I

On 1 August 1740, the tenor Thomas Salway,Footnote ¹ in character as a blind bard, strode out into the centre of a grass amphitheatre high above the River Thames at Cliveden, the home of Frederick, prince of Wales, in Buckinghamshire and started to sing:

These words have become a touchstone of British national identity. Alfred, written by the Anglo-Scots David Mallet and James Thomson, has long been recognized as a political performance, and has traditionally been seen as a dramatization of the ideas contained within Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke's ‘Idea of a Patriot King’.Footnote ³ By reconstituting the masque and its first audience in the specific contexts of August 1740, this article argues that this performance was not simply an expression of Bolingbroke's political philosophy, but was an attempt to create a unified opposition to the men and measures of Sir Robert Walpole, and the prince's father, King George II. Alfred was a cultural expression of Patriot political thought designed to respond to the two problems which faced this group in August 1740: the deaths of William Wyndham and Earl Marchmont, and the successful conduct of war with Spain.

To understand how a ninth-century Anglo-Saxon king could be used as a powerful pedagogic tool during a time of schism and crisis within the Patriot Opposition to Walpole we need first to explore the emergence of this particular movement; second to understand their creative use of the English past throughout the 1730s; and third to understand why, by the summer of 1740, the Patriots were in crisis. Against this background, this article will use newly discovered eyewitness accounts to suggest a revised interpretation of Alfred: a masque.

II

To be a Patriot in the 1730s was to oppose vigorously Sir Robert Walpole's pursuit of a European peace at the expense of British trade and his use of positions and placemen to control the House of Commons. It was also to oppose the expansion of the National Debt, the subsidy of foreign troops at the expense of British naval expansion, and to lament the corruption of the balanced constitution of King, Lords, and Commons. Patriots looked forward to achieving an end to party, through a broad-bottom alliance between disenchanted Whigs and Tories, and a thriving mercantile economy supported by an assertive maritime foreign policy, ready to be led by a future Patriot King, Frederick prince of Wales. These issues and aspirations were to provide the political inspiration for a series of cultural endeavours supported by the prince and his followers, which explains why Thomson and Mallet chose the life and reign of King Alfred as suitable for dramatization.

Thanks to Christine Gerrard's pioneering work it has become a scholarly commonplace to speak of the ‘Patriot Opposition to Walpole’.Footnote ⁴ However, as her work suggests, we must be wary of falling foul of the unifying images of an expansive mercantile economy and heightened imperialist ambitions presented in the pages of opposition newspapers, the plays and poems of authors such as Thomson, Mallet, James Hammond, and Gilbert West, and the landscapes of estates like Stowe, Cirencester Park, and Carlton House. That Walpole remained in office until 1742 was due to a combination of personal ambition, personal antipathy, and personal principles amongst the leading figures of the Patriot Opposition.

Frustrated, isolated, and, by autumn 1737, penniless, Lord Stair looked back over the uneven political terrain of the 1730s and identified four men and one event as crucial to the emergence of a Patriot Opposition in Lords, Commons, and out-of-doors. The duke of Montrose, the earl of Chesterfield, and Earl Marchmont ‘were the Gentle-men that at the time of the Excise Scheme first Set up the Standard against S^r R's Measures, with the advice and assistance of another very worthy man … L^d Cobham’.Footnote ⁵ These lords of the opposition were suspicious of the Excise Bill with its proposed provision of extensive search powers to customs officials, which threatened the sanctity of an Englishman's right to privacy in his own property.Footnote ⁶ To the bill's opponents, Walpole's scheme promised to ‘advance the power of y^e Crown to the prejudice of our Constitution’ and be ‘Destructive of the affection of the people to the King which…[is] the surest foundation upon which the Protestant succession is built’. Stair played an active role in opposing the bill, so as ‘to give an Example of disinterest'd virtue to our fellow Subjects, that they might join w^t us to preserve our Constitution and the Liberties of our Country, both of which we Judged to be struck at by the Excise Scheme’.Footnote ⁷ Throughout the crisis, the unwritten ancient constitution and the protean concept of English liberties were the building blocks of opposition rhetoric.

Walpole, however, dropped the Excise Bill before it came in front of the House of Lords. Deprived of their original target, the opposition peers fastened on a proposal for an enquiry into the use of lands forfeited by South Sea Company directors.Footnote ⁸ As a consequence, Walpole removed seven peers from their positions, and in the process created a new opposition figurehead in Richard Temple, Lord Cobham. Removed from office, Cobham retired to his country estate at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, where he embellished the landscape with potent political symbolism, and ‘became a recruiting officer of rising young talent for the opposition’.Footnote ⁹ This group of young men, pejoratively labelled ‘Boy Patriots’ or ‘Cobham's Cubs’, included Cobham's nephews Richard Grenville and George Lyttelton; Lyttelton's brother-in-law Thomas Pitt, and his brother, future Prime Minister William Pitt; whilst others, such as Hugh Hume Campbell, Lord Polwarth, and Henry Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, eddied around this core.Footnote ¹⁰ For those politicians and courtiers opposed to Walpole, the possibility of a politically active court centred around the heir to the throne provided not only respectability, but also the prospect of immense rewards when their heir became the king.

