ARGUMENT.

The historical state of affairs 1659-60 was briefly as follows:—the Protectorate of Richard Cromwell expired 22 April, 1659. Hereupon Fleetwood and some other officers recalled the Long Parliament (Rump), which was constituted the ruling power of England, a select council of state having the executive. Lambert, however, with other dissentients was expelled from Parliament, 12 October, 1659. He and his troops marched to Newcastle; but the soldiers deserted him for General Fairfax, who had declared for a free Parliament, and were garrisoned at York. 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 assuming the state and title 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 petition her, abruptly dismisses them both and so assuages 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 circumstances 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 crushing 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 title, 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.

To the Right Noble

HENRY FITZ-ROY,

Duke of Grafton, Earl of Sutton, Viscount of Ipswich, Baron of Sudbury, Knight of the most Noble Order of the Garter, and Colonel of his Majesties Regiment of Foot-Guards, &c.

May it please Your Grace,

Dedications which were Originally design’d, as a Tribute to the Reverence and just esteem we ought to pay the Great and Good ; are now so corrupted with Flattery, that they rarely either find a Reception in the World, or merit that Patronage they wou’d implore. But I without fear Approach the great Object, being above that mean and mercenary Art; nor can I draw the Lovely Picture half so charming and so manly as it is; and that Author may more properly boast of a Lucky Hitt, whose choice and Fortune is so good, than if he had pleas’d all the different ill Judging world besides in the business of the Play; for none that way, can ever hope to please all; in an Age when Faction rages, and different Parties disagree in all things—- But coming the first day to a new Play with a Loyal Title, and then even the sober and tender conscienc’d, throng as to a forbidden Conventicle, fearing the Cub of their old Bear of Reformation should be expos’d, to be the scorn of the wicked, and dreading (tho’ but the faint shadow of their own deformity) their Rebellion, Murders, Massacres and Villanies, from forty upwards, should be represented for the better undeceiving and informing of the World, flock in a full Assembly with a pious design to Hiss and Rail it as much out of countenance as they would Monarchy, Religion, Laws, and Honesty; throwing the Act of Oblivion in our Teeths, as if that (whose mercy cannot make them forget their old Rebellion) cou’d hinder honest Truths from breaking out upon ’em in Edifying Plays, where the Loyal hands ever out-do their venom’d Hiss; a good and happy Omen, if Poets may be allow’d for Prophets as of old they were: and ’tis as easily seen at a new Play how the Royal Interest thrives, as at a City Election, how the Good Old Couse is carried on; as a Noble Peer lately said, Tho’ the Tories have got the better of us at the Play, we carried it in the City by many Voices, God be praised!

This Play, call’d The Roundheads, which I humbly lay at your Graces feet, Pardon the Title, and Heaven defend you from the bloody Race, was carried in the House nemine contra dicente, by the Royal Party, and under your Grace’s Illustrious Patronage is safe from any new Seditious affronts abroad; Your Grace alone, whom Heaven and Nature has form’d the most adorable Person in the whole Creation, with all the advantages of a glorious Birth, has a double right and power to defend all that approach you for sanctuary; your very Beauty is a Guard to all you daigne to make safe: for You were born for Conquest every way; even what Phanatick, what peevish Politician, testy with Age, Diseases, miscarried Plots, disappointed Revolutions, envious of Power, of Princes, and of Monarchy, and mad with Zeal for Change and Reformation, could yet be so far lost to sense of Pleasure, as not to turn a Rebel to Revenge the Good old Cause, and the patronage to Plebean sedition with only looking on you, ’twou’d force his meger face to blushing smiles, and make him swear he had mistook the side, curse his own Party, and if possible, be reconciled to Honesty again: such power have charms like Yours to calm the soul, and will in spight of You plead for me to the disaffected, even when they are at Wars with your Birth and Power. But this Play, for which I humbly beg your Grace’s Protection, needs it in a more peculiar manner, it having drawn down Legions upon its head, for its Loyalty—what, to Name us cries one, ’tis most abominable, unheard of daring cries another—she deserves to be swing’d cries a third; as if twere all a Libel, a Scandal impossible to be prov’d, or that their Rogueries were of so old a Date their Reign were past Remembrance or History; when they take such zealous care to renew it daily to our memories: And I am satisfied, that they that will justifie the best of these Traytors, deserves the fate of the worst, and most manifestly declare to the World by it, they wou’d be at the Old Game their fore-Fathers play’d with so good success: yet if there be any honest loyal man allied to any here nam’d, I heartily beg his pardon for any offensive Truth I have spoken, and ’tis a wonderful thing that amongst so Numerous a Flock they will not allow of one mangy Sheep; not one Rogue in the whole Generation of the Association.

