CHAPTER I I

'Esther' to 'Athalia'

Elucidating the possible political implications of an oratorio

libretto, it will by now be agreed, is unlikely to be plain sailing. This
is abundantly illustrated by Esther, which not only demands atten-
tion as Handel's first English oratorio but has the most complicated
textual history. Trying to 'unpack' its meaning demonstrates the
delicacy of the operation and the often unexpectedly rich nature of
its results.
The story begins in France. The first performances of Racine's
Esther, in January and February 1689, by the protegees of Mme de
Maintenon's school of St Cyr, were given to a highly select court
audience. At the third performance, 5 February, this included the
recently deposed James II of England and his queen, Mary of
Modena. The cast included Mile Marie-Claire Decamps de
Marcilly, who so enchanted the Marquis de Villette in her role of
Zares that he subsequently married her (thus causing a rift with
Mme de Maintenon, who was also the Marquis' aunt). 1 The pos-
sible importance to Handel's Esther of both Marie-Claire's participa-
tion and its outcome will appear presently.
In England there was no performance of Racine's Esther on the
public stage in the early eighteenth century, but the play was known
in French - Swift had Racine in his library, as did Handel's friend
John Arbuthnot, a member of the Burlington House and Cannons
circles which generated the first Esther libretto.2 From 1715 it was
available in English in a translation by Thomas Brereton of Chester
as Esther, or Faith Triumphant. A Sacred Tragedy. In other parts of his
life, and indeed in his death, Brereton was involved in politics (see
Dictionary of National Biography), but he appears to have had no
political axe to grind with his translation of Esther. He makes
nothing political of the play's favour in the French court, nor does
he mention the modern British political connotations of the Esther
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 'Esther' to 'Athalia' 211
story. He proffered his text as a specimen of reformed drama (see
chapter 2). Politically the most interesting aspect of his translation is
its dedication to Archbishop William Dawes, who had been Bishop
of Chester. Dawes' most famous sermon had referred to the Esther
story. He had given it on 5 November 1696. The Esther story,
relating one of the 'miraculous5 deliverances of the chosen people
from persecution, was a popular source for texts for sermons on
5 November, a patriotic red-letter day in the English Church calen-
dar so signal that it was marked by a Thanksgiving service in the
1662 Prayer Book (the only other days so celebrated being the
sovereign's accession and the 1660 Restoration): the Gunpowder
Plot had been discovered on 5 November 1605, affording a parallel
with the Jews' last-minute preservation from an impending holo-
caust. The feast day took on additional meaning when William of
Orange landed at Torbay on 5 November 1688, affording a parallel
with the Jews' deliverance from religious tyranny.
Handel's Esther in its original version dates from 1717/18, when he
was working for the then Earl of Carnarvon, James Brydges, later
Duke of Chandos, at Cannons.3 The unknown author(s) of the
libretto used Brereton's translation, but Brereton is not known to
have had any connection with the Chandos circle.4 When the work
reached London fourteen years later, the libretto was attributed to
Pope. Viscount Perceval (a Handel enthusiast) was at the Phil-
armonic Society's first performance at the Crown and Anchor
(see above, p. 14), and recorded in his diary: 'From dinner I went to
the Music Club, where the King's Chapel boys acted the History of
Hester, writ by Pope, and composed by Hendel'. 5 Chandos had
recently been admitted as a member of this same club.6 We do not
know if he was at any of the club performances of Esther, nor who
told Perceval that the words were by Pope, nor who provided Gates
with the score. But it is possible that Percival had his information
about the authorship of the text direct from Chandos. Supposing
this to be the case, it is also possible that Chandos misinformed him.
Chandos was still smarting from the adverse publicity he had
received as a result of Pope's Epistle to Burlington, and could have
been promoting the idea of Esther's being by Pope to prove that the
slur that Pope was criticising his taste in the Epistle was false and
that, on the contrary, Pope had previously endorsed his taste to the
extent of providing for his entertainment. Pope was certainly party
to the other drama which Handel composed for Chandos, Ads and

