This report of a foreigner must not be pressed as if it were precise evidence upon the business organization of the Blackfriars. Yet it forms the main basis of the theory propounded by Professor Wallace that Elizabeth personally financed the Chapel plays and personally directed the limitation of the number of adult companies allowed to perform in London, as part of a deliberate scheme of reform, which her ‘definite notion of what the theatre should be’ had led her to plan—a theory which, I fear, makes his Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars misleading, in spite of its value as a review of the available evidence, old and new, about the company.[140] Professor Wallace supposes that Edward Kirkham, acting officially as Yeoman of the Revels, was Elizabeth’s agent, and that, even before he became a partner in the syndicate, he dieted the boys and supplied them with the ‘köstlichen Kleidern zum Ueberfluss’ mentioned by Gerschow, accounting for the expenditure either through the Revels Accounts or through some other unspecified accounts ‘yet to be discovered’.[141] Certainly no such expenditure appeared in the Revels Accounts, and no other official account with which Kirkham was concerned is known. It may be pointed out that, if we took Gerschow’s account as authoritative, we should have to suppose that Elizabeth provided the theatre building, which we know she did not, and I think it may be taken for granted that her payments for the Chapel were no more than those with which we are already quite familiar, namely the Master’s fee of £40 ‘pro exhibicione puerorum’, the board-wages of 6d. a day for each of twelve children, possibly the breakfast allowance of £16 a year and the largess of £9 13s. 4d. for high feasts, and the occasional rewards for actual performances. None of these, of course, passed through the Revels Office, and although this office may, as in the past, have helped to furnish the actual plays at Court, the cost of exercising in public remained a speculation of the Master and his backers, who had to look for recoupment and any possible profits to the sums received from spectators. If it is true, as Gerschow seems to say, that performances were only given on Saturdays, the high entrance charge of 1s. is fully explained. The lawsuits, of course, bear full evidence to the expenditure by the members of the syndicate upon the ‘setting forward’ of plays.[142] Nor is there any ground for asserting, as Professor Wallace does, that there were two distinct sets of children, one lodged in or near the palace for chapel purposes proper, and the other kept at the Blackfriars for plays.[143] It is true that Clifton charged Giles with impressing boys who could not sing, but Gerschow’s account proves that there were others at the Blackfriars who could sing well enough, and it would be absurd to suppose that there was one trained choir for the stage and another for divine service. Doubtless, however, the needs of the theatre made it necessary to employ, by agreement or impressment, a larger number of boys than the twelve borne on the official establishment.[144] And that boys whose voices had broken were retained in the theatrical company may be inferred from the report about 1602 that the Dowager Countess of Leicester had married ‘one of the playing boyes of the chappell’.[145] I cannot, finally, agree with Professor Wallace in assuming that the play attended by Elizabeth at the Blackfriars on 29 December 1601 was necessarily a public one at the theatre; much less that it was ‘only one in a series of such attendances’. She had dined with Lord Hunsdon at his house in the Blackfriars. The play may have been in his great chamber, or he may have borrowed the theatre next door for private use on an off-day. And the actors may even more probably have been his own company than the Chapel boys.[146]

The appointment of a new Lord Chamberlain by James I seems to have enabled Evans to return to England. He found theatrical affairs in a bad way, owing to the plague of 1603, and ‘speach and treatie’ arose between him and Burbadge about a possible surrender of his lease.[147] By December, however, things looked brighter. Evans did some repairs to the Blackfriars, and the enterprise continued.[148] Like the adult companies, the partners secured direct royal protection under the following patent of 4 February 1604:[149]

Apparently it was still thought better to keep the name of Evans out of the patent, and he was represented by Hawkins; of the nature of Payne’s connexion with the company I know nothing. The adoption of the name of Children of the Queen’s Revels should perhaps be taken as indicating that, as the boy-actors grew older, the original connexion with the Chapel became looser. The use of Giles’s commission as a method of obtaining recruits was probably abandoned, and there is no evidence that he had any further personal association with the theatre.[150] The commission itself was, however, renewed on 13 September 1604, with a new provision for the further education of boys whose voices had changed;[151] and in December Giles was successful in getting the board-wages allowed for his charges raised from 6d. to 10d. a day.[152]

