rformed with all decency,
seemliness, and without rudeness and profaneness, John Maynard,
serjeant-at-law, and several sufficient citizens, were engagers. This
Italian Opera began in Rutland House in Charter-house yard, May 23,
1656, and was afterwards transferred to the Cockpit in Drury Lane."
Cromwell's own fondness for music may have prompted him to this
relaxation, in Davenants favour, of the old theatre-closing Ordinance
of September 1642. At all events, money was coming in for Davenant,
and he was not very unhappy.[2]--The Satirist JOHN CLEVELAND, as we
have said, had never gone into exile. This was the more remarkable
because, through the Civil War, he had adhered to the King's cause
most tenaciously, not only in official employment for it, but also
serving it by the circulation of squibs and satires very offensive to
the Parliamentarians, and to the Scots in particular. Through the
Commonwealth, however, and also into the Protectorate, he _had_
lived on in England, in obscurity and with risks, latterly somewhere
in or about Norfolk, as tutor or quasi-tutor to a gentleman, on L30 a
year. By ill luck, in Nov. 1655, just when the police of the
Major-Generals was coming into operation, he had been apprehended, on
his way to Newark, by the vigilance of Major-General Haynes, and
committed to prison in Yarmouth, There seems to have been no definite
charge, other than that he was "the poet Cleveland" and was a
questionable kind of vagrant. He had been in prison for some months
when it occurred to him to address a letter to the Protector himself.
"May it please your Highness," it began, "Rulers within the circle of
their government have a claim to that which is said of the Deity:
they have their centre everywhere and their circumference nowhere, It
is in this confidence that I address your Highness, as knowing no
place in the nation is so remote as not to share in the ubiquity of
your care, no prison so close as to shut me up from the partaking of
your influence." After explaining that he had been and still was a
Royalist, but that he had taken no active part in affairs for about
ten years, he concludes, in a clever vein of compliment, thus: "If you
graciously please to extend indulgence to your suppliant in taking me
out of this withering durance, you will find mercy will establish you
more than power, though all the days of your life were as pregnant
with victories as your twice-auspicious Third of September." The
appe