Catherine Tofts was the leading female singer on the London stage during the years 1705–9, when all-sung opera in the Italian style emerged and became for a time the dominant form of stage music, virtually banishing English vocal music from the theatres. Praised for both her voice and her beauty, Mrs Tofts was a key figure in this development and has been described as the first English prima donna. She certainly displayed the temperamental behaviour and demands for financial reward associated with that title, but despite her importance, little has been known about her background, early life or vocal training. Mollie Sands, in her very fully researched article ‘Mrs. Tofts, ?1685–1756’ (1956)Footnote ¹ began her coverage with the first public appearances of the singer, and in our article on Catherine Tofts in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) we wrote that her background and teachers were unknown. However, a previously overlooked fictionalised portrait in Delarivier Manley's Memoirs of Europe, together with a petition Tofts wrote in 1704 and the consequent identification of her father's will, all shed light on the period before she emerged as a leading singer. Mrs Manley also provides strong evidence against the generally accepted belief that the London career of Catherine Tofts ended because she had become mentally deranged. Rather, she now emerges as one of a long line of eighteenth-century singers, from John Abell and Richard Leveridge to Guilia Frasi, Michael Leoni and Ferdinando Tenducci, who were forced, for a time or permanently, to leave London to avoid imprisonment for debt. Examination of this period in her career via Manley's account is revealing not only of Tofts's own life circumstances, but also of the precarious role of the professional singer in fickle London at a time when Italian opera was usurping English.

In late 1703 Mrs Tofts emerged as the star of an expensive series of subscription concerts in London's two theatres that were organised by members of the nobility led by the Whig Lords Somerset and Devonshire. There were ten concerts between 30 November 1703 and 30 March 1704, six at Drury Lane Theatre and four at Lincoln's Inn Fields.Footnote ² During the same winter there were also some exclusive subscription concerts organised by the Tory Earl of Nottingham, featuring the soprano Margherita de L'Epine, who had arrived from the Continent in 1702 and had been appearing with great success as an entr'acte singer at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre.Footnote ³ Tofts and L'Epine continued to be favoured by the two rival political factions:

The Whig support for Mrs Tofts was to lie behind the way she came to be portrayed in Manley's ‘secret histories’.

In 1709 Delarivier Manley published the two volumes of her Secret Memoirs and Manners Of several Persons of Quality, of Both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediteranean. This was the first of her chroniques scandaleuses and her first piece of thorough-going anti-Whig propaganda.Footnote ⁵ She had earlier written three plays, of which one, the lurid tragedy The Royal Mischief, had had a moderate success at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in 1696. In 1707 she published The Unknown Lady's Paquet of Letters, a collection of ‘letters’ based on contemporary gossip. A staunch Tory, she dedicated both volumes of the New Atalantis to the Tory-Jacobite second Duke of Beaufort. Manley's method was to take current gossip, for which she had a very keen ear, and enlarge upon it. The books are full of libellous and frequently salacious stories about Whig politicians, members of the nobility, leading churchmen and other celebrities, all thinly disguised by means of pseudonyms. The Whig government attempted to suppress the work and Manley spent a week in custody from 29 October 1709, but the case against her was finally dismissed in the following February. By that time the Whigs, who had been in power for several years, were losing favour, and Manley wrote on with added vigour. 1710 saw the publication of two more volumes, now entitled Memoirs of Europe, Towards the Close of the Eighth Century Written by Eginardus, Secretary and Favourite to Charlemagne; And done into English by the Translator of the New Atalantis. Catherine Tofts figures briefly in the first volume as ‘the finest Singer of her Age’ and at much greater length in the second as ‘the harmonious Unfortunate’.Footnote ⁶ The second volume was published in November 1710, a month after the General Election that returned a strong Tory majority.Footnote ⁷

The episode of the Harmonious Unfortunate tells how a traveller finds nowhere to lodge for the night other than in what is clearly an early eighteenth-century sponging house, a place where debtors were held while bailiffs attempted to extract the money they owed. He overhears through the wall a conversation between two debtors who have been forced to share a room because of a shortage of accommodation. They are ‘Don Phæbo’ and a woman with a charming voice ‘so musical that tho’ she only spoke, there was Harmony in the Sound’.Footnote ⁸ The Key to the Second Volume of the Memoirs of Europe identifies the speakers as ‘Mr Isaac Bickerstaff’ and ‘Mrs T—ts’.Footnote ⁹ Isaac Bickerstaff was the pseudonym used by Richard Steele in the Tatler and at this time Steele and Manley were divided by political allegiance and by personal animosity.Footnote ¹⁰ Manley had begun the first volume of The Memoirs of Europe with a satirical dedication to ‘Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq.’ and followed this up in the second volume by including him and his recurrent debt problems in the scene with the Harmonious Unfortunate.Footnote ¹¹ This sponging house episode also contains a blistering attack on Gilbert Burnet, the latitudinarian Bishop of Salisbury.