The Revels children started gaily on the new phase of their career, and the Hamlet allusion is echoed in Middleton’s advice to a gallant, ‘if his humour so serve him, to call in at the Blackfriars, where he should see a nest of boys able to ravish a man’.[153] They were at Court on 21 February 1604 and on 1 and 3 January 1605. Their payees were Kirkham for the first year and Evans and Daniel for the second. Evidently Daniel was taking a more active part in the management than that of a mere licenser. Their play of 1 January 1605 was Chapman’s All Fools (1605), and to 1603–5 may also be assigned his Monsieur d’Olive (1606), and possibly his Bussy d’Ambois (1607), and Day’s Law Tricks (1608). I venture to conjecture that the boys’ companies were much more under the influence of their poets than were their adult rivals; it is noteworthy that plays written for them got published much more rapidly than the King’s or Prince’s men ever permitted.[154] And it is known that one poet, who now began for the first time to work for the Blackfriars, acquired a financial interest in the undertaking. This was John Marston, to whom Evans parted, at an unspecified date, with a third of the moiety which the arrangement of 1602 had left on his hands.[155] Marston’s earliest contributions were probably The Malcontent (1604) and The Dutch Courtesan (1605). From the induction to the Malcontent we learn that it was appropriated by the King’s men, in return for the performance by the boys of a play on Jeronimo, perhaps the extant I Jeronimo, in which the King’s claimed rights. Marston’s satirical temper did not, however, prove altogether an asset to the company; and I fear that the deference of its directors to literary suggestions was not compatible with that practical political sense, which as a rule enabled the professional players to escape conflicts with authority. The history of the next few years is one of a series of indiscretions, which render it rather surprising that the company should throughout have succeeded in maintaining its vitality, even with the help of constant reconstructions of management and changes of name. The first trouble, the nature of which is unknown, appears to have been caused by Marston’s Dutch Courtesan. Then came, ironically enough, the Philotas of the company’s official censor, Samuel Daniel. Then, in 1605, the serious affair of Eastward Ho! for which Marston appears to have been mainly responsible, although he saved himself by flight, whereas his fellow authors, Jonson and Chapman, found themselves in prison and in imminent danger of losing their ears.[156] I do not think that the scandal arose on the performance of the play, but on its publication in the late autumn.[157] The company did not appear at Court during the winter of 1605–6, but the ingenious Kirkham seems to have succeeded in transferring one of its new plays, Marston’s Fawn, and possibly also Bussy D’Ambois, to Paul’s, and appeared triumphantly before the Treasurer of the Chamber’s paymaster the following spring as ‘one of the Masters of the Children of Pawles’. Meanwhile the Blackfriars company went on acting, but it is to be inferred from the title-pages of its next group of plays, Marston’s Sophonisba (1606), Sharpham’s The Fleir (1607), and Day’s Isle of Gulls (1606), that its misdemeanour had cost it the direct patronage of the Queen, and that it was now only entitled to call itself, not Children of the Queen’s Revels, but Children of the Revels.[158] Possibly the change of name also indicates that thereafter, not Daniel, but the Master of the Revels, acted as its censor. Anne herself, by the way, must have felt the snub, for it was probably at the Blackfriars that, if the French ambassador may be trusted, she had attended representations ‘to enjoy the laugh against her husband’.[159] The alias, whatever it connoted, proved but an ephemeral one. By February 1606 one of the plays just named, the Isle of Gulls, had given a new offence. Some of those responsible for it were thrown into Bridewell, and a fresh reconstruction became imperative.[160] It was probably at this date that one Robert Keysar, a London goldsmith, came into the business. Kirkham, like Evans before him, discreetly retired from active management, and the Children, with Keysar as ‘interest with them’, became ‘Masters themselves’, taking the risks and paying the syndicate for the use of the hall.[161] Kirkham claims that under this arrangement the moiety of profits in which he had rights amounted to £150 a year, as against £100 a year previously earned.[162] Shortly afterwards the dissociation of the Chapel from the Blackfriars was completed by a new commission issued to Giles on 7 November 1606, to which was added the following clause:

It is presumably to this pronouncement that Flecknoe refers in 1664, when he speaks of the Chapel theatre being converted to the use of the Children of the Revels, on account of the growing precision of the people and the growing licentiousness of plays.[164] It is, however, curious to observe that the abandoned titles of the company tended to linger on in actual use. Evans in 1612 speaks of the syndicate as ‘the coparteners sharers, and Masters of the Queenes Maiesties Children of the Revells (for so yt was often called)’ in 1608;[165] while the name Children of the Chapel is used in the Stationers’ Register entry of Your Five Gallants in 1608, at Maidstone in 1610, and even in such official documents as the Revels Accounts for 1604–5 and the Chamber Accounts for 1612–13.

