The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy (European Festival Studies: 1450-1700) 9782503585321, 2503585329
On 11 May 1625 Charles I married Henrietta Maria, the youngest sister of Louis XIII of France. The match signalled Brita
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The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625
European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 Founding Editor J. R. Mulryne, University of Warwick, UK
Series Editors Margaret Shewring, University of Warwick, UK Margaret M. McGowan, CBE, FBA, University of Sussex, UK Marie-Claude Canova-Green, University of London (Goldsmiths), UK
Publications Advisory Board Maria Ines Aliverti, University of Pisa, Italy; Sydney Anglo, FBA, FSA, University of Wales, UK; Richard Cooper, University of Oxford, UK; Noel Fallows, FSA, University of Georgia, USA; Iain Fenlon, University of Cambridge, UK; Bernardo J. García García, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain; Maartje van Geldaer, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; Pieter Martens, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium; R. L. M. Morris, University of Cambridge, UK; Elaine Tierney, Research Institute, Victoria & Albert Museum, UK
This Series, in association with the Society for European Festivals Research, builds on the current surge in interest in the circumstances of European Festivals – their political, religious, social, economic, and cultural implications, as well as the detailed analysis of their performance (including ephemeral architecture, scenography, scripts, music and soundscape, dance, costumes, processions, and fireworks) in both indoor and outdoor locations. Festivals were interdisciplinary and, on occasion, international in scope. They drew on a rich classical heritage and developed a shared pan-European iconography as well as exploiting regional and site-specific features. They played an important part in local politics and the local economy, as well as international negotiations and the conscious presentation of power, sophistication, and national identity, and sometimes in a global context. The Series, including both essay collections and monog raphs, seeks to analyse the characteristics of individual festivals as well as to explore generic themes. It draws on a wealth of archival documentary evidence, alongside the resources of galleries and museums, to study the historical, literary, performance, and material culture of these extravagant occasions of state.
The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625 Celebrations and Controversy
Edited by Marie-Claude Canova-Green and Sara J. Wolfson
F
Cover image: Pierre Régnier, The Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625, silver, cast medal (obverse and reverse), 23.5 mm diameter, Private Collection.
We would like to thank Canterbury Christ Church University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Open University for their financial support.
© 2020, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2020/0095/3 ISBN: 978-2-503-58532-1 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-58533-8 DOI: 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.117863 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.
This volume is dedicated to J. R. Mulryne and his services to the genre of European Festival Studies.
Contents List of Illustrations
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Contributors 13 Foreword 17 Note from the Editors
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R. Malcolm Smuts Introduction. Festivals, Dynastic Alliances, and Political History: Notes on the History and Historiography of Royal Weddings
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Lucinda H. S. Dean Chapter 1. ‘Keeping Your Friends Close, But Your Enemies Closer’? The Anglo-Franco-Scottish Marital Triangle, c. 1200 to c. 1625 41 J. R. (Ronnie) Mulryne Chapter 2. Paradoxical Princes: Charles Stuart and Henrietta Maria, Personality and Politics (1600–1625)
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Karen Britland Chapter 3. A Ring of Roses: Henrietta Maria, Pierre de Bérulle, and the Plague of 1625–1626
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Marie-Claude Canova-Green Chapter 4. Love, Politics, and Religion: Henrietta Maria’s Progress through France and the Entry into Amiens
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Erin Griffey Chapter 5. ‘All Rich as Invention Can Frame, or Art Fashion’: Dressing and Decorating for the Wedding Celebrations of 1625
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Margaret Shewring Chapter 6. Divergent Discourses: Multiple Voices in Festival Accounts of the Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria
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Sara J. Wolfson Chapter 7. The Welcoming Journey of Queen Henrietta Maria and Stuart–Bourbon Relations, 1625–1626
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Sara Trevisan Chapter 8. Nebuchadnezzar, Charlemagne, and Aeneas: John Finch’s Speech for the King and Queen at Canterbury
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Kevin Laam Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the Politics of the English Epithalamium in 1625
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Sydney Anglo Chapter 10. The Festivities that Never Were: 1625–1626
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Margaret M. McGowan Chapter 11. ‘A French Antique’: The Forms of Court Ballets in France, 1621–1627
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John Peacock Chapter 12. Inigo Jones between a Spanish Princess and a French Queen 279 Gordon Higgott Chapter 13. ‘Mutual Fruitfulness’: A Nuptial Allegory on Queen Henrietta Maria’s Bedchamber Ceiling at the Queen’s House, Greenwich 295 Ella Hawkins (Transcribed and annotated) Appendix 1: A True Discourse of All the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies, observed at the Contract and Mariage of the High and Mighty Charles, King of Britain: The Principal English Festival Book of the 1625 Wedding, Including Two Addresses at Canterbury by John Finch
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Margaret Shewring (Transcribed and annotated) Appendix 2. A Relation of the Glorious Triumphs and Order of the Ceremonies: An English-Language Version of the French Festival Book
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Index 353
List of Illustrations Plates Plate I. Henri de Navarre and Marguerite de Valois, in Catherine de Médicis’s Book of Hours, c. 1544?, fol. 169r.
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Plate II. The Coronation of Marie de Médicis at Saint-Denis 13 May 1610, Paris, Musée du Louvre.
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Plate III. Raphael’s cartoon for the tapestry of Christ’s Charge to St Peter, c. 1515–1516, Royal Collection Trust.
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Plate IV. Guillemine la Quinteuse, Ballet des Fées des Forests de SaintGermain, 1625, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
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Plate V. La Musique, Ballet des Fées des Forests de Saint-Germain, 1625, London, The Theatre Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum.
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Plate VI. Wood Spirit, Ballet des Nymphes Bocagères de la Forest Sacrée, 1627, Paris, Musée du Louvre.
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Plate VII. The Queen’s Bedchamber, looking west in 2014, the Queen’s House, Greenwich.
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Plate VIII. The ceiling of the Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich, c. 1637–c. 1640, by Edward Pearce senior (attrib.) and others in the team of the Sergeant-Painter, John de Critz, 5. 94 m × 9. 95 m, oil on plaster and wood; with a central ceiling painting of Aurora Dispersing the Shades of the Night.
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Plate IX A–D. The four cartouches in the angles of the ceiling soffit, the Queen’s Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich.
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Plate X. Giovanni Battista Bolognini (c. 1650s), after Guido Reni’s Bacchus and Ariadne on the Island of Naxos (1637–1640), etching on paper, 49.2 cm × 106.0 cm, London, the British Museum.
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Plate XI. Overlay of a reconstructed outline of Guido Reni’s lost painting, Bacchus and Ariadne on the Island of Naxos.304 Plate XII. The Queen’s House, Greenwich, from the north-west in 2014. 304 Plate XIII. The south-east angle of the ceiling soffit, showing the corner cartouche and the central roundel with an ‘HMCR’ mono gram, the Queen’s Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich.
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l i s t of illustr ation s
Plate XIV. Edward Pearce senior, design for a decorative frieze, published by Robert Peake in 1640, etching on paper, probably by William Faithorne, 9.3 cm × 27.9 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
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Plate XV. Central and east side of the frieze and cove above the chimney breast on the south side of the Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich.
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Plate XVI. Decorative frame in the centre of the north cove, enclosing a cartouche with the arms of France, conjoined in a heart-shaped shield with those of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and surmounted by a French crown, the Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich.
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Plate XVII. The Portland stone pediment over the door to the bridge room on the first-floor gallery of the Great Hall, with a cartouche and heart-shaped shield showing the royal arms of France conjoined with those of England, Scotland, and Ireland, surmounted by an English crown, the Queen’s House, Greenwich.
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Plate XVIII. Trompe l’oeil architectural frame in the centre of the west cove of the Bedchamber, with a cartouche enclosing the French royal arms. Above is a female figure holding a sceptre and crown, the Queen’s House, Greenwich.
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Figures Figure 4.1. Designed by Pierre Régnier, The Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625, silver, cast medal, 23.5 mm diameter. Showing busts of Charles I and Henrietta Maria on the obverse and Cupid walking, scattering roses and lilies, on the reverse. Private Collection.
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Figure 4.2. Pierre Firens, The Marriage Treaty between the Kings of France and England, November 1624, engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale 114 de France, Estampes et photographie, Réserve FOL-QB-201 (23). Figure 4.3. Willem van de Passe (attr.), ‘Epithalamium GalloBritannicum, or A Discourse of the Mariage betwixt England and France’, 1625, engraving. Showing a portrait of Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria. London, British Museum, acquis. no. 1934, 1130.1. Reproduced with permission.
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Figure 5.1. Pierre Firens, The Marriage Treaty between the Kings of France and England, November 1624, engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes et photographie, Réserve FOL-QB-201 (23).
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list of illustrations
Figure 5.2. Designed by Pierre Régnier, The Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625, silver, cast medal, 23.5 mm diameter. Showing busts of Charles I and Henrietta Maria on the obverse and Cupid walking, scattering roses and lilies, on the reverse. Private Collection.
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Figure 9.1. Walter Quin, In nvptiis principvm incomparabilivm, Caroli, Britannici Imperi Monarchae potentissimi, et Henriettae Mariae, Henrici Magni, Galliarum Regis Filiae, gratulatio quadrilinguis Gualteri Quinni (London: G. Purslow, 1625). The British Library Board, General Reference Collection C.28.g.8.(4.).
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Figure 12.1. Inigo Jones, The House of Oceanus, Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion, 1624. Photograph Courtauld Institute Photo graphic Survey. Copyright Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.
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Figure 12.2. After Federico Zuccaro, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa doing homage to Pope Alexander III, c. 1582 (Oxford, Christ Church). Reproduced by permission of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.
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Figure 12.3. Inigo Jones, Queen’s Chapel, St James’s Palace, interior. Photograph London Courtauld Institute Gallery.
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Figure 12.4. Inigo Jones, Queen’s Chapel, St James’s Palace, exterior. Photograph A. F. Kersting, Conway Library, Courtauld Institute, London.
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Figure 12.5. Church of S. Adriano, in Étienne du Pérac, I Vestigi Dell’Antichità Di Roma (Rome: Lorenzo della Vaccheria, 1575), pl. 3. Photograph Warburg Institute, London.
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Figure 12.6. Inigo Jones, Queen’s Chapel, chimneypiece for the Queen’s Closet. Photograph RIBA Library, Drawings and Archives Collection.
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Figure 12.7. Vincenzo Scamozzi, design for a fireplace, in L’Idea Della Architettura Universale (Venice: Giorgio Valentino, 1615), part 2, p. 165. Photograph Warburg Institute.
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Figure 12.8. Inigo Jones, Proscenium and standing scene, Arténice, 1626. Photograph Courtauld Institute Photographic Survey. Copyright Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.
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Figure 13.1. Plan of the Queen’s House at first-floor level in 1635–1640, Greenwich. © Alan Fagan and Gordon Higgott.
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Contributors Sydney Anglo (FBA, FSA, FLSW) is Emeritus Professor in the History of Ideas, University of Wales. He has published widely on the history of tournament and chivalry, including the following books: The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster (Oxford University Press, 1968); Chivalry in the Renaissance (Boydell, 1990); The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe (Yale University Press, 2000); and L’Escrime, la danse et l’art de la guerre (BnF, 2011). His many books also include: Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Clarendon Press, 1969, 2nd edn, 1997); Images of Early Tudor Kingship (Seaby, 1992); Machiavelli – the First Century (Oxford University Press, 2005). Recent chapters on Renaissance festivals include: ‘The Thames en Fête’, in Margaret Shewring (ed.), Waterborne Pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. R. Mulryne (Ashgate, 2013). Karen Britland is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She researches and teaches on early modern literature, especially seventeenth-century drama and women’s writing. She is the author of Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and has edited Elizabeth Cary’s play The Tragedy of Mariam, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan and James Shirley’s The Imposture (forthcoming). Marie-Claude Canova-Green is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has research interests in European court entertainments and has edited a four-volume collection of seventeenth-century ballet libretti. She has contributed chapters to Margaret M. McGowan (ed.), Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615. A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions (Ashgate, 2013); Margaret Shewring (ed.), Waterborne Pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. R. Mulryne (Ashgate, 2013); J. R. Mulryne, with Maria Ines Aliverti and Anna Maria Testaverde (eds), Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power (Ashgate, 2015); and J. R. Mulryne, Krista de Jonge, Pieter Martens, and R. L. M. Morris (eds), Architectures of Festivals: Fashioning and Re-fashioning Urban and Courtly Space in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2017). She has also published monographs on Molière, early modern French drama and more recently the body of the king, Faire le roi. L’autre corps de Louis XIII (Fayard, 2018) as well as an edited collection Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe (Brepols, 2013). Lucinda H. S. Dean is a lecturer at the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She is currently finalizing her first monograph based on her AHRC-funded doctoral research: Death and the Royal Succession: Scottish Funerals, Coronations and Weddings, c. 1214–1543. She has published a number of articles and book chapters on ritual and ceremony of the late medieval and early modern, including chapters in other SEFR volumes. Her new work
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explores manhood, masculinity, and coming of age of the Stewart kings, with a case study of James V as forerunner to a wider comparative analysis project, and she is also developing research into aspects of material culture of the Scottish royal court. She collaborates widely outside the academy also, including work with Historic Environment Scotland, Royal Collections Trust (Holyrood), and Culture Perth and Kinross. Erin Griffey is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland. She is a specialist in early modern visual and material culture and has published widely on the Stuart court, including the edited collection, Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Ashgate, 2008) and articles in The Burlington, The Seventeenth Century, Studi di Memofonte, and the Journal of the History of Collections. Her monograph, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Early Modern Court, was published by Yale University Press in 2015. Ella Hawkins is a doctoral research student at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. Her current research focuses on the significance of Elizabethan and Jacobean aesthetics in twenty-first-century costume design for Shakespeare, and is funded by the Midlands4Cities AHRC DTP. Ella previously completed a BA in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, followed by an MA in Shakespeare and Theatre at the Shakespeare Institute. Gordon Higgott is an independent architectural historian specializing in design practice in the early modern period. In 1989 he co-authored the exhibition catalogue Inigo Jones: Complete Architectural Drawings and has since published articles and book chapters on the work of Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren, including studies on the Queen’s House Greenwich, St Paul’s Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey. His recent published work includes online catalogues of the ‘English Baroque Drawings’ at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and the ‘Wren Office Drawings’ in the St Paul’s Cathedral collections at London Metropolitan Archives. Kevin Laam is Associate Professor of English at Oakland University. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on early modern English literature, including ‘James Howell, Cavalier Nuptial Literature, and the Marriage Act of 1653’, in The Seventeenth Century (Taylor & Francis, 2019); and ‘Marvell’s Marriage Songs and Poetic Patronage in the Court of Cromwell’, in Explorations in Renaissance Culture (Brill, 2016). His research focuses on marriage, politics, and the masque in revolutionary England. Margaret M. McGowan is a Fellow of the British Academy and Research Professor at the University of Sussex. Her research interests centre on the intellectual, cultural, and artistic concerns of early modern Europe. Her publications include: L’Art du Ballet de cour en France, 1581–1643 (CNRS, 1963); Montaigne’s Deceits (Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 1974); Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard (University of California Press, 1985); The Vision of Rome in Late Renaissance France (Yale
contributors
University Press, 2000); and Dance in the Renaissance: European Fashion, French Obsession (Yale University Press, 2008). Her recent chapters on Renaissance festivals include ‘Lyon: A Centre for Water Celebration’, in Margaret Shewring (ed.), Waterborne pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance; Essays in Honour of J. R. Mulryne (Ashgate, 2013); and ‘Henri IV as Architect and Restorer of the State; His Entry into Rouen, 16 October 1596’, in J. R. Mulryne, with Marie Ines Aliverti and Anna Maria Testaverde (eds), Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe. The Iconography of Power (Ashgate, 2015). She edited Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615. A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions, the first published volume in the series European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Ashgate, 2013). She gave the Leopold Delisle lectures in 2012 and was awarded the Wolfson Prize in 2008 and the CBE for services to French Studies in 1998. J. R. Mulryne (1937–2019) was Professor Emeritus at the University of Warwick, UK, a former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. He was a Co-Convenor for the Society for European Festivals Research from its inception. His publications are mainly on Elizabethan and Jacobean Theatre, Shakespeare, and modern theatre and theatre buildings. He has edited and contributed to Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate/MHRA, 2004), Court Festivals of the European Renaissance (Ashgate, 2002), with Elizabeth Goldring; and with Margaret M. McGowan, Margaret Shewring and Marie-Claude Canova-Green was General Editor of the European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 series. He was also Co-Editor of the three most recent books in the series, Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2015), Architectures of Festivals: Fashioning and Re-fashioning Urban and Courtly Space in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2017), and Occasions of State: Early Modern Festivals and the Negotiation of Power (Routledge, 2018). He was Principal Investigator, in collaboration with the British Library, of the collection of 273 digitized Renaissance Festival Books in the ownership of the Library, subsequently accessible on the Library’s website under ‘European Festival Books’ in fully searchable, edited, and annotated digital format. John Peacock was Reader in English at the University of Southampton, where he is now a Visiting Fellow. He is the author of The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones (Cambridge University Press, 1995; reprinted 2006), and The Look of Van Dyck (Ashgate, 2006; reprinted 2016). His research has focused on the literary and visual culture of early modern England in its European relationships; he has just published a study entitled Picturing Courtiers and Nobles, from Castiglione to Van Dyck (Routledge, 2020). Margaret Shewring is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research and recent publications have concentrated on the performance context for Renaissance and early modern festivals and the design of space for performance on the contemporary stage. She was Co-General Editor of the
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two-volume Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2004; e-book 2010) and a Co-Investigator for the digitized collection of Renaissance Festival Books on the website of the British Library. She is Co-Founder and Co-Convenor of the Society for European festivals Research and a General Editor of the ‘European Festival Studies, 1450–1700’ series for which she was the Volume Editor of Waterborne Pageants and Festivities in the Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. R. Mulryne (Ashgate, 2013) and a contributor to J. R. Mulryne with Maria Ines and Anna Maria Testaverde (eds), Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: the Iconography of Power (Ashgate, 2015) and to J. R. Mulryne, Krista De Jonge, R. L. M. Morris and Pieter Martens (eds), Occasions of State: Early Modern European Festivals and the Negotiation of Power (Routledge, 2019). R. Malcolm Smuts is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His publications include Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), Culture and Power in England, 1585–1685 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 1999) and two recent edited collections: The Oxford Handbook to the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2016) and The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Culture and the Visual Arts in Early Seventeenth Century Europe (Brepols, 2016). He is currently working on a study of the role of religious war and instability in shaping the development of the state in Britain and Ireland between the 1570s and the 1620s. Sara Trevisan is a Rare Books and Manuscripts Specialist in the antiquarian book trade, with a focus on the late fifteenth to early nineteenth century. Before this, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick. She has published on royal genealogical rolls for Elizabeth I (Huntington Library Quarterly), poetry and painting (Renaissance Quarterly), seventeenth-century masques (Renaissance Studies), royal and civic festivals, topographical poetry, and mythical ancestry in early modern world cultures. Sara J. Wolfson is a Staff Tutor and Lecturer in History at the Open University. Her research interests chiefly concern the female court and household of Queen Henrietta Maria, above all the political, social, and religious roles that Caroline court women played in the period 1625–1669. She has published on ‘The Female Bedchamber of Queen Henrietta Maria; Politics, Familial Networks and Policy, 1626–1641’, in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds), The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013). Her mono graph on Caroline Court Women, 1625–1669, is under contract with Manchester University Press. She has co-edited a collection of essays on Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Boydell, 2018) and is co-editing a special issue of The Women’s History Review journal on premodern queenship and diplomacy (forthcoming 2020). In 2016, she was honoured by the Times Higher Education awards as the Most Innovative Teacher of the Year.
Foreword
On 11 May 1625 Charles I married Henrietta Maria, the youngest sister of Louis XIII of France. The union between a Protestant king and a Catholic princess was a unique cross-confessional alliance in post-Reformation Europe. Though scholars have become increasingly interested in mixed marriages in early modern Europe, very little attention has been applied to the festivals celebrating this high-profile interfaith match. As Caroline Hibbard remarked nearly two decades ago, it was remarkable that the Bourbon regime was willing to send a ‘young princess from a Catholic court to marry and live among heretics’.1 Henrietta Maria brought with her to England a household designed to facilitate the conversion of Charles and his people to the Catholic faith, even as many of the new King’s subjects hoped the Queen could be moved similarly towards Anglicanism. Yet, much broader political considerations shaped the Stuart–Bourbon alliance against the background of the Thirty Years’ War. The marriage signalled Britain’s firm alignment with France against Habsburg Spain and promised well for future relations between the two dynasties. This volume explores how each regime envisioned their own political and confessional identity vis-à-vis each other through splendour and ceremony. However, the match was controversial from the start and the marriage celebrations were fraught with tensions. Questions of hegemony, dynastic identity, confessionalism, and military union underpinned the festivities and diplomatic relations that surrounded the union, as both regimes sought to define the alliance in allegorical and practical terms. The marriage celebrations were disrupted further by unforeseen natural causes. The sudden death of James I and an outbreak of the plague prevented large-scale public celebrations in London. The British weather also played its part. In fact, unlike other state occasions, the celebrations exposed weaknesses in the display of royal grandeur and national superiority. To a large extent they also failed to hide the tensions in the Stuart–Bourbon alliance. Instead they revealed the conflicting expectations of the two countries, each convinced of its own superiority and intent on furthering its own dynastic interests. While the war between Britain and France of 1627–1629 falls beyond the remit of this volume, the celebrations prefigured many of the personal, political, and confessional concerns that led to a souring of relations between the two polities within the first year of marriage.
1 Caroline Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen’, The Court Historian, 5 (2000), 17.
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for ewo r d
In this volume, leading scholars from a variety of disciplines explore for the first time the marriage celebrations of 1625, with a view to uncovering the differences and misunderstandings beneath the outward celebration of union and concord. French court ballets, royal entries, poetry, courtly airs, architecture, painting, material culture, and festival literature are explored against crucial questions of hegemony, conflict, and concord to reveal the vital role that visual spectacle played in shaping dynastic relations on a national and international stage. Furthermore, by taking into account the ceremonial, political, religious, and international dimensions of the event, the collection helps to paint a rounded portrait of a union that would become personally successful, but complicated by the various tensions played out in the marriage celebrations and discussed here. It is our hope that this volume will further our understanding of the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria with its particular mix of celebration and dispute, as well as lead to a more general reassessment of the part played by visual spectacle in seventeenth-century politics. The essays offered here suggest the range of interpretive possibilities by introducing the broad variety of approaches to early modern festival research. The volume is the result of a long-standing interest on our part in the Stuart–Bourbon alliance of 1625 that culminated in a two-day conference held at the Queen’s House, Greenwich, in February 2012, from which the majority of these papers derive. We would like to thank the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, for their generous support of the conference, as well as Canterbury Christ Church University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Open University, for their financial contribution to the cost of publication. We are particularly grateful to Guy Carney at Brepols for accepting the collection in their European Festival Studies series and to the general editors of the series for their helpful collaboration and advice in the preparation of the volume. Finally we sincerely thank the contributors to this volume for their patience in the production of this collection. Their expertise enriches our understanding of the ceremonial and festival culture designed to celebrate the interfaith union between the Houses of Stuart and Bourbon. Marie-Claude Canova-Green and Sara J. Wolfson
Note from the Editors
The original spelling and punctuation within manuscript sources and printed primary works have been retained throughout this collection. The Editors decided to retain the anglicised spelling of Henrietta Maria, despite the dual focus on British and continental factors found within this collection. In following scholarly tradition to anglicise Henriette Marie, the Editors have adopted the name by which the queen is most commonly known. A similar approach has been applied to the French spelling of Marie de Médicis. Recent use of Anna for Anne of Denmark amongst historians and literary scholars encouraged the Editors to adopt the use of Anna. As the Julian calendar was still in use in England during the seventeenth century, despite the use of the Gregorian calendar on the continent, they have provided both dates for readers, as the marriage alliance was an international affair. The Julian calendar was ten days behind the Gregorian and will always come first in the dates provided within each essay. The beginning of the year, however, is taken as 1 January and not 25 March.
R. Malcolm Sm uts
Introduction. Festivals, Dynastic Alliances, and Political History Notes on the History and Historiography of Royal Weddings ‘In the Old Europe’, Frances Yates asserted in 1972, ‘a royal wedding was a diplomatic event of the first importance, and royal wedding festivities a statement of policy’.1 At the time her claim challenged prevailing historiographical practices on two levels, by emphasizing the dynastic and personal dimensions of early modern politics, while calling attention to the importance of court ceremonies and spectacles as political statements. Although ever since Jacob Burckhardt, scholars of the Italian Renaissance had attempted to incorporate cultural events into their accounts of political history, historians of Northern Europe, and especially of England, had rarely done so systematically. Widely regarded as peripheral to the ‘real’ political work performed by diplomats, state administrators, and members of Parliament, court culture in particular was generally considered wasteful, shallow, and elitist. Its only possible relevance lay in helping to explain how the king and court so thoroughly alienated ‘the country’ that civil war became possible.2 Since the early 1970s a sea-change in perspectives has taken place. Many historians now discuss the early modern period as an age of dynastic rather than nation states. Interest in the ‘representational’ aspects of early modern politics has also exploded, leading to numerous studies of the uses of art, poetry, theatrical performances, and public ceremonies as vehicles for political arguments and instruments of power. Major research projects devoted to the subject have received funding, while specialized organizations, academic journals, and books
1 Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1972), p. 1. 2 For example, P. W. Thomas, ‘Two Cultures? Court and Country under Charles I’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 168–93; Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (New York: Harper, 1972), p. 106. R. Malcolm Smuts is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 21–40 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119183
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series have emerged.3 While this vibrant field of studies encompasses much more than research on royal weddings, events connected to dynastic marriages have rightly received considerable attention.4 In several cases such unions gave rise to especially spectacular public celebrations. The wedding of James I’s daughter, Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine in 1613, for example, provided the occasion for the single most spectacular series of festivals in London during the whole of the early modern period. The great chivalric carousel staged the previous year, in the newly completed Place Royale (present day Place des Vosges) in Paris, to honour the double wedding of Louis XIII to Anne d’Autriche and Élisabeth de Bourbon to the future Philip IV, was equally opulent.5 Such marriages affected both relations between major European states and the internal politics of the countries involved. Through the course of dynastic inheritance, they might ultimately determine not only the fate but the very definition of a kingdom, as in the 1603 union of England and Scotland into Great Britain. Studies of individual royal marriages therefore provide an ideal opportunity to investigate complex interactions between cultural forms, political aspirations, and political events. But for this reason such investigations also present daunting challenges, since they properly require that we pay attention to everything from intricate
3 For example, the Palatium Project on early modern court residences, the European Festival Research Project (both with publication programmes); the Society for Court Studies and its journal, The Court Historian, the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles, the Instituto Universitario ‘La Corte en Europa’ in Madrid (with another ambitious programme of publications), the Centro Studi di Veneria Reale outside Turin and the series to which the present volume belongs. The biblio graphy of relevant secondary works is vast but see, in particular, Jean Jacquot (ed.), Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, 3 vols (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1956–1975); Roy Strong, Splendor at Court (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973); John Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999); Ronnie Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewring (eds), Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Jeroen Duindam and Sabine Dabringhaus (eds), The Dynastic Centre and the Provinces: Agents and Interactions (Leiden: Brill, 2014); and Ronnie Mulryne with Maria Ines Aliverti and Anna Maria Testaverde (eds), Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Icono graphy of Power (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 4 Margaret M. McGowan (ed.), Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615: A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Nicola Courtright, ‘The Representation of the French-Spanish Marriage Alliance in the Medici Cycle: “Concorde perpetuelle”’, in Luc Duerloo and R. Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in SeventeenthCentury Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 39–64; Sara Smart and Mara R. Wade (eds), The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013); Nichola M. V. Hayton, Hanns Hubach, Marco Neumaier (eds), Churfürstlicher Hochzeitlicher HeimführungsTriumph. Inszenierung und Wirkung der Hochzeit Kurfürst Friedrichs V. mit Elisabeth Stuart (1613), Mannheimer historische Schriften, vol. 11 (Heidelberg, Ubstadt-Weiher, Neustadt a.d.W., Weil am Rhein and Basel: verlag regionalkultur, 2019); Mara Wade, Triumphus Nuptialis Danicus: German Court Culture and Denmark: the ‘Great Wedding’ of 1634 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996); Abby Zanger, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018). Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly recently received funding for a project entitled Marrying Cultures: Queens Consort and European Identities 1500–1800. 5 Paulette Choné, ‘The Dazzle of Chivalric Devices: Carrousel on the Place Royale’, in McGowan (ed.), Dynastic Marriages, pp. 155–64.
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diplomatic negotiations to pyrotechnic displays.6 There is an evident risk of the kind of double reductionism that results from viewing politics through the lens of court festivals, while treating cultural forms as little more than vehicles for propaganda. Many publications, including several chapters in the present collection, avoid this pitfall by concentrating on specific facets of a marriage or its attendant celebrations, thereby avoiding the dangers of facile generalization, while providing insights into topics that richly deserve independent consideration. Ronnie Mulryne’s chapter on the early upbringing of Charles and Henrietta Maria, Marie-Claude Canova-Green’s account of Henrietta Maria’s progress through France en route to her new home in England, Erin Griffey’s careful analysis of costumes and decorations employed in the 1625 wedding, Sarah Trevisan’s analysis of the welcoming speeches delivered to the new Queen by John Finch, Kevin Laam’s discussion of English epithalamiums, Margaret McGowan’s essay on the development of the French ballet de cour and the discussions of Inigo Jones’ architecture and the painted decoration of the Queen’s House in Greenwich by John Peacock and Gordon Higgott provide examples of such focused discussions. Taken together they shed light on a wide range of personal circumstances, generic conventions, facets of material culture, and artistic, architectural, and ceremonial practices that affected the marriage celebrations in particular and the period’s political culture more generally. But we also need to consider how to integrate all the individual pieces into an overall picture of the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria that takes into account both its ceremonial and political dimensions. This chapter starts with a historiographical examination of several key issues that have arisen from attempts to treat court culture as a form of political expression, before moving on to examine the specific conjunction of political and religious circumstances surrounding the 1625 marriage alliance and its collapse within barely a year of the royal wedding. Its goal is to highlight the intrinsic difficulties inherent in any attempt at a synoptic treatment of the subject, while at the same time suggesting ways in which we can begin to construct more complex and nuanced interpretations. Court Festivals and Political Communication Especially in Anglophone scholarship, the modern study of court festivals can be traced back to the pioneering work of Frances Yates and the Warburg school to which she belonged in the middle decades of the last century. The Warburg approach was rooted in cultural and intellectual history, with particular stress on the survival and re-appropriation of ancient traditions in more modern periods, and the use of visual and literary sources in studying the history of ideas. Other works by Warburg scholars included Erwin Panofsky’s classic
6 Paulette Choné, ‘Firework Displays in Paris, London and Heidelberg (1612–1615)’, in McGowan (ed.), Dynastic Marriages, pp. 201–14.
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Studies in Iconology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939) and Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1958). Yates’ work on Renaissance courts displayed its affinity with this tradition in its careful icono graphic analysis and close attention to ways in which Roman imperial themes and ancient neo-Platonic and Hermetic philosophies were incorporated into late Renaissance and early baroque court cultures. But although she devoted considerable attention to Renaissance theories concerning ways in which music, visual imagery, and spectacle could shape human thought and even control the natural world through occult influences,7 she generally avoided sweeping claims about the actual political impact of the theatrical spectacles and other cultural forms she studied. She also refrained from drawing parallels to twentieth-century practices.8 This all began to change in the publications of Yates’ student Roy Strong and other scholars in the 1970s and 1980s. ‘Before the invention of the mechanical mass media of today’, Strong asserted at the start of his pioneering survey of court festivals, Splendor at Court, ‘the creation of monarchs as an “image” to draw people’s allegiance was the task of humanists, poets, writers and artists’.9 Studies treating art, theatrical events, and festivals as exercises in political image-making — or as representations, the term favoured by New Historicist literary scholars — quickly proliferated, including Stephen Orgel’s influential studies of court masques, books by historians including Peter Burke and Kevin Sharpe, and several art historical surveys.10 Although more reticent about modern analogies, French scholars were also becoming interested in the uses of ceremony and spectacle by Old Régime monarchs to manage public opinion, influenced in part by a cultural and linguistic turn in French historical studies and a revived interest in high politics, a subject that historians like Fernand Braudel had once disparaged.11 Although this emphasis on the political efficacy of court art and ceremony has been both provocative and useful, it raises a number of methodological 7 See especially Yates’s early study, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1947). 8 It seems impossible to believe that scholars of the Warburg Institute, which had moved from Hamburg to London in 1933 to escape the Third Reich and whose members included a number of refugees from central Europe, would not have been aware of broad parallels between the use of outdoor festivals, painting and architecture by baroque courts and the propaganda tools of Hitler’s regime. But to my knowledge they did not call attention to this comparison. 9 Strong, Splendor, p. 19. 10 For example Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 1987) and Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 11 For example Michèle Fogel, Les Cérémonies de l’information dans la France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Marie-Claude Canova-Green, La Politique-spectacle au grand siècle: les rapports franco-anglais, Biblio 17, 76 (Tübingen: PFSCL, 1993); Gérard Sabatier, Versailles ou la figure du roi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), Frédérique Leferme-Falguières, Les Courtisans: Une société de spectacle sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007).
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difficulties. To begin with, as several recent studies have stressed, we need to recognize that our main sources consist not of actual festivals but festival texts: printed or manuscript descriptions that may purport to give a full and objective description of what actually transpired during a great public event but that inevitably present partial and potentially misleading views. Printed festival texts have been described as a distinct literary genre, although it may be more accurate to characterize them as several different genres, since they vary enormously in quality and manner of presentation, from cheaply printed octavo news pamphlets to lavishly illustrated folio volumes.12 These texts merit attention in their own right, both for what they tell us about the mental habits of the people who compiled them and as evidence of the circulation of news about courts and princes through print. But they were invariably shaped by conventions of court historiography and/or the agendas of their authors and their authors’ patrons. They frequently suppress information, especially about things that went wrong during a spectacle, while providing a fuller and more accurate account of speeches and iconography than most spectators would have been able to obtain. As records of actual festivals they therefore need to be approached critically and supplemented whenever possible by other sources, such as eye-witness accounts and manuscript records of materials. When several texts describing the same event survive, careful comparison between them can often reveal ways in which their authors attempted to shape perceptions of events, by highlighting some details and suppressing others and through their commentaries. Margaret Shewring’s chapter in the present volume is an excellent example of this kind of analysis. But even the most exhaustive research and careful comparison will inevitably fail to provide a completely full and accurate picture of what transpired during a given festival or series of festivals, to say nothing of the responses of the people who watched or participated in it. A degree of scepticism about incautious claims some scholars have made concerning the importance of court art and spectacle as political tools is therefore justified, as Sydney Anglo forcefully argues in his contribution to this collection. There is, however, a danger of carrying scepticism too far. All historical interpretations require selective quotation from sources that are themselves usually incomplete, since our documents rarely tell us everything we would like to know and it is generally impossible to cite all of them within the scope of a scholarly publication. Historians must also describe the past in modern language that does not correspond exactly to that of the period they study. The use of vocabulary or even conceptual ideas not found in early modern sources therefore does not automatically invalidate a scholar’s argument. What matters is whether the terminology and theoretical ideas employed in an analysis seem helpful in making sense 12 Compare Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘The Early Modern Festival Book: Function and Form’, in Mulryne, Watanabe-O’Kelly and Shewring (eds), Europa Triumphans, vol. 1, pp. 3–17 to the essays in Marie-Claude Canova-Green and Jean Andrews (eds), Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
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of what the primary sources tell us, a matter that must always be judged on a case-by-case basis. For example, while Anglo is right to say that no one in the seventeenth century would have described a royal entry as a ‘transaction with the city’, contemporary descriptions do tell us that at a given point along the processional route London’s Lord Mayor and Aldermen, dressed in ceremonial robes, would invariably present the king or queen with a gift and a sword, and that the sword would then be returned to the mayor, to carry before the monarch for the remainder of the event. Those descriptions also tell us that members of the livery companies who made up the base of the civic corporation lined the king’s route, wearing their livery robes. As the ruler passed by, they would shout a blessing, which he or she would reciprocate with words of thanks. Whether one chooses to describe all this as a ‘transaction’ or something else, it seems obvious that an entry amounted, among other things, to a kind of symbolic enactment of the relationship between the king and a civic community and its corporate governing structure, in ways that contemporaries would have recognized. The fact that our sources never say this in so many words should not prevent us from doing so. The interpretive problems become even more difficult when we attempt to discover not just what transpired during a court festival but how spectators reacted to it since, as Anglo rightly remarks, we have virtually no direct evidence bearing on this question. The sources make it clear that tens of thousands of people turned out to watch entries and cheer boisterously for their monarch as he passed before them and that other public appearances by kings and queens sometimes also drew large crowds. This makes it reasonable to conclude that, then as now, many people enjoyed seeing the spectacle that royal weddings, coronations, and entries provided and a fleeting contact with their kings and queens during such occasions. But how far this translated into durable political support for royal policies is far more difficult to determine.13 What is clear is that at the start of his reign Charles I wanted to rally his subjects behind him in an ambitious continental war, and that the dynastic alliance with France cemented by his marriage was integral to his military and diplomatic strategy. A successful coronation and post-coronation entry involving both the King and Queen would, at the very least, have created an appearance that he was making progress towards this goal. Unfortunately, an outbreak of plague forced a postponement of the entry, originally scheduled for July 1625. The quarrels between Charles and Henrietta Maria described in this volume by Sara Wolfson and Karen Britland then contributed to her decision to refuse to participate in a Protestant coronation ritual. The Queen’s ostentatious displays of Catholic piety must also have attracted some attention, much of it presumably disapproving, from the predominantly Protestant London population. For nearly two years the arches erected to grace the entry, at considerable expense by the City of
13 I would be more cautious on this point were I to rewrite the article Anglo criticizes in his chapter, p. 249 of this collection, note 26.
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London, nevertheless remained in place, until in 1627 shortages of money, caused primarily by Charles’ wars, led to a decision to cancel the entry altogether. While there is no reliable way of measuring how much political good will this may have cost Charles, it certainly cannot have helped in compensating for other setbacks, such as the failure of the 1626 Parliament and a series of military failures. The circumstances that prevented a traditional entry at the start of the new reign and the semi-public troubles of the royal marriage can reasonably be added to the list of things that went disastrously wrong near the beginning of his reign. The Marriage as a Dynastic and National Alliance In addition to providing an occasion for public spectacle, the marriage between Charles and Henrietta Maria was intended to cement a diplomatic and military alliance. Modern minds, accustomed to thinking in terms of relations between nation states, naturally tend to regard this union primarily in national terms. But while this is not entirely erroneous, it needs emphasis that for contemporaries, royal weddings represented, first and foremost, leagues between ruling families, whose single most important purpose was to perpetuate the husband’s bloodline through the birth of heirs, while simultaneously creating a family bond between two royal courts that gift-exchanges, correspondence among family members, cultural patronage, and other mechanisms would then perpetuate. Failure to produce an heir might have disastrous consequences not only for a ruling dynasty but for millions of its subjects. Henri III’s death without children in 1589 had plunged France into a deeper civil war, while many Elizabethans dreaded the prospect that the Virgin Queen’s death would have similar consequences in their own country. The triumph of Henrietta Maria’s father, Henri IV, and the peaceful succession of Charles’ father, James I, had led to a greater emphasis on hereditary legitimacy, royal marriages, and royal childbirths in both countries. But this stress on hereditary succession also meant that if a king predeceased his wife while his children remained young, a kingdom would experience a long regency under a foreign-born queen. Although England escaped this fate by sheer luck, France experienced a series of regencies by Italian or Spanish women, including Henrietta Maria’s mother, Marie de Médicis. Henrietta Maria would undoubtedly have been highly conscious of this precedent. In some contexts, the distinction between nationality and dynasticism may have little importance. Whether we label the ballet de cour a French or a Valois/ Bourbon genre, it developed within the courts of French monarchs, through the collective activities of poets, musicians, dancers, and theatrical designers who were mostly French, even if a few had come from Italy and other places. McGowan is therefore fully justified in describing the genre as French. But we do need to remember that two of the key patrons, Catherine and Marie de Médicis, were of Florentine birth and had family connections not only to the dukes of Tuscany but to several Renaissance popes, a fact that demonstrably influenced
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their cultural preferences and patronage.14 If we define royal dynasties through the male line they may look like national institutions, but if we consider the role of queens we get a more cosmopolitan impression, especially if we broaden the perspective slightly to encompass a queen’s mother, maternal family traditions, and siblings. While Henrietta Maria’s brother was King of France, her two sisters were the Queen of Spain and the Duchess of Savoy, giving her multiple family ties to other European courts. These family connections, sometimes extending over several generations, mattered to early modern rulers. The British court wanted the Duc de Chevreuse rather than Gaston d’Orléans to stand as Charles’ proxy in the wedding ceremonies in Paris because Chevreuse belonged to the Guise family, related to the Stuarts through Charles I’s great-grandmother, Mary of Guise, wife to James V of Scotland. While it may be going too far to regard the concept of a nation state as entirely anachronistic in the case of seventeenth-century France and Britain, we should not treat Bourbon and Stuart monarchs simply as heads of national states without also considering their dynastic interests and identities.15 As dynastic heads, kings had interests that at times diverged from those of the kingdoms over which they ruled. The Stuart commitment to the Palatinate derived from a dynastic connection, reinforced by religion, rather than specifically British interests. The long history over four centuries of an ‘Anglo-French-Scottish marriage triangle’, described in Lucinda Dean’s chapter, is attributable to biological accidents and other contingent circumstances, more than durable national identities. Under different circumstances the thirteenth-century Anglo-Scottish alliances she described might have unified the two kingdoms centuries before 1603, while the marriages between the ruling houses of France and England gave the latter a plausible claim to the French throne, which Edward III and Henry V tried to assert through arms. Only the eventual failure of their efforts after dramatic initial victories — due in part, but only in part, to French resistance to English rule — preserved the separate identity of the two kingdoms. Some dynasties had internal conflicts that affected both national and international politics.16 Although momentarily united at the time of her marriage, Henrietta Maria’s family had been divided against itself in the early 1620s and would become so again after 1629, through Marie de Médicis’s disputes with her son, Louis XIII, which were further complicated by the roles of Gaston d’Orléans and Queen Anne d’Autriche. Viewing dynastic marriages through a lens of national history can seriously flatten and distort understanding of the tangled personal, factional, and family relationships they involved. 14 Nicola Courtright, ‘A Garden and Gallery at Fontainebleau: Imagery of Rule for Medici Queens’, in Melinda Gough and R. Malcolm Smuts (eds), Queens and the Transmission of Political Culture, special issue of The Court Historian, 10 (1) (2005), 55–84. 15 In the case of the Stuarts the need to distinguish between a British monarchy and separate English and Scottish feelings of national identity underlines the point. 16 For a penetrating discussion focused on the Habsburgs see Luc Duerloo, Dynasty and Piety: Archduke Albert (1598–1621) and Habsburg Political Culture in an Age of Religious Wars (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), esp. chaps 6–9.