The entry on Catherine Tofts in the original Dictionary of National Biography (1898) began with the statement that she was ‘said to be connected with the family of Bishop Burnet’, but developed this no further and gave no reference. The Victorian writer's reluctance to go into detail may perhaps be explained by the nature of the scandal about Burnet and the Tofts family put about by Burnet's political opponents. Mrs Manley's version of the scandal in the second volume of the Memoirs of Europe is that Gilbert Burnet, here referred to as the ‘Patriarch of Nova’,Footnote ¹² had a love affair with the singer's mother and then turned his attentions to her sixteen-year-old daughter. Eventually the girl was forced to submit: ‘our narrow Circumstances produc’d my Father's absolute Command, and I was – with loathing in my Heart – sacrific'd to his [Nova's] hated Embrace’.Footnote ¹³ Nova later turned her out of his household, her father fell ill and died, and she was forced to earn her living as a singer. The patriarch had accustomed her to an extravagant life style, and after getting into debt she had no choice but to accept the protection of a ‘Military Tribune’. Three weeks before the night in the sponging house the Harmonious Unfortunate was brought to bed of a child. The father is unidentified, but was presumably the Military Tribune, whom the key identifies as ‘Brig— R—s.’

Bishop Burnet was a particular bête noir of the Tories and the High Church faction because of his Whig sympathies and opposition to their Occasional Conformity Bill. There now seems no way of telling if there is any truth in these accusations against him. Certainly a milder version of the scandal had been circulating among High Church Tories since the beginning of the century. In 1702 Robert Ferguson's Large Review of the Summary View of the Articles Exhibited against the Bp. of St. David's included a covert attack on Burnet, as ‘an Eccliastick, who would have Debauched the Daughter of a person where he had an Interest and Authority, and turned her Father out of his Place and Employ, because the Daughter had Chastity and Virtue to abhor his Sollicitations’ (p. 245). Ferguson went on to state that when the daughter threatened to reveal the bishop's overtures, her father was reinstated and compensated for his lost income. In 1708 the Oxford antiquary and Jacobite Thomas Hearne was reading the Large Review and noted in his journal that he remembered hearing of the scandal about eight years earlier and that the father was ‘Mr. Toffts, a Scotch Man, & very honest’.Footnote ¹⁴ The Life of Gilbert Burnet by T. E. S. Clarke and H. C. Foxcroft (1907) notes that a schoolmaster called Tofts left Saltoun when Burnet, who was minister there at the beginning of his career, moved from Saltoun to Glasgow to become Professor of Divinity at the university in 1669.Footnote ¹⁵ This man seems very likely to have been the father of Catherine Tofts. Manley described the Harmonious Unfortunate's father as being ‘one of the Mountaineers’, presumably a reference to his Scottish origins.Footnote ¹⁶ (Saltoun is in the foothills of the Lammermuirs, about twenty miles east of Edinburgh.) Clarke and Foxcroft's biography of Burnet firmly dismisses the scandalous story of the bishop's attempt to seduce the girl as one of the attacks made on him at this time by ‘the Tory-Jacobite gutter-press’.

In the first volume of the Memoirs of Europe, published in May 1710, Manley had used this old Jacobite libel in a short passage where Burnet (there called Tarasius, Bishop of Antioch) is described as having made advances to ‘a Lady afterwards famous in the Altar-Service for the Sweetness and Compass of her Voice, the finest Singer of her Age’.Footnote ¹⁷ Manley said no more of the singer, for at this time she was only concerned to blacken Burnet's character, describing him as having ‘all the Pride, Ambition, Turbulancy, Inconstancy, Violence, Obstinacy, and Spirit of Persecution, that is suppos’d to have infected the fallen Angels'.Footnote ¹⁸ On 12 May 1710 she sent a copy of the just-published first volume of the Memoirs to Robert Harley, the leading Tory politician, offering her services as a propagandist.Footnote ¹⁹ By the second volume, published six months later and with the Tories triumphant, Manley considerably enlarged and sexed up the Tory-Jacobite gossip about Burnet. She added Burnet's love affair with the singer's mother and made the bishop's advances on the girl successful after her own father had ordered her to submit. Manley was, of course, safe from any prosecution by Burnet because of her use of pseudonyms and because of the changed political climate.

