Michael Peverett: Mulberry Garden

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Mulberry Garden

Black Mulberry (Morus nigra)

[Image source: https://www.moruslondinium.org/events .]

I remember plain John Dryden (before he paid his court with success to the great,) in one uniform cloathing of Norwich drugget. I have eat tarts with him and Madame Reeve at the Mulberry-garden, when our author advanced to a sword, and chadreux wig. -- Posterity is absolutely mistaken as to that great man; tho' forced to be a satirist, he was the mildest creature breathing, and the readiest to help the young and deserving; tho' his comedies are horribly full of double entendres, yet 'twas owing to a false complaisance for a dissolute age. He was in company the modestest man that ever convers'd.

(From the Gentleman's Magazine, 1745. The correspondent, a certain Mr W.G., being then in his 87th year.)

The correspondent seems to be remembering Mac Flecknoe: "coarsely clad in Norwich drugget". Dryden was attacking Thomas Shadwell, who did indeed come from Norfolk. (Dryden himself was born in Aldwincle, Northamptonshire.) Drugget was a coarse, cheap, semi-woolen fabric. (Incidentally, WG later remarks that "Shadwell in conversation was a brute.")

Pace Scott, it isn't impossible that a fifteen year old WG should have eaten tarts with Dryden and Anne Reeve before the Mulberry Garden closed in around 1674. (And hence, I suppose, the point about Dryden's readiness to help the young and deserving.) But I do have to agree with J R Lowell that WG can't have remembered a time before Dryden paid court to the great. Dryden's first real success was the 1665 hit The Indian Queen, but he had been seeking favour ever since the Restoration (1661). In 1668 he was appointed Poet Laureate with an income of £200 a year -- the same salary Sir Peter Lely received as court painter.

Perhaps the whole memoir is a fabrication. There's something almost too convincing about this picture of Dryden in his glory days, still inwardly so plain and modest. (Dryden's family had been Puritans.)

This Mulberry Garden was originally a four acre plantation of James I in c. 1609, at the west end of St James's Park. The north wing of Buckingham Palace now occupies the site. James wanted to kick-start a British silk industry, and he encouraged others to plant the trees too. Nearly all the trees were black mulberries, the ones with delicious fruit, though it was well known that they were inferior from the silkworm point of view; perhaps the white mulberry didn't thrive in Britain during the Little Ice Age. One aged tree still survives in Buckingham Palace garden. Anyway, the silk industry never took off, but the Mulberry Garden blazed briefly during the Restoration as a pleasure garden with refreshments, visited by Pepys, and celebrated in the plays of Sedley and Wycherley. (It's an easy but perhaps false assumption that the tarts were mulberry tarts; other sources mention the Mulberry Garden's cheesecakes.)

"Madame Reeve" was Anne Reeve or Reeves, a minor actress in Dryden's company. She was apparently Dryden's mistress from around 1671 to 1675. Dryden never said so, but it was a regular feature of his enemies' writings. (Dryden had married in 1663 and had three sons.) Anne, never a leading actress, disappeared from stage records around 1675. The tradition is that she entered a convent.

In S.G.'s poem on the previous page of the Gentleman's Magazine (to which Mr W.G. responds), Reeve is named in a list of actresses who had appeared in the first performance of Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (1673). A note adds: "Mrs Anne Reeve, Dryden's mistress, acted the part of Amarillis in the Rehearsal, &c. She died a religious."

"A chadreux wig". More commonly Chedreux: a famous Paris maker of perruques. It doesn't seem to mean any particular style of wig, just the normal curled long-bottomed wig of the Restoration era.

E.g in John Oldham's Imitation of Juvenal 3:

What wouldst thou say, great Harry, shouldst thou view
Thy gaudy fluttering race of English now,
Their tawdry clothes, pulvilios, essences;
Their Chedreux perruques, and those vanities
Which thou, and they of old, didst so despise?

Sir Charles Sedley's play The Mulberry Garden, first performed 18 May 1668. Pepys was at the first night and was unimpressed, but it proved popular.

Wildish. What, is there store of game here, gentlemen?
Modish. Troth, little or none; a few citizens that have brought their children out to air 'em, and eat cheesecakes.
Wildish. I thought this place had been so full of beauties, that like a pack of hounds in a hare warren, you could hunt one for another: what think you of an arbor and a bottle of Rhenish?

William Wycherley's Love in a Wood, or St James's Park, first performed in Lent 1671. The final scene in Wycherley's park-ranging play takes place in "The dining-room at Mulberry Garden House". Wycherley may preserve the name of its proprietor: at one point he calls it "Colby's Mulberry Garden"; Sedley gives the name as Coleby.

L. Flip. Have I not constantly kept Covent-Garden church, St. Martin's, the playhouses, Hyde Park, Mulberry garden, and all the other public marts where widows and maids are exposed?

(Act I Scene 1 -- Lady Flippant assuring Mrs Joyner that she has done everything possible to get a new husband.)

Mrs. Joyn. Your reputation! indeed, your worship, 'tis well known there are as grave men as your worship; nay, men in office too, that adjourn their cares and businesses, to come and unbend themselves at night here, with a little vizard-mask.
Gripe. I do believe it, Mrs. Joyner.
Lucy. Ay, godmother, and carries and treats her at Mulberry-garden.
Mrs. Cros. Nay, does not only treat her, but gives her his whole gleaning of that day.
....
Lucy. But I have the boldness to ask him for a treat.—Come, gallant, we must walk towards the Mulberry-garden.
Gripe. So!—I am afraid, little mistress, the rooms are all taken up by this time.
Mrs. Joyn. Will you shame yourself again? [Aside to Gripe.
Lucy. If the rooms be full we'll have an arbour.
Gripe. At this time of night!—besides, the waiters will ne'er come near you.