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 278 The Patriot libretto

Galatea.1 The first public performance of Esther, on 20 April 1732 at

York Buildings, advertised the work as 'compos'd originally for the
most noble James Duke of Chandos, the Words by Mr. Pope, and the
Musick by Mr. Handel'.8 This was the first public attribution of the
libretto to Pope. Pope had publicly contested the public's inference
that he had referred to Chandos in his Epistle to Burlington; he made
no public reference to or refutation of this public linking of their
names, only two months later, so presumably he was satisfied to have
the authorship of Esther ascribed to him. Perhaps Esther was brought
out of mothballs at this particular moment in part to smooth the
troubled Burlington-Pope-Chandos relationship with proof of
happy collaboration.9 It was after the York Buildings production
that Handel brought out his own much altered and amplified first
London version of the work, performed at the King's Theatre.
Modern critics have considered the possibility of Pope's author-
ship, and it is accepted in the Twickenham edition of his works, on
the grounds of verbal echoes (rightly queried as valid grounds by
Dean). 10 So far as I am aware, no one has considered why Pope and
his friends might have taken an interest in Racine's play. Pope
himself has left no reference to Esther. But one of his closest friends
had a curiously strong connection with it. In 1716 Lord Bol-
ingbroke, in exile in France, took as his mistress Marie-Claire
Decamps de Marcilly, who (as already mentioned) had not only
acted Zares in the first court performances (and incidentally had
been commended by Louis himself for her acting), but as a result
had married the Marquis de Villette. One of these performances, as
mentioned above, had been in the presence ofJames II, the man on
whose account Bolingbroke was in exile and whose son he served.
The liaison with Marie-Claire was not a transient one: the couple
was still together when the Cannons Esther was completed, and they
married the year after, in 1719.11 Pope could have heard about the
play and its early performances from Bolingbroke, who (given its
consequences for her) would surely have heard about it from
Marie-Claire; so could Brydges, with whom Bolingbroke was in
correspondence.12 There is also a connection, this time a striking
verbal one, between the heroine of Racine's play and the women
most important to another of Pope's closest friends, Swift: in reality
Stella's first name was Esther, and Vanessa's (and her mother's) was
Hester. Another thread connecting the circle of the oratorio's birth
with its content concerns Chandos himself and Arbuthnot. Their

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 'Esther3 to 'Athalia3 279
correspondence includes letters showing that, like most well-read
men of their time, they kept abreast of publications opposing atheism,
and suggesting that (unlike Pope) Chandos had no truck with
modern rationalism. The story of Esther would have suited a believer
in divine interventionism.13
For Pope, a Catholic and a Jacobite sympathiser, James IPs
attendance at the play soon after the start of his exile would have
added to its stature, and Bolingbroke's connection with it would
have brought it even closer home. The same applies to the libretto's
other putative author, their mutual friend Arbuthnot, whose
brother fought on the Jacobite side in the 1715 Rebellion.14 The
actual story of Esther in the Bible and Apocrypha (itself fictional
wishful thinking), and as transmitted by Racine and/or Brereton,
would also have had great personal meaning for Pope. The Jews in
Persia, an exiled minority, of a different religion from their over-
lords, are nevertheless loyal to the regime. One of them, Esther, is
King Ahasuerus' wife, but is not assured of royal favour. The Jews'
safety depends on the king's being persuaded of their loyalty. The
king's evil first minister, Haman, represents them as seditious to the
king in an attempt to destroy them which rebounds on him through
the brave action of Esther and through the king's recollection that
Esther's cousin and guardian, Mordecai, once saved his life. Jewish
probity is rewarded and irreligion punished - in the Bible by the
massacre of 75,000 Persians as well as the execution of Haman. The
feast of Purim marks this event. There is no mention of God in the
biblical account (though there is in the Apocryphal elaboration,
which Handel's librettists fully exploited), but in the dramatic
reworkings under consideration here the Jews interpret their threat-
ened persecution as a merited punishment from God for their
religious inadequacy (as it often is elsewhere in the Old Testament).
This chimes with the moral tone of remarks by Pope's own circle,
and by Pope himself, about the ethical and religious decline of
Britain.15
In relating both Racine's Esther and his Athalie to political events
in England, Olivier Lutaud points out that contemporaries referred
to James II as Ahasuerus and Mary of Modena as Esther, interced-
ing with her husband for the international Catholic cause as repre-
sented by the British minority (an allegory which would have added
meaning to James' and Mary's presence at one of the first perform-
ances of Esther). He also notes the recurrent use of the Esther story in