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Some of the symbolism used in celebrating the marriage also had a complex and mixed significance, easily missed when viewed within a national framework. The rose and lily may strike us as unproblematic symbols for England and France, but the former had once served as a Tudor dynastic emblem, while the fleur-de-lis originated as a symbol of French monarchy rather than French nationality. As Jean-François Dubost has shown in a recent essay, robes covered in fleurs-de-lis became incorporated into the iconography of Marie de Médicis in ways used to link her to personified images of France, notably in Rubens’s great cycle of paintings for the Luxembourg Gallery, first displayed during a reception honouring the Stuart–Bourbon marriage.17 For Henrietta Maria’s mother the fleur-de-lis had taken on multiple related meanings, as a personal emblem that was simultaneously a symbol of royal majesty and of French identity, allowing it to be used in fashioning visual narratives of her role as guardian of the French state and people. We need to remain alert to the potential for similar kinds of complexity in interpreting the significance of the material trappings of Henrietta Maria’s new English household or displays during the wedding festivities. Both sides hoped that the 1625 marriage would become the centrepiece of a wider system of dynastic and political alliances intended to counter the power of a rival dynasty, the Habsburg House of Austria, accused of harbouring ambitions to establish a universal monarchy over Christendom. Other prospective participants included Charles’ brother-in-law, the Elector Palatine, his uncle, the King of Denmark and Henrietta Maria’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Savoy. But while the English saw this grand alliance as a means to defend European Protestantism and liberty, the French were tempted to regard it as a means to replace Habsburg hegemony with their own dominance, expressed hyperbolically as a Bourbon ‘empire of the whole world’, in a passage of one of the French marriage festival texts analysed by Shewring that was tactfully altered in the English translation.18 From the beginning, the alliance therefore involved potential elements not only of cooperation but rivalry, emulation, and potential conflict. These in turn affected relations not only between the French and British crowns, but personalities involved in the marriage negotiations, including the minister-favourites, Richelieu and Buckingham, the French Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis, and other members of both courts. These relationships, which might become friendly or hostile by turns, often cut across national distinctions rather than coinciding with them, as for example in the cooperation between the English diplomat, Henry Rich Earl of Holland and his French mistress, the Duchesse de Chevreuse, and their
17 Jean-François Dubost, ‘Rubens et l’invention d’une image politique: la France personnifiée’, in Luc Duerloo and R. Malcolm Smuts (eds), Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Seventeenth Century Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 65–110. 18 Two of these texts are reproduced by Shewring and Hawkins at the end of this volume.
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respective patrons, Buckingham and Louis XIII’s consort, Anne d’Autriche.19 Cultural exchanges as well as politics were affected. The Stuart court, or at least many important groups within it, readily adopted the French fashions Henrietta Maria and her entourage helped import, as Jones’ experimentation with French interior design suggests,20 while Louis XIII received British and Irish gifts, including mastiffs and falcons. During the course of the marriage negotiations, Buckingham ‘borrowed’ the Italian painter, Orazio Gentileschi, from the French Queen Mother and also renewed contacts with the Fleming, Peter Paul Rubens, who remained in Paris after painting his great Luxembourg cycle for the Queen Mother. A recent study of the material culture deployed by Stuart diplomats argues that in decorating their residences they did not try to adopt a national style; instead they sought to acquire furnishings and other luxuries that conformed to the latest European fashions, from the cheapest and most convenient sources.21 What mattered in the seventeenth century court culture was that material objects should be magnificent, beautiful and ‘rare’; where they came from normally counted for less. The Marriage and Religious Politics These observations reinforce Marie-Claude Canova-Green’s point that the marriage of Charles to Henrietta Maria meant different things to different people, requiring a nuanced consideration of the issues at stake. For some French Catholics, including Pierre Bérulle and other clergy who accompanied the Queen to England, it represented an opportunity to proselytize in a heretic kingdom. By contrast Marie de Médicis, Richelieu, and other French ministers, although not indifferent to religious considerations, wanted primarily to enlist English support against Spain while discouraging assistance to Huguenot rebellions.22 Some of the non-clerical members of the Queen’s French household, who as Britland remarks wanted her to seek an accommodation with the Duke of Buckingham, were probably motivated largely by a desire to protect their own positions and material interests. Britland’s chapter provides a vivid description of Bérulle’s mounting anger and disillusionment over the resistance his missionary efforts encountered and several provocative demonstrations of Catholic piety he allegedly encouraged. It allows us to see the marriage from the perspective
19 R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–37 and Wolfson’s chapter, below (pp. 179–204), provide discussions of this point. 20 See John Peacock’s chapter below, pp. 279–94. 21 Helen Jacobsen, Luxury and Power: The Material World of the Stuart Diplomat, 1660–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 22 The French ambassador Blainville was specifically instructed that although as much as possible he should treat affairs relating to religion, Henrietta Maria’s personal situation and the alliance together, if he needed to choose, ‘le bien de l’état’ [the good of the state] should take precedence (Archives des Affaires Étrangères, Correspondance Politique Angleterre 36, fol. 52v).
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of a French prelate deeply committed to the Catholic Reformation, for whom religious considerations overrode everything else. But while the religious conflicts Britland described undoubtedly contributed to the difficulties of the marriage, we should not oversimplify their role. Many scholars have assumed that the deep anti-Catholic prejudices of most of the English people would have led them to regard a pious French Catholic queen as only marginally preferable to a Spanish one, and that Henrietta Maria therefore rapidly became a political liability for her husband. Evidence exists that some contemporaries, including both French diplomats and the Duke of Buckingham, believed that this might be the case, and that the latter’s animus against the Queen’s French household derived partly from this perception.23 But the actual depth and breadth of public disapproval of Henrietta Maria because of her religion turns out to be almost as hard to document as negative reactions to the cancellation of Charles’ London entry. In a recent study of popular reactions to the reign of Charles I, David Cressy turned up two records of ordinary people in trouble for insulting speech about Henrietta Maria between 1625 and 1639: hardly an impressive number.24 Additional research may uncover more examples and most individuals presumably had the sense to keep their mouths shut in contexts where their rude opinions might be reported to the authorities. It therefore seems likely that more religious hostility existed than the records reveal but the evidence on this point is much thinner than many accounts imply. Religion and secular politics interacted in highly complex ways during this period and many contemporaries may have had a better sense of this complexity than historians who depict anti-Catholicism as monolithic prejudice have assumed. French Catholicism had an ambiguous position, not only because Henri IV had continued to ally with Protestant states against Spain after his conversion to Rome but because Gallican Catholics generally disliked Spain, Jesuits, and papal attempts to interfere in secular politics almost as much as Protestants did.25 This made it possible to see some French Catholics as potential allies in a fight against Spanish and papal tyranny. George Marcelline’s Epithalamium GalloBritannicum, a tract of over 150 pages celebrating the royal marriage published in 1625, exemplifies this view. Although Marcelline, who also published a number of other militant Protestant tracts, hoped that Henrietta Maria would eventually convert, her Catholicism did not particularly bother him. What mattered was the prospect that her union with Charles would bring together a great coalition of European states opposed to the House of Austria and the papacy, ‘presaging the destruction and ruin of Antichrist, the establishment of the true faith, the propagation of the gospel, the restitution of the Palatinate, the overthrow of the enemies’ designs, the erection of peace, the increase of plenty and the general
23 Smuts, ‘Henrietta Maria’s Circle’, pp. 15–16. 24 David Cressy, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 2, 149. 25 Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004).
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welfare of all Christendom’.26 Despite the Queen’s personal religion, Marcelline depicted her as a key player in bringing about a Protestant apocalypse. Court Politics and Religion in Dynastic States Rather than viewing religious differences in isolation, we therefore need to pay more attention to how they became entangled with other kinds of conflict, including personal animosities and factional rivalries within and between the French and British courts. As Sara Wolfson observes in her chapter, doing this also requires ‘a more socially defined understanding of the political’, involving awareness of how personal ‘interactions of the monarch’ and other key figures affected the distribution and operation of power. In David Starkey’s suggestive phrase, personal monarchy led to a ‘politics of intimacy’, hinging on direct access to the ruler on a regular basis within his private apartments and other environments, allowing for relaxed and unfettered exchanges.27 One of the many reasons courtiers valued an invitation to participate in a court masque or ballet was that it afforded them opportunities for such intimate contact during long rehearsals. But whereas Starkey stressed the importance of the king’s privy chamber or bedchamber as the single privileged site of intimacy, subsequent studies have complicated the picture by showing that most courts had multiple centres of power and influence, belonging not only to the king but to other members of his family and privileged favourites.28 Depending on circumstances, a king might engage in intimate political activity not only in his own apartments but those of his wife, his mother, a royal mistress, or a close male associate, each of whom would likely have their own circle of intimates, who might thereby gain indirect but significant access to the ruler.29 The politics of the British court during and after the marriage negotiations illustrates the complexity of this kind of court system. Between October 1623 and March 1625 the cautious and generally Hispanophile policies of James I
26 George Marcelline, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum: Or Great Britaines, Frances and the most parts of Europes unspeakable Joy, for the most happy Union and blessed contract of the High and Mighty Prince Charles… and the Lady Henrette Maria (London: Thomas A. Archer, 1625), quotation on title page. 27 See David Starkey et al., The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987). Starkey’s insights have been applied to other courts as in, e.g., Dries Raeymaekers, One Foot in the Palace: The Habsburg Court of Brussels and the Politics of Access in the Reign of Albert and Isabella, 1598–1621 (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 2013). 28 Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For complementary arguments see R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Change at the Court of James I’, in Linda Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 99–112, and Magdalena Sanchez, The Empress, the Queen and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 29 See, for example, Sánchez, Empress, and Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘The Duchess of Portsmouth: English Royal Consort and French Politician, 1670–1685’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 247–73.
introduction. festivals, dynastic alliances, and political history
were challenged and largely defeated by an alliance between his favourite, Buckingham, and his heir, Prince Charles, who united to promote the French alliance and war with Spain. This required Charles and Buckingham to undermine the influence of Spanish diplomacy and pro-Spanish members of the court. It also constrained their ability to resist French demands during the negotiations, since any breach with Paris risked precipitating a return to favour of pro-Spanish courtiers committed to Buckingham’s destruction. James’ death removed these threats, but the arrival of Henrietta Maria and her French household soon added another complication, which Sara Wolfson’s contribution to this collection explores. Louis XIII’s government naturally expected that household to provide both a channel of communication and a French lobby within the English court. The appointment of Richelieu’s nephew, the Bishop of Mende, as Henrietta Maria’s almoner, over the objections of some of Richelieu’s rivals suggests the intimacy of these links.30 But a French royal household within the English court presented a potential challenge to Buckingham’s pre-eminence, a fact emphasized by the cordial overtures that the Queen and Mende soon received from British courtier-politicians who did not belong to Buckingham’s clientage network, especially Lord Keeper John Williams, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, and James Stuart, Duke of Lennox. In addition to his court office of Lord Chamberlain, Pembroke had a following in the parliaments of the period, which gave him some ability to channel public resentment of the Duke into a coordinated campaign of pressure on Charles to jettison his favourite. Buckingham naturally wanted to forestall any possibility that the Queen’s entourage might assist such an attack. As Wolfson shows, and as I have also discussed in previous publications, the Duke quickly moved, with Charles’ full support, to counter the threat by pressuring Henrietta Maria to admit his own female relatives and those of his clients into positions of intimacy within her household.31 She resisted, with the strong backing of the French government, which feared that the admission of these new, mainly Protestant English attendants might endanger the young Queen’s religion. That resistance provoked Buckingham into escalating his pressure and attacks on the Queen’s French attendants, in part through complaints against their Catholic practices. Outwardly the dispute therefore centred on religion and nationality, and from a French perspective this remained the crux of the matter. But beneath the surface Charles and Buckingham had launched a pre-emptive strike against a perceived threat to the Duke’s pre-eminent position at court that was only incidentally related to religion. They wanted to force Protestant attendants on the Queen, not to facilitate her conversion but to allow Buckingham to surround her with his dependents.
30 See TNA SP78/73 fol. 144r for the opposition to Mende’s appointment, chiefly by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. 31 Smuts, ‘Henrietta Maria’s Circle’, pp. 13–37 and R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘The French Match and Court Politics’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), pp. 13–28.
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Deteriorating relations, not only between England and France but Buckingham and Charles I on one side and Richelieu and Louis XIII on the other, further contributed to this conflict. Through the summer of 1625, Richelieu, along with Louis and Marie de Médicis, attempted to maintain cordial relations with Buckingham, to the extent of trying to assist him in his battles with English adversaries.32 If Buckingham had reciprocated these efforts the disagreements over appointments to Henrietta Maria’s bedchamber might well have been resolved through compromise. However, he had already become suspicious of Richelieu’s aims, and he had an added incentive to pick fights with the Queen’s Catholic attendants, as a way of attempting to shore up the wavering support of Protestant and puritan members of Parliament for himself and the war effort. It is revealing that this strategy failed so completely that during the 1626 session of Parliament, the Queen’s household was able to make common cause with the crypto-Catholic Earl of Arundel and the Protestant Earls of Pembroke and Lennox in pressing for the Duke’s impeachment.33 Dislike of French Catholic priests obviously counted for less, among puritan MPs and disaffected Protestant court noblemen, than a desire to get rid of the King’s overweening favourite. Buckingham sought, in turn, to exploit fissures within the French court and French society to topple Richelieu. He had earlier established relations with Louis XIII’s estranged wife, Anne d’Autriche, while his client, the Earl of Holland, who had been sent to France to negotiate the royal marriage, had taken the surintendante of Anne’s household, the Duchesse de Chevreuse, as his mistress. Chevreuse, who hated Richelieu, became involved in a plot to assassinate him known as the Chalais conspiracy, of which Buckingham was probably aware. With a tidy symmetry, the households of the French Queen of Britain and the Spanish Queen of France had therefore become centres of efforts to destroy the minister-favourites of both kingdoms, which had at least the tacit backing of the two rival governments.34 Buckingham subsequently sent another client, Walter Montagu, on a mission to France, Lorraine, and Savoy in 1626–1627, to foment rebellions against Richelieu’s government. The French arrested him before he could complete his assignment but, with strong English encouragement, the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle did rebel. As relations between France and Britain deteriorated, protagonists on both sides therefore grasped opportunities afforded by the dynastic character of seventeenth-century states and the polycentric structure of court politics to link up with oppositional elements and foment trouble in the opposite kingdom. These attempts failed: Buckingham survived impeachment in 1626, while La Rochelle’s rebellion ended with the city’s unconditional surrender to the French crown after a long and devastating siege, which Buckingham’s expedition to the Isle of Ré had failed to lift. But such intrigues should warn us against viewing 32 Smuts, ‘French Match’, p. 24. 33 Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Smuts, ‘Henrietta Maria’s Circle’, pp. 17–18. 34 Smuts, ‘French Match’, pp. 24–26.
introduction. festivals, dynastic alliances, and political history
Anglo-French relations as a contest between two entirely cohesive national states. Examined closely, they also illustrate once again the highly tangled ways in which confessional allegiances and issues became intertwined with personal and family rivalries and secular political disputes. Religion, Reason of State and Anglo-French Relations This sort of religious ambiguity and complexity was not simply a feature of court politics, attributable to the pliant consciences of seventeenth-century aristocrats. To a considerable degree it also characterized international relations. Some historians have suggested that James I consistently sought to balance his Protestant alliances, especially the one cemented by his daughter Elizabeth’s marriage to the Calvinist Elector Palatine Frederick V, with a Catholic dynastic alliance, so that he might hope to influence both rival confessional camps and mediate between them. This view rests on a tacit assumption that Catholic Europe was sufficiently united that an alliance with any one of its members would confer influence over the whole body. But this was far from being the case. There is no reason to think that a Stuart alliance with states like Savoy or France that were frequently in conflict with the Habsburgs would have strengthened British influence in Madrid or Vienna. What such alliances offered instead were opportunities to broaden Protestant coalitions into wider and more powerful ‘leagues of state’, by drawing in Catholic powers. They also provided the Stuarts with some leverage in trying to prevent Catholic dynasties from allying too closely with each other. Both considerations had influenced British policies towards France since the early years of the century. In some ways the 1625 marriage marked the culmination of many years of efforts to assure that one of Europe’s two greatest Catholic monarchies would ally with Protestant states to oppose the other. But shared secular objectives did not entirely eliminate religious tensions and disagreements; instead they created circumstances in which it became necessary to manage these disputes so they would not disrupt cooperation in pursuit of shared goals. For reasons of prestige and to avoid antagonizing Catholic opinion both within his own kingdom and abroad, the King of France needed to show that he cared about defending the Church and its members as deeply as did the King of Spain. In addition to provisions meant to safeguard Henrietta Maria’s faith, the French therefore needed to procure a pledge that the marriage would lead to toleration for English Catholics. But a British government that had to obtain parliamentary funding for an expensive war could not afford to make such a concession in public. After much dickering the issue was resolved through the inclusion of secret articles in the treaty that Charles and Buckingham eventually disavowed, once Henrietta Maria was safely in England and the French could do nothing about it. This naturally displeased the French, while infuriating the Queen’s household clergy. But if it had been the only point of contention, it would not have destroyed the alliance, since Richelieu and Marie de Médicis
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were prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice the interests of English Catholics for the sake of ‘reason of state’. Unfortunately, two other conflicts soon erupted in which reason of state compounded strategic and religious disagreements between the two countries. The British wanted immediate French assistance to recover the Palatinate, the main objective of their war with Spain. Richelieu, on the other hand, wished to avoid an immediate war with Spain until he had consolidated the authority and resources of the French crown at home. He hoped that Britain and other Protestant powers would fight the Habsburgs in the interim, giving him a free hand. Even more seriously, Richelieu had determined that the consolidation of royal authority within France required the elimination of the capacity of Huguenots to lend armed assistance to rebellions against the French state. That meant the reduction of the last independent Huguenot bastion of La Rochelle. He had no wish to launch a religious persecution of French Calvinists; instead he was reacting to the lesson provided by a number of rebellions during the past ten years, in which Huguenot arms had assisted rebellions by discontented Catholic nobles, seriously weakening the French state. But this was not entirely clear to outside observers, who saw that a French Cardinal with a record of promoting Catholic reform seemed intent on crushing the military power that gave the Huguenots a measure of protection. In addition to motives of religious solidarity, the British felt committed to defending the Huguenots’ armed power because it offered them a measure of protection against the prospect that France might one day turn into an aggressive Catholic power like Spain. Compounding the disagreement, the Duc de Soubise, who commanded La Rochelle’s fleet, had retreated to England after suffering a defeat, where he proceeded to lobby Charles, Buckingham and anyone else who would listen for British intervention. As a distant relative of the Stuarts, Soubise also had a dynastic connection that made him harder to ignore. Charles and Buckingham were prepared to use their influence to moderate Huguenot behaviour in return for similar restraint by the French crown, and during the marriage negotiations they had even agreed to lend the French an English warship to help deter Huguenot piracy. But they were not willing to stand idly by as the French state pursued measures, such as the construction of fortifications on islands controlling access to La Rochelle, that threatened to destroy the Huguenot’s capacity to defend themselves. Huguenot resistance to pressure from the French crown had played a role in convincing Richelieu to withdraw from external conflicts until he had dealt decisively with the internal threat.35 As an extension of this latter policy he also began investing in a more formidable navy that might eventually have challenged English and Dutch supremacy in the Channel and North Sea.36 From the perspective of Charles and Buckingham, the French Cardinal had therefore reneged on his offers to assist them in a war against Spain, while
35 A succinct summary is Françoise Hildersheimer, Richelieu (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), pp. 138–44. 36 Pierre Castagnos, Richelieu face à la mer (s.l.: Ouest-France, 1989).
introduction. festivals, dynastic alliances, and political history
initiating measures that seemed to threaten survival of French Protestantism and the future security of Britain itself. Several convergent developments therefore turned the alliance of 1625 into a state of war by 1627. The existence of an independent French household within the British court threatened the position of the powerful favourite, Buckingham, and therefore Charles’ determination to support his leading minister and assert firm control over his own government at the start of his reign. By assisting manoeuvres against the Duke within the court and in parliament in 1626, the Queen’s French servants played a provocative role in English politics that further antagonized Buckingham and Charles. The vulnerability of Buckingham’s position and fragility of support for Charles’ war with Spain simultaneously limited their ability to make any religious concessions to the Queen or to English Catholics, for fear of exacerbating already strained relations with English puritans. Richelieu’s determination to deal with the problem of internal rebellion before embarking on war with Spain then led to a further erosion of trust and growth of mutual antipathy between the leaders of the two governments. This eventually led Buckingham to attempt what amounted to a pre-emptive strike, by trying to foment another great rebellion uniting Huguenots and Catholic malcontents within France, before Richelieu’s efforts at consolidating royal authority made such an event impossible. The very limited success of this effort, in precipitating a rebellion by La Rochelle but nowhere else, provoked Richelieu into an immediate siege of the Huguenot stronghold that drew the British crown into a war with France. Superficially this may have looked to some like a war of religion, but its real causes had more to do with strategic calculations, secular politics, and personal animosities. On an elementary level Yates’ assertion, quoted at the start of this chapter, obviously does apply to the Stuart–Bourbon marriage alliance of 1625. This was indeed not only an event of major diplomatic importance but one that affected the internal politics of both kingdoms, and the festivities that accompanied the marriage were indisputably intended partly as ‘policy statements’. But explaining exactly how and why this was the case requires a multi-level analysis. It means thinking more deeply about a number of complicated relationships: between public spectacles and print culture; religion and reason of state; formal diplomacy and informal dynastic and personal networks; court politics and personalities; fundamental religious and strategic interests; and shifts in public opinion. It also demands facing up to the problem that gaps in our evidence mean that some important questions can never receive definitive answers. Attempting to dodge these difficulties by falling back on traditional historiographical assumptions will perpetuate misconceptions and oversimplifications. But if we make a rigorous effort to confront them, by building upon the insights of recent scholarship in a number of different fields and disciplines and re-examining the fairly abundant source materials that do exist, we may hope to illuminate not only the royal marriage itself but much of the surrounding historical landscape.
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Bibliography Manuscripts and Archival Documents
London, The National Archives (Kew), SP78/73 fol. 144r —— , SP78/74–76 Paris, Archives des Affaires Etrangères, Correspondance Politique Angleterre 32–39 Early Printed Books
Marcelline, George, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum: Or Great Britaines, Frances and the most parts of Europes unspeakable Joy, for the most happy Union and blessed contract of the High and Mighty Prince Charles… and the Lady Henrette Maria (London: Thomas A. Archer, 1625) Secondary Studies
Adamson, John (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999) Burke, Peter, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) Caldari, Valentina and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018) Canova-Green, Marie-Claude, La Politique-spectacle au grand siècle: les rapports francoanglais, Biblio 17, 76 (Tübingen : PFSCL, 1993) Canova-Green, Marie-Claude and Jean Andrews (eds), Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) Castagnos, Pierre, Richelieu face à la mer (s.l.: Ouest-France, 1989) Choné, Paulette, ‘The Dazzle of Chivalric Devices: Carrousel on the Place Royale’, in Margaret M. McGowan (ed.), Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615: A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 155–64 —— , ‘Firework Displays in Paris, London and Heidelberg (1612–1615)’, in Margaret M. McGowan (ed.), Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615: A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 201–14 Courtright, Nicola, ‘A Garden and Gallery at Fontainebleau: Imagery of Rule for Medici Queens’, in Melinda Gough and R. Malcolm Smuts (eds), Queens and the Transmission of Political Culture, special issue of The Court Historian, 10 (1) (2005), pp. 55–84 —— , ‘The Representation of the French-Spanish Marriage Alliance in the Medici Cycle: “Concorde perpetuelle”’, in Luc Duerloo and R. Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016) Cressy, David, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Deyon, Pierre and Françoise Deyon, Henri de Rohan. Huguenot de plume et d’épée (1579–1638) (s.l.: Libraire Académique Perrin, 2000)
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Dubost, Jean-François, ‘Rubens et l’invention d’une image politique: la France personnifiée’, in Luc Duerloo and R. Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Seventeenth Century Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016) Duerloo, Luc, Dynasty and Piety: Archduke Albert (1598–1621) and Habsburg Political Culture in an Age of Religious Wars (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) Duindam, Jeroen, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Duindam, Jeroen and Sabine Dabringhaus (eds), The Dynastic Centre and the Provinces: Agents and Interactions (Leiden: Brill, 2014) Fogel, Michèle, Les Cérémonies de l’information dans la France du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1989) Hayton, Nichola M. V., Hanns Hubach and Marco Neumaier (eds), Churfürstlicher Hochzeitlicher HeimführungsTriumph. Inszenierung und Wirkung der Hochzeit Kurfürst Friedrichs V. mit Elisabeth Stuart (1613), Mannheimer historische Schriften, vol. 11 (Heidelberg, Ubstadt-Weiher, Neustadt a.d.W., Weil am Rhein and Basel: verlag regionalkultur, 2019) Hildersheimer, Françoise, Richelieu (Paris: Flammarion, 2004) Howarth, David, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) Jacobsen, Helen, Luxury and Power: The Material World of the Stuart Diplomat, 1660–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Jacquot, Jean (ed.), Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, 3 vols (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1956–1975) Klein Maguire, Nancy, ‘The Duchess of Portsmouth: English Royal Consort and French Politician, 1670–1685’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 247–73 Leferme-Falguières, Frédérique, Les Courtisans: Une société de spectacle sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007) McGowan, Margaret M. (ed.), Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615: A Celebration of the Habs burg and Bourbon Unions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) Mulryne, J. R., Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewring (eds), Europa Trium phans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) Mulryne, J. R., with Maria Ines Aliverti and Anna Maria Testaverde (eds), Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) Orgel, Stephen, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) Panofsky, Erwin, Studies in Iconology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939) Parsons, Jotham, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004) Raeymaekers, Dries, One Foot in the Palace: The Habsburg Court of Brussels and the Politics of Access in the Reign of Albert and Isabella, 1598–1621 (Louvain: Leuven Uni versity Press, 2013)
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Russell, Conrad, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) Sabatier, Gérard, Versailles ou la figure du roi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999) Sanchez, Magdalena, The Empress, the Queen and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) Sharpe, Kevin, Criticism and Compliment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) —— , Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) Smart, Sara and Mara R. Wade (eds), The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013) Smuts, R. Malcolm, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Change at the Court of James I’, in Linda Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 99–112 —— , ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–37 —— , ‘The French Match and Court Politics’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018), pp. 13–28 Starkey, David, et al., The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987) Stone, Lawrence, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (New York: Harper, 1972) Strong, Roy, Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973) Thomas, P. W., ‘Two Cultures? Court and Country under Charles I’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 168–93 Wade, Mara, Triumphus Nuptialis Danicus: German Court Culture and Denmark: the ‘Great Wedding’ of 1634 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996) Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen, ‘The Early Modern Festival Book: Function and Form’, in J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewring (eds), Europa Triumphans, 2 vols (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), vol. 1, pp. 3–17 Wind, Edgar, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1958) Yates, Frances A., The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1947) —— , The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1972) Zanger, Abby, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
Lucinda H. S. De an
Chapter 1. ‘Keeping Your Friends Close, But Your Enemies Closer’? The Anglo-Franco-Scottish Marital Triangle, c. 1200 to c. 1625 William Dunbar’s poem celebrating the marriage of Margaret Tudor and James IV of Scotland, as is often the case, uses symbols and images representative of the union rather than directly discussing the couple themselves. As ‘the joyning of the bright Lillie and the Rose’ was used to symbolize the marital union between Charles I of England and Henrietta Maria of France in 1625, so The Thrissel and the Rose have become synonymous with the earlier union of 1503.1 Similarly, the ceremonies for both of these unions presented them as capable of perpetuating an enduring, even perpetual, peace. Yet, 1503 was a marriage between long-term enemies (England and Scotland), where 1625 is a match more commonly described as one consolidating an existing peace between allies (France and England). As such, when searching for longue durée comparators, the 1625 Stuart–Bourbon match might seem best suited to exploration within the context of the Auld Alliance — the long-term alliance between Scotland (where the Stuart dynasty originated) and France that existed officially from 1295 to c. 1560. Not unlike the alliance between England and France in the early seventeenth century, the Auld Alliance was one designed to counter the animosity of a common enemy. Nonetheless, where the common enemy of England and France in 1625 was Spain, the common enemy of France and Scotland for over 250 years in the centuries preceding this had been England. It is also important to recognize that, although Charles I was born in Scotland and his Scottish lineage was emphasized overtly in the displays surrounding the union, he was a creature of a new post1603 union-of-the-crowns Stuart dynasty rather than one that nurtured the Auld Alliance. Once the rulers of Scotland alone, this was now a redefined dynasty with kings residing in London, leaving Scotland ruled by an absentee monarch. Moreover, following the religious turmoil of the sixteenth century, Charles and 1 William Dunbar, ‘The Thrissel and the Rose’, in Dunbar, Poems, ed. by James Linsley (Exeter: Univer sity of Exeter Press, repr. 1989). Lucinda H. S. Dean is a lecturer at the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 41–62 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119184
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Henrietta Maria — and their respective kingdoms — sat on opposite sides of the confessional fence, adding a new potentially destabilizing dimension to the union. This was a new challenge that did not have a direct precedence, but overall perhaps more parallels present themselves between ‘the joyning of the bright Lillie and the Rose’ and ‘the thrissel and the rose’ than at first meets the eye. By considering examples across this complex diplomatic triangle between Scotland, England, and France from the thirteenth century onwards, this chapter intends to provide extended foundations for understanding the union and ceremonial display associated with the 1625 match. Increasingly recognized for their importance in European diplomacy, royal marriages and the ceremonies that celebrate them have equally risen in prominence for more than just their composite theatrical parts.2 Yet, marriages between intertwined countries — such as France, England, and Scotland — are rarely analysed comparably over time. Whether being considered for its role in the larger political landscape or studied for its ceremonial dimensions, a notable single occasion is often the centre of attention. Thus, any common strands that might emerge between marriage and wedding ceremonial across the centuries and geographic space can pass by unnoticed and undiscussed. Drawing on examples rooted in original research, particularly of Scottish marital unions, in the three centuries prior to the union of Henrietta Maria of France and Charles I of England (and Scotland) in 1625, this chapter aims to buck that trend using a twofold method. Firstly, it will provide further contextual understanding of the marriages between Anglo-Scot-French houses during the late medieval and the early modern era to underscore the complexities of the diplomacy and to identify purpose and agenda in the marital patterns in question. Secondly, it will analyse prominent ceremonial aspects of marriages — particularly linked to journeys and arrival — to highlight significant points of continuity and change as to explore how and why marital traditions and the role of diplomatic ritual developed between c. 1295 and 1625. This includes considering issues of status and projecting majesty, the burden of expectation on marriage unions and particularly on arriving consorts, the importance of personality and royal ego, political role of gesture, rituals, and material objects, ritual triggers for diplomatic crisis, impact of personal agenda on display, and the role of entourage and attendants. In so doing, this chapter will assess the extent to which the rituals experienced by Henrietta Maria in 1625 were rooted in earlier traditions, how far rituals were shaped by — or indeed shaped — political machinations and personal agendas, and the extent to which traditions were either retained across or unaffected by confessional divides.
2 For example, J. R. Mulryne with Maria Ines Aliverti and Anna Maria Testaverde (eds), Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewring (eds), Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Aldershot and Burlington: MHRA/Ashgate, 2004).
chapter 1. ‘keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer’?
Auld Alliances and Even Older Enemies Historians commonly perceive the two high-profile Stewart–Valois royal marriages of the sixteenth century as the Indian summer of the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France before its ‘final’ decline as an official alliance.3 The marriage of James V to Madeleine de Valois, eldest surviving daughter of François I, in January 1537 marked the culmination of choosing a marriage partner for the young Scottish King that had seen seventeen brides offered by eight realms.4 The subsequent union of James V’s daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, to the Dauphin François (later François II) in 1558 provided a brazen opportunity to claim the thrones of Scotland, France, and England, following the death of the Catholic Queen of England, Mary I.5 Yet, in many respects these marriages were unusual, particularly in the context of the Auld Alliance. Not least because, despite a long-held alliance between France and Scotland, these marriages were the only two completed marriage alliances between Scottish monarchs and children of the French crown.6 The original treaty of the Auld Alliance between John Balliol and Philippe IV (le Beau) in 1295 included a clause of marriage between the former’s son and the latter’s niece, but this union never came to fruition.7 From its inception, the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France was one designed to counter the animosity faced by both parties from England. The Scots and their alliance with France were recognized by late medieval contemporaries as ‘an antidote to the English’ — a term coined by Pope Martin V in the fifteenth century — in a period when war between France and England, or England and Scotland, was predominant over periods of peace.8 The relationship between Scotland and France is one over which much ink has been spilt, but it is not one in which marriages were often brokered.9 In fact, the Auld Alliance only saw one 3 Norman Macdougall, An Antidote to the English (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001), p. 122, and chapter 6 also takes ‘Indian Summer’ as the title. Elizabeth Bonner claims 1558 as the ‘apogee’ of the alliance: ‘Scotland’s “Auld Alliance” with France, 1295–1560’, History, 84 (273) (1999), 5–30 (5–6). 4 Jamie Cameron, James V: The Personal Rule, 1528–1542, ed. by Norman Macdougall (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998), pp. 60–61, 132–33 (list of all proposed matches, 153, fn. 15). 5 Macdougall, Antidote to the English, pp. 141–42; Pamela E. Ritchie, Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548–1560: A Political Career (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), p. 193; Alexander S. Wilkinson, Mary Queen of Scots and French Public Opinion, 1542–1560 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 43–49. 6 See chapter appendix. 7 Macdougall, Antidote to the English, pp. 18–20. 8 Macdougall, Antidote to the English, p. 3; Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. by D. E. R. Watt et al., 9 vols (Aberdeen and Edinburgh: University of Aberdeen Press and Mercat Press, 1987–1998), vol. 8, p. 121. 9 Examples of studies on Auld Alliance: Francisque Michel, Les Écossais en France, les Français en Écosse, 2 vols (Paris: A. Franck, 1862); Gordon Donaldson, Histoire de l’amitié franco-écossaise: la vieille alliance (Edinburgh: Association Franco-Écossaise, 1995); Elizabeth Bonner, ‘French Naturalization of the Scots in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, Historical Journal, 40 (4) (1997), 1085–1115; Bonner, ‘Scotland’s “Auld Alliance” with France’, 5–30; James Laidlaw (ed.), The Auld Alliance: France and Scotland over 700 Years (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1999); Macdougall, Antidote to the English; Siobhan Talbott, ‘Beyond “the antiseptic realm of theoretical economic models”: New Perspectives on Franco-Scottish Commerce and the Auld Alliance in the Long Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 31 (2011), 149–68. The discussion is certainly still a live
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direct Franco-Scot marriage prior to 1536–1537, that of James I’s daughter, Princess Margaret, to the Dauphin Louis, son of Charles VII of France in 1436. This was the first Scottish marriage to a continental house since the thirteenth century, and it had been over ten years in the making with the first ambassadorial visits and initial betrothal occurring in 1428.10 This marriage took place in the wake of the release from James I’s long imprisonment in England (1406–1424) and during his ambitious project of personal aggrandisement, in which he aimed to gain as much as possible from efforts to play the French and English off against one another during the Hundred Years’ War.11 This alliance did lead to other marriages for James I’s other daughters and his son, James II, but these were not directly into the royal house of France. Moreover, taking place during the minority of James II (c. 1437–c. 1449), these marriages have been convincingly argued to be part of the wider diplomatic programmes of Charles VII and Philippe le Bon of Burgundy rather than under the firm direction of the Scots.12 There may have been efforts made to emphasize Charles’ Scottish roots in 1625 when emphasizing the genealogical prowess of the King and Queen, perhaps with designs to draw the Auld Alliance above former animosities between England and France, but marriages within the Auld Alliance itself were markedly uncommon.13 This lack of direct marital bonds created by the Auld Alliance, at first glance, may seem a little odd. Yet, if the marital unions around the tripartite relationship across the longer durée are more broadly considered, a clearer understanding of the rationale and agenda begins to take shape. During the late medieval period, the frequency with which English kings found brides from the French royal blood line was notably high, even after the Angevin losses in northern France, prior to which the volume of land held by the Angevin English kings obviously shaped their marital agendas differently (see chapter appendix). In fact, this history
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one as the following conference in 2016 indicates: ‘New Perspectives on the Auld Alliance: Scotland, France and their Neighbours in the Early Modern Period’ (University of Canterbury, 21–22 June 2016). National Records of Scotland [hereafter NRS], State Papers, Treaties with France, SP7/10–12; Inventaire chronologique des documents relatifs à l’histoire d’Écosse conservés aux Archives du royaume à Paris. Suivi d’une indication sommaire des manuscrits de la bibliothèque royale, ed. by Jean B. A. T. Teulet (Edinburgh: Abbotsford Society, 1839), pp. 42–44 (Originals, Paris AN, J409/57–59); Louis Barbé, Margaret of Scotland and the Dauphin Louis (London, Glasgow and Bombay: Blackie, 1917), 13–75; Fiona Downie, She is But a Woman: Queenship in Scotland 1424–1463 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006), pp. 39–49. Michael Brown, James I (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1994), pp. 109–20. For further on these wider marriages, see David Ditchburn, ‘The Place of Guelders in Scottish Foreign Policy, c. 1449–c. 1542’, in Grant G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and the Low Countries, 1124–1994 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), pp. 59–75; Fiona Downie, ‘La voie quelle menace tenir’: Annabella Stewart, Scotland, and the European Marriage Market, 1444–1456’, Scottish Historical Review, 78 (2) (1999), 170–91; Priscilla Bawutt and Bridget Henisch, ‘Scots Abroad in the Fifteenth Century: The Princesses Margaret, Isabella and Eleanor’, in Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (eds), Women in Scotland, c. 1100–c. 1750 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), pp. 45–55; Elizabeth Bonner, ‘Charles VII’s Dynastic Policy and the “Auld Alliance”: The Marriage of James II and Marie de Gueldres’, Innes Review, 54 (2) (2003), 142–85; Downie, She is But a Woman, pp. 50–65. For example, see Sara Trevisan’s chapter, ‘Nebuchadnezzar, Charlemagne, and Aeneas: John Finch’s Speech for the King and Queen at Canterbury’ in this collection, pp. 205–20.
chapter 1. ‘keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer’?
of marital bonds between England and France was one that was emphasized in the 1625 royal entry of Henrietta Maria to Amiens en route to her wedding and coronation in England, where one of the triumphal gates identifies five princesses of France who became queen of England.14 The final marriage between an English monarch and a French princess prior to 1625 was that of Henry VI to Margaret of Anjou (niece to the King) in 1444–1445. However, following this there was still the significant, if short-lived, marriage of Princess Mary Tudor (daughter of Henry VII) to ageing Louis XII, and subsequent Tudor marriage patterns were dictated by other concerns, particularly after the 1530s separation from the Catholic Church. Turning to the other two ‘old enemies’ — England and Scotland — in a comparable post-1200 period, there were also four marriages between Scottish reigning monarchs and English princesses in 1221, 1250, 1328 and 1503 (see chapter appendix). James I also married Joan Beaufort, who was half niece to Henry IV of England, in 1424, and a further two marriages were discussed to the point of treaties being signed in 1474 and 1543 (see chapter appendix). The marriages of Alexander II (1221) and Alexander III (1250) of Scotland in the thirteenth century took place within a different broader political context — one largely of peace — to those that took place after the first Scottish Wars of Independence (c. 1295–c. 1328). The centuries after 1328 are well known for the continuation of animosity and sporadic warfare between England and Scotland. The first marriage that took place between England and Scotland in the fourteenth century was that between the infant Prince David Bruce, son of Robert I of Scotland, and Edward III’s sister, Joan of the Tower. This union set a precedent for marriages being used to broker peace, if often only briefly, taking place within the peace negotiations that ended the first Wars of Independence in 1328. The patterns emerging here in the marital choices between Scotland, England, and France bring new meaning to the common phrase of ‘keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer’. Ultimately, marriages at such high levels of late medieval and early modern politics often functioned to broker peace, build alliances, and attempt to provide stability at points of crisis. As such, marriages between enemies could in fact be a more common occurrence than those between allies. The latter was of course not unheard of, but was simply less necessary within the political agenda of many kingdoms. All marriages and the ceremonial that accompanied them between royal houses in this era carried certain commonalities and followed etiquettes of procedure. Marriages brokered for the sake of peace did, however, share more pointed commonalities, not least in the expectation laid upon the union and, by default, the arriving consort. Brokered in a period of piece with France, the peace underpinning the Stuart–Bourbon marriage of 1625 was one in which ‘old enemies’ were pushed together against the common enemy of Spain. If taking a longer view of the relations between these realms, this was a short-lived peace in the face of centuries of animosity which preceded it. Equally, the confessional 14 For more on the triumphal gates and the five princesses, see Marie-Claude Canova-Green’s chapter on Henrietta Maria’s entry into Amiens in this collection, pp. 105–29.
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divide that now existed in Europe injected a new kind of friction between England and France that had the potential to threaten the stability achieved, if not handled carefully. The heavy burden of expectation of the maintenance of a stable peace — if primarily a confessional one at this time — was certainly something discernible in the ceremonial surrounding the journey and arrival of Henrietta Maria as it was for many of her predecessors. The subsequent sections of the chapter will discuss three key ceremonial areas — the departure, journeys of arrival, and royal entries — to further explore earlier ceremonies and the context they provide for 1625. A Fond Farewell Whether at peace or making peace, the mode of departure for a royal princess was a key moment, particularly so for the court that raised her essentially to make this journey. In the case of Henrietta Maria, the journey of departure from Paris, via Amiens, to the coast was as richly replete with symbolism as the one she received in England.15 Princesses from France, as well as comparators from England and Scotland, made notable journeys through their home country across land and sea marked by ceremony, large entourages, and lavish gift-giving from both sides. Yet, such departures could also reveal tensions and covert animosity even among ‘friends’, as royal egos and pretentions bartered for precedence in terms of status, particularly where there were issues of hegemony between realms. There are certainly examples that show the Scots holding a strong hand in relations with both France and England in the brokering of marriages, despite traditionally being viewed as a junior partner, but equally there was also the potential for being perceived as punching above their weight. At a peak of Scottish prominence on the European stage, when James V travelled to France in 1536–1537, the scathing remarks of an English ambassador commenting on the young King’s seemingly excessive acquisitive activities purchasing fine supplies, implying he did not know how to behave properly, offer one of numerous examples where behaviour could be misread or misreported.16 During the protracted negotiations leading to the first complete marriage contract of the Auld Alliance, that of Princess Margaret of Scotland and the Dauphin Louis in 1436 introduced above, the French ambassador, Regnault Girard, was resident in Scotland for over a year. He recorded much about the grand welcome he received and his experiences of Scottish hospitality, but also described the tribulations of closing such a complex diplomatic process.17 15 See Marie-Claude Canova-Green’s chapter, ‘Love, Politics, and Religion: Henrietta Maria’s Progress through France and the Entry into Amiens’, pp. 105–29. 16 John Penven to Sir George Douglas: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. by J. S. Brewer, J. Gardiner and R. H. Brodie, 21 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1862–1932) vol. 9, p. 916. 17 Regnault Girard’s account of his journeys to, from, and within Scotland exists in a sixteenth-century copy, Bibliothèque nationale de France [hereafter BnF], MS Fr. 17330 [accessed through BnF Gallica], fols 119–48. See also Barbé, Margaret of Scotland. For further discussion of Girard’s
chapter 1. ‘keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer’?
