Astley, Philip
Astley, Philip
- Marius Kwint
Astley, Philip (1742–1814), equestrian performer and circus proprietor, was born on 8 January 1742 at Newcastle under Lyme, one of three children of Edward Astley (fl. 1725–1772), cabinet-maker and veneer cutter. Apprenticed to the family trade at nine, the forthright Astley had a traumatic relationship with his father and when he was seventeen left to join the 15th light dragoons, newly established in 1759 for swift action in the Seven Years' War. At over 6 feet tall he exceeded the regimental height limit by some 6 inches, but was quickly noted for his exceptional talent at riding and breaking horses as well as his good looks and powerful bearing. A series of dramatic rescues and daring captures in battle at Emsdorf, Freiburg, and elsewhere earned him promotion to the rank of sergeant-major in 1763, along with presentation to George III. Astley married Patty Jones (1740/41–1803) in London on 8 July 1765 and was discharged from the army nearly a year later with, according to circus legend, his commander's gift of a white regimental charger. By the summer of 1767 he was working as a groom and advertiser at Mr and Mrs Sampson's riding school in Islington, near London.
On 4 April the following year Astley opened his own ‘riding school’ in a fenced wayside field on Lambeth Marsh named Halfpenny Hatch. Styling himself the English Hussar, he promised such feats as straddling two cantering and jumping horses, doing headstands on a pint pot on the saddle, and a parody of riding by a foppish tailor. After collecting the 6d. admission or shilling for a seat, Mrs Astley would perform several of the turns, sometimes covering for her husband when his war wound was troubling him and developing her own specialism in mounted apiculture. She would also drum out an accompaniment before their exceptional profits—a reputed 40 guineas a day—allowed two French-horn players to be employed. The hiring of professional clowns and acrobats soon followed and the Astleys fostered a new genre in which the traditional comic interludes of the fairground and theatre relieved a core of thrilling and arduous experiments in trick-riding.
Having purchased a timber yard at the south-east foot of Westminster Bridge, the Astleys and their infant son, John [see below], moved to permanent headquarters for the next summer, of 1769. Astley's Amphitheatre, as it was eventually known, underwent a series of seasonal, jerry-built metamorphoses. It gradually acquired a roof over the ring and an auditorium that aped the elegance and accommodation of the patent theatres across the river in Westminster. During the 1770s the newly vigilant Surrey magistrates made several unsuccessful attempts to prosecute Astley for this unlicensed challenge to the theatrical monopoly. In 1782 he provoked a crisis by erecting a stage next to the ring in emulation of the new Royal Circus nearby. He was summarily gaoled along with his competitor as a rogue and a vagabond, but appealed amid strong popular and press support. Both were acquitted on the ostensible grounds that equestrian displays were not covered by the law. Their case not only practically undermined the inherited patchwork of repressive theatrical legislation, but also served as a rallying-point for its reform.
From the outset Astley had spent his winters strategically touring British towns and continental capitals. His company performed at pleasure gardens, fairs, assizes, and races, and in open fields well into the 1780s, later tending to erect temporary wooden circuses or adapt municipal theatres. Astley played the British and French courts against each other, earning command performances, gifts, and favours from both. These included, in 1782, a patent from George III for Astley's method of horse-breaking. In October of the following year he opened his Amphithéâtre Astley—the first of its kind in France—in the rue du Faubourg-du-Temple in Paris, under the patronage of Queen Marie Antoinette. Like many she had been captivated by John—Young Astley—whose dancing on horseback had superseded his father's stunts. By 1788 Philip Astley also received a full dramatic patent for Dublin, where the British authorities were less concerned to protect existing culture. There, in Peter Street, he established the Equestrian Theatre Royal.
Astley spent much of his remaining career reacting in his own way to the revolutions of Europe. Six days after the fall of the Bastille in 1789 his company became the first to dramatize the news for the London stage, a role that it would sustain thereafter. Once war with France was declared in 1793 Astley, aged fifty, left his London amphitheatre under the management of his son and re-enlisted with his regiment under the duke of York. In Flanders he served as a horse-master, reporter, and celebrity morale-booster before word that the amphitheatre had burnt down on 17 August 1794 prompted his discharge and return. Despite the fact that his property had been insured to only a tenth of its £30,000 value he ensured that the New Amphitheatre of Arts and Sciences was ready on the same site for the following Easter. Barring the insurrections of 1798 in Dublin, where his loyal pageants attracted serious rioting and personal assault, Astley assumed retirement. In 1799 he sold a half-share of the amphitheatre to his son and two years later published his successful Astley's System of Equestrian Education. This concise treatise surpassed his earlier handful of pamphlets on military affairs and riding.
Upon peace with France in 1802, however, the sixty-year-old Astley embarked with royal endorsement for Paris. There he successfully sought from Napoleon the return of approximately £10,000 of property and fourteen years of back rent. When war recommenced within a year he was interned as an enemy subject, but escaped, reportedly shamming illness in order to obtain a passport to the spa at Montpellier, hijacking a postilion to the German border and descending the Rhine. There he learned that not only had his amphitheatre in London burnt down once again, but his wife had died a week beforehand on 25 August 1803. Having sold his theatre in Dublin for £6000 (plus a rumoured £4000 of government compensation), he supervised the rebuilding of the third amphitheatre with equal speed to the last.
