The Clifton Star Chamber Case and Kidnapped Child Actors

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. I was poking around J Store Daily a while back, and while I was there, I found this article called Her Majesty's Kidnappers. And this article was about a couple of men who abducted boys and forced them to work as actors in early modern England. And I was like, well, I definitely have to find out more about that. So I did, and here is the episode that resulted. As it turned out, pressing boys into service as performers really wasn't new, and it wasn't isolated to these people that this article was about. What led to legal action in this particular case was that these guys abducted a kid who's his father was in a position to actually do something about it. I did want to note England is obviously not the only place where children have been made to work as performers under conditions that could be questionable at best. A lot of the time. We're really not going to be talking about or even touching on other historical examples or like all the legal and ethical issues that surround child performers in today's world. Like, those are all separate stories from that one, with their own historical and social context. I'm sort of imagining people listening to this and thinking, like, why aren't they talking about Yes, but what about that one thing? Yeah? And that like, because those are whole other things. Yeah. The court case that we're talking about today was not directly connected to William Shakespeare, but it did happen during his lifetime while he was working as an actor and a playwright. So as folks probably know, and we actually alluded to it briefly during our vander Barbett episode. Women were not allowed to perform on stage at this point in British history, so in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the roles of women and girls were played by young men and boys. But boys did not just play female roles in productions that otherwise had a cast of adult men. There were also entire troops of boys who worked as performers, stretching back to before there were established public theaters in England. The earliest British accounts of boys as actors were actually in the role of female characters, but these were not in Shakespearean comedies or tragedies. They were in liturgical productions that were staged by churches and cathedrals, and these might be performed at the church or on church grounds, or in some other public space. There were also churches and religious groups that put on touring productions that sort of traveled among nearby towns, doing miracle plays and mystery plays. In other words, they were depictions of the lives of particular saints or stories from the Christian Bible. Mentions of boys playing the roles of women in these kinds of productions go back at least to the twelfth century. Not long after that, boys choirs were established to perform religious music at services. Boys had been included in choirs before this point, but choirs only made up of boys whose voices had not yet changed due to puberty came a little bit later. The other place that boys were pretty likely to perform during this era was school. Performance was seen as a way for boys to practice their poise and their diction and to learn to develop things like public speaking skills. So school performances were usually of religious or didactic works, or maybe classical pieces from Latin or Greek literature. Sometimes schools did put on public performances, but usually this was pretty controlled, so the audience was limited to the student's family, as are other members of the community, and it was really tightly supervised by the teachers. While she was still a princess, the future Queen Elizabeth the First often liked to visit schools and particularly enjoyed being honored with a performance while she was there. Eventually, boys performing troops were being invited to perform at court. The first written reference to one of these court performances dates back to fourteen eighty five. Boys performing companies became an established part of court entertainment in Tudor England, especially around the holidays, Saints feast Days and other celebrations. In fifteen oh nine, King Henry the Eighth appointed William Cornish as Master of the Chapel Royal, and underneath Cornish's direction, the use of boys's actors and singers and other entertainers at court increased dramatically. Queen Elizabeth was also a fan of these companies, both before and after she ascended to the throne. So in Tutor England, whoever was in charge of court entertainment, or whoever was specifically in charge of child entertainers, they often had the right to press people into service. We more often talk about impressment in the context of something like being forced to serve in the Royal Navy, but anybody whose labor was seen as valuable could be impressed, so that included artisans, skilled crafts people, and performers, including child performers. Since the choirs were made up of boys whose voices hadn't changed due to puberty, these children were usually between the ages of about six and fourteen. If there are any first person accounts from any of these children about what life was like in these troops, whether they were impressed, or whether they were performing of their own free will, Tracy didn't find any of them. We don't know that any exists, but it's likely that the conditions that they were working in often were not good. We