Ignoramus the 1st and the 2d.

But as they are I leave ’em to your Grace to Judge of ’em; to whom I humbly present this small Mirror, of the late wretched Times: wherein your Grace may see something of the Miseries three the Most Glorious Kingdoms of the Universe were reduc’d to; where your Royal Ancestors victoriously Reign’d for so many hundred years: How they were Governed, Parcell’d out, and deplorably inslav’d, and to what Low, Prostituted Lewdness they fell at last: where the Nobility and Gentry were the most contemn’d and despis’d part of them, and such Meane (and till then obscure) Villains Rul’d, and Tyrannized, that no Age, nor Time, or scarce a Parish Book makes mentions or cou’d show there was any such Name or Family. Yet these were those that impudently Tug’d for Empire, and Prophan’d that illustrious Throne and Court, so due then, and possest now (through the infinite Mercies of God to this bleeding Nation) by the best of Monarchs; a Monarch, who had the divine goodness to Pardon even his worst of Enemies what was past; Nay, out of his Vast and God-like Clemency, did more than Heaven it self can do, put it out of his Power by an Act of Oblivion, to punish the unparalell’d Injuries done His Sacred Person, and the rest of the Royal Family: How great his Patience has been since, I leave to all the World to judge: but Heaven be prais’d, he has not yet forgot the Sufferings and Murders of the Glorious Martyr of ever Blessed memory, Your Graces Sacred Grandfather, and by what Arts and Ways that Devilish Plot was layed! and will like a skilful Pilate, by the wreck of one Rich Vessel, learn how to shun the danger of this present Threatning and save the rest from sinking; The Clouds already begin to disappear, and the face of things to change, thanks to Heaven, his Majesties infinite Wisdom, and the Over-Zeal of the (falsly called) True Protestant Party; Now we may pray for the King and his Royal Brother, defend his Cause, and assert his Right, without the fear of a taste of the Old Sequestration call’d a Fine; Guard the Illustrious Pair, good Heaven, from Hellish Plots, and all the Devilish Machinations of Factious Cruelties: and you, great Sir, (whose Merits have so Justly deserv’d that glorious Command so lately trusted to your Care, which Heaven increase, and make your glad Regiment Armies for our safety. May you become the great Example of Loyalty and Obedience, and stand a firm and unmoveable Pillar to Monarchy, a Noble Bullwark to Majesty; defend the Sacred Cause, imploy all that Youth, Courage, and Noble Conduct which God and Nature purposely has endued you with, to serve the Royal Interest: You, Sir, who are obliged by a double Duty to Love, Honour, and Obey his Majesty, both as a Father and a King! O undissolvable Knot! O Sacred Union! what Duty, what Love, what Adoration can express or repay the Debt we owe the first, or the Allegiance due to the last, but where both meet in one, to make the Tye Eternal; Oh what Counsel, what Love of Power, what fancied Dreams of Empire, what fickle Popularity can inspire the heart of Man, or any Noble mind, with Sacrilegious thoughts against it, can harbour or conceive a stubborn disobedience: Oh what Son can desert the Cause of an Indulgent Parent, what Subject, of such a Prince, without renouncing the Glory of his Birth, his Loyalty, and good Nature.

Ah Royal lovely Youth! beware of false Ambition; wisely believe your Elevated Glory, (at least) more happy then a Kings, you share their Joys, their pleasures and magnificence, without the toils and business of a Monarch, their carefull days and restless thoughtfull nights; know, you art blest with all that Heaven can give, or you can wish; your Mind and Person such, so excellent, that Love knows no fault it would wish to mend, nor Envy to increase! blest with a Princess of such undisputable charming Beauty, as if Heaven, designing to take a peculiar care in all that concerns your Happiness, had form’d her on purpose, to compleat it.

Hail happy glorious Pair! the perfect joy and pleasure of all that look on ye, for whom all Tongues and Hearts have Prayers and Blessings; May you out-live Sedition, and see your Princely Race as Numerous as Beautifull, and those all great and Loyal Supporters of a long Race of Monarchs of this Sacred Line, This shall be the perpetual wish, this the Eternal Prayer of

SIR,
Your Graces most Humble,
and most Obedient Servant,

A. BEHN.