Of all the ways in which the profits of slavery could be spent in London, a season subscription to a whole box or seats therein for the opera at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, must seem the most incongruous and indulgent.Footnote ¹ What other art form was as removed from the lived experience of planters, merchants and colonial administrators and those they held in subjection, who dealt with the exigencies of slavery’s goods – sugar, rum, cotton, rice, coffee, ivory – and slavery’s consequences such as sickness, rebellion, destruction and death?Footnote ² The British trade in the enslaved across the Atlantic from 1551 to 1825 removed from Africa over 3.26 million persons, at least 526,000 of whom died en route to the Americas and the Caribbean.Footnote ³ The trade was at its height in the eighteenth century, when 78% of those so far enumerated were embarked. Between the years 1782 and 1808 the subscribing opera audience comprised a portion of the richest and most powerful persons in the land, with at least five royal princes, several prime ministers, cabinet members, parliamentarians (both noble and common), the nobility and gentry, a few military officers, government office holders, some bankers and merchants, lawyers, and courtesans, along with their spouses, partners, older children, relatives and friends.Footnote ⁴ Just what proportion of this audience was supported wholly or in part by slavery’s profits is revealed in what follows. The consequence is that the opera singers, composers, instrumentalists, scenery artists, ballet dancers, costume designers and makers, et alii, whether imported or domestic, and the productions they mounted, benefitted directly from the profits of the slave economy.Footnote ⁵ In this article I offer a first look at the individuals who chose to subscribe for box seats and were able to do so in whole or part because their income (or loans) derived from:

1. (1) profits made from plantations on the Caribbean islands,

2. (2) trading in (or mortgaging) goods or property produced by or employing the labour of the enslaved that was located in the Caribbean or shipped to Britain, other British territories such as Canada and Ireland, or the United States (e.g. London’s sugar merchants),

3. (3) financing or insuring plantations, slave voyages, or the shipping of slave-produced commodities,

4. (4) salaries or fees paid to administrators of colonies in the Caribbean or of the armed forces,

5. (5) dowry payments upon marriage when those had their origin in slave-economy activity,

6. (6) inherited wealth based on proprietorship of a North American colony that utilised the enslaved (e.g. Henry Harford of Maryland).

For most opera seasons during the period 1782–1808, a volume was issued annually listing the box and seat holders.Footnote ⁶ The information was also published in the form of fans, which could be purchased at shops in Pall Mall adjacent to the theatre and elsewhere, which allowed attendees to more discreetly identify who was present (Figures 1–3). Both the printed volumes and the fans are now quite rare. Only single copies of the books are known for 1798 and 1802 (1805 has the most survivors, eight), while no fans exist for 1794, 1795, 1801, 1805 and 1807, and only single ones for most other years.Footnote ⁷

Figure 1.

First ‘official’ fan, obverse. Plan of the boxes in the King’s Theatre for the years 1787 & 1788 (H. Laurence); paper, uncoloured, bone sticks, double-sided. Worshipful Company of Fan Makers, London: AR 247. Photography by D. Court; image courtesy the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers, London.

Figure 2.

First ‘official’ fan, reverse. Subscribers to the boxes in the King’s Theatre for the years 1787 & 1788 (H. Laurence); paper, uncoloured, bone sticks, double-sided. Worshipful Company of Fan Makers, London: AR 247. Photography by D. Court; image courtesy the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers, London

Figure 3.

First ‘unofficial’ fan. King’s Theatre for 1788 [no imprint]; paper, coloured, gold leaf, wooden sticks, ivory guard sticks, single-sided. Fan Museum, Greenwich: HA 1791. Photography by and image courtesy of the Fan Museum, Greenwich.

The study of European music is perhaps the last area of cultural achievement to face up to the fact that its practitioners in earlier days and the works they created for and with audiences benefitted in part from audience patronage by those who profited from the wide span of the slave economy.Footnote ⁸ Given the vast literature on slavery, its economic, ecological, psychological, technological, social, cultural, religious and eventually musical effects, this is more than an omission; it is a dereliction of duty.Footnote ⁹ As I have written elsewhere, it is not enough to say that eighteenth-century musicians or audiences were ignorant of either the issue of slavery tout court or of the horrors of the slave trade and working conditions in particular, because writing and talk about them were available in the form of pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, and sermons, in homes, coffee houses and the streets, along with numerous rebuttals.Footnote ¹⁰ Music-loving families such as the Sharps actively worked to alleviate the plight of individual Blacks brought to their door as well as campaigned for the abolition of the trade.Footnote ¹¹ That the music historians of the day, pioneers such as John Hawkins and Charles Burney, failed to acknowledge slavery’s profits in making what was heard and taught possible, is to be expected.Footnote ¹²

The hugely discrepant valuations of the alterities of opera and racial slavery – differing additionally between the period under consideration and our own – would seem to preclude their being addressed in the same article.Footnote ¹³ One has been lauded as the ne plus ultra of human artistic expression (at least in the Western world). The other, both literally and figuratively, has been embraced as an essential economic driver, as morally, spiritually and legally sanctioned by the finest philosophical, religious and legal minds of the time. It has also been decried and rejected not only by the enslaved themselves – through suicide, rebellion, flight, sabotage and cultural separation – but also from the beginning of the eighteenth century, by a growing number of people in Britain and in its colonies in North America and the Caribbean (only thirteen of which formed the United States), as well as in other slave-trading nations.Footnote ¹⁴ The development of racially based slavery designed to benefit the owners of conquered or stolen lands was a story long omitted from British history.Footnote ¹⁵ Even today, after so much scholarship and teaching, Britain’s slave history remains contested.

