Origins of Lord Strange's Men

PATRONAGE: A FAMILY TRADITION

Family tradition was fundamental to the creation and patronage of Lord Strange's Men. From the standpoint of the players who formed the company, aristocratic patronage was both a working condition dating back to the medieval period and, following the 1572 "Acte for the Punishement of Vacabondes," a legal necessity, since the Act declared that "Bearewardes, Comon Players in Enterludes & Minstrels, not belonging to any Baron of this Realme or towardes any other honorable Personage of greater Degree," were subject to punishment as "masterless men" akin to "Roges, Vacaboundes, and Sturdye Beggers." But from the standpoint of the company's patron, Ferdinando Stanley, a key motive for his backing of players lay in a tradition of patronage developed through previous generations of the family.

The Stanley Earls of Derby were landed aristocrats without equal in the northwest of En gland, where their vast estates centered in the two residences of Lathom and Knowsley in southwestern Lancashire. The founding member of the Stanley earldom was the same Lord Stanley familiar from the final scene on Bosworth Field in Shakespeare's Richard III. A cunning politician, Thomas Stanley was able to parlay his inherited position as 2nd Lord Stanley and Lord of the Isle of Man into an earldom from a grateful Henry VII in 1485. Although this Tudor elevation to the higher nobility brought him a windfall of lands and important offices, Stanley had managed to develop political status through two previous Yorkist reigns, serving both Edward IV and Richard III as a privy councillor and lord steward of the royal house hold (1471–85), while accumulating numerous local appointments across the kingdom and offices in Cheshire and Lancashire, where his family had held lands for several generations. A telling indication of his ability to maneuver his way through the upheavals of the time are his back-to-back appointments as constable of En gland, first by Richard III (1483) and then by Henry VII (1485/86). His marriages matched his political strategies. He first married Eleanor Neville, sister of Warwick the Kingmaker, and then in 1472, after her death, took a bride from the other side of the conflict, Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond and, after Bosworth, Henry VII. As the newly created Earl of Derby, Stanley bore the sword of state at Henry VII's coronation, presided at his wedding to Elizabeth of York, and stood as godfather to their son, Prince Arthur.

By 1489 Lord Thomas stood confirmed as a leading member of the new Tudor peerage and, "in consideration of good ser vice," became the landowner of estates in no fewer than fourteen counties, stretching from the northwest through the Midlands as far south as Somerset. In the same decade, the marriage of his eldest son, George Stanley, to the heiress of the Lestrange estates in Shropshire and the Welsh marches had brought further lands and the title Strange of Knokyn into the family. Thus was established "an extensive territorial empire that was to last virtually unchanged for over two centuries."

Numerous members of the gentry, nobility, and royalty in the later fifteenth century are known to have patronized performers, either for their own personal entertainment when in residence or as part of their traveling retinues. Such individual performers or small troupes seem to have toured on their own account as well, though the extent of their circuits can be difficult to trace because of the sporadic survival of records from the period. Members of a traveling retinue wore their lord's livery, thereby claiming his protection while upholding his honor at home, at court, or on the road. This traditional bond between medieval minstrel and lord underlies the later Elizabethan links between player and patron. In the case of the Stanley Earls of Derby, a tradition of patronage was developed to support the family's new prestige in the Tudor era and, we believe, to advance their influence in the northwest of En gland, at court, and, through touring, across the new Tudor nation.

Lord Thomas Stanley does not seem to have been an especially active patron of performers. The accounts of medieval house holds are more elusive than civic records, but one roll of Lord Thomas Stanley's accounts from an early stage in his career happens to be among those extant. In 1459–60 Lord Stanley paid wages for a piper, Thomas, and a trumpeter, Mordoc, attached to his Lancashire household, and there are external records for his "minstrel" or "minstrels" at King's Lynn in 1457–58 and the second a decade later, also for minstrels, in 1468–69 at Grimsby. The most consistent form of entertainment associated with Lord Stanley's name before and immediately after his acquisition of the Derby title is the itinerant bearward who was rewarded eleven times along the southeast coast not far from London between 1474 and 1491.

After his elevation to the earldom of Derby, three "mimi" under his patronage appeared at New College, Oxford, in mid-July 1485 and one or more of his "minstrels" showed up on their own at Rye in 1491, in Salisbury in 1498–99, and at Bridgwater in 1504. There is one more important notice of a Derby troupe, termed "histriones," at Shrewsbury in July 1495, in company with "histriones" of Prince Arthur and of the Earl of Shrewsbury. The occasion, which included a play in the Quarry, was a royal visit by the king and queen to Shrewsbury, where in 1485 Henry Tudor had crossed the Severn on his way to Bosworth and received the final messages of support from his Stanley allies. The king's visit to Shrewsbury, which perhaps commemorated events from a decade earlier, was part of the royal family's progress through the West Midlands on their way to the Derby residences of Knowsley and Lathom, where they were entertained from 28 July to 5 August. Of the events of that visit little is known, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the "histriones" who entertained the royal entourage at Shrewsbury may have been part of the lavish great house hospitality described in the early family verse chronicle known as "The Stanley Poem":

King Henry the Seaventh ... did lye their eight dayes,
And of all houses he gave it the most praise,
And his haule at Richmond he pulld downe all,
To make it up againe after Latham hall;
To speake of his fare was sure so excellente,
The king and his company so well contente,
I hard noble men say that...