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 280 The Patriot libretto
English Catholic (Jesuit) plays in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to represent God's care of His true followers.16 Even
without these connections the story has obvious potential, in the
years immediately after the 1715 Rebellion, as an allegorised plea
for justice for loyal Catholics indiscriminately victimised by punitive
taxation as well as continued exclusion from public office. For Pope,
and for any Catholic, this interpretation would have had the
additional satisfaction of an allegorical takeover: the text used each
year by Protestants to congratulate themselves publicly on victories
over 'evil' Catholic forces was now used to represent Catholics in the
role of the chosen people saved from misfortune.
The Cannons libretto favours the chosen people, adjusting the
biblical and Racinian accounts to strengthen sympathy for the
endangered Jews. In the Bible, Haman is activated by resentment of
Mordecai's lack of deference to him; this motivation is almost totally
absent from the libretto, so Haman appears more simply as a
prototype paranoid dictator. The king is remote from his people,
enabling Haman to work on him. The libretto's first line presents a
colleague recommending tolerance to Haman: "Tis greater far to
spare than to destroy'. Haman responds that the king has vested all
power in him and the Jews are to be wiped out and their temples
destroyed: 'Pluck root and branch out of the land . . . Shall we the
God of Israel fear?' There is no ethically repellent massacre of the
native majority in the libretto and, most significantly, all Racine's
references to, and condemnations of, the irreligion of gentiles (who
would be British Protestants in a Catholic reading of the story) are
suppressed. Finally, Esther's status as heroine is enhanced, the Jews'
salvation being more entirely her achievement. In the Bible, the
king independently recollects her uncle Mordecai's service, which
prompts him to reverse the decree against the Jews; in the libretto,
he is reminded by Esther.
It is easy to read the Cannons libretto of Esther as produced by a
circle sympathetic to Jacobitism and containing an unexceptionable
plea for tolerance of minority views and the repeal of anti-Catholic
legislation.17 There is no reason to suppose that such a subtext
would have been inimical to Handel who, as I have argued, seems
always to have measured commissions principally according to their
scope for his compositional power. But this is an instance where a
coded message could have escaped the notice of the composer. The
allegory was sufficiently flexible to stand for any national-religious

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 'Esther'to'Athalia' 281
group spared from persecution, hence its use in connection with the
Torbay landing. So it could have seemed politically unexception-
able in 1732 as well, when Esther was first heard outside the Cannons
circle, first at the Philarmonic Society and then at York Buildings.
At this date it could also have acquired a new topicality: there had
been a serious French invasion scare the previous year, and once
more the story could aptly be enlisted to celebrate 'danger
averted'. 18
The potential or intended 'Catholic' reading could have been
unrecognised by the majority. Yet the public linking of the libretto
with Pope, known to be Catholic and suspected of being Jacobite,
could have signalled an interpretation unacceptable to the crown
and government. Perhaps this was one reason for some of the
circumstances of the revised Esther, for the reported wish of Princess
Anne for its public presentation, for the alterations to the text, for
the royal family's conspicuous patronage of the work in its revised,
'Hanoverianised', form, and for the fact that the author of the
libretto was not mentioned in Handel's advertisements, nor any
reference made to Chandos (or anyone else) as the person for whom
it was originally composed.19 If so, this text, which may already
have constituted an allegorical takeover, was now retaken. Tussles
for ideological 'possession' of both biblical texts and historical record
have already been noted. Esther may be a prime example of the
similar tussles for historical myths and symbols which took place in
the field of music theatre. 20 As so often, the ground had been
prepared. Racine's Esther had already been given a Hanoverian
association {contra its connection with James and Mary) by Pierre
Coste, who in 1723 brought out the first English edition of Racine's
works, including Esther and Athalie. His prefatory dedication, to
Frederick Duke of Gloucester (the future Prince of Wales), is an
early instance of efforts to teach Frederick the duties of a Patriot
King.
The 'Hanoverianising' of Esther may have emanated from the
Church as well as the crown. As is well known, according to Burney,
Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, took an active interest in
Handel's first public performance of the oratorio, affecting the
whole subsequent history of oratorio performance by prohibiting
stage action.21 Gibson at this period was doing his utmost to main-
tain the Church-state alliance which he had forged with Walpole
and which he considered essential to the security of British Prot-

