders. The players asked about £7,000, Shakespeare's four shares being valued at £1,433 6s. 8d., including the wardrobe and properties, estimated at £500. The poet's income at this time Mr. Collier estimates at £400 a year. The Blackfriars Theatre was pulled down in Cromwell's time (1655), and houses built in its room.
Randolph, the dramatist, a pupil of Ben Jonson's, ridicules, in The Muses' Looking-Glass, that strange "morality" play of his, the Puritan feather-sellers of Blackfriars, whom Ben Jonson also taunts; Randolph's pretty Puritan, Mrs. Flowerdew, says of the ungodly of Blackfriars:—
"Indeed, it sometimes pricks my conscience,
I come to sell 'em pins and looking-glasses."
To which her friend, Mr. Bird, replies, with the sly sanctity of Tartuffe:—
"I have this custom, too, for my feathers;
'Tis fit that we, which are sincere professors,
Should gain by infidels."
Ben Jonson, that smiter of all such hypocrites, wrote Volpone at his house in Blackfriars, where he laid the scene of The Alchymist. The Friars were fashionable, however, in spite of the players, for Vandyke lived in the precinct for nine years (he died in 1641); and the wicked Earl and Countess of Somerset resided in the same locality when they poisoned their former favourite, Sir Thomas Overbury. As late as 1735, Mr. Peter Cunningham says, there was an attempt to assert precinct privileges, but years before sheriffs had arrested in the Friars.
In 1623 Blackfriars was the scene of a most fatal and extraordinary accident. It occurred in the chief house of the Friary, then a district declining fast in respectability. Hunsdon House derived its name from Queen Elizabeth's favourite cousin, the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, and was at the time occupied by Count de Tillier, the French ambassador. About three o'clock on Sunday, October 26th, a large Roman Catholic congregation of about three hundred persons, worshipping to a certain degree in stealth, not without fear from the Puritan feather-makers of the theatrical neighbourhood, had assembled in a long garret on the third and uppermost storey. Master Drury, a Jesuit prelate of celebrity, had drawn together this crowd of timid people. The garret, looking over the gateway, was approached by a passage having a door opening into the street, and also by a corridor from the ambassador's withdrawing-room. The garret was about seventeen feet wide and forty feet long, with a vestry for a priest partitioned off at one end. In the middle of the garret, and near the wall, stood a raised table and chair for the preacher. The gentry sat on chairs and stools facing the pulpit, the rest stood behind, crowding as far as the head of the stairs. At the appointed hour Master Drury, the priest, came from the inner room in white robe and scarlet stole, an attendant carrying a book and an hour-glass, by which to measure his sermon. He knelt down at the chair for about an Ave Maria, but uttered no audible prayer. He then took the Jesuits' Testament, and read for the text the Gospel for the day, which was, according to the Gregorian Calendar, the twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost—"Therefore is the kingdom of heaven like unto a man being a king that would make an account of his servants. And when he began to make account there was one presented unto him that owed him ten thousand talents." Having read the text, the Jesuit preacher sat down, and putting on his head a red quilt cap, with a white linen one beneath it, commenced his sermon. He had spoken for about half an hour when the calamity happened. The great weight of the crowd in the old room suddenly snapped the main summer beam of the floor, which instantly crashed in and fell into the room below. The main beams there also snapped and broke through to the ambassador's drawing-room over the gatehouse, a distance of twenty-two feet. Only a part, however, of the gallery floor, immediately over Father Rudgate's chamber, a small room used for secret mass, gave way. The rest of the floor, being less crowded, stood firm, and the people on it, having no other means of escape, drew their knives and cut a way through a plaster wall into a neighbouring room.