What follows is a prosopographical study focused on rich white people. Nonetheless, I am actively conscious of the enslavement of the millions of men, women and children brought from Africa or born in captivity, and the Native Americans sold into bondage, who worked in brutal conditions in the Caribbean and North American colonies, and who died before their time far from family and home.Footnote ¹⁶ The immiseration of the enslaved cannot be equated to, let alone balanced (in some alchemical measuring device) by, the performance of an opera by Handel (Giulio Cesare, 1787), or more contemporary offerings by Cherubini, Paisiello or Cimarosa on the London stage.Footnote ¹⁷ Dismissal of the music of the African diaspora (and, we can add, of Native Americans) as primitive by writers such as Edward Long (1734–1813), whose son Robert, nephew George Ellis, and cousins had opera subscriptions, only adds to the necessity of the task.Footnote ¹⁸

Reparative history includes the elucidation of colonialism and its effects on the subjugated both then and continuing to the present, as well as assessment of the attitudes and imaginations of the perpetrators of racism, the pervasive white privilege that enabled exploitation and violence. Disavowal – of interest, of pertinence to today, of relevance to historical enquiry, in short, affective numbness – may be a rhetorical strategy adopted by defensive historians, but it cannot eliminate the material traces, the facts, offered in what follows. As Catherine Hall has so clearly articulated, it is we, the ‘beneficiaries of the gross inequalities associated with slavery and colonialism’, who ‘need to develop a different understanding […] of Britain’s involvement in the slavery business’.Footnote ¹⁹ In the present context, the profits of racial ideology and practice, manifest as racial capitalism, enabled some persons to regularly attend the socially elite Italian opera at the King’s Theatre at which newly composed works (and revivals) were performed by the most talented musicians of the day. This study works in tandem with the ongoing, collective effort to understand how and when African music traversed the Atlantic, was modified in a new environment, and emerged as such a powerful force in the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁰ It is offered in the spirit of reparation. Some conclusions must be interim rather than final, but I encourage others to pick up where I leave off.

* * *

The strengths and weaknesses of the various forces in Britain for and against abolition of the trade (and again in the push for emancipation in the period 1823–33) have been argued over by historians seeking to determine importance and value.Footnote ²¹ The merits of the abolitionists’ cause – religious or moral objection, fellow-feeling for oppressed humans, the awakening of conscience, political mobilisation, declining economic importance of colonial plantations, the lack of immediate economic interest to the majority of the population – as well as the counter-arguments of those in favour of retention have been ranked. No historian would list attending the opera as a contributory factor, and yet numerous participants in the slave economy and in the political decision-making body ultimately responsible for whether slave trading or slave holding by the British were to be allowed to continue, spent two evenings a week for six or seven months if they went consistently, in a theatre about 1,100 yards (1 kilometre) as the crow flies from the building in which they deliberated such contentious matters.Footnote ²² The King’s Theatre, Haymarket had been built by Sir John Vanbrugh and several Whig grandees during the first decade of the eighteenth century specifically for opera performances.Footnote ²³ Located on the corner of the Haymarket and Pall Mall, close to the developing residential areas of St James’s parish, Piccadilly and Mayfair, rather than in the Drury Lane and Covent Garden area to the east, the theatre enjoyed a genre monopoly thanks to the power of the Lord Chamberlain.Footnote ²⁴ The Prince of Wales, the Duke of Bedford and the Marquis of Salisbury held what amounted to veto power over decisions made by the nominal managers.Footnote ²⁵ Their treaty in October 1791 included a clause enabling the Duke and Marquis to select boxes at the King’s Theatre for their friends who had been subscribers at the Pantheon the previous season.

Jennifer Hall-Witt has claimed that subscription lists lack detail sufficient to identify ‘untitled subscribers’ and thus she feels unable to comment on ‘the professional occupations and family backgrounds of the middle-class couples who attended the opera’, though she concedes that ‘those whose income matched or exceeded that of the aristocracy and gentry, and who thus formed an elite of wealth’ are to be differentiated from ‘those with more moderate income’.Footnote ²⁶ Attempting to overlay class and economic vectors in a social analysis is unfruitful at best; exceptions will always emerge to ruin any hypothesis. Therefore I propose to circumvent the issue by assuming that those who subscribed to a box or a seat therein were of the elite, certainly one of wealth (the ‘overly affluent’ as some might characterise them), but also socially, comprising many persons who considered themselves as leaders.Footnote ²⁷ Neither great wealth nor high social prestige were exclusionary in any strict sense (unlike the House of Lords, for example), inasmuch as there were no formal bars to being an opera subscriber. Nor was subscribing to the opera the only means of demonstrating great wealth and high social prestige.Footnote ²⁸ But an opera box subscription was a clearly public way of doing it in the metropole (Table 1).

Table 1.

Cost of whole box or seat subscriptions for selected seasons at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, 1780s–1807

^a Prices are in guineas: 120 g. = £126, 240 g. = £252.

^b Data derived from Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, 279, with my additions in [ ].

^c Published information is often lacking for single-seat costs.

^d In terms of 2022 currency, £126 in 1783 equals £251,900 in income value (amount needed ‘today’ in order to buy that item), and £252 in 1807 equals £296,200. MeasuringWorth.com (accessed 20 February 2024). All currency equivalents in this paper derive from MeasuringWorth.com, which I prefer to other currency converters (including the rule-of-thumb multipliers devised by Robert D. Hume) due to its accuracy (specific to the historic year and the present), its flexibility (a variety of different converters, each with its own pertinence), and its widespread acceptance (having been started by economic historians).

^e The two columns under 1798–9 show the cost of a 50-night and a 60-night season.