Frederick, prince of Wales, has suffered at the hands of historians who have struggled to escape the shadow of his premature death, nine years before his father, in 1751.Footnote ¹¹ It is only in recent years that a full re-evaluation of the prince's political and cultural activities in life, and influence in death has revealed the crucial position he played in mid-eighteenth-century Britain.Footnote ¹² Historians have finally moved away from a reliance on eminently quotable yet distinctly partial sources such as Lord Hervey's Memoirs of the reign of King George II and Henry Etough's Free and impartial reflexions on the character, life, and death of Frederick prince of Wales.Footnote ¹³ In place of the ‘Poor Fred’ of previous generations,Footnote ¹⁴ the prince can now be seen as an important political and cultural figurehead, a patron of the arts, and the most important royal collector since King Charles I.Footnote ¹⁵ This artistic revival was, in turn, one of the ways in which the prince bound himself to the Patriot Opposition, with artistic exchange forging a common identity among Frederick's circle. Poets and playwrights, artists and architects were drawn to Frederick, not solely for pecuniary gain, but because they shared a vision of national recovery founded upon enlightened royal patronage of the arts.Footnote ¹⁶

Born in Hanover in 1707, Frederick had acted as the ceremonial head of the Hanoverian court during the long absences of his grandfather, George I. The prince did not arrive in England until 1728, for his father was loath to bring Frederick across the North Sea, fearing he prove a magnet for disaffected courtiers. Indeed, it was the young prince's relationship with his father that was to define his political and cultural life. It had been clear since the time of the Excise Crisis in 1733 that any proposal for increasing the prince's annual income would cause an open break with the king, thanks to an unwritten assumption, understood by all parties, that any increase in the size of the prince's household or his allowance through the Civil List covered not just personal expenses but provided a considerable war chest for political patronage.

With his marriage to Augusta in 1736 and impending birth of his first child, Frederick's claims for a yearly allowance of £100,000 came to a head at the start of 1737's parliamentary session. The administration, fearful they could lose the Commons’ vote, especially given the king's long absence in Hanover,Footnote ¹⁷ presented a compromise to the prince, which he rejected. Pulteney spoke for the prince in the Commons, while in the Lords, Carteret ‘drew a sort of comparison between Edward the Black Prince and the present Prince of Wales – said that this prince was like him in his humanity and virtue, and he wished him in every respect such as he was, excepting the shortness of life’.Footnote ¹⁸ Frederick's breach with king, court, and administration was made absolute by the circumstances of Princess Augusta's birth on 1 August 1737.Footnote ¹⁹ As Augusta entered labour late on 31 July, Frederick rushed her from Hampton Court to St James's Palace, distancing his parents from the birth. Frederick's impetuousness shocked both members of his household and the court. His father banned him from all royal palaces and declared that those who attended the prince would not be welcome at court.

Sir William Irby, Princess Augusta's vice-chamberlain, feared for the coherence of the opposition. ‘There are Hot ones about him, who will never rest till they make things desperate.’ He believed that the moderate members of the prince's household would be ‘made Fools to a set of Desperate Men who endeavour to blow him up, & ruin him’ arguing that ‘Your Carterets & your Chesterfields consider their own Spleen Preferable to our Masters real Good, Let him act like a Man in his Cause but let him not be led away a Fool to any Party’.Footnote ²⁰ Chesterfield wrote to Lyttelton in November, suggesting that with the prince at the head of an organized opposition in both houses of parliament, and out–of-doors, ‘We have a prospect of the Claud Lorraine kind before us, while Sir Robert's has all the horrors of Salvator Rosa. If the prince would play the Rising Sun he would gild it finely; if not he will never be able hereafter to shine through.’Footnote ²¹

The opposition politicians who clustered around Frederick were, however, uncertain as to the prince's capabilities, forcing Lyttelton to write to Alexander Pope, ‘Animate him to virtue, to the virtue least known to princes, though most necessary for them – love of the public – and think that the morals, the liberty, the whole happiness of the country depends on your success.’Footnote ²² Not that the prince seemed all that concerned. Irby complained that ‘Cricket & a Succession of Royall Diversions’ prevented him from his correspondence;Footnote ²³ and Martin Madan, one of the prince's equerries,Footnote ²⁴ remarked of Kew that ‘this Palace is the seat of Chearfulness, no one here ever frowns but at the Thought of Hampton Court’.Footnote ²⁵ However, the proximity of Kew to Hampton Court inclined Frederick to find a new country residence. When the earl of Orkney died in 1737, Frederick leased his home, Cliveden, from Orkney's daughter Lady Anne Inchiquin for £600 per year.Footnote ²⁶

III

For Thomson and Mallet's Alfred to function as both a didactic tool and a political statement in August 1740 it needed to build upon connections already established between Frederick, prince of Wales, the Patriot Opposition to Walpole, and the English past. The third section of this article explores how throughout the 1730s and into the 1740s Patriot political thought could operate across a variety of different genres, including landscape and drama.

