Implying that the managers set out to ruin certain performers, including herself, Mrs. Clive accuses them of putting on "a better Face to the Town" by publishing (inaccurate) salary figures--a ploy to get public sanction for lower salaries. Mrs. Clive alludes to salaries published ostensibly by Fleetwood in the papers (e.g., _Gentleman's Magazine_, XIII, October 1743, 553), where the pay of such lights as Garrick, Macklin, Pritchard, and Clive in the 1742-1743 season is made to seem higher than the salaries of such worthies as Wilks, Betterton, Cibber, and Oldfield in the 1708-1709 season. The actors, in presenting their case (_Gentleman's Magazine_, XIII, November 1743, 609), hit at Fleetwood for citing 1708-1709 salaries, for "the Stage [then] both of _Drury-Lane_ and the _Hay-market_, were in so wretched a Condition ... as not to be worth any body's Acceptance." The players use instead salaries of the 1729 players "to place the salaries of the present Actors in a true light," since the stage in that year flourished. In 1729, Wilks, the highest paid actor, earned more than his later equal, Garrick. All other principals' salaries were comparable.
The main complaint of Fleetwood's company, then, was not only base salary but the "Fallacy" of the manager's account and his "setting down besides the Manager's Charges, every benefit Night, what is got by the Actor's own private Interests in Money and Tickets, as also the Article of 50L for Cloaths, added to the Actresses Account, which is absolutely an Advantage to the Manager, as they always lay out considerably more." This evidence, if not in itself damning to Fleetwood's designs toward his actors, at least indicates the internecine breach at Drury Lane. (The inter-theater conflict, important for its effect on repertory and morale, is adequately examined in theater histories and lies outside my interests in this essay.)
Mrs. Clive admits, however, that reduced, unpaid, or "handled" salaries were not the first fear of the actors; it was instead, she says, the fear of what "would happen from an Agreement supposed to be concluded betwixt the two Managers, which made 'em apprehend, that if they submitted to act under such Agreements, they must be absolutely in the Managers Power." As the writer of _The Case Between the Managers_ (p. 11) presents it, a conversation between a personified Covent Garden and Drury Lane would have gone like this: "Well, but, Brother _Drury_, we can manage that matter [how to keep audiences]--Suppose you and I make a Cartel; for instance, agree for every other Theatre, and oblige ourselves by this Cartel to reduce by near one half the Salaries of our principal Performers--I'gad, we may cramp 'em rarely this way--they must serve us at any rate we tax their Merit at, for they'll then have no where else to go to." Drury Lane responds, "D--n me, if that is not divinely thought--my dear Friend, give me a Kiss."