Boxes typically had six seats (though a few had eight), and there was no discount when buying the maximum. Attending all performances meant a cost of 14s. (£867.60 in 2022 income-value money) per seat per performance in 1806–7, in a six-seater box. While it is accurate to say that the nominal cost of a box doubled from the early 1790s to 1807, most of that increase was due to inflation. The pound lost over 45% of its value during those 16 years.Footnote ²⁹ Attending the opera on a subscription basis was the most expensive form of theatrical entertainment at the time.Footnote ³⁰ All of the names (even those where there are several possibilities) can be tied to persons who were not only wealthy but also held ‘a certain stature’ in society. To show how this is possible let me explain my method.Footnote ³¹

The first list published, dated 1783, was unofficial, as is clear from the author statement, ‘By a Lady of Fashion’ rather than a named person attached to the opera company.Footnote ³² Table 2 summarises the current findings about subscribers in terms of certainty of identification and participation in the slave economy for three of the seasons. 356 persons are named in the 1783 list.Footnote ³³ Of these, forty-three persons are identified only by their surname, with no helpful appellation such as Gen. or Hon. Nonetheless, only twelve of those cannot be associated with an actual person or have several options making a single determination impossible. These dozen comprise both men and women, for although women have traditionally been harder to trace in biographical sources due to male primogeniture and other forms of neglect or disregard, males with common names such as Davies/Davis, Fawkener/Falkener, Hamilton and Palmer offer too many possibilities.Footnote ³⁴

Table 2.

Certain, uncertain and unidentified subscribers to the opera seasons at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, 1783, 1797, 1807, and their participation in the slave economy

^a Numbers in the slave economy column indicate how many persons from the column to the immediate left were profiteers from the slave economy.

^b A certain identification is made on the basis of a noble title, membership of the House of Commons, spousal or parental activity, uniqueness, profession, prominence.

^c An uncertain identification indicates that two or more probable candidates exist, usually from the same family, e.g. brothers, sisters, eponymous aunts or uncles.

^d An unidentified person is one who has a common name; a name not found in sources of the time, nor in standard reference sources; or cannot readily be distinguished among eponymous persons.

Initial identification involves checking titled individuals in the standard reference sources.Footnote ³⁵ All the men (except senior noblemen) are checked in the History of Parliament Online for possible election as members of the House of Commons.Footnote ³⁶ To assess participation in the slave economy the first stop is ‘Legacies of British Slavery’, the database that continues to be updated and expanded as it extends its archival trawl into the more distant past from its initial conception as a list of all who received compensation under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.Footnote ³⁷ While the majority of cases can be solved quickly, a residue of tough nuts remains. These require the use of a variety of specialised sources for biographical data, newspaper databases, genealogical work on particular families and places, trade and social directories of the time, and the Victoria county histories as well as earlier ones by individual historians.Footnote ³⁸ In some cases archival catalogues, such as Discovery (The National Archives of the UK), provide useful clues. Establishing accurate dates of birth, marriage and death is essential but in some cases the impediments are great (and not helped by amateur or religiously motivated genealogical research). While all sources retain the possibility of error, some are more error-prone or deliberately obfuscatory than others.Footnote ³⁹ None of the thirty-one persons whose identity is uncertain in the surname-only rump of the 1783 list can be characterised as middle-class. They all belonged to wealthy families, or, in three cases, were the courtesans/mistresses/partners of wealthy men (Mrs Armistead, Mrs Robinson and Mrs Abington).Footnote ⁴⁰ Sources of dowries can be particularly elusive, and sales of plantations are often hard to confirm.Footnote ⁴¹ I designate as profiteers only persons for whom clear evidence can be found, so the numbers are likely undercounted.

As far as the theatre’s managers are concerned, in 1783 the present managers William Taylor (?1753–1825), and an MP 1797–1802, and former Thomas Harris (d. 1820) had box seats. Another former manager, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816), the playwright and MP 1780–1812, was represented, under the name ‘Mrs Sheridan’, either by his first wife Elizabeth Linley (1754–92), or one of his sisters Ann Elizabeth (1758–1837) or Alicia (1753–1817). Taylor paid Sheridan over £12,000 (about £164.5m in 2022 pounds as a share of GDP) for his share in the theatre in 1781.Footnote ⁴² During his brief initial tenure financial losses mounted, so a group of trustees had to manage affairs until 1785. Rather surprisingly Taylor was restored in 1791, though with minimal involvement until 1793 (Sheridan was again manager 1792–3), and continued in post until 1803. After four years he replaced Francis Gould and ran things again from 1807 to 1813.Footnote ⁴³

One could conceive of the opera house and regular attendance thereat as a social club open to all who could pay, unlike the House of Commons, access to which, while it might entail considerable expenditure, was dependent upon the good will of the relatively few men in most constituencies who possessed a right to vote. Even though the opera house could seat over four times as many persons as were elected to the House of Commons, only a small minority of MPs, and a minority of Lords, attended the opera.Footnote ⁴⁴ Indeed, not all of those leaders chose to attend. For example, past, present and future prime ministers and/or their spouses in 1783 were the Duke and Duchess of Grafton, the Marquis and Lady Rockingham, the Earl of Shelburne, the Duke of Portland and William Pitt the Younger. In 1794 the Duke of Portland, William Pitt and Lady Grenville were subscribers. In 1797 the list included the Duke of Portland, Lady Grenville, Lord and Lady Hawkesbury (he succeeded the 2nd Earl of Liverpool in 1808), William Pitt and George Canning. No prime ministers or their spouses subscribed in 1807. Future prime ministers such as Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, Frederick J. Robinson (created Viscount Goderich in 1827 and the Earl of Ripon in 1833), Arthur Wellesley, who rose from Viscount Wellington in 1809 to Duke in 1814, and Spencer Percival did not feel the need to hold subscriptions. Presumably most MPs, as heirs to or clients of county grandees in many cases, did not feel the necessity to subscribe and mingle.Footnote ⁴⁵ While several bankers had subscriptions, most did not. Similarly, a few merchants from the City paid for subscriptions but the vast majority did not. Evidently, these persons, already at the top of the social heap, found opera attendance neither necessary nor sufficient to maintain their positions, whether hard-won or inherited.