do have first accounts from people who encountered various children's troops who described those children as hungry, sick, and exhausted after traveling to their performance. It is also very likely that many of them were subjected to physical or sexual abuse. In the early mid sixteenth century, these troops started to evolve, and the material that they were performing evolved as well. Rather than performing almost exclusively religious or didactic work, or maybe classical literature and doing that at a church or a school or at court, troops started performing more comedic work for the public, including satirical songs and sketches and plays. Some of those grew out of the Protestant Reformation. Since Catholic dramas and Catholic religious music were no longer permitted, performers had to find new material. This wasn't entirely new. The earliest known English language secular plays date back to about thirteen hundred, but more our playwrights started writing these kinds of plays, and more people started watching them. These troops also weren't performing at the large purpose built theaters that might come to mind in the context of Elizabethan or Shakespearean theater. So those three story round structures that were open in the center, none of those had been built yet when these troops started performing publicly. The first of those, the Red Lion, was erected in fifteen sixty seven, and James Burbage built England's first permanent theater, which was just called the Theater, in fifteen seventy six. So instead these boys troops were talking about, were in much smaller, enclosed, repurposed spaces. Also, especially as people moved away from staging plays that were explicitly religious or didactic, performing in public was seen as really suspect. There were plenty of small troops of entertainers of adults who traveled around England putting on some kind of a show, but they were often regarded as vagrants or criminals. It's possible that the adults who were in charge of these troops of children thought that their age would offer them some protection from criticism or suspicion, and that really may have been true, but that didn't necessarily apply to the playwrights who were writing for children's troops. Some of these playwrights were censured or even imprisoned over material that they wrote that was then performed by children. One way the people who managed these boys companies tried to get around this kind of suspicion was to frame their performances as rehearsals. So, after all, if you were going to perform before the monarch, of course you had to practice. What was the harm in selling a few tickets so that people could watch the boys rehearse, and so the boys could get used to having an audience. It's possible that this really did start out with selling tickets to watch rehearsals, but soon fully commercial professional troops of children were regularly performing for a paying audience, just with their managers still describing it as a rehearsal. In fifteen seventy two, the City Council of London banned public performances due to an outbreak of plague, and plays were banned altogether. Three years later. These boys companies continued, though thanks in part to that claim that they were just rehearsing ahead of their appearances at court, but the boy's companies started to be dismantled as well. After Richard Farrant, who was Master of the Children at Winsor Chapel, rented a space in Blackfriars that he said was going to be used for teaching and rehearsing, but he really turned it into a working public theater. After a lot of legal wrangling, in fifteen eighty four, Farrans landlord Sir William Moore evicted him and the company. By fifteen ninety most of the boys' companies that had been established earlier in the sixteenth century had fallen up art and no longer existed, but they were revived a few years later, and we'll get into that after a sponsor break. After a hiatus of about a decade, boys performing companies were briefly re established in Britain. In fifteen ninety nine, a new troupe of boy actors was established at Saint Paul's Cathedral. This was known as the Children of Paul's and then another, the Children of the Chapel Royal, was established in sixteen hundred. The next part of this story is mostly focused on the Children of the Chapel Royal, but these two troops really had a lot of similarities and sometimes they performed together. The Chapel Royal was the monarch's personal chapel and the master of the Children of the Chapel Royal was Nathaniel Giles, who was also organist and master of the choristers at Saint George's Chapel. Windsor Helles managed boys who sang for church services and a troop of boy actors who were headquartered in Blackfriars in central London. So a bit on Blackfriars. Back in the thirteenth century, King Edward the First had given land to the Dominican Order to build a monastery and a cathedral. By the first decades of the sixteenth century, though this order was becoming a lot smaller and less powerful, with fewer monks actually living there, so the order started renting out some of its buildings. In fifteen twenty nine, King Henry the eighth also started using part of this site as the office and storage space for the King's Rebels, which was responsible for royal entertainments. This included storage for things like props and costumes. In fifteen thirty six, after Henry d eighth had cut ties with the Catholic Church, he started dissolving England's