The most famous of these Patriot landscapes was Lord Cobham's at Stowe, designed to provide pertinent political comment on Sir Robert Walpole's administration.Footnote ²⁷ Frederick visited Stowe in July 1737, and Cobham commemorated the occasion in the Temple of Friendship, constructed from 1739, which celebrated in stone, sculpture, and paint the Patriot Opposition's vision for national recovery. Busts of Lord Cobham, Frederick, the earls of Westmorland, Chesterfield, and Marchmont, Lords Gower and Bathurst, Richard Grenville, William Pitt, and George Lyttelton were placed around the room and an emblematic painting by Sleter of Britannia comparing the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and Edward III with the debased rule of George II completed the ensemble.Footnote ²⁸ The Elysian Fields, inspired by the ancient landscape of Tivoli, has consistently been interpreted as a demonstration of a new form of Patriot politics, inspired by both a classical and English past, and designed to counteract the endemic corruption and degeneracy of the Walpole administration. The Temple of Ancient Virtue, completed in 1736, containing full-length statues of Homer, Socrates, Epaminondas, and Lycurgus, provided inspiration from the classical past. Positioned across the ‘River Styx’, the Temple of British Worthies was a domestic counterpoint. The epitaphs for each of the Worthies functioned collectively to rewrite English history with past liberties secured against external threats by a band of selfless Patriots. King Alfred featured prominently as the wellspring of liberty:

What the figure of Alfred offered Frederick and his political allies was a standard of kingship against which his father could consistently be found wanting. If Alfred, as the gardens at Stowe proclaimed, ‘crush'd corruption’ and ‘guarded liberty’, George II and Walpole promoted venality and encouraged tyranny. Whereas Alfred was believed to have founded the Royal Navy, promoted trade, and ensured the nation's maritime security, contemporary governmental foreign policy was believed by Cobham and his allies to be too pacific and inappropriately European. Alfred, therefore, was both a stick with which to beat the administration and a figure that offered the possibility of a reformation of the role of the monarchy through a restoration of idealized Anglo-Saxon values.

Frederick also visited Lord Bathurst's estate at Cirencester Park in autumn 1738, where the convivial bond of friendship was likewise expressed through architecture. Bathurst, like Cobham, was an enthusiastic gardener and had been ornamenting his landscape with the help of Alexander Pope from the early 1720s. By the summer of 1733 he had created a Gothic banqueting house, known as King Alfred's Hall.Footnote ²⁹ Mrs Pendarves wryly observed that ‘My Lord Bathurst has greatly improved the wood-house … It is now a venerable castle, and has been taken by an antiquarian for one of King Arthur's’,Footnote ³⁰ suggesting a more generalized association with the remote British past, rather than a specific engagement with a highly politicized historical figure.Footnote ³¹

Throughout these landscapes there is an emphasis on networks of friendship and political patronage. These landscapes were not just a result of these friendships but also a crucial original element in creating links. The process of design bound members of the Patriot Opposition together in a collaborative exercise, and one that Frederick was eager to be an active participant in.

Frederick, adopting the iconography developed at Stowe, willingly promoted himself as a latter-day Alfred through the garden of his London residence, Carlton House.Footnote ³² The garden, ‘more diversified and of greater variety than anything of that compass’, contained within it an overt political statement.Footnote ³³ The Octagon Temple, decorated by some of the pre-eminent craftsmen of the day, was a showcase of the prince's various artistic interests.Footnote ³⁴ Standing in ‘the neaches in the Pavillion’ were ‘two Bustows of king Alfred and the black prince’ provided by Michael Rysbrack.Footnote ³⁵ Their commissioning and installation was perceived as a political act with both pro-Walpole and opposition newspapers passing comment.Footnote ³⁶ The Daily Gazetteer carried a Latin tribute to Frederick, ‘on recently erecting one statue to Alfred the Great another to Edward’, which prophesized that ‘blessed England will rejoice in your kingdom, and broken France will fear a victorious leader. One day Virtue and Piety will know you as a patron, and the Laws, and the Muses too, will know you as their own.’Footnote ³⁷ The same day the Craftsman, in a lengthy article discussing the antiquity of parliament, suggested that Frederick's recent adoption of Alfredian iconography, ‘gives us an happy Presage that He will think Himself under an Obligation, whenever He comes to the Throne, to preserve the Liberties of our antient Constitution’.Footnote ³⁸ The figure of the Black Prince, used by Pulteney in his Commons’ speech to emphasize Frederick's potential and future promise, and at Carlton House acted in tandem with Alfred, as Barbara Gribling has suggested, to highlight the prince's dissatisfaction with the Walpole administration's ‘conciliatory stance towards Catholic France and the ministry's reluctance to wage war on Spain’.Footnote ³⁹

