CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Actress as Honey-Pot

According to John Evelyn, Margaret Godolphin was so mortified to find herself ‘an Actoress’ in 1674, in the court masque Calisto, that she spent all her time off stage reading a book of devotion; she could hardly wait for the performance to end before rushing to her oratory to pray. This distaste was recorded with ecstatic approval by Evelyn: in her dress worth nearly £300, and £20,000’s worth of borrowed jewels his favourite looked like ‘a Saint in Glory’; even when on the stage, she had the air of abstracting herself from it.¹

The behaviour of the rest of the cast did not live up to this high standard. The ‘tiring-room’ was crowded with gallants, with whom the lady performers passed the time agreeably between entrances. The celebrated singer Mrs Knight, whose services had been called upon to supplement the somewhat weak voices of the amateurs, was an ex-mistress of the King. Renowned for the range of her voice, she had recently been ‘roaming’ in Italy, as a result of which her range was still further extended. Mrs Knight sang ‘incomparably’ on this occasion; nevertheless she was not a particularly welcome sight at court to the royal ladies. Another professional invited, Moll Davis – ‘Dear Miss, delight of all the nobler sort’ – had cast such enchantment over the King with the sweetness of her singing on stage that he had made her his mistress on the strength of it; she had recently borne him a child.

Although Evelyn was carrying prudery a little far in suggesting that Margaret Godolphin condemned a masque – the real cause of her pique lay elsewhere² – nevertheless it was true that in the 1670s a respectable woman could not give her profession as that of ‘Actoress’ and expect to keep either her reputation or her person intact.

It was a royal warrant of 21 August 1660 which brought Englishwomen on to the English stage for the first time, so that plays should become ‘useful and instructive representations of human life’, from being merely ‘harmless delights’. Before that, women had been seen on stage – but they had been foreigners, and as such highly suspect. Some of these were more travelling performers, mountebanks in the original sense of the word (monta in banco – mount on the bench), than actresses: in the time of Queen Elizabeth for example the honest town of Lyme had felt both thrilled and threatened by the ‘unchaste, shameless, and unnatural tumbling of Italian women’. In 1629 a troupe of genuine actresses had arrived from France and had performed at Blackfriars, in the Red Bull and Fortune Theatres; they had been hissed off the stage by the English as being immoral. Later William Prynne in Histriomastix denounced them as ‘notorious whores’.³

Under the Protectorate, when Sir William Davenant performed the brilliant conjuring trick of persuading the music-loving Cromwell that the new dramatic form of opera bore absolutely no relation to the scandalous theatre, a woman, Mrs Edward Coleman, had sung the part of Ianthe in the ‘opera’ The Siege of Rhodes. (Later, conveniently, The Siege of Rhodes turned out to be a play, and a very popular one too. Mrs Betterton made the part of Ianthe so much hers that she was generally referred to under that name rather than her own.) The conception of the court masque, so beloved of Queen Henrietta Maria and King Charles I, was also preserved during the Protectorate, because in that too music played its soothing part. At the wedding of Mary Cromwell a masque, with pastorals by Marvell, graced the protectoral court in which the young bride appeared; Cromwell himself may have played a non-speaking part.⁴ However, a masque – for all Margaret Godolphin’s megrims – was not a professional theatrical performance and nor was an opera – by protectoral decision.

It was a few months after the warrant – sometime in November or December 1660 – that one young Englishwoman actually stepped on to the London stage as the first swallow to signify the long hot summer of the English actress. We do not and shall presumably never know her name, although we know the play – The Moor of Venice – and the part – Desdemona. (Before that, as it was wittily said, with men of forty or fifty playing wenches of fifteen, when you called Desdemona: ‘enter Giant’.)⁵ Two companies had been given the monopoly of the London stage by the King’s warrant, following the Restoration: The King’s Company under Thomas Killigrew and The Duke’s Company under Davenant. Although on balance of probability the claim of The King’s Company to provide the first actress has been allowed, both companies actually claimed it; which means that the honour lies between Anne Marshall, Mary Saunderson (Mrs Betterton) and Katherine Corey, who became a specialist in old women’s roles, famously creating that of the Widow Blackacre in Congreve’s The Double Dealer. If Katherine Corey is ruled out as an unlikely Desdemona for this reason, the choice lies between Anne Marshall and Mary Saunderson.⁶

Mary Saunderson, who married the great actor-manager Thomas Betterton in 1662 when she was about twenty-five, would be a worthy founder of her profession; since she was the famous exception to the rule that all actresses of this period were to be considered potential prostitutes. ‘Having, by nature, all the accomplishments required to make a perfect actress,’ wrote Betterton’s biographer Charles Gildon, ‘she added to them the distinguishing characteristic of a virtuous life.’ So wondrous was her virtue that she was actually engaged to coach the young Princesses Mary and Anne in Calisto, a task for which those participants Mrs Knight and Moll Davis would certainly not have been held suitable. Shortly before Mrs Betterton’s marriage Pepys was ravished by her performance in the title role of The Duchess of Malfi (Betterton played Bosola), the play itself being one of the most popular tragedies in the repertory of The Duke’s Company. A long career in the theatre at her husband’s side ended with the admirable Mrs Betterton training up other younger actresses, including Anne Bracegirdle.⁷

Most of her colleagues presented a very different image to the public. By 1666 Evelyn was finding the professional theatre increasingly distasteful, because audiences were abused by an ‘atheistical liberty’, to wit, ‘foul and indecent women, now (and never till now) permitted to appear and act’; he much preferred the special court performances. In the 1680s the word actress was virtually synonymous with that of ‘Miss’ or kept woman, at least in the expectations of the public.⁸ The burden of proof otherwise fell upon the individual actress, but there were very few who essayed to make the point. The trouble was that those ‘useful and instructive representations of human life’, the kind of new plays inspired by the opportunity of putting women on the stage, might be brilliant comedies of manners or turgid tragedies of emotion or some combination of the two, but in general they were extremely frank in their depiction of promiscuity. Inevitably and excitedly, the public merged the personality of the actress with that of her character on stage.