Girard’s account records a rather touching scene in Perth, prior to the Princess’s departure where the King and Queen spoke openly to their daughter of the honour of the marriage match being made for her, noting that: […] et Dieu sait les grans pleurs qui d’une part et d’autre estoinent faictz en ceste matiere.18 [and God knows the great tears which, on one hand and the other, were made in this matter]. Yet, the actions and words recorded by Girard also emphasize tensions bubbling close to the surface even in a marriage that was ostensibly between allies. For example, while Girard does note that the entire visit of the ambassadors from January 1434 [1435] to February 1435 [1436] was funded by James I of Scotland, he notably does not record the exact nature of the ‘great gifts’ offered by the King before he departed.19 Comparably, detailed descriptions of the gifts sent to the Princess’s parents by the French King, received at Dumbarton where the fleet was prepared to return Margaret to France, do exist. A mule, an animal allegedly unseen in Scotland before, was presented to the King of Scots, while Queen Joan received casks of wine and barrels of fruits and chestnuts.20 The marked emphasis on the French King’s gifts as exotic, where the Scottish King’s gifts did not warrant description — as Barbé notes — suggests that the value of James’ gifts to the ambassadors were inconsequential and lacking in worth by comparison. Gift giving was a vital part of the marriage process at all levels.21 In diplomatic marriages, the ambassadorial interactions prior to the union provided the opening gambit. In both the Anglo-Scot marriages proposed in 1474 by James III of Scotland, between Prince James (later James IV) and Cecilia (daughter of Edward IV of England), and that which came to fruition under James IV, to Margaret Tudor, in 1503, gifts from the Scots included robes of cloth of gold presented to English heralds and officers of arms. In 1502 one of the robes gifted was that worn by the Earl of Bothwell in the proxy marriage in London and was offered to the English Officer of Arms, while the Scottish ambassadors received gold and silver plate in large quantities.22 Pretentions and affectations of status account see L. Dean, ‘Crowns, Wedding Rings and Processions: Continuity and Change in the Representations of Scottish Authority in State Ceremony, c. 1214–c. 1603’ (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013), pp. 247–48, and expanded upon in forthcoming monograph, L. Dean, Death and the Royal Succession: Scottish Funerals, Coronations and Weddings, c. 1214–1543 (forthcoming). 18 BnF, MS Fr. 17330, fol. 141v; Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, pp. 75–76. 19 Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, pp. 76–77; BnF, MS Fr. 17330, fol. 141v. 20 BnF, MS Fr. 17330, fols 141v, 142v; Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, pp. 76, 78. 21 Nathalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 44–48. 22 For 1474: Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, ed. by Thomas Dickson and James Balfour Paul, 12 vols (Edinburgh: H. M. Register House, 1877–1916) [hereafter TA], vol. 1, p. 27. For 1502, see John Young, ‘The Fyancells of Margaret, eldeſt Daughter of King of the King Henry VIIth to James King of Scotland’, in Johannis Lelandi antiquarii De rebus Brittannicis Collectanea, ed. by Thomas
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fuelled the giving of gifts between powerful countries, and this was not only the case between ‘old enemies’. In a trip studded with lavish gift-giving on both sides, James V and François I made one final elaborate exchange prior to the departure of James V and his new wife from France in May 1537. James and Madeleine received horses, jewels, cloths of gold, and other rich fabrics. The French King and Queen and the ‘master of France’ received great gold cups, valued at over 7500 francs, and the French ambassador received a silver cup overgilt with gold.23 The reciprocal giving of gifts carried many benefits and opportunities for displays of magnificence, but equally carried the potential for embarrassment or even renewed hostility or conflict. The marriage of Isabelle de France to Edward II of England in 1308 was overshadowed, for example, by renewed political tensions due to rumours that Edward had sent the wedding gifts bestowed upon him and his new wife by Philippe IV of France, Isabelle’s father, to his male favourite, Piers Gaveston.24 Slights of such proportions are rare. Yet, like many aspects of the facets of marital performance ritual, when the political stakes were high this was a highly charged issue that had to be carefully handled. All accounts of the departure of Princess Margaret of Scotland, and particularly the Scottish ones, emphasize the impressive nature of the fleet that accompanied her to France in 1436: the king of Scotland sent his eldest daughter Margaret to France with a distinguished company of lords, knights and brave men most admirably appointed, in such becoming apparel and so splendidly marshalled, that never within living memory had such and so remarkable an army, so proudly arrayed, so skilfully commanded, been sent out from the kingdom off Scotland.25 William Sinclair, Earl of Orkney and Admiral of Scotland, and John Crannock, Bishop of Brechin, headed up her entourage. A host of nobles, lairds, knights, and clerics, reflecting the three estates of the realm, accompanied them; along with 140 squires in matching elegant livery, presumably emblazoned with the royal arms, and between 1000 and 3000 men-at-arms.26 This display was one designed
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Hearne (London: Impensis Gul. & Jo. Richardson, 1774), vol. 4, pp. 263–64 [hereafter Fyancells (Hearne)]. The gifts to the Scottish ambassadors included two cupboards of gold and silver plate, that for the Archbishop of Glasgow contained: a cup of gold, six great standing pots of silver, 24 great bowls of silver with covers, a basin and ewer of silver, and a chasoir of silver also. TA, vol. 7, 25, 31; Robert Lindesay Pitscottie, The Historie and Chronicles of Scotland From the Slauchter of King James the First to the Ane thousande five hundrieth thrie scoir fyftein zeir (being a continuation of the translation of the chronicles written by Hector Boece and translated by John Bellenden), ed. Æ. J. G. Mackay, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1899), vol. 1, pp. 367–68. As yet the author has not been able to locate any reference to the survival of any of the gifts. These gifts would have been worth around £3750 Scots. Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘The Political Repercussions of Family Ties in the Early Fourteenth Century: The Marriage of Edward II of England and Isabella of France’, Speculum, 63 (3) ( July 1968), 573–95 (582). The Book of Pluscarden, Vol. ii, The Historians of Scotland Series, Vol. 10, ed. by Felix J. H. Skene (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1880), p. 282. The different accounts have figures ranging between these totals for the men-at-arms: Bower, Scotichronicon, vol. 8, p. 249; Pluscarden, pp. 282–83; Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, p. 81.
chapter 1. ‘keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer’?
to provide a visual projection of the Stewart royal prowess to a foreign audience. Nonetheless, the Princess’s manner of departure and, more particularly, the ship in which she travelled turned into a cause of disagreement around which Girard had to navigate in the hours before departure. His account reveals that of all the ships that came from the continent to escort Margaret to her wedding, James I selected the only Spanish-made ship in the fleet to carry his daughter and caused much upset among the French shipmasters, to whom — it was demanded — the honour of carrying the new Dauphiness home to France should lie.27 The honour of both the kingdoms involved in this marriage was at the forefront of the minds of more than just the monarchs and their ambassadors; status and precedence seeped through every stratum of society involved. Margaret of Scotland’s journey to her point of departure at Dumbarton, through Scotland from Perth, is not one recorded in much detail, likely due to Girard — the pre-eminent commentator — having left for the port two weeks prior to the princess. Travelling as she did with her mother and father through the central regions of Scotland from Perth (in the east) to Dumbarton on the Clyde (in the west), her passage through Scotland was undoubtedly one of some grandeur and potentially included entries at major burghs, such as Dunblane and Stirling. The practice of being welcomed to towns along the route to port or border, is one common in the departures of princesses centuries prior to Henrietta Maria’s journey, which included an entry to Amiens. One of the best described of such journeys is that of Margaret Tudor to Scotland in 1503, recorded in the account of the Somerset herald, John Young, who accompanied Margaret.28 Sarah Carpenter highlights that this northward journey was organized by Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch of England, to provide an ‘appropriate spectacle that would demonstrate royal magnificence wherever she passed’.29 A large entourage accompanied Margaret, including many women, as she travelled the length of England from Richmond (Surrey) to Berwick via Colweston, Grantham, Newark, Doncaster, Pontefract, Tadcaster, York, Newborough, Hexham, Darnton, Durham, Newcastle, Morpeth, and Alnwick. At each town, around three miles before arrival, officials were sent out to meet her with varying numbers of riders and, once in the towns, processions were made through the towns with people crowding streets and windows to observe their princess on her farewell journey.30 Equally, it was not just major towns that marked the Princess’s passage: And thorough all the goodis townes bourgad[is] and willaig[is] thorow the Countre wher she past all the bell[is] war rong daily. With thys thoroughly
27 BnF, MS Fr. 17330, fols 142v-143v; Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, pp. 78–80. 28 Fyancells (Hearne), pp. 258–300; College of Arms, [ John Young] The Marr. of Margarete da: to Hen: VII to the King of Scots, MS 1st M.13 bis., fols 75–115v [hereafter Fyancells MS]. 29 Sarah Carpenter, ‘“To Thexaltacyon of Noblesse”: A Herald’s Account of the Marriage of Margaret Tudor and James IV’, Medieval English Theatre, 29 (2007), 104–20 (107). 30 Fyancells MS, fols 76v-91r; Fyancells (Hearne), pp. 265–78.
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all the said veyage by the way cam[e] the habitants of the Countrey for to see the noble Company, bryngyng grette Vessels full of Drynk.31 Young records how the smaller towns and villages also welcomed the royal entourage of the Princess, which was quite literally a walking statement of Tudor royal authority. There were indications of Margaret’s new Scottish royal status in the displays according to Young, who notes that her carriages carried the badges of both countries, but the proliferation of Tudor symbols (such as the crowned portcullis and the rose) and the Tudor colours of green and white in the English financial accounts suggest that these were dominant.32 In the case of Henry VII, the first of a questionably legitimate dynasty less than 20 years after he had won his crown on the battlefield, such a procession was both a test and an opportunity. This was not just a display for the Scots, in fact little of Margaret’s journey prior to Berwick included interactions with Scots at all; the demonstration of Tudor magnificence at this point was very much for the people of England. The favourable response to Henry’s order to extend to Margaret ‘all honor and reverence’ suggests that the people were offering ritualistic acceptance of his authority through the ceremonial welcomes offered to his daughter.33 Thus, the journeys of consorts within their own homelands were complex displays that could have more than one purpose. This was certainly the case for Catherine de Valois (m. 1420) and Madeleine of France (m. 1537), as the presence of their husbands in France altered the agenda and, therefore, the representations that were made. The journey of Catherine and Henry V, following their union at Troyes on 2 June 1420, was one of an English King concluding the besieging of extant opposition in France and subsequently undertaking entries as a conquering hero alongside his new French wife.34 Jousting and displays of manly magnificence dominated James V’s five months touring France in 1537 with his new wife, after their wedding in Paris, as the young Scottish monarch made his mark on Europe. Moreover, this period was also one that emphasized his confidence and the stability of his own realm, left under the command of appointed regents from September 1536 to May 1537.35 In appropriating these farewell journeys of their wives, these royal husbands repurposed this part of the ceremony for their own ends rather than those of the host realm. While
31 Fyancells (Hearne), 268; Fyancells MS, fol. 79v. 32 Fyancells (Hearne), 268; Fyancells MS, fol. 78r. Warrants in the English financial records give a great deal of information on the expenses and preparation, see: National Archives (Kew) [hereafter TNA], King’s Remembrancer: Wardrobe and Household: Documents subsidiary to accounts of the great wardrobe (22 Aug 1501–21 Aug 1503), E101/415/7, fols 91–92, 95–99, 104–05, 107–22, 138, 141; some of these can also be found printed in Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland preserved in her Majesty’s Public Record Office, London, ed. by Joseph Bain et al., 5 vols (Edinburgh: H. M. General Register House, 1881–1986), vol. 4, nos 1715–17, 1720–27. Many warrants can be cross-referenced with Young’s account, as can also be done with the Scottish financial accounts once north of the border, highlighting the accuracy of Young’s record. 33 Fyancells MS, fol. 77r; Fyancells (Hearne), p. 266. 34 Christopher Allmand, Henry V, V (London: Methuen Publishing, 1992), pp. 144–56. 35 Dean, ‘Crowns, Wedding Rings and Processions’, pp. 278–83; Cameron, James V, chapter 7.
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the farewell journey was notionally an event coordinated by the natal family of the consort to send off their children in style, these journeys could present a variety of opportunities for ceremonial and ritual dialogue depending on the situation, agency, and purpose.36 Attendants, Entourage, and the Right Amount of Magnificence Once a consort arrived in the new country, the new kingdom and court orchestrated the ceremonial of welcome. Royal entries to a capital city or major town were a key part of this process, and for many a coronation and related festivities would also occur; however, these grand events were rarely the first interactions that an arriving consort encountered. For most, there was a journey within the realm from a port or border to the major town or city of entry. This journey offered the first points of contact for the new consort and the entourage from her natal country with the people of the new realm.37 This section draws upon some earlier arrivals to explore how these first points of contact were managed. The arrivals of consorts to Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, as with England, predominantly began at a port, due to the island nature of both countries. The obvious exception to this was marriages between the two, where a land border existed. For consorts arriving into Scottish ports the predominant arrival point was Leith, with ease of access to Edinburgh, and six of seven port arrivals in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries occurred there.38 The marked exception was Mary of Guise, who arrived at St Andrews to marry James V of Scotland in 1538. This location shift was unusual. The fact that James V’s first wife, Madeleine of France, had arrived at Leith only the previous year and died some seven weeks later without her formal entry to Edinburgh may well have been a motivating factor. Nonetheless, St Andrews was the seat of Scotland’s premier archbishop, and home to the oldest university and one of Scotland’s most eminent cathedrals, making it a prime alternative to Leith as a point of arrival that had the gravitas to impress foreign observers. Entering the country at St Andrews on the east coast of Fife, nearly one hundred miles from Edinburgh travelling by land, also created an opportunity for a quite different process of arrival for Mary of Guise into Scotland than the two-and-a-half mile journey between 36 There are comparisons to be drawn here with the use of Henrietta Maria’s trousseau by Louis XIII to pursue his own agenda in 1625. See Erin Griffey’s chapter, ‘“All rich as invention can frame, or art fashion”: Dressing and Decorating for the Wedding Celebrations of 1625’, in this collection, pp. 131–51. 37 On Henrietta Maria’s arrival see Sara Wolfson’s chapter, ‘The Welcoming Journey of Queen Henrietta Maria and Stuart–Bourbon Relations, 1625–1626’, also included within this collection, pp. 179–204. 38 Mary of Guelders (1449), Margaret of Denmark (1469), Madeleine of France (1537), Mary Queen of Scots (1561) and Anna of Denmark (1590) all arrived at Leith. Joan Beaufort (1424) and Margaret Tudor (1503) arrived by land from England. For more on these entries, see Lucinda Dean, ‘Enter the Alien: Foreign Consorts and their Entries into Scottish Cities, c. 1449–1590’, in J. R. Mulryne with Maria Innes Aliverti and Anna-Maria Testaverde (eds), The Iconography of Power: Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 267–95.
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Leith and Edinburgh. Mary’s arrival at St Andrews included an entry ceremony with speeches by Sir David Lindsay, later Lion King of Arms, and at least one mechanized welcoming pageant that lowered an angel in a cloud to present Mary with the keys to the realm.39 This initial welcome entry offered far more than comparable arrivals in Leith, which was essentially a holding and resting port prior to entry to Edinburgh. Moreover, after several weeks of entertainment at St Andrews, the new Queen consort made her journey to Edinburgh, a journey which was designed to take in the royal residences at Falkland Palace, Stirling Castle, and Linlithgow Palace, the first two of which had been promised to the new Queen as part of her dower.40 Falkland and Stirling had seen extensive works in the reign of James IV and all three underwent further significant work under James V, with the palace block at Stirling built between c. 1538 and c. 1542.41 Thus, this journey via three major royal works-in-progress was likely to impress on the new Queen the prosperity and magnificence of her new royal husband. Yet, after the death of Madeleine before most Scottish people had seen her, the visibility and accessibility of Mary also took on new significance. Thus, by designing this new lengthy progress route to Edinburgh and following it up with subsequent entries to Dundee and Perth, James V created many opportunities for interaction between the Queen and her people.42 Unfortunately, there are few records for Mary’s arrival that give us much insight into those who travelled with her or the reception of her entourage, an issue which caused plenty of problems for Henrietta Maria, as is explored by Sara Wolfson.43 An elaborate land journey after arrival was also something that occurred for Princess Margaret of Scotland on her arrival to France in 1436. Here the survival of contemporary reports recording the journey from La Rochelle to Tours provides opportunities to see both the opening of a dialogue and potential contention arising with the arrival of a foreign entourage. All consorts arrived with an entourage and it was not unusual for such entourages to be sizeable. As noted previously, Princess Margaret left Scotland in 1436 with between 1000 and 3000 men-at-arms, 140 squires (potentially matched by equal numbers of women or damsels), plus key ambassadors to make an elite leading envoy including members of all three estates.44 A welcome of rather mixed messages greeted this party. A royal envoy headed by the Archbishop of Rheims and Chancellor of France welcomed her as the King’s royal guest, before Margaret 39 For further details of Mary’s welcome to St Andrews: Dean, ‘Enter the Alien’, pp. 275–77; Andrea Thomas, Princelie Majestie, The Court of James V of Scotland, 1528–1542 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005), pp. 191–92. 40 NRS, Household Accounts of James V, E31/7, fols 70r-80r, 116r-119r; TA, vol. 6, 418; Pitscottie, The Historie and Chronicles of Scotland, pp. 380–81. For the dower portion: Alexandre Teulet, Papiers d’État, pièces et documents inédits ou peu connus relatifs à l’histoire de l’Écosse au XVIème siècle, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1852–1860), vol. 1, pp. 133–34; Ritchie, Mary of Guise, p. 14. 41 John G. Dunbar, Scottish Royal Palaces: The Architecture of the Royal Residences during the Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Period (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), pp. 18–20, 23–38, 40–55. 42 Pitscottie, The Historie and Chronicles of Scotland, p. 381. 43 Wolfson’s chapter ‘The Welcoming Journey of Queen Henrietta Maria’ discusses this in much detail. 44 See above, p. 48–49.
chapter 1. ‘keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer’?
made a grand entry to La Rochelle on 5 May. The Mayor with other dignitaries processed out to meet her, a group of wives of nobles and prominent townsmen met her at the city gate, and the King had selected courtiers to represent him. The Scottish entourage was said to have ‘made a great impression on the crowds’ and the town offered her a gift of silver plate.45 However, before Margaret and her entourage left La Rochelle, Charles VII ordered the return to Scotland of a significant number of the Scots, much to their displeasure according to the contemporary chronicle of Perceval de Cagny.46 Moreover, shortly after the wedding ceremony in Tours on 24 June, the majority of the remaining Scots were also sent home. Only four Scots (three women and one lord) were permitted to remain according to Regnault de Girard, the ambassador to Scotland who became Margaret’s treasurer in her French household.47 Throughout the ceremonial between La Rochelle and Tours, Margaret made many grand entries, received numerous valuable gifts from the townspeople who gladly welcomed her, and received greetings by various distinguished men and women of the court. It is notably women who appear most prominent in the accounts: at La Rochelle and other towns it is women of the town who met her at the gate, and at Niort court ladies led by Mesdames de La Roche-Guyon and de Gamaches joined her entourage to replace the Scots who were sent away.48 The Queen of France, the ladies of the French court, and the towns Margaret entered all welcomed the young Scottish Princess, but the evidence for Margaret’s arrival relates a mixed reception, particularly for her Scottish entourage. In part, the prominence of the French courtiers at each stage of her arrival as her Scottish entourage was being reduced suggests a process of removing those of her natal court to replace them with French equivalents. Madame de La Roche-Guyon, for example, was potentially being positioned for a key role in Margaret’s life at the French court as she is found accompanying Margaret on horseback into Tours while the remaining nameless entourage of women follow in carriages.49 Notably, as discussed by Wolfson, this process was something actively protected against in Henrietta Maria’s case, with French control over her household structure written into the treaty; however, the level of caution in this regard was likely due to a desire to protect her Catholic faith among the heretics of the English court.50 However, Charles VII’s brief last-minute appearance on the day of the wedding in 1436 — arriving late from Amboise ‘booted and spurred, in a plain grey suit’ —
45 BnF, MS Fr. 17330, fols 144r-v; Chroniques de Pereceval de Cagny, ed. by H. Moranvillé (Paris: Libraire Renouard/ Libraire de la Société de l’Histoire de France, 1902), pp. 228–29; Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, pp. 86–88. 46 Chroniques de Pereceval de Cagny, p. 220. 47 BnF, MS Fr. 17330, fol. 146r; Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, p. 106. 48 BnF, MS Fr. 17330, fol. 141r–46r; Chroniques de Pereceval de Cagny, pp. 219–22; Jean Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII Roi de France, ed. by Vallet de Viriville, 3 vols (Paris: P. Jannet, 1858), vol. 1, pp. 229–32; Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, pp. 83–106. 49 Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, p. 89; Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, p. 230. 50 See Wolfson’s chapter, ‘The Welcoming Journey of Queen Henrietta Maria’, pp. 179–204.
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reflected that the marriage arranged with the Scots was no longer a priority in his diplomatic manoeuvrings.51 Charles’ situation had vastly improved since he began negotiations with James I in 1428 and the tide of the war with England turning in his favour increasingly, as such, reducing his need for Scottish soldiers.52 This, combined with the rapid dismissal of Margaret’s Scottish entourage, tinged the ceremonial with a certain level of ambiguity and even disinterest by the King, something that perhaps influenced the dauphin if Barbé’s continuing account of Margaret’s subsequent short unhappy life in France is correct.53 Thus, the welcoming journeys of consorts and their entourages often set the tone for subsequent relations, and had long been shaped by the wider political, diplomatic and, in Henrietta Maria’s case, religious circumstances that encircled the marriage unions.54 Royal Entries and Heavy Expectations Henrietta Maria’s was the first French consort within this diplomatic triangle who was essentially tasked with the conversion of her husband,55 but she was certainly not the first royal bride to arrive in England (or elsewhere) with the weight of expectation on her marital union. From 1444 at the proxy marriage of Margaret of Anjou and Henry VI of England at Tours, the crowds demonstrated a common desire and expectation of this union, shouting: ‘Peas [peace], peas, peas be us!’56 Once in London in 1445, where records show that the officials bickered over the minutiae of details in providing properly for the honour of the Queen’s arrival, the first half of the pageants performed proclaimed Margaret as ‘the bringer of peace’.57 In the very first pageant a figure representing peace announced: Through youre grace and high benignite, Twixt the reawmes two, Englande and Fraunce, Pees shal approche, rest and vnite, 51 Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, p. 98. 52 Andy King and Claire Etty, England and Scotland, 1286–1603 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 69–70. 53 Barbé, Margaret of Scotland, pp. 105–83. 54 Karen Britland’s chapter in this volume, ‘A Ring of Roses: Henrietta Maria, Pierre de Bérulle and the Plague of 1625–1626’, pp. 85–104; Sara Wolfson’s chapter, ‘The Welcoming Journey of Queen Henrietta Maria’, pp. 179–204. 55 Mary Queen of Scots’ entry to Edinburgh in 1561 marked her return to a newly Protestant Scotland after fifteen years. As an entry that demonized Catholicism quite brazenly, this offers a very interesting comparison to Henrietta Maria’s arrival ceremonials in many ways, but as Mary was a queen regnant not a consort, this discussion must take place elsewhere. For more on 1561: A. A. MacDonald, ‘Mary Stewart’s Entry to Edinburgh: An Ambiguous Triumph’, Innes Review, 42 (2) (Autumn 1991), 101–10. 56 Helen Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), pp. 17–18. 57 Maurer, Margaret of Anjou, p. 19; Gordon Kipling, ‘“Grace in this Lyf and Aftirwarde Glorie”: Margaret of Anjou’s Royal Entry into London’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 29 (1986–1987), 77–84.
chapter 1. ‘keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer’?
Mars sette aside, will alle hys cruelte, Which to longe hath troubled the reawme tweyne.58 The expectations laid on Margaret, especially with an existing knowledge of Henry VI’s weaknesses, were arguably setting her up for a fall. There were no denominational differences to hamper Margaret’s union to Henry VI, but her very Frenchness would ultimately be considered the root of the problem as failures emerged and England’s high hopes were rapidly undermined. In fact, as Margaret’s consortship continued, Maurer identifies that such anti-French feeling also extended towards Henry VI’s mother, Catherine de Valois.59 Catherine de Valois’s own arrival in England to marry Henry V in 1420 was, in many ways, quite different. Henry V was very much the ‘hegemonic king’ in 1420, holding James I of Scotland as a prisoner (and using him at the head of armies against the Scots in France) on the one hand, and brokering a peace with France that placed his heirs as heirs to the French crown on the other.60 The marriage of Margaret of Anjou and Henry VI essentially only brought a pause in a war that the French were now winning, due to the seismic shift in the balance of power that occurred between these two arrivals.61 Nonetheless, the arrival of Catherine was more contested than such comparisons may first suggest. Joel Burden emphasizes in his work on Catherine’s coronation banquet that ‘the conditions for peace were the subject of considerable hostile scrutiny’ and sparked very real resistance from the English to the prospect of a double monarchy, which manifested in a refusal of further subsidies from parliament for Henry V’s endeavours on the continent.62 These issues aside, there was much hope in Catherine’s arrival for a long-lasting peace and, while details of her entry do not survive in the same volume as for her successor, the soltetes at her banquet speak of such hopes. The third soltete depicted St Katherine and four angels, with a written label: Il est escrite, pur voir et dit, par marriage pure, ce guerre ne dure.63 [It is written to be seen and said that by this pure marriage the war does not continue]. Here was a bold and clear statement, written in the Queen’s home tongue to avoid any confusion about whom the message was for, emphasizing her role as the bringer of peace.
58 Gordon Kipling, ‘The London Pageants for Margaret of Anjou: A Medieval Script Restored’, Medieval English Theatre, 4 (1) ( July 1982), 5–27 (19, ll. 10–14). 59 Maurer, Margaret of Anjou, p. 29. 60 Title ‘hegemonic king’ given to Henry V by Katherine J. Lewis, Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medi eval England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), Chapter 6. 61 Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, reprinted 1998), pp. 482–83. 62 Joel F. Burden, ‘Rituals of Royalty: Prescription, Politics and Practice in English Coronation and Royal Funeral Rituals c. 1327 to c. 1485’ (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of York, Dec 1999), pp. 196–97. 63 Burden, ‘Rituals of Royalty’.
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The emphasis on the peace that marital unions could bring found prominence in Anglo-Scottish unions also. Perpetual peace was a sentiment often invoked. It was a term used in the rhetoric of the marriage of Henrietta Maria and Charles, and the union that ultimately paved the Stewart path to the English throne was also known by this ambitious title. The naming of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, signed in 1502, echoed the desires and expectations layered onto the union of Margaret Tudor and James IV of Scotland. Following the unsuccessful efforts under James’ father, James III, to complete a union with England that led to heavy criticism of the King’s policies, James IV had to create a ceremony that brushed off such doubts.64 In many ways, perhaps for this reason, Margaret’s entry pageantry was notably lacking in overt references to national difference; however, it still carried similar symbolic references to the expectations of the continuation of peace.65 The final pageant depicting the four virtues described by John Young includes Justice who ‘had under hyr Feet the kyng Nero’, Holofernes ‘all armed’ restrained beneath the feet of Force, and Sardanapalus under the feet of Prudence.66 These restrained historic and biblical characters provide the vices or opposites to their corresponding virtue, and this scene is placed beneath the united symbols of the houses of Tudor (greyhound and rose) and Stewart (unicorn and chardon, or thistle). The words spoken — if indeed any were designed to be spoken — are not recorded, and the display does not offer quite so blatant a message as that marking Catherine de Valois’s soltete, but the desired effect was one similarly laden with expectation and responsibility. Peace and harmony were common tropes at the ceremonies of all marital unions. However, where the union was contested and success less likely but often highly sought after by all, the displays created ever-higher levels of expectation in common to elite audiences alike. As such, these ceremonies had long placed the queen as the pivotal lynch pin that would maintain a lasting peace, whether between nations or religions, producing almost unattainable expectations in many cases.
64 NRS, State Papers, SP6/29, SP6/31. 65 For further on 1503: Louise O. Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament, Arts of Rule in Later Medieval Scotland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), particularly pp. 67–152; Douglas Gray, ‘The Royal Entry in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in Sally Mapstone and Juliette Hood (eds), The Rose and the Thistle, Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998), pp. 10–32 (pp. 6–22); L. Barrow, ‘“the Kynge sent to the Qwene, by a Gentylman, a grett tame Hart”: Marriage, Gift Exchange, and Politics: Margaret Tudor and James IV, 1502–1513’, Parergon (Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Inc.), 21 (1) (2004), 65–84; Carpenter, ‘Thexaltacyon of Noblesse’, pp. 104–20; Dean, ‘Enter the Alien’, pp. 19–25. 66 Fyancells MS, fol. 103r; Fyancells (Hearne), pp. 289–90.
chapter 1. ‘keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer’?
Conclusion By its very nature, the ceremonial that took place around high-level diplomatic marriages in the late medieval and early modern period drew together the people of different kingdoms and placed them in unusually close quarters on a scale that was rarely matched beyond the fields of war and confrontation. As the examples here have demonstrated, even where these marriages were among ‘friends’ there was the potential for misunderstanding, animosity, and the shifting of diplomatic goals which could cause tensions and perceived challenges to honour. Thus, the fact that many marriages were manufactured to bring about peace between warring nations, or later opposing religions, meant that the associated ceremonies carried the very real potential of forming a different type of battlefield if not managed carefully. Yet, the rituals and processions that accompanied marriage were often more than just opportunities for the public healing of breaches or strengthening of ties between the two kingdoms involved. The ceremonies that took place within the bride’s own country could offer testing grounds for domestic authority, such as those undertaken by Henry VII for his daughter Princess Margaret. For Henrietta Maria, the denominational difference between her and Charles I was a new challenge that can find little comparison in the ceremonies that preceded it. However, the ceremonies of previous queens within this Anglo-Franco-Scot dichotomy offer a wealth of experience that would have been recognizable to the French princess whose marriage is dissected in the subsequent collection of essays. Throughout the stages of the consort’s departure from her homeland and arrival in her new kingdom, she had always been the centre of attention (on the whole) and the emphasis upon her pivotal role in the future of her new kingdom was always at the forefront of the display.
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Appendix: Marriage Alliances Between France, England, and Scotland, c. 1200 to 1625 Marriages between English monarchs and French royal house after 1200
Edward I m. Margaret of France (second wife, at Canterbury, 1299) Edward II m. Isabelle de France (at Boulogne, 1308) Richard II m. Isabelle de Valois (at Calais, then English territory, 1396) Henry V m. Catherine de Valois (at Troyes, 1420) Henry VI m. Margaret of Anjou (at Titchfield Abbey, 1445)* Charles I m. Henrietta Maria (at Canterbury, 1625) Marriages between Scottish monarchs and English royal house after 1200
Alexander II m. Joanna Plantagenet (at York, 1221) Alexander III m. Margaret Plantagenet (at York, 1250) David II m. Joan Plantagenet (at Berwick, 1328) James I m. Joan Beaufort (at St Mary’s Overy church, part of Augustinian Southwark Priory, 1424)* James IV m. Margaret Tudor (at Holyrood, 1503) Marriages between Scottish monarch/heirs and English royal house, contracted but not completed
James IV (then Prince James) to Celia, dau. Edward IV (ratified at Edinburgh, 1474) Mary Queen of Scots to Prince Edward (later Edward VI) son of Henry VIII (Treaty of Greenwich, 1543) Marriages between Scottish monarchs/ house and French royal house after 1200
Margaret of Scotland, dau. of James I m. dauphin Louis, later Louis XI (at Tours, 1436) James V m. Madeleine of France (at Paris, 1537) Mary Queen of Scots m. François II, then Dauphin (at Paris, 1558) * Niece or great-niece of king
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Burden, Joel F., ‘Rituals of Royalty: Prescription, Politics and Practice in English Coronation and Royal Funeral Rituals c. 1327 to c. 1485’ (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of York, December 1999) Dean, Lucinda H. S., ‘Crowns, Wedding Rings and Processions: Continuity and Change in the Representations of Scottish Authority in State Ceremony, c. 1214–c. 1603’ (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013)
J. R. ( Ronnie) Mulryne
Chapter 2. Paradoxical Princes Charles Stuart and Henrietta Maria, Personality and Politics (1600–1625) Charles Stuart (or Stewart)1 — the man who became Charles I of England — may lay claim to being the king more frequently maligned than any other monarch who has occupied the English throne. Seen as inadequate in personality and competence, Charles has been presented as responsible for the collapse of British constitutional order before and during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. More generally, he has been portrayed as the princely figure who disastrously diminished the respect in which the monarchy had previously been held. These were not only the views of hostile contemporaries and more recent commentators. Charles himself was plagued by what Conrad Russell has called ‘constant nagging doubt about his status and capacity’.2 Some judgements have been still more severe. The roll-call is a long one. J. P. Kenyon detected what amounts to an incapacitating flaw in a man called on to rule: ‘All his life Charles had been separated from the people, even from the ruling classes, by barriers of mutual suspicion and misunderstanding’.3 Roger Lockyer takes a more generally favourable attitude, though he accuses Charles of the protracted error of giving in to, indeed idolizing, the unreliable and overbearing Duke of Buckingham.4 S. R. Gardiner, the great Victorian, took a Whig view of the Stuart dynasty, complaining that Charles ‘had no power to see how his actions looked to other people’5 thus anticipating his summary judgement that Charles was ‘a bad king’. Christopher Hill compounded this assessment: ‘the King’s [Charles’] 1 The Scottish spelling. See, for example, Rosalind K. Marshall (ed.), Dynasty: The Royal House of Stewart (Edinburgh: National Galleries and National Museums of Scotland, 1990). 2 Quoted in Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (London: Pearson Longman, 2005), p. 25. 3 J. P. Kenyon, The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship (London: B. T. Batsford, 1958; pb. Glasgow: Fontana/ Collins, 1966, 28th impression, 1987), p. 98. 4 Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (London and New York: Longman, 1981), p. 235. 5 As phrased by Michael B. Young in Charles I, British History in Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) pp. 2–3. Gardiner’s complaint and some other voices neatly enough encapsulate a gibe at the expense of a sufferer from Asperger’s disease. J. R. Mulryne (1937–2019) was Professor Emeritus at the University of Warwick, UK, a former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 63–84 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119185
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high idea of this own station, his rigid inability to compromise in time, and his transparent dishonesty, made it impossible for him ever to have functioned as a constitutional monarch’ — a fate sadly borne out, in Hill’s view, by history.6 Lawrence Stone twisted the knife as cruelly as the rest, finding in Charles ‘turpitude’, ‘bottomless duplicity’, ‘proven untrustworthiness’, and though he part-retracts these opinions, he held to his perception of ‘the folly, obstinacy and duplicity’ of Charles as prince and king.7 It would be foolish to attempt a vindication of Charles here. I shall instead offer three perspectives on the youthful years of the Prince who, within months of his father’s death (1625), married the Princess Henrietta Maria of France and acceded to the throne. I’ll first, in by far the most extended section of the paper, set out the prime influence, arguably, on Charles during his formative years, his extended period assigned to the oversight of that feisty character Sir Robert Carey, within a household presided over by Carey’s more nurturing yet formidable wife Elizabeth. I’ll say something, however inadequate, about Charles’ relationship with his elder brother, the fabled Henry, Prince of Wales. Finally, I’ll sketch in moments from the curious episode of Charles’ journey towards Madrid with the Duke of Buckingham, when Charles had a different, Spanish, bride in view. How far these brief insights, none entirely new, may explain or moderate the judgements cited above will be for the reader to decide. The Past is Another Country, They Do Things Differently There8 It’s worth bearing in mind that Charles, born in Dunfermline, Scotland, was for most of his life a stranger in a strange land, even though his quasi-English or Anglo-Scots identity (he never visited his third kingdom, Ireland)9 could be said to have kicked in as early as three years old, when his father James VI, already King of Scotland for more than 30 years, succeeded Queen Elizabeth I. Even so, his earliest experiences of his new country, coloured by the pervasive 6 Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (New York: Nelson, 2nd edn, 1980) pp. 61–62. 7 Quoted in Young, Charles I, pp. 3, 4. Stone’s phrases are picked up from his Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Harper Collins, 1972). A digital version of Stone’s book with added material appears in the Routledge Classics series (accessed 25 October 2017). More moderate but still critical voices include Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 192: ‘Charles developed into a rather rigid personality. He came to trust people slowly but his confidence, once placed, was unshakeable’. Charles Carlton in his important book Charles I: The Personal Monarch (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), while broadly sympathetic to Charles, nevertheless writes in the Preface to his second (paperback) edition (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. xiv: ‘I maintain that the king — more than anyone else — was to blame for the bloodiest war known to English history. In sum, Charles failed because of his own personal defects’. John Morrill, Stuart Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ProQuest online edn, p. 39, accessed 26 October 2017, sums up Charles’ character tersely: ‘Charles was glacial, withdrawn, and shifty’. 8 From L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), an opening sentence which has become proverbial. 9 Out of sight did not mean out of mind. In the last years of his reign Charles’ government had to deal with rebellion in Ireland, in Ulster especially.
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presence of Scots at the Anglo-Scots court, replicated the essential features of those experiences from birth which must have left a scar. Abandoned early to the care of others by his father and, against her protests, by his mother Anna, weak of limb — he had to wear leg braces to be taught to walk10 — a stammerer and by report unattractive of feature, Charles started life as an isolated figure in a turbulent land and time. When Charles came to England in 1605, two years after he had last seen either father or mother,11 it must have seemed as though parental abandonment continued, since he was consigned for the next seven or eight years12 — a long time in a young child’s life — to the guardianship of the noble family of Robert Carey and his wife Elizabeth Trevanion (or Trevannion). Carey was the youngest son of Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon, but despite the exalted social and political circles to which the Careys belonged, and however widespread the practice among European nobility, consignment to the Careys and consequent separation from his mother and sister may well have appeared to Charles another instance of rejection. The Careys’ guardianship was interrupted by what must have been, for the young Charles, baffling and from time to time stomach-churning visits to his father’s notoriously lewd court.13 It was a feeling, we may suppose, that never left him. He must have known at some level that his consignment to the Careys was motivated primarily by the King’s need to identify accommodation for him away from London. The same motive applied to his sister Elizabeth, at risk of abduction on account of her exalted lineage. Elizabeth was placed with John, first Baron Harington of Exton and his wife Anne at Combe Abbey, Coventry.14 Did Charles learn by rumour or deliberate account, we might ask, that James had found it difficult to place him with potential guardians, with refuseniks self-justifying their choice by fear that the sickly prince would die in their care? Hostile witnesses report that when he was created Duke of York in 1605 (aetat 4) Charles had to be supplied with two supporters standing each side to keep him in an upright posture. This may be myth or cruel exaggeration, but if true would have humiliated the Prince 10 Carlton, Charles I, pp. 4–5, casts doubt on extreme versions of Charles’ disabilities. 11 Carlton, Charles I, p. 3. 12 Cust, Charles I, p. 2, says that the Careys ‘provided [Charles] with a stable home until 1613, when he was considered old enough to set up his own household’. Pauline Gregg, King Charles I (London, Melbourne, Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1981), p. 13, writes: ‘when he came to London Charles was established close to his parents in the Palace of Whitehall’, presumably for his scheduled visits to the court. 13 Carlton, Charles I, p. 6, relates one barbaric episode when James decided a suitable outing for eight-year-old Charles was to take him to see ‘a bear condemned to death by being eaten by lions for mauling a child’. For James’ boisterous personality, see, e.g., Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), passim, and Kevin Curran, Marriage, Performance and Politics at the Jacobean Court (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 14 One strand of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) entailed that, after the murder of James and other members of the royal line, Charles’ sister Elizabeth would be placed on the throne as a Catholic puppet queen. For a portrait of Elizabeth and a brief biography see Catharine MacLeod et al. (eds), The Lost Prince, Exhibition Catalogue, (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2012), pp. 58–59. See also Rosalind K. Marshall, The Winter Queen: The Life of Elizabeth of Bohemia 1596–1662 (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1998).
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and intensified his sense of alienation from the royal status to which by birth and custom he was entitled.15 It would scarcely be a consolation that the major scandal which immediately followed his ducal installation entailed his mother blacking up for a court masque and exposing her breasts in what was deemed a manner unbefitting for a queen.16 Circumstances, personal and societal, seemed to conspire against Charles from the very beginning.17 The Child is Father of the Man18 We are fortunate to have from Charles’ appointed guardian, Robert Carey (or Cary?, 1560–1639), an autobiography written when Carey was in his sixties, but not published until 1759. This is a book which features among the earliest pieces of extended autobiography in English, and has some claim to being the most candid piece of retrospective writing of the Elizabethan-Jacobean period. The book, reprinted in full or in excerpt in several modern versions, is Memoirs of the Life of Robert Cary, Baron of Leppington and Earl of Monmouth. Written by Himself.19 Not much read today except as a duty by professional historians, the Memoirs nevertheless tells us much, both directly and by implication, about the attitudes and personality of the man who must have been, along with his wife, a considerable influence on Charles’ emotional development during his formative years — even if, as appears, Carey was actively pursuing a court career away from home during much of this time. Carey’s career brought him into close contact with the Prince not only as guardian but later as ‘master of Charles’s growing household’,20 and eventually (1617 onward) as chamberlain of the prince’s court.21 Tutors, invariably of a reformed persuasion, provided instruction — and Charles was, it seems, an apt and even eager pupil — but for
15 The ‘divine right’ of kings remained a preoccupation for Charles throughout his life. See, for example, Kevin Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 218, 880 and David Wootton (ed.), Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), passim, especially Introduction and the excerpt, pp. 107–09, from James’ two-hour address to the Lords and Commons (March 1610). 16 The masque, which became notorious in the gossip economy, was Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’ Masque of Blackness (Twelfth Night, 1605) prepared and performed at the express wish of the Queen, and costing the vast sum of up to £3000. An easily accessible edition is David Lindley (ed.), Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605–1640 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 17 More detail about Charles’ earliest years will be found in Carlton, Charles I, pp. 1–9. 18 A much-borrowed line from William Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up when I behold […]’. 19 The most accessible modern edition is F. H. Mares (ed.), The Memoirs of Robert Carey (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972). All quotations are taken from this edition. 20 A. J. Loomie, ‘Carey, Robert, first Earl of Monmouth (1560–1639)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Bio graphy Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 10 Oct 2017]. It is difficult to track Carey’s day-to-day contacts with Charles, since no relevant archival material known to me survives. 21 Carey was prepared to fight hard to retain his place close to Charles, even taking on opposition from the heir to the throne, Prince Henry. See Carey, Memoirs, pp. 70–71.
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a role model, or at the least a close-up example of adult manners, Charles must have turned largely to his guardian.22 A moment early in the Memoirs predicts some of the themes that follow: The next year (which was 1586) was the Queene of Scottes’ beheading. I lived in court, had small meanes of my friends: yet God so blessed me that I was euer able to keep company with the best: in all triumphes I was one; either in tilt, tourney, or barriers, in maske or balles: I kept men and horses farre above my ranke, and so continued a long time. At which time (few or none in the court being willing to undertake that journey) her Majestie [Queen Elizabeth] sent me to the King of Scottes, to make known her innocence of her sister’s [Mary Queen of Scots’] death, with letters of credence from herself to assure all that I should affirm.23 What is one to say? Carey’s sheer naiveté is breath-taking. Being willing to undertake such an impossible mission — of more than considerable diplomatic significance — as attempting to persuade the Scottish King that Elizabeth was innocent of Mary’s execution — the execution of the King’s own mother — was incontestable foolhardiness. Contemporaries quailed in reasonable expectation of James’ potentially murderous wrath. Carey was motivated by ambition, a sense of duty or — and this is the note that emerges throughout — unquenchable self-belief. During his self-chosen mission, Carey says, he was in hourly danger of assassination at the hands of rebellious Scots. We have to remember that this is Carey’s own retrospective report, seen through the long lens of a career that was to elate him and disappoint him in equal measure. Yet his unvarying naiveté seems to have saved him, for James — after, as Carey tells it, a display of tempestuous rage — appears to have taken personally to Carey who, adroitly enough, cultivated a relationship with James that lasted well into the Scots King’s English reign. There were characteristic waverings of support on James’ part, to Carey’s bitter resentment, but unfailing loyalty on Carey’s. That same naiveté, coupled with patient and persistent cultivation of preferment, characterized Carey’s relationship with Elizabeth, or so the Memoirs tell it, provoking her to fury on at least one memorable occasion but, following an extended masquerade of diplomatic tact, leading to him coming away eventually with improved prospects.24 Much of this occurred 20 years or so before the Careys assumed 22 The most influential of these tutors was probably Sir Thomas Murray (1564–1623), a Scots Presbyterian and ‘a staunch supporter of protestant causes’ appointed by James before 26 June 1605 and continuing in the prince’s service until at least 1617. In 1612, Murray shared with Robert Carey (author of the Memoirs) and Sir James Fullerton the responsibility for suppressing ‘disorders’ in the prince’s household. Between 1617 and 1621 he served as secretary to Charles. See R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Murray, Thomas (1564–1623)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press, 2004) [accessed 12 Oct 2017]. 23 Carey, Memoirs, p. 7. 24 The occasion involved the emotionally charged topic of the Queen’s relationship with the Earl of Essex who against his will was summoned to return to court from Rouen, whither Carey had accompanied the Earl’s military expedition. Carey handled the delicate matter of Elizabeth’s sensitivities with considerable skill — by his own account — and mollified her.