Slave economy profiteers are thought to have struggled financially during the American Revolutionary war, when dearth and destruction, and the interruption of trade were widespread in the Caribbean.Footnote ⁴⁶ Clearly some were able to ride out the difficulties and purchase an opera box subscription. Fourteen years later, in 1797, a greater percentage drawn from a significantly larger pool of subscribers was willing to put down the necessary funds for their entertainment.Footnote ⁴⁷ Whether the slight decline in subscribers and the slave-economy proportion over the next ten years is part of a trend or just annual variation remains to be established. Behavioural evidence suggests that a range of causes (both overt and covert) for subscription to and attendance at the opera is in operation, and while the result (purchasing a seat for a season in the opera house) may look the same, individuals bring their own reasons to bear. Regardless of the proximate causes, the data indicate that during the 1790s and 1800s one in six persons who subscribed was funded from slavery’s profits.

* * *

The three case studies that follow are microhistories that serve to illustrate the complexities of individual cases while also contributing to the macro-level argument. Their detailed and highly personal stories may seem far removed from the conclusions reached about overall levels of support of the opera companies by persons who profited from the slave economy. But I suggest that paying close attention to personal and familial circumstances not only offers contrasting motivations (duration, persons, frequency) that are easily lost in higher-level analysis, but also shows how interconnected were the lives of seemingly disparate or autonomous families. Macro-level work, distanced as it inevitably is from individuals, comprises summarisation and is teleological in intent. By subsuming persons and their individual desires and decisions into a whole, a fiction of a singular audience is created. In-depth studies of historical opera and concert audiences are rare indeed, and none has heretofore paid attention to the income sources used to purchase seats. In disclosing a method and sharing what can be accomplished, I hope to encourage others to take up the work.

This contribution to the decolonisation efforts starting to make their way into the Anglosphere’s music history and pedagogy, provides clear evidence for the material support of music-making in the metropole thanks to funds generated through the efforts of slave labour in the colonies and the continued upholding of the slave trade. At the level of individuals and families, the boxes’ inhabitants provide contrasting evidence for their choices while simultaneously showing how profits from involvement in the slave economy could be put to use.Footnote ⁴⁸

Case Study 1: The Lewis family in Pit box 20. The Lewis family was well known to the powers-that-be. Father Matthew Lewis (1750–1812) had been Chief Clerk at the War Office since 1772, and Deputy Secretary at War since 1775, thanks in large measure to his superior William Wildman, Viscount Barrington (1717–93). He married in 1773 Frances Maria Sewell (d. 1822), a daughter of Sir Thomas Sewell (1758–68), a lawyer and MP, then judge, and Master of the Rolls. Their marriage, after the birth of four children, ended in a judicial separation in 1783 following Mrs Lewis’s affair with the singer Samuel Harrison (1760–1812), who was a leading tenor and performed at the Handel Commemoration (1784), the Three Choirs festivals, the Concerts of Antient Music, as well as the pleasure gardens.Footnote ⁴⁹ Lewis’s career provided a large income due to the fees to which he was entitled at the War Office, which increased considerably during war time.Footnote ⁵⁰ He also owned two plantations in Jamaica. His wealth allowed him to lease a brand-new house in Devonshire Place (no. 9), in the rapidly developing and exclusive Marylebone area, from about 1790.Footnote ⁵¹ Through his father’s connections, son Matthew Gregory (1775–1818) served in 1794–5 as an attaché at the British embassy at The Hague but was withdrawn due to ongoing hostilities with the French. In his twenty-first year (1796), Matt (as he was known in the family) had his first novel The Monk: A Romance published anonymously, and then in a new edition with his name on it.Footnote ⁵² In May he ran successfully for Parliament, thanks in part to his father’s influence and money. His two sisters, Frances Maria (1776–1862) and Sophia Elizabeth (1780–1819), were regular attendees at society balls and concerts.Footnote ⁵³ Given that the box (pit level 20) was held for the six seasons that coincided with Matt’s time in Parliament, I imagined that father had, at least initially, obtained it as a reward for his son and to support his ambition as a theatrical writer and legislator, in addition to providing a spot in the most elite of entertainment venues for his daughters to appear in public. The evidence points instead to somewhat different motivations (Table 3).

Table 3.

Pit box 20 occupied by the Lewis and Ricketts families 1796–1802

^a As used in the ‘Plan of the Boxes’ section of the publications, ‘ditto’ means the seats so designated have been assigned to the person(s) named in the first seat.

^b Names have been regularised.

^c Information from fan (Fan Museum, Greenwich, HA255).

