Volume I Part 106 (1/2)
Here Monk, entering England 2 January, 1660, joined them with his forces. Lambert, deprived of his followers, was obliged to return to London. His prompt arrest by order of Parliament followed, and he, Sir Harry Vane and other members of the Committee of Safety were placed in strict confinement. On 5 March Lambert was imprisoned in the Tower, whence he escaped on 10 April, only to be recaptured a fortnight later.
There are vivid pictures in Aubrey, Pepys, and other writers, of the wild enthusiasm at the fall of the Rump Parliament, with bonfires blazing, all the church bells ringing, and the populace of London carousing and pledging King Charles on their knees in the street. 'They made little gibbets and roasted rumps of mutton. Nay, I saw some very good rumps of beef,' writes Aubrey, and Pepys is even more vivid in his tale than the good antiquary.
King Charles landed at Dover, 26 May, amid universal rejoicings.
Mrs. Behn has (quite legitimately) made considerable departures from strict historical fact and the sequence of events for her dramatic purposes.
Lambert and Fleetwood are scheming for the supreme power, and both intrigue with Lord Wariston, the chairman of the Committee of Safety, for his good word and influence. Lambert meantime fools Fleetwood by flattery and a feigned indifference. Lady Lambert, who is eagerly expecting her husband to be proclaimed King, and is a.s.suming the state and t.i.tle of royalty to the anger of Cromwell's widow, falls in love with a cavalier, Loveless. Her friend, Lady Desbro', a thorough loyalist at heart, though wedded to an old parliamentarian, has long been enamoured of Freeman, the cavalier's companion. Lambert surprises Loveless and Freeman with his wife and Lady Desbro', but Lady Lambert pretending they have come to pet.i.tion her, abruptly dismisses them both and so a.s.suages all suspicion. At a meeting of the Committee the two gallants are sent to prison for a loyal outburst on the part of Loveless. Ananias Goggle, a lay elder, who having offered liberties to Lady Desbro' is in her power, is by her obliged to obtain her lover's release, and she at once holds an interview with him. They are interrupted by Desbro' himself, but Freeman is concealed and makes an undiscovered exit behind the shelter of Goggle's flowing cloak.
Loveless is brought to Lady Lambert at night. She endeavours to dazzle him by showing the regalia richly set out and adorned with lights.
He puts by, however, crown and sceptre and rebukes her overweening ambition. Suddenly the Committee, who have been drinking deep, burst in upon them dancing a riotous dance. Loveless is hurriedly concealed under the coverlet of a couch, and Lady Lambert sits thereon seemingly at her devotions. Her husband takes his place by her side, but rolls off as the gallant slips to the ground. The lights fall down and are extinguished, the men fly howling and bawling 'A Plot! A Plot!' in drunken terror.
Lambert is cajoled and hectored into believing himself mistaken owing to his potations. The ladies hold a council to correct and enquire into women's wrongs, but on a sudden, news is brought that Lambert's followers have turned against him and that he is imprisoned in the Tower. The city rises against the Parliament and the Rump is dissolved.
Loveless and Freeman rescue Lady Lambert and Lady Desbro', whose old husband has fallen down dead with fright. The parliamentarians endeavour to escape, but Wariston, Goggle, and Hewson-- a leading member of the Committee-- are detected and maltreated by the mob. As they are haled away to prison the people give themselves up to general merry-making and joy.
SOURCE.
The purely political part of _The Roundheads; or, The Good Old Cause_ was founded by Mrs. Behn on John Tatham's _The Rump_; or, _The Mirror of the Late Times_ (4to, 1660, 4to, 1661, and again 1879 in his collected works,) which was produced on the eve of the Restoration, in February, 1660, at the Private House, i.e. small theatre, in Dorset Court. The company which played here had been brought together by William Beeston, but singularly little is known of its brief career and only one name has been recorded, that of George Jolly, the leading actor. Tatham was the author of the Lord Mayor's pageants 1657-64. His plays, four in number, together with a rare entertainment, _London's Glory_ (1660), have been well edited by Maidment and Logan.
_The Rump_ met with great success. It is certainly a brisk and lively piece, and coming at the juncture it did must have been extraordinarily effective. As a topical key-play reflecting the moment it is indeed admirable, and the crescendo of overwhelming satire, all the keener for the poet's deep earnestness, culminating in the living actors, yesterday's lords and law-givers, running to and fro the London streets, one bawling 'Ink or pens, ink or pens!', another 'Boots or shoes, boots or shoes to mend!', a third 'Fine Seville oranges, fine lemons!', whilst Mrs. Cromwell exchanges Billingsgate with a crowd of jeering boys, must have caused the house absolutely to rock with merriment.