As a result, the convenient identification of actress and ‘Miss’ led to young ladies becoming actresses precisely in order to secure a rich admirer. Now contemporaries pitied the ‘little playhouse creatures’, as Mrs Squeamish termed them in The Country Wife, only if they did not manage to pick up a protector. The casting-couch made its first appearance in our social history when a young woman was sometimes obliged to sacrifice her virtue in order to obtain a coveted place in the theatre from one of its patrons. It was an investment she expected to recoup in the shape of the desired wealthy keeper, once she could display her pretty face to advantage on the stage itself. The beaux of the court expected in their turn to keep a pretty actress; it figured along with all their other expenses in the cause of public display, such as gaudy clothes and fine horses. In this way George Porter kept Mrs Jane Long, Sir Robert Howard (the nephew of his namesake, the lover of Lady Purbeck) Mrs Uphill, Sir Philip Howard Mrs Betty Hall, and the Earl of Peterborough Mrs Johnson.⁹

The louche atmosphere of the times is well caught by a joyful letter of 1677 from Harry Savile to Lord Rochester, then ill in the country. Savile tried to tempt Rochester to London with the prospect of a sweet new French comédienne called Françoise Pitel: ‘a young wench of fifteen’. Savile declared ‘it were a shame she should carry away a maidenhead she pretends to have brought’, but unfortunately the price was so steep that no one currently in London could afford it.¹⁰

This two-way traffic called forth many references in the plays of the time. Some of these took the rueful side of management: ‘our Women who adorn each Play, Bred at our cost, become at length your prey’. Others pointed to the actress herself as predator, since she intended:

Be that as it may, by the 1670s the word actress had secured in England that raffish connotation which would linger round it, for better or for worse, in fiction as well as fact, for the next 250 years.

It had not always been so. The first actresses often concealed their origins, while the honorific appellation ‘Mrs’ pronounced mistress, which they were granted – as opposed to the opprobrious ‘Miss’ – sometimes makes their marital status hard to unravel. Yet it is clear that they were neither ‘Misses’ nor the daughters of ‘Misses’. Some, like Peg Hughes, came from actors’ families. Others were drawn from that same penurious segment of society which supplied waiting-women and the like, where the daughters were likely to go husbandless if they had no dowry. Singing and dancing being the prerequisites of a ladylike education such as that provided by the Chelsea girls’ schools, there were plenty of pupils in the early days from which to choose; some of whom later came to form part of what Anthony Hamilton called ‘the whole joyous troop of singers and dancers who ministered to His Majesty’s slighter pleasures’.¹²

Hannah Woolley, advocating the role of gentlewoman in The Queen-like Closet as being the best option available to the unendowed girl, drew attention to the alternatives: ‘Some who have apt Wits and that Dame Nature hath been favourable to, they are courted to be Players.’ The fact was those who had been favoured by Dame Nature did not necessarily share Hannah Woolley’s particular sense of priorities. Mrs Pepys’s gentlewoman, Gosnell, was one of these. Finding the post of gentlewoman too restrictive, she left to find her freedom (see p.386). A few months later, in May 1663 ‘Who should we see come upon the stage’, wrote Pepys, ‘but Gosnell, my wife’s maid’. Unfortunately Gosnell ‘neither spoke, danced nor sung; which I was sorry for. But she becomes the stage very well.’ The following year Pepys saw Gosnell again, singing and dancing finely at first, but finally falling out of tune. Poor Gosnell! Her career never amounted to much more than being an understudy and an occasional singer. Four years later she was singing the performance ‘meanly’ throughout, and had lost her looks: Sir Carr Scroope characterized her as ‘that old hag’. Finally Gosnell was discharged and vanished from view.¹³

Gosnell had been the daughter of a widow with very little money but genteel connections. Among the first actresses there were plenty of Gosnells, who preferred the liberty and adventure of the stage to a life of doing shell-work with Mrs Pepys, only they turned out to be more talented. Anne and Rebecca Marshall were the daughters of a country parson, who as chaplain to Lord Gerard had been married off to the illegitimate daughter of a Cheshire squire. Mrs Shadwell’s father was either a Norwich public notary or ‘a decayed knight’; Charlotte Butler was the daughter of a widowed shopkeeper. Accounts of Mrs Barry’s origins varied: she was either an orphan brought up by Lady Davenant to be her ‘woman’ in Norfolk, or the daughter of a barrister called Robert Barry who ruined himself fighting for the King.¹⁴

Wherever they began, the first actresses – and their managers – were not slow to take advantage of their unique opportunities for display, and profit from that display. Inheriting the famous pre-Restoration female ‘breeches’ parts from the men who had previously played them, they made of them something yet more titillating. Actresses with pretty legs, like Peg Hughes and Nell Gwynn, welcomed this legitimate opportunity for showing them off in public, not otherwise granted to them by the costume of the time; then there were the infinite enjoyable possibilities of the double entendre. New plays were rapidly written employing the old device for a new reason: it has been estimated that nearly a third of all the plays first produced after 1660 and before 1700 contained one or more breeches roles.¹⁵ Audiences, unused to such bonanzas, were enchanted when Betty Boutel, playing Fidelia disguised as a boy in Wycherly’s The Plain Dealer, had her peruke pulled off and her breasts felt by the actor playing Vernish.

The costumes for the more straightforward women’s parts offered opportunities for self-advertisement too.¹⁶ The actress would first don a loose smock of Holland linen falling below the knees, with short sleeves and a very low-cut draw-string neck (it was in these smocks that they spent their hours resting off stage; a convenient costume it might be thought for receiving the gallants who pestered the tiring-rooms with their attentions, including during the performances, to judge from the frequent prohibitions issued against such behaviour). After the smock came wood or whalebone stays. Holland drawers followed for those who intended to dance: Nell Gwynn had a habit of wearing ‘Rhinegraves’ for the King’s delectation, special short wide divided skirts which flew up as she danced.¹⁷ Thread or silk stockings, gartered above and below the knee, were worn with high-heeled shoes and buckles. Two or three petticoats, a tight bodice and an over-skirt completed the outfit; this left the bosom more or less bare (so that actresses generally wore a scarf – ‘a whisk’ – out of doors).

