Performing Race in the London Lord Mayors’ Show, 1660-1708

From Thomas Southerne’s adaptation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to John Dryden’s Indian Queen, colonial settings and characters racialised as black were prominent on the Restoration stage. Indeed, the Folger’s collection contains three copies of the 1673 edition of Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco that includes a series of well-known illustrations featuring figures racialised as black. Offstage, on the streets of London, civic pageantry also included performers racialised as black and opulent displays of colonial wealth that have gone largely unnoticed by scholars working on Restoration theatre.

The London Lord Mayor’s Show, which celebrated the inauguration of the Lord Mayor at the end of October, was an important annual event in the civic calendar. It included a procession from London to Westminster and back, that was followed by a series of pageants around the City and an evening feast at one of the City’s livery companies. The Shows were organised by the Lord Mayor elect’s livery company and brought together playwrights, performers, craftsmen, and the liverymen. There were twenty-nine Shows between 1660 and 1701. Of these, twenty-four included references to performers described as “Blacks”, “Negroes”, “Moors”, or “Indians”.

Scholars have mostly focused on the Shows taking place at the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They have attended to the global networks displayed in the pageantry and raised questions about the possible identities of performers described with racial terminology. Were these performers of African, Asian, or indigenous American descent or performers in blackface? England, and especially London, was home to many people of African, Asian, and indigenous American descent so it is possible that they performed in the Show’s pageants. At the same time, race was a fluid concept that could be moored to a variety of pre-existing ideas and concepts, including religion, nation, climate, and the body. As such, connecting racial terms in these pamphlets to specific seventeenth-century communities of colour is extremely difficult.

After a break caused by the Civil Wars, the Show was gradually revived in the mid-1650s and retained many of the features of the earlier Shows including performances by individuals described as “Black”, “Moor”, “Negro”, and “Indian”. These performances took place in a distinctive political context. The later Stuarts actively pursued an imperialism based on racial slavery. This played a role in the transformation of the City’s economy as merchants moved into industries associated with the American colonies and the trade in enslaved people. At the same time, a growing political partisanship and demographic growth into the suburbs weakened the City’s traditional institutions: the Corporation and the livery companies. As such, the Restoration Lord Mayor’s Shows displayed the City’s power at a moment of weakness and when race was becoming legible in different ways.

The most important sources for the Shows are pamphlets published to accompany the performances. They provide a textual description of the procession and the pageants. The Folger holds five of these pamphlets for the Shows in 1677, 1679, 1681, 1686, and 1689. Three of these Shows included performers racialised as black.

The 1679 Show, for Sir Robert Clayton of the Drapers’ Company, featured a chariot pulled by models of lions, “back’d by two Negro’s, richly and properly habited” (see above image).

The 1681 Show, organised for Sir John Moore of the Grocers’ Company, included a camel ridden by “a young Negro” wearing an “East-Indian Habit” that included a “Golden Coronet”, “a round orient Pendant of Pearl”, “Scarlet colour’d Silk Hose”, and “Buskins of Gold Laced and surfled with Silver and Purple Ribon”. This performer distributed the “delicious Traffic of the Grocers Company”.

This same Show included “an Indian Garden of Spices” featuring a representation of Fructifera who, in their speech, referred to themselves as an “Indian Moor”. They claimed they had “been Baptiz’d in the Christian Faith” and that they were “a Moor, yet a good Christian too”. Here, the international trade networks established by English merchants were celebrated for the wealth they brought into the City and the Christian evangelism they helped to facilitate abroad.

Alongside these performances, political partisanship was often articulated through race, particularly during the fractious 1680s. In 1686, with the City loyal to James II/VII, the Show for John Peake, a member of the Mercers’, featured an individual “in the Habit of a Turk” who sang about the siege of Budapest. Only a month earlier, Budapest had been captured from the Ottomans by the Holy League. Folding in City politics, the final verse stated:

The Whigs’ scepticism about alliances with Catholic monarchies was, here, invoked by aligning them with Jews and Muslims. While the Show from 1689 did not feature any performers referred to by racial terminology, it did feature a speech by a representation of Monarchy that compared the recently abdicated James VII/II to a Turk. The City had defended itself “’Gainst the Intrigues of the Most Christian TURK” and freed itself “From Arbitrary Force and Slavery” (T242). Here James’s reign was analogised through the racialised figure of the ‘Turk’, a stand in for the Ottomans who were commonly considered tyrannical and despotic.

Race and racialised performance was an important feature of the London Lord Mayor’s Shows through the Restoration and beyond. As characters racialised as black and colonial settings featured on the Restoration stage, the City’s streets witnessed performers racialised as black riding camels, lions, and griffins and political speeches littered with racialised metaphors and analogies. Such performances formed part of the cultural politics of racemaking as the City of London participated in an emergent empire based on racial slavery.

Works Consulted

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