Under Keysar the name was Children of the Blackfriars. For a couple of years the company succeeded in keeping clear of further disaster. But on 29 March 1608 the French ambassador, M. de la Boderie, reported that all the London theatres had been closed, and were now threatened by the King with a permanent inhibition on account of two plays which had given the greatest offence.[166] Against one of these, which dealt with the domestic affairs of the French king, he had himself lodged a protest, and his description leaves no doubt that this was one of the parts of Chapman’s Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron, which was published, without the offending scene, later in the year, as ‘acted at the Black-Friars’. The other play was a personal attack upon James himself. ‘Un jour ou deux devant’, says La Boderie, ‘ilz avoient dépêché leur Roi, sa mine d’Escosse, et tous ses favorits d’une estrange sorte; car aprés luy avoir fait dépiter le ciel sur le vol d’un oyseau, et faict battre un gentilhomme pour avoir rompu ses chiens, ils le dépeignoient ivre pour le moins une fois le jour.’ This piece is not extant, but I have recently come across another allusion to it in a letter of 11 March 1608 to Lord Salisbury from Sir Thomas Lake, a clerk of the signet in attendance upon the King at Thetford.[167]

Sir Thomas Lake appears to have been under the impression that two companies were concerned, and that the ‘matters of France’ were not played by the Children of Blackfriars. If so, we must suppose that Byron was originally produced elsewhere, perhaps by the King’s Revels, and transferred to the Blackfriars after ‘reformation’ by the Council. M. de la Boderie, however, writes as if the same company were responsible for both plays, and perhaps it is on the whole more probable that Sir Thomas Lake misunderstood the situation. I feel very little doubt that the maker of the play on the mines was once more Marston, who was certainly summoned before the Privy Council and committed to Newgate, on some offence not specified in the extant record, on 8 June 1608.[168] And this was probably the end of his stormy connexion with the stage. He disappeared from the Blackfriars and from literary life, leaving The Insatiate Countess unfinished, and selling the share in the syndicate which he had acquired from Evans about 1603 to Robert Keysar for £100. Before making his purchase, Keysar, who tells us that he put a value of £600 on the whole of the enterprise, got an assurance, as he thought, from the King’s men that they would not come to any arrangement with Henry Evans which would prejudice his interests.[169] This the King’s men afterwards denied, and as a matter of fact the negotiations, tentatively opened as far back as 1603, between Evans and Burbadge for a surrender of the lease were now coming to a head, and its actual surrender took place about August 1608.[170] On the ninth of that month Burbadge executed fresh leases of the theatre to a new syndicate representing the King’s men.[171] The circumstances leading up to Evans’s part in this transaction became subsequently the subject of hostile criticism by Kirkham, who asserted that the lease, which Alexander Hawkins held in trust, had been stolen from his custody by Mrs. Evans, and that the surrender was effected with the fraudulent intention of excluding Kirkham from the profits to which he was entitled under the settlement of 1602.[172] According to Evans, however, Kirkham was at least implicitly a consenting party, for it was he who, after the King’s inhibition had brought the profits to an end, grew weary of the undertaking and initiated measures for winding it up. On or about 26 July 1608 he had had the ‘apparells, properties and goods’ of the syndicate appraised and an equitable division made. When some of the boys were committed to prison he had ‘said he would deale no more with yt, “for”, quoth he, “yt is a base thing”, or vsed wordes to such, or very like effect’. And he had ‘delivered up their commission, which he had vnder the greate seale aucthorising them to plaie, and discharged divers of the partners and poetts’. In view of this, Evans claimed that he was fully justified in coming to terms with Burbadge.[173]