Acting as powerful visual mnemonics of the threat posed to the ancient constitution by the Walpole administration, the landscapes of the Patriot Opposition were complemented by dramatic action on the London stage. Members of the opposition bound themselves tightly to these theatrical performances. Lord Barrington, for example, was keen to extend such pedagogic drama further, asking Mallet for a prologue and epilogue to a schoolboy performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, but cautioned him that, ‘the Schoolmaster having the Sons of Courtiers, as well as the Brothers of Patriots at his School, beggs there may not be any offensive flights in praise of Liberty & honesty’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Political controversy was not just limited to the Patent Theatres and children's plays, as Frederick had earlier supported the Opera of the Nobility from its inception in 1733 as a riposte to George II and Handel's Royal Academy of Music.Footnote ⁴¹

In the summer of 1738, despite private doubts in Frederick's household about his suitability as a leader, the prince chose David Mallet's Mustapha to open a fearsome theatrical attack on Walpole's ministry.Footnote ⁴² A Patriot prince, Mustapha, alienated from his father, King Solyman the Magnificent, by the machinations of the empress and her evil favourite, and subsequently executed, required little imagination on the part of the audience to uncover the political message. If Mustapha was the arrowhead of the Patriot attack, Thomson's Edward and Eleonora, Henry Brooke's Gustavus Vasa: the deliverer of his country, and William Paterson's Arminius provided the flanking wings. Yet, the censor counteracted the opposition assault. A little over a month after the first performance of Mustapha, Brooke's Gustavus Vasa became the first play to be banned under the provisions of the 1737 Licensing Act. As is often the case, prohibition only increased interest in what was otherwise an unremarkable play, with Brooke clearing a profit of over £800.Footnote ⁴³ Thomson's Agamemnon had been the only new play performed during the 1737–8 season, where the straightforward equation of Agamemnon with George II, Aegisthus with Walpole, and Clytemnestra with Queen Caroline had passed the censor.Footnote ⁴⁴ He was not to be so lucky the next season. Thomson's Edward and Eleonora in many ways prefigures elements of Alfred with its presentation of a princess's ‘inviolable Affection and generous Tenderness for a Prince, who was the Darling of a great and free People’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The censor's objections lay in the discussion of the future Edward I's accession to the throne, for mendacious courtiers and evil favourites surround his father, Henry III. Thomson included an ‘Advertisement’ – ‘The Representation of this Tragedy, on the Stage, was prohibited in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty-Nine’ – the Gothic type face acting as a powerful visual stimulus to the reader to recall the danger posed to the ancient constitution.Footnote ⁴⁶ The lord chamberlain also banned Arminius in January 1740. Patterson had clearly read his Rapin, as English constitutionalism emerges from Teutonic forests:

Frederick, the modern-day Arminius, had emerged from the forests of Hanover to become the figurehead of a new movement of national regeneration, fighting against the degenerate influence of the Roman tyrant, Sir Robert Walpole.

IV

On 17 June 1740, Lord Hervey wrote to Count Algarotti at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin to inform him that ‘S^r William Windham has been seized with an apoplectic-Fit since you left England … What Alteration this will make in our political World here, I know as little as you care.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Hervey only hinted at the chaos Wyndham's death would plunge the Patriot Opposition into.

By 1740, Wyndham occupied a central position in the Patriot Opposition to Walpole. He offered the possibility of removing a sufficiently large number of dissident Whigs to form a broad-bottom ministry with the Tories, and thereby provide the numerical strength required to counter Walpole in both houses of parliament.Footnote ⁴⁹ With Wyndham's death, however, members of the prince's inner circle felt this opportunity to be lost forever. Pope informed Hugh, Earl Marchmont, that ‘If I see any man merry within a week after this death, I will affirm him no Patriot.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Lyttelton was worried that the prince would not be able to manage the group of Tories previously orchestrated by Wyndham, and that an alliance with a corps of disaffected Whigs would be impossible to achieve.

Bolingbroke, in his reply, asserted the need for a concerted attempt at preserving a broad-bottom Patriot coalition during the parliamentary recess of summer 1740.

