1 As quoted in Gibson, Elizabeth, The Royal Academy of Music 1719–1728: The Institution and Its Directors (New York: Garland, 1989), 311Google Scholar.

2 As there is not complete agreement in the literature about the word ‘Director’, it is useful to quote from the original charter. The Royal Academy of Music was established as a joint-stock company with fifty-eight original subscribers (stockholders) listed and more invited. ‘And further for the due and orderly Regulating and Government of the said Corporation . . . there shall be a Governour a Deputy Governour and Fifteen Directors at the least but the same not to Exceed the Number of Twenty . . . And that the Lord Chamberlain of our houshold for the time being shall be always Governor [sic] of the said Corporation’. The directors were chosen by vote of all members (subscribers) who owned ‘Two hundred pounds or more Share or Interest in the Capital Stock of the said Corporation’. See Milhous, Judith and Hume, Robert D., ‘The Charter for the Royal Academy of Music’, Music & Letters 67/1 (1986), 50–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On the identity of the early directors of the Royal Academy of Music see Gibson, The Royal Academy, 21–25; see also her Table 1, 33–34, which provides a chronological listing of the directors. Gibson provides transcriptions of documents relating to the Royal Academy from The National Archive (formerly Public Record Office) in her Appendix A, 311–333. On the elite composition of Handel's audience see Hunter, David, ‘Patronizing Handel, Inventing Audiences: The Intersections of Class, Money, Music and History’, Early Music 28/1 (2000), 32–36 and 38–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The Percival letters exist in two great ranges in the British Library: Add. MSS 47025–47033 (1697–1736), mostly personal correspondence; and Add. MSS 46964–47000 (1699–1748), estate correspondence, but with most volumes including a ‘conclusion’ with personal information. Unlike the Percival diaries, these have not been published: Diary of Viscount Percival, ed. Richard Arthur Roberts, Historical Manuscripts Commission 63, three volumes (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1920–1923). In this essay I use the spelling of ‘Percival’ consistently employed by John Percival, 1st Earl of Egmont. The spelling ‘Perceval’ is a later preference.

5 BL Add. MS 46,971, p. 241 [f. iir].

6 I first presented the discovery of Percival's statement and the evidence of his taking the oaths in a paper given to the American Handel Society in 2012. Subsequently, I provided this detailed information to Burrows, Donald so that it could be included in George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents, volume 1: 1609–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 467Google Scholar (although it is incorrectly labelled there as from ‘Lord Percival's Diary’), and I included it in my book George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends (New York: Norton, 2014), 72. In this essay I expand on the original discovery by providing historical background on taking the oaths, and on the surviving evidence more generally of all the early directors of the Royal Academy taking the oaths for the purpose of becoming a director.

7 Friends of Devon Archives: Oath Rolls Project: Introduction, [1] (<www.foda.org.uk/oaths/intro/introduction2.htm> (21 April 2015)).

8 This and all subsequent statutes discussed in this essay can be found in The Statutes at Large, from the Twelfth Year of Queen Anne, to the Fifth Year of King George I, ed. Danby Pickering (Cambridge: Joseph Bentham), volume 13 (1764) and volume 15 (1765).

9 Page numbers refer to The Statutes at Large, volume 13.

10 The Statutes at Large, volume 15, 100.

11 The Statutes at Large, volume 15, 121.

12 Each shelf mark at TNA represents numerous rolls, often of widely differing dates and not separately classified. All of the directors whom I have found in the oath rolls preserved from the Petty Bag Office appear within the set of rolls in TNA C 214/15. Confusion can result from the entries for fathers of later directors of the opera. For example, the ‘Rutland’ who signs the oaths at this time must be the father of the later director; John Manners, 3rd Duke of Rutland, only succeeded to that title in 1721. G. Byng is the father of later director Pattee Byng, 2nd Viscount Torrington (see Figure 1).

13 de Beer, G. R., Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum (London: Oxford University Press, 1953)Google Scholar, Appendix I: ‘Dates in the Life of Sir Hans Sloane’, 155–156. For more recent research on Sloane see Walker, Alison, MacGregor, Arthur and Hunter, Michael, eds, From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collection (London: The British Library, 2012)Google Scholar, which, however, offers no further insight into the reason for Sloane's repeated oaths in terms either of appointments or of travel.