What with the Holland smocks and the low-cut dresses, the opportunities for actors on stage – in the course of plays which made frequent use of such gestures – and the gallants off stage, to ‘towse and mowse’ with a willing actress were virtually unlimited. Pepys was shocked by the backstage incidents he witnessed, including the bad language of the actresses.¹⁸ Only the leading actress had a room to herself.

Nor were the financial rewards of being an actress such as to make additional income unnecessary. For one thing actresses had to supply their own petticoats, shoes, stockings, gloves and scarves as well as other living expenses; the introduction of liveries paid for by the King was thus a welcome economy, not a humiliation. (When the King, the Duke of York and the Earl of Oxford lent their coronation robes for Orrery’s Henry V, in which Betterton played Owen Tudor and Mrs Betterton the Princess of France, it was as much to do with economy as with the close informal relationship which existed between the court and the theatre; the court supplying the Lord Chamberlain, whose duty it was to license the players.) Runs of plays were often as short as two or three days and it has been estimated that no one worked for much more than thirty or thirty-five weeks in the year.¹⁹ The shutting of the London theatres for eighteen months at the time of the Great Plague brought about further hardship.

A young actress would receive 10s to 15s a week and would be expected to work for nothing at the beginning of her career. Even the great Mrs Barry only received 30s at the height of her fame, although she also received much larger sums from benefit performances. Mrs Betterton, paid the enormous sum of 50s a week in 1691, was the wife of the principal actor, who was also incidentally the man who ran the company. There were rules which prevented actresses (and actors) from moving between the two companies without permission; the amalgamation of The King’s Company and The Duke’s Company between 1682 and 1695 as The United Company increased the problems of actors by setting up a monopoly.

Unmarried actresses lived as close as possible to the theatre, the Fleet Street and Covent Garden area for The Duke’s Company and Drury Lane for The King’s Company; Davenant originally boarded some of his leading actresses, including Moll Davis, in his own apartments. As against these conditions, the life of the kept woman with her own house, best of all her own settlement from her protector, offered innumerable advantages unknown to the virtuous. It is hardly surprising that a large number of actresses succumbed to the temptation.

It was not the talentless who adopted this code of behaviour, rather the reverse. Of the eighty women, who appeared on the Restoration stage, listed by name by J.H. Wilson in his comprehensive study of the subject,²⁰ twelve who enjoyed an enduring reputation as courtesans or ‘Misses’ included the most celebrated performers such as Elizabeth Barry and Betty Boutel, an innocent-looking Fidelia, but off stage known as ‘Chestnut-maned Boutel, whom all the Town F–ks’. The ladies, it should be said, thrived on this combination of public and private acclaim: Betty Boutel spent twenty-six years on the stage and Elizabeth Barry thirty-five. As for Mrs Bracegirdle, who made a special parade of her virtue, she was described as one that had got ‘more Money out of dissembling her Lewdness than others by professing it’; and it seems that she was kept at different times by both Congreve and Lord Scarsdale.²¹

At least another twelve, either lazier, unluckier or less successful, are known to have left the theatre to become straightforward kept women or prostitutes. Another thirty are mentioned so briefly as being on the stage, that it is likely that many of them also vanished into prostitution. ‘Mistaken Drab, back to thy Mother’s stall’; with these cruel words the pretensions of Sarah Cooke, Rochester’s protégée, to be an actress were dismissed by a satirist in the 1680s. In fact ‘Miss Sarah’s’ origins were not so low as indicated; nor was she quite devoid of talent, since she was wanted by Dryden to play Octavia in All For Love.²² Nevertheless the supposition that an unsuccessful actress, having come from the stews, would return to them, was a characteristic one of the period.

Roughly a quarter of these actresses lived respectable lives, so far as we know, and most of these, like Mrs Betterton, were married to fellow-actors; it seems that in the seventeenth century show-business marriages reversed the modern trend and were more stable than otherwise. In general, as the jovial satirist Tom Brown wrote in Letters from the Dead to the Living (this letter was headed: ‘From worthy Mrs Behn the Poetress, to the famous Virgin Actress’): ‘’Tis as hard a matter for a pretty Woman to keep herself honest in a Theatre, as ’tis for an Apothecary to keep his Treacle from the Flies in Hot Weather; for every Libertine in the Audience will be buzzing about her Honey-Pot …’²³

Hester Davenport, widely known as ‘Roxalana’ after her performance in that part in The Siege of Rhodes in 1661, was ‘a charming, graceful creature and one that acted to perfection’. She was about twenty at the time of her first fame. With her exceptional looks – a beauty that made men ‘take ill courses’ wrote Anthony à Wood – she captured the heart of the Earl of Oxford, then a childless widower of forty-four. He was a Knight of the Garter, handsome, famously rich, notoriously proud; he was also a lover of the theatre (as his loan of his coronation robes would evince). However, these were the early years before the identification of actress and ‘Miss’ had thoroughly set in, and there is reason to believe that Roxalana herself attached as much importance to her talent as to her looks; she was after all in proper employment and as the darling of the stage able to support herself.²⁴ She therefore began by refusing Lord Oxford’s tender of protection.

Offers of services and presents were of no avail, nor were insults, nor, in the last resort, were ‘spells’ and incantations. Lord Oxford could neither smoke nor gamble as a result of his obsession. Various contemporary accounts agree that Hester Davenport only finally succumbed because Lord Oxford made it seem lawful for her to do so (an elaborate process which neither of them would probably have thought necessary ten years later). In Anthony Hamilton’s words, where Love had failed, he ‘invoked the aid of Hymen’.²⁵ First Lord Oxford displayed to his Roxalana a signed contract of marriage. He then enacted that scene which was to become a commonplace of Restoration drama, the fake wedding ceremony, with the minister played by his own trumpeter and the witness by his kettle-drummer. A fellow-actress, who was not in the plot, stood witness for Roxalana.