monasteries. The Dominican Monastery in Blackfriars was dissolved two years later in fifteen thirty eight, but the area known as Blackfriars maintained its status as a liberty, meaning that it had some autonomy from the City of London Corporation that other parts of the city did not. So as an important example for this story, if a group of performers in Blackfriars did something that upset the Lord Mayor of London, he did not have the authority to shut it down. Various buildings and Blackfriars were sold after the dissolution of the monasteries, and in fifteen fifty part of this was granted to Sir Thomas Coworden, who was Master of the Rebels. After Cowardon's death, the property was eventually sold to Sir William Moore, looping back to what we talked about before the break. More later rented this to Richard Farrant, master of the Children at Windsor Chapel, who used it as a theater for about a decade starting in fifteen seventy six. Usually this theater is called the First Blackfriars Theater, and as we mentioned earlier, More evicted Farrant and his company from that space in fifteen eighty four because it was not a rehearsal space an actual functioning theater. James Burbage, father of famed Shakespearean actor Richard Burbadge, built a second, larger theater in Blackfriars in fifteen ninety six, which was used primarily by the Children's Troops, and a lot of what we know about this theatre's history comes from court records. The people involved with managing this theater filed so many lawsuits against each other and There were also lawsuits filed by people from outside the company, including the one that we're going to be talking about shortly. By the time Burbage opened the second Blackfriars Theater in fifteen ninety six, multiple stand alone theaters had been built in and around London. There was the one just called the Theater built by Burbage, which we mentioned. There was also the Curtain, the Rose, the Newington Butz Theater and the Swan. So the second can't Blackfriars Theater was a lot smaller than all of these. It was roofed like it was an enclosed building rather than being open in the center like all of those other theaters were. And the Children of the Chapel Royal as a performing company was also different from the companies of adult men who were performing at these other larger public theaters. These adult companies were often beholden to one or more patrons who were funding their work, and the work itself was subject to approval and censorship by the Master of the Revels. During this period, the Master of the Rebels was Edmund Tilney, whose role grew until he had near total control of English theater like. Eventually he allowed only two performing companies of men, and he had to personally approve every single play before it could be performed, but the boys' companies were not subject to any of that. It's often a little unclear whose authority they were performing under, if anybody's. They might be criticized for satirical works that insulted people in power, but they weren't stopped from performing it in the first place. Yeah, they were basically flying under the radar of all of the censorship. That sort of kept the other theaters in line. And then also the fact that they were performing in Blackfriars meant they had this other layer of protection. So we mentioned Nathaniel Giles, Master of the Children of the Chapel Royal, earlier. In fifteen ninety seven, Queen Elizabeth I granted him a patent authorizing him to quote take so many children as he or his sufficient deputy shall think meet in all cathedral, collegiate, parish churches, chapels, or any place or places as well within liberty as without this a realm of England, whatsoever they may be. So the purpose of this patent was to make sure that the most talented children in the realm were available to sing for the Queen, but Giles did not focus strictly on finding good singers for the Queen's entertainments. He got into a partnership with Henry Evans, who had apprenticed as a scrivener but had become a theatrical producer. In sixteen hundred, Evans leased the Blackfriars Theater from Cuthbert and Richard Burbadge, sons of James Burbage, with the plan of establishing a company a boy performers there. Evans envisioned turning this company into a highly profitable business venture, which meant that Giles needed to use his patent to recruit enough boys to fill an entire acting troupe. By December of sixteen hundred, Giles and Evans were aggressively impressing children to fill out their acting company. If parents complained, sometimes they would offer them the option to buy out the boy's contract, which was really not much different from kidnapping children and then ransoming back to their parents, except in this case, these kidnappers had royal permission to impress children into performing, which meant most parents didn't think they could complain about it. But then on December thirteenth, sixteen hundred, James Robinson, acting on the order of Nathaniel Giles, abducted thirteen year old Thomas Clifton as he was on his way to school, and around the same time Robinson, Giles and Evans also took a number of other boys. Nathan Field, John Chapel and John Moderam were all in grammar school, and Alvary Trussell, Philip Pickman, Thomas Grimes and Solomon Pavey were all apprentices. Thomas's father, Henry, was a member of the nobility, and he was well connected enough to get his son back. After about a day and a half, he went to his