The subscriber list published in 1797 names Mrs Lewis as the holder of the box. In fact, she is very unlikely to have been the responsible party as she was subject to a purdah enforced by her family.Footnote ⁵⁴ Rather, as will be made clear shortly, it was the two daughters (the Misses Lewis) who signed up for all six seats, presumably paying with their father’s money, directly or indirectly.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the following season, the occupants of the box are fully listed and comprised, in addition to Matt ‘Monk’ Lewis, his sisters and their father, Gov. Poyntz Ricketts and his wife Sophia. The Governor was an old friend of Lewis senior, both having been born in Jamaica. The Ricketts property in Jamaica had, supposedly, suffered greatly in the earthquake and hurricane of 1779. While the Ricketts were widely known in elite circles in London – they had signed as witnesses when David Garrick made his will, for example – their income had been much reduced.Footnote ⁵⁶ The King approved Ricketts’s appointment as Governor of Tobago in 1793, and then Barbados in 1794.Footnote ⁵⁷ Whether it was Mr Lewis or the Governor who paid for the seats is unclear, but the Ricketts remained box-mates of the Lewises even after the Governor died in 1800, their daughter Isabella (1782–1845) taking over her father’s seat for two seasons.

According to biographers of his son, upon retirement in 1803 Matthew Lewis transmogrified a long-standing friendship with Mrs Ricketts into something that went beyond the bounds of propriety, even though it was three years after the death of her husband and the Lewises had been separated for twenty years.Footnote ⁵⁸ Rather surprisingly, the opera box proved to be one of the sticking points. In a letter to his mother thought to date from 1805, Matt wrote that ‘Many years ago my Sisters refused to go into Public with [Mrs Poyntz Ricketts], and in consequence the Opera-Box (which before they had jointly) was divided into alternate weeks.’Footnote ⁵⁹ It can hardly have been ‘many years ago’ that this alternation of occupation began if the relationship commenced in 1803. Nor would that have influenced the use of the box, as no subscription by the Lewises or the Ricketts can be found after 1802.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, in another letter, this one with secure dating of 13 January 1803, Lewis tells his mother that ‘Sophia [… is] rather in the dumps at her Sister’s not having yet succeeded in getting an Opera-Box.’Footnote ⁶¹ Either the relationship began earlier than has been supposed or ‘Monk’ Lewis was exaggerating, perhaps for his mother’s sake, how long this alternation had been in effect.Footnote ⁶²

Regarding Mrs Ricketts, ‘Monk’ Lewis says that ‘She has been the cause of almost every quarrel that has happened in our family, ever since I can remember.’ In which case, one wonders why the box with both families named was continued for so long. Furthermore, given that Gov. Ricketts was stationed in Barbados most of the time during the years in which he is named as a subscriber, it can hardly have been he who sat in the seat to which his name was attached.Footnote ⁶³ Perhaps Isabella attended in his place. Perhaps the seat was left open, or another friend of the Lewises was offered the opportunity. Whatever the case may have been, it is clear that the names listed do not necessarily accord with those of the persons who attended. For William Lee, who, as keeper of the boxes and the purveyor of drinks and food in the Great Room, the constant churn of subscribers and seat users must have been a troublesome business.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nonetheless he seems to have been scrupulous about recording the names of subscribers when they changed due to marriage or inheritance. Though he could do nothing in the printed lists for 1799 about Frances Maria Lewis becoming Mrs Lushington following her marriage to Henry in April of that year, he has her clearly marked as Mrs Lushington for the following season. Perhaps it was her husband who sat in the seat nominally assigned to Gov. Ricketts. The box was undoubtedly a family affair and inter-generational.

The Lushingtons were a notable family. Henry (1775–1863) was the eldest son and heir to Sir Stephen (1744–1807), who was an MP, a director of the East India Company, and its chosen chairman in 1790, after which he was created a baronet. Sir Stephen had married Hester Boldero (1753–1830), the eldest child of John Boldero (1713–89), and his wife. Hester’s brothers Edward and Charles were in a banking partnership with the Lushingtons. The bank has recently been characterised as ‘a global investment portfolio embedded in the provision of mortgages for West Indian planters’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Though it collapsed in 1812 due in part to renewed war with the USA, the Bolderos were able to keep Aspenden Hall, Hertfordshire, and after Charles’s death in 1851 it passed to Sir Henry, the 2nd Baronet.

Whether it was Frances or her sister Sophia Elizabeth who was responsible for designing the personal fan now in the Schreiber Collection at the British Museum remains to be established, but we can be certain that one of them did as it includes an image of the ivory opera ticket on which is inscribed ‘Miss Lewis PIT BOX No.20’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Several snippets of music are visible among the poems and letters, including their brother’s poem ‘The Orphans Prayer, a Pathetic Ballad’, with the music by Harriett Abrams. The sheet music version, probably published in 1800, was issued by Lavenu.Footnote ⁶⁷ Sophia had literary aspirations. In about 1800 she translated the satiric novel La nuit anglaise by Léon-François-Marie Bellin de la Liborlière (Paris, 1799), which was published as The Hero: Or, the Adventures of a Night (London, 1815), and includes some mockery of her brother’s novel.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1804 she married John Shedden (d. 1843), and it was he who received compensation of over £10,650 (over £54.5m in 2022 pounds as a share of GDP) under the 1833 Act for part ownership of two plantations in Jamaica.

The Lewis family was related to the Sewells not only through the marriage in 1773 of Matthew and Frances Maria, but also through the marriage in 1775 of her brother Robert (1751–1828) and Matthew’s sister Sarah (dates unknown). Robert trained as a lawyer, went to Jamaica, was appointed Attorney General for the island 1780–95, and on returning became the agent for the island in London 1795–1806. He also obtained a seat in Parliament 1796–1802. Another Sewell, brother George (1755–1801), married into a Caribbean planter family, the Youngs, in 1796, ‘after many perplexities & Obstacles’, according to his wife, Mary (c. 1758–1821).Footnote ⁶⁹ George had studied at Lincoln College, Oxford, took holy orders and was, at his death, the rector of Byfleet, Surrey. It is to the Young family, specifically Mary’s brother Sir William, the 2nd Baronet, that we now turn our attention.