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responsibility for the five-year-old Charles but the traits on display persisted throughout Carey’s life. In its very openness, the passage quoted above is characteristic. The main themes are all there: a persistent concern with money; an equally persistent preoccupation with status; and a pious sense that a benign providence oversees and approves his actions. Carey doesn’t hesitate to enlist the Almighty as the agent responsible for forwarding his career, just as the same God, he fervently believes, endorses the existing hierarchy from which Carey expects, and believes he deserves, to benefit. The emphasis on providential intervention is so apparently unselfconscious as to become a leading motif of Carey’s discourse. Reflecting, for example, on his arguably foolhardy decision to accept — indeed seek — the guardianship of the young Prince, Carey writes: Those who wished me no good were glad of it, thinking that if the Duke [i.e. Charles] should die in our charge (his weaknesse being such as gave them great cause to suspect it) then it would not be thought fitt that we should remaine in court after. My gracious God left me not, but out of weaknesse he shewed his strength, and beyond all mens expectations so blessed the Duke with health and strength, under my wive’s charge, as he grew better and better every day.25 These are accents readily associated with Puritanism, as though Carey as the recipient of God’s favour were already one of the elect. They are accents too which predict the cast of mind of several of Charles’ tutors, including Thomas Murray,26 and of other personnel appointed by James to surround Charles in his fledgling court. Characteristically, James played both sides of the street, introducing anti-Calvinists for political reasons into Charles’ entourage in preparation for the abortive wooing embassy to Spain. Besides Murray, the ‘Anglican’ theologian Lancelot Andrewes, with his preference for a traditional liturgy in a Church led by bishops, exercised considerable influence on the scholar in Charles. The men who joined Charles’ court circle, such as his chaplains George Hakewill and Richard Milborne, described by Richard Cust as ‘evangelical Calvinists’, often belonged to a persuasion closer to a more godly-extreme reformed ethos. Alongside his much-loved sister Elizabeth’s Calvinist views, the religious bias of Charles’ court circle must have caused him considerable unease, given his marital choice of a Catholic French princess, and his early preference for a Catholic, Spanish, Infanta. Such a slew of religious opinion, in an age when personal and social identity was formed largely in terms of religious affiliation, must have created a perplexing context within which Charles’ own sincerely-held religious beliefs were being
25 Carey, Memoirs, p. 133. 26 For Murray, see note 22. See also P. E. McCullough, Sermons at Court, Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 194–204.
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framed.27 It would be foolish to attribute Charles’ later broadminded, if anti-Calvinist, tolerance28 to the influence of Robert Carey. It is inviting, however, to suppose that the comfortable religion of the Careys remained for Charles an ideal, though an unattainable one, given his own life-experience and responsibilities. It is tempting in today’s secular world to mock the assurance which marks Carey’s assumption that he personally enjoys divine favour, but the ease with which he sits to the crises, dangers, and disappointments of his long life has its enviable features. As Peter Marshall remarks in a major study of Reformation faith, religion ‘was woven inextricably into the fabric of virtually all the other artificial abstractions […] of collective human existence: politics, culture, gender, art, literature, economy’.29 Carey must have seemed to Charles the epitome of the man of settled religious faith who could outface all the ills life could throw at him.30 David Cressy has pithily summarized Charles’ religious outlook as ‘an untroubled and unreflective Christianity’, typically encapsulated in his Proclamation of June 1626, which aimed to achieve ‘the establishing of the peace and quiet of the Church’.31 Carey’s Memoirs could be seen by an unsympathetic witness as belonging to what Cressy calls ‘the [religious] complacency of elite political culture’.32 As a marker of this, Carey doesn’t refer in his chronicle to Charles’ leanings towards High Church liturgy. Nor does he mention that Charles was suspected by some of eventual conversion to Catholicism under his wife’s influence. Carey is even incurious about Charles’ practice of ‘touching’ for the
27 King James’ ‘rex pacificus’ attitude to Catholic liturgy and symbolism during negotiations over a Spanish marriage for Charles will not have made his son’s religious identity-formation any easier. The brouhaha over the proposed Spanish match, and the rejoicings on Charles’ return without a Spanish bride (‘to the comfort of all true English hearts’ in Carey’s phrase (Memoirs, p. 78)), have been widely discussed. For a carefully considered contextualisation of Charles’ abortive journey and a wide-ranging bibliography see Alexander Samson (ed.), The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006). 28 This assessment of Charles’ beliefs is offered in N. R. N. Tyack, Anti-Calvinists. The Rise of English Arminianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 114, as quoted by Cust, Charles I, p. 16. For David Cressy’s brief characterization of Charles’ religious outlook see note 31 below. 29 Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 1. 30 Carey’s fastidious dislike for bawdry and name-calling is suggested by a letter written by Don Carlos Coloma to the Count Duke of Olivares in August 1624, in the aftermath of the notorious production by the King’s Men, formerly the Chamberlain’s Men, of Middleton’s A Game at Chesse. The letter refers to ‘some filthy songs that [the Duke of ] Buckingham makes his musicians sing […] such that the Marquis of Hamilton, the Earls of Montgomery and Carey [i.e. Robert Carey] left a great reception not to hear them’. For context and further quotation, see Edward M. Wilson and Olga Turner, ‘The Spanish Protest against A Game at Chesse’, Modern Language Review, 44 (1949), 476–82. Carey’s attitude will have found a sympathetic echo in Charles’ shy and sensitive nature. 31 David Cressy, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 215. Cressy offers a brief categorization of Charles’ religious outlook: ‘a ceremonial anti-Calvinist version of Protestantism which favoured episcopal discipline, “the beauty of holiness” and the reconfiguration of services around communion tables railed as east-set altars’ (Cressy, Charles I, p. 14). 32 Cressy, Charles I, p. 11.
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King’s Evil, an implicit assertion, if in some circles a controversial one, of the divine right of kings.33 It is striking that Carey thinks it apt to boast (in the first passage quoted above) of his involvement in the pageantry of Elizabeth’s court. Carey’s puritan or proto-puritan instincts, however settled they appear to be, by no means blinded him to the more superficially frivolous aspects of court life. That an attraction to the glamour of court entertainment became an embedded trait in his personal outlook is scarcely surprising, given that his father was Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon. It was Hunsdon who established and passed on to his son George, Robert’s brother, ‘the famous Lord Chamberlain’s company […] illumined by the genius of Shakespeare’.34 Hunsdon35 according to Andrew Gurr ‘was evidently a supporter of plays and playing throughout his life’.36 Robert, as the Lord Chamberlain’s son, must have lived in an atmosphere permeated by court and public entertainment. His performance as the ‘forsaken knight’ at an Accession Day tilt in 1593, at the prodigious cost, as he himself tells us, of more than £400, is an astonishing incident in the biography of a man always hesitating on the brink of financial ruin, until one realizes how natural an instance of noblesse oblige, and how socially elevating, such conspicuous expenditure must have seemed for a member of the Carey family.37
33 Charles adopted ‘touching’ immediately after his accession and practised it almost till the end of his reign. A royal proclamation of 18/28 June 1625 refers to Charles’ ‘Sacred touch and invocation of the name of God to cure those whoe are afflicted with the disease called the Kinges evill’ i.e. the skin disease scrofula. The proclamation also includes clauses providing for good order among those seeking touching, including a requirement that petitioners should carry certificates from the clerical authorities of their home parishes. See James F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, vol. 2, 1625–1646, [accessed 23 October 2017]. Touching formed an element of the cult centred on Charles after his execution; see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971; pb. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 230–34 and Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003). 34 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923, repr. with corr., 1951), vol. 2, p. 193. An authoritative guide to the Elizabethan-Jacobean theatre companies is Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). See also Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 4th edn, 2009), pp. 48–49. 35 Henry Carey, first Lord Hunsdon, could boast the most exalted social credentials. Queen Elizabeth was either his first cousin, or possibly his half-sister following on from Henry VIII’s liaison with Mary Boleyn. David Loades is sceptical about the rumoured illegitimate origin for Henry Carey. See Loades, Henry VIII (Stroud, Gloucs: Amberley Publishing, 2011), pp. 181–82. 36 Gurr, Playing Companies, p. 278. 37 There were other motives. Carey sought by his participation in the tilt, and by a present to Elizabeth of a valuable jewel, to mollify her annoyance at his marriage, of which she hadn’t been informed. See Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977, pb. 1987), pp. 138, 141. Carey is recorded as appearing in tilts on six further occasions between 1585 and 1597; see Strong, Cult, pp. 207–09. See also Frances A. Yates, ‘Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20 (1957), 4–25 and Roy C. Strong, ‘The Popular Celebration of the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth I’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958), 86–103.
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Story Power Robert Carey was no raconteur. Nowhere in the Memoirs is there a hint of the guile with which the raconteur constructs his or her story from outset to climax. But Carey was undoubtedly a man with a fund of life-stories, even if these are unsophisticated and coloured by self-conceit. The stories are, whatever else, unquestionably vivid. A reader of the Memoirs — or Charles, we may suppose, listening — would recall for example Carey’s eye-witness account referring to ‘the King of Spain’s great Armada [which] came upon our coast, thinking to devour us all’. In this crisis, Carey contrived as a first move, he tells us, to sail with his commandeered frigate into the midst of the Spanish instead of the English fleet — his luckless naiveté never deserted him — a contretemps he follows with a circumstantial, close-up, account of the fire-ships which he says proved the Spaniards’ undoing. Characteristically, the story closes with a prayer thanking God who ‘gave victory over this invincible navy’.38 Among other episodes which might have become embedded in a listening boy’s imagination might be Carey’s unique narrative of the death of Queen Elizabeth.39 This offers a remarkably detailed account of the Queen’s last days, including the pathos of her increasing debility, her pious dependence on intercessory prayer and — despite her weakness — her iron will in insisting that her ageing Archbishop, John Whitgift — himself within a twelvemonth of death — should kneel and pray for her hour after hour ‘till the old man’s knees were weary’.40 Carey typically introduces emotional touches which foreground his own centre-stage involvement, for instance reporting the Queen’s willingness to confess her most intimate feelings when he visited her on the brink of her final illness: I kissed her hand, and told her it was my chiefest happiness to see her in safety and in health, which I wished might long continue. She took me by the hand, and wrung it hard, and said, ‘No, Robin, I am not well’, and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days, and in her discourse fetched not so few as forty or fifty great sighs.41 As story-telling this is astute, covering physical gesture, genuine-seeming speech, and unvocalized sound. Even in the emotionally-charged atmosphere of the Queen’s death, Carey presents his tale as a Christian duty performed in service to the truth — and as a matter of fealty to his sovereign: 38 Carey, Memoirs, pp. 9–11. 39 Unique among printed documents, Carey’s account became well known to historians from the eighteenth century on, thanks initially to transcribed material in Thomas Birch, An Historical View of Negotiations Between the Courts of England, France and Brussels, 1592–1617 (London: A. Millar, 1749). Excerpts are also included in John Nichols’s widely read edition of The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols (London: J. B. Nichols, 1828), vol. 4, pp. 809–10. 40 Carey, Memoirs, p. 60. 41 Carey, Memoirs, p. 58.
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This that I heard with my ears, and did see with my eyes, I thought it my duty to set down, and to affirm it for a truth, upon the faith of a Christian, because I know there have been many false lies reported of the end and death of that good lady.42 Carey’s emphasis remains firmly, here as elsewhere, on the unflinching veracity he claims for his narrative. The Once and Future King There is much more to tell about Carey’s Memoirs and the light they throw on influences, religious, political, social, and cultural, surrounding the young Charles. Carey was a careerist and by his own account a not unsuccessful one. Paranoid about conspiracies directed against him by seeming friends as well as declared rivals, Carey was ever at the whim of two unpredictable monarchs, Elizabeth and James. He must have conveyed to Charles a watchfulness in political and social relationships that while typical of the era became especially pronounced in Charles’ public life as Prince and King. Carey was also — and here he may have influenced Charles in a contrary direction — a bold and, by his own account, a courageous, risk-taking, no-holds-barred soldier and field commander. His descriptions of mayhem in the badlands of the Scots-English borders, where for a good many years he was warden or deputy warden of the West, East and Middle Marches,43 together with the forthrightness and competence he exhibited in temporarily quelling the mayhem, may strike today’s readers as scarcely credible. It is not beyond possibility that his memoirs are literally incredible, at least in detail and by way of omission or elaboration, but the tales they tell must be the kind of stories which the sensitive, physically frail, and fastidious Charles may have heard his robust guardian tell. The effect on his mind and imagination lies beyond precise assessment. Perhaps he turned all to favour and to prettiness in the court masques his mother commissioned and in which he danced.44 There, chivalry and high achievement are common themes. Or Charles may have sublimated a grudging admiration for Carey’s self-declared heroism into belligerence towards Spain or paranoid suspicion of real or imagined enemies. What he made of Carey’s best-known action, his unauthorized mad dash in 1603 to inform James that Queen Elizabeth had died, 42 Carey, Memoirs, p. 60. 43 Carey was deputy warden of the West March from 1593 to 1595, followed by a spell as deputy warden of the East March, and by November 1597 he was warden of the Middle March. The ‘Marches’ were regions of the Anglo-Scots border whose wardens were responsible for administering the law in these often-lawless areas. 44 Sharpe, Personal Rule, p. 180, notes Charles’ fastidiousness of speech and sees ‘court plays, festivals and ceremonies’ as ‘expressions of the royal mind’. Elsewhere, he ventures that ‘in Charles’s own character, we may suspect, the distinctions that we make between theatre and life were never firm or clear’, Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 265.
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remains equally unknown, an ill-considered episode entailing serious injury during a virtually non-stop horseback ride of 397 miles to Edinburgh via his Borders house at Widdrington.45 It must have been an oft-repeated tale in the Carey household. It certainly provoked in London and the country at large disapproving gossip and official reproof.46 Charles would surely have recoiled from anything so reckless as this action of Carey’s.47 And yet, as will be suggested below, it may have triggered an equally impetuous — though, paradoxically, long in planning — foolhardy and pantomime-like action on Charles’ part, which resulted in an outcome as decisive for the Prince’s future as Carey’s proved for his remaining court career.48 Sibling Sentiment It is impossible here to do more than skim the surface of Prince Henry’s influence on Charles’ personality.49 Charles’ relationship with James lies outside the bounds of this discussion, being such a tussle, poised between love and distaste, as to become a source of daily anxiety for Charles, stirred by his own feelings of inadequacy and by repeated fruitless attempts to win his father’s praise and affection.50
45 By F. H. Mares’ calculation in his edition of Carey, Memoirs, pp. 62 and 63. 46 Carey, Memoirs, pp. 60–65. For Carey’s injury, resulting from a fall from his horse, and being struck on the head by his mount’s hoof, see Carey, Memoirs, p. 63. 47 Rather surprisingly, Sharpe, Personal Rule, p. 197, echoing Conrad Russell, concludes after exhaustive study that Charles ‘suffered from energy’. If this was largely confined to administration and paperwork, Charles’ impetuosity in certain life-episodes may nevertheless be said to have taken a lead from Carey’s swashbuckling recklessness. Carlton, Charles I, 2nd edn, p. xvii is sceptical of Charles’ attributed ‘energy’. 48 Carey, Memoirs, p. 64. Carey claims to have secured further personal favour from James following his buccaneering excursion to Edinburgh, with the Scottish King telling him ‘here, take my hand, I will be as good a master to you [as Elizabeth was], and will requite this service with honour and reward’. James’ benevolent interest in Carey goes back to at least 1583, when Carey participated in Walsingham’s embassy to James, who ‘took such a liking to me’ that he wrote ‘to the queen [Elizabeth] […] to give me leave to come back to him again’ (Carey, Memoirs, p. 7). Carey’s warm relations with the Scots King may owe something to Hunsdon’s diplomatic activities. According to Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Hunsdon ‘as the privy council’s Scottish expert […] became in fact a kind of minister for Scottish business’. See ‘Carey, Henry, first Baron Hunsdon (1526–1596)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 17 Oct 2017]. For Hunsdon’s activities in relation to 1580s Scotland see further MacCaffrey, Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572–1588 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), esp. chapter 15. Robert’s brother George, second Baron Hunsdon, also served several times as an ‘envoy’ to Scotland. 49 The relationship between the princes Henry and Charles is often portrayed as having negative consequences for the younger brother. Charles, though unquestionably admiring and by his own account, loving, grew up under his elder sibling’s shadow and as a — possible — result became full of self-doubt. Recent research by professional psychologists tends to take a double view of sibling relationships. See e.g. Joyce Edward, The Sibling Relationship: A Force for Growth and Conflict (London and New York: Jason Aronson, 2015). Charles arguably achieved greater self-definition or ‘individuation’ through sharing with his elder brother a deep interest in, especially, chivalry and the visual arts of Europe. 50 Curran, Marriage, p. 173, describes James as ‘informal, familiar and jocular; he could be bawdy, coarse and crude’ — qualities antithetical to Charles’ temperament.
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His relationship with his brother Henry was different.51 On the one hand, Henry’s renowned chivalric image, his charismatic personality and his political popularity — the National Portrait Gallery exhibition of 2012–2013 provided a superb visual commentary52 — must have proved psychologically oppressive for his weak-limbed younger brother who was not often in the public gaze.53 Disabling rivalry between poorly matched siblings is a common phenomenon. Yet, by contrast, on such occasions as Henry’s creation as Prince of Wales in 1610, resentment and rivalry on Charles’ part must at the least have been tempered by pride — Charles was himself involved in the elaborate celebrations, playing Zephyrus, a prominent dance-part in Samuel Daniel’s masque Tethys’ Festival.54 Some commentators say that Charles saw little of his brother and sister in the years before the King permitted him in 1613 to set up his own lesser court in London. Even then, he is said not to have shared a great deal with Elizabeth, who was normally kept secure at Combe Abbey until shortly before she left England for her married life in the Palatinate. Charles was therefore once more isolated, in this instance from his immediate family. He must have been keenly aware of his elder sibling’s brilliant court and the art-collecting that so distinguished it, and been proud to be associated with its celebrity. It even seems, according to Richard Cust, that in the years around 1620 ‘Charles was about to take up the chivalric mantle laid down by Prince Henry’, especially in view of his leading role in the Accession Day tilt of that year, described by Cust as ‘the central event in the revival of English chivalric culture’.55 Yet at his installation as Prince of Wales, six years after his brother’s taking up the same office, and four years after the latter’s death, it must have stung when the presiding Bishop of Ely committed the Freudian slip of praying for Prince Henry as the heir to the throne, not Prince Charles.56 It may be that Charles’ ill success as statesman and politician stemmed in part from the self-division that must have plagued him in regard to his elder brother — even if that is manifestly too glib and trivial an explanation for Charles’ fate, and the momentous disaster that overtook the monarchy.57
51 Charles’ devotion to his brother began early. David A. H. B. Taylor quotes a letter from Charles to Henry (BL Harleian MS 6986, 154) referring to Henry as ‘my sweet, sweet brother’ and adding ‘Good brother love me and I shall ever love you and serve you’. These may be conventional phrases between royal siblings, but Charles’ affection, though not always reciprocated, seems to have been life-long. Quoted in Catharine MacLeod et al., The Lost Prince, Exhibition Catalogue, p. 60. 52 The exhibition catalogue (see previous note) offers excellent reproductions of relevant portraits of Henry and his family, together with brief biographies. 53 Mark A. Kishlansky and John Morrill note however that in time Charles ‘conquered his physical disabilities by sheer determination and excelled at tournament sports, hunting, and riding’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 19 Oct 2017]. 54 For the text of the masque, with preface, stage directions and scene descriptions, see Lindley, Court Masques, pp. 54–65 and notes pp. 231–34. Daniel’s text makes specific allowance for Charles’ relatively young age and small stature. 55 Cust, Charles I, p. 6. 56 Cust, Charles I, p. 3 and Carlton, Charles I, p. 18. 57 For near-hagiographic accounts of Charles, see Lacey, The Cult of King Charles.
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Married Bliss? Perhaps, to remain at the personal level, we should consider the view that the shy, fastidious and essentially celibate Charles of the earlier years found psychological consolation and fulfilment in his marriage with Henrietta Maria.58 There is plentiful evidence that the marriage ultimately proved a happy one. Kevin Sharpe writes, ‘In falling in love, at last, with Henrietta Maria […] Charles found peace and tranquility for the first time in his reign and his life’.59 Jerry Brotton concurs, offering in support a brilliant analysis of Anthony Van Dyck’s great family portrait, King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria and their Children. In this, both King and Queen appear physically attractive: Charles is, in Brotton’s words, ‘slim and handsome’, gazing at his wife ‘attentively’; Henrietta Maria is ‘pale and delicate, with cheekbones, an elegant jawline and tapering fingers’.60 Brotton half-concedes that Van Dyck’s royal portraits ‘confirmed what Charles’s supporters wanted people to believe’, yet the artist is undoubtedly here telling a truth about ‘this most unlikely of royal romances’. Less debatable would be the fulfilment Charles must have found, not always vicariously but sometimes as participant, in Henrietta Maria’s promotion of, and accomplishment in, masques and masquing. Of course, Charles’ art collection must have been a lasting solace, and just perhaps a necessary obsession. But the objets d’art were enjoyed largely in isolation, as Jerry Brotton remarks.61 Yet even personality traits as deeply ingrained as Charles’ sense of isolation if scarcely erased may be soothed by addictive collecting. Charles’ relationship with his wife was not always as relaxed and loving as Van Dyck portrays it. Even the marriage articles which gave it formal recognition were tinged with duplicity, since they included secret clauses offering Catholics in England a degree of toleration unacceptable to parliament and people. They also conferred on Henrietta Maria a release from almost every restraint on the public face of her Catholicism.62 Charles was from the beginning unsettled by these articles, and even more so by what he came to perceive as the virtual takeover of his court — at the very outset of his reign — by a contingent of
58 Carey, ever vigilant in Charles’ interest, thought the negotiations for the Prince’s marriage with Henrietta Maria intolerably long-drawn-out: ‘Two years or more were spent in this affair, and when it was come to a full point of agreement on all parts, the King fell sick of a tertian ague at Theobalds, and to the grief of all true hearts died of that sickness […]’ (Carey, Memoirs, p. 79). 59 Sharpe, Personal Rule, p. 183. Sharpe is referring to the period following the difficulties which beset the first days of Charles’ and Henrietta Maria’s marriage. See also, Katie Whitaker, A Royal Passion: the Turbulent Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010). 60 Jerry Brotton, The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection (London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, 2006), p. 158. And see Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 193–97. 61 Brotton, Sale, pp. 52–53. 62 The secret clauses are briefly discussed in Sharpe, Personal Rule, p. 8 and Carlton, Charles I, p. 56. Whitaker, Royal Passion, pp. 32 ff., usefully summarizes the political and personal circumstances under which the secret clauses were finally agreed.
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Henrietta Maria’s attendants, both clerical and secular. The tense situation was exacerbated on both sides, as R. Malcolm Smuts points out in a fine essay,63 by deliberately provocative behaviour on Henrietta Maria’s part64 and oppressive measures on Charles’, including the expulsion of many of his wife’s closest servants and confidants.65 Charles and Buckingham continued their attacks on the Queen’s household for more than a year.66 The situation was a confused one, by no means clarified by being entangled with the intricate politics of both French and English courts. There may even have been an element of uncertainty in Henrietta Maria’s own religious outlook since, as the daughter of the French King, Henri IV (Henri de Navarre), she was the child of a volatile religious era, and closely acquainted with the great Calvinist families of her country. Yet her commitments as Queen of England were to the growth, and conceivably the ultimate triumph, of Catholicism.67 Charles on his side walked a tightrope between his own religious inclinations and upbringing and the suspicions of his subjects. L. J. Reeve even writes that in Protestant England ‘Charles shared [a] general Laudian sympathy towards Rome and it is legitimate to describe him as a quasi-Catholic’.68 Smuts tells in some detail the sad story of the early antagonism between husband and wife.69 Yet there can be no denying the couple won through, at the least, to a sustained truce between divergent religious views and personalities, a situation helpfully brokered by repeated successful pregnancies. Touring Passions The famous and much-derided episode that took Charles and the Duke of Buckingham to Spain in 1623 has been subject to a good deal of political and, more recently, literary analysis. It remains difficult to tell how far the trip was a fantasy-journey impetuously transformed into reality, or a genuinely hazardous 63 R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–37. 64 For Henrietta Maria’s promotion of a well-provided Catholic chapel in central London see Jonathan P. Wainwright, ‘Sounds of Piety and Devotion: Music in the Queen’s Chapel’, in Griffey, Henrietta Maria, pp. 195–213. For the many conversions to Catholicism attributed to Henrietta Maria’s religious practice see Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 304–05: ‘the queen’s household became a public place of worship, a refuge for metropolitan Catholicism and a headquarters for a campaign of conversions’ (p. 304); ‘what caused most scandal were the conversions of leading aristocrats, especially ladies, effected by priests within the queen’s court’ (p. 305). 65 Charles expelled 300 of these in 1626. 66 Smuts, ‘Henrietta Maria’s Circle’, p. 17. 67 In Kevin Sharpe’s words, ‘the young French queen was personally devoted to her faith, was attached to the dévot party at the French court and had sworn to the pope to promote Catholicism in her new kingdom’ (Sharpe, Charles I, p. 304). Henrietta Maria’s religious aims were repeatedly expressed, not least in letters to her brother, Louis XIII. For the suggestion relating to Henri IV’s influence on Henrietta Maria see Gregg, Charles I, p. 200. 68 L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 68. 69 Smuts, ‘Henrietta Maria’s Circle’, pp. 16–20.
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enterprise deserving the description ‘romantic epic’. The latter would require that the identity of the Prince and his companion always teetered on the verge of discovery — it was indeed discovered in Paris by a kitchen maid, if we are to believe Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury.70 Farcical episodes of discovery occurred before the noble pair — and their invited companions — even left England. How far was the journey to Spain a matter of serious political negotiation? It is tempting to see the whole trip as a replica of the absurd and absurdly dangerous enterprises to which Sir Robert Carey committed himself and, one may assume, which he proudly relayed to Charles.71 It would be easy to explain away this new, equally absurd, enterprise by claiming that James’ frustration at endless delays in the marriage negotiations was the factor that triggered it. A Spanish match had been on the cards, and more important on James’ cards, for more than a decade without much progress. Charles’ personal emotions played their part, however. He became besotted, it appears, with an image of the Spanish Infanta Maria and pestered the Earl of Bristol, our man in Spain, for a portrait of her; he even took Spanish lessons in anticipation of closer contact to come.72 There was also the added incentive that the journey could be seen as one in the eye for the House of Commons, with whom Charles’ relations were chronically volatile, and who almost to a man opposed the Spanish match.73 Perhaps this adventure was a last, desperate throw of the dice so far as relations with Spain were concerned, though James, assuming he was complicit in its conception and execution, as he must have been, would never have presented it as such. At least the hoary myth, brokered by subsequent accounts, that Charles and Buckingham stole away on their romantic adventure without James’ knowledge or consent has been decisively set aside. As Alexander Samson has pointed out, ‘The decision to undertake such a journey had been in discussion for over a year before they [Charles and Buckingham] went’.74 James kept himself informed about virtually every step they took, maintained diplomatic contact with the French court and even, according
70 Quoted by Marie-Claude Canova-Green, ‘A French View of the Marriage: Abraham Rémy’s La Galatée ou les Adventures du Prince Astiagès’, in A. Samson (ed.), The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 139–50 (pp. 148–49). 71 J. P. Kenyon, in his colourful way, describes the trip as Charles’ and Buckingham’s ‘most insane episode together’ and claims that ‘it had taken twenty-four hours’ alternate bullying and cozening to secure James’ permission’. The source of this information is not stated. James is subsequently quoted as being hysterically regretful that he ultimately gave permission. See Kenyon, The Stuarts, p. 58. 72 Kevin Sharpe puts the matter with his customary fluency: ‘He dreamt of her, he cherished her portrait, he yearned to woo her’ (Personal Rule, p. 183). 73 Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 219–22 and 325–27 points to the cordial relations between Charles and the early parliaments of his reign, despite the members’ lingering suspicion of the French marriage and its religious implications. Thomas Cogswell’s masterly The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) largely concurs, noting repeated ups-anddowns in Charles’ relationship with his parliaments. 74 Samson, Spanish Match, pp. 1–7 (p. 2). See also The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. by Norman Egbert McClure), 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939).
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to the Venetian ambassador, sent the Earl of Carlisle to Paris to apologize ‘for the prince’s behaviour, as induced by necessity and not being from lack of respect’.75 The pantomime dressing-up of Charles and Buckingham was itself, we learn, a shared secret between the Prince and his father.76 A different source of frustration, more relevant to our concerns here, may provide a plausible explanation of the motives which set the Prince on his quasi-heroic quest, and in particular might offer a useful comment on his reported response to a first sighting of Henrietta Maria, which took place during a rehearsal of the French Queen Anne’s Grand Ballet de la reyne representant les Festes de Junon la Nopcière on Friday or Saturday 3 or 4 March 1623.77 Karen Britland has very adroitly de-glamourized the fictional accounts that began to proliferate shortly after the event, in verse and on the stage. Such accounts were intended to show, no doubt for political — broadly anti-Spanish — reasons, that Charles’ glimpse of his French Queen-to-be was the initiating moment of a fairy-tale marriage, blessed by God and fulfilling all the criteria of literary romance.78 Marie-Claude Canova-Green, in a fascinating essay, quotes Sir Henry Wotton (or Wootton) to show that contemporary opinion did not envisage the event as anything quite so heart-warming. Wotton tells us, after reporting that Charles and Buckingham had provided themselves with ‘periwigs’ to ‘over-shadow their fore-heads’79 during their unheralded visit to the French court and so disguise their features: Towards Evening, by a meer chance, in appearance, though under-lined with a Providence, they had a full sight of the Queen Infanta [Anne
75 The Earl of Carlisle is James Hay, a Scot and favourite of King James, who became a gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles on the Prince’s accession — a position for which Robert Carey was also unsuccessfully in contention. 76 For material quoted in this paragraph see Samson, Spanish Match, pp. 2, 123–24, 147–48 and 149 referring to contributions by Samson (‘Introduction’, pp. 1–8), Britland (‘A Fairy-tale Marriage: Charles and Henrietta Maria’s Romance’, pp. 123–37), and Canova-Green (‘A French View’, pp. 139–50). 77 The ballet is recorded as being danced at the Louvre on 5 March (23 February Old Style). Assuming this is correct, and that the date of Charles’ attendance was 3 or 4 March (Marie-Claude CanovaGreen favours the latter date), he and Buckingham must have seen a rehearsal, or the performance must have been repeated, possibly in different locations. Sir Henry Wotton’s account, quoted below, suggests a dress rehearsal (‘practise’) open to an elite public, since the English visitors ‘pressed’ in and were admitted by a compliant official, where French would-be attendees were excluded. The fourteen-year old Henrietta Maria danced and spoke the role of Iris. The librettist was the poet and dramaturge François Le Métel de Boisrobert with music by the Queen’s Master of Music, Anthoine Boësset. See Marie-Claude Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII. Danse et politique à la cour de France (1610–1643) (Toulouse: Société de Littératures Classiques, 2010), pp. 203–12. 78 See Britland, ‘A Fairy-Tale Marriage’. Britland is persuasive in detecting exaggerated literary motives in subsequent re-evaluations of Charles’ glimpse of Henrietta Maria’s dancing, yet Charles himself was not averse to crediting it with real significance. See Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. by Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), p. 5, letter from Charles to Henrietta Maria after the marriage treaty was concluded. 79 In early seventeenth-century France a periwig (or wig) often entailed long hair. Promoted by Louis XIII from the early 1620s, it became fashionable. How precisely a wig ‘over-shadowed’ the Prince’s and Buckingham’s ‘fore-heads’ is not entirely clear.
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d’Autriche], and of the Princess Henrietta Maria, with other great Ladies, at the practise of a Masquing Dance, which was then in preparation; having over-heard two Gentlemen who were tending towards that sight, after whom they pressed, and were let in by the Duke De Mount Bason,80 the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, out of humanity to Strangers, when divers of the French went by.81 According to Wotton, therefore, it was ‘mere chance’ that this first sighting of Henrietta Maria took place at all. He reads it as a perfectly ordinary event, though by his account a providential one, during a bread-and-butter grand-tour-like trip to Paris. A manuscript letter from Charles to his father, cited by Britland, may offer more direct testimony to Charles’ reaction to seeing Henrietta Maria dance when splendidly dressed and in glamorous surroundings 82 — though Charles will have been distinctly conscious, as the last phrases of the following quotation show, of what the letter’s recipient, James, will have wanted to hear. Charles tells James he had more than once visited the French court: Where we saw the young Queene [Anne d’Autriche] … at the practising of a Maske that is intended by the Queene to be presented to the Kinge, and in it there danced the Queene & Madame [Princess Henrietta Maria] with as manie as made up 19 faire dancing Ladies: among which the Queene is the handsomest, which hath wrought in me a greater desier [sic] to see her Sister [the Spanish Infanta Maria].83 James no doubt wished to know that Charles was keeping his eye on the main — Spanish — prize, that his disguise was as yet undiscovered, or so he believed, and that he was still bound for Spain, whatever distractions were offered by a dazzling city such as Paris. Yet it is hardly surprising that the fancy of a young man of 23 should turn to a group of handsome women alluringly dressed, with among them an appealing fourteen-year-old nymph — Henrietta Maria — playing Iris. It must have been frustrating for Charles, sexually as well as in terms of self-esteem, that at a relatively-advanced age for royal grooms, and with his
80 Hercule de Rohan, second Duc de Montbazon (1567/8–1654), a notable figure who had previously served Henri III and Henri IV. Montbazon evidently exercised considerable authority in the French court, as his admission of Charles and Buckingham to the ballet rehearsal suggests. It is not entirely implausible, however, that James exercised behind-the-scenes influence to set up the whole event. 81 Quoted in Marie-Claude Canova-Green, ‘A French View’, p. 149. Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 78, refers to three ballets danced by the young Princess in the French court before her marriage to Charles in 1625. 82 The livret for the ballet quotes Iris (Henrietta Maria) announcing: ‘Si l’on y veut prendre garde, j’ay comme Iris emprunté Mes couleurs et ma beauté Du Soleil qui me regarde’. The effect the teenage girl’s performance was aiming at (her words claim both the many-hued splendour of the rainbow and the bright beauty of the sun) would be likely to appeal to the impressionable Charles. Quoted in MarieClaude Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, p. 212. 83 Quoted in part in Britland, ‘Fairy-Tale Marriage’, p. 124. And see Canova-Green, ‘A French View’, Appendix, p. 147.
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elder sister long since married, even if currently beset by troubles,84 he still had no outlet, as known outside the court at least, for his sexual wants. James, with his customary delicacy of expression, is said to have bluntly attributed his son’s continental quest to ‘the codpiece point’. In the brief encounter between the future bride and groom we might find two apparent confirmations of Charles’ personal education. First, his interest in masquing, including ballet, remained undimmed, initially stimulated conceivably by Carey, and undoubtedly encouraged by Queen Anna’s long-term passion for the danced masque.85 He and Buckingham, we are told, ‘pressed’ in to see the French ballet rehearsal where he first glimpsed Henrietta Maria.86 Their attendance was, that is to say, adventitious and appealingly risky, when entry was not only (seemingly) unauthorized but posed a hazard to their incognito status. And secondly, though fastidious to a fault, and repelled by the excesses of his father’s court, Charles nevertheless grew into a distinctly heterosexual adult and father. Both of these traits played their part in the marriage to Henrietta Maria that followed two further years after the abortive and in many respects absurd Spanish adventure.87 The Paradoxical Princes Paradox accompanied Charles from birth. Born a prince, he lacked in the eyes of the world, and from early in his own, the physical and personal traits appropriate to princely rank. His complex character was composed of seemingly incompatible elements. He was formal, fastidious, scholarly but also theatrical, impetuous, capable of infatuation for at least two potential spouses yet overbearing — in the early days — with his wife. If he was shy and withdrawn Charles also craved 84 Elizabeth’s misadventures, leading to her popular sobriquet, the Winter Queen, were already well in train by 1623. By this date she was in exile in the Low Countries, a situation that was a continuing source of anxiety and frustration to James. 85 Between 1604 and 1611, in her early days as Queen of England, Anna ‘commissioned and performed in six glittering masques at Hampton Court and Whitehall’ and continued her interest thereafter. Her delight in visual art also no doubt encouraged both Henry’s and Charles’ interest in picture collecting. She could be a formidable influence at court, and on her son, as she displayed a ‘keen sense of her royal status’ as a ‘daughter, sister, and wife of a king’ as well as a descendant of the Habsburg Emperor, Charles V. According to the Venetian ambassador, she was ‘full of kindness for those who support her, but on the other hand she is terrible, proud, unendurable to those she dislikes’. See Maureen M. Meikle and Helen Payne, ‘Anna (1574–1619)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 18 Oct 2017]. Her support for Robert Carey was crucial to his advancement at court. She also forwarded Charles’ interests. 86 Kevin Sharpe emphasizes the shared interest of Charles and Henrietta Maria in the masque as a factor in the love that flourished between them in later years, noting the ‘series of entertainments performed by the king and the queen (at Shrovetide) principally for each other’ (Sharpe, Criticism, p. 183). 87 As for a marriage made in heaven, Charles was a formal, somewhat withdrawn twenty-five-year-old, Henrietta Maria a ‘headstrong teenage bride, for the first time away from home […] possessed of a natural gaiety, humour, innocence and Princess Diana-like skittishness’ (Sharpe, Personal Rule, pp. 168–69).
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excitement — a trait which if not instilled by Carey must nevertheless have been stimulated by Carey’s delight in risk and, we may infer, in the pleasures and temptations of recounting it. Henrietta Maria, for her part, was no stranger to paradox. A princess by birth, sister of the reigning King of France and daughter of Henri IV, her princely credentials were beyond question. Yet the privileges of princely rank must have seemed to her fragile indeed. Her father Henri, having narrowly escaped death in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), mere days after his wedding to Marguerite de Valois, was assassinated in 1610 when his daughter was a few months old. For Henrietta Maria, her Catholic faith was the bedrock of her character and the impulse which sustained her during hard times as Queen of England. Yet the recent history of her homeland, embroiled in civil war, and with the crown having swivelled between Huguenot and Catholic, cannot have offered a reassuring background to her Catholicism, despite the ethos of the court in which she was bred and her own unflinchingly expressed spiritual commitments and religious observance.88 Even her eventually happy marriage to Charles may have appeared compromised by the secret clauses in the marriage treaty. Both partners to the marriage must have suffered initial disappointment. Charles’ infatuation with the now sixteen-year-old dancing princess came up against the cold light of her actual person — rather cruelly described by Carlton as characterized at her young age by ‘a small slight figure, large eyes, projecting teeth and bony wrists’.89 The impetuous prince who ‘suffered from energy’ would inevitably feel let down when the actual princess stood before him, and Henrietta Maria would scarcely find the epitome of princely person and manners in Charles. If circumstances conspired against both partners — and they did — both paradoxically came through to something like princely status, at the very least in the paintings of Van Dyck. But that is another and even longer story.
88 For Henrietta Maria’s commitments see e.g. her letter to Louis XIII in which she promises that ‘I desire religiously to keep and observe your majesty’s sincere intentions […] in what may be useful and advantageous to the religion and to the Catholics of Great Britain […] If it so be that it please God to bless this marriage […] I will make no selection of persons to bring up and serve the children who may be born, except from Catholics […]’ (Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, p. 8). 89 Carlton, Charles I, p. 66.