For the libel on Burnet to have any effect, there must have been a connection between the Tofts family and the bishop, and indeed there is contemporary evidence that the singer's father worked for Burnet. On 2 February 1704 the playwright Catharine Trotter wrote a letter from Salisbury, where she was staying with her sister and was on friendly terms with the bishop's wife: ‘This winter, I hear Mrs. Toft (whose father belonged to the Bishop of Salisbury) sings publickly in the same manner [as John Abel, who was singing in his own series of subscription concerts] and is much admired’.Footnote ²⁰ The singer's father must have died very close to the time when Mrs Trotter wrote her letter, for his will was proved on 23 February 1704.

Andrew Tofts, gentleman, made his will on 12 September 1703, ‘being weak of body but of sound and perfect mind’.Footnote ²¹ He left his whole estate to his ‘loveing wife Anne’, apart from two bequests: ‘I give unto my Daughter Katherine ToftsFootnote ²² the Summe of five Shillings she haveing already had her share out of my Estate Alsoe I give as a Token of my Kindness and Brotherly affection to my loveing Sister Agnes wife of M^r Bell of Little Liberton near Edinburgh in the Kingdom of Scotland the Summe of five pounds’. The lack of any term of endearment for his daughter, compared to the affectionate references to his wife and sister, would seem to indicate a coolness between the singer and her father in autumn 1703. It is possible, of course, that a man classing himself as a gentleman did not approve of his daughter's imminent series of appearances in concerts at the public theatres or he may have disapproved of aspects of her personal life. The will confirms that the singer was not married and that the Tofts family had connections with Scotland.Footnote ²³

A document in the Tonson Collection at the National Portrait Gallery, London, shows conclusively that this must be the will of Catherine Tofts's father. It has not previously appeared in print, and a transcription is given as an appendix to this article. The document is a copy of a petition from Tofts to the Duke of Somerset, written after the last of the 1703–4 subscription concerts but before the end of the theatre season. The singer claims that she has received less money from the Lords Subscribers for her performances in the concerts than she expected and that her agreement with them has prevented her from accepting an offer from Christopher Rich to sing at his Drury Lane Theatre. Her plea concludes with a reference to ‘the late misfortune shee had of loosing her father’.Footnote ²⁴

In his will, Andrew Tofts described himself as ‘of the Pallace of S^t James within the Citty of Westminster in the County of Middlesex Gentleman’. In July 1702 he had been appointed to a place in the royal household as Second Yeoman of the Cellar, one of the administrative officials responsible for the supply and storage of wine for the palace.Footnote ²⁵ The Cellar was one of the departments of the Board of the Green-Cloth and was in the overall charge of the Lord Steward, the Duke of Devonshire. The number of yeomen of the cellar was increased in 1702, so it would appear that a place was created for the singer's father. Burnet had held lodgings in St James's Palace since 1698, when William III appointed him Preceptor to Prince William, son of Princess Anne and heir to the throne, who died in 1700. When Anne became queen in March 1702, Burnet lost his power at court, for the queen had High Church sympathies and disliked him personally. In January 1703 the queen ordered that his lodgings at St James's Palace should be given to Henry Compton, the High Church Bishop of London, so Burnet no longer had a base in Westminster.Footnote ²⁶ It seems very likely that the Duke of Devonshire, a leading figure among the concert subscribers, was instrumental in Andrew Tofts's appointment, which ensured secure employment for the singer's father and her continued residence in London. After Tofts's death, his widow received a pension of £10 a year from Queen Anne, for records survive in the accounts of the Privy Purse kept by the Duchess of Marlborough for payments to her in December 1706 and 1707.Footnote ²⁷

It is clear that Catherine Tofts had a very thorough training in the most up-to-date vocal style, for besides her immediate success singing in Italian and English in the subscription concerts of 1703–4, she took leading roles in seven of the first nine all-sung operas to be performed on the London stage, beginning with Arsinoe at Drury Lane in January 1705. (The other two operas, Greber's Gli amori d'Argasto and Saggione's The Triumph of Love were mounted by the rival theatre company and were both failures.) According to Manley, her training was paid for by her father: ‘Rob’d of my Father's Support … what cou'd I do, but endeavour to make some Advantage of that extraordinary Voice which Nature had bestow'd upon me, and which had cost my Father more than two thousand Pieces to improve?’Footnote ²⁸ This clearly refers to a large sum of money, and it is probable that a good part of her share of her father's estate referred to in his will had been spent on singing lessons. There is no mention of her teachers in the Memoirs of Europe, but Manley writes of two musicians with whom the singer is said to have fallen in love. Unlike the characters higher up the social scale, these two foreign musicians are named in full in the key: ‘A Man — Monsieur Nicola’ [Nicola Matteis the younger] and ‘Person beloved — Du Parr’ [Charles Dieupart].