The next morning, according to the most colourful description of the episode (by the Baroness d’Aulnoy), Lord Oxford aroused his ‘bride’ with the surprising words: ‘Wake up, Roxalana, it is time for you to go.’ At which the betrayed woman burst out screaming and wounded her husband-lover with his own sword. The trumpeter and the kettle-drummer vanished; the actress-witness was told Roxalana had merely been playing a part in a play. Whatever her initial revulsion, Roxalana did continue the relationship; she left the stage and bore Lord Oxford a son, Aubrey de Vere, a couple of years – not nine months – later.

Nevertheless Anthony à Wood wrote of Roxalana as having married ‘the Earl of Oxon’, and another account criticized Lord Oxford for ‘marrying his whore’ as well as ‘spending his estate’. Roxalana complained to the King that she had been deceived and secured a large pension of 1,000 crowns per annum. She also continued to term herself the Countess of Oxford for the rest of her life: at the time of her second – or first – marriage, which occurred after Lord Oxford’s death in 1703, she was termed Dame Hester, Dowager Countess of Oxford; she signed her will Hester Oxford.²⁶ None of this prevented Lord Oxford himself from marrying, in 1673, that fascinating if promiscuous beauty Diana Kirke, successful rival to Mrs Grace Worthley for the affections of Henry Sidney (see p.485).

The solution may lie in the loose nature of marriage at the time. Given that Roxalana was joined together with Lord Oxford in some kind of union in some kind of ceremony, perhaps she herself did not inquire too closely into its validity. ‘You may think she was but an actress …’ observed Mrs Hobart to her fellow Maid of Honour Mrs Temple, telling this cautionary story about the evil intentions of the opposite sex;²⁷ yet in the early sixties, this mere actress might put up considerable resistance before sinking into the role of ‘Miss’.

Peg Hughes, on the other hand, arrived on the stage five years later ‘a mighty pretty woman’ but not a modest one, for she had a reputation already for being Sir Charles Sedley’s mistress.²⁸ She proceeded to capture the heart of that old warhorse, the King’s cousin, Prince Rupert. Peg Hughes’s brother was a minor comedian (later killed in a brawl at Windsor over the relative claims of his sister and Nell Gwynn to be ‘handsomer’). Her first appearance may have been as Desdemona in an Othello seen by Pepys in February 1669; she probably replaced another actress called Davenport, Frances, no relation to Hester, who had vanished ‘to be kept by somebody’ a few weeks earlier. Peg Hughes was certainly acting by the summer – in May Pepys was granted a backstage kiss – although her first recorded performance was as Panura in Fletcher’s The Island Princess.

Like Roxalana, Peg Hughes resisted her elderly royal admirer in the first place, although unlike Roxalana, she was hardly concerned to preserve her virtue. The fatal encounter took place at the fashionable spa of Tunbridge Wells; Queen Catherine had sent for the players from London to divert the court. To the ribald glee of the younger gallants and the open pleasure of the King, Prince Rupert became quickly obsessed by the ‘mighty pretty’ actress, deserting all his habitual scientific pastimes. It was ‘farewell to alembics, crucibles, furnaces and the black tools of alchemy; farewell to mathematical instruments and speculations! Powder and perfume now filled his whole mind …’²⁹ At first Peg seems to have been reluctant to leave the fun of the stage and to have regarded the Prince’s passion as rather ridiculous (perhaps he was one of those who, as in Madam Cresswell’s advice to Dorothea, recalled ‘Naseby fight’ in moments of amorous excitement).

The following year more worldly counsels prevailed. Peg Hughes became the Prince’s mistress, being installed by him in a substantial house at Hammersmith (George IV’s spurned Queen, Caroline, later lived there). She bore him a daughter named Ruperta in 1673, at which point she quitted the stage for three years. It should be said that Peg Hughes, whose acting had been widely praised by her contemporaries, also proved an admirable concubine. At first there were local difficulties: in 1674 Peg Hughes was suspected of acquiring some of the jewels which had once belonged to Prince Rupert’s mother, Elizabeth of Bohemia. But as the years wore on, Prince Rupert’s sister, the Electress Sophia, grew to appreciate the good care which Peg took of her elderly protector. The Electress described Mrs Hughes as ‘très modeste’, or at least the most modest of that not conspicuously modest English court; she wished ‘Mistress Hus’ (or sometimes Hews) had produced a son for her brother, but in any case wished to embrace ‘pretty Ruperta’.³⁰

In 1682 Prince Rupert’s health began to give way. He praised Peg Hughes’s solicitude in a letter to the Electress which also conveyed a picture of the happy family life enjoyed in Hammersmith: ‘She [Peg] took great care of me during my illness’, he told his sister, ‘and I am obliged to her for many things … As for the little one [Ruperta] she cannot resemble me, she is turning into the prettiest creature. She already rules the whole house and sometimes argues with her mother, which makes us all laugh.’ Prince Rupert died at the end of November. In his will, for which the Earl of Craven was trustee, he divided his property between ‘Margaret Hewes’ and ‘Ruperta my natural daughter begotten on the body of the said Margaret Hewes’. In addition Ruperta was charged to be a good obedient daughter and not to marry without her mother’s consent.³¹

Ruperta carried out her father’s dying commands. She made a suitable match to Lieutenant-General Emmanuel Scroope of Norfolk, and had children.¹ Peg Hughes was the giddy one, and in the end Ruperta had to look after her mother (Peg lived till 1719). Despite receiving the huge sum of £6,000 from the will of Prince Rupert, Peg Hughes gambled it all away. Another of Tom Brown’s fictional dialogues in Letters from the Dead to the Living took place between Peg and Nell Gwynn, her rival for ‘handsomeness’. Nell Gwynn’s sentiments were probably based on truth. Nell was made to reproach Peg for losing by gambling what she had acquired by whoredom: ‘for a woman who has enriched herself by one, to impoverish herself by the other, is so great a fault, that a harlot deserves correction for it’.³²