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 282 The Patriot libretto

estantism. This entailed enmity to latitudinarianism, Catholicism,

and any political opposition to the Whig administration, which
Gibson tended to see as Jacobitism in disguise.22 Gibson's position
weakened during the years 1727-36, as both Queen Caroline and
Parliament opposed his policy. In 1731 his visitation charge
included special exhortations to loyalty, as laymen and clergy
showed signs of coming under Pulteney's spell, and in the same year
he investigated a disturbing report of a sermon preached at St
George's, Hanover Square (Handel's parish church), which was
said to have promulgated opposition views and was on a text from
the Book of Esther (V.13).23 So Esther had come to Gibson's notice,
and as a potentially seditious text, before Handel's performance.
With his propensity for seeing Jacobites lurking under every Tory
cloak, Gibson would surely have been aware of the possibility of
reading Jacobite propaganda in Esther, whose libretto was publicly
said to be by a Tory Papist. But the basic story of the libretto would
certainly have appealed to him, since it enacts the goal he always
had in view, the preservation of the true religion through the
alliance of religion and state, and he might well have thought a
Hanoverian version worth encouraging.
The new Esther received an unmistakable and prominent
Hanoverian stamp in the form of two of the 1727 Coronation
Anthems. The first, written for the part of the service during which
the queen was anointed, was placed at the end of a new first scene of
the Jews at prayer, voicing their hope that through Esther's power
over the king
Again shall Salem, to the Skies,
From all her Woes triumphant rise,
And our avenging God, with Speed,
Captivity shall captive lead.
The second was placed at the end of Esther's audience with
Ahasuerus. Choruses from the 1718 version, praising Esther's
'Virtue, truth and innocence' and anticipating God's deliverance of
the Jews and His vengeance on their foes, are dwarfed in 1732 by an
interpolated anthem, of which the second line of text comes from
'Zadok the Priest', but the first does not:
God is our Hope, and he will cause the King to shew Mercy to Jacob's
Race.
God save the king! Long live the king! May the king live for ever! Amen.
Hallelujah.

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 'Esther' to 'Athalia' 283
What are we to make of this reference to 'Jacob's Race' and a hope
for royal indulgence to it, cast in Old Testament language and
grafted onto an expression of loyalty to the regime by a nonconform-
ist minority, set to music of the Hanoverian coronation? Or to the
idea in the first scene that the queen will intercede for her persecuted
co-religionists with the king, likewise associated with the music of
the coronation? Conversely, from the final Israelite chorus of the
1718 version the 1732 version omits the claim that God 'plucks the
mighty from his seat and cuts off half his days', which could be read
as insulting to the crown and government, and the promises that
'The Lord his people shall restore / And we in Salem shall adore',
which could be read as a subversive hope for a Stuart restoration.
On the other hand again, the 1732 version enlarges the villainy of
the king's first minister and deepens his fall. Act I scene 2, which is
only in the 1732 version, shows the devoted minister informing his
trusting master the king that
The vassal Jews, through all thy Realms, disdain
A due Subjection to thy gracious Reign;
They boast, their God will plead their Cause,
Restore their Temple, and their Laws.
In his opinion, 'Captivity's too mild to quell' their 'pernicious pride'
and 'impious ardour'. The king naturally gives him a mandate to
'Avenge thy monarch on his foes . . . Pursue their pride . . . purge
Rebellion from the tainted land'. But the Jews are not rebelling. The
first minister is misrepresenting the peaceful oppressed minority to
the ruler, who consequently orders repression. Here is a favourite
theme of Patriot opposition drama, majesty misled by an evil minis-
ter. Appropriately the denouement is the rewarding of the true
patriot, and to Ahasuerus' command in the 1718 libretto to execute
Haman and honour Mordecai, the 1732 libretto adds an extended
air for Ahasuerus more specifically replacing Haman with Mord-
ecai: 'Through the nation he shall be / Next in dignity to me'. In
opposition writing of the time Haman was one of the figures for
Walpole.24
Apparently the royal family not only received this work equably,
they conspicuously supported it. If they did not see it as allegory,
what did they make of the prominence in it of their Coronation
Anthems, the story which was so often used to refer to national
events, and the familiar Patriot opposition theme? If they did, how