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Bibliography Primary Sources
Birch, Thomas, An Historical View of Negotiations Between the Courts of England, France and Brussels, 1592–1617 (London: A. Millar, 1749) Boisrobert, François Le Métel de, Grand Ballet de la reyne representant les Festes de Junon la Nopcière (1623), in Marie-Claude Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII. Danse et politique à la cour de France (1610–1643) (Toulouse: Société de Littératures Classiques, 2010), pp. 203–12 Larkin, James F. (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, vol. 2, 1625–1646 [accessed 23 October 2017] The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. by Norman Egbert McClure, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939) Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. by Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Richard Bentley, 1857) The Memoirs of Robert Carey, ed. by F. H. Mares (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) Nichols, John, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols (London, 1828), vol. 4 Secondary Studies
Britland, Karen, ‘A Fairy Tale Marriage: Charles and Henrietta Maria’s Romance’, in Alexander Samson (ed.), The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 123–37 —— , Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Brotton, Jerry, The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection (London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, 2006) Canova-Green, Marie-Claude, ‘A French View of the Marriage: Abraham Rémy’s La Galatée ou les Adventures du Prince Astiagès’, in Alexander Samson (ed.), The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 139–50 —— , (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII. Danse et politique à la cour de France (1610–1643) (Toulouse: Société de Littératures Classiques, 2010) Carlton, Charles, Charles I: The Personal Monarch (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983; 2nd edn (pb.), London and New York: Routledge, 1995) Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923, repr. with corr., 1951), vol. 2 Cogswell, Thomas, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Cressy, David, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Curran, Kevin, Marriage, Performance and Politics at the Jacobean Court (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009) Cust, Richard, Charles I: A Political Life (London: Pearson Longman, 2005)
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Edward, Joyce, The Sibling Relationship: A Force for Growth and Conflict (London and New York: Jason Aronson, 2015) Gregg, Pauline, King Charles I (London, Melbourne, Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1981) Gurr, Andrew, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) —— , The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 4th edn, 2009) Hartley, L. P., The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953) Hill, Christopher, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (New York: Nelson, 2nd edn, 1980) Kenyon, J. P., The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship (London: B. T. Batsford, 1958; pb. Glasgow: Fontana/ Collins, 1966, 28th impression, 1987) Kishlansky, Mark A., and John Morrill, ‘Charles I’, Oxford Dictionary of National Bio graphy Online [accessed 19 Oct 2017] Lacey, Andrew, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003) Lindley, David (ed.), Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605–1640 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) Loades, David, Henry VIII (Stroud, Gloucs: Amberley Publishing, 2011) Lockyer, Roger, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (London and New York: Longman, 1981) —— , The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1999) Loomie, A. J., ‘Carey, Robert, first Earl of Monmouth (1560–1639)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online [accessed 10 Oct 2017] MacCaffrey, Wallace T., Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572–1588 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) —— , ‘Carey, Henry, first Baron Hunsdon (1526–1596)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online [accessed 17 Oct 2017] MacLeod, Catharine, et al. (eds), The Lost Prince, Exhibition Catalogue (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2012) Marshall, Peter, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017) Marshall, Rosalind K. (ed.), Dynasty: The Royal House of Stewart (Edinburgh: National Galleries and National Museums of Scotland, 1990) —— , The Winter Queen: The Life of Elizabeth of Bohemia 1596–1662 (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1998) McCullough, P. E., Sermons at Court, Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Meikle, Maureen M., and Helen Payne, ‘Anne (1574–1619)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online [accessed 18 Oct 2017] Morrill, John, Stuart Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Reeve, L. J., Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Samson, Alexander (ed.), The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006) Sharpe, Kevin, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
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—— , The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) —— , Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010) Smuts, R. Malcolm, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–37 —— , ‘Murray, Thomas (1564–1623)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online [accessed 12 Oct 2017] Stewart, Alan, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003) Stone, Lawrence, Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Harper Collins, 1972) Strong, Roy C., ‘The Popular Celebration of the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth I’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958), 86–103 —— , The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977; pb. 1987) Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971; pb. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973) Tyack, N. R. N., Anti-Calvinists. The Rise of English Arminianism (Oxford: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1987) Wainwright, Jonathan P., ‘Sounds of Piety and Devotion: Music in the Queen’s Chapel’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 195–213 Whitaker, Katie, A Royal Passion: The Turbulent Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010) Wilson, Edward M. and Olga Turner, ‘The Spanish Protest against A Game at Chesse’, Modern Language Review, 44 (1949), 476–82 Wootton, David (ed.), Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986) Yates, Frances A., ‘Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20 (1957), 4–25 Young, Michael B., Charles I, British History in Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997)
Karen Britland
Chapter 3. A Ring of Roses Henrietta Maria, Pierre de Bérulle, and the Plague of 1625–1626 We brought them lilies, but we found their roses either plucked by persecution or wilted by irreligion. The rose bush of this island changed its nature when [the island] changed its beliefs. And it bears only very sharp thorns. (Cardinal Bérulle)1
On 16/26 June 1625, Edward Pike, a dyer, and Elizabeth, his wife, parishioners of St Mary Somerset church in London, buried Daniel, their four-year-old son, who had died of the plague.2 He was the fourth plague victim to be buried in the parish and the first of the Pike family to succumb to the epidemic. The churchyard in which he was interred was ‘ouer against the broken Wharffe’, in sight of the Thames at Queenhithe, and later that day, as it started to rain, King Charles I and Henrietta Maria, his new wife, sailed past on their way to Whitehall.3 As they travelled up the river, they were saluted by ships’ guns and the artillery from the Tower of London, and they wore green suits, presumably as a sign of their youth and fecundity. Many Londoners turned out to greet them, standing in ‘houses, ships, lighters, [and] western barges’ to watch the royal couple pass by.4 It was an incongruous end to the day of Daniel Pike’s funeral. When we think of 16/26 June 1625, it is invariably to Charles and Henrietta Maria’s arrival in London that we turn, and not to the effects of the plague. The story of a bereaved dyer and his wife lies uninvestigated in parish registers and old wills. 1 ‘Nous leur avons porté des lys, mais nous avons trouvé leurs roses ou cueillies par la persécution, ou fanées par l’irréligion. Le rosier de cette île a changé de nature lorsqu’elle a changé de créance. Et il ne porte que des épines très poignantes’ (Cardinal Bérulle, Élévation sur sainte Madeleine, ed. by Joseph Beaude (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 1998), p. 27. 2 The Register of St Mary Somerset, ed. by W. Bruce Bannerman, 2 vols (London: Harleian Society, 1929–1930), vol. 1 (1930), p. 50. See also The Visitation of London Anno Domini 1633, 1634, and 1635, ed. by Joseph Jackson Howard, 2 vols (London: Harleian Society, 1883), vol. 2, p. 183. 3 John Stow, A Suruay of London (London: John Wolfe, 1598), p. 290. 4 Dr Meddus to the Reverend Joseph Mead, 17/27 June 1625, in The Court and Times of Charles I, ed. by Thomas Birch, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1848), vol. 1, pp. 29–30. Karen Britland is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 85–104 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119186
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By early July, another five people had died of plague in St Mary Somerset parish, including a certain Philip Pike who was ‘dwelling with Mr Edward Pike’, perhaps as a relative and apprentice.5 Despite precautions to keep the infection away from the newly-wed royal couple, the plague had also penetrated to Whitehall, although, in the words of the Venetian ambassador, it was to be found only ‘among low officials’.6 The king’s baker’s son died on 6/16 July (the court’s bread, we are told, ‘was all given away’); an unnamed woman was sent from court and died on 7/17 July; Walter Galloway, a servant to David Mallowgh, the king’s shoemaker, was buried a week later.7 King Charles, his new wife and their entourage decamped to Hampton Court. Justifying their flight, the anonymous author of the plague tract, Lachrymae Londiniensis, asserted that ‘his Majesties Life and safety is more worth than many Millions of others his Subjects’.8 Edward and Elizabeth Pike experienced this distinction personally: by 19/29 August, Elizabeth and two more of her sons — Samuel (aged five) and Joseph (aged 11) — were dead.9 I want to foreground the 1625–1626 plague in this chapter for several reasons. First, I want to recognize that something profoundly serious was affecting the population of England at the time of the royal wedding and to acknowledge that a focus on the wedding alone risks distorting our understanding of this moment. Second, a discussion of the plague helps us to interpret English anxieties about the marriage and about Henrietta Maria’s Catholicism, and sheds light on some of the writing directly associated with the new English Queen, especially that by Pierre de Bérulle, her confessor and the founder of the French Congregation of the Oratory. Most importantly, a focus on the plague allows ordinary people into the story. Elite diplomacy and the political effects of cultural spectacles are compelling, but I am concerned to keep one eye on the labouring bodies that provided the resources for what, in another age, might be called an insensitive, even tasteless, display. That the Duke of Buckingham spent tens of thousands of pounds on suits for the royal marriage (the diamonds on one of which reputedly dropped off as he walked) demonstrates his understanding of the importance of courtly splendour.10 That he subsequently raised £1500 for the La Rochelle expedition by selling his suit’s diamond buttons demonstrates how closely 5 Edward Pike’s father was named Philip. However, since the parish register marks Edward Pike’s status by calling him ‘Mr’, it seems likely that the Philip buried that day was subordinate to him. See Visitation of London, vol. 2, p. 183. 6 Zuane Pesaro, Venetian Ambassador in England, to the Doge and Senate, 8/18 July 1625, Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1625–1626 [hereafter CSPV] (London: HMSO, 1913), p. 115 (document 163). 7 See the Reverend Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 9 July 1625, in Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 41; The Register of St Martin in the Fields, 1619–1636, ed. by J. V. Kitto (London: Harleian Society, 1936), p. 198 (14/24 July 1625). 8 Lachrymae Londinenses (London: H. Holland and G. Gibbs, 1625), p. 2. 9 The Register of St Mary Somerset, vol. 2, p. 50 (Samuel was buried on 8/18 July and Joseph on 10/20 July), p. 53. 10 For an account of Buckingham’s clothes and train, see the Harleian manuscript transcription printed in Original Letters Illustrative of English History, ed. by Henry Ellis, 3 vols (London: Harding et al., 1824), vol. 3, p. 189. For the loose diamonds, see Philarète Chasles, Révolution d’Angleterre (Paris: Mme Janet, [1844]), p. 44.
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intertwined personal and national finance were at élite levels.11 However, across the same period, Buckingham’s stable staff were not receiving their wages and, in August 1626, were forced to petition the Duke for 18 months of back pay, without which, they claimed, they would be ‘utterlie undone, being spent out of meanes and creditt’.12 The disparity between rich and poor in this story is staggering and is something this chapter seeks to acknowledge, investigating the ways in which commentators’ different perspectives (rich, middling, or poor; English, French, or Italian; Catholic or Protestant) affected the ways in which events were perceived and reported. The notion of narrative, then, is something that concerns this chapter. I am interested in which events are privileged — both as they happen and as time passes — and I am interested in the perspectives from which such events are reported. I am interested in how loopholes in language are exploited to make actions or promises appear or disappear and I am keen to uncover stories that get pushed to the side in other accounts of the period. I want to begin, though, with a small amount of background about the marriage negotiations and the part played in them by Bérulle to establish the significance of his influence alongside Henrietta Maria in the early years of her marriage and to illustrate his awareness of the central role played by language in the game of diplomatic negotiation. Marriage Negotiations Much excellent work has been produced about the diplomatic efforts that went into the marriage negotiations and there is no need to rehearse that material again here.13 However, a quick consideration of Pierre de Bérulle’s experiences in Rome, where he was tasked with facilitating the papal dispensation for the marriage, brings to the fore the importance placed on verbal definition during
11 Roger Lockyer, Buckingham (London: Longman, 1981), p. 367. 12 Petition of the Duke of Buckingham’s Coachman, Grooms, Sumptermen, and Farrier, to the Duke, 12/22 August 1626: TNA SP 16/33/141. 13 See especially Caroline Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen’, Court Historian, 5 (2000), 15–28; R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–38; Michael C. Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621–1625 (Cambridge: Royal Historical Society, 2009), pp. 75–114; Bernard Cottret, ‘Diplomatie et éthique de l’État: L’ambassade d’Effiat en Angleterre et le mariage de Charles Ier d’Angleterre et d’Henriette-Marie de France’, in Henry Méchoulan (ed.), L’État baroque: regards sur la pensée politique de la France du premier XVIIe siècle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1985), pp. 221–42; Dagmar Freist, ‘Popery in Perfection? The Experience of Catholicism: Henrietta Maria Between Private Practice and Public Discourse’, in Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith (eds), The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 33–51. See also Sara Wolfson’s chapter on the marriage negotiations in this volume, pp. 189–89, and Sara J. Wolfson, ‘Practical Proselytising: The Impact of Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the Caroline Court, 1625–1626’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), pp. 43–63.
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the negotiations and the (sometimes minute) linguistic changes that could facilitate agreements. The main concerns discussed by Pope Urban VIII and his congregation of cardinals included a consideration of the wording of any oath of allegiance demanded by Charles of his Catholic subjects; whether English Catholics would be permitted to attend Henrietta Maria’s religious services; and the possible reaction of the English parliament to any easing of the recusancy laws.14 Rome also wished for a promise that the Stuart–Bourbon marriage would never be dissolved; an assurance that a Catholic bishop would baptize any royal children; a similar assurance that Henrietta Maria would be in charge of those children’s early education; and a promise that the persecution of English Catholics would be brought to an end. During the negotiations, Bérulle showed himself to be acutely attuned to the nuances of diplomatic language. For example, when the Pope and his advisers expressed anxiety that divorce was an option for heretic princes, Bérulle reported back to Paris that a small word change might solve the problem. If one replaced the formula, ‘en la forme usitée en l’Église’, with ‘selon l’usage et les lois de l’Église’, the objections would be surmounted, he said, because since the marriage was made according to the church’s unalterable laws, the English prince would be accepting its permanency by accepting this wording.15 Similarly, in November 1624, Bérulle drew attention to new words slipped into the articles by the English, which asserted that any children from the marriage would be raised ‘auprès de Madame’. Bérulle pointed out that this was equivocal: the French needed to ensure, he said, that the children would be raised ‘par Madame’ or ‘selon la religion de Madame’; that is, they should be raised by Henrietta Maria and in her religion, not just in her vicinity.16 In this way, he demonstrated his understanding of the potential duplicities of diplomatic language and the ways in which the smallest linguistic loopholes might be exploited. Bérulle had been educated by the Jesuits, had engaged successfully in debates of faith, and had facilitated some notable conversions.17 His Oratorians were a missionary order and, without question, he saw his role in England as a conversionary one, describing Henrietta Maria’s religious establishment as ‘cette petite Eglise naissante et militante’ [this budding and militant little Church].18 The members of the new Queen consort’s religious entourage were hand-picked for their experience in doctrinal disputation and Bérulle also tried, on at least one occasion, to persuade a devout noblewoman to join the French princess’s
14 See Pierre de Bérulle, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Michel Dupuy et al., 11 vols (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995–2011), vol. 11: Correspondance (2011), especially pp. 239–46. 15 That is, ‘in the form commonly used in the church’ was replaced by ‘according to the use and laws of the church’ (Bérulle, Correspondance, p. 242). 16 Bérulle, Correspondance, pp. 262–63. 17 See Mathieu-Mathurin Tabaraud, Histoire de Pierre de Bérulle, 2 vols (Paris: A. Egron, 1817), vol. 1, pp. 3–33. 18 Pierre de Bérulle, Œuvres complètes, ed. by l’Abbé Migne (Paris: Bibliothèque Universelle du Clergé, 1856), p. 1484.
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household.19 In sum, his task when he left France — a task affirmed by the French king (Henrietta Maria’s brother) and the Pope (her godfather) — was to encourage the new Queen consort to convert her husband and to ensure that English Catholics were secure in their lives and goods.20 Protestants, though, had their own hopes for the union and members of the two different faiths were entirely capable of interpreting the same information in diametrically different ways. For example, on their wedding journey from Dover, the royal couple stopped at Canterbury, where they were feasted and spent the night. An English Catholic commentary on the event reports that the Queen consort, ‘being advertised by one of hir chapelines’ that she should not be consuming flesh, immediately ‘forbore eatinge’ until ‘some whitmeates [i.e. eggs and cheese] were presently made readdy for hir’.21 A Protestant report of the event, though, insists that Henrietta Maria, although informed by her confessor that she was eating pheasant and venison on a fast day, nevertheless ignored the reminder and continued ‘to eat heartily of both’.22 In one account, the Queen signals her faith by refusing to eat. In the other, she shows her willingness to entertain conversion by ignoring her confessor. What actually happened in Canterbury is ultimately irretrievable, but the situation is fascinating for the way it reveals the different interpretations and desires that were brought to the same event. The tussle over the ways the Queen consort and her household were to be interpreted — which, as Bérulle was acutely aware, had already begun during the marriage treaty negotiations — looked set to continue once Henrietta Maria set foot on English soil. It is this phenomenon that the next section of my chapter explores as I trace the path of the royal progress around the south of England, showing how the experience of the epidemic coloured the vocabulary brought to bear on the royal union by commentators on both sides. Summer Progress Charles I’s first London parliament was adjourned on 11/21 July 1625 and the King and his new consort soon arrived in Windsor, en route for Oxford where the Lords and Commons would reconvene. However, Zuane Pesaro, the Venetian ambassador, noted that ‘as they brought the plague with the Court, they have left’.23 On 20/30 July, Thomas Locke informed Carleton that ‘a few dayes since there dyed two of the sicknes at Windsore in a house where 4 of the Queenes Priests were lodged, who were presentlie sent to one of the Towers in Hampton 19 Bérulle and the Pope were strongly in favour of the inclusion of Mme la Marquise de Maignelay in Henrietta Maria’s household, but the Marquise seems to have been reluctant to serve and was not eventually selected (Bérulle, Correspondance, p. 256). 20 Bérulle, Correspondance, pp. 167–68. 21 Thomas Roper to Thomas Rant, 17/27 June 1625, in Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy, p. 375. 22 Unknown correspondents, 17/27 June 1625, in Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 31. 23 Pesaro to the Doge and Senate, 21/31 July 1625, CSPV 1625–1626, p. 127 (document 187).
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Court’.24 The burial records of St John the Baptist, New Windsor, reveal that a certain Richard Bussell ‘from the Court’ was buried there on 15/25 July, after which burials at the church begin to be marked with the ominous ‘p’, identifying plague victims.25 Joseph Mead confirmed to Sir Martin Stuteville that one of the King’s guard had died in the town around 26 July/5 August, whereupon the royal party ‘returned no more thither’.26 The plague, then, had struck incredibly close to Henrietta Maria’s religious household, causing several of her servants to be separated from her. However, no ordained priests were ultimately to die from the infection, something that Bérulle later interpreted as a sign of God’s plan, informing one of his Oratorian brothers that God had preserved them from death in England for a reason, even though the infection had taken two of their confrères in Saumur.27 The English, too, saw divine intent in the epidemic and anxiety about a connection between the plague and the Stuart–Bourbon marriage bubbled under the surface of English discourse that summer. For example, the plague tract, Lachrymae Londinenses, exhorted God to protect the monarch’s ‘sacred Person from the Pestilence’ and ‘his Minde from Papistrie’, making an association, through this parallelism, between plague and Catholicism.28 Similarly, John Chamberlain reported to Dudley Carleton that members of parliament had begun ‘to mutter about matters of religion’, continuing: Some spare not to say there that all goes backward since this connivance in religion came in, both in our wealth, honour, valour, and reputation, and that it is visibly seen God blesses nothing that we take in hand.29 Worried about the religious accommodations they suspected had been made in the marriage treaty, the MPs interpreted England’s military setbacks and the plague epidemic as symptoms of God’s displeasure. Others had a more practical view of the situation. By mid-August, when it had become obvious the court was helping to spread the infection across the countryside, the Venetian ambassador pointed out that ‘the plague springs up everywhere and especially follows the Court, the mischief having penetrated to […] the very quarter near the king’s dwelling’.30 From Titchfield, where the court headed after the dissolution of the Oxford parliament, Mary Broumfeld wrote to Sir John Oglander, her brother, who was on the Isle of Wight, observing, ‘We ar all hear in great troubel and feare by reasan of the queanes coming’, 24 Thomas Locke to Sir Dudley Carleton, 20/30 July 1625 (TNA SP 16/4/139v). 25 Berkshire Record Office, Parish Records of St John the Baptist, New Windsor: D/P149/1/1. The record for Roger Succour is the first to be marked ‘p’ on 25 July/4 August 1625. Bussell’s burial is not marked as a plague death. However, on 16/26 July 1625, Sir Francis Nethersole told Dudley Carleton that one of the King’s kitcheners had died of the sickness at Windsor (SP 16/4/96v). 26 The Reverend Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 30 July/9 August 1625, in Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 44. 27 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes (1856), p. 1486. 28 Lachrymae Londinenses, pp. 25–27. 29 John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, 25 June/5 July 1625, in Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 36. 30 Pesaro to the Doge and Senate, 11/21 August 1625, CSPV 1625–1626, p. 138 (document 209).
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continuing, ‘you god be prased ar free of all this feare in the Ilan and I pray god so kepe you and all youres […] with my continual prayers for your health’.31 Charles and Henrietta Maria arrived at Titchfield on 20/30 August and the Queen stayed five weeks and three days.32 During that time, John Burowe, a ‘servant to the Court’, John Potter, ‘a follower to ye Court’, and Jane Malborne, ‘a servant to the queens Court’, were buried in the parish. The Titchfield register does not identify plague victims, so the causes of their deaths can only be surmised. However, it is notable that between May and August only nine people were buried in the parish, while in September and October this number rose to 19. The pattern was similar in the neighbouring village of Fareham with six people buried between May and August and 20 people buried in September and October.33 Burials demonstrably rose with the Queen consort’s arrival: it seems that Mary Broumfeld’s fears about infection were not idle. Bérulle, accompanying the court, was not having the best time of it. Far from interpreting the Catholic presence in England as a cause of the plague, he clearly viewed the infection as a sign of God’s abandonment of Protestant heretics. Henrietta Maria had first tried to broach the subject of the treatment of her co-religionists with her new husband in late July, but, as Amerigo Salvetti, the Florentine agent, observed, English Catholics were ‘almost without hope or comfort’.34 On 5/15 August, Bérulle wrote to Mère Madeleine de St Joseph, prioress of a Carmelite convent in Paris, to inform her that he saw no evidence of God’s guidance in England and that he did not even know if the time had come for God’s mercy to reach the desolate region.35 He was clearly distressed by what he was experiencing, later informing Henrietta Maria that what she saw in England was ‘mort et infect devant Dieu’ and ‘peut être destiné aux flammes éternelles’ [dead and infected before God [and] perhaps destined for the eternal flames].36 Bérulle’s choice of vocabulary was clearly coloured by his experience of the plague, leading him to equate England’s spiritual desert with the desolation wrought by the epidemic. Importantly, Henrietta Maria’s behaviour at this time was strongly influenced by Bérulle, and her letters show great respect for his advice and guidance. While Charles was issuing proclamations to isolate the court from the country, forbidding his subjects from approaching the court and setting up gibbets ‘at the Court Gates’ to execute anyone who violated the prohibition, Henrietta Maria, in her turn and with Bérulle’s approbation, often separated herself and her household from the court.37 Caroline Hibbard makes the important observation that the 31 Isle of Wight Record Office, Oglander Collection, MS OG/EE/49. The letter bears a date of 17/27 August, but is misdated in the Record Office catalogue to 11 August. 32 Titchfield Parish Register, 1590–1634, ed. by Keith Hayward (Titchfield: Titchfield History Society, 1998), pp. 111–12. 33 Hampshire Record Office, Parish Registers of St Peter and St Paul, Fareham, PCRO/CHU43/1A/1. 34 Dispatch of 29 July/8 August, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of Henry Duncan Skrine, Esq.: Salvetti Correspondence, in 11th Report, Appendix, Part I (London: HMSO, 1887), p. 28. 35 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes (1856), p. 1374. 36 Bérulle, Élévation, pp. 29–30. 37 Thomas Locke to Dudley Carleton, 14/24 August 1625 (TNA SP 16/5/90).
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new Queen consort did not entirely cut herself off from her English subjects when she points out that Henrietta Maria stood as godmother to several noble infants.38 Nevertheless, in August and September, at the height of the plague, the Queen consort wrote twice to Mère Madeleine in Paris to tell her that she and her ladies had established a convent of the Incarnation for themselves, although it was very difficult to maintain because of the constant travelling. Because of this, she joked, Monsieur de Bérulle had given her a dispensation which exempted her from some of the monastic rules. In her letters, she also expressed the hope that she would one day be able to found a real convent in England: ‘j’ay la plus grande joye du monde quand j’en parle’ [I have the greatest joy in the world, when I speak of it], she said.39 This desire to found a monastery in England was a radical challenge to the Protestant Reformation and one that sought to rewrite the country’s religious history. Nevertheless, one cannot help also to speculate that Henrietta Maria’s retreat into the Catholic core of her household was influenced by the dangers of the plague, combined with Bérulle’s sense of the infective qualities of Protestant heresy. By the middle of August — despite the Queen consort’s optimism that she might one day found a convent in the country — Catholic hopes for toleration in England had been severely curtailed. Parliament protested to Charles that, through the importunities of foreign ambassadors, several recusants had received royal pardons, and they exhorted the King to redress this development.40 Charles agreed to forbid any Catholic bishop from exercising an ecclesiastical function over his subjects, as well as to enforce existing laws forbidding recusants from holding positions of trust, from travelling more than five miles from their homes, and from owning arms. Penalties for non-attendance at church and for abusing the Protestant religion were also reestablished.41 On 14/24 August, the King issued a proclamation ‘Recalling His Maiesties Subiects from the Seminaries Beyond the Seas, and Putting the Lawes Against Iesuites and Popish Priests in Execution’.42 English subjects were given six weeks in which to obey. Immediately, Protestant observers began to link up a perceived abatement in the plague with this proclamation. For example, on 4/14 September, the Reverend Joseph Mead in Cambridge wrote to Sir Martin Stuteville to inform him that people were saying ‘that the first abatement of the plague was the week next following that wherein came out the proclamation against the papists’. ‘[B]y the date thereof ’, he continued, ‘it is true’, adding that a series of national fasts might also have contributed to the amelioration of the situation.43
38 Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty’, p. 21. 39 See Victor Cousin, Madame de Longueville (Paris: Didier, 1853), p. 454. 40 See 9/19 August 1625, Journal of the House of Lords, 1620–1628 [hereafter LJ] pp. 477–85 [accessed 6 July 2014]. 41 9/19 August 1625, LJ, pp. 477–85. 42 King Charles I, A Proclamation for Recalling His Maiesties Subiects (Oxford: Norton and Bill, 1625). 43 The Reverend Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 4/14 September 1625, in Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 46.
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This divinely inspired improvement was a matter of perspective. The French were furious that the articles of the marriage treaty were being overturned and it is worth mentioning briefly here that Henrietta Maria’s infamous behaviour at Titchfield, when she disrupted a Protestant service, as well as her courtiers’ ill-advised pot shots at a local clergyman, took place in the immediate aftermath of Charles’ proclamation and the re-enforcement of penal laws against English Catholics. Bérulle strongly reacted to this setback of a mission that had begun for him in Rome, and was repeatedly implicated in the Titchfield disruptions: he apparently tried to prevent a Protestant minister from saying grace at dinner, and, according to Joseph Mead, was instrumental in encouraging the Queen consort to disrupt a Protestant service, conducted by a local preacher.44 Later, in concert with the Évêque de Mende (the head of Henrietta Maria’s religious household) and Père de Sancy (another Oratorian priest), he would be accused by the English of stirring up trouble between Henrietta Maria and her husband. Even Richelieu would eventually claim that Bérulle had fostered the aversion between the royal couple that led to the violation of the marriage treaty.45 Nevertheless, Henrietta Maria’s dedication to Bérulle did not waver. In the autumn of 1625, even though she did not wish to see him leave and pleaded with him to hurry back, she entrusted him with the significant task of returning to France to break the news of the violation of the marriage treaty to Louis XIII. As I will discuss, she also continued to receive his advice after his departure from England.46 Plague and Poverty That summer, the plague blasted through London, rendering the city a ghost town. Food was scarce because of restrictions placed on trading between London and the countryside, and the flight of the rich meant that tradesmen had no customers and were reduced to begging in the streets.47 By mid-August, Locke was reporting to Carleton that the sickness in the city was so violent that those who visited there were not allowed to return to the country.48 Three weeks later, Mead was advising Stuteville that at one o’clock in the afternoon the city was as empty as it would usually be at 3am, with ‘no more people stirring, no more shops open’.49
44 The Reverend Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 3/13 and 8/18 October 1625, in Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 50, p. 52. 45 See Tabaraud, Histoire, vol. 1, p. 568; and l’Abbé Michel Houssaye, Le cardinal de Bérulle et le cardinal de Richelieu (Paris: E. Plon, 1875), pp. 46, 2n. 46 See Bérulle et Richelieu, pp. 41–42. 47 The Reverend Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 10/20 September 1625: Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 48; Lachrymae Londinenses, p. 4. 48 Thomas Locke to Sir Dudley Carleton, 14/24 August 1625, TNA SP 16/5/90. 49 The Reverend Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 10/20 September 1625: Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 48.
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On board the ships that had saluted the new Queen’s arrival into London, sailors were ‘falling sick in round numbers’.50 All across the country, men continued to be pressed into military service for the army amassing at Plymouth, which was directed towards engagement with the Spanish at Cadiz.51 Wages, not to mention basic food and clothing, remained scarce. On 10/20 August, Sir Francis Steuart wrote to inform Sir John Coke, one of the navy’s commissioners, that the men were complaining of ‘want of chirurgeons’, ‘want of clothes’, lack of bread and beer, and a lack of vinegar to wash between the ship’s decks to prevent the spread of infection.52 Steuart was already lodging sick men on shore in makeshift tents in an attempt to limit contagion.53 Nevertheless, his complaints were disregarded. Sir John Coke wrote to Buckingham (whose elaborate suits for the Stuart–Bourbon wedding should now be recalled to mind) to aver that it ‘was not intended to cloth the marinars in harborowgh [i.e. harbour] to make them handsome to runne away’.54 That autumn, as England’s fleet prepared to sail for Cadiz, the Catholics in England were disarmed ‘on the pretext that they [would] join Spinola and his troops should he effect a landing in England’.55 In Hampshire, the Justices of the Peace called for a list of communicants so that recusants and aliens could be taxed at a double rate and, by late January 1626, Salvetti was reporting that an edict had been published limiting recusants’ residence to certain districts and taxing them of two thirds of their incomes. Priests, he added, were ‘imprisoned almost daily’.56 This was no light punishment. For example, writing from the Fleet Prison in November 1625, the recusant Charles Tregian observed that 23 people had died there from the plague.57 Although he survived the epidemic, Tregian was eventually buried — four years later and still ‘a prisoner in the
50 Sir Francis Steuart to Sir John Coke, 10/20 August 1625: HMC, Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, KG, vol. 1, 12th Report, Appendix, Part I (London: HMSO, 1888), p. 209. Charles Creighton cautions that we must not assume all the sickness on the ships to be the plague, since this was the age when ‘ship-fever’ became prevalent: see Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891), p. 521. 51 See TNA SP 16/4/95 (15/25 July 1625) in which the Commissioners at Plymouth informed the Council that they had endeavoured to provide the soldiers with hose, shoes, shirts and ‘some small proportion of breeches’, but did not have enough money left ‘for a fortnight’s pay’. See also SP 16/4/208 (29 July/8 August 1625) in which Sir Edward Cecil writes to Secretary Conway to discuss a press for 3000 men. 52 Sir Francis Steuart to Sir John Coke, 10/20 August 1625: Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, p. 209. 53 The Mayor and Commissioners at Plymouth to the Council, 26 July/4 August 1625 (TNA SP 16/4/191). 54 Sir John Coke to the Duke of Buckingham, 25 August/4 September 1625, TNA SP 16/5/137. 55 Salvetti’s dispatch of 16/26 November 1625, in HMC, Skrine MSS, p. 37. See also Kent History Centre, NR/CPw/129 (letters from the Privy Council for the disarming of popish recusants, 2–21/12–31 October 1625), and Isle of Wight Record Office, OG/BB/88 (letter from Lord Conway to Sir John Leigh, Sir Edward Dennis and Sir John Oglander for the disarming of recusants, 7/17 November 1625). 56 ‘Copy letter from JPs … requiring certificate of communicants’, Hampshire Record Office, 44M69/ G3/173 (7/17 September 1625); Salvetti’s dispatch of 28 Jan/6 Feb 1625/6, HMC, Skrine MSS, p. 43. 57 Charles Tregian to William Coryton, 30 November 1625 (Cornwall Record Office, CY/6827).
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ffleete’ — at St Bride’s church on 16/26 September 1629.58 Despite such terrifying consequences, some who refused to obey the laws were belligerent about their delinquency. On 6/16 December 1625, Richard Beake of Kentishtown was called before the Quarter Session justices to account for his recusancy and declared that ‘he cared not a f[art] for the Justices, and that he had not been at church for tenn yeares, nor wold go to churche for all the Justices could doe, adding further, Lett the Justices kisse his A[rse]’.59 Bérulle’s Letters to Henrietta Maria That winter, Bérulle sent Henrietta Maria a series of consolatory letters in which he expressed similar disgust for England’s treatment of the Catholics, but in language that combined the iconic vocabulary of roses and lilies that had celebrated the royal union with the notion of England as an infected desert. Rather than lauding the union of the lily and the rose, he described England’s roses as overblown and the country as a wilderness of thorns. His letters play havoc with the ceremonial language of the wedding celebrations, reworking the earlier motifs to emphasize how far the language of the marriage had been corrupted and disregarded. For example, in a letter to Philippe de Béthune, France’s ambassador at the Vatican, he averred that Henrietta Maria and her religious establishment were ‘des fleurs, mais rien encore que des fleurs, et des fleurs environnées d’espines’ [they are flowers, still nothing but flowers, and flowers surrounded by thorns].60 In his consolatory letters to the Queen consort, he again picked up the imagery of flowers to wonder, ‘faut-il que les lis et les roses soient ainsi flétris et fanés en leur printemps, et qu’au lieu de cueillir ces belles fleurs nous ne rencontrions que des épines?’ [must it be that the lilies and roses are thus withered and faded in their spring, and that instead of gathering lovely flowers we encounter only thorns?].61 Notably, in Bérulle’s presentation of the matter, Henrietta Maria and her household remained unchanged: they were still lovely flowers. It was the welcoming fields of England that were shown to have been deceptive — just as Bérulle had suspected they might be, and tried to counter, when he worked on the treaty negotiations in Rome. His letters to Henrietta Maria, written over the period from Christmas to Lent, are worth investigating, not least because they emphasize his belief that England, despite everything, could still be converted. They also demonstrate how much he advocated periods of contemplative solitude for the Queen
58 ‘St Bride Fleet Street, Register of Burials, 1595–1653’, London Metropolitan Archives, P69/ BRI/A/004/MS06538. On the Tregian family, see P. A. Boyan, ‘The Tregian Family: A Musician in the Fleet Prison’, The Tablet (26 Nov. 1955), pp. 525–26. 59 Middlesex County Records, 1625–1667, ed. by John Cordy Jeaffreson, 4 vols (London: Woodfall, 1886–1892), vol. 3 (1888), p. 6. 60 Bérulle et Richelieu, p. 70. 61 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes (1856), p. 1093.
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consort.62 Using vocabulary that again resounded with echoes of the plague, he encouraged Henrietta Maria to believe that ‘Ces horreurs, ces ténèbres, ces fureurs passeront’ [These horrors, this darkness, these frenzies will pass] and that Jesus’s empire would spread its light over England once again. Reminding the Queen consort that her husband’s grandmother was Catholic, Bérulle reassured her that Charles would eventually be returned to the true faith. Meanwhile, he said, she should detest and revile the heresy that surrounded her. Separate yourself from this Herod, he advised, ‘ayez en horreur l’hérésie, n’écoutez point l’hérésie, ne prenez point de part aux mystères de l’hérésie, car ce sont mystères d’iniquité’ [fear heresy, don’t listen to heresy, don’t participate in heretical rites, because they are iniquitous].63 That February, Charles I was to be crowned in a Protestant ceremony, which Henrietta Maria refused to attend. Bérulle’s letters can therefore be seen to be powerfully controversial.64 It was for this reason, perhaps, that he directed them to Père de Sancy, who had taken over the role of Henrietta Maria’s confessor.65 On one occasion, Bérulle suggested to Sancy that the Queen consort should be encouraged to read his letter in private, with only two women in attendance. He also recommended that Sancy store the letters for Henrietta Maria and expressed reservations about the people who normally looked after her papers. Indeed, in January 1626, Blainville, the beleagured French extraordinary ambassador, informed Bérulle that some of Henrietta Maria’s entourage were encouraging a reconciliation with Buckingham and had invoked the support of Marie de Médicis, her mother, in the matter.66 Bérulle himself hints of a division in the Queen consort’s religious household when he advises Sancy to do all he can to get along with ‘ces messieurs les ecclésiastiques de la reine’ [these men, the Queen’s priests], recommending that Sancy defer to them in everything and avoid any pretext ‘à la division qu’on voudrait introduire’ [for the division that some want to bring about].67 Bérulle’s communications with Sancy suggest the Oratorian position was not the only one being expounded near the Queen consort, and that there were other, more moderate, voices in her entourage. Notably, when her religious household was later reorganized, the English were strident in their demands that no Jesuits or Oratorians be included (although Henrietta Maria did succeed in keeping Father Philip, her Oratorian confessor).68 After 1630, when her religious household was fully reestablished, Henrietta Maria was served by the less militantly controversial Capuchins. 62 I have shown elsewhere how retirement from contact with heresy was a feature of both Bérulle and St François de Sales’ religious teachings: see Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 31. 63 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes (1856), pp. 1087, 1101, 1094, 1098. 64 Hibbard underlines that Henrietta Maria’s decision not to attend the coronation was her own (‘Translating Royalty’, p. 23). 65 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes (1856), p. 1482. 66 L’Abbé Houssaye, ‘L’ambassade de M. de Blainville’, Revue des questions historiques, 23 ( January 1878), 176–204 (188–91). 67 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes (1856), pp. 1482–83. 68 See Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty’, pp. 26–27, for the figures who remained with Henrietta Maria after the expulsion of the French.
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In sum, then, Bérulle’s time in England and his interactions with the country after his departure were frequently characterized by a competition for religious precedence and for the right to define how events should be interpreted. From his early involvement in the marriage negotiations when he evinced an awareness of how loose language might enable those of a different religion to manipulate Catholic intentions, through his competition at mealtimes over which form of grace should be preferred, to his reworking of the iconography of the wedding celebrations to draw attention to English perfidy, he demonstrated his understanding of how a single action could generate competing significations. To underline the significance of this competition, I want to conclude by lingering on a particularly iconic event — Henrietta Maria’s alleged penitence at the gallows at Tyburn — which the French denied ever to have taken place and which the English insisted was the driving force behind Charles’ expulsion from England of the bulk of the Queen consort’s French household. Bérulle’s presence can be felt behind the story, which not only encapsulates the competition for control over narrative authority that was occurring between the two nations, but also draws attention to how the definition of a crime is often dependent on one’s social, national, or religious perspective. Tyburn and the Expulsion of the French The enforcement of penal laws against English Catholics in 1625 was particularly distressing to Henrietta Maria because Pope Urban VIII had announced a year of Jubilee, during which Catholics were encouraged to travel to Rome, to visit its basilicae and churches, and thereby to obtain indulgences and pardons. While other European Catholics enjoyed this freedom to visit, Catholics in England did not, so, in February 1626, Henrietta Maria wrote to the Pope to ask that the Jubilee be extended to her subjects.69 By April, he had agreed, stipulating that since English and Scottish Catholics were unable to travel to Rome, either because they were not allowed to leave their countries, or because they had been ‘despoiled of their goods’ and therefore could not meet ‘the cost and fatigues of so long a journey’, they could celebrate the Jubilee ‘in the places they happen to be’ by paying eight visits to a church, and ‘piously pouring forth prayers to God Almighty, with the due fulfilment of the other conditions set forth in the Letters of Indiction of the year of Jubilee’.70 This request was Henrietta Maria’s first successful intercession with the Pope on behalf of her new Catholic subjects. That Easter, the Queen consort retired to Somerset House and, on Holy Thursday (6/16 April 1626), walked a mile to St James where she apparently ‘visited the Holy Sepulchre in the Chapel provided there for her Household’,
69 See Henrietta Haynes, Henrietta Maria (London: Methuen, 1912), p. 47, citing TNA Roman Transcripts. 70 Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, ed. by Henry Foley, 8 vols (London: Burns and Oates, 1877–1883), vol. 6 (1880), pp. 536–37.
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before returning in a carriage to Somerset House.71 Soon afterwards, Bérulle wrote to her, commending her pious behaviour ‘en ces jours saints, et le voyage à pied que vous avez fait à Saint-Jemme’ [in these holy days, and the journey on foot that you made to St James].72 He informed her that Marie de Médicis strongly approved of this action, adding that during Lent the French royal family had also walked to churches to demonstrate their piety.73 He also encouraged Henrietta Maria, on the instructions of her mother, to undertake the same walk, ‘au Jubilé, si votre santé le permet’ [at the time of the Jubilee, if your health permits it].74 On Monday 26 June/6 July, the Queen consort again retired to Somerset House for a week’s seclusion in celebration of the Jubilee.75 This, I suggest, was the time of the infamous visit to the gallows at Tyburn (if it ever happened), which enraged Charles I and led to the expulsion of the French.76 The Maréchal de Bassompierre, who, in the autumn of 1626, was sent to England as France’s extraordinary ambassador, would later comment on that day’s events, observing that Henrietta Maria had celebrated the Jubilee in the Oratorian chapel at St James, and then, when the day’s heat was over, had gone for a walk in St James’s Park and in Hyde Park, ‘ainsi qu’elle avoit autres fois accoustumé de faire’ [as she had been accustomed to do on other occasions]. Nevertheless, he denied that she had gone there in a formal procession, that there had been any private or public prayers, or that she had gone near the gallows at Tyburn.77 In contrast, Charles and his ministers protested that the Queen consort had been encouraged by her priests and household officers ‘to go in devotion to a place where it has been the custom to execute the most infamous malefactors and criminals of all sorts’.78 Similarly, the Venetian ambassador to France reported he had heard that she had prayed there for ‘a Jesuit named Garnet’, who had been executed for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot.79 The English strongly asserted that those hanged at Tyburn were not martyrs who had been killed ‘on account of religion’, but were instead criminals who had been executed for ‘high treason’, thereby claiming that Henrietta Maria’s behaviour lacked the
71 Salvetti’s dispatch of 7/17 April 1626, HMC, Skrine MSS, p. 57. (NB. Salvetti uses the name ‘Denmark House’. Somerset House and Denmark House were different names for the same location). 72 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes (1856), p. 1528. 73 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes (1856), pp. 1528–29. 74 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes (1856), p. 1530. 75 Dispatch of 30 June/10 July, HMC, Skrine MSS, p. 77. 76 John Pory informed Mead that the Queen consort had walked to Tyburn on ‘St James’s-day last’ (i.e. 25 July/4 August 1626). Pory’s letter, which is (mis-)dated 1 July, must have been written in August 1626 since it mentions Pembroke’s inauguration as Lord Steward: see Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 121. Another of Mead’s correspondents reported the incident in a letter dated 21/31 July 1626 (Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 132). 77 François de Bassompierre, Négociation du mareschal de Bassompierre (Cologne: Pierre du Marteau, 1668), p. 186. See also Bassompierre, Memoirs of the Embassy of the Marshal de Bassompierre, ed. by J. W. Croker (London: John Murray, 1819), p. 146. 78 Memoirs of […] Bassompierre, p. 138. 79 Simone Contarini, Venetian Ambassador in France, to the Doge and Senate, 11/21 August 1626, CSPV 1625–1626, p. 517 (document 705).
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respect due to Charles’ ‘illustrious predecessors’.80 In other words, the alleged event put into opposition two important definitions: an English Protestant belief that Tyburn was a site for the execution of traitorous criminals and a Catholic belief that it was the site of religious martyrdom. As the controversy raged on, these two possibilities were layered over the contested ground like a palimpsest. The competition for defining this event became even more interesting after Bassompierre’s arrival from France. Charles had used it as a reason to expel his wife’s Catholic entourage (the Venetian ambassador in France, for example, asserted that the King had become ‘wonderfully angered and forth-with ordered the dismissal of all the Jesuits and all the French of the Queen’s household’).81 However, the immediacy of the dismissal was belied by Bassompierre, who noted that there was a delay of six weeks between the (alleged) event at Tyburn and any reaction to it, implying that it had been retrospectively invoked, or even invented, to create a reason for expelling the French.82 Bassompierre went on flatly to deny the trip had ever taken place: ‘Je nie formellement que ceste action ait esté commise’, he averred, immediately affirming, though, that the Queen would have done well if she had prayed at the gallows, since souls condemned to death were not condemned to damnation and it was therefore permissible to intercede for them.83 It is fascinating to watch this diplomatic game play itself out as the English and French manoeuvred around an event which, like Henrietta Maria’s consumption of flesh on a fast day, may or may not have taken place. ‘Je scay assurément, Messieurs’, Bassompierre declared at one point in the proceedings, ‘que vous ne croyez pas ce que vous publiez aux autres pour leur faire croire’ [I know for certain, gentlemen, that you do not believe those things you make public for others to believe].84 Despite the ambiguity surrounding the event, the Protestant perspective won out (at least in England) and 20 years later, writers supportive of the parliamentary cause in the English civil wars would report it as fact, presenting the Stuart–Bourbon marriage as ‘a scourge’ and explaining that the Queen was ‘forced’ by her priests to go barefoot to Tyburn.85 Charles’ 1626 message to Louis XIII and Marie de Médicis — in which he protested that Henrietta Maria’s action at Tyburn could ‘have no greater invective made against it, than the relation’ — was also printed at the centre of The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645), a parliamentarian tract of Charles’ civil war letters, captured after the Battle of
Memoirs of […] Bassompierre, p. 138. Contarini to the Doge and Senate, 11/21 August 1626, CSPV 1625–1626, p. 517 (document 705). Memoirs of […] Bassompierre, p. 145. ‘I formally deny that this act was committed’ (Memoirs of […] Bassompierre, p. 147). Tillières also denied the event took place (Comte Tanneguy Leveneur de Tillières, Mémoires inédits du comte Leveneur de Tillières sur la cour de Charles Ier, et son mariage, avec Henriette de France, ed. by M. C. Hippeau (Paris: Poulet-Malassin, 1862), p. 148). 84 Memoirs of […] Bassompierre, p. 145. 85 Anon., A Looking-Glas for the Presbitary Government (London: printed by B. A., 1644), p. 7. See also William Gouge, The Progresse of Divine Providence (London: Joshua Kirton, 1645), p. 21.
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Naseby.86 This 1626 message was the sole item in the volume that pre-dated the civil wars and Laura Knoppers has suggested its central position in the publication helped to construct Charles as a weak and uxorious king, a man who had fallen under the spell of his wilful Catholic wife.87 In The Kings Cabinet Opened, then, we can see a continuation of the attempt to rework and control definitions in the service of nationhood and religion: Charles’ Protestantism, it is implied, has been diluted, over time, by his Catholic spouse, rendering him ineffectual as England’s king. Whether or not Henrietta Maria prayed at the foot of the gallows at Tyburn, she and her entourage insisted that those who were hanged there were Catholic martyrs. In contrast, Charles and his advisers insisted they were criminals. Later, the King’s civil war opponents would invoke the same moment to underline Charles’ perceived hypocrisy towards his subjects and his nation, slowly and surely redefining him as ‘a man of blood’, a criminal who should suffer execution.88 The Tyburn episode, more than any other I have discussed in this chapter, shows how a victor is able to privilege certain narratives, pushing others to one side to assert a powerful point of view. The alternative narratives, though, linger in the records and are rarely entirely erased. Social Perspectives When Henrietta Maria’s Catholic attendants left England in the summer of 1626, they were accused of taking with them many of her numerous possessions. One of Joseph Mead’s correspondents informed him (with some exaggeration) that the Queen consort’s servants had not left her ‘any thing in apparel, jewels, &c., but what she had on her’.89 Nevertheless, apart from a few strongly worded complaints and the recovery of some of the goods, little was done to chastise the departing French. This stands in stark contrast to the fates of Robert Wheeler, George Chester, and Richard Hewett, three labourers who were tried at the Middlesex Quarter Sessions in July 1626 for breaking into the house of Charles de Marcilly, Comte de Cipierre, Henrietta Maria’s master of horse. They stole about £300 of goods, including ‘a silver sugar-boxe’, ‘two silver salts’, and ‘two dozen engraved silver plates’.90 On 4/14 July 1626, they were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. A month later, Cipierre was reputed to have ‘laid claim to all the horses and furniture under his charge’, accoutrements that actually
86 [Charles I,] The Kings Cabinet Opened (London: Robert Bostock, 1645), pp. 34–36. 87 Laura Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 55–57. 88 See Patricia Crawford, ‘Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood’, Journal of British Studies, 16 (2) (1977), 41–61. 89 The Reverend Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 11/21 August 1626, in Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 136. 90 Middlesex County Records, vol. 4, p. 10.