After all, the King’s anger proved only a flash in the pan. Perhaps the company travelled during the summer of 1608, if they, and not the King’s Revels, were ‘the Children of the Revells’ rewarded at Leicester on 21 August.[174] But by the following Christmas they were in London, and with Keysar as their payee gave three plays at Court, where they had not put in an appearance since 1604–5. Two of these were on 1 and 4 January 1609. As they still bore the name of Children of Blackfriars, they had presumably remained on sufferance in their old theatre, which the King’s men may not have been in a hurry to occupy during a plague-stricken period.[175] But when a new season opened in the autumn of 1609, new quarters became necessary. These they found at Whitefriars, which had been vacated by the failure of the short-lived King’s Revels company, and it was as the Children of Whitefriars that Keysar brought them to Court for no less than five plays during the winter of 1609–10. He had now enlisted a partner in Philip Rosseter, one of the lutenists of the royal household, who carried out a scheme, with the co-operation of the King’s men, for buying off with a ‘dead rent’ the possible competition of the Paul’s boys, who had closed their doors about 1606, but might at any moment open them again.[176] More than this, through the influence of Sir Thomas Monson, Rosseter was successful in obtaining a new patent, dated on 4 January 1610, by which the Children once more became entitled to call themselves Children of the Queen’s Revels.[177] It ran as follows:

Of the new syndicate Browne and Jones were old professional actors who had belonged to the Admiral’s men a quarter of a century before, and had since been prominent, Browne in particular, as organizers of English companies for travel in Germany. Daborne was or became a playwright. Of Tarbock I know nothing; he may have been a nominee of Keysar, whose own name, perhaps for reasons of diplomacy, does not appear in the patent. He may, of course, have retired, but a lawsuit which he brought in 1610 suggests that his connexion with the company was not altogether broken. The Whitefriars had not the tradition of the Blackfriars, and Keysar was aggrieved at the surrender of the Blackfriars lease by Evans over his head. On 8 February 1610 he laid a bill in the Court of Requests against the housekeepers of the King’s men, claiming a share in their profits since the date of surrender, which he estimated at £1,500, on the strength of the one-sixth interest in the lease assigned by Evans to Marston and by Marston to him.[178] He asserted that he had kept boys two years in the hope of playing ‘vpon the ceasing of the generall sicknes’, and had spent £500 on that and on making provision in the house, and had now, at a loss of £1,000, had to disperse ‘a companye of the moste exparte and skilful actors within the realme of England to the number of eighteane or twentye persons all or moste of them trayned vp in that service, in the raigne of the late Queene Elizabeth for ten yeares togeather and afterwardes preferred into her Maiesties service to be the Chilldren of her Revells’.[179] Burbadge and his fellows denied that they had made £1,500, or that they had attempted to defraud Keysar either about the surrender of the lease or, as he also alleged, the ‘dead rent’ to Paul’s, and they pointed out that his losses were really due to the plague. He could recover his share of the theatrical stock from Evans. Evans had had no legal right to assign his interest under the lease. As only the pleadings in the case and not the depositions or the order of the court are extant, we do not know what Evans, who was to be a witness, had to say.[180] The fact that one of the new Blackfriars leases of 1608 was to a Thomas Evans leaves the transaction between Henry Evans and Burbadge not altogether free from a suspicion of bad faith. Kirkham also found that he had been either hasty or outwitted in 1608, and as the deaths of Rastall and Kendall in that year had left him the sole claimant to any interest under the arrangement of 1602, he had recourse to litigation. In the course of 1611 and 1612 he brought a ‘multiplicitie of suites’ against Evans and Hawkins, and was finally non-suited in the King’s Bench.[181] Then, in May 1612, Evans in his turn brought a Chancery action against Kirkham, in the hope of getting his bond of 1602 cancelled, and thus securing himself against any further persecution for petty breaches of the articles of agreement. The result of this is unknown, but in the course of it many of the incidents of 1600–8 were brought into question, and Kirkham claimed that not merely had Evans shut him out in 1604 from certain rooms in the Blackfriars which he was entitled to use, but that by the surrender of the lease in 1608 he had lost profits which he estimated at £60 a year.[182] Finally in July 1612 Kirkham brought a Chancery action against Evans, Burbadge, and John Heminges, and also against the widow of Alexander Hawkins and Edward Painton, to whom she was now married, for reinstatement in his moiety of the lease. In this suit much of the same ground was again traversed, but the Court refused to grant him any relief.