Indeed, despite their combative programme of drama on the London stage, members of the Patriot Opposition continued to express concern for the coherence of the movement. Its members, the duke of Queensberry asserted, ran into the country at the end of parliamentary sessions, ‘and in appearance laying aside their patriotism with their winter clothes, to be put on again at the return of the season’.Footnote ⁵⁴ As parliament debated the Convention of Pardo, designed to prevent war, settle the commercial differences between Britain and Spain, and seen by the opposition as the highpoint of Walpole's pacific policy, Frederick could not ensure the unanimity of his household: his treasurer, Charles Montagu of Papplewick, for example, voted in favour of it.

The letters of the Patriots in the immediate run up to the first performance of Alfred: a masque were full of calls to action, reminders of the task in hand, and naïve reassurances that there were to be brighter days ahead. For Alexander Pope, however, it was too little too late, and he launched a stinging satire against the Patriot Opposition in his unfinished poem, ‘One Thousand Seven Hundred and Forty’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Patriots are indolent, reduced to proud, ineffectual fools with the death of Wyndham:

The only hope in Pope's poem, ‘on one alone our all relies’, is Frederick. Pope pleads with the prince of Wales:

It was against Pope's exhortation for Frederick to lead that Alfred was first performed.

IV

On 2 August, the London Daily Post and General Advertiser reported the performance of a new masque, ‘of two Acts, taken from the various fortunes of Alfred the Great, by Mr Thomson’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The following day, the newspaper commented on how, ‘Their Royal Highnesses were so well pleas'd with the whole Entertainment, that he commanded the same to be perform'd’ the following evening,Footnote ⁵⁷ inspiring the London Evening Post to remark that

Subsequent discussion of the masque's first two performances at Cliveden has relied extensively on a small handful of newspaper reports in the mistaken belief that no relevant accounts or correspondence survive. Yet, these newspaper reports clearly suggest that the audience was composed of members of Frederick's court, and buried amongst the voluminous correspondence of these individuals are accounts of the Cliveden performances.

Writing to his wife, Judith, Martin Madan (one of the prince's equerries) related how:

Madan went on to relate how the masque was followed by a ‘great Dance, in which the celebrated Barbinni perform'd’ and ‘a French Farce & a Pantomime Scene’ before a performance of ‘the Judgement of Paris, of Congreve, set to Musick by Martini’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The whole event lasted six hours, concluding with a firework display orchestrated by Frederick's chaplain Dr Desaguliers. The famous Signora Le Barbarini may well have been the main attraction for many members of Frederick's court.Footnote ⁶¹

If Barberini was one attraction, the other came in the form of the outdoor theatre, constructed from Charles Bridgeman's grass amphitheatre.Footnote ⁶² Madan continued to his wife, Judith:

But despite these distractions, the ‘noble Lesson’ succeeded in awaking patriotic fervour in the audience. Writing to Lord Guilford two weeks after the event, Bussy, 4th Baron Mansel, observed:

For the basic contours of the plot, Mallet and Thomson drew heavily from Paul de Rapin-Thoyras's account of the king's reign in his hugely popular History of England. Both authors were familiar with the Anglo-Saxon king. Alfred had featured in Thomson's Britain: being the fourth part of Liberty, a poem in 1736, in a traditional pantheon of Patriot Whig heroes alongside Edward III, Henry V, Elizabeth I, Algernon Sidney, and William III;Footnote ⁶⁵ in his preface to a new edition of John Milton's Areopagitica in 1738 as the original defender of freedom of writing and publishing;Footnote ⁶⁶ and he would revise parts of The seasons in 1743 to include Alfred, ‘the best of kings’.Footnote ⁶⁷ David Mallet used Alfred in a comparative historical and political framework in his Life of Bacon in 1740. In contrast to James I, Alfred was a monarch who encouraged learning and the spirit of liberty.Footnote ⁶⁸

Alfred was imbued with a far greater degree of specificity than scholars have hitherto noted. Too often the masque has been reduced to a straightforward espousal of Bolingbroke's ‘Idea of a Patriot King’.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, there are no mentions of this slim treatise, composed in manuscript during the autumn of 1738, with a deliberately limited circulation, in any of the private correspondence of this period.Footnote ⁷⁰ This scholarly obsession with Bolingbroke, moreover, has diverted attention from one of the more striking elements of the performances of August 1740, the conscious and deliberate use of the term ‘masque’. Arne had provided the music for a successful revival of John Milton's Comus for the London stage in 1738,Footnote ⁷¹ but the inspiration for Alfred was rooted much more closely in the masque tradition of the Jacobean and Caroline periods. The masques of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were interactive entertainments, which relied on the participation of their audience for effect. Intriguingly, one newspaper report recorded that ‘Mr. Essex’ composed the ‘Dances’, which whilst in all probability referring to the movements of the actors, offers the possibility for further audience engagement.Footnote ⁷² The use of this genre would have appealed to Frederick, who modelled his artistic patronage and collecting on that of Charles I, repatriating much of the royal collection that had been dispersed under the Commonwealth.Footnote ⁷³