Anne Marshall, who shares with Mary Betterton the claim to be the first professional English actress, was one of a pair of striking dark-haired sisters; later in her career she acted under her married name of Mrs Anne Quin, leaving the title of ‘Mrs Marshall’ to her younger sister Rebecca or ‘Beck’.³³ The equation of dark tints with tragic grandeur marked both women out for the proud and passionate female roles created pre-eminently by Dryden, in the new type of ‘heroic drama’, the opposite pole to the brightness and lightness (and lewdness) of Restoration comedy. Rebecca Marshall had the additional advantage for queenly roles – of which there was a plentiful supply – of being very tall. ‘Behold how night sits lovely on her Eye-brows While day breaks from her eyes!’, or ‘Her quick black eye does wander with desire’, or ‘Her long black locks, on her fair shoulders flow’; these contemporary allusions commemorate the saturnine beauty of the Marshall sisters.

Anne Marshall, as a founder member of The King’s Company and a leading lady there from 1661 onwards, played Zempoalla in The Indian Queen which Dryden co-wrote with Sir Robert Howard, and then Almeria in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor. Pepys praised her Zempoalla and thought it done ‘excellently well, as ever I heard woman in my life’, even if Anne Marshall’s voice was not quite so sweet as Mrs Betterton’s.³⁴ But in depicting the character of Zempoalla, ‘the usurping Indian Queen’ of Mexico who fell in love with her enemy Montezuma, a little stridency would not have come amiss, for she habitually expressed herself in lines like these:

At the end of the play, defeated and her love scorned, Zempoalla killed herself. Almeria in the sequel was Zempoalla’s daughter, equally beautiful, equally tempestuous, equally proud. Catching the eye of the new Emperor of Mexico, Montezuma, who proposed to take her as his wife, Almeria vowed to use his passion to avenge her mother:

At the end of The Indian Emperor however it was Almeria’s destiny, like that of her mother, to die. She killed herself at the feet of the Spanish conqueror Cortez, the object of her unrequited love, as Montezuma had been that of Zempoalla.

Rebecca Marshall joined her sister at The King’s Company sometime in the summer of 1663 but seems to have been a mere apprentice up until the closure of the theatres in June 1665. Besides being always plagued with debt she had a stormy character: in real life her adventures, if not on such a lofty level, were at least as tempestuous as those of Dryden’s ‘barbarian Princesses’. In 1665 she complained about the attentions of a certain Mark Trevor of the Temple to the Lord Chamberlain (considered the protector as well as the licenser of the theatrical profession); Mark Trevor responded by assaulting her. This brought a second complaint from Rebecca Marshall: that Mark Trevor had ‘affronted her both on and off the stage, attacked her in a coach with his sword etc., and threatens vengeance for her complaining of him to the Lord Chamberlain’.³⁷

Two years later there was further trouble with Sir Hugh Middleton. Having insulted the women of The King’s Company as a whole, he had the temerity to come round to their tiring-room at the Theatre Royal. Beck Marshall forthwith and roundly denounced him. Sir Hugh Middleton denounced her, calling her ‘a jade’. Beck then went to the King and secured his promise of protection. Unfortunately she proceeded to boast of this moral victory. Whereupon Sir Hugh Middleton hired some ruffians who waylaid the actress on her way home and rubbed the most disgusting filth all over her. In general Beck Marshall could look after herself: in a further row with Orange Moll, plying her wares at the theatre, both sides gave as good as they got in language and blows.

Naturally her morals were not elevated. She had for example a liaison with the famous fop Sir George Hewell, to whom she bore a daughter. A satire of 1683 suggested that the daughter was no more virtuous than the mother:

Beck Marshall also acted as go-between or procuress to Barbara Duchess of Cleveland, who conceived a passion for the well-known actor Charles Hart.

At the reopening of the theatres in November 1666, the position between the sisters was reversed. The interregnum had given an opportunity to the younger actresses to come to the fore, prominent among them the ex-orange-girl Nell Gwynn with her pretty legs and her talent for comedy, and the ‘mighty pretty and fine and noble’ Beck Marshall: ‘very handsome near-hand’ wrote Pepys, sitting close to her at the theatre. In December 1666 Beck Marshall played the part of Evadne, the corrupted heroine of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy, a part hitherto considered the prerogative of her sister. Pepys noted that ‘the younger Marshall’ had become ‘a pretty good actor’. Early the next year it was Rebecca Marshall who played the lead part of the Queen of Sicily in Dryden’s Secret Love or The Maiden Queen – ‘very good and passionate’ – while Anne, having been transformed into Mrs Quin by marriage at some unknown date in between, was condemned to play the secondary part of Candiope, Princess of the Blood; Nell Gwynn incidentally scored a great success in the ‘comical’ part of Florimel, the Maid of Honour.³⁸

The situation was not to be borne, at least from the elder sister’s point of view. Nor did Anne Marshall Quin attempt to bear it. She left the theatre once more shortly afterwards and petitioned the Lord Chamberlain to restore her to her old roles – and her old stature as a leading lady. This included the privilege of a dressing-room for her own private use. As a result on 4 May 1667 the Lord Chamberlain instructed The King’s Company to admit Mrs Anne Quin ‘to Act again at Theatre Royall and that you assign her all her own parts which she formerly had and that none other be permitted to act any of her parts without her consent. And that you assign her a dressing room with a chimney in it to be only for her use and whom she shall admit.’³⁹