It is not altogether easy to disentangle the plays produced at the Blackfriars under Keysar from those produced immediately afterwards at the Whitefriars. The only title-page which definitely names the Children of the Blackfriars is that of Jonson’s The Case is Altered (1609). But Chapman’s Byron (1608) and May Day (1611) and Middleton’s Your Five Gallants (n.d.?1608) also claim to have been acted at the Blackfriars. The Q₁ of Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (1608) assigns it to Paul’s; the Q₂ both to Paul’s and Blackfriars, with an indication of a Court performance on New Year’s Day, which can only be that of 1 January 1609. This play, therefore, must have been taken over from Paul’s, when that house closed in 1606 or 1607. As Middleton is not generally found writing for Blackfriars, Your Five Gallants may have been acquired in the same way. It is also extremely likely that Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois passed from Paul’s to Blackfriars on its way to the King’s men. No name of company or theatre is attached to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613) or to The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1609). But the K. B. P. was published with an epistle to Keysar as its preserver and can be securely dated in 1607–8; it refers to the house in which it was played as having been open for seven years, which just fits the Blackfriars. The Faithful Shepherdess is of 1608–9 and a boys’ play; the commendatory verses by Field, Jonson, and Chapman justify an attribution to the company with which they had to do. Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears (1612) had been staged both at Blackfriars and at Whitefriars before publication, and was probably therefore produced shortly before the company moved house. The greatest difficulty is Jonson’s Epicoene (S. R. 20 September 1610). No edition is known to be extant earlier than the Folio of 1616, in which Jonson ascribed the production to ‘1609’ and to the Children of the Revels. According to the system of dating ordinarily adopted by Jonson in this Folio, ‘1609’ should mean 1609 and not 1609–10. Yet the Children were not entitled to call themselves ‘of the Revels’ during 1609. Either Jonson’s chronology or his memory of the shifting nomenclature of the company has slipped. The actor-list of Epicoene names ‘Nat. Field, Gil. Carie, Hug. Attawel, Ioh. Smith, Will. Barksted, Will. Pen, Ric. Allin, Ioh. Blaney’. Amongst these Field is the sole direct connecting link with the Chapel actor-lists of 1600 and 1601. Keysar’s pleading shows us that from 1600 to 1610 the company had maintained a substantial identity throughout all its phases, as successively Children of the Chapel, Children of the Queen’s Revels, Children of the Blackfriars, Children of the Whitefriars; but part of his grievance is its dispersal, and possibly the continuity with the second Children of the Revels may not have been quite so marked. ‘In processe of time’, say the Burbadges in the Blackfriars Sharers Papers of 1635, ‘the boyes growing up to bee men, which were Underwood, Field, Ostler, and were taken to strengthen the King’s service’.[183] This, which is written in relation to the acquisition of the Blackfriars, is doubtless accurate as regards Ostler and Underwood, and their transfer may reasonably be placed in the winter of 1609–10. But it was not until some years later that Field joined the King’s men.

