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Pope-Burning Pageants: Performing the Exclusion Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Odai Johnson
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Extract

On November 17, 1677, Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician was performed at Dorset Gardens by the Duke of York's Company. All we know of the play comes from a letter of Andrew Marvel: “Today is acted the first time Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician where my Lord Shaftsbury and all his gang are sufficiently personated. I conceive the King will be there.” Though we are offered little else, the fact that Shaftsbury and his gang are ridiculed is, I think, enough to situate the play fairly with other royally endorsed parodies of the Whig party that found a ready marketplace in the King's Theatre in the years of fervent, 1677–1683. Plays such as John Crowne's The Ambitious Statesman (1679) and City Politiques (1682), Thomas D'Urfey's Sir Barnaby Whig (1681) and The Royalist (1682), and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1681) all were having no end of sport lampooning the Whig platform, with scarcely the benefit of a rebuttal.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , May 1996 , pp. 35 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1996

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References

1. Historical Manuscript Commission, 14th Report, Appendix, Part 2, 1894, Portland MSS, iii, 357.

2. The Pope Burnt to Ashes; or, Defiance to Rome (1676).

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4. The terms, of course, are loosely applied. As Nancy Klein Maguire has recently summarized it: “if pushed to a succession choice, ‘Whigs’ would choose Protestantism, ‘Tories’ legitimacy.” “Factionary Politics: John Crowne's Henry VI,” in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, Maclean, Gerald, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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25. The 1679 pageant was described in London's Defiance to Rome and a copper plate engraving “The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope…” was issued. There are two broadsides, both in copper plate, for the 1680 pageant, “The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope…,” published for Langley Curtis, and “The Solemn Mock Procession…,” published for Nathaniel Ponder. The description of the 1681 pageant is preserved in The Procession; or, the Burning of the Pope in Effigy.

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41. The first trial was held in London where College was acquitted when the jury, selected by Whig sheriffs, returned a verdict of Ignoramus. For the second trial, College was moved to Oxford, a Tory stronghold. The results there were not so fortunate.

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46. One affidavit of William Lewis testifies to his engineering efforts in the Fitzharris case: “John Harrington persuaded me to suborn Mrs. Fitzharris to retract her evidence and procured me money on bond to effect it and employed me to persuade Mrs. Peacock to retract her evidence and to suborn her to accuse some at Court for putting her on to accuse Lord Howard.” CSPD (1681), 499. See also CSPD (1681), 432.

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48. Luttrell, Narcissus, Brief Relations of State Affairs (Oxford: Gregg International Pub. Ltd., 1969), 1:188Google Scholar ; London Mercury, #23.

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51. CSPD (1682), 143; CSPD (1683), 2:106.

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53. Ibid., 38.

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59. Remarks Upon E. Settle's Narrative, 3.

60. Roger L'Estrange writes that College “has been cautioned hundreds of times to keep his tongue in's head, or if he did not he would talk himself at last to the Gallows.” “Notes on Stephen College,” 25. In Hone's trial it was revealed he had consulted with an informant about “taking off the King and the Duke at once” during a Lord Mayor's Show. The Tryals of Thomas Walcott, William Hone, William Russel for High Treason (London: n.p., 1683), 27Google Scholar.

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63. CSPD (1680), 86–87.

64. The First Whig (Scarborough: Private press, 1894), 105–106Google Scholar.