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 284 The Patriot libretto

could they read it to suit themselves, and how could any government
supporter? The use of the anthems suggests that Ahasuerus repre-
sents George II and Esther Queen Caroline, and that we should
view them favourably. This reading, however, fails to account for
Ahasuerus' and Esther's different nationalities and religions
(George and Caroline shared theirs), the extreme villainy and
punishment of Haman (no one writing for rather than against the
royal family would blacken Walpole so thoroughly), the need for
Esther's plea to the king, the fact that the Jews are a nonconformist
minority (the English are not), and the decree against them. A
reading which mixes people and personifications, whereby Ahasu-
erus is George and Haman is Walpole but Esther is Britannia,
guardian of British constitutional liberties, is warranted by other
allegorical music theatre works, possibly including Humphreys'
Ulysses (reading Ulysses as the Stuart king, the suitors as the
Hanoverians and Penelope as Britain). This would please the
Patriot opposition, who could see themselves as the Jews, but would
not gratify the king, queen, minister or bishop. A Gibsonian version
is possible, in which all the characters are personifications: the king
is the state, Esther is the Church, enlisting the state's defence of true
Protestant religion, and Haman is Catholicism. Even an anti-
Gibson version is also possible, in which Esther (Caroline) inter-
cedes with the king (George) in favour of the Tory and latitudin-
arian clergy, whom Caroline favoured in opposition to Gibson
(Haman): this would be plausible in that Caroline's opposition
brought Gibson close to resigning his bishopric.25
Other readings are probably available. But none I can think of fits
neatly, and the lack of correspondence strongly suggests a hasty
attempt at allegorical takeover. Like other attempts to stamp an
alternative ideological impression on an existing work, Esther shows
the joins in the scissors-and-paste treatment. For example, in Merlin
(1735), reclaimed from Dryden's King Arthur for Hanoverian glorifi-
cation, the centrepiece of Act I shows the German invaders of
Britain sacrificing white horses; but this is highly inappropriate,
since the white horse was Hanover's emblem. It would seem that
some aspects of the revised Esther, and royal patronage of it, embody
a Hanoverian attempt to annex a potentially subversive text when it
became public and showed signs of becoming popular.
Though we have no decisive factual evidence of Humphreys'
politics, we can find a very clear political interpretation of the

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 'Esther' to 'Athalia' 285
Esther story in his three-volume biblical commentary, The Sacred
Books of the Old and New Testament, Recited at Large, which, Humph-
reys' title informs us, is 'illustrated with critical and explanatory
annotations, carefully compiled from the commentaries and other
writings of Grotius, Lightfoot, Pool, Calmet, Patrick, Le Clerc,
Lock, Burkit, Sir Isaac Newton, Pearse, and a variety of other
authors, ancient and modern'. He does not indicate the individual
sources of his comments, but it is obvious what he himself thinks
about the story of Esther. He has two main points to make: that the
salvation of the Jews is miraculous (notwithstanding apparent
'second causes'), and that it warns kings not to neglect their
responsibilities. His comments are an outspoken version of the Patri-
ots' 'majesty misled' theme:
She then laid before him the wickedness of Haman then present, who by his
fraudful lies had surprised the king, and insolently made use of his royal
name and authority, to prescribe [proscribe?] and destroy the whole nation
of the Jews. Ahasuerus, who was a prince naturally inclined to justice and
mercy, was astonished, when he considered, to what an excess his own
credulity, and the inhuman disposition of his favourite, had like to have
carried him ... It is evident from this history, that the heart of kings is in
the hand of God, who by this book teaches them, that they must bear the
burden of the crown themselves, and see with their own eyes; lest leaving
their authority to others, they should meet with those who abuse it, like
Haman, in the gratification of their own passions and corrupt interests, to
the prejudice of justice, and of their prince's credit and reputation.26