The petition worked. In a performance of Boyle’s The Black Prince in October 1667, elder sisters will be relieved to learn that Anne Quin played the romantic part of Alizia Pierce, while younger sisters will burn to hear that Rebecca Marshall played the dull part of Plantagenet. The important part of Donna Aurelia in Dryden’s An Evening’s Love followed for Anne Quin in 1668, with Rebecca Marshall uncast. Anne Quin also re-created her famous part of Zempoalla in June 1668; if Pepys no longer doted upon her quite so much, the rest of the world was full of praise.⁴⁰

However, by October 1669 Mrs Quin had left The King’s Company once more, to reappear some years later in The Duke’s Company, where she played the part of the courtesan Angelica Bianca in Aphra Behn’s The Rover and a whole list of other important parts in the late seventies and early eighties (she is last heard of in 1682). These included Lady Knowall, Aphra Behn’s caricature of Mary Astell, in Sir Patient Fancy; Lady Squeamish in Otway’s Friendship in Fashion, and Queen Elizabeth in Banks’s The Unhappy Favourite (a role to which her regal appearance and manner were especially well suited).

The departure of her sister left Rebecca Marshall in full command at The King’s Company. She took over the part of Donna Aurelia, and continued as a leading actress there until 1677 when she briefly caught up with her sister again at The Duke’s Company for a few months before leaving the stage for good.

It has to be borne in mind that for all the worldly advancement of a Roxalana, a Peg Hughes, and the busy Marshall sisters there were many actresses who fell through the net, were not fought over at court, or ended their lives as ‘Dame Hester, Countess of Oxford’, but like Gosnell, faltered and disappeared. Elizabeth Farley, generally known as Mrs Weaver, was one of these. She was born about 1640, and as a member of The King’s Company from 1660 to 1665, played secondary roles at the Theatre Royal.

According to Pepys’s actress friend Mrs Knepp, Elizabeth Farley was ‘first spoiled’ i.e. seduced, by the King himself. If true, the relationship did not last very long, for by the winter of 1660 Elizabeth Farley was living with James Weaver, a gentleman of Gray’s Inn.⁴¹ Although she was never married to Weaver, Elizabeth Farley ran up bills of credit as his wife, and was also generally listed as Mrs Weaver in the cast lists of the theatre. Weaver not only cast off his mistress but also sought permission of the Lord Chamberlain to sue her for the return of £30; and she had other debts. Furthermore Elizabeth Farley was by now pregnant, although she continued desperately to act, since so long as she was a member of The King’s Company, she was immune from arrest.

The visible signs of her pregnancy could not be concealed for ever. ‘Mrs Weaver’ was finally discharged. Carefully misrepresenting the cause of her dismissal, Elizabeth Farley appealed to the King for reinstatement. Sir Henry Bennet, on behalf of the King, was ordered to see to it. At this point Sir Robert Howard, the principal shareholder in The King’s Company, issued an indignant protest. Mrs Weaver, he said, had been dismissed because she was ‘big with child’ and ‘shamefully so’ since she was not married. Women of quality were declaring that they could not possibly come to the theatre to watch an actress in such a condition. ‘Truly, Sir, we are willing to bring the Stage to be a place of some Credit, and not an infamous place for all persons of Honour to avoid’, protested Howard.⁴² (This was at a moment, incidentally, when the King’s maîtresse en titre, Barbara, future Duchess of Cleveland, was just recovering from the birth of the second of the five bastards she bore to the King; admittedly she was legally married to Roger Palmer at the time; nevertheless the genteel protest was striking evidence of the double standard which operated.)

Elizabeth Farley did return to the stage, and played the part of ‘fair Alibech’, Almeria’s sympathetic younger sister, in The Indian Emperor of 1665, a secondary but not unimportant role. Debts continued to pursue her. When the theatres closed in the summer of 1665 owing to the plague she effectively vanished from view. It is possible she returned to the stage from time to time in the 1670s, under her own name; but if she is the ‘Mrs Farley’ named in a poem of Rochester’s she became a prostitute.

Elizabeth Barry – ‘famous Madam Barry’ – was by acclaim the greatest actress of the Restoration period and beyond, her reign extending from the 1670s until 1710, when she made her last appearance on the stage. Yet the beginnings of her story are such as to encourage any first-time failure on the stage to persevere. What was more, she might never have pursued her career further had not the most notorious libertine of the age, the Earl of Rochester, come ‘buzzing about her Honey-Pot’.

No one ever pretended Mrs Barry numbered beauty among her gifts: ‘middle-sized’ with ‘darkish Hair, light eyes, dark Eyebrows … indifferently plump’, was one unenthusiastic description.⁴³ She also had a mouth which was slightly drawn up on one side, which she used to try to conceal by composing her face as though about to be painted. Her portrait by Kneller shows a face which is distinctly plain, with a Roman nose and thick lips; even if there is an air of intelligence about it, and more than a hint of determination.

It is easy to believe from such a picture that Mrs Barry at the height of her fame was held to be ‘the Finest Woman in the World upon the Stage, and the ugliest woman off on’t’.⁴⁴ Nevertheless it was not likely that the homely creature she represented as a girl would have caught Rochester’s eye had Mrs Barry not belonged to the traditionally promiscuous profession of actress. It can be argued therefore that this aura of promiscuity, while it ruined some young women, helped to advance Mrs Barry.

The story of Mrs Barry, like her origins, has to be pieced together from various (often conflicting) accounts.⁴⁵ It seems that she first appeared on the stage in 1674 when she was sixteen. Mrs Barry was thus some twenty years younger than Mrs Betterton and Hester Davenport, the founders of her profession. She played Isabella Queen of Hungary in Mustapha, by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery (brother of Mary Countess of Warwick and Katherine Viscountess Ranelagh). This début was a disaster. According to Colley Cibber, Mrs Barry was considered so feeble that she was discharged from the company at the end of her first year. Anthony Aston wrote: ‘for some time they could make nothing of her; she could neither sing nor dance’, not even in a country dance. Mrs Barry was not the only actress-goose whom Rochester determined to turn into a swan. Had he not attempted the same transformation on Sarah Cooke – ‘Miss Sarah’ – that ‘Mistaken Drab’ so utterly unable even after Rochester’s tuition to impress the critical Wits, that she was ordered back to her ‘Mother’s stall’? It would therefore not be right to credit Rochester with an unerring eye in this respect: he struck unlucky with ‘Miss Sarah’ for all her ravishing looks; with Mrs Barry, much less easy on the eye, he struck very lucky indeed.

