IT was not Heidegger who turned Handel out of the King's Theatre at the end of the 1733/34 season, but the Opera of the Nobility functioning as the rump of the Royal Academy of Music, whose 1719 Charter still had several years to run. Heidegger remained as manager, a post he held for the greater part of his active life. Handel, who could be high-handed when his professional interests were affronted (witness his treatment of Cuzzoni and Gordon in the 1720s) had antagonised a number of the Academy's directors and supporters. Lord Delaware's letter of 16 June 1733 to the Duke of Richmond (see Chapter 7, p. 133) is not the only evidence of this, though it is conclusive enough. Three weeks earlier, on 24 May, Thomas Delahaye wrote to the Earl of Essex: ‘Hendel is become so arbitrary a prince, that the Town murmurs’. Unfortunately no minutes of the Opera of the Nobility's meetings, formal or informal, and no lists of its directors between Delaware's letter and the expiry of the Royal Academy's charter in July 1740 are known to survive. There can, however, be no doubt that, as soon as Handel's five years were up, they made haste to get rid of him and repossess the theatre. Perhaps they expected him to retire. If so, they misjudged his character. He immediately looked for another theatre.

Robert D. Hume finds the move to John Rich's Covent Garden puzzling from the angle of both parties. But it is not difficult to explain. For Handel it was an obvious choice. It was London's newest theatre, open for less than two years, perhaps larger than Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Little Haymarket and better equipped for staging opera, especially the sort of opera Handel was about to present. Rich was not hostile to opera. ‘My Inclination to Musick frequently leads me to visit the Italian Opera’, he wrote in his dedication of the libretto of the Theobald–Galliard pantomime The Rape of Proserpine (Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1727).