England was facing a revolt in the American colonies, and Horace Walpole feared the worst. To Sir Horace Mann on 27 May 1776 he wrote: ‘Oh madness! To have squandered away such an empire! Now we tremble at France, which America enabled us to resist.’ The following 11 June in Philadelphia Thomas Jefferson and four others were elected to frame a Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile, George III, who had already shown signs of madness, was becoming a hands-on ruler and interfering with the running of England more than some of his government leaders liked. Captain Cook was on his ill-fated third Pacific voyage, Beaumarchais was working on The Marriage of Figaro, and the steam engine had just been perfected by James Watt. Goethe’s Weimar years were beginning and Mozart’s youthful works were being composed; Goya was finding himself as a painter while the portraitist Reynolds was completing his career. Voltaire had recently retired, Eli Whitney’s life was just beginning, Byron, Shelley and Keats were not yet born. Gibbons’s first volume of his examination of imperialism, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, had just appeared; Adam Smith pleaded for a free economy in The Wealth of Nations; Tom Paine’s Common Sense argued passionately for American liberty. The year 1776 was one of crises, doldrums, successes, failures, endings, beginnings; it was the best and the worst of years: one like no others, one like all the rest. The world, as always, was on the brink.

A stranger visiting London in June 1776, however, might have thought that the most serious threat to the even tenor of English ways was not some national or international confrontation, but rather the retirement of the century’s greatest theatre personality. On the evening of the 10th at Drury Lane Theatre the actor-manager David Garrick played Don Felix in The Wonder; or, A Woman Keeps a Secret, a popular comedy by Susanna Centlivre.