Thomson and Mallet may have met Bolingbroke while he was staying with Pope during the autumn/winter of 1738–9, and whilst the masque shares images of national regeneration under a virtuous king with Bolingbroke's treatise, these ideas were part of a common currency of Patriot thought, and should not be ascribed solely to Bolingbroke's influence. Instead, Mallet and Thomson wrote the text in response to the sense of crisis that was, by summer 1740, pervasive among members of the Patriot Opposition, especially given the success of war with Spain and the victory of Admiral Vernon at Portobello, which offered Walpole the opportunity to claim back the opposition's maritime posturing for the administration. Many of the problems relating to the play's later performances relate to this specificity of context, and the unique circumstances of the garden theatre at Cliveden. Furthermore, the significance of the date has largely been overlooked. Not only was 1 August the anniversary of Frederick's grandfather, George I's accession to the throne, and thus a celebration of the original principles of Hanoverian kingship; but in commemorating Princess Augusta's birthday, Alfred celebrated a pivotal moment in the recent history of the Patriot Opposition, Frederick's removal from Hampton Court and formal break with his father. For the audience, the date of the first performance, combined with its Cliveden setting, powerfully restated the reasons for their political position at a time when the fragile coherence of the movement seemed to be splintering.

Turning to the plot of the masque, these occasional hints become more apparent. Alfred, ‘in this universal dejection’, retires to Athelney, just as melancholy Patriots decamped to Cliveden. Bridgeman's amphitheatre, cut into the side of the steep hill dropping down to the Thames, offered expansive views to the fertile floodplain below, and was surrounded by woods, providing the perfect pastoral setting.Footnote ⁷⁴ Throughout the masque, characters frequently draw attention to the views, showing Frederick the land he will one day rule, but which is currently suffering. The earl of Devon, for example, points to a hill at the eastern extent of the scenic backdrop, where ‘some devouring fire/ That ruins without mercy where it spreads‘Footnote ⁷⁵ originates. From Cliveden's amphitheatre it is still just possible to see the outline of Windsor Castle to the east. Moreover, the pastoral setting goes some way to explaining why Mallet and Thomson chose to dramatize a period of Alfred's reign when he was ‘at once abandoned by all his subjects’. In choosing the episode in which Alfred retires to the shepherd's hut, Mallet and Thomson were returning to an older English source, the ballad ‘King Alfred and the Shepherd’.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the ballad, Alfred has gone out disguised as a peasant to seek out some of his citizens. In the masque, these citizens become political mouthpieces.

Act i, scene I opens with a shepherd Corin, and his wife Emma, in a pastoral setting identified as the Isle of Athelney (Alfred's last stronghold against the Danish invaders). The shepherds, in a clear nod to Patriot concerns regarding corruption, note that ‘heaven forbid, / A British man should ever count for gain, / What villainy must earn.’ Frederick, forbidden by his father from military service and aware of contemporary Spanish depredations in the Caribbean, sees his keenly felt political indolence find its dramatic mouthpiece in Alfred:

The earl of Devon, unwilling to pander to his sovereign's misery, reminds him that there is but one castle that is still English, from which it is possible to launch a counterattack. It is significant, given Frederick's experience the year previously with members of his household voting with the administration, that Thomson and Mallet should highlight the loyalty of Alfred's courtiers. Alfred, revived, is reminded by Devon to hold back from rash acts, for

The connection with Frederick, sitting in the audience with his wife, three-year-old daughter, and eighteenth-month-old son, would have been clearly apparent to members of the audience. In scene III Alfred is instructed by ‘two aerial spirits unseen’ that the greatest of heroes are those who show patience and forbearance, but that the present moment is the right time to act. Lyttelton, Pope, Marchmont and Stair's letters had, since August 1737, been full of similar exhortations. Alfred reflects on these sentiments in Scene iv, before meeting a ‘Thrice-happy Hermit’ of whom he demands, ‘Say what remains, / What yet remains to save our prostrate country?’ Fortunately the Hermit, well versed in the rhetoric of the Patriot Opposition, provides Alfred with a vision of national recovery.

The second act included a discourse between Alfred and the Hermit on the subject of paternal affection, a fitting subject as the masque was ostensibly performed to celebrate Princess Augusta's birthday, and an area in which the House of Hanover hardly excelled. Summoned by the Genius of England, Alfred's illustrious successors are presented to the audience. The first three shapes to appear on the stage are the spirits of Edward III, Philippa, his queen, and the Black Prince, his son. Edward, ‘Matchless in arms; in arts of peaceful rule’, to whom ‘Proud France, even now, thro all her dukedoms quakes’, was not just a military hero, but crucially held his royal family together through respect for his ambitious son. The Hermit instructs Alfred to ‘Remember then, / What to thy infant sons from thee is due, / As parent and as prince.’ Philippa is presented to Eltruda as ‘the best of wives’, whose ‘noblest charms’ she must transmit to ‘that fair daughter, that unfolding rose, / With which, as on this day, heaven crown'd your loves’. Frederick, parading his legal wife and legitimate children and celebrating his daughter's birthday, was a far more suitable inheritor of this perfect Patriot family than the widowed George II, overseas in Hanover, visiting his mistress Lady Yarmouth and their four-year-old son, Johann Ludwig.

