ENGLISH ACTING COMPANIES AT THE COURT OF BRUSSELS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Abstract

NORMALLY accounts of the royal court at Brussels, which were part of the sovereign's personal expenses, would not be preserved in the administrative records which for the most part constitute the General Archives at Brussels, but by a happy freak of circumstance three such account books have found their way there and provide us with considerable information about the personnel, activities, and amusements of the Court from 1612 to 1618 and from mid-1647 to 1652.' The first two books (Archives Generales du Royaume, Chambre des Comptes, 1837 and 1838) contain the accounts of the Archduke Albert (joint sovereign, with the Infanta Isabella, of the Spanish Netherlands from 1596 till his death in I621), his libros de razon which, as their title suggests, are kept in Spanish. The former, Libro de Razon 7, covers the years 1612-15, the latter, Libro de Razon 8, the years 1615-18. The third book (Manuscrits divers I374), also kept in Spanish, contains the household expenses of Archduke Leopold William of Austria, governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands, 1647-56, the earliest dated entry being that of ii May 1647, one month after the Archduke's arrival in Brussels (ii April) and the last dated entry being that of 31 December I652. This was once Phillipps MS. No. 7083. At the top of the recto of the flyleaf is written in pencil: 'There were two volumes, but one was torn up long ago. I saw the cover of it at Brussels.' Below this is written in ink: 'Expences of Leopold William archduke of Austria from 1647 to 1652.' The Archduke Albert libro de razon for 1615-18 and the Archduke Leopold William account book were used by Henri Liebrecht in his Histoire du thddtre franfais a Bruxelles au XVIP et au XVIIP sidcle (Paris, 1923), in the course of which he cites the entries referring to performances by English as well as Spanish companies, but, so far as I can discover,