The Harmonious Unfortunate relates that, while she and her parents were still in the household of the Patriarch of Nova, the first of these lovers left England for the court of Charles King of the Franks to find a patron more supportive than ‘our late Russian Emperor [William III], who was not very likely to reward, what he never design'd nor desir'd to hear’.Footnote ²⁹ Nicola Matteis left England around the turn of the century, for a song by him was published in Mercurius Musicus for January and February 1700 headed ‘Set by Mr. Nicola, being the last he did before he took his Voyage to France’.Footnote ³⁰ He had been trained as a violinist by his father, whom John Evelyn described in 1674 as ‘that stupendious Violin Signor Nicolao’.Footnote ³¹ By the mid-1690s the younger Nicola Matteis had become a fashionable singing teacher. He published two books of songs, A Collection of New Songs Set by Mr. Nicola Matteis made purposely for the use of his Scholers (1696) and A Collection of new Songs, Set by M^r Nicola … being all teaching Songs, made for his Scholars’ (1699).Footnote ³² In the prefatory letter to ‘M^r Nicola’ in the second book, the publisher John Walsh wrote of how the songs had given great pleasure and satisfaction to ‘all those Persons of Quality to whom you have taught them’. The songs are florid and certainly not designed for beginners. Mercurius Musicus for November and December 1700 included ‘A SONG on a Lady in Imitation of Mr. Nicola's Manner. Set by Mr. Weldon of New Colledge Oxon’, a song even more florid than most of those in the 1699 Collection of New Songs. The musical amateur Roger North strongly disapproved of violinists acting as singing teachers and was clearly referring to Matteis when he wrote: ‘Once it was a mode in London to learn to sing of a famous violin master, who had no manner of voice, but had the corrupting of many good ones’.Footnote ³³ It seems very possible that Matteis's teaching method, inappropriate for the average noble amateur, was just what the young Catherine Tofts needed, and lay behind the ‘exquisitely sweet, silver Tone of her Voice, with that peculiar, rapid Swiftness of her Throat’, that so impressed Colley Cibber.Footnote ³⁴ There is, however, no evidence that Matteis was her lover. In the Memoirs of Europe the singer rhapsodises about the ‘inchanting Voice’ of the man who ‘by the Charms of his Voice, captivated my Soul!’Footnote ³⁵ It seems that Mrs Manley recast Matteis's talents for her own purposes, or that she was not aware that this musician, who had been absent from England for the previous ten years, was a virtuoso violinist with ‘no manner of voice’ rather than a singer with an enchanting one. Manley's report of the spending of large sums on vocal training may stem from lessons Mrs Tofts received in her youth from Mr Nicola, the fashionable and doubtless expensive teacher of singing to persons of quality.

Charles Dieupart, a harpsichordist, violinist and composer, arrived in England some time before February 1703, when he is known to have accompanied the violinist Gasparo Visconti in a London concert. He was associated with the subscription series in which Mrs Tofts starred, for the concert on 22 February 1704 included a musical interlude, Britain's Happiness, with vocal music by Weldon and instrumental music by Dieupart. (As usual, Mrs Tofts sang ‘several Songs in Italian and English’ during the concert.) Without Dieupart, it is quite possible that Mrs Tofts would not have had a career as a leading opera singer, for the first of the all-sung operas, Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus, was initially ignored by both of London's theatre companies. Its composer, Thomas Clayton, was later to write: ‘I was not able to bring my Opera of Arsinoe to be so much as heard, but by the Mediation of Mr. Dupar, who, for half the profit, which came to two hundred Pounds, bustled through that Affair for me.’Footnote ³⁶ It was the title role of Arsinoe that in January 1705 launched Mrs Tofts on her career as the first English prima donna and Dieupart's awareness of the singer's potential was no doubt an important factor in his promotion of Clayton's opera. The production was handsomely mounted with sets by James Thornhill and was largely funded by subscribers, who received tickets in the pit and boxes for the first three performances. The fourth performance was at court, as part of Queen Anne's birthday celebrations on 6 February,Footnote ³⁷and there were twelve more performances at Drury Lane before the end of the season. According to John Hawkins, Dieupart played the harpsichord and Nicola Haym the cello for Arsinoe and for Haym's English versions of both Bononcini's Camilla (1706) and Scarlatti's Pyrrhus and Demetrius (1708).Footnote ³⁸ Dieupart and Haym would have played the continuo in these operas and they presumably also did so for the other works in which Mrs Tofts sang – Rosamond and Thomyris (both 1707), Love's Triumph (1708), for which Dieupart arranged the music and composed recitatives, and Clotilda (1709). Indeed, Dieupart and Haym were the leading musicians in the operas until these came to be completely dominated by Italian singers and performed wholly in Italian.