With the lesson in family management complete, Elizabeth I replaces the perfect Patriot family. The Hermit details her creation both of an empire against a backdrop of universal animosity and religious strife, and of a culture under which the arts flourished. Alfred, understandably curious, asks the Hermit how this queen was able to achieve such things. With the political vacuum created by Wyndham's death, Elizabeth's successes offered Frederick a guide. As the Hermit relates, Elizabeth, ‘By ever seizing the right point of view, / Her truest interest’ pursues this through the organs of the state and against ‘The storm of opposition.’ She is advised by ‘various worthies glowing round her’ and yet ‘Still shines the first’ in contrast to those monarchs who are the ‘passive property of [their] own creatures’. But most of all, she is loved by her people.

As the spirit of William III rises, the Hermit takes time to discuss the failings of James II, ‘the slave of dreaming monks’, who was ‘fond of lawless rule’, before launching into a panegyric to ‘Immortal William’,Footnote ⁸⁰ after whose reign ‘Shall Britain date her rights and laws restor'd’, before alluding to Frederick's grandfather, George I. With the vision complete, and Alfred's confidence restored, the earl of Devon returns with news of an English victory. He relates how, on sneaking through the Danish lines in disguise, he returned to his troops, ‘They with a fierce / And gloomy joy inspirited each other; / Resolv'd on death, disdaining to survive / Their dearest country’. Such fatalism found its modern day contemporaries in the members of Frederick's court. Devon, however, succeeds in inspiring them to triumph over ‘the careless drousy camp’ of the Danes.

The final scene of the masque reunites Alfred with Corin and Emma. The king leaves his wife with Emma and the Hermit, and, apostrophizing to God, pledges to ‘finish thy great work, and save my country’. The Hermit then introduces an ‘Aged and blind’ Bard who starts to sing ‘Rule Britannia!’ To reinforce the message of an expansionist, global empire, the Hermit adds an epilogue:

The masque, therefore, was a response to a specific crisis that threatened the unity and coherence of the opposition. In powerfully restating the Patriot's core, political tenets Thomson and Mallet's masque looked forward, on one level, to a global empire, and, on another, to a coherent assault on the polls for the 1741 general election. Yet the masque, with its celebration of sea-power, might also have been an attempt by the Patriot Opposition to appropriate the government's success in the early stages of war with Spain. News of Admiral Vernon's victory at Portobello reached England in March 1740 and Vernon swiftly became the popular hero of the day,Footnote ⁸² swiftly eclipsing Frederick's star, which had been burnished by his royal progresses through the West Country where he presented himself at the centre of the modern fashionable world, professing his loyalty to the patriotic causes of English trade and English liberty. Court Whigs had been quick to highlight Vernon's victory as ‘proof of the vision and sagacity of ministerial war policy’, whereas Patriot Whigs and Tories were swift to claim Portobello as vindications of their ‘prescriptions for a vigorous and aggressive war policy and a purified body politic’.Footnote ⁸³Alfred embodied the opposition's interpretation of Portobello in masque form.

The performance was a popular topic of conversation. ‘A subject I have heard a great deal of’, wrote Jemima, Marchioness Grey, ‘is the Entertainment at Cliefden.’

The political hints were not just apparent to the masque's first two audiences, but to readers of the printed version available two weeks after its private debut.Footnote ⁸⁵ Frances, countess of Hertford, observed

Hertford felt that attempts to disguise political comment were so transparent as to draw further attention to them.Footnote ⁸⁷ Elizabeth Montagu was likewise unconvinced. She had first written to her sister, from Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire (eight miles from Cliveden), in early August that:

Montagu's Mr. Grenville could be either of Lord Cobham's nephews, Richard or George Grenville, both of whom were tightly enmeshed in the opposition to Walpole. Not trusting Grenville's judgement, Montagu replied to her sister, having read ‘the famous mask of Alfred’, informing her that ‘it is a sublime piece of nonsense, with very few good things in it’ and linked it to the plot of Gustavas Vasa, ‘whose je ne scai quoi heroical fashion, in taking a walk, or sitting down on a bank, betray an air of majesty that you know may be a compliment to our countrymen’.Footnote ⁸⁹ The conventionality of the plot offended Montagu, but offered the perfect vehicle for Mallet and Thomson to convey their pedagogic message to Frederick, a point that was picked up in the audience by Martin Madan as ‘proper to be exhibited to a Prince that durst hear Truth’ and by pro- and anti-Walpole wings of the popular press.

