English Actors in Paris during the Civil Wars: Samuel Speede and the Prince of Wales's Company

Abstract

The banning of all public stage plays, by order of Parliament on 2 September 1642, cast the English professional actors into a sorry plight and, as The Actors' Remonstrance complained in the following January, threatened them with poverty and hunger. During the ensuing years of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth, the fates of individual players are poorly documented. Some joined the ranks of the Royalist or (in the rarest of cases) the Parliamentarian armies, the luckier ones found roles in the plays performed to cheer the King's camp at Oxford, some actors will doubtless have returned to their former employment, others took part in the surreptitious performances which continued in defiance of the law, while yet others (or perhaps some of the same) sought to pursue their theatrical careers abroad, such as the English company attested at the Hague between November 1644 and about February 1645.1Regarding the English actors who crossed to the Continent, Leslie Hotson's study of the Thomason Collection of Tracts in the British Library led him to reports in two newsbooks which revealed that a company was in Paris under the patronage of Charles, Prince of Wales, who in June 1646 had crossed from Jersey to join his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, in the French capital. The Mercurius Candidus for 11-20 November 1646 recorded the recent dissolution of 'the company of English Actors that the Prince of Wales had' in France, while The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer for 23 February-2 March 1647 added that William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, 'has writ severall things for the English company that did lately act in Parris'.2 Hotson surmised that the young Prince's company may have included some of the actors who had performed in the Hague, and whom a Dutch notary had named as Jeremias Kite, William Cooke, Thomas Loveday, Edward Shatterell, Nathan Peet and his son.3More recently, our knowledge of the membership of the Prince's men in exile has been augmented by important new evidence published by Judith Milhous and Robert Hume.4 Depositions made in 1664 by witnesses with theatrical connections, in answer to a suit brought in Chancery by the retired actor William Hall, name several players who performed together on the Continent between 1644 and 1646: Richard Baxter, Thomas Bedford, Nicolas Burt, Walter Clun, William Hall, Charles Hart, Thomas Loveday, Robert Shatterell, and William Wintershall5 - players who would have made for 'an unseasoned but on the whole talented troupe'.6 The testimony of Richard Baxter refers specifically to performances given abroad before the future Charles II:shortly after the Rendition of Oxford [...] William Hall did goe beyond the seas & Did their Joyne himselfe to the Defendants Walter Clunn, William Wintershall Charles Hart & Robert Shotterell & with this Deponent & one Mr Loveday [...] & Did use & exercise the Art of Stage playing before his now Majestie, as his Majesties servant.7Several other actors also testified that they 'and some others of the same profession did repaire then to his new Majesty then beyond the seas and there Did sometymes but not longe Act before his Majesty'.8These statements confirm the evidence from the newsbooks that the Prince's men performed in Paris. That the actors' fortune there was ill-starred is reported in the Mercurius Candidus's issue for 11-20 November 1646:From France thus: The company of English Actors that the Prince of Wales had, are for want of pay dissolved -: That's newes not strange [...] It is probable, that the Prince thinkes it may concern his present condition to mind something else. [...] The English audience being there so poor and few, that they were not able to maintaine the charges of the Stage -: It is wonder sufficient to me, how they can maintain themselves.9Records have since come to light in Paris, in the Minutier Central des Notaires (the legal archive for the Paris region, forming part of the Archives Nationales de France), which provide further information about the activities of English actors in the French capital shortly after the arrival of the exiled Prince. …