The career of the second Queen’s Revels, but for the temporary suppression of Epicoene owing to a misconstruction placed on it by Arabella Stuart, was comparatively uneventful. They are recorded at Maidstone as the Children of the Chapel about March 1610. They made no appearance at Court during the following winter, and were again travelling in the following autumn, when they came to Norwich under the leadership of one Ralph Reeve, who showed the patent of 4 January 1610, and at first claimed to be Rosseter, but afterwards admitted that he was not. As he could show no letters of deputation, he was not allowed to play, although he received a reward on the following day, which was recorded, not quite correctly, as paid to ‘the master of the children of the King’s Revells’. By 29 August Barksted and Carey had left the company to join the newly formed Lady Elizabeth’s men. We may therefore place at some time before this date Barksted’s completion of Marston’s Insatiate Countess, which was published in 1613 as ‘acted at Whitefriars’. The entry in the Stationer’s Register of Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock (1612) on 23 November 1611 shows that he also had begun to experiment in authorship. As this had been acted at Court, as well as by the Queen’s Revels at Whitefriars, it probably dates back to the winter of 1609–10. The company returned to court on 5 January 1612 with Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge, and the Clerk of the Revels entered them as the Children of Whitefriars.[184] The travels of 1612 were under the leadership of Nicholas Long, and on 20 May another contretemps occurred at Norwich. The instrument of deputation was forthcoming on this occasion, but the mayor chose to interpret the patent as giving authority only to teach and instruct children, and not to perform with them; and so once again ‘the Master of the Kings Revells’ got his reward of 20s., but was not allowed to play. Between Michaelmas and Christmas ‘the queens maiesties revellers’ were at Bristol, and at some time during 1612–13 ‘two of the company of the childeren of Revells’ received a reward at Coventry. Conceivably the provincial company of Reeve and Long was a distinct organization from that in London. Rosseter was payee for four performances at Court during the winter of 1612–13. On the first occasion, in the course of November, the play was Beaumont and Fletcher’s Coxcomb; on 1 January and again on 9 January it was Cupid’s Revenge; and on 27 February it was The Widow’s Tears. In one version of the Chamber Accounts the company appears this year as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, but in another under the obsolete designation of Children of the Chapel. In addition to the plays already named, Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy had been on the Whitefriars stage before it was published in 1613; and it is conceivable that Chapman’s Chabot and Beaumont and Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas and The Nightwalker may be Queen’s Revels plays of 1610–13. They may also, indeed, be Lady Elizabeth’s plays of 1613–16, but during this period the Lady Elizabeth and the Queen’s Revels appear to have been practically amalgamated, under an arrangement made between Henslowe and Rosseter in March 1613 and then modified, first in 1614, and again on the addition of Prince Charles’s men to the ‘combine’ in 1615. Yet in some way the Children of the Revels maintained a separate individuality, at least in theory, during these years, as may be seen from the patent of 3 June 1615, which licensed Rosseter and Reeve, together with Robert Jones and Philip Kingman, to build a new Blackfriars theatre in the house known as Porter’s Hall.[185] The main purpose of this undertaking was expressed to be the provision of a new house for the Children of the Queen’s Revels instead of the Whitefriars, where Rosseter’s lease was now expired, although it was also contemplated that use might be made of it by the Prince’s and the Lady Elizabeth’s players. Porter’s Hall only stood for a short time before civic hostility procured its demolition, and the single play, which we can be fairly confident that the Children of the Revels gave in it, is Beaumont and Fletcher’s Scornful Lady. This presumably fell after the amalgamation under Henslowe broke up about the time of his death early in 1616. Field appears to have joined the King’s men about 1615. The Queen’s Revels dropped out of London theatrical life. Their provincial travels under Nicholas Long had apparently terminated in 1612, as in 1614 he is found using the patent of the Lady Elizabeth’s men (q. v.) in the provinces. But some members of the company seem to have gone travelling during the period of troubled relations with Henslowe, and are traceable at Coventry on 7 October 1615, and at Nottingham in February 1616 and again later in 1616–17. On 31 October 1617 a new Queen’s Revel’s company was formed by Rosseter, in association with Nicholas Long, Robert Lee of the Queen’s men, and William Perry of the King’s Revels.[186]

iii. THE CHILDREN OF WINDSOR

The Chapel Royal at Windsor was served by an ecclesiastical college, which had been in existence as far back as the reign of Henry I, and had subsequently been resettled as St. George’s Chapel in connexion with the establishment of the Order of the Garter by Edward III, finally incorporated under Edward IV, and exempted from dissolution at the Reformation. Edward III had provided for a warden, who afterwards came to be called dean, 12 canons, 13 priest vicars, 4 clerks, 6 boy choristers, and 26 ‘poor knights’. The boys were to be ‘endued with clear and tuneable voices’, and to succeed the clerks as their voices changed. Their number was altered from time to time; during the greater part of Elizabeth’s reign it stood at 10. Each had an annual fee of £3 6s. 8d. They were lodged within the Castle, in a chamber north of the chapel, and next to a building founded by James Denton in 1520, known as the ‘New Commons’. This is now merged in the canons’ houses, but a doorway is inscribed ‘Edes pro Sacellaenorum et Choristarum conviviis extructae A. D. 1519’. There were also an epistoler and a gospeller.[187] The music was ‘useyd after ye order and maner of ye quenes chappell’.[188] One of the clerks, whose position corresponded to that of the Gentlemen of the household Chapel Royal, was appointed by the Chapter of the College to act as Organist and Master of the Children. The College was privileged, like the Chapel Royal itself, to recruit its choir by impressment. A commission for this purpose, issued on 8 March 1560, merely repeats the terms of one granted by Mary, which itself had confirmed earlier grants by Henry VIII and Edward VI.[189]

