Event Comment: The United Company. On this evening
William Mountfort, the actor, was killed by
Lord Mohun and
Captain Hill, but the name of the play given that night seems not to have been mentioned in the testimony at the trial. In a novel based on the event,
The Player's Tragedy; or, Fatal Love (1693),
Mrs Bracegirdle acted the
Wife of Essex in
The Unhappy Favourite, and the fiction may have been based on fact.
Luttrell,
A Brief Relation, II, 637, 10 Dec. 1692: Last night lord Mohun, captain Hill of
collonel Earles regiment, and others, pursued
Mountfort the actor from the playhouse to his lodgings in
Norfolk Street, where one kist him while Hill run him thro' the belly: they ran away, but his lordship was this morning seized and committed to prison. Mountfort died of nis wounds this afternoon. The quarrell was about
Bracegirdle the actresse, whom they would have trapan'd away, but Mountfort prevented it, wherefore they murthered him thus. [See also
HMC, 14th Report, Appendix,
Portland MSS., III, 509;
The Ladies Lamentation for their Adonis, 16@2, a poem on Mountfort's
death; The Player's Tragedy; or, Fatal Love, 1693, a fictional treatment of the affair; and, particularly,
Borgman,
The Life and Death of William Mountfort, pp. 123-69. See also
Cibber, Apology, I, 108, for an account of
Betterton's taking the role of Alexander after Mountfort's
death.