A petition to the King was prepared, to the effect that no play-house might be permitted 'in London or in Middlesex, within four miles of the City on that side of the Thames', and with this Taylor pursued James to Theobalds, Newmarket, and Royston. It recited the service done by watermen in the navy during the Armada invasion of 1588 and in such expeditions as those of Essex in 1596 and 1597. And it proceeded:
'Afterwards the players began to play on the Bankside and to leave
playing in London and Middlesex (for the most part), then there went
such great concourse of people by water that the small number of
watermen remaining at home were not able to carry them, by reason
of the court, the terms, the players, and other employments, so that
we were enforced and encouraged (hoping that this golden stirring
would have lasted ever) to take and entertain men and boys.'
It was calculated that the number of watermen and their
dependants between Windsor and Gravesend had now by
1614 reached 40,000:
'The cause of the greater half of which multitude hath been the
players playing on the Bankside, for I have known three companies
besides the bear-baiting, at once there; to wit, the Globe, the Rose,
and the Swan. And it is an infallible truth that, had they never played
there, it had been better for watermen by the one half of their living,
for the company is increased more than half by their means of playing
there in former times.'
Foreign employment had now come to an end:
'And the players have all (except the King's men) left their usuall
residency on the Bankside, and do play in Middlesex far remote from
the Thames, so that every day in the week they do draw unto them
three or four thousand people, that were used to spend their monies
by water.'
Such, Taylor assures us, was the effect of the petition. It was
referred by James to 'his commissioners for suits', that is
to say, the Court of Requests, composed of Sir Julius Caesar,
Sir Thomas Parry, Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Henry Montagu,
Sir Walter Cope, George Calvert, and Baron Sotherton. The
King's men exhibited a counter-petition, and the case came
on for hearing.
'Sir Francis Bacon very worthily said that so far as the public weal
was to be regarded before pastimes, or a serviceable decaying multitude
- [Footnote: and the reasons that their Playing on London side is their extreame hindrances.
With a Relation how farre that suit was proceeded in, and the occasions that it was not effected, reprinted by Hindley, ii, No. 15, from Taylor's Works (1630), probably originally printed in 1614.]
