Handel's publisher was said to have gained £1,500 from the publication of Rinaldo, which drew from Handel this complaint, "My Dear Sir, as it is only right that we should be upon an equal footing, _you_ shall _compose_ the next opera, and I will sell it." Publishers then, as now, not only lived by the brains of others, but had the lion's share of the profits.
Handel's success as an harpsichordist was equal to that which he enjoyed as a composer. He very often played solos in the theatre, and at the house of Thomas Britton.
Britton, the small coal merchant of Clerkenwell Green, deserves a passing remark.
Thomas Britton belonged to that class of men whom persons of limited views are accustomed to term _the lower orders_ of society, for he gained his daily bread by crying small coal, which he carried about the streets in a sack upon his shoulders. He lived near Clerkenwell Green, a quarter of the town with which fashionable people were scarcely acquainted before he made it illustrious.
How it came to pass that he learnt to play upon the _viola de gamba_ is not known, but he played upon it, and he was so much of an artist, that he grouped around him a number of amateurs who were happy to perform concerted music under his direction.
Britton was the tenant of a stable which he divided horizontally by a floor--on the ground floor was his coal shop. The upper story formed a long and narrow room, and it was in this chamber that the first meetings in the nature of private concerts took place in England, and instrumental music was first played regularly. Here it was that from 1678 to 1714 (the period of his death), the itinerant small coal merchant weekly entertained the intelligent world of London at his musical soirées, always gratuitously. Among others, the Duchess of Queensbury, one of the most celebrated beauties of the Court, was very regular in her attendance.
Pepusch and Handel played the harpsichord and the organ there.
Hawkins mentions, as a proof of the great consideration which Britton acquired, that he was called "_Sir_;" and many persons, unable to believe that a man of that class and of such a business could arrive by natural means to be called "Sir," took him for a magician, an atheist, and a Jesuit.