Given the opposition's appropriation of this theme, it is difficult to

avoid a partisan, or at least tendentious, reading of Humphreys'
gloss. But his subsequent librettos for Handel do not suggest a
consistent political intention. As already mentioned, he dedicated
Deborah to Queen Caroline, expressing the utmost 'Loyalty and
Veneration' and acknowledging that he was quite unable to repre-
sent his heroine, 'acting for the Happiness of her People, with half
the Lustre that diffuses itself around Your Majesty's Conduct'. As
for Esther, the music of Deborah underscores this loyalty, by recycling
the Coronation Anthems.27 But Deborah's first action in the libretto
is to select a leader for the Israelites, who desperately need to find a
new one who will rescue them from heathen oppression. In the early
1730s the lack of a strong national leader to redeem the population
from tyrannical rule was a favourite theme of Patriot opposition
writing (see chapter 10), whereas Caroline was Walpole's most

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 286 The Patriot libretto
powerful supporter, so clearly the analogy of heroine and queen
cannot be pushed very far in the political direction.
More surprising, if we take Humphreys' protestations of loyalty to
be genuine, is his authorship of the libretto of Athalia. This drama-
tises a part of the Old Testament which was a crucial debating point
in the discussion of the validity of the 1688 Revolution and a
favourite Nonjuror and Jacobite parallel: the story of the restoration
of the true heir to the throne and the despatch of the usurping
queen.28 The story had a strong tradition of interpretation as an
example of Whig principles of law and liberty triumphing over
tyrannical despotism and religious persecution. Previous exponents
of it in this guise included the author of the anti-Cromwellian Killing
Mo Murder (1657, frequently reprinted in the mid eighteenth
century), who used as epigraph 2 Chronicles XXV.27, 'And all the
People of the land rejoyced, and the City was quiet, after that they
had slain Athaliah with the sword',29 and William Duncombe, in the
prefatory dedication of his translation of Racine's play (1722, 1726,
1746).30 Humphreys himself, in his biblical commentary, described
how 'Athaliah tyrannised over Judah without controul, filling Jeru-
salem with blood, and destroying the servants of the true God, that
she might the more effectively establish the worship of Baal
throughout the kingdom.'31 But since the Revolution, when the
Nonjurors established a strong claim to it, this was one of the
ideological tropes which had most firmly resisted dual possession.
Athalia was written for the English stronghold of Toryism and
Jacobitism, Oxford,32 where three months before its first perform-
ance toasts had been drunk to the Pretender for three nights in
succession to celebrate the defeat of the Excise Bill.33 As already
mentioned, the Athalia of the libretto has the characteristics of a
despot as well as a usurper, and the priesthood (whose power was a
constant Whig bugbear) is a more powerful force for radical, just,
beneficial political change than in any other libretto. It is conceiv-
able that Athalia represents James II and Joad the brave bishops
who opposed him, but such a reading leaves the discovery and restor-
ation of the true king, devoted upholder and future reformer of the
true religion, unaccounted for. That discovery has exactly the effect
that Jacobite writers depicted for the Pretender: instant recognition
and acceptance as the indubitably rightful monarch. 34 Philip Brett
and George Haggerty suggest that the coronation scene was
intended to inspire the disaffected elements in the Oxford audience

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 'Esther3 to 'Athalia' 287
with loyalty to the ruling monarchy, but the line they cite in support
of this idea, 'Bless the true Church and save the king', is capable of
being taken either way: it expresses Nonjuring as well as Hanoverian
sentiments, as Dean realised.35
If this libretto constitutes a Hanoverian allegorical takeover it is
peculiarly inept, it is unsupported by musical references (there are
no Coronation Anthems, or any other music associated with the
crown, in Athalia), and its ideological ambition is foolhardy: one
could hardly find a more challenging part of the Bible to reclaim or
a more hostile venue for the first performance. As Shapiro points
out, the first London performance of the music was for a royal event,
the marriage of the Princess Royal, but the words were changed, to
a whole new story (Parnasso infesta).36
* * *
From their inception, Handel's oratorios concerned themselves with
scriptural events that had strong, and strongly contested, applica-
tions to contemporary political life for the mid-eighteenth-century
audience, at least its educated members. They well illustrate how
closely religion and politics were bonded in eighteenth-century
English thought. The ambiguity of political meaning in these first
three librettos is, we shall see in subsequent chapters, characteristic,
and perhaps deliberate on the part of composer as well as librettist.
The more numerous the possible interpretations, the wider the
appeal, and Handel would be the first to appreciate the benefit this
would bring to box-office takings.

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