Case Study 2: Third Tier box 84, the Young family and friends. The inhabitants of Third Tier box 84 (see Table 4) were as follows.

1. (1) Barbara Young (d. 1830), the second wife of Sir William Young (they married in April 1793), daughter of Col. Richard Talbot (c. 1736–88) of Malahide Castle, Co. Dublin, and Margaret O’Reilly (d. 1834), who was created Baroness Talbot of Malahide in 1831. Barbara’s brother, Admiral Sir John Talbot (c. 1769–1851), owned an estate on Montserrat.

2. (2) Her husband Sir William Young (1749–1815), 2nd Baronet, plantation owner in Antigua and Tobago, MP for St Mawes 1784–1806 and Buckingham 1806–7, and Governor of Tobago 1807–15.Footnote ⁷⁰

3. (3) Her sister, either Frances (Fanny) Gabriella (early 1770s–1850), who first travelled on the Continent 1814–17, and who never married, or Charlotte (d. 1863), who married Captain John Cutcliffe (d. 1822) in 1808. Two other sisters (Catherine and Margaret) married before 1807.Footnote ⁷¹

4. (4) Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (1772–1840), 5th Baronet, MP 1794–1840, was the eldest son of the eponymous MP 1772–89, music enthusiast and Handel-lover, and his second wife Lady Charlotte Grenville (1754–1832).Footnote ⁷² In 1817 he married Lady Henrietta Antonia Clive, daughter of Edward, the 1st Earl Powis.

5. (5) Sir Henry Vane Tempest (1771–1813), 2nd Baronet, MP 1794–1800, 1807–13, who married in 1799 Anne Katharine MacDonnell (1778–1834),Footnote ⁷³ Countess of Antrim (Figure 4).

   Figure 4.

   Fan (1808) that may have belonged to the Countess of Antrim. The New Opera Fan for 1808 (J. Michel); paper, uncoloured, wooden sticks, single-sided. ‘Countess of Antrim’ written on the reverse. Fan Museum, Greenwich: LDFAN 2005.24. Photography by and image courtesy of the Fan Museum, Greenwich.

   

6. (6) Hon. Thomas Brand (1774–1851), MP 1807–19, who succeeded his mother in 1819 as 20th Baron Dacre. He married in 1819 Barbarina (1768–1854), author, daughter of Sir Chaloner Ogle (d. 1816), 1st Baronet, widow of Valentine Henry Wilmot (1757–1819), whose father had been a merchant on St Vincent.

7. (7) Present only for the 1795–6 season: Thomas Orby Hunter (1774–1847), of Croyland Abbey, Lincolnshire, and the eponymous grandson of an owner of an estate in Jamaica. (See the next case study for more detail.)

8. (8) Present only for the 1798–9 season: Mr Henry. No MPs of this period had this surname. Neither of Sir William’s daughters married a Mr Henry. Two possibilities are John Henry (d. 1806), who was an officeholder on St Kitts, and Alexander Henry (dates unknown), a merchant in London who traded in slave-produced goods from Jamaica. Though his partnership declared bankruptcy in 1811 he continued to trade thereafter. His wife died on 31 July 1809, at Blackheath.

Table 4.

Box 84, Sir William and Lady Young and friends, 1794–1803

^a Names have been regularised.

^b Information from fan (Fan Museum, Greenwich, HA255).

^c Fan has no name for this seat.

^d As found in the ‘Plan of the Boxes’ section of some of the published lists and fans, B means blank, i.e. unrented.

^e Fan has Hon. T. Brand.

Sir William Young was the most senior in terms of age. He had not been a subscriber to the opera when his first wife, Sarah Lawrence (d. 1791), was alive, notwithstanding her interest in music. Presumably it was his second wife Barbara, along with one of her sisters, who were the more desirous of attending the spectacle.Footnote ⁷⁴ Why they ceased to hold the box beyond 1803 is, at present, undetermined, as Sir William continued to be an active MP and an opponent of the abolition of the slave trade until he resigned in order to take up the post of Governor of Tobago in 1807. In contrast with the Lewis family, three seats in box 84 were occupied by younger male colleagues of Sir William from Parliament prior to their marriages (except for Sir Henry Vane Tempest).

Two of the regulars, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and the Hon. Thomas Brand, also had seats in other boxes during this period. Sir Watkin spent some time in Pit box 25 in 1796–7 with Lady Catherine Cornewall (d. 1835), wife of Sir George, 2nd Baronet (1748–1819), MP 1774–96, 1802–7, who owned an estate in Grenada, she having been an opera subscriber since at least 1789; and Thomas Amyand (c. 1763–1805), a cousin of Sir George, and a director of the Bank of England.Footnote ⁷⁵ That same season the Hon. Thomas Brand sojourned in Pit box 21 with Lady Caroline Beauclerk (c. 1775–1838), who in February 1797 married the Hon. Charles Dundas (1771–1810), MP 1798–1805, 1806–10, the third son of Sir Thomas Dundas (1741–1820), 2nd Baronet, who was created Baron Dundas in 1794, and who inherited estates in Dominica and Grenada from his father Lawrence Dundas (1712–81), 1st Baronet.Footnote ⁷⁶ In other words, profiteers could be found throughout the house.