What should be credited to him without reservation is the manner of his tutorage. This, which might be described as an early form of method-acting, in the hands of the amazing Mrs Barry enabled her to give a proper reality, something rare indeed at the time, to the whole range of female parts in Restoration drama: ‘solemn and august’ in tragedy, ‘alert, easy and genteel’ in comedy.⁴⁶ As we have seen, the first generation of actresses (with the exception of Mrs Betterton) tended to be admired in one or the other.

The original failing of Mrs Barry was that while she had ‘an excellent understanding’ she lacked a musical ear: thus she could not catch ‘the sounds or emphases taught her; but fell into a disagreeable tone, the fault of most young stage-adventurers’. Lord Rochester’s solution was ‘to enter into the meaning of every sentiment; he taught her not only the proper cadence or sounding of the voice, but to seize also the passions, and adapt her whole behaviour to the situations of the characters’. He would rehearse her in a part more than thirty times. As a result Betterton said that she could transform a play that would disgust the most patient reader, calling her ‘incomparable’: ‘her action was always just, and produced naturally by the sentiments of the part’. At a time when artificial heroics were considered an inevitable concomitant of such heroines as those created by Dryden, Mrs Barry could wipe away real tears when acting out a tragic death scene.⁴⁷

Rochester had taken over Mrs Barry’s career in the first place for a bet: after the disastrous début, he vowed he would make her the most accomplished performer at the Dorset Garden Theatre (the new home of The Duke’s Company) within six months. He certainly won his bet. Alcibiades, the first tragedy by Thomas Otway, performed in September 1675, featured Thomas Betterton in the title role, with Mrs Betterton as his betrothed Timandra; it was in the small part of Alcibiades’ sister Draxilla that Mrs Barry reappeared on the London stage. It was probably after this and before her appearance as Leonora in Abdelazar by Aphra Behn the following July that Rochester coached her, although the precise sequence is uncertain.⁴⁸ At all events, the new improved Mrs Barry captured more than critical attention: she also won the heart of Thomas Otway. As a result, he laid at her feet the type of bouquet which only a playwright can bestow upon an actress – a series of plays. Mrs Barry dazzled in such varied parts as Monimia, the pathetic eponymous heroine of The Orphan, and Lavinia (Juliet) in Otway’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. This was an unpopular play, at least in Shakespeare’s version, after the Restoration. Otway’s adaptation, which also drew on Plutarch, was entitled The History and Fall of Caius Marius; which led to Mrs Barry as Lavinia pronouncing (to her lover, known as Marius junior) the interesting line: ‘O Marius, Marius, wherefore art thou Marius.’⁴⁹ Most striking of all Mrs Barry’s creations in the first flush of her success was that of ‘beauteous Belvidera’, the plangent heroine of Venice Preserv’d.

In all however Mrs Barry created over 100 roles, at The Duke’s Company, as the leading lady of The United Company after 1682, and at the breakaway Lincoln’s Inn Fields Company after 1695; although by now she was surrendering the juvenile leading parts to a rising young actress called Anne Bracegirdle. Her parts included that of Hellena in Aphra Behn’s The Rover (a ‘breeches’ part), Arabella in Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds, Lady Brute in Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife and Cordelia in another of those bastard versions of Shakespeare which audiences so much preferred to the glorious originals, Nahum Tate’s Lear (Cordelia finally married Edgar and lived happily ever after). In 1694 Thomas Southerne, author of The Fatal Marriage, paid a graceful tribute to her handling of Isabella, his ill-fated heroine: ‘I made the play for her part, and her part has made the play for me.’⁵⁰

In Venice Preserv’d, Thomas Betterton as Jaffeir gave Mrs Barry as Belvidera, on her first entrance, this lyrical salutation which sums up the romantic view of the female in the late seventeenth century:

It was ironic under the circumstances that Mrs Barry herself, angel painted fair on stage as she might be, was the focus of so many ‘ill-stories’ off it, which if only half of them were true, more than justified the opposing cynical view of the female sex. Mrs Barry was dissolute (‘She has been a Rioter in her time’, wrote Gildon): that in itself was not unusual. She was bad-tempered and at times even violent. Although her good breeding – more or less – was said to make her on stage ‘Mistress of that Behaviour which sets off the well-bred Gentlewoman’, Mrs Barry was capable of exhibiting quite another side to her character, stage or no stage. In a famous incident, Mrs Barry and ‘Chestnut-maned [Betty] Boutel’, acting in Lee’s The Rival Queens, quarrelled over a scarf as the play was about to begin. On the all-too appropriate line:

Mrs Barry as Roxana struck Mrs Boutel playing the rival queen Statira with such force that her blunted stage dagger managed to penetrate Mrs Boutel’s stays, and pierce the flesh beneath.⁵²

Furthermore Mrs Barry was mercenary. Where her professional life was concerned, that was understandable, in view of the low salaries paid to actresses at the time: for example, she insisted on receiving the proceeds of a benefit at the theatre, hitherto generally reserved for writers. But she was also mercenary where her affections were concerned, to an extent that amazed even this worldly age. It was not so much the settlement she was supposed to have secured from the playwright Sir George Etherege (Mrs Barry could see for herself what happened to the unendowed actress), but Tom Brown wrote: ‘Should you lie with her all night, she would not know you next morning, unless you had another five pounds at your service.’ The lampoons which blasted the private lives of all the famous actresses and courtesans of the time (with the ever-glowing exception of Mrs Betterton) showed in later years a particular bitterness towards the ‘slattern Betty Barry’.