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belonged to Henrietta Maria.91 He left England with his reputation intact, and with a pair of earrings given to him by Secretary Conway.92 As with many other things, the crime of theft, in Caroline London, was clearly subject to a sliding scale of definition.
91 John Pory to the Reverend Joseph Mead, in Court and Times, vol. 1, p. 122. This letter is mis-dated 1 July 1626 (see 76n. above). 92 Tillières, Mémoires inédits, p. 147.
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Bibliography Manuscripts and Archival Documents
Kresen Kernow, Redruth, Cornish Record Office, Charles Tregian letter (30 Nov 1625), CY/6827 London, Metropolitan Archives, ‘St Bride Fleet Street, Register of Burials, 1595–1653’, P69/BRI/A/004/MS06538 London, The National Archives (Kew), SP 16/4/95 —— , SP 16/4/96v —— , SP 16/4/139v —— , SP 16/4/191 —— , SP 16/4/208 —— , SP 16/5/90 —— , SP 16/5/137 —— , SP 16/33/98 —— , SP 16/33/141 Maidstone, Kent History Centre, Privy Council Letter (Oct 1625), NR/CPw/129 Newport, Isle of Wight Record Office, Oglander Collection, MS OG/BB/88 —— , MS OG/EE/49 Reading, Berkshire Record Office, Parish Records of St John the Baptist, New Windsor, D/P149/1/1 Winchester, Hampshire Record Office, Parish Registers of St Peter and St Paul, Fareham, PCRO/CHU43/1A/1 —— , JPs’ letter (7 Sept 1625), 44M69/G3/173 Early Printed Books
Bassompierre, François de, Négociation du mareschal de Bassompierre (Cologne: Pierre du Marteau, 1668) Charles I, A Proclamation for Recalling His Maiesties Subiects (Oxford: Norton and Bill, 1625) [Charles I,] The Kings Cabinet Opened (London: Robert Bostock, 1645) Gouge, William, The Progresse of Divine Providence (London: Joshua Kirton, 1645) Lachrymae Londinenses (London: H. Holland and G. Gibbs, 1625) A Looking-Glas for the Presbitary Government (London: printed by B. A., 1644) Stow, John, A Suruay of London (London: John Wolfe, 1598) Primary Sources
Bassompierre, François de, Memoirs of the Embassy of the Marshal de Bassompierre, ed. by J. W. Croker (London: John Murray, 1819) Bérulle, Pierre de, Élévation sur sainte Madeleine, ed. by Joseph Beaude (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon, 1998) —— , Œuvres complètes, ed. by l’Abbé Migne (Paris: Bibliothèque Universelle du Clergé, 1856)
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—— , Œuvres complètes, ed. by Michel Dupuy et al., 11 vols (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995–2011), vol. 11: Correspondance (2011) Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1625–1626 (London: HMSO, 1913) The Court and Times of Charles I, ed. by Thomas Birch, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1848) Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), The Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, KG, vol. 1, 12th Report, Appendix, Part I (London: HMSO, 1888) Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), The Manuscripts of Henry Duncan Skrine, Esq.: Salvetti Correspondence, 11th Report, Appendix, Part I (London: HMSO, 1887) Journals of the House of Lords, 1620–1628 [accessed 6 July 2014] Middlesex County Records, 1625–1667, ed. by John Cordy Jeaffreson, 4 vols (London: Woodfall, 1886–1892), vol. 3 (1888) Original Letters Illustrative of English History, ed. by Henry Ellis, 3 vols (London: Harding et al., 1824) Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, ed. by Henry Foley, 8 vols (London: Burns and Oates, 1877–1883), vol. 6 (1880) The Register of St Martin in the Fields, 1619–1636, ed. by J. V. Kitto (London: Harleian Society, 1936) The Register of St Mary Somerset, ed. by W. Bruce Bannerman, 2 vols (London: Harleian Society, 1929–1930) Tillières, Tanneguy Leveneur, Comte de, Mémoires inédits du comte Leveneur de Tillières sur la cour de Charles Ier, et son mariage, avec Henriette de France, ed. by M. C. Hippeau (Paris: Poulet-Malassin, 1862) Titchfield Parish Register, 1590–1634, ed. by Keith Hayward (Titchfield: Titchfield History Society, 1998) The Visitation of London Anno Domini 1633, 1634, and 1635, ed. by Joseph Jackson Howard, 2 vols (London: Harleian Society, 1883) Secondary Studies
Boyan, P. A., ‘The Tregian Family: A Musician in the Fleet Prison’, The Tablet (26 Nov. 1955), 525–26 Britland, Karen, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Chasles, Philarète, Révolution d’Angleterre (Paris: Mme Janet, [1844]) Cottret, Bernard, ‘Diplomatie et éthique de l’État: L’ambassade d’Effiat en Angleterre et le mariage de Charles Ier d’Angleterre et d’Henriette-Marie de France’, in Henry Méchoulan (ed.), L’État baroque: regards sur la pensée politique de la France du premier XVIIe siècle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1985), pp. 221–42 Cousin, Victor, Madame de Longueville (Paris: Didier, 1853) Crawford, Patricia, ‘Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood’, Journal of British Studies, 16 (2) (1977), 41–61 Creighton, Charles, A History of Epidemics in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891)
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Freist, Dagmar, ‘Popery in Perfection? The Experience of Catholicism: Henrietta Maria Between Private Practice and Public Discourse’, in Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith (eds), The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 33–51 Haynes, Henrietta, Henrietta Maria (London: Methuen, 1912) Hibbard, Caroline, ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen’, The Court Historian, 5 (2000), 15–28 Houssaye, Abbé Michel, Le Cardinal de Bérulle et le cardinal de Richelieu (Paris: E. Plon, 1875) —— , ‘L’ambassade de M. de Blainville’, Revue des questions historiques, 23 ( January 1878), 176–204 Knoppers, Laura, Politicizing Domesticity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) Lockyer, Roger, Buckingham (London: Longman, 1981) Questier, Michael C., Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621–1625 (Cambridge: Royal Historical Society, 2009) Smuts, R. Malcolm, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–38 Tabaraud, Mathieu-Mathurin, Histoire de Pierre de Bérulle, 2 vols (Paris: A. Egron, 1817) Wolfson, Sara J., ‘Practical Proselytising: The Impact of Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the Caroline Court, 1625–1626’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), pp. 43–63
Marie-Claude Canova-Green
Chapter 4. Love, Politics, and Religion Henrietta Maria’s Progress through France and the Entry into Amiens* At a time when the public and the private closely overlapped, important moments in the lives of rulers and their families were also great moments in the history of the state. Royal weddings were a case in point. As they often sealed alliances between nation states, they were at the heart of diplomacy in early modern Europe. The marriage of Louis XIII to the Spanish Infanta Anne d’Autriche in 1615, his sister Elisabeth’s marriage, the same year, to the future Philip IV of Spain, his other sister Henrietta Maria’s marriage to Charles I in 1625, as well as his elder son’s marriage to another Spanish Infanta in 1660, marked the history of the Continent increasingly torn between opposing blocs. The old religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants were compounded by the bitter rivalry between France and Spain for supremacy in Europe and the increasing ambitions of the Austrian Habsburgs in the north. Against this backdrop, the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria in 1625 was of particular significance. It was an alliance between two neighbouring countries, which had formerly been at war and which continued to be divided on matters of religion. France was a Catholic state, Britain a Protestant one. As political powers, they also weighed unequally in the European balance of power. For all these reasons the marriage was pregnant with multiple, contradictory meanings which crystallized differences in foreign policy and split public opinion on both sides of the Channel. For some it was a way to counter Spanish influence in Europe; for others it neutralized the British threat still hanging over France; for others it signalled a desire to intervene in the affairs of the Palatinate. These differences were hinted at in the textual and non-textual forms of the wedding celebrations in France. Conventional metaphors and allegories of love, peace, and harmony were adapted to foretell future conflict by bringing to
* An earlier, unpublished, version of this paper was presented at the international conference ‘Le Mariage à la Renaissance. Représentations et célébrations’ (Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours, 5–11 juillet 1995) under the title ‘Le mariage du lys et de la rose, ou les fêtes de l’alliance d’Angleterre (1624–1625)’. Marie-Claude Canova-Green is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 105–129 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119187
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light the politico-religious dimension of the event. Moreover, already muted by the recent death of James I, rejoicing was soon replaced by diplomatic friction and even armed conflict. In August 1626, Henrietta Maria’s French entourage was expelled from Britain. In July 1627 the Duke of Buckingham led a British expedition against Louis XIII’s troops in support of the rebel Huguenot town of La Rochelle. The carefully constructed façade of concord and agreement proved to be just that, a façade. Public Celebrations in Paris and Amiens After 12 months of difficult negotiations,1 and despite the sudden death of James I on 27 March/6 April, the wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria finally took place in Paris on 1/11 May with the usual pomp and circumstance. However the protocol had to be changed because of Charles I’s accession and he did not come to France for the ceremony as he had originally planned, being represented there instead by his cousin, the Duc de Chevreuse, who had to stand in at the last minute for Buckingham. The marriage treaty had been signed the previous November amid much public rejoicing, with bonfires and illuminations in the streets of the French capital, cannonades at the Arsenal and the Bastille, firework displays outside the palais du Louvre and on the place de Grève, as well as banquets, balls, and ballets at court for two consecutive nights.2 In February, ‘pour celebrer par avance la feste de [l]’Hyménée’ [to celebrate the wedding in advance],3 a Ballet des Fées des Forests de Saint-Germain was also danced at court by Louis XIII and his close entourage. The official betrothal ceremony, the fiançailles, was held at the palais du Louvre on 28 April/8 May. Louis XIII, his sister, the Queen Mother, the Queen regnant, the Duc de Chevreuse, who stood proxy for Charles, and the two British ambassadors signed the marriage contract. Accounts differ as to the rest of the proceedings. According to Matarel, there was ‘un festin Royal, qui fut suivy d’un Bal, feux de joye, & canons tirez au soir dudit jour’ [a Royal Banquet, followed by a
1 See Bernard Cottret, ‘Diplomatie et Éthique de l’État. L’ambassade d’Effiat en Angleterre et le mariage de Charles Ier d’Angleterre et d’Henriette-Marie de France (été 1624–printemps 1625)’, in Henry Méchoulan (ed.), L’État baroque : regards sur la pensée politique de la France du premier XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1985), pp. 221–42. 2 Le Mercure François, ou, la Suitte de l’histoire de la paix, 25 vols (Paris: Jean & Estienne Richer, 1611–1648), vol. 10 (1625) [for the years 1623–1625)], p. 487. In contrast to Karen Britland (Drama at the Courts of Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 23), I am inclined to think that a ballet entitled Les Dieux descendus en France pour honorer la feste de l’Alliance d’Angleterre, with verses by Antoine-André Mareschal (in Recueil des plus beaux vers de messieurs de Malherbe, Racan, Monfuron, Maynard, Bois-robert, L’Estoille, Lingendes, Touvant, Motin, Mareschal et autres des plus fameux esprits de la Cour (Paris: Toussainct du Bray, 1627), pp. 793–95), was per formed on this occasion rather than in the following spring. The phrase ‘alliance d’Angleterre’ seems to me to be more appropriate to the signature of a marriage treaty than the celebration of a marriage. 3 Jean Puget de La Serre, Les Amours du Roy & de la Reyne (Paris: Nicolas Bessin & Denis de Cay, 1625), pp. 329–30.
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Ball, Fireworks and Gun Salutes, the same night],4 whereas for Godefroy ‘il n’y eut ny Bal, ny festin à cause de la mort du Roy d’Angleterre’ [No Ball nor Banquet was held because of the death of the King of England].5 This divergence may be attributed to the fact that, as was usual on these occasions, Matarel’s hastily written piece was probably composed beforehand, on the basis of official ‘press releases’, so last-minute changes of programme could not have been incorporated. It is also possible that his account was a deliberate falsification which aimed to give the readers not so much a truthful report of the proceedings as a hyperbolic account of the ceremony and its magnificence. The official wedding ceremony was celebrated a few days later on 1/11 May. Again accounts differ. The religious ceremony was held on a specially constructed platform outside the cathédrale Notre-Dame, followed by a service inside the cathedral ‘selon l’ordre & forme observee en celuy du feu Roy & de la Royne Marguerite, & de Madame la Duchesse de Bar’ [according to the order and form established for [the marriage] of the late King and Queen Marguerite, and that of the Duchesse de Bar].6 Neither the Duc de Chevreuse nor the two British ambassadors, the Earls of Holland and Carlisle, were allowed to attend. After the service and following a distribution of gold and silver coins to the people, the court withdrew to the Archevêché for a ‘banquet nuptial’ [wedding breakfast]. Most contemporary accounts then mention gun salutes, bonfires, and fireworks.7 One manuscript account even reports that once the royal party had gone back to the palais du Louvre, supper was served, but that the water fireworks ordered by the King for the next day, 2/12 May, had to be postponed to a later date because the King was unwell.8 Another change of programme resulted in the cancellation of the Queen’s ballet out of respect for the death of James I. As La Porte, Louis XIII’s valet, writes in his Mémoires, cette cérémonie eût été suivie d’un ballet que la Reine avoit étudié, sans la mort du roi d’Angleterre, qui changea toute cette cérémonie en deuil.9
4 Matarel, Les Magnificences Royales, faictes en Angleterre à l’Arrivée & Reception de la Royne (Paris: N. Alexandre, 1625), p. 7. 5 Théodore Godefroy, Le Cérémonial François, 2 vols (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1649), vol. 2, p. 119. 6 Le Mercure François, vol. 10, p. 480. The Duchesse de Bar was Catherine de Bourbon, sister to King Henri IV. 7 Notably Le Triomphe glorieux & l’ordre des ceremonies observees au mariage du Roy de la Grand’Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du Roy (Paris: J. Martin, 1625); Matarel, Les Magnificences Royales, faictes en Angleterre à l’Arrivée & Reception de la Royne; and vol. 11 [for the years 1625–1626] of Le Mercure François (Paris, 1626), pp. 353–63. 8 ‘Rellation de ce qui s’est fait tant aux fiancailles de madame Henriette marie de France [Sœur] du Roy avec Charles premier Roy de la grande bretagne lesquelles furent faictes au louvre en la chambre du Roy le Jeudy huitiesme mai Jour de Lassension qu’au mariage de ladicte dame qui fut faict en l’eglise de nostre dame le dimanche xi du[dict] mois et an 1625’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr 23600, fol. 239–40. 9 Pierre de La Porte, Mémoires de La Porte, ed. by J. F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat (Paris: Éd. du commentaire analytique du Code civil, 1839), p. 7.
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[the ceremony would have been followed by a ballet which the Queen had rehearsed, but the death of the King of England changed entertainment into mourning]. It is possible, as I have suggested elsewhere,10 to associate this entertainment prepared by Queen Anne, but cancelled because of the death of James I, with a ballet entitled Ballet de la Reyne d’Angleterre, for which only a few verses by the poets Malleville and Boisrobert are extant. On 14/24 May the eagerly awaited Duke of Buckingham arrived in Paris with royal orders to convey the new Queen to England, and there was a new whirl of banquets, balls, and other entertainments.11 Durant les sept jours que le Duc de Bucquingham fut à Paris pour accelerer le partement de ladite Royne, les festins & les resjouyssances se renouvellerent, & sembloient mesmes estre augmentez, car on n’entendoit les nuicts que des canonnades, que coups de boëttes, & le matin que le recit des festins magnifiques, entre lesquels nul n’esgalla celuy que fit le Cardinal de Richelieu.12 [During the seven days that the duke of Buckingham was in Paris to encourage the departure of the said Queen, the festivals and rejoicings were renewed, and even seemed to be multiplied, because in the night only cannon shot and mortars were heard, and the morning brought only tales of magnificent banquets, among which none equalled that offered by Cardinal Richelieu]. Finally, on 16/26 May, at the cost of £40,000,13 Cardinal Richelieu gave the court a splendid refection of sweetmeats at the freshly redecorated palais du Luxembourg,
10 For a discussion of the ballet, see Marie-Claude Canova-Green, ‘Remarques sur la datation et l’attribution de ballets de cour sous le règne de Louis XIII’, XVIIe siècle, 157 (4) (1987), 421–26; and Karen Britland, Drama, pp. 21–22. 11 His arrival in Paris had been delayed by the funeral of James I in Westminster Abbey on 7/17 May. It is possible that it was on this occasion that the entertainment at Monceaux was given. On 1 August 1655 Christiaan Huygens visited the château and the ‘salle de Comediens de laquelle on s’est servij la derniere fois au mariage de la Reijne d’Angleterre’ [the great hall that was last used by actors for the wedding of the Queen of England] (‘Le Voyage en France de 1655’, Œuvres complètes, 23 vols (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–1950, vol. 22, pp. 461–491 (p. 479). 12 Le Mercure François, vol. 11, p. 366. Britland has argued that the fragmentary ballet Les Dieux descendus en France might have been performed at one of the feasts in honour of Buckingham in Paris (Drama, pp. 22–24), on the grounds that Mareschal’s verses ‘A Monseigneur le Duc de Chevreuse, sur son Voyage d’Angleterre’ (included in the Recueil des plus beaux vers, pp. 796–99) were probably written for the same ballet — the Duc was part of the entourage chosen by Louis XIII to accompany Henrietta Maria to England. This is debatable. Indeed, because it was not customary at the time for noble men and women to dance together in court ballets, it is highly unlikely that the Duc would have taken part in a ballet danced by his wife and other ladies, such as Les Dieux descendus en France. Moreover Mareschal’s verses are couched in a form — an ode — not commonly used for the ‘vers pour les personnages’. They were most probably an occasional piece written on the eve of Chevreuse’s departure for England. 13 Père François Garasse, Mémoires, ed. by Charles Nisard (Paris: Amyot, 1860), p. 70. See Chantal Gaulin, ‘À propos du goûter de confitures offert par Richelieu à Marie de Médicis’, Journal d’Agric. Trad. et de Bota. Appli., 35 (1988), 233–40.
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followed by fireworks in the palace gardens.14 This reception and propaganda coup for the Queen Mother concluded the wedding celebrations in Paris. Henrietta Maria finally left Paris on 23 May/2 June. After stopping in Montdidier to meet up with the Queen Mother, the Queen regnant, the King’s brother, and a number of lords and ladies, she made her way towards Amiens where she arrived on 28 May/7 June. On the orders of Louis XIII that she should be welcomed ‘comme vous feriez à nous mesme, ou à la Royne, ainsi que vous avez accoustumé’ [as they would welcome him or the Queen, as was their custom],15 she was given a solemn entry into the town. Although Amiens could ill afford the expense, a number of triumphal arches, pyramids, suspended gardens, arcades, and porticoes lined her route. As she passed, young ladies dressed as Sibyls sung her praises, Jason fought the dragon to win the Golden Fleece — a transparent allegory of her wedding to Charles — and Paris handed her the apple as ‘à la vraye Beauté’ [to the true Beauty].16 In the niches decorating the arch in front of the cathedral stood five boys representing five French princesses who had become Queens of England.17 The qualities and virtues they respectively embodied, Faith, Clemency, Humility, Prudence, and Constancy, were a reminder to Henrietta Maria of her mission in a ‘heretical land’. The entry concluded with a service of thanksgiving in the cathedral. The next days were spent receiving compliments and gifts of food and drink from town officials, banqueting, visiting the citadel, attending christenings,18 etc. The common people were not forgotten and were treated to a free distribution of wine on the last day of her stay. However the entry into Amiens is better known for the alleged tryst between Anne, Louis XIII’s Queen, and the Duke of Buckingham. The dashing Duke, believed to have fallen in love with Anne during his stay in Paris, reportedly decided to try his luck one evening in the secluded garden of her residence. The 14 See Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, Mémoires du cardinal de Richelieu, 10 vols (Paris: H. Laurens (H. Champion), 1908–1931), vol. 5 [for the years 1625–1626], ed. by Roger Gaucheron and Emile Dermenghem (1921), pp. 16–17; and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr 23600. It is said that Marie de Médicis hurried Rubens to finish the twenty-four pictures, glorifying her own life, that were to hang in the gallery (they were only installed on 28 April/8 May, on the eve of the marriage), so that they could be displayed during the wedding festivities and shown to the foreign dignitaries. See Jean-François Dubost, Marie de Médicis. La Reine dévoilée (Paris: Payot, 2009), p. 657). 15 Le Mercure françois, vol. 11, p. 367. 16 Le Mercure françois, vol. 11, p. 379. 17 They were Bertha (or Aldiberge), daughter of Charibert I and wife of Ethelbert of Kent (sixth century); Judith, daughter of Charles II and wife of Ethelbald of Wessex (ninth century); Marguerite, daughter of Louis VII and wife of Henry II (twelfth century); Isabelle, daughter of Philippe IV and wife of Edward II (fourteenth century); and Catherine, daughter of Charles VI and wife of Henry V (fifteenth century). Bertha was later canonized for her role in the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England. 18 In an exchange of ceremonial compliments, the Duke of Buckingham and the Duc de Chevreuse, acting as proxy for Charles I, were invited on 5/15 June to play the role of godfather to the youngest son of the Duc de Chaulnes, Governor of Picardy. The baby’s godmother was Henrietta Maria herself, who named him Charles after her husband (Mercure François¸ vol. 11, pp. 388–89). See Caroline Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen’, The Court Historian, 5 (2000), 25–28 (21).
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incident was reported by a number of witnesses, notably La Porte, who wrote that the Duke ‘s’émancipa fort insolemment jusqu’à vouloir caresser la reine, qui en même temps fit un cri auquel tout le monde accourut’ [took liberties and insolently tried to lay his hands on her. But she screamed and everybody rushed up].19 Another encounter is rumoured to have taken place a few days later in Anne’s bedchamber,20 although it is unlikely that anything even remotely approaching the sexual assault graphically described by Cardinal de Retz21 happened on either occasion. Did Anne give Buckingham the famous ferrets [diamond ornaments] which, according to Alexandre Dumas, had been a gift from the King,22 and whose disappearance and later retrieval by D’Artagnan make up the plot of The Three Musketeers? We will never know. On 6/16 June Henrietta Maria left Amiens for Abbeville, and after further royal entries into Montreuil and Boulogne (Calais was avoided because of an outbreak of the plague23), finally sailed for England on 12/22 June. She landed in Dover in the evening of the same day. Images of the Royal Wedding The wedding celebrations in France were reported in a number of official publications which gave a detailed, albeit idealized, account of the proceedings with a view not only of informing the readers but also of highlighting and even exaggerating their magnificence. Other, unpublished, accounts by ministers or ambassadors focused on the negotiations leading to the marriage and gave a partisan view of the reasons behind what was seen on both sides of the Channel as a controversial alliance. Epithalamia were also composed to celebrate the royal wedding, praising the beauty of Henrietta Maria and the heroic virtues of Charles, and extolling their glorious lineage in the most conventional terms. However it was less a case of singing the mutual love and happiness of the royal couple than of making the union serve the hegemonic ambitions of France or the apocalyptic designs of contemporary illuminati. Unlike other accounts, epithalamia did not aim to describe the wedding celebrations; nor did they report on the diplomatic negotiations (or if they did, it was only allegorically). As encomiastic texts, their main aim was to glorify the French monarchy and to demonstrate the benefits of the Stuart-Bourbon alliance. 19 La Porte, Mémoires, p. 7. Other accounts include Françoise Bertault de Motteville, Mémoires, 5 vols (Amsterdam: François Changuion, 1723), vol. 1, pp. 17–19, and François de La Rochefoucauld, Mémoires, ed. by J. F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat (Paris: Éd. du commentaire analytique du Code civil, 1838), p. 382. 20 Motteville, Mémoires, vol. 1, pp. 20–21. 21 Jean François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, Œuvres, ed. by Marie-Thérèse Hipp and Michel Pernot (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 720–21. Another account is to be found in Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, ed. by Antoine Adam, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), vol. 1, pp. 239–40. Neither Retz nor Tallemant had been in Amiens at the time. 22 Six such jewels were found in the inventory of her belongings after her death. 23 Mercure françois, vol. 11, p. 390.
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The imagery deployed in the wedding ballets, entries into Amiens and other towns, as well as in epithalamia, appears to have been highly conventional. It included the usual images of love and peace, reminiscent of those used in other celebrations of dynastic alliances, as in 1612 and 1615 for instance, and also traditional emblematic representations of England and France, commonly used throughout the seventeenth century as national markers in the war of images between European countries. The network of motifs relating to the myth of the Golden Age falls into the first category. Like peace treaties or the accession of a new monarch, royal weddings were celebrated as a hope for the future, the prospect of better times to come.24 The 1625 celebrations were no different. Poets and other panegyrists repeatedly turned to the ancient myth to evoke a harmonious vision of love between human beings and peace between nations.25 In the Bouquet du lys et de la rose, the poet Claude Garnier contended that Les haynes, les vieilles querelles Finiront s’il en reste encor’: L’amour & la paix au lieu d’elles Fleuriront comme en l’Age d’or.26 [Hatreds and old quarrels, / If any remain, will cease: / In their place love and peace / Will flourish as in the Golden Age]. The return of the Golden Age was systematically presented as one of the major benefits to be gained from the alliance between England and France. For the French, the alliance heralded a new British policy of openness towards and union with the Continent. However, for the English, this new age of peace and plenty seemed to be rather based on an economic programme of expanding trade between the two nations,27 as well as the continuation of James I’s oft-vaunted isolationist policies of non-intervention in Europe.28 In the wedding masque performed in January 1625 in anticipation of the marriage, The Fortunate Isles and their Union, Ben Jonson emphasized the kingdom’s proud separation from
24 See the article by Marie-Claude Canova-Green, ‘Le mythe de l’Âge d’or dans les divertissements à la cour des Bourbons et des premiers Stuarts’, in P. Béhar (ed.), Image et Spectacle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 25–45. 25 Notably the anonymous Triomphe des François et Anglois (s.l.: [n.pub.], 1625), the (cancelled?) Ballet de la Reyne d’Angleterre, and Abraham Rémy’s allegorical novel La Galatée et les adventures du prince Astiagès. Histoire de nostre temps où sous noms feints sont représentez les amours du roy et de la reyne d’Angleterre. Avec tous les voyages qu’il a fait, tant en France qu’en Espagne (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1625). 26 Claude Garnier, Le Bouquet du lys et de la rose. Au nom de l’alliance de France et d’Angleterre (Paris: [n.pub.], 1624), p. 10. 27 George Marcelline describes France as ‘stored with all kinde of commodities fit for commerce and traffique, being (as it were) Gods garden’, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum: or, Great-Britaines, Frances and the most parts of Europes unspeakable Ioy (London: Thomas Archer, 1625), p. 55. 28 In fact Steve Murdoch has shown that James did pursue military intervention in the 1610s and 1620s, notably in Scandinavia and Bohemia. See his chapter ‘James VI and the Formation of a ScottishBritish Military Identity’, in Steve Murdoch and Andrew Mackillop (eds), Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience c. 1550–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 3–32.
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the rest of the world and presented his own imperialist vision of England in his description of Neptune’s fleet ‘ready to goe or come / Or fetch the riches of the Ocean home’.29 Plus ça change… Another conventional, albeit less frequent, network of motifs drew on the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece to allegorize the royal wedding and its significance. The tableau vivant which met the eyes of Henrietta Maria in Amiens represented: [un] Jardin suspendu en l’air sur des pilliers & arcs-boutans, où parmy une quantité de grands arbres, il y en avoit un sur tous qui se faisoit cognoistre par la Toison qui y estoit attachee, par un Jason qui la desiroit conquerir, & par un grand Dragon qui veilloit & gardoit la Toison.30 [[a] garden suspended on pillars and flying buttresses, where one could see tall trees, with a golden fleece hanging from one of them, with Jason in the act of taking the fleece, and a great dragon standing guard over it]. As the verse on the frieze explained, Ce Jardin c’est la France, Ou par ceste alliance [,] Marie est la Toison, Et Charles le Jason.31 [The garden represents France, / Where, in this alliance, / Marie is the Fleece / And Charles Jason]. The list would not be complete without the mention of divinities traditionally associated with marriage celebrations, such as Juno, Hymen, and Cupid, who appeared in the majority of epithalamia to present the union between Charles I and Henrietta Maria as a love match. In Le Parnasse triomphant, their union was said to be the work of Cupid.32 In the poet André Mareschal’s Feux de joye de la France, Cupid was seen to fall in love with Henrietta Maria herself,33 while in the ballet Les Dieux descendus en France all the gods, including Venus, came to pay homage to the new alliance. In addition to this conventional nuptial imagery, a second category of metaphors drew on heraldic images to describe the relations between France and Britain, and more specifically the wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. 29 Ben Jonson, The Masque of the Fortunate Isles and their Union, in Ben Jonson, ed. by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1925–1952), vol. 7 (1941), ll. 624–25, p. 728. According to Britland, the masque presents a tension between the pacific policies advocated by James and the more interventionist policy promoted by Charles and Buckingham after their return from Spain in 1623. 30 Le Mercure François, vol. 11, p. 376. Henrietta Maria was also compared with the Golden Fleece in André Mareschal’s Les Feux de joye, sur l’heureuse alliance d’Angleterre (Paris: B. Martin, 1625). 31 Le Mercure François, vol. 11, p. 377. 32 Le Parnasse Triomphant, à l’honneur du Roy de la Grand’Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du Roy, son Espouse (Paris: Jean Bessin, 1625), p. 3. 33 Mareschal, Les Feux de joye, p. 23.
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Figure 4.1. Designed by Pierre Régnier, The Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625, silver, cast medal, 23.5 mm diameter. Showing busts of Charles I and Henrietta Maria on the obverse and Cupid walking, scattering roses and lilies, on the reverse. Private Collection
Because they were easily identifiable by the spectators, emblematic fleurs-de-lis and roses were used in the decoration of ceremonial platforms, triumphal arches, and the like. They were also embroidered on Henrietta Maria’s purple wedding gown and on the sash worn by the Duc de Chevreuse at the wedding ceremony. The small silver and gold medals distributed to the populace were struck with busts of the royal couple on the obverse,34 while the reverse featured a Cupid scattering roses and lilies (with the inscription ‘Fundit amor lilia mixta rosis’)35 [Figure 4.1]. On Pierre Firens’s commemorative engraving of the betrothal a giant lily and a rose were also represented, growing on either side of the royal couple (with the inscription ‘Magis magisque florebit cum lilio’).36 Henrietta Maria’s gown, which had been embroidered all over with fleurs-de-lis on her wedding day, is instead depicted with a rose ornament at the end of the bodice [Figure 4.2]. On the other side of the Channel George Marcelline similarly linked the rose and the lily in his Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum: 34 One variant of the obverse showed two infants, seated, leaning on each other, and each holding a lily, with the inscription ‘Hoc foedere lilia florent’ [With this alliance, lilies come into flower]. The inscription was borrowed from a medal cast in 1601 to celebrate the marriage of Henri IV and Marie de Médicis. Another variant, possibly cast for an English audience, showed two infants, one male, the other female, joining hands and standing upon a flowery island in the midst of the sea, fastened beneath by chains, with the inscription ‘Stat prole hac altera Delos’ [For this family another Delos]. This was a clear allusion to the birth of Apollo and Artemis on the island of Delos, which Poseidon had called out of the sea to provide a safe haven for their pregnant mother Latona. England was frequently compared to this happy island by Waller and other poets. 35 The inscription [Love pours out lilies mingled with roses] is adapted from Virgil, Aeneid, XII. 68: ‘aut mixta rubent ubi lilia multa / alba rosa’ [as when white lilies blush with many a blended rose]. 36 The engraving is entitled ‘La représentation du Mariage accordé entre les très puissans roys de France et d’Angleterre, pour Charles, prince de Walles, duc de Cornwy, avec Madame Henriette Marie, sœur du très chrestien Roy de France et de Navarre Louys XIII, l’an 1624, au mois de novembre’ (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes, Collection Hennin (2056), Réserve FOL-QB-201 (23)).
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Figure 4.2. Pierre Firens, The Marriage Treaty between the Kings of France and England, November 1624, engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes et photographie, Réserve FOL-QB-201 (23).
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What prosperitie it would bring to the Prince, and what happinesse it would bring to England, to haue her Lyons adorned with Frances Lillies, and the Flower-Deluce and the Rose bound vp, and conioyned. What bed so sweet, as that which is composed of Lillies and Roses?37 Together with the Scottish thistle, both flowers were unsurprisingly used to decorate the triumphal arch that frames the portrait of the royal couple on the frontispiece to the tract. It is interesting that while in France the couple is blessed by God, in England Cupid oversees the match [Figure 4.3].38 The same images recurred in literary discourse. In his verses for the Ballet de la Reyne d’Angleterre, the poet Malleville described Henrietta Maria as the one Qui deux sceptres unit et, comme en son visage, Va faire un mariage De la rose et du lis.39 [Who joins two sceptres and, as on her face, / Will unite / The rose and the lily]. Whereas in the Bouquet du lys et de la rose, Garnier referred his choice of metaphors to the coats of arms of the two royal houses: La France a l’une pour devise, Et pour les armes qu’elle a pris: L’Angleterre, en la mer assise, A l’autre dans les siennes mis.40 [France has chosen one for her device / And for her coat of arms: / England, set in the sea, / Has placed the other in hers]. The allegorical vision depicted in the Parnasse triomphant was slightly more original. It showed a tame leopard lying at the foot of a lily in a transparent reference to Charles’ love for his new French bride. The heraldic ‘leopard’, rather than the lion, continued to be used in French discourse to signify England, although the royal beast featuring in the coats of arms of the kings of England (‘de gules ove trois lupards d’or’41) came to be referred to as a lion from the fifteenth century onwards (‘de gueules, trois lions passants regardants or’42). In satirical engravings
37 Marcelline, Epithalamium, pp. 42–43. Kevin Sharpe identifies Marcelline as a ‘naturalised Frenchman […] writing for an English audience’, in his Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 264. 38 The portrait of the couple is flanked by allegorical figures representing war on the left and peace on the right. 39 Claude Malleville, ‘Vers presentez par Diane à la Reyne mère du Roy pour le Balet de la Reyne d’Angleterre’, in Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Raymond Ortali, 2 vols (Paris: M. Didier, 1976), vol. 2, p. 479. 40 Garnier, Le Bouquet du lys et de la rose, p. 9. 41 According to the description given in the Glover’s Roll in 1255. 42 The lions were soon said to be ‘gardants’.
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Figure 4.3. Willem van de Passe (attr.), ‘Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum, or A Discourse of the Mariage betwixt England and France’, 1625, engraving. Showing a portrait of Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria. London, British Museum, acquis. no. 1934, 1130.1. Reproduced with permission.
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its French counterpart was traditionally the cock,43 but a farmyard animal could hardly have been used in encomiastic discourse to represent a princess! Hence the ubiquitous lily, which not only helped to identify the ‘blazons du Royaume de France’ [French royal blazon], it also symbolized the Princess’s feminine virtues, beauty, modesty, and chastity: La pudeur, jointe avec la beauté, Assise sur le roc de quelque chasteté.44 [Modesty, together with Beauty, / Seated on the rock of Chastity]. Tritons and dolphins were also used emblematically to signify England and France, as on the triumphant chariot described in the anonymous Triomphe des François et Anglois. A sea god with a human face and a fish tail, the triton appeared in Renaissance iconography as one of the companions of Neptune, traditionally associated with English monarchs in their claim to the sovereignty of the seas.45 In what could be construed as a compliment Charles was praised here in terms of the imagery his predecessors had promoted. On the other hand, the dolphin owed its presence to a pun on the name of the French heir to the throne, the dauphin. On the chariot rode the two allegories of France and England, whose hands were joined together above the heads of Charles I and Henrietta Maria ‘[en] signe de perpetuelle alliance’ [as a sign of perpetual alliance] between the two kingdoms.46 This rapid iconographical survey demonstrates that the textual and visual metaphors used in the wedding celebrations in France drew on a conventional repertory of stereotyped images inherited from Greek and Roman mythology, as well as from national emblematic imagery. As hyperbolic rhetorical ornaments, these images had little specific significance in themselves and could be — and were indeed — used in all kinds of eulogistic discourse. But they indicate the tension in the diplomatic negotiations: both countries wanted to derive political advantage from the marriage and both were convinced of their national superiority. We can find a clearer expression of these conflicts of interest in other less conventional images and their accompanying glosses. The Royal Wedding and ‘la Raison d’État’ Given the profound distrust at the time between the two countries, the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria in 1625 was a clear example of realpolitik. France seems to have seen the alliance with Britain as the best way to put a stop to 43 Because of the pun on the Latin gallus, meaning both a cock and an inhabitant of Gallia or Gaul, the ancient name for France. 44 Le Parnasse Triomphant, p. 8. 45 For the French this explained the choice of royal insignia by British monarchs: the sword, the imperial crown and the globe were said to be ‘la marque de l’empire qu[’ils] prétendent avoir sur la mer’ [the sign of the sovereignty they claim to have over the seas] (Henri-Auguste Loménie de Brienne, Mémoires du comte de Brienne, ed. by A. Petitot, 2 vols (Paris: Foucault, 1824), vol. 1, p. 410). 46 Le Triomphe des François et Anglois, p. 11.
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Spanish imperialism in Europe. According to the Marquis d’Effiat, who had led the marriage negotiations, la plus puissante Couronne en la Chrestienté après celle de France & d’Espagne est celle de la Grand’Bretagne, & de telle consequence qu’elle peut donner le trébuchant en faveur de l’une des deux couronnes à laquelle elle se sera jointe au grand préjudice de l’autre.47 [Britain is the most powerful kingdom in Christendom after France and Spain; it is of such importance that it will weigh the scales in favour of the realm with which it is joined to the detriment of the other]. Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s chief minister, also shared the view that ‘l’Espagnol perd, en ce faisant, l’assistance de ce royaume-là et […] nous nous en fortifions contre lui’ [with this marriage, the Spaniards lose the assistance of Britain and […] we grow stronger against them] and that ‘si on vouloit passer aux raisons d’Etat, il n’y avoit personne qui ne reconnût qu’il étoit utile à toute la chrétienté que l’orgueil d’Espagne fût abaissé par toutes sortes de moyens’ [if one were to consider ‘reasons of state’, all would agree that it is expedient for the whole of Christendom that Spanish pride be humbled by any possible means].48 Not to mention the fact that it was strategically important for France to seek an alliance with a country which, given its geographical location, was like ‘un boulevard sur ce royaume’ [a bastion overlooking the realm].49 News books and royal historians highlighted the concerns of Spain and its allies regarding the potential political fallouts of the marriage.50 Epithalamia and other occasional pieces abandoned conventional celebration in order to outline a political programme ranging from the realistic to the visionary. Some saw the marriage as an occasion for reconciliation between old enemies and consequently as a hope for peace in Europe. Hence the river imagery developed by the author of the Triomphe des Anglois et des François, for whom the marriage renewed the promises made at the field of the cloth of gold in 1520: L’heritier de la Grande Bretaigne est une de ces grosses rivieres, qui va porter ses ondes à ce grand canal de la famille de Bourbon, deux grans de mer qui prenans un lieu commun, par le meslange & accroissement de leurs eaux, se termineront en fin en un Occean, autant ou plus grand, que les deux dont ils prennent leur source.51
47 Le Mercure François, vol. 12 (Paris, 1627) [for the year 1626], p. 891. Quoted by Cottret, ‘Diplomatie’, p. 224. 48 Richelieu, Mémoires, vol. 4 [for the year 1624], ed. by Robert Lavollée (1920), pp. 56, 71. 49 Richelieu, Mémoires, vol. 4, p. 55. 50 Both Scipion Dupleix (Histoire de Louis le Juste, XIII du nom (Paris: Claude Sonnius, 1635), pp. 376–78) and Michel Le Vassor (Histoire de Louis XIII, roi de France et de Navarre, 6 vols (Amsterdam: aux dépens des associés, 1757), vol. 2, pp. 600–32) stress the uneasiness felt by the Habsburgs at the prospect of a league between France and Britain, supported by Venice and Savoy. This explains the last-minute endeavours by the Spaniards to offer a counter-proposal of marriage between Henrietta Maria and the Infante Don Carlos. 51 Le Triomphe des François et Anglois, p. 26.
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[The heir to the British throne is one of these great rivers that flows towards the great canal of the Bourbon family, two arms of sea, which, becoming one, with the merging and increase of their waters, will turn into an ocean that will be as powerful, if not more so than the two seas in which they have their source]. Others, such as the author of the Églogue, ou chant pastoral, dedicated to Charles and Henrietta Maria, preferred to see the marriage as a challenge to Spain, the first stone in the construction of a North-European league aggressively directed against the Habsburg powers: Que rien n’est assez fort contre la force Angloise, Conjointe avec l’Escosse, & la valeur Francoise.52 [Nothing can withstand the strength of England, / Allied with Scotland, and French valour]. The British agenda for this league was the recovery and the protection of the Palatinate, lost to the Imperial armies in 1623. As Marcelline contended in his Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum: for what hindrance is there, whereby that most Christian King, Lewis the thirteenth, may expect, but that as our Princes Highnesse joynes hands with his Sister, so our Kings Majestie will joyne Armes with him, for the regaining of those kingdomes, which unjustly an usurping hand detaineth from him?53 However French hopes were very different: as Louis XIII was reluctant to involve himself openly in the affairs of the Palatinate, the possibility of a military intervention was never mentioned. Instead propagandists dwelled on the exhilarating prospect of universal dominion for France. The Stuart/Bourbon alliance was seen as the first step towards imperium. In Les Feux de joye de la France, Mareschal praised the new Queen of England Qui deux puissants Sceptres conjoint, Et qui d’un si beau mariage Gaignant à la France l’Anglois, Promet à son Frere cét Âge De voir tout le Monde à ses loix.54 [who conjoins two powerful sceptres, / And with this well-matched marriage / Winning the English / over to the French, / Promises her brother / An age where he will see / The whole world obey his laws].
52 Eclogue, ou Chant pastoral sur les nopces des Serenissimes Princes Charles Roy de la Grand’Bretagne, France et Irlande, et de Henriette Marie, fille de Henry le Grand, Roy de France, et de Navarre (London: [n.pub.], 1627), p. 13. 53 Marcelline, Epithalamium, p. 14. 54 Mareschal, Les feux de joye, p. 25.