Case Study 3: The daughters of James Modyford Heywood and his wife Catherine Hartopp. James Modyford Heywood (1729–98), MP 1768–74, was the son of James Heywood of Maristow, Devon, and Mary, a daughter of Sir Abraham Elton (1679–1742), 2nd Baronet, a notable Bristol merchant, slave trader and MP. From his father James inherited at least two plantations in Jamaica, including Heywood Hall, which he sold to the Glasgow merchant house of Robert Mackay & Co. in 1789.Footnote ⁷⁷ Both the Heywoods and the Modyfords were long established as planters in Barbados and Jamaica. In 1754 James married Catherine Hartopp (1728–living in 1796) and they had one son (James, 1756–84) and five daughters (one of whom died in her first year).Footnote ⁷⁸ The four daughters who reached adulthood were: Sophia (1758–1819), Emma (1763–1805), Maria Henrietta (1765–1836) and Frances (1771–1834). To each he gave £8000 (£12.3m in 2022 pounds in terms of income or GDP per capita), according to his will, money derived in part from the sale of Heywood plantation in 1796.Footnote ⁷⁹ Except for Emma, the sisters were all subscribers to the opera (Table 5).Footnote ⁸⁰

Table 5.

Three Heywood sisters at the opera, 1793–1808

^a Mrs Musters had box 99 PS at the Pantheon in 1791, her first opera subscription, and 7F at the Little Theatre in 1792.

^b Mrs Heywood and her daughter shared with the Duke of Somerset (Edward Seymour, 11th Duke), the Hon. Mr Bagot, the Hon. Mr Moreton, Sir Willoughby Aston.

^c Mrs Montolieu and her sister shared with the Hon. Mr Bagot, Sir Willoughby Aston, Col. Crewe and Mr Northey. No entry in the alphabetical list for Mrs Musters. Box 85 was occupied by the Hon. Mrs Cawthorne. Mr Orby Hunter was in the Young family’s box, 84.

^d Information from fan (Fan Museum, Greenwich, HA255).

^e Box 85 was occupied by Marchioness Wellesley; she was Hyacinthe-Gabrielle (d. 1816), who had married in 1794 Richard Colley Wellesley (1760–1842), succeeded in 1781 as 2nd Earl Mornington, created Marquis Wellesley 1799, Governor of Bengal 1798–1805. He was the elder brother of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington.

^f Box 82 has ‘March Worcester’ in pencil in the copy at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Lady Charlotte Sophia Leveson-Gower (1771–1854) on 16 May 1791 married Henry Charles Somerset (1766–1835), Marquis of Worcester, MP 1788–1803, who in 1803 succeeded as 6th Duke of Beaufort. Box 85 has Mrs Dickenson and others.

^g Mrs Montolieu and Mrs Orby Hunter were joined by their husbands.

^h Mrs Montolieu’s husband joined the ladies.

ⁱ Information from fan (Fan Museum, Greenwich, LDFAN 2005.24).

Sophia married John Musters (1753–1827) in 1776. John was already known as a country sports afficionado at the time of their marriage. George Stubbs completed a picture of them on horseback in front of Colwick Hall, Nottinghamshire, the Musters family home.Footnote ⁸¹ They had two children – John (1777–1849) and Sophia Ann (1778–1850) – and a girl born in 1779 who died within a month. Supposedly Sophia did not enjoy country life, preferring the social whirl of London and the resorts of the fashionable. Frances Burney wrote to her sister Susanna in October 1779 from Brighton saying that Mrs Musters, ‘an exceedingly pretty woman, […] is the reigning Toast of the season’.Footnote ⁸² Some difficulties ensued, and the couple started living apart. Invited by her friend the Hon. Louisa Beckford (wife of Peter, MP, another country sports enthusiast, a plantation owner in Jamaica, and a cousin of the host), to spend Christmas 1781 with her cousin – the immensely wealthy Jamaican planter William Thomas Beckford (1760–1844) at Fonthill in Wiltshire – Sophia was apparently paired with George Pitt, Louisa’s unmarried brother and an MP 1774–90, who succeeded as 2nd Baron Rivers in 1803.Footnote ⁸³ Upon his father’s death in 1770, William Thomas became heir to an estate that included 2,245 slaves and about 22,000 acres in Jamaica.Footnote ⁸⁴ He was already known as ‘England’s wealthiest son’. The party, designed to celebrate his coming of age, lasted several days and no expense was spared. Philippe de Loutherbourg created the scenes and special effects. The leading castrati from the opera in London performed.Footnote ⁸⁵ While Beckford’s novel Vathek (1785), which he framed as an additional Arabian Nights’ tale, has become a locus classicus for literary and cultural critics, the party that provided the prefigurement has largely gone unconsidered in terms of its funding by and for profiteers of the slave economy.Footnote ⁸⁶

The lack of an even-handed biography has left Mrs Musters at the mercy of her critics. Admittedly, these included contemporaries such as her husband, who had her painted out of the two joint portraits by Stubbs. One quotation attributed to Fanny Burney has it that Mrs Musters ‘was most beautiful, but most unhappy’. Unfortunately, it is not to be found in the latest or earlier editions of Burney’s diaries and letters.Footnote ⁸⁷ Instead, it appears to have been invented by Edward Hamilton (1811–1903), the notable botanist and homeopathic doctor, who wrote in his catalogue of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s engraved works that, according to Burney, ‘She was most beautiful, but most unhappy; and it is to her that a gentleman at a ball […]’ continuing the story related by Charlotte Barrett, in her edition of Burney’s letters, told her by an unnamed man.Footnote ⁸⁸ Mrs Barrett does not include the seven-word phrase, nor is it to be found used in the context of Mrs Musters in any other source prior to the publication of Hamilton’s book, as far as HathiTrust and other full-text databases can tell.Footnote ⁸⁹ After 1874 the phrase is widely, though mistakenly, used as a genuine Burney quotation.Footnote ⁹⁰