The Master at Elizabeth’s accession was one Preston.[190] But he was deprived, as unwilling to accept the new ecclesiastical settlement; and the first Master under whom the choristers appear to have acted at Court was Richard Farrant. He had been a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal from about 1553, but was replaced on 24 April 1564, doubtless on his appointment as Master at Windsor.[191] On the following 30 September the Chapter assigned a chantry to the teacher of the choristers for an increase of his maintenance.[192] On 5 November 1570, Farrant was reappointed a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, but evidently did not resign his Mastership.[193] On 11 February 1567 he began a series of plays with the ‘Children of Windsor’ at Court, which was continued at Shrovetide 1568, on 22 February and 27 December 1569, at Shrovetide 1571, on 1 January 1572, when he gave Ajax and Ulysses, on 1 January 1573, on 6 January 1574, when he gave Quintus Fabius, on 6 January 1575, when he gave King Xerxes, and on 27 December 1575. With the winter of 1576–7 the entries of his name in the accounts of the Treasurer take a new form; he is no longer ‘M^r of the children of the Chappell at Wyndsore’ but ‘M^r of the children of the Chappell’. The Revels Accounts for the same season record that on 6 January 1577 Mutius Scaevola was played at Court by ‘the Children of Windsore and the Chappell’, and it is a fair inference that Farrant, in addition to exercising his own office, was now also acting as deputy to William Hunnis, the Master by patent of the Children of the Chapel Royal, and had made up a combined company from both choirs for the Christmas delectation of the Queen.[194] This interpretation of the facts was confirmed when Professor Feuillerat was able to show from the Loseley archives that in 1576 Farrant had taken a lease of rooms in the Blackfriars from Sir William More and had converted them into the first Blackfriars theatre.[195] Whether boys from Windsor continued to take a share in the performances by the Chapel during 1577–8, 1578–9, and 1579–80, for all of which Farrant was payee, we do not know; there is no further mention of them as actors in the Court accounts, although they accompanied the singing men from Windsor to Reading during the progress of 1576.[196] Farrant died on 30 November 1580, leaving a widow Anne, who in 1582 obtained the reversion of a small lease from the Crown, and was involved in controversies with Sir William More over the Blackfriars tenement at least up to 1587.[197] He had acquired some reputation as a musician, and amongst his surviving compositions are a few which may have been intended for use in plays.[198] Farrant was succeeded at Windsor by Nathaniel Giles, but only after an interval of either five or fifteen years. Ashmole reports Giles’s monument as crediting him with forty-nine years’ service as Master of St. George’s before his death in 1634.[199] There must be an inaccuracy, either here or in the date of 1 October ’37 Eliz.’ (1595) upon a copy of his indenture of appointment by the Windsor chapter, which is amongst Ashmole’s papers.[200] This recites that the chapter ‘are now destitute of an experte and cunnynge man’, and that Giles ‘is well contented to come and serve’ them. He is granted from the previous Michaelmas to the end of his life ‘the Roome and place of a Clerk within the said ffree Chappell and to be one of the Players on the Organes there, and also the office of Instructor and Master of the ten Children or Choristers of the same ffree Chappell, And the office of tutor, creansor, or governor of the same tenn Children or Coristers’. He is to have an annuity of £81 6s. 8d. and ‘tholde comons howse’, wherein John Mundie lately dwelt, which he is to hold on the same terms as ‘one Richarde ffarrante enjoyed the same’ at a rent of £1 6s. 8d. His fee is to be ‘over and besides all such giftes, rewardes or benevolences as from time to time during the naturall lief of him the said Nathanaell Gyles shall be given bestowed or ymployed to or upon the Choristers for singinge of Balattes, playes or for the like respects whatsoever’. He is to maintain the children and to supply vacancies, ‘her Maiesties comission for the taking of Children which her highnes hath alredie graunted to the said Dean and Canons being allowed vnto him the said Nathanaell Gyles for that purpose’. Evidently the door was left open for a resumption of theatrical activities, such as was afterwards brought about at the London Chapel Royal during the Mastership of Giles there; but there is no proof that such a resumption ever took place at Windsor. It is perhaps a fanciful conjecture that the boys may have helped with The Merry Wives of Windsor about 1600.[201]

iv. CHILDREN OF THE KING’S REVELS

Masters:—Martin Slater and others.