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Her principal role as Charles’ new wife was to spread the fame and advance the empire of her royal brother. In the Ballet de la Reyne d’Angleterre, Charles himself became ‘a tributary king, co-opted into France’s policy of world domination’, and implicitly threatened with subjection should he choose not to join Louis in his imperial expansion:55 S’il reste encore quelques Rois Qui n’ayent pas soumis leur orgueil à vos loix Vos fils mettront bien-tost ardans à la conqueste Le joug dessus leur teste.56 [If there still remain kings/ Who have not submitted their pride to your laws / Your sons, ardent for victory, / Will soon put the yoke over their heads]. In the same ballet the Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis, was exalted as a divinity ruling over several kingdoms through her sons and sons-in-law,57 a weaver of peace between nations who through her beauty governed the world: À vous toute gloire appartient C’est vostre seul pouvoir qui ce globe soustient Mère des plus grands Roys de la terre & de l’onde Vous gouvernez le monde.58 [For yours is the glory / It is your power alone that supports the globe / Mother of the greatest kings of earth and of sea / You rule the world]. This notion of France as a supreme imperialist power was complemented by the representation of England as the grateful recipient of France’s benevolence. In Mareschal’s verses for the ballet of Les Dieux descendus en France, the Sun hailed Louis XIII as ‘Grand Roy, Prince fameux, fils aisné de la Terre’ [Great King, famous Prince, eldest son of Earth],59 to whom all the gods paid homage, and added: Le renom de ce jour où l’on voit l’Angleterre Son bon-heur en celuy de la France emprunter, N’est pas ce qui nous peut icy-bas arrester, C’est ta seule Grandeur qui les nostre atterre.60
55 Britland, Drama, p. 25. 56 François Le Metel, Sieur de Boisrobert, ‘Récit de Galathee’, in Recueil des plus beaux vers, p. 579. 57 This image took its inspiration from the tableau by Giovanni Cosci decorating the arch at Ponte della Carraia for the entry of Christine de Lorraine into Florence on 20/30 April 1589. It represented Catherine de Médicis surrounded by the most illustrious members of her family (see Raffaello Gualterotti, Descrizione del regale apparato per le nozze della Serenissima Madama Cristina di Loreno (Florence: Antonio Padovani, 1589), p. 60). 58 Boisrobert, ‘Récit de Galathee’, in Recueil des plus beaux vers, p. 578. 59 Mareschal, ‘Le Soleil au Roy’, in Recueil des plus beaux vers, p. 793. 60 Mareschal, ‘Le Soleil au Roy’, in Recueil des plus beaux vers, p. 793.
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[The renown of this day, in which England is seen / To borrow her happiness from that of France, / Is not what makes us linger here below, / It is your greatness alone that attracts us to earth]. As Karen Britland explains, ‘by absorbing Charles into the imperialist agenda of Louis’s France, the wedding ballets live[d] out this fantasy by insisting that the English King dance to the tune of his new-brother in law’.61 A Mission in a Heretical Land The marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria did not just serve the interests of the secular state. It also served the interests of Catholicism, indeed those of the Church triumphant. For Louis XIII’s ministers, the new alliance was meant to deprive the French Huguenots of their traditional English support, if and when they rebelled again.62 As with the Franco-Spanish marriages of 1615, matrimonial diplomacy was used as an instrument of internal stabilization.63 The author of Ceremonies et solennitez called upon all good French citizens to: Resjoüissons-nous donc … à ceste heure que les adversaires de l’Estat tremblans de peur & de crainte, ont leur ame affligée d’une si belle alliance.64 [Let all good Frenchmen now then reioyce, at such time as the aduersaries of our State, trembling with amazement and feare, haue their very soules afflicted with so goodly an alliance]. Cardinal Richelieu hoped that the alliance would help bring persecutions against English Catholics to an end, and guarantee them liberty of conscience and public freedom of worship. This was the argument used by Cardinal Bérulle in Rome to obtain papal dispensation for the marriage. Louis XIII himself wrote to Pope Urban VIII to assure him of his zeal and desire to ‘diriger les moyens qui sont en [sa] puissance […] au bien de toute la Chrétienté’ [use all means in [his] power […] for the greater good of Christendom’].65 The proposed alliance was intended for this purpose, even though it might not be in his and his country’s best interests.66 In fact support for English Catholics was only a pretext: what 61 Britland, Drama, pp. 27–28. 62 This hope was short-lived. Two years after the wedding, the British sent aid to the Huguenot town La Rochelle. 63 See Dubost, Marie de Médicis. La Reine dévoilée. 64 Ceremonies et solennitez observees en l’Eglise de Nostre Dame de Paris, au mariage du Roy de la Grand’Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du Roy (Lyon: Nicolas Jullieron, 1625), pp. 4–5. Translated as A Relation of the Glorious Triumphs and Order of the Ceremonies, obserued in the Marriage of the High and Mighty Charles, King of Great Brittaine, and the Ladie Henretta [sic] Maria, Sister to the Most Christian King of France (London: Printed by T.S. for Nathaniel Butter, 1625), sig. A3. [See Appendix 1]. 65 Louis XIII, Lettre cccl ‘Au Pape’ [undated], Lettres de la main de Louis XIII, ed. by Eugène Griselle, 2 vols (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles français, 1914), vol. 2, p. 339. 66 This was made clear in a letter sent to Cardinal Barberini in Rome: ‘l’affection intérieure que j’ai à l’avancement du vrai culte divin ne souffre pas que je considère cette alliance par mes seuls vrais intérêts’ [the inner love I feel for the advancement of the true faith will not permit me to think only of my
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the French government were really interested in was to draw English Catholics into the French sphere of influence to weaken the influence of Spain and of Spanish Catholicism. The farewell letter written to Henrietta Maria by her mother, Marie de Médicis,67 with the help of Cardinal Bérulle,68 reminded her daughter that she had been placed on earth for the sake of heaven. Henrietta Maria was urged to remember that she was a grand-daughter of Saint Louis and that, like him, she was sent among the ‘Infidels’ to convert them. Like Esther she was chosen by God to protect her people, in her case the suffering English Catholics. She was also exhorted to pray for Charles, that he might be brought back to ‘the true faith’, and to be charitable towards Protestants, so that, by her example, they might be led to convert: Ayez soin de protéger, auprès du roi votre mari, les catholiques anglais. Soyez à leur égard une Esther suscitée de Dieu pour le salut de son peuple […] N’oubliez pas non plus les autres pauvres Anglais. Quoiqu’ils soient d’une autre religion que vous, vous êtes leur reine; vous les devez assister et édifier, et par cette voie, les disposer doucement à sortir de l’erreur.69 [Be sure to protect English Catholics. Be an Esther to them, sent by God to bring relief to his people … Do not forget either your other English subjects. Although they are of a different religion, you are their Queen; you must assist and edify them, and, in this manner, prepare them gently to see the error of their ways]. The ultimate aim of her marriage to Charles was her mission: to bring relief to English Catholics and to save Protestant heretics by showing them the way back to the true Church. Pope Urban VIII in turn sent her a highly symbolic gift, a Golden Rose, representing the hoped-for conversion of Protestant England to
own best interests when considering this alliance] (lettre cccli ‘Au Cardinal Barberin’ [dated 24 July/3 August 1624], Lettres, p. 340). 67 ‘Instruction de la Reine Marie de medicis — a la Reine dangleterre sa fille marie-anriette de France’, which might have been written by the Queen Mother herself (Paris, Archives nationales, K 1303, no 1). 68 Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, ‘Extraits des avis que le Cardinal de Bérulle rédigea au nom de Marie de Médicis pour la reine d’Angleterre’, in Œuvres complètes de Bérulle, in l’Abbé Migne (PetitMontrouge: J.-P. Migne, 1856), pp. 1619–21. The head and founder of the Oratorian order, Bérulle accompanied Henrietta Maria to England as her confessor. He returned to France in the autumn of 1625. 69 Bérulle, Œuvres complètes, pp. 1619–21. In a brief to the Princess dated 18/28 December 1624, Pope Urban VIII also compared her to Esther, ‘the liberator of the Chosen People’, as well as to Clotilde, ‘who submitted her triumphant spouse [Clovis] to Christ’, and to Aldiberge (Bertha), whose marriage led to the establishment of Christianity in Britain (‘Bref de Notre St Pere le Pape Vrbain VIII, a Madame, s’en allant en Angleterre, l’exhortant a remettre la Religion catholique, en cest pays dont Elle a esté bannie’, British Library, King’s MS 135, fol. 528v). For a discussion of Henrietta Maria’s proselytising mission to England, see Sara J. Wolfson’s chapter, ‘Practical Proselytising: The Impact of Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the Caroline Court, 1625–1626’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy. Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), pp. 43–63.
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the Catholic faith, together with an injunction to become like a rose, ‘a flower of the root of Jesse among the spines of Hebrew iniquity’.70 The wedding entertainments drew comparisons between her and other French princesses who had become queens of England and could act as role models for her activities. Among them Queen Bertha, who had converted her husband, King Ethelbert of Kent, and who was depicted on the seventh and last arch of the Amiens entry, holding a sun in her hand to show that J’estois fille de France espouse d’un grand Roy A qui j’ay fait cognoistre un seul Dieu qu’on adore: Je n’ay que commencé faisant comme l’Aurore Qui vous ai attiré vray Soleil de la Foy.71 [I was a daughter of France and the wife of a great king / To whom I made known the one God who is adored: / But I was only the start; like the Dawn, / I have drawn you, true Sun of the Faith]. Epithalamia too emphasized Henrietta Maria’s conversionary mission. The authors of Le Triomphe des François et des Anglois and Le Parnasse Triomphant both alluded to the future happiness of English Catholics that would follow the royal wedding: Une belle esperance Je vois naistre aujourd’huy au coeur de nos François, Et en l’ame des bons Catholiques Anglois.72 [Today I see / A new hope being born in the hearts of our French people / And in the souls of good English Catholics]. Elaborating on this idea, Mareschal saw a divine plan in the union between a Catholic princess and a Protestant monarch.73 As God’s elect, Henrietta Maria was the one destined to bring England back into the Catholic fold: Peuple trop heureux! si tu peux Te rendre digne de ses vœux, Et dans la douceur de sa face Perdant ton erreur & ton fiel, Ouvrir ton Royaume à la Grace Qui t’ouvrira celuy du Ciel.74 70 Quoted in Erin Griffey, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016), p. 40. According to Griffey, she received the papal gift on her arrival in Amiens. 71 Le Mercure François, vol. 11, p. 380. 72 Le Parnasse Triomphant, p. 8. 73 Clause 17 stipulated that ‘Les Enfans qui naistront du Mariage seront eslevez auprès de la Royne leur mère jusqu’à l’aage de treize ans’ [the children born of the marriage would be brought up under the Queen’s care until the age of thirteen]. See Père Henri Griffet, Histoire du règne de Louis XIII, Roi de France et de Navarre, 3 vols (Paris: chez les libraires associés, 1758), vol. 1, pp. 421–22. 74 Mareschal, Les feux de joye, p. 44.
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[O too happy people! if only you could / Be worthy of her prayers, / And in the sweetness of her face / Losing your error and your gall, / Open your kingdom to the grace / Which will open for you the kingdom of heaven]. As for Le Beau, the author of an Adieu de la France à la Serenissime Reyne de la Grand’Bretagne, he compared Henrietta Maria with the Ark of the Covenant, at the mere sight of which the walls of Jericho once fell: Par tous les coins de la terre On dira tousjours de toy, […] De mesme sans bruit ny guerre, Et sans aucune terreur Que tu auras mis parterre La Babylone d’erreur.75 [In every corner of the earth / You will always be said / […] / To have, in the same way, / Without noise, war, or terror, / Brought down / The Babylon of error]. However the conversion of Charles I to Catholicism would only be the beginning. Most panegyrists also hoped for the defeat of Islam and the recovery of the Holy Land. The poets Mareschal and Garnier vied with each other to encourage European nations to embark on a new crusade against the Turks: Qui voyant la France, & l’Espagne, Et l’Angleterre en bon accord, Si leurs Roys marchent en campagne, Ne tiendra l’infidelle mort? […] S’ils veulent joindre leurs bannieres, (Seulement pour un tel effect) Qui dessous leurs armes guerrieres Ne verra le Croissant deffaict?76 [Seeing the new entente cordiale / Between France, Spain, and England, / If their Kings fight together, / Who will not regard the Infidel as dead? /[…] / If they seek to join their standards, / (With only this goal in mind) / Who will not see the Crescent defeated / By their warlike weapons?] The same hopes had been raised by the Franco-Spanish marriages in 1615 and the marriage of another French princess (Christine) with the heir to the Duchy of Savoy in 1619. A ballet on the Adventure de Tancrède en la Forest enchantée had 75 I. Le Beau, Adieu de la France à la Serenissime Reyne de la Grand’Bretagne (Paris: C. Hulpeau, 1625), pp. 11–12. 76 Garnier, Le Bouquet du lys et de la rose, pp. 10–11.
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marked the latter occasion. Its topic, inspired by the exploits of Geoffrey of Bouillon in the Holy Land, had augured well for the future of Christendom.77 But contrary to the more realistic hope of the conversion of English Protestants to Catholicism, the call for a crusade against the Turks seems to have been only a topos periodically revived for great state celebrations, although the renewed threat from the Ottoman empire and the restoration of the cult of Saint Louis by Louis XIII in 1618 might have given it a new urgency. Unsurprisingly English epithalamia called for another conversion, that of Henrietta Maria herself to Protestantism. And this in turn was the prelude to the Church’s long-awaited triumph over the forces of evil, as in Marcelline’s apocalyptic tableau in Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum: Happie in this Contract is Christendome; for although now it may for a time endure the corrosive of war, yet it shall be healed with the plaster of peace; and a wrangling mother shall beget a quiet daughter; and the purifying of the aire shall bee the issue of storme & lightning. Happie in this Contract are Christians; for they see the bow of the wicked broken, and the horne of the righteous exalted; the woman in travaile shall forsake the desert; the Church shall put off her mourning weeds, and put on the robes of comfort; the name of Christ and the Gospell shall be exalted, and the man of sinne and perdition cast into everlasting destruction.78 Just like the political agenda, the religious agenda discernible in encomiastic discourse on both sides of the Channel revealed misunderstandings in international relations. Besides, whereas ‘reasons of state’ and religion seemed to coexist amiably in France, in Britain they pitted king and subjects against one another. Reality soon revealed the futility of these nationalistic ambitions and religious hopes. The long-awaited intervention in the affairs of the Palatinate, which Louis XIII reluctantly agreed to finance, was a disastrous failure. French and British troops confronted each other at La Rochelle two years later and, far from converting to Catholicism, Britain opposed Charles I’s religious policies and viewed the teachings of Arminianism as heretical and a threat to the Protestant Reformation. The images of union, concord, and harmony developed in epithalamia and festival books did not outlast the marriage celebrations. Paradoxically the only image to stand the test of time was one which had been summarily handled in encomiastic discourse because the consideration of personal feelings did not enter princely marriage negotiations: that of a couple bound together by love.
77 According to Claude Malingre, ‘que le subject du ballet du Roy pour la resjouïssance de ceste Alliance, ayant esté pris sur les advantures de Godefroy de Boüillon, en la conqueste de la Terre Saincte, estoit un bon augure’ [the fact that the subject of the King’s ballet given to celebrate the alliance was drawn from the adventures of Geoffrey of Bouillon in the Holy Land, was regarded as a good omen] (Annales Générales de la Ville de Paris (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1640), Book XVII, p. 647). 78 Marcelline, Epithalamium, p. 100.
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Bibliography Manuscripts and Archival Documents
London, British Library, King’s MS 135, fol. 528v. ‘Bref de Notre St Pere le Pape Vrbain VIII, a Madame, s’en allant en Angleterre, l’exhortant a remettre la Religion catholique, en cest pays dont Elle a esté bannie’ Paris, Archives nationales, K 1303, no 1. ‘Instruction de la Reine Marie de medicis — a la Reine dangleterre sa fille marie-anriette de France’ Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr 23600. ‘Rellation de ce qui s’est fait tant aux fiancailles de madame Henriette marie de France [Sœur] du Roy avec Charles premier Roy de la grande bretagne lesquelles furent faictes au louvre en la chambre du Roy le Jeudy huitiesme mai Jour de Lassension qu’au mariage de ladicte dame qui fut faict en l’eglise de nostre dame le dimanche xi du[dict] mois et an 1625’ Engravings
Pierre Firens, ‘La représentation du Mariage accordé entre les très puissans roys de France et d’Angleterre, pour Charles, prince de Walles, duc de Cornwy, avec Madame Henriette Marie, sœur du très chrestien Roy de France et de Navarre Louys XIII, l’an 1624, au mois de novembre’, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes et photographie, Collection Hennin (2056), Réserve FOL-QB-201 (23) Willem van de Passe (attr.), ‘Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum, or A Discourse of the Mariage betwixt England and France’, London, British Museum, 1934, 1130.1 Early Printed Books
Ceremonies et solennitez observees en l’Eglise de Nostre Dame de Paris, au mariage du Roy de la Grand’Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du Roy (Lyon: Nicolas Jullieron, 1625) Cotolendi, Charles, Histoire de la Tres-Haute et Tres-Puissante Princesse Henriette-Marie de France, Reyne de la Grand’Bretagne (Paris: Michel Brunet, 1693) Dupleix, Scipion, Histoire de Louis le Juste, XIII du nom (Paris: Claude Sonnius, 1635) Eclogue, ou Chant pastoral sur les nopces des Serenissimes Princes Charles Roy de la Grand’Bretagne, France et Irlande, et de Henriette Marie, fille de Henry le Grand, Roy de France, et de Navarre (London: [n.pub.], 1627) L’Entrée superbe et magnifique faite à la Royne de la grande Bretagne en la ville d’Amiens. Le Samedi septiesme de Juin 1625 (Paris: Fleury Bourriquant, 1625) Garnier, Claude, Le Bouquet du lys et de la rose. Au nom de l’alliance de France et d’Angleterre (Paris: [n.pub.], 1624) Godefroy, Théodore, Le Cérémonial François, 2 vols (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1649) Griffet, le Père Henri, Histoire du règne de Louis XIII, Roi de France et de Navarre, 3 vols (Paris: chez les libraires associés, 1758) Gualterotti, Raffaello, Descrizione del regale apparato per le nozze della Serenissima Madama Cristina di Loreno (Florence: Antonio Padovani, 1589)
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Le Beau, I., Adieu de la France à la Serenissime Reyne de la Grand’Bretagne (Paris: C. Hulpeau, 1625) Le Vassor, Michel, Histoire de Louis XIII, roi de France et de Navarre, 6 vols (Amsterdam: aux dépens des associés, 1757) Malingre, Claude, Annales Générales de la Ville de Paris (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1640) Marcelline, George, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum: or, Great-Britaines, Frances and the most parts of Europes unspeakable Ioy […] (London: Thomas Archer, 1625) Mareschal, André, Les Feux de joye, sur l’heureuse alliance d’Angleterre (Paris: B. Martin, 1625) Matarel, Les Magnificences Royales, faictes en Angleterre à l’Arrivée & Reception de la Royne (Paris: N. Alexandre, 1625) Le Mercure François, ou, la Suitte de l’histoire de la paix, 25 vols (Paris: Jean & Estienne Richer, 1611–1648) Motteville, Françoise Bertault de, Mémoires, 5 vols (Amsterdam: François Changuion, 1723) Le Parnasse Triomphant, à l’honneur du Roy de la Grand’Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du Roy, son Espouse (Paris: Jean Bessin, 1625) Puget de La Serre, Jean, Les Amours du Roy & de la Reyne (Paris: Nicolas Bessin & Denis de Cay, 1625) Recueil des plus beaux vers de messieurs de Malherbe, Racan, Monfuron, Maynard, Boisrobert, L’Estoille, Lingendes, Touvant, Motin, Mareschal et autres des plus fameux esprits de la Cour (Paris: Toussainct du Bray, 1627) Rémy, Abraham, La Galatée et les adventures du prince Astiagès. Histoire de nostre temps où sous noms feints sont représentez les amours du roy et de la reyne d’Angleterre. Avec tous les voyages qu’il a fait, tant en France qu’en Espagne (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1625) Triomphe des François et Anglois (s.l.: n.p., 1624 or 1625) Le Triomphe glorieux & l’ordre des ceremonies observees au mariage du Roy de la Grand’ Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du Roy […] par le sieur D. B. (Paris: J. Martin, 1625) Primary Sources
Bérulle, Pierre de, ‘Extraits des avis que le Cardinal de Bérulle rédigea au nom de Marie de Médicis pour la reine d’Angleterre’, in Œuvres complètes de Bérulle, ed. by l’Abbé Migne (Petit-Montrouge: J.-P. Migne, 1856), pp. 1519–21 Brienne, Henri-Auguste de Loménie, Comte de, Mémoires du comte de Brienne, ed. by A. Petitot, 2 vols (Paris: Foucault, 1824) Garasse, Père François, Mémoires, ed. by Charles Nisard (Paris: Amyot, 1860) Huygens, Christiaan, Œuvres complètes, 23 vols (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888–1950) Jonson, Ben, The Masque of the Fortunate Isles and their Union, in Ben Jonson, ed. by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1952), vol. 7 (1941) La Porte, Pierre de, Mémoires de La Porte, ed. by J. F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat (Paris: Éd. du commentaire analytique du Code civil, 1839) La Rochefoucauld, François de, Mémoires, ed. by J. F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat (Paris: Éd. du commentaire analytique du Code civil, 1838)
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Louis XIII, Lettres de la main de Louis XIII, ed. by Eugène Griselle, 2 vols (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles français, 1914) Malleville, Claude, Œuvres poétiques, ed. by Raymond Ortali, 2 vols (Paris: M. Didier, 1976) Retz, Jean François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de, Œuvres, ed. by Marie-Thérèse Hipp and Michel Pernot (Paris: Gallimard, 1984) Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de, Mémoires du cardinal de Richelieu, 10 vols (Paris: H. Laurens (H. Champion), 1908–1931) Tallemant des Réaux, Gédéon, Historiettes, ed. by Antoine Adam, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) Secondary Studies
Britland, Karen, Drama at the courts of Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 2006) —— , ‘A Fairy Tale Marriage; Charles and Henrietta Maria’s Romance’, in Alexander Samson (ed.), The Spanish Marriage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 123–37 Canova-Green, Marie-Claude, ‘Remarques sur la datation et l’attribution de ballets de cour sous le règne de Louis XIII’, XVIIe siècle, 157 (4) (1987), 421–26 —— , ‘Le mythe de l’Âge d’or dans les divertissements à la cour des Bourbons et des premiers Stuarts’, in P. Béhar (ed.), Image et Spectacle (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 25–45 Cottret, Bernard, ‘Diplomatie et Éthique de l’État. L’ambassade d’Effiat en Angleterre et le mariage de Charles Ier d’Angleterre et d’Henriette-Marie de France (été 1624– printemps 1625)’, in Henry Méchoulan (ed.), L’État baroque : regards sur la pensée politique de la France du premier XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1985), pp. 221–42 Dubost, Jean-François, Marie de Médicis. La Reine dévoilée (Paris: Éditions Payot et Rivages, 2009) Gaulin, Chantal, ‘À propos du goûter de confitures offert par Richelieu à Marie de Médicis’, Journal d’Agric. Trad. et de Bota. Appli, 35 (1988), 233–40 Griffey, Erin, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016) —— , ‘The Materials of Marital Diplomacy: Henrietta Maria’s Trousseau’, in R. Malcolm Smuts and Luc Duerloo (eds), The Age of Rubens (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 197–212 Hibbard, Caroline, ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen’, The Court Historian, 5 (2000), 15–28 McGowan, Margaret M. (ed.), Dynastic Marriages 1612/1615. A Celebration of the Habsburg and Bourbon Unions (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) Murdoch, Steve, ‘James VI and the Formation of a Scottish-British Military Identity’, in Steve Murdoch and Andrew Mackillop (eds), Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience c. 1550–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002) Sharpe, Kevin, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010)
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Smuts, R. Malcolm, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–38 Wolfson, Sara J., ‘Practical Proselytising: The Impact of Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the Caroline Court, 1625–1626’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy. Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018), pp. 43–63
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Chapter 5. ‘All Rich as Invention Can Frame, or Art Fashion’* Dressing and Decorating for the Wedding Celebrations of 1625 The wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria had all the eyes of Christendom on it: here, in an unprecedented move, a young Bourbon princess, raised as a devout Catholic, was marrying the Protestant king of England. The stakes were high, both for the royal families involved and the Church: in addition to the prestige of a royal match, a rich dowry for England and a valuable political alliance for both, the marriage showcased the potential for confessional movement at courts. The opportunity — but also the liability — was the possibility of a conversion, and certainly the hopes were very real for the papacy that Charles I might convert to Catholicism and even some in English circles fixed their expectations on an impressionable princess who could be swayed to Protestantism. Other courts could see that cross-confessional royal matches could secure, if not immediate rewards, then long-term possibilities. If there was always a need at royal weddings to promote the political weight and religious integrity of the respective families concerned, this was a particularly sensitive issue for the wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, as other essays in this volume discuss. Given the range of potential tensions, one arena that could be usefully marshalled to signal a united front, a suitable magnificence binding France and England, was the material display of appropriately magnificent clothing, jewellery, and decorations. That most visible and indeed oft-commented aspect of weddings then and now — the bride’s wedding dress and the rich ensembles worn by the wedding party — vividly displayed status and staged a successful match. Similarly, the wedding and reception venues, with their decorations, needed to ‘match’ the status of the couple.
* The quotation, cited in Henry Ellis, Original Letters Illustrative of English History, 3 vols (London: Harding, Triphook & Lepard, 1824), ser. 1, vol. 3, p. 189, comes from the description of the Duke of Buckingham’s clothes ordered for his potential appearance as proxy at the wedding festivities. This, as will be seen below, did not materialize. However, the quote embodies the richness of materials on display. Erin Griffey is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 131–151 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119188
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For the elite, their prerogative and duty was to communicate ‘magnificence’, which Aristotle explained in terms of a relationship between a person’s status and material display: ‘the expenses of the magnificent man are large and fitting […] and he will consider how the result can be made most beautiful and most becoming’.1 This concept of magnificence was circulated in Thomas Hobbes’ 1637 A briefe of the art of rhetorique, which foregrounds the importance of a man doing what is ‘proper’, ‘sutable’, what one is ‘fit for’.2 The English term ‘suitable’ or the French ‘convenable’ was regularly deployed at the time and used to describe objects or display that were appropriate to a person’s status or dignité.3 This notion of dignité was similarly stressed in the articles of the marriage treaty.4 Comparable early modern terms underscored how any object, garment or palace was meant to correspond to the quality of the owner: ‘fit’, ‘requisite’, ‘convenient’, ‘fitting’. The coupling of magnificence with decorum had strong currency at the early modern courts, where lavish expenditure was justified in goods that were highly visible and symbolic. Magnificence was, in essence, the materialization of status in clothing, jewellery, and the whole panoply of materials displayed ceremonially. This extended to the decorating of palaces, with their rich assemblages of suitably magnificent artworks and furnishings, and in the case of the dress and decorations for the wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, this was done with exacting attention. This essay will examine the strategic dressing of the wedding party, both in terms of clothing and jewellery but also in the form of the lavish textiles that were proudly displayed in Notre Dame Cathedral to champion the magnificence of the Bourbons. Comparisons will be drawn with other royal weddings in France and England to show the extent to which such choices were conventional and a number of general observations will be made here about the setting, protocol, and materials found in early modern royal weddings. The wedding clothing and decorations will also be related, where relevant, to the contents of Henrietta Maria’s lavish trousseau, a gift from her brother, King Louis XIII, a materialization of Bourbon magnificence.5 Although this was the first major cross-national wedding of a Catholic princess with a Protestant king, this was not the first cross-confessional
1 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by William David Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), book IV, ch. 2 [accessed 19 June 2015]. 2 Thomas Hobbes, A briefe of the art of rhetorique Containing in substance all that Aristotle hath written in his three bookes of that subject, except onely what is not applicable to the English tongue (London: printed by Tho. Cotes, for Andrew Crook, 1637), p. 20. 3 For this concept, see Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae notitia, or, The present state of England by Edward Chamberlayne (London: printed by T. N. for J. Martyn, 1670), p. 312. 4 See in particular articles 4 and 5; BL, Kings MS 135, fols 66r-v. For dignity as a quality of rank, see also fol. 68v. 5 On the trousseau, see Erin Griffey, On Display: Henrietta and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2015), especially Chapter 2, and Appendix 1, which provides a transcription and translation of the trousseau. See also Griffey, ‘The Materials of Marital Diplomacy: Henrietta Maria’s Trousseau’, in Luc Duerloo and Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Age of Rubens (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 197–212.
C h a p ter 5 . ‘All Rich as In ven tio n Ca n Fra me, or Art Fa shion’
Plate I. Henri de Navarre and Marguerite de Valois, in Catherine de Médicis’s Book of Hours, c. 1544?, fol. 169r.
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Plate II. The Coronation of Marie de Médicis at Saint-Denis 13 May 1610, Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Plate III. Raphael’s cartoon for the tapestry of Christ’s Charge to St Peter, c. 1515–1516, Royal Collection Trust.
C h a p ter 5 . ‘All Rich as In ven tio n Ca n Fra me, or Art Fa shion’
marriage in recent French history. In 1572, the Catholic Princess Marguerite de Valois married the Protestant Henri de Bourbon, King of Navarre, a union commemorated in a portrait in Catherine de Médicis’ Book of Hours [Plate I]. Indeed, their wedding was closely scrutinized to shape the protocol and decoration of the 1625 wedding, as shall be seen below.6 Upon Henri IV being crowned King of France in 1589, Marguerite became Queen. After their marriage was annulled in 1599, Henri married Marie de Médicis, a Florentine princess with a huge (and much needed) dowry, and eventually Marguerite returned to Paris. Marguerite is depicted in blue royal robes ‘powdered’ with royal fleurs-de-lis and lined with ermine in Rubens’s depiction of The Coronation of Marie de Médicis [Plate II].7 Marguerite’s presence reveals her continued currency at the French court, a currency announced not solely in her official presence but her visual proximity to Marie and the royal attire she wears. Henrietta Maria would have almost certainly met Marguerite and known her history and significance at court and she may have felt a powerful connection to her on the occasion of her own wedding to a Protestant king. Beyond the parallels in terms of the confessional dynamics of their weddings, there were further links between Marguerite and the young Henrietta Maria — both were younger daughters who had spent their childhoods at the royal palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye; both were daughters and sisters of kings and had older sisters who married Spanish kings. Perhaps Henrietta Maria wondered if she would be destined, like Marguerite, for years of religious turmoil and exile. But any internal conflicts on her wedding day were covered by the splendour of material magnificence.
6 See BNF, NAF MS 7020, BL Kings MS 136, BL Add MS 4154, and BL Add MS 30.649 which couple the accounts of the Queen’s trousseau, household and marriage ceremonies with the ceremonies of Henri IV’s marriage with Marguerite de Valois in 1572 and a list of the officers of the household of Anna of Denmark. The precedents of recent royal blood relatives of each were both studied and invoked for both the marriage ceremony and for the constitution of the Queen’s household. See for example BL Kings MS 136, ‘Recueil de Lettres, de Memoires, d’Actes, d’instructions et de Contracts, faits pour parvenir le Traité de Mariage d’entre Madame Henriette Marie soeur du Roy, et Charles Premier Roy de la Grande Bretagne’ (1624–1625), fols 206v-207r, that the house of ‘Madame sera composé avec autant de dignité et aussy grand nombre d’officiers qu’ait jamais eu Reine d’Angleterre’. Anna would remain an important precedent, and the young Queen would invoke her predecessor for example in the heated argument to choose officials to manage her jointure lands. See Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, ed. by Rawdon Brown, 38 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864–1947), vol. 19 (London, 1913), p. 497. Article 3 of the marriage contract specifies that they be married in the manner of Henri IV and Marguerite de Valois (as well as Madame the Duchesse de Bar); BL Kings MS 135, fol. 66r; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Salisbury MSS (London, 1883–1976), Pt 22, p. 198. 7 The robes resemble the robes worn at coronation ceremonies. On the attire worn by French queens at their French coronations and Marie’s outfit at her coronation, see Nicolas Menin, An Historical and Chronological Treatise of the Anointing and Coronation of the Kings and Queens of France, From Clovis I. to the Present King (London: printed for W. Mears, S. Chapman & J. Woodman, 1723), pp. 253–55. ‘Powdered’ or ‘powder’d’ is commonly used to describe the decorative placement of fleur-de-lis on coronation garments, as on p. 255.
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It must have seemed more Henrietta Maria’s wedding than the bridegroom’s — after all, the wedding was taking place in Paris and the bridegroom was not physically present but represented by proxy. This was not unusual. Such had been the case with numerous cross-national weddings, where it was generally deemed essential that the bride was married before she left her natal court. There were a number of precedents, including Mary Tudor, who married Louis XII of France in 1514 at Greenwich Palace through the Duc de Longueville; Anna of Denmark, who married James VI of Scotland (the future James I of England) through George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal in 1589 in Kronborg Castle in Denmark; Henrietta Maria’s mother, Marie de Médicis, who married Henri IV of France in 1600 in the duomo in Florence through the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando; proxies were also on hand at the 1615 double wedding of Henrietta Maria’s older sister, Élisabeth de Bourbon, to Philip, Prince of Asturias (later King Philip IV), and her older brother, King Louis XIII, to Anne d’Autriche. George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, was originally suggested as the proxy for Charles and, in inimitable style, had orchestrated an elaborate wardrobe for the wedding festivities comprising Twenty seven rich suits embroidered and laced with silk and silver plusches, besides one rich white satten uncut velvet suit, set all over both suite and cloak with diamonds, the value whereof is thought to be four score thousand pounds, besides a feather made with great diamonds, with sword, girdle, hat-band, and spurs with diamonds; which suit his Grace intends to enter Paris with. The other rich suit is of purple satin, embroidered all over with rich orient pearls; the cloak made after the Spanish fashion, with all things suitable, the value whereof will be 20,000 l. and this is thought shall be for the wedding day in Paris. His other suits are all rich as invention can frame, or art fashion. His colours for the Entrance are white and watchet, and for the Wedding, crimson and gold.8 Such sartorial and bejewelled magnificence — such impressive ‘value’, measured both in monetary terms and in artistic ones (‘invention’ or ‘art’) — would not have been lost on the fashion-conscious French court. The choice of pearl-encrusted purple satin — which may have been a violet crimson based on the reference to his wedding colours of ‘crimson and gold’ — would have been unambiguous in its regal hue. The account stresses that the garments and jewels are ‘rich’ (the word is used in the paragraph six times); this was a mark of the value of both the material or object as well as its wearer. It was of course customary for the proxy to be royally attired since he was there to embody the bridegroom. Ultimately Buckingham was abandoned in favour of offering Louis XIII a choice between his brother, Gaston, Duc d’Orléans (Monsieur), and Charles I’s distant relative,
8 Ellis, Original Letters, vol. 3, p. 189.
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the high ranking Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse.9 The Duc de Chevreuse was selected and, as will be shown below, he was just as eager as Buckingham to highlight his proxy status through dress and jewellery. The contract (the betrothal) was settled on Thursday 8 May French time (or New Style, which was 28 April in English or Old Style time) in Louis XIII’s chamber in the Louvre.10 The room was decorated in crimson velvet embellished with lavish passementerie or trimming.11 The King appeared ‘comme un beau soleil’,12 and there, in his reflection, was his sister, wearing a spectacular outfit fashioned from cloth of silver and gold: Her garments that day were exceeding rich and sumptuous, her Gowne being of cloth of gold, cut upon cloth of silver, and richly embrodered all over with Flower de Luces [fleurs-de-lis] of gold, and chased and interlaid with Dimonds, Rubies, Pearle, and other rich Juelrie of inestimable valew.13
9 On the selection of Chevreuse as proxy, which was both a personal (as a kinsman to the English King) and financial one, see Calendar of State Papers, Venice [hereafter CSPV], ed. by Allen B. Hinds (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1913), vol. 19 [1625–1626], p. 7, and Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), The Manuscripts of Henry Duncan Skrine, Esq.: Salvetti Correspondence, 11th Report, Appendix, Part I (London: HMSO, 1887), pp. 5–10. 10 Five contemporary accounts for the wedding are used here: Anon., A true discourse of all the royal passages, tryumphs and ceremonies, obserued at the contract and mariage of the high and mighty Charles, King of Great Britaine, and the most excellentest of ladies, the Lady Henrietta Maria of Burbon (London: printed by John Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625) [reproduced in Appendix 1]; Anon., L’Ordre des ceremonies observees au mariage du roy de la Grand Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du roy: ensemble l’ordre tenuë aux fiançailles faictes au Chasteau du Louvre, en la chambre de sa Maiesté: avec l’ordre du service observé au souppé royal faict en la grand salle l’embruissee de l’archevesché (Paris: de l’imprimerie de Jean Martin, 1625); the account of the Venetian ambassador to France, CSVP 19, 1625–1626, p. 44; the account published in Le Mercure François, 25 vols (Paris, 1611–1648), vol. 11, pp. 353–65; and BL Kings MS 136, fols 463r-99v (also transcribed in BL, Additional MS 4154, fols 268v-302r and Add MS 30.649, fols 265r-86v). The latter two appear to have been very little used by scholars. The L’Ordre account was translated into English and published the same year as A relation of the glorious triumphs and order of the ceremonies, obserued in the marriage of the high and mighty Charles, King of Great Brittaine, and the Ladie Henretta [sic] Maria, sister to the most Christian King of France Together vvith the ceremonie obserued in their troth-plighting, performed in the castle of the Louure, in his Maiesties chamber there. As also the Kings declaration containing a prohibition vnto all his subiects to use any traffique or commerce with the kingdome of Spaine. Published in the Parliament of Paris, the 12. of May, 1625. Whereunto the originall French copie is added (London: printed by T[homas] S[nodham and others] for Nathaniel Butter, 1625) [reproduced in Appendix 2]. On the confessional divide from the marriage through to the death of Buckingham, see Caroline Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen’, Court Studies, 5 (May 2000), 15–28; Sara J. Wolfson, ‘Practical Proselytising: The Impact of Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the Caroline Court, 1625–1626’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018), pp. 43–63. 11 The only mention is in BL, Kings MS 136, fols 463v. 12 L’Ordre des ceremonies, p. 5; Relation of the glorious triumphs, unpaginated, ‘like the glorious Sunne’. 13 True discourse, p. 3; this is the most detailed description of her betrothal dress. See also L’Ordre des ceremonies, pp. 5–6, and Relation of the glorious triumphs, unpaginated. According to BL, Kings MS 136, fols 468v-69r, however, she wore white satin thickly embroidered in gold and jewels. If the Kings MS description is correct, this corroborates Suzanne Lussier’s suggestion that the white satin ensemble with gold and silver embroidery in her trousseau was the betrothal dress; see Lussier, ‘Habillement de la Dite Dame Reine’: An Analysis of the Gowns and Accessories in Queen Henrietta Maria’s Trousseau’, Costume, 52 (1) (2018), 31–32.
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Cloth of silver and cloth of gold were regularly used for royal wedding attire for both bride and groom, as it was for example at the wedding of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves.14 The Princess Marie Louise Gonzaga, too, in her 1645 wedding to King Ladislaus IV of Poland wore cloth of silver.15 White, with its associations with virginity and the Virgin Mary, was another popular colour choice for royal brides and bridegrooms; Catherine of Aragon wore white, as did Arthur, Prince of Wales, at their wedding on 14 November 1501 in St Paul’s Cathedral, and so too did Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, when she married the dauphin of France, François, on 24 April 1558.16 What was essential in all royal wedding attire was the inherent value of both the textiles and the precious stones that adorned the garments and jewellery; as such the royal entourage embodied value very visibly. King Edward VI described his ideal wife in comparable terms: ‘a foreign princess, well stuffed and well jewelled’.17 Similarly, seventeenth-century accounts explicitly stress material worth as inherently linked to the illustrious quality of the person wearing it. It was a palpable way in which a person embodied value. This is evident in the description of Charles I’s proxy, the Duc de Chevreuse, who deployed his magnificent dress as a mirror to the King’s own in his outfit for the betrothal ceremony, being: most richly attired, and though the ground was blacke, yet was the imbrodery of admirable value, and abundance of Diamonds and other Precious stones bestowed within the same, but especially upon the panes of his breeches and the tagges of his points, which were praised as an infinite world of treasure.18 As such, Chevreuse’s rich attire — his wearing quite literally a ‘world of treasure’ — was suitable to his role as proxy for the betrothal ceremony. Jewels were a central element of the magnificence of the bride and bridegroom and their respective families and were the subject of much relish in accounts of early modern royal weddings. Pearls and diamonds in particular seem to have been extensively used in the context of weddings, as we see in the case of Henrietta Maria and Charles I, and a splendid array of these gemstones (and only these gemstones) appear in Henrietta Maria’s trousseau.19 14 Detailed descriptions are provided in Maria Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII (Leeds: Maney, 2007), p. 54; see also the dress worn by Princess Mary for her 1518 betrothal to the Dauphin of France, described also by Hayward, p. 51. On cloth of silver for bridal garments, see also Marieke de Winkel, Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Painting (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), p. 70. 15 See Memoirs of Madam de Motteville on Anne of Austria and Her Court, trans. by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, 3 vols (Boston: Hardy, Pratt & Co, 1902), vol. 1, p. 139. 16 On the significance of white in royal bridal gowns and bridegrooms’ apparel, see Hayward, Dress at the Court of Henry VIII, p. 52. 17 Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII, p. 213, citing Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, vol. 2, p. 339. 18 True discourse, p. 5; see also L’Ordre des ceremonies, pp. 6–7. 19 Jacob Cats writes about both diamonds and pearls within the context of weddings in his section on the bride in Houwelick (Middelburgh: Inde druckerye van Jan Pieterss van de Venne, 1625); see pp. 32–34. On the jewels in Henrietta Maria’s trousseau, see Erin Griffey, On Display, pp. 43–45 & 257–58 and Griffey, ‘The Materials of Marital Diplomacy’, p. 204.
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The wedding, the ‘Celebration’, needed to be conducted with ‘so great a pompe and state’ as well, and this was marshalled magnificently in the dress and decorations for the occasion.20 Weddings were often conducted on important days in the calendar, and the choice of Sunday, 1 May in English time (11 May New Style) may have been decided because of the associations of May Day with fertility. The Dutch poet and emblematist Jacob Cats’s hugely popular Houwelick (Marriage), published the same year as the wedding, situates the bride in ‘de koele Mey’, with flowers blooming.21 This has special resonance for Henrietta Maria’s wedding day — the lily (Henrietta Maria) would now marry the rose (Charles I). A massive progress of the wedding party moved from the Archbishop’s palace to Notre Dame via an eight-foot high gallery that ended at a platform in front of the main, western portal to the cathedral hung with a rich canopy of cloth of gold, which a French account describes as of ‘valeur inestimable’.22 This platform, with its dramatic gold backdrop, provided a set-up described repeatedly in one account as the ‘Theatre du mariage’.23 A similar elevated walkway had been deployed for the 18 August 1572 wedding of Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre at the same cathedral, with the wedding conducted on a dais in front of the west doors so that the bridegroom did not have to enter the church for the Catholic mass.24 Such structures were commonly erected for weddings and used for the procession of the bridal party from a palace to the church doors as well as from the doors of the church into the choir, where the mass would take place.25 The gallery was covered with violet satin covered with fleurs-de-lis, and the Queen was positioned between King Louis XIII (on her right) and Monsieur (on her left).26 Contemporary accounts relate how rich textiles were strategically deployed at Notre Dame to stage the significance of the event: and that it might bee the fitter for the receipt of so great a pompe and state, it was out of hand hang’d all over with wonderfull rich Arras, cloth of Tissue, cloth of Gold, and cloth of Silver; there was also in the same Church raised up upon goodly pillasters and gillt columbs a most rich and stately gallery or Scaffold of state, which extended from the first entry of the Archbishops
20 As cited in this context in True discourse, p. 7. 21 The section on the ‘Bruyt’ or the bride, Cats, Houwelick, p. 1 (‘cool May’). 22 L’Ordre des ceremonies, p. 12 (‘inestimable value’). Similarly, True discourse, p. 14, makes this point, ‘incomparable valew’. 23 Mercure François, vol. 11, p. 356. 24 Mercure François vol. 11, p. 356. Marguerite’s account of her wedding, The history of Queene Margaret of Valoys, was written in the 1590s, published in France in 1626, and translated into English and published in London in 1653, provides on pp. 30–31, a relatively short summary, though she does refer to the scaffolding as ‘usuall at the marriages of the Daughters of France’ and the court’s passing along the scaffold, with the court stopping at the door of the church for the official ceremony. 25 One was also used for the wedding of Catherine of Aragon and Arthur, Prince of Wales. 26 L’Ordre, pp. 7–8; True discourse, pp. 7–8 and p. 12; and Mercure François, vol. 11, pp. 355–59. Kings MS 136, fol. 479r calls it ‘bleu’.