Family lore has it that Sophia Musters became a Bedchamber Woman to Queen Charlotte.Footnote ⁹¹ As in the case of Mrs Lewis, no such appointment can be found in the official records. That she had artistic talent is clear from a stained glass window she designed for the east window of Colwick church.Footnote ⁹² Edward Jones (1752–1824), ‘Bardd y Brenin’, dedicated his Lyric Airs (1804) to her, and was probably her daughter’s harp teacher. Upon her death her husband had a monument erected at Colwick that portrayed her as ‘Resignation’, the three panels of the pedestal depicting painting, music and dancing.Footnote ⁹³ The piece was made by the noted sculptor Richard Westmacott (1775–1856), who had been a pupil of Antonio Canova.Footnote ⁹⁴ Both the window and the monument were moved to Annesley All Saints church by the Chaworth-Musters family when they made Annesley their main seat.Footnote ⁹⁵

Maria Henrietta married, in 1786, Lewis/Louis Montolieu (1761–1817), a bank director at Hammersley’s, which for a period was the bank used by George, Prince of Wales. After the birth of her children, she turned translator and writer and became quite well known, with two volumes of her own verses published and reissued between 1801 and 1822 in which she uses plants as moral guides.Footnote ⁹⁶ Her husband ran, unsuccessfully, as a parliamentary candidate for Leicester in 1790.

The last sister to marry was Frances.Footnote ⁹⁷ For her first season at the opera, 1794–5, her mother accompanied her. Whether she met Thomas Orby Hunter at the opera that season or he obtained his seat with the Youngs nearby in order to continue a courtship begun elsewhere we shall probably never know. They married in 1796. The proximity provides another reason for having a subscription, as well as an opportunity to point to the plantation ownership history of the Orby Hunters, which began with Maj.-Gen. Robert Hunter (c. 1666–1734), governor of Virginia, New York and New Jersey, and Jamaica, who married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Orby, Bt. Hunter was a director of the Royal Academy of Music by 1722.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Jamaican estates, the details not yet established by the Legacies of British Slavery, passed to son Thomas Orby Hunter (c. 1716–69), MP 1741–59, 1760–9. His son Charles Orby Hunter (1750–91) sold the family’s property in Surrey – Waverley Abbey House – in 1771. He married Elizabeth (d. 1813), daughter of George Howard of Dublin, and it was their son Thomas who inherited whatever remained in England, but possibly also in Jamaica.

As can be seen from Table 5, only for one year did the three sisters share a box, 97, in 1806–7. Prior to that Maria Henrietta and Frances shared the box, while Sophia had different boxes, including 85 and Pit box 9. Before her marriage, Frances joined her sister in box 81 for the 1794–5 season, and in box 82 for the 1795–6 season, when Hunter was in box 84. Sophia, as one of the leaders of fashion in high society and an active participant in the beau monde or bon ton, had numerous men share her box before 1800. These included: Prince Frederick, Duke of York (1793–5, 1796–7); John Manners, Duke of Rutland (1796–9); the Hon. Mr Lamb (1798–9); the Hon. George Pitt (1794–5, 1798–9). Only for one season, 1797–8, did a woman join her, Mrs Campbell. In the season 1802–3 Mr and Mrs Musters shared Pit box 9 with Mrs Jackson and Miss Morgan, and in 1803–4 they shared it with Mrs Jackson and Mr, Mrs and Miss Rolle (the identity of these individuals is uncertain).

* * *

The choice of subscribing to and attending the opera were activities undertaken with family and/or friends, and dependent upon others’ interests, whether or not one was a profiteer of the slave economy. Lords, MPs and their spouses predominate among subscribers, but hundreds of other such persons felt no need to subscribe. Aesthetic preference (opera as acme) was not necessarily relevant, though if it had been second-rate, support is unlikely to have been forthcoming. The location of the theatre and its perceived exclusivity were significant draws. The activity was exclusive due to cost, interest and control of the necessary resources.

Owners of plantations on British islands in the Caribbean and other participants in the slave economy used their profits to fund box subscriptions at the opera house for their families and friends.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Lewis family did so for five seasons, though family tensions supposedly resulted in an alternating sequence of attendees. For the Youngs, who had owned a plantation on Antigua since the 1720s that had been highly profitable, nine seasons with friends and family sufficed. The daughters of James Modyford Heywood received large dowries due to the early death of their brother and their father’s decision to liquidate his properties in Jamaica and the estate of Maristow, Devon, which he sold to Manasseh Masseh Lopes (1755–1831), a merchant, MP 1802–6, 1807–8, 1812–19, 1820–9, who was created a baronet in 1805, and who came from a wealthy plantation-owning family in Jamaica. The women had their own agendas, and spouses with differing interests or demands, and shared a box only for one season.

The 1782–1808 subscribers who derived their profits from Caribbean estates experienced considerable variation in value and returns due to natural and human interventions.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Though such estates could be highly profitable when compared with agricultural estates in England, boom and bust cycles were common.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The churn of slave-economy subscribers occupying the boxes at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, is considerable. Of the thirty certain (known) individuals who subscribed for the 1782–3 season, only seven were themselves or a close family member present in 1806–7, even though the number of such subscribers had increased by 150% (from thirty to seventy-four).Footnote ¹⁰² This compares with an overall increase of subscribers by 138% (from 356 to 492).

Given the financial precariousness of opera production in London, the portion of subscription income (9–17%) contributed by the profiteers of the slave economy during these twenty-six seasons must be seen as crucial to the continued existence of the company and the genre.Footnote ¹⁰³ Had it not been for the subscriptions by persons whose wealth derived from the slave economy it is clear that the company’s continued existence would have been jeopardised.