Charles Dieupart certainly acted as Mrs Tofts's principal accompanist, for a petition dated 8 January 1706 that she submitted to the Lord Chamberlain included the demand that ‘Mr Rich must pay Mr Dieupart for his Attendance and performance Upon the Harpsicord 25 times that are due to him of 33 times Catherine Tofts has sung for Mr Rich since her Engagement with him the said Mr Dieupart having Received but for 10 Times and that is to be paid according to Agreement between them’.Footnote ³⁹ Dieupart delivered proposals from Mrs Tofts to the Lord Chamberlain later that same January and was again in negotiations on her behalf in late 1707.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is clear that he acted as her agent, accompanist and repetiteur for several years and he was possibly also her vocal coach. Manley's claim that he was her lover may be true, but we have found no other contemporary gossip about this.

In the Memoirs of Europe Manley makes a feature of the pride of the Harmonious Unfortunate, who says to Don Phæbo, ‘Have you been ungrateful to your Friends? I have not been less thankless to my Benefactors! Have you assum’d a haughty supercilious Look? Have I been more humble?’Footnote ⁴¹ Certainly there were occasions on which Mrs Tofts did not appear at the theatre when her audience expected her to perform. In the subscription concerts at the very beginning of her public career she failed to sing on 14 December 1703 ‘by reason of a great Cold she had then’.Footnote ⁴² However, her petition to Lord Somerset written later that season states that ‘shee had the Misfortune to gett a violent cold during which time shee was forc’d to sing’, which suggests that the noble subscribers did not believe she was really too ill to perform and so forced her to sing in the next concert. In her petition of 8 January 1706 to the Lord Chamberlain she claimed that when she missed a performance in mid-summer 1705 the theatre manager Christopher Rich had ‘Maliciously spread abroad that it was a feigned sickness’.Footnote ⁴³ (Arsinoe had been advertised but not performed on 28 June 1705.) On 15 November 1707 both Tofts and L'Epine refused to sing in an advertised performance of Camilla because of a dispute with the theatre management. Manley, however, refers to a specific, high-profile occasion: ‘Cou’d any thing equal the Pride wherewith I have made the whole Court wait for my Performance? and when I had a Mind to exert my Power, I wou'd totally disappoint 'em’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This may well refer to her behaviour on 9 December 1708 at a rehearsal of the new opera, Pyrrhus and Demetrius, before a select audience. The following day, Lady Wentworth described the occasion to her son in her splendidly phonetic spelling:

‘The house’ was of course the Queen's Theatre, where the operas were being performed.Footnote ⁴⁶

That audiences did turn against Mrs Tofts and that she was hissed at times is borne out by a letter in the Spectator of 29 July 1712 supposedly written by ‘Camilla’, her most popular operatic role. Tofts was then in Venice and the letter describes in glowing terms her success there, where the men in the audience hang on her every note and ‘the Women too do Justice to my Merit, and no ill-natur’d worthless Creature cries, The vain Thing … The Humour of Hissing, which you have among you, I do not know any thing of’. The letter ends: ‘I will not return, but leave you in England to hiss all Merit of your own Growth off the Stage’. Camilla ends with the postscript ‘I am ten times better dress’d than ever I was in England.’

Certainly Mrs Tofts had been dissatisfied with the stage costumes provided for her in London. In a document drawn up by Dieupart for the opera performers in their complaint against Christopher Rich in December 1707, three paragraphs were devoted to complaints by Mrs Tofts about her stage dress. She claimed that Rich bought her only three sets of clothes for four opera roles and that as she was singing principal roles she had been ‘at very great Expenses for several things that the house never allow’d for, as Locks for hair, jewells, ribbons for knotts for the head & body, muslin for vails, gloves shoes washing of vails and head cloaths, and many other things, for which she may modestly affirm that one hundred pounds is not sufficient for the season’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the Memoirs of Europe Manley mocks the Harmonious Unfortunate for living in the extravagantly luxurious style appropriate to her stage roles rather than to her own station in life:

The point is underlined when she comments to her fellow debtor Steele that they are in their present situation because they have lived in a way ‘which neither our Rank nor Fortune ever design’d us for’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Richard Steele, in his persona of ‘Mr Bickerstaff’, had brought out the first issue of the Tatler in April 1709 and in the issue for 24–6 May he had given an amusing report on the recent disappearance of Catherine Tofts from the London stage. His account, which depicts her as living in real life in the luxurious style of the queens and princesses she played on stage, is not malicious and is without the political overtones of Manley's version, where the singer's desire for an extravagant life style is the result of the way in which she was indulged and corrupted by Burnet, the Patriarch of Nova. Steele writes of

‘I was born of Royal Race’ is the opening line of Camilla's first aria in the English version sung by Mrs Tofts and the Italian lines come from the libretto of Il trionfo di Camilla, published in Naples in 1696. The words are not those of a mad song, as has been suggested, but come from the beginning of the opera where Camilla, the daughter of a deposed king, is wandering in the countryside in humble disguise. Steele chose the words not just because they came from the role with which Mrs Tofts was most identified, but also because they provided a neat parallel to her current situation, being forced to live in reduced circumstances in the countryside. Within the small, gossipy world of upper-class London there would have been few who were unaware of the relevance of the words of the aria to Tofts's situation.