friend, Sir John Fordescu, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer and a member of the Privy Council, and he issued a warrant for Thomas's release, and then after that Henry Clifton filed a complaint in the Court of the Star Chamber. The Court of the Star Chamber convened at Westminster. There are contradictory explanations for where the name came from, but most agreed that the room were it originally heard complaints was decorated with stars in some way, either with the Star Spangled ceiling or with drapes. This court had started out as a function of the Royal Council in the early sixteenth century. The Council would take on legal questions that, for one reason or another, couldn't go through the regular court system. Eventually, this court evolved into its own body. Although it still was made up of Privy Councilors and it operated under the monarch's prerogative, it was outside the bounds of the courts of common law. A lot of the cases that were heard before the Star Chamber had to do with rioting or other disturbances of the peace, as well as defiance against royal proclamations. In this case, Henry Clifton's basic argument was that Giles was abusing a patent that had been granted to him by the Queen, and we're going to get to all the details after we pause for a sponsor break. Henry Clifton's complaint was heard before the Court of the Star Chamber on December fifteenth, sixteen oh one. This complaint outlines his opinion that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth had granted letters patents to Nathaniel Giles, quote for the better furnishing of your Chapel Royal with well singing children, and this granted him to take such children from places like parish churches and chapels. But instead Giles had confederated himself with James Robinson, Henry Evans and others to put these boys into a quote company of leude and dissolute mercenary players. The language used in this complaint is really repetitive, and it's kind of circular, with just inordinately long sentences which I'll tend to say the same thing. Yeah, I usually enjoy reading historical documents like this, but I found this one in particular kind of exhausting. So Tracy bless Her has edited all of that to make it a bit more understandable. And he basically accused them of quote endeavoring, conspiring and complotting how to oppress diverse of your Majesty's humble and faithful subjects, and thereby to make unto themselves an unlawful gain and benefit. They conspired and concluded for their own corrupt gain in lucre to erect, set up, furnish, and maintain a playhouse or place in the Blackfriars within your Majesty's City of London. To better furnish their plays and interludes with children. They and the said Confederates, abusing the authority and trust by your Highness, have most wrongfully, unduly and unjustly taken diverse and several children from diverse and sundry schools of learning and other places, and apprentices to men of trade from their masters. Clifton also spelled out that these children were being taken not for service as part of the choir in the Chapel Royal, as had been intended, but they were being quote employed in acting and furnishing of the said plays and interludes. This was, he said, quote against the wills of the said children, their parents, tutors, masters and governors, and to the no small grief and oppressions of Your Majesty's true and faithful subjects. Importantly, Giles's patent empowered him to impress quote well singing children. But the boys named in the complaint were quote no way able or fit for singing, nor by any the said confederates endeavored to be taught to sing. But by them the said confederates abusively employed, as aforesaid, only in plays and interludes. There's just a whole whole lot of the said and the AfOR said in here more than in the bits that we just read. So instead, Clifton's son had been given lines to learned, and he was threatened with being beaten if he did not learn them. Clifton called this an abuse of Her Majesty's commission. Clifton also described what had happened when he had gone to the theater to get his son back. He had been quote utterly and scornfully refused, and the perpetrators had basically dared him to take them to court. Clinton argued that it was quote not fit that a gentleman of his sort should have his son and heir, and that his only son to be so basely used. So to be clear, Clifton was not arguing that no children should be impressed as performers, but that it was not appropriate for his son due to his station and the fact that these children were being used as actors, not as singers and religious services. It was, in his words, quote, an abuse of the nobility of this your Highness's realm, and an abuse of Your Majesty's said commission. Many of the records relating to the Court of the Star Chamber have not survived until today, so we don't have a lot of detail about the decision. But in short, the court found in Clifton's favor. Evans was censured for quote, taking up of gentlemen's children against their wills and to employ them for players. He had to resign from his work at Blackfriar Theater and leave London, but in a lot of ways this really didn't affect him. He transferred his interest in the company to his son in law, Alexander Hawkins, and Hawkins more or less ran things as Evans's proxy. We know all of this from a letter that was written later on by one of his associates, not from any actual legal records about this