A Iirnil'RTO UNRECOGNIZED CAVALIER DRAMATIST: JAMES COMPTON, THIRD EARL OF NORTHAMPTON H I I. ION K KI t.tllF.R ON 8 March K)78 there was offered for sale at Christie's, as lot 293, a large collection oric:inatinG; trom Castle .\shb\ in Northamptonshire of plays and other writings in manuscript that had largely been lost sight of since Thomas Percy, the literary historian and editor ot the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry^ first noted their existence during his residence in the area as Vicar of Easton Maudit between 1753 and 1782. They had been rccoxered as recently as September 1977 by the present Marquess of Northampton from the back ot a drawer in the house, and their rediscovery had been announced in '//;(• Tunes Literary Supplement of 9 December that year by Professor William P. \\ illianis, an .American scholar whose inquiry regarding their whereabouts had prompted this tortunate event.' Percy's list of nine ofthe plays in this collection occurs among the annotations that he made in a copy of Langbaine's Account of the English Dramatic Poets (Oxford, r6(ji) that is now preserved in F^dinburgh University Library.^ It was to Cosmo \lanucci or Manuche, the author of two of the pieces in his list as also of a iliird not rccnrdcd b\ him that Percy had, as he later recalled in his notes, been inclined to ascribe all ihu plays when he saw them together. Christie's cataloguer was more cautious, ascribing all but those manuscripts that bear Manuche's signed dedications to the 3rd l",arl of Northampton to an 'unidentified Cavalier Dramatist, circa 1640 to 1050', though mentioning a possibility that they might be the work of one Samuel Holland, the manuscripts of whose two-part masque entitled The Enchanted Groi\\-^ also dedicated to Northampton and now lost (though perhaps not beyond hope of recovery), Percy had also seen at Castle Asbby. A very little work carried out shortly before the sale by the present writer showed, however, that several of these manuscripts were uritten in the variable but unmistakable hand of James Compton, Earl of Northampton, himself; and the fact that a number of them are clearly autograph drafts b\ their author ine\itabl\ led to the conclusion that probably all are the work of Northampton, whose name may therefore be added to the list of known seventeenth- century, or more particularly of Cavalier, playwrights. The whole collection was subsequently purchased by the British Library (Add. MSS. 60273-85), along with various other items trom the same source including, at a further sale of 5 July that 158 year (lot 47), a translation in stanzaic verse of Virgil's Aeneid, Book IV, that has credibly been ascribed to Sir John Harington of Kelston.*^ Scholars everywhere owe a debt of gratitude to Christie's for allowing the integrity ofthe Castle Ashby collection of plays to be preserved by not dividing it into individual lots, with consequent risk of dispersal. The importance of this step will be the more apparent when it is said that Professor Williams's researches into the family papers at Castle Ashby strongly suggest that the notebooks into which Northampton and Manuche copied their respective plays were made up from stocks of paper held in the Earl's household between about 1642 and 1666.^ This tends to confirm what the dedications already hinted, namely that a small coterie of dramatists had formed around Northampton and his first Countess during the later 1640s and the Interregnum, centring on London or Castle Ashby. What follows is a preliminary attempt to describe the career and literary productions of the 3rd Earl. A fuller appreciation of his literary merits, his place in contemporary closet-drama, and his debts to previous authors, both English and foreign, must await the patient researches of more competent literary historians and critics. THE COMPTON FAMILY AND THE THEATRE The purpose of the present biographical notes is to provide a background to the brief examination of Northampton's writings that is attempted in the latter part ofthis article, and to emphasize his family's connection with the theatre during the first half of the seventeenth century.