We have found nothing at all to suggest that Mrs Tofts suffered at any time from madness before John Hawkins, in his History of Music (1776), interpreted the Tatler report as implying that she had become mentally deranged. He wrote:

Writing in the 1770s, Hawkins was using second-hand information about the state of Catherine Tofts's mental health in 1735, and there seems to be no way of checking the accuracy of this report. Catherine Tofts certainly married Joseph Smith, who became a wealthy merchant, book collector and patron of Canaletto, but he was not appointed as consul at Venice until 1744.Footnote ⁵¹ In August 1715 Hugh Broughton, then Consul in Venice, reported that Smith was hoping to become British Resident there ‘& in such case, M^rs. Tofts the famous Voice who hath been here about 3 or 4 Years is like to be Mad^m. Resident’. A year later, in September 1716, when Smith was one of the candidates to succeed Broughton as consul, Alexander Cunningham wrote ‘As for M^r Smith he is soe much in love w^t M^rs Tofts, y^t he is fitt for nothing at present’, so it is likely to have been at about this time that the marriage took place, after Catherine Tofts had been singing with success in concerts in Italy since 1712.Footnote ⁵² She died in 1756 and it was in that year that Smith gave up his box at the Opera of San Giovanni Crisostomo, near their palazzo on the Grand Canal.Footnote ⁵³ It would seem that his wife remained interested in the art in which she had been a star fifty years earlier. Hawkins was also incorrect in his claim that Catherine Tofts went to Venice with Smith, for Anthony Hammond, newly appointed deputy paymaster of the forces in Spain, encountered her travelling alone on the Continent in July 1711, ‘sick, frighted & tir’d out’ by the unwelcome attentions of a Spanish count.Footnote ⁵⁴

The Memoirs of Europe, of course, shows that there was no gossip about Mrs Tofts having gone mad in 1709, for had this been the case Manley would have seized on it to use against Bishop Burnet. There is not the slightest indication of any mental instability in the portrayal of the Harmonious Unfortunate. In more recent times, Steele's use of the work ‘break’ in his Tatler piece has been taken to refer to mental breakdown, but the word did not have that meaning in the early eighteenth century. Instead, it referred to the state of being ‘broke’ and unable to pay your debts. In Defoe's novel, Moll Flanders's extravagant second husband lands himself in a similar position to that of the Harmonious Unfortunate:

There was the real-life predicament, too, of Owen Swiny, the opera manager of the Queen's Theatre. In the 1712–13 season he spent lavishly on new costumes, sets and machines for Handel's Teseo but failed to obtain a subscription for the opera and managed only to put on two performances. Although the house was full on these two occasions, Swiny did not have enough money to satisfy his creditors, and fled to the Continent to avoid imprisonment for debt. As Colman's Opera Register puts it: ‘after these Two Nights M^r Swiny Brakes & runs away & leaves ye Singers unpaid ye Scenes & Habits also unpaid for’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Colman's words have been misinterpreted as implying that Swiny ran off with the takings, but as the opera company later employed him to engage Italian singers and recommend operas, this was clearly not the case. Elizabeth Gibson, in her article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), restores Swiny's reputation in this respect, stating that he became bankrupt and was compelled to take refuge abroad.

It was not the Tatler's punning phrase ‘break before her Voice’ but the image of the singer wandering among woods and forests singing in Italian that led Hawkins to assume that she lost her reason in May 1709. In the Memoirs of Europe the reason for the country retirement is spelled out:

So the Tatler's ‘involuntary Retirement’ refers to the way Mrs Tofts avoided the creditors who would have arrested her for debt by taking refuge in the country with her lover, the Military Tribune. The little joke about singing in Italian, ‘for Fear of being over-heard, and her Quality known’, does not imply madness but that her creditors would not recognise her if she sang in Italian, since she always performed the role of Camilla in English, even when the foreign members of the cast were singing in Italian.Footnote ⁵⁸

The identity of the Military Tribune, given as ‘Brig. R—s’ in the Key to the Memoirs of Europe, is clarified by a contemporary annotation in the copy at Yale University Library, where the name is completed as ‘Ross’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Charles Ross or Rosse (1667–1732), the second son of the 11th Lord Ross of Halkhead, was a professional soldier who had fought with distinction under King William in Ireland and under the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenarde. In March 1710 he was elected MP for Ross-shire, apparently with support from the Whig interest. A month later he rejoined his regiment in Flanders, where he took part in the Battle of Malplaquet in September. As the younger son of a Scottish peer he was not a rich man and in 1710 was petitioning both the Treasury and Commons for arrears of pay.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the Memoirs of Europe the Harmonious Unfortunate tells Don Phæbo that her protector was sent ‘upon an Expedition against the Vandals’, and she returned to the city to see ‘the Person belov'd’ (Dieupart). There she was seized and hurried off to the sponging house, where her baby was born. She claims that her debts have been discharged and she is only waiting until the proper time has elapsed after the birth before leaving. No more is said about the child, which one assumes was put out to nurse or died, if indeed it existed other than in Manley's fiction.