14 The bibliography on European companies trading to the east is vast; the following publications are good places to begin. On the English East India Company see Chaudhuri, K. N., The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660–1760 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sutherland, Lucy S., The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962)Google Scholar; and Farrington, Anthony, Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600–1834 (London: British Library, 2002)Google Scholar. On the Ostend East India Company see Hertz, Gerald B., ‘England and the Ostend Company’, English Historical Review 22/86 (1907), 255–279CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Monod, Paul, ‘Dangerous Merchandise: Smuggling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in Southeast England, 1690–1760’, Journal of British Studies 30/2 (1991), 150–182CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussions of the impact of eastern trade on Handel's operas see Harris, Ellen T., ‘With Eyes on the East and Ears in the West: Handel's Orientalist Operas’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36/3 (2006), 419–443CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hawks, Katie, ‘Looking for Richard: Why Handel Wrote Riccardo primo’, Handel Institute Newsletter 23/1 (2012), 5–7Google Scholar.

15 For example, Thomas, Earl of Ailesbury, confided in his memoirs that after the revolution of 1688 he took the oaths to William and Mary in order better to serve James II (Memoirs of Thomas, earl of Ailesbury written by himself, ed. W. E. Buckley (Westminster [London]: Nichols and sons, 1890), volume 2, 229–230, 232–233, as cited in Cruickshanks, Eveline and Erskine-Hill, Howard, The Atterbury Plot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 5 and 264)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Cruickshanks, Eveline, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the ’45 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), ixGoogle Scholar: ‘anonymous poem in the manuscripts of the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton’. I am grateful to Jane Clark for the reference to this poem. See also Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot, 4–6; on Burlington and the Atterbury Plot, 108.

17 See Edward Vallance, ‘The 1723 Oath Rolls in England: An Electronic Finding List’, <www.historyworkingpapers.org/?page_id=373> (21 July 2014), a listing by county of all surviving returns of the 1723 oaths following the enactment of I Geo. 9 [1723] c. 4, requiring all persons over the age of eighteen to take the oaths or, failing that, to register their names and real estates in court (and face fines or forfeitures). See also Dibbs, Sylvia J., ‘The Loyalty Oaths Rolls of 1723: An Early Census’, Genealogists’ Magazine: Journal of the Society of Geneaologists 31/6 (June 2014), 225–229Google Scholar, which cites Vallance's finding aid.

18 I am grateful to Ruth Smith for this observation.

19 Loftis, John, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 5Google Scholar.

20 Hume, Robert, ‘The Politics of Opera in Late Seventeenth-Century London’, Cambridge Opera Journal 10/1 (1998), 42–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Bowersock, G. W., Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 12–13Google Scholar. See also Ellen T. Harris, ‘Interrogating the Dead: An Ethnography of Handel's London’, a paper presented at ‘Out of Bounds: Ethnography, Music, History’, a conference in honour of Kay Kaufman Shelemay at Harvard University (October 2014); the paper will be published in the proceedings of the conference.

22 I have previously written about the political resonance of this opera in George Frideric Handel: A Life with Friends, 69–72.

23 The letter from Dr William Stratford to Edward Harley, both of whom had Jacobite leanings, is printed in MSS of the Duke of Portland VII, ‘Harley MSS V, 1701–29’, Historical Manuscripts Commission 29 (London: Mackie, 1901), 311, and in Gibson, The Royal Academy, 155–156.

24 Archives étrangères, Correspondance Politique, Angleterre 340, fols 70–73, as cited in Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill, The Atterbury Plot, 85.

25 McGeary, Thomas, The Politics of Opera in Handel's Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 McGeary, Politics of Opera, 84. McGeary doubts that any anti-Hanoverian interpretation can be correct (23): ‘when the generic expectation leads to interpretations that are subversive or critical of the Hanoverians, the method must be suspected of being flawed and unhistorical’.

27 The full text of the treatise is given in Cruickshanks and Erskine-Hill, Atterbury Plot, Appendix A, 244–245.