^ In his handsomely produced History of the Comptons the 6th Marquess published a detailed account of his ancestors that need not be abstracted here. Suffice it to say that despite their title and adoption of Castle Ashby as their principal residence during the reign of James I the Comptons were a Warwickshire family who had been seated at Compton Wyniates near Banbury since at least the thirteenth century. By the marriage of Earl James's grandfather. Lord William Compton, later (1628) ist Earl of Northampton, to the only child ofa very wealthy merchant and Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Spencer, they had added to their title and favoured standing at Elizabeth's court considerable riches and landed property: as a consequence Spencer Compton, the 2nd Earl (1630), inherited lands in no fewer than eleven counties, as well as three houses in London and the tw^o in the country that were mentioned above, and was able to settle ^20,000 for the portions of his younger children. It was only to be expected that talented men, such as they were, should have become involved in amateur theatricals at the courts of Elizabeth and her successors, but the ist Earl and his descendants showed, in their different ways, a distinct flair for the drama that exceeded the normal level of aristocratic accomplishment. As a young man James's grandfather had appeared as a tilter in Sir Henry Lee's Tilt Yard Entertainment held on the Queen's Day, 17 November 1590, his entry being described by George Peele in glowing terms; while at the wedding ofthe Earl of Somerset in 1613 he took part in a masque by Campion and a tilt by Jonson.^ He revealed 159 Fig. I. Portrait of James, 3rd Karl of Northampton. From: William Bingham Compton, Marquess of Northampton, Htstory ofthe Comptons (London, 1930) histrionic abilities of quite a different order, however, when the court celebrated at Salisbury in August 1620 the anniversary ofthe failure ofthe Gowrie conspiracy with 'a show or play of twelve parts' in which he portrayed a 'cobbler and teacher of Birds to whistle.'^ This talent for comedy seems to have passed to his son Spencer, who on the same occasion played a tailor, and as a Fellow Commoner at Queens' College, Cambridge, while not yet thirteen years of age had taken on three roles in the Latin comedy of Ignoramus^ written by George Ruggle of Clare, when it was presented before King James and Prince Charles at Trinity College on 8 March 1614/5.^ One of these was the part of Surda, a female servant, which young Spencer had taken over in place of his tutor whose Puritan scruples about wearing women's clothes could not be overcome. The part of Dulman was taken by John Towers who later, as chaplain to Lord Compton, was presented to the Rectory of Castle Ashby and eventually became Bishop of Peterborough. John Chamberlain, writing to Dudley Carleton, remarked that the 'thing was full of mirth and variety, with many excellent actors; among whom the Lord Compton's son, though least, yet was not worst, but more than half marred by extreme length'. James, however, was so delighted with the play that on his return in the following May he commanded a second performance. The young Spencer is rightly described by his descendant as having been 'educated at Cambridge and abroad', for David Lloyd wrote of him that 'his parts were so great, and his appetite for knowledge so large, that it was as much as four several Tutors, at Home, at Cambridge^ and in France, and Italy^ each taking his respective hour for the Art and Science he professed, to keep pace with his great proficiency'.^° In December 1619 he was granted a licence to travel abroad for two years but was back by October 1621 when he married Mary, daughter of Sir Francis Beaumont, a very distant kinsman of the dramatist. Spencer's heir, James Compton, was born on 19 August 1622, the eldest of six sons of whom four were to distinguish themselves as royalist commanders in the civil war and the youngest of all as Bishop of London after the Restoration. He seems to have been schooled at Eton from about 1633 to 1636. During one of his summer holidays, in August 1634, the King and court stayed four nights at Castle Ashby while on a progress, and though there is some doubt about whether Prince Charles's Company remained with them thus far into the month it is more than likely that the visit involved some theatricals.^ ^ In February 1635/6 he received an M.A. at Cambridge zsjilius nobilis when he visited the University in the train ofthe Elector Palatine, ^^ though it was not until almost a year after this, on 21 January 1636/7, that he was formally admitted to his father's old College. Early in this year the authorities at Cambridge began to assemble a collection of congratulatory verses, Musarum Cantabrigiensium Z'wojSa, on the birth ofthe princess Anne that eventually took place on 17 March. Northampton's contribution, which curiously enough was the only one received from Queens', comes third in the printed volume, following verses by the Vice-Chancellor and by two younger sons of the Duke of Lennox, both of whom were subsequently killed fighting for the King. His four-line Latin epigram is distinguished from the elegant literary tributes of Crashaw, Cowley, Marvell and their fellows by its fierce topicality.