The developments at the Queen's Theatre in the 1708–9 season explain why Catherine Tofts was likely to have been pursued by her creditors in the spring of 1709. Opera singers were highly paid in comparison to the leading actors, and tradesmen were happy to sell them luxury goods on credit. As the Harmonious Unfortunate says, ‘People petition’d me, that I wou'd please to do 'em the Honour to be in their Debt’.Footnote ⁶¹ In the 1707–8 season Mrs Tofts was still one of the three highest-paid performers, with L'Epine and the castrato Valentino Urbani (Valentini).Footnote ⁶² Things changed in the next season with the advent of the great castrato Cavaliero Nicola Grimaldi (Nicolini), who received twice as much as any other singer. In spring 1709 he signed a contract for three years at 800 guineas a year, as well as an annual benefit and £150 for providing a new Italian opera each season.Footnote ⁶³ In May 1707 John Vanbrugh, then the company manager, had already been negotiating to bring over Nicolini and an Italian female star and wrote to the Earl of Manchester,

Official mourning for the death of Queen Anne's consort, Prince George of Denmark, delayed the opening of the 1708–9 season until 14 December, when Nicolini made his debut on the London stage in the premiere of Pyrrhus and Demetrius. He and Valentini sang the title roles and the 1709 edition of the libretto indicates that Mrs Tofts, as the heroine Climene, sang in Italian in her scenes with them but sang in English in scenes involving the lesser characters. Nicolini was an enormous success and was the singer most often named in newspaper advertisements, which at this time never include a full cast list. There is another sign that the Italians were becoming dominant, for the performance of Pyrrhus and Demetrius on 2 April was advertised with ‘an entire set of new Scenes, Painted by two famous Italian Painters, (lately arriv’d from Venice)’. For the rest of the season these Italian scene painters were included in every advertisement for the opera.Footnote ⁶⁵ The two painters, Marco Ricci and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, came to England through the agency of the Earl of Manchester and Ricci was to paint a number of conversation pieces showing the leading singers and musicians at an opera rehearsal.Footnote ⁶⁶

It is clear that by spring 1709 Mrs Tofts had become less important to the opera management, and the delayed start to the season may well have increased her debts. Her friends among the Whigs continued to support her, for on 17 March Camilla was performed ‘expressly for Lord Marlborough’, according to a letter written by Charles Dering on that day. He went on to gossip about the enormous sum raised by Nicolini for his benefit and the desperation with which Mrs Tofts had been selling tickets for her benefit: ‘She was only sunday last at the Duke of Somerset's, where there was about thirty gentlemen, and every kiss was a guinea. Some took three, others four, others five kisses at that rate, but none less than one. A pretty trade, if it would only last all the year.’Footnote ⁶⁷ This money was clearly insufficient to satisfy her creditors and, with her future career uncertain, they closed in on her just before the end of the season. The Tatler account of the ‘Distresses of the unfortunate Camilla’ was published on 26 May 1709, but we do not know exactly when Mrs Tofts was forced to leave London. A performance of Camilla was advertised for 21 May, so the Tatler report must indicate that either she did not sing in that performance or that it was common knowledge that she had disappeared immediately afterwards. There was only one more opera performance in the season, on 28 May, when Pyrrhus and Demetrius was performed with an additional three arias for Nicolini, perhaps included to compensate for cuts in the role usually taken by Catherine Tofts.Footnote ⁶⁸