With all its point and cleverness _The Rump_, however, from a technical point of view, is ill-digested and rough. The scenes were evidently thrown off hastily, and sadly lack refining and revision. Mrs. Behn has made the happiest use of rather unpromising material. The intrigues between Loveless and Lady Lambert, who in Tatham is very woodeny and awkward, between Freeman and Lady Desbro', which give _The Roundheads_ unity and dramatic point, are entirely her own invention. In the original _Rump_ neither cavaliers nor Lady Desbro' appear. Ananias Goggle also, the canting lay elder of Clements, with his subtle casuistry that jibs at 'the person not the office,' a dexterous character sketch, alive and acute, we owe to Mrs. Behn.
Amongst the many plays, far too numerous even to catalogue, that scarify the puritans and their zealot tribe, _The Cheats_ (1662), by Wilson, and Sir Robert Howard's _The Committee_ (1662), which long kept the stage, and, in a modified form, _The Honest Thieves_, was seen as late as the second half of the nineteenth century, are pre-eminently the best. Both possess considerable merit and are worthy of the highest comic traditions of the theatre.
As might have been expected, the dissolution of the Rump Parliament let loose a flood of political literature, squibs, satires and lampoons.
Such works as _The famous Tragedie of the Life and Death of Mrs. Rump ... as it was presented on a burning stage at Westminster, the 29th of May, 1660_ (4to, 1660), are of course valueless save from a purely historical interest. A large number of songs and ballads were brought together and published in two parts, 1662, reprint 1874. This collection (_The Rump_), sometimes witty, sometimes angry, sometimes obscene, is weighty evidence of the loathing inspired by the republicans and their misrule, but it is of so personal and topical a nature that the allusions would hardly be understood by any one who had not made a very close and extended study of those critical months.
THEATRICAL HISTORY.
_The Roundheads; or, The Good Old Cause_ was produced at the Duke's Theatre in 1682. They were unsettled and hazardous times. The country was convulsed by the judicial murders and horrors which followed in the train of the pseudo-Popish Plot engineered by the abominable Gates and his accomplices. King and Parliament were at hopeless variance. The air was charged with strife, internecine hatreds and unrest. In such an atmosphere and in such circ.u.mstances politics could not but make themselves keenly felt upon the stage. The actors were indeed 'abstracts and brief chronicles of the time', and the theatre became a very Armageddon for the poets. As _A Lenten Prologue refus'd by the Players_ (1682) puts it:-- 'Plots and Parties give new matter birth And State distractions serve you here for mirth!
The Stage, like old Rump Pulpits, is become The scene of News, a furious Party's drum.'
Produced on 4 December, 1682, Dryden and Lee's excellent Tragedy, _The Duke of Guise_, which the Whigs vainly tried to suppress, created a furore. Crowne's _City Politics_ (1683) is a crus.h.i.+ng satire, caricaturing Oates, Stephen College, old Sergeant Maynard and their faction with rare skill. Southerne's _Loyal Brother_ (1682), eulogizes the Duke of York; the scope of D'Urfey's _Sir Barnaby Whigg_ (1681), can be told by its t.i.tle, indeed the prologue says of the author:-- 'That he shall know both parties now he glories, By hisses th' Whigs, and by their claps the Tories.'
His _Royalist_ (1682) follows in the same track.
Even those plays which were entirely non-political are inevitably prefaced with a mordant prologue or wound up by an epilogue that has party venom and mustard in its tail.
It would be surprising if so popular a writer as Mrs. Behn had not put a political play on the stage at such a juncture, and we find her well to the fore with _The Roundheads_, which she followed up in the same year with _The City Heiress_, another openly topical comedy.
The cast of _The Roundheads_ is not given in any printed copy, and we have no exact means of apportioning the characters, which must have entailed the whole comic strength of the house. It is known that Betterton largely refrained from appearing in political comedies, and no doubt Smith took the part of Loveless, whilst Freeman would have fallen to Joseph Williams. Nokes was certainly Lambert; and Leigh, Wariston.
Mrs. Leigh probably played Lady Cromwell or Gilliflower; Mrs. Barry, Lady Lambert; and Mrs. Currer, Lady Desbro'. The piece seems to have been very successful, and to have kept the stage at intervals for some twenty years.