‘Philomathes’, in the London Magazine, asserted that ‘there was never any Thing gave me greater Pleasure, than to hear, that the Heir Apparent to our Crown was entertaining himself with a Masque, wherein our great King Alfred was represented’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Philomathes situated the masque within the broader body of Patriot writing on the synergy of corruption with arbitrary government:

Philomathes suggests that the course of English history after the Norman Conquest has been a series of attempts to ‘get restored the Laws of Edward the Confessor, that is to say, the Form of Government established by King Alfred’.Footnote ⁹² The only escape from the tyranny of Walpolean corruption is a return to first principles, ‘which consisted in such a Distribution of Power between the King and the People, as prevented the latter's being oppressed, and preserved the Grandeur of the former’. Philomathes argues that the appointment of officials through a dialogue between king, Commons, and people, as existed in Alfred's reign, acted as a check on corruption: ‘by their being appoint'd or chosen by distinct and separate Interests, they could not all unite together in oppressing or betraying the People, nor in protecting one another against the Resentment and Vengeance of the Nation’.Footnote ⁹³

The Champion; Or, The Evening Advertiser, which had close links to George Lyttelton, drew attention to an often-overlooked element of the masque. As a private performance, it did not need to pass through the Lord Chamberlain's office, for in the gardens of Cliveden it was ‘no Crime, to applaud Virtue, stigmatize Corruption, or endeavour to awake the ancient Spirit of a brave, tho’ slumbering people’.Footnote ⁹⁴

This broader call to action relied on the masque's publication, inspiring a ‘Literary Article’ in The Champion, which claimed it to be ‘a Piece perfectly moral’ with ‘Some Strokes … of a bold, and some of a delicate Nature’ where ‘Some Things are artfully insinuated, some amply described.’ The article pointedly compares the prince's literary patronage with that of the king. ‘Upon the whole we heartily congratulate the Muses on this Occasion; the oldest Man living scarce remembering to have ever see them before at Court, except in the Tapestry Hangings at St. James's.’Footnote ⁹⁵ The article excerpted dialogue between Alfred and the earl of Devon, where Alfred apostrophizes on the desolation caused by war and weeps for England's shame, to summarize the masque's sentiments. The Champion's coverage elicited a favourable response from its subscribers.

The Daily Gazetteer,Footnote ⁹⁷ by contrast, unable to attack the prince of Wales directly, turned to his immediate circle, ‘this Generation of Vipers’, a group of ‘malicious Pickthanks, who in their best Humours are a boisterous Kind of Jesters and in their worst more fatal in their Flattery, than a fair enemy in his strongest attacks’ chastising the rival definition of Alfred as ‘a piece perfectly Moral’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The author works hard to separate the character of Alfred from his appropriation as a totemic figure for the opposition, suggesting that ‘there is no sort of resemblance’ between the present state of England and when the Danes had overrun it. Any resemblance is ‘in the malicious Judgement of the Libeller; who is wicked enough to hope, that the Reader's Malice will help the Writer's out’. The article concludes with an attempt to wrest back the character of Alfred for the king and his ministers:

The ire of the Daily Gazetteer was especially aroused, not by the hints regarding war with Spain, or by the suggestion of the administration's inability to launch a fleet, but by the scurrilous comments on ‘Persons of Sublime Rank’ and suggests that the performance of the masque at Cliveden on 1 and 2 August was not in of itself a political act. Instead, the story of Alfred has been given a partisan political interpretation through the malignant machinations of opposition newspapers such as The Champion.

V

This article has shown that in the original performance and the published text, audience members and readers alike perceived both a political purpose and a political message to Alfred: a masque. Indeed, performing the masque in private allowed Thomson and Mallet to circumvent submitting the text to the lord chamberlain. The Cliveden performance was a resounding success and James Hammond, the prince's secretary, expressed his master's approval for Mallet's plan ‘to bring Alfred upon the Stage this winter’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Mallet would have to wait a decade until his play appeared. First performed on 23 February 1751, Alfred ran for nine evenings, until, ironically, being cut short by the death of Frederick, prince of Wales on 20 March.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But, by 1751, the association between the prince and Alfred had loosened to such a degree that the original political purpose of the masque was lost. The Monthly Review, for example, was relieved that the masque had been ‘much more adapted to general entertainment than in its first occasional model’.Footnote ¹⁰² The transition from a rallying cry for the Patriot Opposition to a broader popular patriotism was achieved only by detaching the Ode in Honour of Great Britain, ‘Rule, Britannia!’ from its original context.Footnote ¹⁰³