Theatre Royal

The Theatre Royal in Drury Lane is one of the oldest theatres in London, and like many of the other major entertainment venues in this neighborhood, it saw Indigenous audience members. The Theatre Royal is where a near-riot broke out during the visit of the Four Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee) Kings in 1710—one of several theatres vying for their attendance during their stay, since their presence brought crowds keen to observe them. The “Kings” (they were young men, chosen either by the clan mothers or the British colonists) were not in fact all Haudenosaunee. Three of them—Onioheriago, Tejonihkarawa, and Sagayenkwaraton, the grandfather of military leader Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant)—were Mohawk. The fourth, Etowaucum, was Mahican, an Algonquian speaking people allied to the Haudenosaunee in 1675. Travelling to London as a diplomatic delegation, they sought Queen Anne’s assistance against French encroachment on their lands, just recompense for the vital (and often fatal) role their men had played defending British settlers in Canada. The British, in their turn, sought both to impress the Haudenosaunee with their might and power and present the image of a political alliance that legitimized their colonial claims against the French (hence calling them Kings). The Haudenosaunee were no strangers to diplomacy, having managed relationships with newcomers through the Covenant Chain, a diplomatic sequence that linked them to other peoples through the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace. In this portrait of Tejonihokarawa by Jan Verelst, you can see the foremost symbol of that covenant chain, a wampum belt, draped over his arm. It is believed that this is an exact representation of one of the belts the men presented Queen Anne, but the original’s whereabouts are unknown.