arrangement. For Giles, so the biggest consequence was that when he received a new patent in sixteen oh six, it specified this quote. We do straightly charge and command that none of the said choristers or children of the chapel, so to be taken by force of this commission, shall be used or employed as comedians or stage players, or to be exercise or act in any stage plays, interludes, comedies, or tragedies, for that is not fit or decent, that such as should sing the praises of God Almighty should be trained up or employed in such lascivious and profane exercises. There's kind of a gap though, between when this case was heard in sixteen oh six, and we don't really know if he kept impressing children as actors in that window between when the court case was decided and when he was issued this new patent. How it's like you can kidnap them if they're gonna sing for the Queen only religious music, but they're gonna sing if they're gonna sing church music, kidnapping them as fine, just cool, cool, cool. And at least two of the boys named in Clifton's complaint wound up staying with the theater, Solomon Pavey and Nathan Field. Pavey had been apprenticed to Edward Pearce, who was choir master at Saint Paul's. He died at the age of thirteen, but Field continued to act into adulthood, and he died in sixteen twenty. After all this, a lot of theater companies started, at least nominally apprenticing young boys as actors rather than pressing them into service. But these apprenticeships were a lot different from the guild apprenticeships that people might be more familiar with. A guild apprenticeship was very lengthy and formalized, and while conditions for apprentices could be very poor, when the apprenticeship ended, the person was trained in a craft or a trade, and they had also earned a range of rights and privileges as a freedman. The boys who apprenticed as actors were often younger than typical guild apprentices, and based on the records that we have, most adult performers had not apprenticed as actors when they were children, so it was like if children were being quote apprenticed, they weren't becoming actors using that training was when they were adults. It was actually a lot more likely for an actor who to have gone through an apprenticeship in some other trade and then come to acting as an adult and then conscripting children for performing as singers continued for a lot longer. Once there were more permanent public theaters in England with established companies of adult actors, children's troops became increasingly controversial among performers and playwrights. There are written references to them in some of the dramatic work of the day. Shakespeare's Hamlet was written right around the time that the Boys Companies were revived, and the first folio version includes a conversation between Hamlet and Rosenkrantz in which Rosenkrantz describes a theater troupe as quote an area of children, little iases that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for it. Hamlet answers, quote, what are they children? Who maintains them? How are they a scotted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards if they should grow themselves to common players, as it is most like if their means are no better? Their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession. Ben Johnson's satire The Staple of News also includes a character called Censure, who complains about these troops. Quote, they make all their scholars playboys. Is not a fine sight to see all our children made interluders? Do we pay money for this? We send them to learn their grammar and their terance, and they learned their playbooks. The Staple of News was first performed in sixteen twenty five, and at that point boys acting companies had once again faded out. In England, Queen Elizabeth the First died in sixteen oh three, and King James the sixth of Scotland and First of England succeeded her. His consort and of Denmark issued a new patent to the Children of the Royal Chapel and they became the Children of the Queen's Revels. They were disbanded about three years later after facing increasing criticism for performing a range of material that satirized the government, the nobility and the monarchs. The Children of Paul's was disbanded in sixteen oh seven after the playhouse on the Cathedral grounds was closed. London's theaters were closed down entirely in sixteen oh eight and sixteen oh nine due to plague. After the plague subsided, Richard Burbage evicted the remnants of the Boy's Company from the Blackfriar Theater and it became the winter home of William Shakespeare's company, The King's Men. The Court of the Star Chamber also faced increasing opposition from the courts of common law and from some members of Parliament. It was abolished by the Long Parliament in sixteen forty one. We haven't really touched on this, but as a final note, there's a lot of literary criticism and theatrical scholarship that looks at how these companies of boy performers and the material they performed contributed to the development of English language drama. Obviously, there were comedies and tragedies long before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but a lot of what was being written in England and in English was either religious or didactic in nature. Playwrights writing for boys companies, which were working outside the bounds of official patronage and censorship, laid a lot of the foundations for the English language dramatic