Sheridan and the Theatre of Patriotism: Staging Dissent during the War for America

In 1778 Britain was facing what appeared to be a very real threat to its national and colonial security. The war in America, which had begun three years earlier, was going badly: although General Howe had occupied Philadelphia, Boston had been evacuated and General Burgoyne defeated at Saratoga. Seizing the opportunity presented by British humiliation, French ministers concluded alliances with the rebel colonists and subsequently with Spain. French mobilization began almost immediately and British spies were soon obliged to report on the impressive scale of French military stores and munitions. By the beginning of 1778 a French fleet was in preparation which, when joined by her Spanish allies, would pose a serious threat to Britain's southern coastline. Although no invasion came in 1778, the threat returned in the spring of 1779. The terror reached its height in August when the Franco-Spanish fleet was sighted off the Devonshire coast. Numbering some sixty ships of the line, it easily outnumbered the British Channel fleet under the seemingly lacklustre command of Sir Charles Hardy. ¹ At this moment the aggressive intentions of the warships appeared horribly clear, and what had been alarm and preparation became open panic. Ignatius Sancho wrote to his friend Mrs. Cocksedge complaining, "I awake to fears of invasion, to noise, faction, drums, soldiers, and care." ² The Plymouth poet Ann Thomas captured the mood when she penned these lines "To Laura, On the French Fleet parading before Plymouth in August 1779":

Our ears were stunned with noisy drum,
That beats to arms—the foe is come!
The combined fleets plain did appear,
The van, the centre and the rear;
You cannot think what horrid rout,
And how the people ran about. ³

The threat was not so unthinkable: recent naval histories have demonstrated just how close Britain came to disaster after losing control of the Channel in the summer of 1778. Such was the extent of Britain's vulnerability, that by the summer of 1779, when Thomas composed her poem, the coastal towns of Plymouth and Portsmouth had been fearful of invasion for nearly a year. The threat was to return in 1781—albeit briefly—when the Dutch United Provinces joined the Bourbon powers in opposition to Britain. ⁴

In such circumstances it is not surprising that panic enveloped those living on the coast in Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Sussex, Kent, and Essex, the counties where invasion was most likely. Aware of the threat posed by France, Lord North's government ordered the establishment of several large military encampments early in 1778. Positioned at strategic points along the coast, the camps were intended to block an invading army's advance, while reassuring the local population. The threat of invasion infected every aspect of political and cultural life: troops were mustered, debates raged in the Lords and Commons, angry letters in newspapers bemoaned the state of His Majesty's ships, and poets and dramatists exploited the mood of the times. In his "Ode to the Warlike Genius of Great Britain," William Tasker urged Britain to rouse herself to defeat the aggressors; ⁵ in the summer of 1778 Richard Cumberland's tragedy The Battle of Hastings told a tale of forlorn Saxon daring and love in troubled times; at the Haymarket George Colman revived John Fletcher's The Tragedie of Bonduca, cleverly revising the play to reflect new anxieties about invasion and colonial conquest; and at Sadler's Wells in 1779 Tom King's extravagant pageant, The Prophecy; or, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, tried to rouse spirits by appealing to past glories. Not every playwright took the fears of the summer seriously, however: in 1778 Frederick Pilon's The Invasion; or, a trip to Brighthelmstone mocked those who panicked too easily.

Rather than attempt to survey these works, this essay will focus on the complex and contradictory ways in which Richard Brinsley...