Astley promised now to 'keep the whip hand', but in his weakened financial state sought to diversify, leasing his half of the amphitheatre to a syndicate of four younger associates (Memoris of J. Decastro, 80). Assisted by royal favour and the more liberal jurisdictions of a new lord chamberlain, he obtained a year-round licence for what had been the forbidden territory of Westminster and in 1806 opened the Olympic Pavilion in Wych Street, off the Strand. This smaller theatre-cum-circus, built from the timbers of an old naval prize, failed in its attempt to win a more socially exclusive audience. Seven years later, in declining health and increasing anxiety, Astley sold the Olympic Pavilion to the new licensee of the Royal Circus, John Elliston, for a meagre £2800 and a small annuity. He estimated his loss at £10,000.
Astley died, diagnosed with gout in the stomach, in Paris on 20 October 1814, and was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery. The London amphitheatre and its profits were bequeathed to his son and only child, John.
Philip Astley was no great innovator, but a pre-eminent distributor and developer of trends—a survivor in a precarious and litigious business thanks to his shrewd sense of what would, in his words, 'catch John Bull' (Memoirs of Charles Dibdin, 99). In several respects his fame represented the advance of the artisan classes into the mass consumer market. His robust loyalism was in tune with a wider cult of militaristic display during a period of naked imperialism and frequent war. He also catered to demands for an apparently respectable popular entertainment that was suitable for a diverse audience. Likened by one employee to a 'humane Hog', Philip the Big was a strict paternalist (ibid., 26). He led by detailed control as well as sheer energy, tenacity, bluster, and sometimes physical brutality. Some clearly despised him; most, however, were bemused by his bellowing and malapropisms. Anecdotes about Old Astley became a staple of metropolitan legend both during and after his life.
John Conway Philip Astley (1768–1821), equestrian performer and circus proprietor, was born in Lambeth, probably in September 1768. He shared his father's hot temper but had acquired more formal manners and education. His prowess in the ring graduated into an aptitude for writing and performing popular dramas. After a philandering youth involving an alleged duel in Ireland, in 1800 he married his co-star of Astley's stage, Hannah Waldo Smith (d. 1843), niece of the political economist Adam Smith. The glamorous couple took a country house at East Sheen in Surrey. John Astley became instrumental in the development of hippodrama—a swashbuckling form of melodrama featuring spectacular battle scenes on horseback. In 1810 he wrote and produced The Blood-Red Knight, or, The Fatal Bridge, netting the amphitheatre £18,000 profits and triggering a controversial wave of competition from the patent theatres, including Blue Beard at Covent Garden. In spite of several more successes, John Astley ran up considerable debts that were not helped by his apparent drinking. He too died in Paris, of a liver complaint, on 19 October 1821, and was interred next to his father.
Astley's amphitheatre went on to further triumphs and disasters under the regimes of Andrew Ducrow, Dion Boucicault, and the Sanger brothers, among others. As a national institution it was gently lampooned in the pages of Dickens, Thackeray, and Punch before being demolished in 1893. The only local trace of Philip Astley's efforts remains in the name of Hercules Road in Lambeth, where he erected his mansion and a terrace of houses and called them both after the human pyramid, or the Force d'Hercule.
Sources
- M. Kwint, ‘Astley's Amphitheatre and the early circus in England, 1768–1830’, DPhil diss., U. Oxf., 1994
- The memoirs of J. Decastro, comedian, ed. R. Humphries (1824)
- Professional and literary memoirs of Charles Dibdin the younger, ed. G. Speaight (1956)
- P. Bemrose, Circus genius: a tribute to Philip Astley, 1742–1814 (1992)
The Times (17 Aug 1795)Find it in your libraryGoogle PreviewWorldCat; repr. inD. Lysons, ed., Collectanea, or, A collection of advertisements and paragraphs from the newspapers, 4 [1840]Find it in your libraryGoogle PreviewWorldCat
- R. Toole-Stott, Circus and allied arts: a world bibliography, 1500–1970, 4 vols. (1958–71)
- M. Kwint, ‘The legitimization of the circus in late Georgian England’, Past and Present, 174 (2002), 72–115
Archives
- BL, cuttings from newpapers scrapbook, Th. Cts. 35–7
- Harvard TC, scrapbooks, TS 930.10F
- Surrey HC, quarter sessions records
- Theatre Museum, London
- University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, scrapbooks, G126
- BL, D. Lysons, collectanea (scrapbooks), 5 vols., C.103.k.11
- Bodl. Oxf., John Johnson collection, circus boxes
- Tyne and Wear Archives Service, Newcastle upon Tyne, Fenwick collection
Likenesses
- lithograph, 1782 (John Astley)
- caricature, 1785, BM; repro. in S. Collings, The downfall of taste and genius, or, The world as it goes
- J. H. Grieve?, watercolour, 1795 (of Astley?), Bodl. Oxf., John Johnson collection, circus boxes
- J. Smith, silhouette, line engraving, 1801, BM, NPG
- engraving, 1806 (with G. Packwood and others), Bodl. Oxf., John Johnson collection, circus boxes
- G. Hill, group portrait, coloured aquatint, pubd 1808 (after Astley's amphitheatre by Pugin and Rowlandson), NPG
- line engraving, NPG [see illus.]
- photograph, Theatre Museum, London
- prints, Theatre Museum, London
Wealth at Death
approximately £50,000—in buildings; encumbered with heavy debt: will, PRO, PROB 11/1562; J. Bratton and J. Traies, Astley's amphitheatre (1980)