It has been assumed that Mrs Tofts did not perform in London after May 1709, but it is quite possible that she returned in the autumn. The first opera performed at the Queen's Theatre in the 1709–10 season was Camilla, on 20 October. The newspaper advertisements mention only Nicolini, but in view of the identification of Mrs Tofts with the title role one would expect any replacement in that part to be named, as had happened in February 1709 when L'Epine took over the part for three performances.Footnote ⁶⁹ The 1709–10 season saw revivals of Camilla, Thomyris and Pyrrhus and Demetrius and the premieres of Almahide (10 January) and Hydaspes (23 March). Both of the new operas were sung completely in Italian, apart from comic interludes in Almahide performed by English stage singers. There was no part for Mrs Tofts in either of the new operas, but her name appears in two lists of the personnel of the Queen's Theatre Company, in early November 1709 and in January 1710.Footnote ⁷⁰ The singer known as the Baroness, who had sung in the operas since 1706, is also in both lists and presumably retained her own roles in Camilla, Thomyris and Pyrrhus and Demetrius, but she too did not sing in the new operas, where the female roles were taken by the newly arrived Isabella Girardeau and by Margherita de L'Epine, who had created roles in the operas from Thomyris onwards. Girardeau figures only in the January list of personnel and appears to have made her debut in Almahide. It therefore seems very likely that Mrs Tofts remained in the company at least until after the performance of Camilla on 13 December. After this, that opera was not performed again in London for seven years. There were serious financial problems in the Queen's Theatre company in 1709–10, so it is likely that Tofts was discarded after the arrival of Girardeau, who could have taken over her roles in the performances of Thomyris and Pyrrhus and Demetrius in the latter part of the season.

When writing the second volume of the Memoirs of Europe in the summer or early autumn of 1710 Mrs Manley did not see the career of Mrs Tofts as irretrievably over. The Harmonious Unfortunate says: ‘Had not I it in my Power to make my Fortune? nay, still have, cou’d I be but perswaded to part with my Pride, and be submissive and thankful to the Town for their Favours.’Footnote ⁷¹ However, she could not have continued in the opera company, for this was now a completely Italian affair. Even Charles Dieupart lost his place at the opera at the beginning of the 1710–11 season, for on 17 November 1710, a long-standing viola player in the theatre orchestra, William Armstrong, wrote to Nicolini:

By now, opera audiences were requiring constant novelty and in the 1710–11 season it was the newly arrived Italian singers who were advertised rather than Nicolini. According to Colley Cibber, then a leading actor at the Queen's, the appeal of the operas quickly came to depend on novelty ‘and that Novelty could never be supported but by an annual Change of the best Voices, which like the finest Flowers, bloom but for a Season, and when that is over, are only dead Nose-gays’.Footnote ⁷³

Mrs Tofts left England in July 1711 and when Anthony Hammond encountered her in Holland she told him that she was on her way to Hanover, in the hope of performing in operas there with Valentini.Footnote ⁷⁴ She was travelling as ‘Mrs Smith’, but it seems impossible to know whether this was because she was already in a relationship with Joseph Smith or had assumed a common English name to avoid creditors or unwelcome attention. It is not known whether she visited Hanover, but by the spring of 1712 she was singing successfully in Venice, for according to a newspaper report from that city dated 16 April 1712 ‘an English Gentlewoman named Mrs. Tofts hath been much applauded here for her fine Singing’.Footnote ⁷⁵ She did not return to England and after her marriage to Joseph Smith would have had no more financial problems. Ironically, it was Mrs Manley who was to have difficulties with debt, particularly after the death of Queen Anne in 1714 and the resultant recovery of power by the Whigs. Harley sent her £50 in June 1714 (she had asked for £100), but she wrote a further begging letter in August, writing ‘The Bill your Lordship was so good to send me, went immediately to quiet uneasy Creditors; and now I have nothing but a starving scene before me’.Footnote ⁷⁶

That Catherine Tofts appears as she does in Manley's chroniques scandaleuses is indicative of the fashionable and glamorous image Italian-style opera in London had acquired by the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century. Manley also included two other singers from the opera company in these works. The dark-complexioned Margherita de L'Epine appears very briefly in The New Atalantis, i, 172, as a ‘singing Creature at the Opera, whom no body else could admire’. There, ‘Margretta’ is shown receiving large sums of money from a ‘grave Seignior’, the Earl of Nottingham, whose strong anti-Jacobite views had put him out of favour with Harley. Mary Lindsey, a mezzo-soprano who took character parts in almost all the operas in which Tofts sang, appears twice in spicy lesbian sex scenes with Lady Wharton, the wife of the Whig lord lieutenant of Ireland, as ‘warbling Lindamire’ and as ‘Philomela, a Nymph agreeable for her Voice and the knack she had in pleasing Ariadne [Lady Wharton]’.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, unlike Mrs Tofts, neither of these two singers is given a life history, developed as a character, or allowed to speak. Indeed, the episode of the Harmonious Unfortunate can be seen as a fore-runner of the semi-fictionalised biographies of leading female singers that were to appear later in the century, from The life of Lavinia Beswick, alias Fenton, alias Polly Peachum (1728) to the Memoirs of Mrs Billington (1792). The extensive use of Catherine Tofts in The Memoirs of Europe not only allows us, with appropriate caution, to glean information about her life and musical background, but also emphasises both her star status and her crucial role in the introduction of Italian opera to London.