tradition. Virtually all of England's most prominent play rights during these decades wrote for children, and I wrote material for children that broke away from what was expected in terms of form and content. Yeah, I read one paper that was sort of like, I'm not gonna go so far as to say that without these boys companies there would be no William Shakespeare, but like, it really was a lot of playwrights kind of cutting their teeth on writing different material that was then going to be performed by children. It's a wild thought, it is, and that also makes like such a hugely complicated moral and like analytical set of criteria to look at everything through where it's there. I like this play, but it's grounded and enslavement of children and that's not good and I don't know how we reconcile all of this. Yeah, I of course I think most people who have ever studied Shakespeare probably are aware about, you know, women's parts being played by boys and young men. I was really not aware until getting into this that there had been whole companies of just child actors who are all either boys in England specifically. I do have some listener mail which is about a totally different subject. This is from Jen. Jen wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy. I loved the tomatoes episode and especially the Friday behind the scenes conversation. I wanted to write to share my own history with disliking, slash loving tomatoes. As a kid, I had the same aversion to chunky tomato textures as Tracy. I enjoyed the flavor, love tomato soup, non chunky tomato sauces, and ketchup, yes, even the strange, colorful ketchups that Hinz introduced when I was thirteen. Holly is making like excited excited gestures about the colorful ketchups, but any semblance of actual tomato texture. No thanks. My mom would roll her eyes when I asked her to I mean jarred salsa, only to scrape the tomato chunks off my tortilla chip with each dip, so only a flavorful tomato juice coated it. Meanwhile, my paternal grandpa had a garden filled with tomato plants that he tended with care each summer. Those plants brought him so much pride and happiness, and each time my parents and I joined my grandparents for dinner, Grandpa would pick a few tomatoes and serve them as a side dish, sliced with a pinch of salt on top. He, grandma, and my mom would devour them with praise for how fresh and yummy they were. My dad and I would abstain ew tomatoes, and Grandpa would reply, she she don't know what you're missing. Flash forward to college, with a buffet style cafeteria in my dorm and a city full of diverse culinary experiences. By then, my grandpa was sick and unable to take care of the garden. Still thinking about what Grandpa said, and in line with Holly getting swayed by beautiful words about tomatoes, it seemed like I had been missing out on something. I started sneaking lice tomatoes into my cafeteria sandwiches and eating entire chipfuls of salsa without scraping off the tomato pieces. Little by little, my taste buds started to accept fresh tomatoes as a legitimately delicious food. My big realization of this change was a few years later when I attended an EarthFest festival on the Boston Esplanade and each one of the organic grocery store tents was handing out fruit and vegetable samples. I was offered an entire tomato, and I bit into it as if it was an apple, savoring each bite. My grandpa passed away soon after I finished college and didn't get to witness my love of tomatoes. Still, every time I smell a vine fresh tomato, I think of him and smile. I now have a garden full of my favorite cherry tomato plants and a big old tomato tattoo on my arm and memory of my grandpa. I've also attached a photo of my pup I think risa is how we say this who also enjoys occasional ripe tomato. Keep up the amazing work. I always look forward to your episode, especially the food history ones. Take care and have a relaxing and lovely summer. Jen, we have a very cute dog and a great tomato tattoo. Yeah. I wanted to read this in part because I love this story. For one thing, it did occur to me after we had that hole behind the scenes conversation that one thing that I will eat that does include big pieces of tomato is crazy salad because the combination of you know, slices of tomato with the cheese and the olive oil and the basil and like all that, like that I actually find pretty good, but still just plain tomatoes, big chunks of them by themselves, not usually my favorite. Last night, I had a like, very basic store bought salad as part of my dinner, and it had like four or five little cherry tomatoes in there, and I ate none of them, row of them. Listen, cherry tomatoes are a gamble because sometimes they'll even look great and I don't love them to begin with, but like a ripe flavorful one can be good. But sometimes they look great and they just taste like not good. Yeah that dog is Yeah, weapons a great cube. By the way. Yes, during tomato season, I will get like an heirloom tomato at the farmer's market and cheese from the cheese vendor. Like we'll get a bunch of farmer's market stuff and make like a cuprazy salad or something, and that I do really enjoy and I ate a million of it. When we were in Italy, like every meal it was or just like there would be some kind of fresh mozzarella appetizer. There was a lot of a lot of that. So anyway, thank you so much, Jen for this email and these pictures. 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