At the same time it had to be admitted that Mrs Barry was one whom ‘every fop upon the stage admires’.⁵³ It was as though her defiant combination of talent and calculation was especially exacerbating.

Thomas Otway despaired of Mrs Barry’s treatment of him: while accepting the parts, it is said that she would not even requite his besotted love with a kiss. Otway referred to himself as being fobbed off ‘with gross, thick, homespun friendship, the common Coin that passes betwixt Worldly Interests’. He addressed a series of agonized letters to his beloved, confessing that since the first day he saw her, ‘I have hardly enjoy’d one Hour of perfect Quiet’; and yet he could not break loose: ‘though I have languished for seven long tedious Years of Desire, jealously and despairingly; yet, every Minute I see you, I still discover something new and bewitching’.⁵⁴

Otway was bitter in the knowledge that Rochester had succeeded where he had failed: ‘I have consulted my Pride, whether after a Rival’s Possession I ought to ruin all my Peace for a Woman that another has been more blest in, though no Man ever loved as I did: But Love, victorious Love, o’er throws all that, and tells me, it is his Nature never to remember; he still looks forward from the present hour, expecting new Dawns, new rising Happiness, never looks back, never regards what is past, left behind him, but buries and forgets it quite in the hot fierce pursuit of Joy before him.’ On the other hand Rochester, on the evidence of his own letters (thirty-four survive, although they are undated and the originals have vanished), suffered equally from jealousy where Mrs Barry was concerned, for all the consummation of his desire. It was thought by contemporaries that Mrs Barry was the great love of Rochester’s life: she was ‘his passion’, wrote one, and another claimed that he never loved anyone else ‘so sincerely’ as Mrs Barry.⁵⁵

In poetry Rochester could serenade ‘The Mistress’ with elegance:

The letters were less controlled: ‘Madam, There is now no minute of my life that does not afford me some new argument how much I love you; the little joy I take in every thing wherein you are not concern’d, the pleasing perplexity of endless thought, which I fall into, wherever you are brought to my remembrance; and lastly, the continual disquiet I am in, during your absence, convince me sufficiently that I do you justice in loving you, so as woman was never loved before.’ And again: ‘Seeing you is as necessary to my life as breathing; so that I must see you, or be yours no more; for that’s the image I have of dying …’ Writing to Mrs Barry at three in the morning, a letter of furious expostulation, Rochester ended: ‘I thank God I can distinguish, I can see very woman in you … ’Tis impossible for me to curse you; but give me leave to pity myself, which is more than ever you will do for me.’⁵⁶

Rochester’s relationship with Mrs Barry lasted for about four years; towards the end of it, in 1677, she bore him a daughter. Rochester was by this time immured in the country, crippled and virtually blind from disease, moving towards that classic reprobate’s deathbed in which he would abandon his wicked ways for the consolations of religion. Savile broke the news to him: ‘Your Lordship has a daughter born by the body of Mrs Barry of which I give your honour joy.’ Savile added that the mother’s lying-in was not being held in ‘much state’ since Mrs Barry was living in great poverty in the Mall. The woman who had taken her in was ‘not without some gentle reflections on your Lordship’s want either of generosity or bowels [compassion] towards a lady who had not refused you the full enjoyment of her charms’.⁵⁷

Rochester was however at this point pursued by his creditors as well as cut off from London by his physical condition, so that it is difficult to see how he could in fact have helped his mistress financially. He contented himself with writing to her: ‘Madam, Your safe delivery has deliver’d me too from fears for your sake, which were, I’ll promise you, as burthensome to me, as your great belly could be to you. Every thing has fallen out to my wish, for you are out of danger, and the child is of the soft sex I love …’ The child, mentioned in Rochester’s will under the name of Elizabeth Clarke, where she was left £40, died in 1689 at the age of twelve. At some point before Rochester’s death in 1682 little Elizabeth Clarke was taken away briefly from her mother’s care because of her want of ‘discretion’ in bringing her up. Rochester wrote firmly but kindly on the subject: ‘Madam, I am far from delighting in the grief I have given you, by taking away the child: and you, who made it so absolutely necessary for me to do so, must take that excuse from me, for all the ill nature of it …! I hope very shortly to restore to you a finer girl than ever.’⁵⁸

Doubtless Mrs Barry did show lack of discretion in her way of life: ‘You have a character, and you maintain it’, wrote Rochester in one of the anguished letters.⁵⁹ Yet her legendary rapacity and even her coldness and severity towards her admirers are at least explicable when one bears in mind the alternative: the wretched downfall experienced by an actress like Elizabeth Farley. Famous as Mrs Barry was, she had no alternative but to give birth to her child in poverty, without support from husband or lover, and only the help of a ‘protectress’; that was the predictable fate of an actress who became pregnant. A little rapacity may be pardoned under the circumstances.

Mrs Barry retired to Acton – then pleasant countryside – when she finally left the stage in her fifties after her long reign. She died there in 1713. She is said to have been the victim of a bite from a pet lap-dog, which she did not know had been ‘seized with madness’.⁶⁰ If the story is true, it was an appropriately bizarre and tragic end for the first of the great English dramatic actresses, a line of descent leading down to Mrs Siddons in the next century.

Although her plain memorial stone is still to be seen in the church at Acton where she lies buried, the words of Colley Cibber himself constitute her best epitaph: ‘Mrs Barry, in Characters of Greatness, had a Presence of elevated dignity, her Mien and Motion superb and gracefully majestick; her Voice full, clear, and strong, so that no Violence of Passion could be too much for her: And when Distress or Tenderness possess’d her, she subsided into the most affecting Melody and Softness. In the Art of exciting Pity She had a Power beyond all the Actresses I have yet seen, or what your Imagination can conceive.’⁶¹

¹Today Sir Rupert Bromley Bt represents the direct line of descent from Ruperta, Prince Rupert and of course Peg Hughes.