the army and served in Marlborough's campaigns, receiving a wound and attaining the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
On 1 May 1716 Shute's commission as governor of Massachusetts passed the privy council, and he landed on 4 Oct. His connection with Caryl and Morton made his appointment acceptable to the New Englanders. In the year following his arrival he successfully ratified the treaty of 1713 with the ‘Eastern Indians’ (Maine, Hist. Soc. Coll. iii. 361). Nevertheless, as with most governors of Massachusetts appointed by the crown, his administrative responsibilities soon brought him into conflict with the assembly.
His principal grounds of dispute with them were five: (1) his instructions ordered him to endeavour to obtain from the assembly fixed salaries for the governor, lieutenant-governor, and judges; this was a system which the colonies resisted tenaciously down to the time of separation, and Shute's attempts to insist on it failed. (2) He made war against the easy but ruinous device adopted by the colonial assembly of making unlimited issues of paper money. Shute's opposition was no doubt based partly on conviction, partly on personal interest, since the value of his own salary was lowered by the depreciation of money. Here too the assembly defied the advice of the governor. (3) Shute strove zealously to protect the forests in Maine, so as to secure ship-timber for the royal navy. The question was a difficult one. On the one hand it was clearly the duty of the governor to hinder the waste of an important resource of the crown; on the other hand it was hard to carry out a system of control without unnecessarily interfering with private enterprise. (4) The assembly refused to support the governor in his attempts to defend the north-western frontier; they would neither renew the fortification of Pemaquid, nor vote an adequate sum towards providing presents for the Indians. (5) The assembly endeavoured to lay import duties on English goods, in bold defiance of all those principles on which the colonial policy of England then rested. The result of all these differences was that Shute's career as a governor was marked by an unending series of disputes with the assembly, and was thus a slight but distinct anticipation of the great storm of fifty years later.
On new year's day 1723 Shute sailed to England, ostensibly on private business, but really to lay his administrative difficulties before the advisers of the crown. In 1727 his commission was vacated by the death of George I. He was not reappointed, but received a pension of 400l. a year, charged on the customs duties of the West Indies. Shute remained in a private station till his death on 15 March 1742.
[Hutchinson's History of Massachusetts; Palfrey's Hist. of New England; Gent. Mag. 1742, p. 219.]
SHUTE-BARRINGTON, WILLIAM WILDMAN, second Viscount (1719–1793). [See Barrington.]
SHUTER, EDWARD (1728?–1776), actor, was born of obscure parents in Vine Street, St. Giles's, London, in a house occupied by one Merit or Meritt, a chimney-sweep. Such is his own statement, possibly humorous, to which he adds that his father was a chairman, and his mother a vendor of oysters in the winter and cucumbers in the summer. A second and eminently improbable account, more than once copied, declares him to have been the son of a clergyman and by occupation a billiard-marker. All concerning his origin is obscure, and he seems himself to have traded on the lowness of his extraction. It is probable that he was in some general capacity engaged at a vintner's near Covent Garden, and he is said to have obtained some education at the cost of a gentleman whom he aided in recovering a pocket-book left in a coach. Chapman, an actor of Drury Lane, struck with some display of humour, took him as an apprentice, and led him behind the scenes of the theatre, where he became known as ‘Comical Ned.’ After some practice with country companies, and the customary experiences of poverty and privation, over which he subsequently made merry, he played on 8 July 1744 Catesby in ‘Richard III’ at Chapman's theatre, Richmond. On 15 April 1745, for Chapman's benefit, he played at Covent Garden as ‘Master’ Shuter, the Schoolboy in Cibber's ‘Schoolboy,’ with the inaccurate announcement after his name that he had never appeared on the stage before. On 5 June at Drury Lane, for the benefit of Morgan, this performance was repeated. On 25 Aug. he played at Richmond the characters of Donalbane and Cheatley. In June 1746 Garrick, after his return from Ireland, gave six performances at Covent Garden, and ‘Master’ Shuter played on the 13th Osric in ‘Hamlet,’ and on the 27th the Third Witch in ‘Macbeth.’ In 1746–7 he was at Goodman's Fields with what Genest calls ‘an inferior company,’ including Lee, Paget, Mrs. Hallam, and Mrs. Butler. Here he was seen in a round of comic characters, including Trapland in ‘Love for Love,’ Periwinkle in ‘A Bold Stroke for a Wife,’ Mons. le Medicin
