Anne was dressed for burial inside Westminster Abbey. For an actress it was an extraordinary honour. The Abbey still had something it would refuse her.
Anne Oldfield died at her home in Grosvenor Street, London, on 23 October 1730. Her funeral followed four days later. She had spent about thirty years on the stage, playing fashionable women whose rank she had not been born to, and tragic heroines whose grief she could make an audience believe. The woman going into the Abbey had earned her fame over a working lifetime.
Nineteen months before her death, in March 1729, the demand for places at her benefit was so great that benches were put on the stage itself, enclosed to keep the ladies sitting on them from catching cold. The king, the queen, the Prince of Wales and the princesses all attended. The play was Sir Courtly Nice, and the night's takings were hers. An actress could hardly ask for a plainer measure of her worth than paying customers sitting in her workplace.
It was a play with history for her. More than a quarter of a century earlier, when she was about twenty and had been given the part of Leonora in it, Colley Cibber, the actor and playwright who would later write some of her finest roles, thought so little of her that he ran through her scenes with her only grudgingly. Her performance on the night corrected him. When she played Lady Betty Modish in his comedy The Careless Husband in 1704, he admitted that many of the character's sentiments might almost be called her own. The woman of fashion on the stage owed something to the actress talking off it.
She went on to Lady Townly in The Provoked Husband in 1728, another lady of quality whose appetite for pleasure drove the comedy. Long after she was famous, she still wanted every help anyone could give her with a part she liked.
The apparent ease was work.
Her value had once brought her close to a different kind of position. A new agreement for running the company named Oldfield alongside Cibber, Robert Wilks and Thomas Doggett as joint sharers in its management. Doggett objected. He did not dispute her talent. He disputed the wisdom of admitting a woman. The company's affairs, he insisted, could never be on a "secure Foundation" if more than one sex was admitted to the management of them.
That disposed of Oldfield's share. The men offered to let her name her own terms as a salaried performer instead. She asked for £200 a year and a benefit clear of all charges. They agreed, and some years later raised the salary to 300 guineas, with the benefit kept. Her services were worth paying for. Her presence in the management was another matter.
The money supported a household. Arthur Maynwaring, a politician and writer, had been her partner until his death in 1712. They had a son, also Arthur, and Maynwaring left much of his estate to mother and child. She later lived with Charles Churchill, an army officer and nephew of the Duke of Marlborough, and their son was named Charles. Her comfort rested on that inheritance as well as on her salary, but the salary was hers, earned night after night.
In 1725 she became the first occupant of a house in Grosvenor Street, in Mayfair. By the final year of her life, the fashionable ladies she played belonged to a world in which she herself had an established address.
There was another actress in that household. Margaret Saunders is said to have first appeared on the Drury Lane stage in 1702, at about sixteen, through Oldfield's influence. When a violent asthma ended her career, she became Oldfield's friend and confidential attendant. A friendship that began in one theatre had outlasted Saunders's time in it.
On 28 April 1730 Oldfield appeared as Lady Brute in The Provoked Wife. It was her last performance. Illness kept her from the stage through the months that followed. Her will was dated 27 June, with a codicil added in September. Her mother and her aunt Jane Gourlaw were remembered. Saunders was to have £10 a year, paid quarterly. Charles was to have the Grosvenor Street house. There were still people whose futures she could arrange.
By the middle of October, hope of her recovery had been given up. She died early on the morning of the 23rd.
Before the funeral her coffin lay in the Abbey's Jerusalem Chamber. Arthur, her elder son, was chief mourner, and Lord De la Warr and Lord Hervey were among the men who supported her pall. She was buried in the south aisle of the nave, near the monument to the playwright William Congreve. Actors admitted to the Abbey were more usually placed in its cloisters. It was Margaret Saunders who later described what her friend was buried in: a head of very fine Brussels lace, a holland shift, double ruffles of the same lace. A small square stone was laid over the grave.
Churchill asked permission to put up a monument to her. The Dean and Chapter refused. Her burial inside the church had been allowed. A monument was another matter. The small stone carries her name and the year, and nothing else: "ANN OLDFIELD 1730".