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house to the very Quire or uppermost end of the same Church […] The Pillars and railes which did underprop this gallery were at the top covered with a very curious Purple or Violet coloured Sattin, all imbrodered and powdred over with golden Flower de Luces, and at the bottems they were overspread with very fine white linen and many burning tapers of waxe flaming about the same, so that the Church seemed like the Pallace of the Sunne […].27 Such ‘rich’ textiles provided a ‘fitter’, more appropriate stage for the wedding, presumably ‘fitter’ than cheaper materials or no textiles at all. The choice of cloth of gold and cloth of silver insists upon the value of precious metals — gold and silver — that matched the precious jewels worn by the wedding party. The metallic hues were fitting for the status of this royal troop, who sparkled — like the sun, like gold, like silver, like flames.28 These solar analogies abound in the accounts, and the English poet William Davenant (1606–1668) would describe Henrietta Maria as the ‘Queene of light’.29 The symbols of the lily and the sun and the rich materials chosen to convey those symbols were essential to communicating this symbolism. The lilies on display in the gallery and in the church signalled both the Bourbon crown and this ‘Mary’s’ virginity and echoed the embroidery on her bridal gown. Both the setting and its occupants were dressed to represent the sun. Chevreuse was there ‘representing the Person of the Royall Bride-Groome’ in a spectacular black velvet outfit with diamonds, the richness of the outfit itself a material representation of the king: Sute of most rich perfumed blackecloth, cut upon cloth of gold, and lined with rich Tissue; upon his head he wore a Cap of cloth of gold, on which was fixed a Jewell of a most inestimable value, every Diamond being so glorious, that it dazelled the eyes of all that gazed upon it; about his body Bantricke-wise he wore a wonderfull curious rich Scarffe, all embrodered over with Roses, and powdred with Paragon Diamonds, and great orient Pearle; he wore a short cloake all embrodered over with gold, and set with Diamonds so wonderfull thicke and curiously, that in his moving he seemed to burne and beare a living flame about him.30 His black ensemble accented with cloth of gold and lined with gold tissue, festooned with rich gold and embroidery, and adorned with a proliferation of 27 True discourse, pp. 7–8. 28 Comparable analogies are found in the description of Mary Tudor as a bride in Michael Drayton’s poem, Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk, to Mary the French Queene, in The barrons vvars in the raigne of Edward the second. VVith Englands heroicall epistles (London: printed by J[ames] R[oberts] for N. Ling, 1603). 29 William Davenant, Madagascar; with other poems (London: printed by John Haviland for Thomas Walkly, 1638), p. 47. 30 This account is taken from True discourse, p. 11. See also L’Ordre des ceremonies, p. 10, and CSPV, 1625–1626, 9/19 May 1625, p. 35. A paragon diamond is a perfect, flawless stone, and at this time at least 12 carats in size.
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large diamonds and pearls, the duke quite literally dazzled, appearing enveloped like a ‘living flame’. As Charles I’s ‘Presence’, such a characterization was appropriate given the solar attributes of the French royal family and the English king’s own central power in his own kingdom.31 James I had himself recognized jewellery as a sign of not just rank but divinity in claiming that kings were God’s representatives on earth ‘and so adorned and furnished with some sparkes of the Divinitie’.32 But as Amerigo Salvetti recognized at the death of James, courtiers were now turning their ‘eyes toward the new sun’, Charles I.33 Henrietta Maria was resplendent in a wedding ensemble that highlighted her dynastic importance and magnificence, ‘all powdred with golden Flower de Luces’, and wearing a gold crown set with diamonds and a ‘world of other precious stones’.34 We can safely assume that she was cloaked, as Marguerite de Valois had been, in the royal mantle of velvet emblazoned with still another large embroidered fleur-de-lis, the mantle lined in ermine.35 Marie de Médicis was portrayed in a similar mantle in a portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger, though this was made to commemorate her coronation.36 In the case of Henrietta Maria, the royal mantle is specifically listed in her trousseau: ‘un grand manteau Royal de velours violet cramoisy avec une grande queue toute parsemée de fleurs de Lys d’or en broderie doublée d’hermine’.37 Henrietta Maria seems to have worn this mantle, as Anne d’Autriche did at her marriage mass to Louis XIII, paired with its matching gown.38 This too seems to be borne out by Henrietta Maria’s trousseau, which lists the mantle in tandem with its matching gown: ‘la Robbe Royalle de même velours parsemé de fleurs de Lys avec les manches et corps’.39 Comparable gown-mantle ensembles are seen in Rubens’s depictions of Marie
31 This is the term used by John Finet, Finetti Philoxenis: som choice observations of Sr. John Finett knight, and master of the ceremonies to the two last Kings, touching the reception, and precedence, the treatment and audience, the puntillios and contests of forren ambassadors in England (London: printed by T.R. for H. Twyford & G. Bedell, 1656), p. 152. 32 Cited by Diana Scarisbrick, ‘Anne of Denmark’s Jewellery: The Old and the New’, Apollo 23 (1986), 229. 33 HMC, Skrine MSS, p. 5. 34 True discourse, p. 12. See also L’Ordre des ceremonies, p. 11, and Mercure François, vol. 11, p. 353. 35 For Marguerite’s wedding attire, see Marguerite, The history of Queene Margaret of Valoys, p. 31. 36 Marie de Médicis’s portrait is in the Louvre, Paris, Inv. 1710. As Isabelle Paresys has shown, this ensemble was worn by subsequent French queens, Isabelle Paresys, ‘Dressing the Queen at the French Renaissance Court: Sartorial Politics’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Sartorial Politics: Fashioning Women at the Early Modern Court (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019). On French fashions at the time of the wedding and garments in Henrietta Maria’s trousseau, see Paresys, ‘Dressing the Queen’ and Lussier, ‘Habillement’. 37 BL, Kings MS 136, fol. 445v; Griffey, On Display, p. 262. This is a point also made in Lussier’s ‘Habillement’, 26–47. 38 For a seventeenth-century account of Anne d’Autriche’s attire at the marriage mass, see Abby E. Zanger, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolute Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 59. See also the Rubens portrait of Anne d’Autriche in the Norton Simon, Pasadena, c. 1622–1625, thus several years after the wedding, but shown in the royal mantle and gown; illustrated in Griffey, On Display, fig. 76, p. 146. 39 BL, Kings MS 136, fols 445v-46r (‘a large Royal mantel of crimson violet velvet with a long train entirely dotted with gold embroidered fleur de Lys, lined with ermine’ and ‘the Royal Gown in same velvet sprinkled with fleur de Lys with its sleeves and bodice’); Griffey, On Display, p. 262.
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Figure 5.1. Pierre Firens, The Marriage Treaty between the Kings of France and England, November 1624, engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes et photographie, Réserve FOL-QB-201 (23).
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de Médicis and Marguerite de Valois in the Coronation of Marie de Médicis [Plate II]. Interestingly, none of the printed portraits that commemorate the betrothal or wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria match the descriptions found in contemporary accounts or the trousseau garments; only one print, the only one to my knowledge produced in France, depicts Henrietta Maria in a royal mantle [Figure 5.1].40 This could possibly be attributed to anxiety about her coronation or even a lack of knowledge on the part of English printmakers about conventions of French royal dress at weddings. Henrietta Maria bore the weight of her dynastic importance in her royal mantle and gown. This was a duty and a load that was not just symbolic. The physical weight of the materials of her outfit, complete with her crown, would have been immense, as period accounts mentioned in reference to other queens such as Anne d’Autriche and Marguerite de Valois.41 In this sense this was a physical burden that would have made for very calculated, slow movements, and, one imagines, feeling very hot and constricted. The King of France, present naturally ‘in his owne Person’, wore ‘Royall garments of Estate, all embrodered over with gold and silver, and almost covered over with rich Jewels’.42 The Queen, Anne d’Autriche, Monsieur, and the Earls of Carlisle and Holland were similarly dressed in cloth of gold and silver, so the effect was indeed as if Henrietta Maria was a sparkling reflection of her family.43 Indeed, the train was likened to ‘so many faire Planets mounting in their severall orbes, made all the place like the Heavens sparkle with renowne and glory about them’.44 There was little doubt who these planets were orbiting: King Louis XIII. Such was the association between the king and the sun, a seventeenth-century treatise on art claims that ‘sol’ or Apollo is the ‘author’ of ‘Honour, Glory, Renown, Preferment, Life, Generosity, Magnanimity, Sovereignty, Dominion, Power, Treasures, Gold, Silver and whatsoever may make the life of Man splendid’.45 Edward Payton’s Discours of Court and Courtiers (1633) similarly declares: ‘The Soveraigne is the Sunne of the Court’, with courtiers ‘borrowe[ing] theire
40 She would however be painted in the royal robe and mantle in a 1637 portrait by Van Dyck in the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gäarten Berlin-Brandenburg; illustrated in Griffey, On Display, fig. 54, p. 123. Note that the fleur-de-lis design of the stomacher is distinct from the stomacher illustrated here in Fig. 5.1. 41 On the weight and other constrictions of early modern dress, see Isabelle Paresys, ‘The Dressed Body: the Moulding of Identities in Seventeenth-Century France’, in Robert Muchembled et al. (eds), Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe: Forging European Identities, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 233, citing the example of Marguerite de Valois. See also Zanger, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV, p. 59, for a seventeenth-century account of Anne d’Autriche’s heavy garments worn at the marriage mass at Bordeaux. 42 True discourse, p. 12; see also L’Ordre des ceremonies, p. 11. 43 True discourse, pp. 12–13; L’Ordre des ceremonies, p. 11. Marie de Médicis was attired ‘very grave, yet richly’ according to True discourse, p. 12. 44 True discourse, p. 13. 45 William Salmon, Polygraphice, or, The art of drawing, engraving , etching, limning , painting , washing, varnishing, colouring, and dying in three books (London: printed by E. T. & R. H. for Richard Jones, 1672), p. 82.
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attracting splendour’.46 Thus the material sparkle Louis radiated was considered an expression of his power, and was reflected in his sister’s richly bejewelled ensemble.47 Perhaps one can see the predominance of cloth of gold and silver garments and gold and silver embroidery in Henrietta Maria’s trousseau as further mirrors of her richness and royal status as well as her link with the reflective brilliance of the sun, her brother.48 Virtually every garment had silver or gold as the ground material or in the embroidery. Having conducted the ‘theatre du mariage’, the Bourbon family paraded down another gallery through the nave of the cathedral, where the ceremony was concluded with a mass by Cardinal La Rochefoucauld, while the Duc de Chevreuse and English ambassadors excused themselves.49 The inside of the cathedral sparkled with ‘wonderfull rich cloth of Arras, being more then [sic] three quarters of gold and silver’ giving further shimmer to the ceremony.50 The nave they slowly processed down was encompassed by a massive set of 22 tapestries depicting the ‘triomphes & victoires de Scipion sur les Carthaginois’ [‘triumphs and victories of Scipio over the Carthaginians’]. On stopping at the choir, they were confronted by the nine-piece set of tapestries representing the Acts of the Apostles. These very rich sets of tapestries woven with gold, silver and silk were the ones commissioned in 1532 by François Ier from Brussels weavers after designs by Giulio Romano and Francesco Penni for the Scipio set and Raphael for the Apostle set.51 As the jewels in the French royal collection which had been regularly harnessed on ceremonial occasions, these sets reflected the magnificence of the Bourbons and their bridal princess.52 The Apostles set may have been selected for its iconographic significance. The original set, commissioned by Pope Leo X for the Sistine Chapel, stressed the pre-eminence
46 Quoted in Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 21; BL, Harley MS 3364, fol. 7r-v. 47 Similar celestial analogies were used in a description of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s wedding. See ‘Magnificent Marriage’, in John Nichols (ed.), The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols (London: printed by and for John Nichols, 1828), vol. 2, pp. 542–43, and Anon., Mariage of Prince Fredericke, and the Kings daughter (London: printed by T[homas] C[reek] for W. Barley, 1613), p. 8. 48 See the list of her garments in BL, Kings MS 136, fols 444v-46v. 49 The English carefully researched precedence in terms of French royal marriage ceremonial. See the letter of 22 March/1 April 1624 published in Cabala: Mysteries of State in Letters of the Great Ministers of King James and King Charles wherein Much of the Publique Manage d’Affaires is Related (London: for M. M. G. Bedell & T. Collins, 1654), pp. 106–07. 50 True Discourse, p. 15. 51 Mercure François, vol. 11, p. 355, is the only account that names the subjects of the tapestries. Both sets appear in the inventory of François Ier; see Sophie Schneebalg-Perelman, ‘Richesses du gardemeuble parisien de François Ier, inventaires inédits de 1542 et 1551’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th series, 78 (November 1971), 260–62. 52 On the commissioning of the Scipio and Apostle sets and their importance, see Thomas P. Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty, Tapestries at the Tudor Court (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 209–11; Thomas P. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, Art and Magnificence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 201; and Jules Romain, L’Histoire de Scipion: tapisseries et dessins (Paris: Éd. de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1978), pp. 341–48.
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Figure 5.2. Designed by Pierre Régnier, The Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625, silver, cast medal, 23.5 mm diameter. Showing busts of Charles I and Henrietta Maria on the obverse and Cupid walking, scattering roses and lilies, on the reverse. Private Collection.
of the Catholic Church through its founding figures Peter and Paul. Both the fountainhead of the church and martyrs for it, these apostles provided powerful exemplars for the bride, a visual reminder of the papal pressure on her, as one might see for example in Raphael’s cartoon for the tapestry of Christ’s Charge to St Peter [Plate III].53 In the spectacular tapestry itself, papal charge was complemented here by material richness and heavenly sparkle in the tapestry itself with its combination of wool, silk, and gilt-metal-wrapped thread. Once assembled in the choir, the heralds threw huge quantities of gold and silver ‘pieces’ ordered by the King to celebrate the marriage, medals with the heads of King and Queen on the recto and on the reverse Cupid scattering roses and lilies with the inscription ‘fundit amor lilia mixta rosis’ [Figure 5.2].54 Surrounded by a host of court and civic officials, the service was conducted in the choir, and the celebrations completed by spectacular canon-fire and a lavish dinner at the Archbishop’s palace, the dining room hung with the ‘plus belles tapisseries du Roy, avec grande quantité des chandeliers et de pleques’ [The most beautiful tapestries of the King, with great numbers of chandeliers].55 As with the procession, the 53 A version of the same set was hung at the wedding of Elizabeth of Bohemia. See ‘The Marriage of the Two Great Princes Frederick Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth’ (London: by T[homas] C[reede] for William Barley, 1613) transcribed in Archaeologia, 15 (1806), 544–46. However in this context the cycle would have functioned as a more generic showcase of the magnificence of the Stuart line. Even so, as Thomas Campbell has argued, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty, p. 273, the set on display has been acquired by Henry VIII after the break from Rome and would have been viewed as an image of the king himself as a ‘latter-date evangelist’. 54 ‘love pours out lilies mixed with roses’. For contemporary accounts, see BL, Kings MS 136, fol. 494v, and Joseph Mead’s description in Thomas Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of King Charles the First; Illustrated by Authentic and Confidential Letters, from Various Public and Private Collections; Including Memoirs of the Mission in England of the Capuchin Friars in the Service of Queen Henrietta Maria by Father Cyprien de Gamache, Capuchin Preacher and Missionary to the Queen, 2 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1848), vol. 1, p. 23. 55 BL, Kings MS 136, fol. 495v.
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seating arrangements were carefully planned to centralize the importance of the King, who was placed in the middle (on a dais) of the long table. Marie de Médicis sat to his immediate right, followed by Anne d’Autriche and Monsieur; his newly-wed sister was positioned to his left and ‘under’ (to her left) was the Duc de Chevreuse, followed by the Earls of Carlisle and Holland.56 Such an arrangement was calculated to position the French King as the focal point of the marriage; not only was he perfectly centred at the table, but he was placed on the hierarchic right of the new Queen of England. In turn Charles I’s proxy was placed on her left side. Thus such spatial arrangements were explicitly political in visually articulating rank. The wedding had taken place in France, after all, and the new Queen was a coup for the English court, politically and financially. The painstaking detail taken of issues of rank and precedence of the event would have been carefully narrated to the King by the English Earls present, and was publicly communicated in published accounts.57 The visual cachet of the event was compounded by the opening display of Rubens’s cycle of paintings glorifying the life of Marie de Médicis in the Luxembourg Palace. In fact, Cardinal Richelieu hosted an extravagant meal and entertainment shortly after the wedding ceremony to honour the ‘trois Reines’ — Henrietta Maria, Marie de Médicis, and Anne d’Autriche — and the English ambassadors in the grand gallery where the paintings hung.58 Even if Henrietta Maria had not been herself represented in the cycle (that honour going to her sister, Élisabeth, who appeared by virtue of her marriage to Philip, Prince of Asturias and later King of Spain), she was implicitly commemorated in the cycle as one of Marie’s progeny to marry a king, an association that would not have been lost by those viewing the pictures as part of the wedding festivities. The pictures themselves promoted a picture of virtuous queenship for the new Queen consort, and the values and iconography of Marie as displayed in the cycle were played out in both the life and portraits of her daughter, who would one day herself become a politically relevant (and polarizing) widow. If marriage was the centre of the cycle’s iconography — the source of Marie’s rank and status at the French court and the root major political alliances for France in the marriages of her children — Marie’s most recent coup in the marriage stakes with Henrietta Maria would have offered a living continuation of this heroic narrative.59 56 True discourse, p. 20; Mercure François, p. 362; BL, Kings MS 136, fol. 496r-v. 57 These issues were laboriously, obsessively recounted by court officials. For a sense of the enormous importance attached to rank and precedence at the English court, see the account of John Finet, Finetti Philoxeni, with its extensive coverage of such issues as they played out at the courts of James I and Charles I. See also Caroline Hibbard, ‘The Role of a Queen Consort: The Household and Court of Henrietta Maria, 1625–1642, in Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (eds), Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 393–414, on the ‘intricate dances of royal ceremonial’, p. 402. 58 BL, Kings MS 136, fol. 499v. 59 For Marie’s pivotal role in presenting a ‘concorde perpetuelle’ through the strategic marriage alliances of Élisabeth de France, see Nicola Courtright, ‘The Representation of the French-Spanish Marriage Alliance in the Medici Cycle: “Concorde perpetuelle”’, in Luc Duerloo and Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Early Seventeenth-Century
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As such the unveiling of the cycle allowed Marie to implicitly promote her own role in the alliance. If reflected light was a visual theme of the bridal party’s dress, it was also presented in the form of spectacular ‘bonefires, fireworks, feasts, musickes of all kinds, and all sounds, dancings, maskings, & all manner of revells’ that night all over France.60 Through such revels France had never been ‘more abundantly clothed with contentments and comforts’, ‘clothed’ here referring to the materials of magnificence (the shimmering garments and hangings, elements of light).61 As such, all of France basked in the reflected glory of the King and his sister. The materials and ceremonials of magnificence in Henrietta Maria’s first major rite of passage as Queen consort were characteristic of early modern court culture generally, and figured prominently in other visual displays throughout her life, especially at the Restoration. However there is little doubt that the stakes were never higher than on her wedding day: she was charged with the ambitions not just of her brother’s kingdom in a political alliance but the dreams of converting the English King and his kingdom to Catholicism.62 She had the weight of France, and indeed of the papacy, on her shoulders, a weight she literally carried in a wedding dress so heavily embroidered and enriched with jewels it much have been laborious to stand, let alone move. Her movement from Paris to London would be just as eagerly watched, and just as heavily laden.
Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 39–63. 60 L’Ordre des ceremonies, pp. 15–16, and True discourse, p. 17. 61 True discourse, p. 18. 62 On the French position regarding the marriage and the papal dispensation, see Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty’, p. 17, and Sara J. Wolfson’s chapter, pp. 179–204, in this volume, ‘The Welcoming Journey of Queen Henrietta Maria and Stuart-Bourbon Relations, 1625–1626’. See also BL Kings 135–36 for numerous letters discussing the delicate and vexing issues around religion which were central to the French approval of the match.
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Bibliography Manuscripts and Archival Documents
London, British Library, Add MS 30.649 —— , Add MS 4154 —— , Harley MS 3364, fols 7r-v, Edward Payton, ‘A Discours of Court and Courtiers’, 1633 —— , Kings MSS 135–36, ‘Recueil de Lettres, de Memoires, d’Actes, d’instructions et de Contracts, faits pour parvenir le Traité de Mariage d’entre Madame Henriette Marie soeur du Roy, et Charles Premier Roy de la Grande Bretagne’, 1624–1625 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection de Brienne, Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises (NAF) 7020 Early Printed Books
Cabala, mysteries of state, in letters of the great ministers of K. James and K. Charles. Wherein much of the publique manage of affaires is related. Faithfully collected by a noble hand (London: for M. M. G. Bedell & T. Collins, 1654) Cats, Jacob, Houwelick (Middelburgh: Inde druckerye van Jan Pieterss van de Venne, 1625) Chamberlayne, Edward, Angliae notitia, or, The present state of England by Edward Chamberlayne, 2nd edn (London: T. N. for John Martyn, 1670) Davenant, William, Madagascar; with other poems (London: printed by John Haviland for Thomas Walkly, 1638) Drayton, Michael, The barrons vvars in the raigne of Edward the second. VVith Englands heroicall epistles (London: printed by J[ames] R[oberts] for N. Ling, 1603) Finet, John, Finetti Philoxenis: som choice observations of Sr. John Finett knight, and master of the ceremonies to the two last Kings, touching the reception, and precedence, the treatment and audience, the puntillios and contests of forren ambassadors in England (London: H. Twyford and G. Bedell, 1656) Hobbes, Thomas, A briefe of the art of rhetorique Containing in substance all that Aristotle hath written in his three bookes of that subject, except onely what is not applicable to the English tongue (London: printed by Tho. Cotes, for Andrew Crook, 1637) Marguerite, Queen consort of Henri IV of France, The history of Queene Margaret of Valoys, daughter to Henry the second, sister to Henry the third, and wife to Henry the fourth of France. Truly representing the growth and fury of the most unnaturall war in that kingdome, occasioned partly by some of the Catholick nobility, and partly by the pernicious counsell of some bishops. Rendred into English by that hand, who translated the last volumes of the Holy Court (London: [n.pub.], 1653) The Mariage of Prince Fredericke, and the Kings daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, upon Shrovesunday last VVith the shows on land and water, before, and after the wedding, as also the maskes and revels in his Highnes court, with the running at the ring, by the Kings Maiestie, the Palsegrave, Prince Charles, and divers others of the nobilitie (London: Printed by T. C. for W. Barley, 1613) The Marriage of the Two Great Princes Frederick Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth, (London: by T[homas] C[reede] for William Barley, 1613) [transcribed in Archaeo logia, 15 (1806), 544–46]
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Menin, Nicolas, An Historical and Chronological Treatise of the Anointing and Coronation of the Kings and Queens of France, From Clovis I. to the Present King (London: printed for W. Mears, S. Chapman & J. Woodman, 1723) Mercure François, 25 vols (Paris: Denis and Étienne Richer, 1611–1648) L’Ordre des ceremonies observees au mariage du roy de la Grand Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du roy: ensemble l’ordre tenuë aux fiançailles faictes au Chasteau du Louvre, en la chambre de sa Maiesté: avec l’ordre du service observé au souppé royal faict en la grand salle l’embruissee de l’archevesché (Paris: de l’imprimerie de Jean Martin, 1625) A relation of the glorious triumphs and order of the ceremonies, obserued in the marriage of the high and mighty Charles, King of Great Brittaine, and the Ladie Henretta [sic] Maria, sister to the most Christian King of France Together vvith the ceremonie obserued in their troth-plighting, performed in the castle of the Louure, in his Maiesties chamber there. As also the Kings declaration containing a prohibition vnto all his subiects to use any traffique or commerce with the kingdome of Spaine. Published in the Parliament of Paris, the 12. of May, 1625. Whereunto the originall French copie is added (London: T. S. [Thomas Snodham], for Nathaniel Butter, 1625) Salmon, William, Polygraphice, or, The art of drawing, engraving, etching, limning, painting, washing, varnishing, colouring, and dying in three books (London: printed by E. T. & R. H. for Richard Jones, 1672) A true discourse of all the royal passages, tryumphs and ceremonies, obserued at the contract and mariage of the high and mighty Charles, King of Great Britaine, and the most excellentest of ladies, the Lady Henrietta Maria of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of France Together with her iourney from Paris to Bulloigne, and thence vnto Douer in England, where the King met her, and the manner of their enterview. As also the tryumphant solemnities which passed in their iournies from Douer to the citie of London, and so to Whitehall, &c. (London: John Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625) Primary Sources
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by William David Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908) Birch, Thomas (ed.), The Court and Times of King Charles the First; Illustrated by Authentic and Confidential Letters, from Various Public and Private Collections; Including Memoirs of the Mission in England of the Capuchin Friars in the Service of Queen Henrietta Maria by Father Cyprien de Gamache, Capuchin Preacher and Missionary to the Queen, 2 vols (London: H. Colburn, 1848) Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, ed. by Rawdon Brown, 38 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864–1947) Calendar of State Papers, Venice, ed. by Allen B. Hinds (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1913), vol. 19 [1625–1626] Ellis, Henry (ed.), Original Letters, Illustrative of English History, 3 vols (London: Harding, Triphook and Lepard, 1824) Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), Salisbury MSS. (London, 1883–1976)
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Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), The Manuscripts of Henry Duncan Skrine, Esq.: Salvetti Correspondence, 11th Report, Appendix, Part I (London: HMSO, 1887) Motteville, Françoise Bertault de, Memoirs of Madam de Motteville on Anne of Austria and Her Court, trans. by Katharine Prescott Wormeley, 3 vols (Boston: Hardy, Pratt & Co, 1902) Nichols, John (ed.), The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols (London: printed by and for John Nichols, 1828) Secondary Studies
Campbell, Thomas P., Tapestry in the Renaissance, Art and Magnificence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002) —— , Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty, Tapestries at the Tudor Court (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007) Courtright, Nicola, ‘The Representation of the French-Spanish Marriage Alliance in the Medici Cycle: “Concorde perpetuelle”’, in Luc Duerloo and R. Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Early Seventeenth-Century Europe (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016), pp. 39–63 Griffey, Erin, On Display: Henrietta and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2015) —— , ‘The Materials of Marital Diplomacy: Henrietta Maria’s Trousseau’, in Luc Duerloo and R. Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), pp. 197–212 Hayward, Maria, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII (Leeds: Maney, 2007) Hibbard, Caroline, ‘The Role of a Queen Consort: The Household and Court of Henrietta Maria, 1625–1642, in Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (eds), Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 393–414 —— , ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen’, The Court Historian, 5 (2000), 15–28 Lussier, Suzanne, ‘Habillement de la Dite Dame Reine’: An Analysis of the Gowns and Accessories in Queen Henrietta Maria’s Trousseau’, Costume, 52 (1) (2018), 31–32 Paresys, Isabelle, ‘The Dressed Body: The Moulding of Identities in SeventeenthCentury France’, in Robert Muchembled et al. (eds), Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe: Forging European Identities, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 227–57 —— , ‘Dressing the Queen at the French Renaissance Court: Sartorial Politics’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Sartorial Politics: Fashioning Women at the Early Modern Court (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019) Ribeiro, Aileen, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005) Romain, Jules, L’Histoire de Scipion: tapisseries et dessins (Paris: Éd. de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1978) Scarisbrick, Diana, ‘Anne of Denmark’s Jewellery: The Old and the New’, Apollo, 23 (1986), 228–36
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Schneebalg-Perelman, Sophie, ‘Richesses du garde-meuble parisien de François Ier, inventaires inédits de 1542 et 1551’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6th series, 78 (November 1971), 253–304 Winkel, Marieke de, Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Painting (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006) Wolfson, Sara J., ‘Practical Proselytising: The Impact of Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the Caroline Court, 1625–1626’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018) Zanger, Abbey E., Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and the Making of Absolute Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)
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Margaret Shewring
Chapter 6. Divergent Discourses Multiple Voices in Festival Accounts of the Marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria This chapter focuses on festival books published in England and France to mark the wedding in 1625 of Charles Stuart and Henrietta Maria, in particular three festival books held in the British Library, two in English and one in French (the last bound with an English translation of the French text). The chapter considers the relationship between these books, their value as accounts of the wedding, the circumstances surrounding it, and the contribution the books make to our understanding of the occasion itself and of its role in state diplomacy. This Stuart–Bourbon wedding was marked by several features which contributed significantly to the intertwined familial, dynastic, and Europe-wide negotiations which reflected personal and religious tensions between individuals and European states. Tensions existed within the royal families and households of Great Britain and France and in the relationships of those families and households with the national and international concerns of their parliaments and civic authorities, the commercial interests of their merchants and guilds and, perhaps above all, in individual and national confessional identities. In France, Henrietta Maria grew up at a time when internal tensions had led to a rift between Louis XIII and his mother, Marie de Médicis, who was exiled to Blois in 1617 after the assassination of her favourite, Concino Concini, on the orders of her son. Marie de Médicis escaped in 1619 and took refuge in Angoulême, from where she launched two unsuccessful ‘guerres de la mère et du fils’, as they were known at the time. Richelieu, the King’s principal advisor, reconciled her to Louis in August 1620, in the wake of her defeat at the battle of Les Pontsde-Cé, but the relationship between the King and his mother remained uneasy.1 Henrietta Maria was very much under the influence of Marie de Médicis in matters of Catholic duty and obligation linked to a strong personal faith.2 1 Armand Jean Du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), became the King of France’s chief minister from 1624 with his entry into the conseil d’état. See David J. Sturdy, Richelieu and Mazarin. A Study in Statesmanship (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 22–24. 2 See below, p. 175. Margaret Shewring is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 153–178 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119189
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In England, the peaceful European balance — between England-FranceSpain principally — fostered with varying degrees of success by King James I of England, VI of Scotland, was initially to be reinforced by a dynastic marriage alliance with Spain, with the strong support of the King and Prince Charles and of their joint favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. This had, however, suffered a setback. As recently as 1623, Charles and Buckingham had been engaged with James’ knowledge in an enterprise that could well have resulted in the prince’s marriage to a Catholic princess, the Spanish Infanta.3 Popular opinion vehemently opposed such a Spanish match and popular relief when the prince returned to London without a Spanish bride or marriage contract led to an outpouring of public celebration. By 1625, circumstances and policy had changed. Stung by Spanish rejection, the Duke of Buckingham now championed an anti-Spanish policy, in Council and in Parliament. He had the ear of King James and argued for a foreign policy that favoured France rather than Spain, hoping to draw France into a diplomatic alliance directed against Spain, the Habsburgs, and the Ottoman Empire. The union of Prince Charles with Princess Henrietta Maria of France, a dynastic alliance which required the formal dispensation of Henrietta Maria’s godfather, Pope Urban VIII, would mark the success of this policy.4 But on the brink of its implementation there were more political realities to consider, most pressingly the illness and death of James I. While arrangements were in hand for an imminent wedding in Paris — timed, according to the Venetian ambassador in France, for the first days of May5 — arrangements for James’ funeral were central to the thoughts of both Charles and Buckingham. The funeral took place on 7/17 May 16256 and ‘Buckingham, as the late King’s Master of the Horse, walked in the procession’.7 Charles followed his father’s hearse as chief mourner. As Kevin Sharpe notes, ‘Even while the preparations for the funeral of his father were underway, Charles was awaiting the arrival on English soil of his bride, who set out before James’ interment’.8
3 See Alexander Samson (ed.), The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 4 See, for example, Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London: Longman, 1981). 5 See Marc Antonio Morosini, to the Doge and Senate, from Paris, 16 May 1625, in Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, ed. by Allen B Hinds (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1913), vol. 19, 1625–1626, British History Online at [accessed 1 August 2018], p. 44, item 61 (translated, on the website, from the Italian original). 6 Of the two widely accepted calendars in the seventeenth century, the Gregorian was used in Continental Europe, and the Julian in Britain. The Julian calendar recorded dates ten days behind the Gregorian calendar. Both dates are given in this chapter, in the format adopted in the book as a whole, with the English date first: so, for example, 7/17 May indicates the same [funeral] day in Britain and 1/11 May indicates the same [wedding] day in France. 7 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 235. Lockyer concentrates almost exclusively on Buckingham’s personal and political career as an English statesman. In a chapter entitled ‘1625: “Your Glorious Match with France”’, the proxy wedding itself is given just one sentence. 8 Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 232.
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Unsurprisingly, as Sharpe further notes, the public presentation of the StuartBourbon wedding began to show clear indications that the arrival of the new Queen in England was being carefully managed, including on specially issued coins and medals9 as well as in epithalamia,10 not least in view of Henrietta Maria’s Catholic faith. It was in the context of a deeply divided, factionalized power-balance that the published festival books had a part to play, developing both generic and more personally sourced rhetorical resources to document and promote the royal marriage and its Stuart–Bourbon alliance. Drawing on contemporary accounts of the wedding, the present discussion seeks to evaluate the validity of those accounts and to assess their place in the wider religious, political, and cultural negotiations between Britain and Europe. Festival Books for the Wedding of Charles and Henrietta Maria The most detailed account, and the one that receives most attention here, is A Trve Discovrse of all the Royal Passages, Tryvmphs and Ceremonies, obserued at the Contract and Mariage of the High and Mighty Charles, King of Great Britaine, and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady Henrietta Maria of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of France. Together with her Iourney from Paris to Bulloigne, and thence vnto Douer in England, where the King met her, and the manner of their enterview. As also the tryumphant Solemnities which passed in their Iournies from Douer to the Citie of London, and so to Whitehall, &c.11 Printed in London in 1625 by John Haviland12 for the bookseller Hanna Barret,13 there are two copies in
9 ‘Small medals [were cast] with a double portrait of the king and queen under rays from heaven, with, on the reverse, Cupid scattering roses and lilies’. These were widely distributed ‘as the first visual impression of their soon-to-be king which the ordinary people received’ (Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars, pp. 215–16). See also John Peacock, ‘The Visual Image of Charles I’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 176–239 (pp. 188–89), as well as Erin Griffey’s and Marie-Claude Canova-Green’s chapters, p. 145 and p. 113, in this collection. 10 Oxford University welcomed Charles with a volume of verses on the royal marriage: Epithalamia Oxoniensia In Auspicatissimum, Potentissimi Monarchæ Caroli, Magnæ Britanniæ, Franciæ, et Hiberniæ Regis, etc. Cum Henrietta Maria, Aeternæ Memoriæ Henrici Magni Gallorum Regis Filia, Connubium (STC 19031, Oxford, 1625). See Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 174, who notes that the overarching theme of this collection is sadness turned to joy and death to renewal of hope and fertility. 11 Hereafter referred to in this chapter as A True Discourse. 12 John Haviland worked in London as a printer in the first half of the seventeenth century. In A Short History of English Printing, 1476–1898 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company Ltd, 1900), Henry R. Plomer notes that the ‘history of the best work in the trade in London is practically the history of three men — John Haviland, Miles Fletcher, and Robert Young, who joined partner ship and, in addition to a share in the Royal printing-house, obtained by purchase the right of printing the Abridgements to the Statutes and bought up several large and old-established printinghouses’ (p. 170). 13 On her husband’s death in 1624, his publishing business passed to Hanna Barret. See Helen Smith, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press, 2012), p. 115.
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the British Library, one of which has been digitized as part of the ‘Treasures in Full: Renaissance Festivals’ project.14 Two further festival books of the wedding, also published in 1625 as mentioned above, provide a context for, and throw light on, A True Discourse.15 These are bound into a single quarto. The first of these books is A Relation of the Gloriovs Trivmphs and Order of the Ceremonies obserued in the Marriage of the High and Mighty Charles, King of Great Brittaine, and the Ladie Henretta [sic] Maria, Sister to the most Christian King of France. Together with the Ceremonie obserued in their Troth-plighting, performed in the Castle of the Louure, in his Maiesties Chamber there.16 Printed in London for Nathaniel Butter in 1625 by T. S. – Thomas Snodham17 — the book was ‘to be sold at the signe of the Pyde-Bull, neere S. Austens Gate’.18 A note on the title page provides interesting information: ‘Whereunto the Originall French Copie is added’. This French-language version, printed by the workshop (imprimerie) of Jean Martin in Paris (1625),19 consists of a total of three quarto leaves (bound as sigs C1r to C3r) and offers an account of Le Triomphe glorieux & l’ordre des Ceremonies obseruees au mariage du Roy de la Grand’ [sic] Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du Roy. Ensemble l’ordre tenu aux fiancailles [sic] faictes au Chasteau du Louure, en la Chambre de sa Majesté. The book focuses, that is to say, on the betrothal contract at the Louvre and the subsequent wedding at Notre Dame. It is, unsurprisingly, written from a French viewpoint. Both English-language and French-language books bound in this volume also include, in English or French, The Kings Declaration containing a
14 Two hundred and fifty-three Festival Books from the British Library’s collections have been made available on the BL website in digital, searchable format. For access to a digitized copy of A True Discourse see and follow the ‘Renaissance Festivals’ link. Membership of the project team is cited in the introduction to Appendix 1 in the present volume and at http://www.bl.uk/treasures/festivalbooks/acknowledgements.html [accessed 11 November 2019]. 15 The online ‘Early Modern Festival Books Database’, developed by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, is an expanded and fully revised version of her bibliographical and historical handbook, Festivals and Ceremonies. A Bibliography of Works Relating to Court, Civic and Religious Festivals in Europe 1500–1800 (originally compiled by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Anne Simon and published in 2000). The database is available online at . The entry for this festival book names the publisher as Nathaniel Butler, presumably a misprint for Butter (see note 18, below). 16 BL 605.B.17. A copy can be accessed via Early English Books Online at . The Database (see note 15) lists two further copies, in Paris, at BNF 8-RA9–29 and BNF R 119231. 17 Thomas Snodham (fl. 1595–c. 1624/1625) was adopted by his uncle, the printer Thomas East, and was an apprentice in his printing business. On his uncle’s death in 1608, Snodham inherited the business. He was best known as a music printer; see the entry by Miriam Miller in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 11, p. 428. 18 The London publisher and bookseller Nathaniel Butter (d. 1664) became a freeman of the Stationers Company in 1604. He published the first edition of Shakespeare’s Lear quarto in 1608. The festival book discussed here is a quarto, bound in leather but lacking its front cover. Sig. A3r echoes the content of the title page but mentions the ‘Glorious Triumph’ (in the singular, not the plural as on the title page). 19 Probably Jean Martin (fl. early seventeenth century) based on the Pont St Michel, Paris.
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Prohibition vnto all his Subiects to vse any Traffique or Commerce with the Kingdome of Spaine. Published in the Parlament of Paris, the 12 of May, 1625.20 The English-language version that in the BL bound copy precedes ‘the original French Copie’ [sigs A3r-B4v] comes close to being a direct translation from the French, yet there are multiple variants between the two. For example, the translator of the English version frequently modifies the French text’s claims to France’s international standing and influence.21 The opening paragraph, in both original and translation, emphasizes France’s political ambitions. Vocabulary throughout the book makes use of phrases that have come to be associated especially with the French monarchy. For example, the translator notes that ‘the King came forth into his Chamber and there appeared like the glorious Sunne, out-shining the other Starres, hauing his Queene with him, his second light’ [A3v]. The account ends [on B1v] with a prayer for the future prosperity of France. Sometimes as noted the French writer’s celebrations of French greatness are directly translated in the English version, but sometimes more- and less-subtle changes of emphasis occur. An example might be the French writer’s observation that ‘les deux plus puissantes Curronnes de la Chrestiente soient vnies ensemble, par le plus celebre mariage qui se soit iamais veu dedans l’Vniuers. C’est donc auiourd’huy que tant de felicite, de gloire, & de bon-heur ne promettent pas moins a notre grand Roy, inuincible Lovys Le Iuste, que l’Empire de tout le monde’ [C1r]. In the English translation this reads, ‘two of the most mighty and potent Kingdomes of Christendome, should be vnited together, by the most glorious Marriage that ever was seen in the world. Therefore now our Inuincible King Lewis the Just, must needs promise to himselfe all felicity, glory and happinesse heaped upon him by this Vnion’ [A3r].22 This altogether more modest forecast would surely have struck a less contentious note in English ears. There is no indication of the name or status of the writer of the French-language festival book. What is clear is that the writer was — almost certainly — of French nationality. Dates are given according to the French calendar23 and the writer is knowledgeable about the appropriate ceremonies according to French practice, the relevant etiquette, and the titles and rank of French participants. The writer’s familiarity with the ways of the French court is especially evident in his description of the occasion on which the Contract of Marriage (fiançailles) was read aloud by ‘Monseigneur le Chancelier’ [C1v]. This public declaration was followed by the presentation of the Procuration [a document conferring proxy status] given by the ‘Roy de la Grand’ Bretagne’ for the Duc de Chevreuse to serve as Charles I’s officially sanctioned stand-in during the public marriage ceremony 20 Printed on C4r-C4v of the French festival book, and in the English translation on B3r-B4v, this Declaration is presented as if it is one of the desired outcomes of the royal marriage on the part of France, although it’s far from clear that such a trading ban could have been enforced. 21 An annotated transcription of this English translation, compiled by Margaret Shewring, is included in this volume as Appendix 2. 22 Shifts in detail and nuance between the French and English texts are identified in the transcription of the English translation in Appendix 1. In each case the French is given in the footnote. 23 The Gregorian calendar as used in Continental Europe (see note 6 above).
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and at subsequent celebrations in Paris. This Procuration was signed by all the relevant parties: ‘Cela fait & arreste, Monsieur le Cardinal de la Roche-foucaut fit les fiançailles a la maniere accoustumee’ [C1v-C2r]. It appears to be assumed that a reader of the French account would be familiar with such a ‘customary manner’. The French festival book is a documentary-style record of the key ceremonies and exchanges that collectively provided the public declarations legally enshrined in both secular and church law. This allowed the writer and the translator to negotiate with the necessary tact and sensitivity the tensions of a marriage involving the union of a devout Catholic princess and a prince with Protestant beliefs based on (in David Cressy’s words) ‘a ceremonial anti-Calvinist […] Protestantism which favoured episcopal discipline, “the beauty of holiness” and the reconfiguration of services around communion tables railed as east-set altars’.24 Such an outlook would have been unacceptable to the more devout among Catholics. At the culmination of events at Notre Dame, the writer adds what looks like a personal wish, perhaps also voicing the hopes of the French people: ‘Dieu qui luy a este tousiours fauourable la maintienne en sa grandeur, & face que son grand Roy triomphe glorieux de tous ses ennemis, & borne ses terres de l’enclos de tout le monde’ [C3r].25 This time, the English translator offers a broadly literal translation, although toned down from claims to ‘tout le monde’. All that remains within his chosen brief is for the French writer to offer a short summary of the arrangements for the banquet that took place following the wedding in the Great Hall of the Archbishop’s palace directly adjacent to Notre Dame. This one-page description lists the seating arrangements and the etiquette followed for the service of food and wine ‘autant magnifiques que splendides & Royaux’ [C3v]. The brevity of his account may result from the writer not being present. He is therefore relaying the information second hand or, perhaps, from reliance on details of arrangements made prior to the event rather than on knowledge of what actually took place. The festivities associated with the banquet may have been outside his remit, as he conceived it, since they did not contribute to the necessary legalities of the public occasion. The thinness of the summary may even be due to practical considerations such as print restrictions resulting from a need to find space for the ‘King’s Declaration’ on the final pages of the quarto (see above). There is no indication that either the French text or English translation were specifically commissioned, even though the publication details given in the English translation at the end of the ‘King’s Declaration’ link it to a royal permission-to-print. For the French author and readers, a prohibition of trade with Spain, written in the first person (using the customary royal ‘we’), sealed with the King’s seal, signed with the King’s name and witnessed by De Loménie
24 David Cressy, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 215. 25 Sig. B1v in the English festival-book translation: ‘And God I pray, who hath ever beene propitious unto us, maintaine our Countrie in her greatnesse, and grant our King a glorious triumphe over his enemies, and a large extent of his Dominions’.
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(Minister and Secretary of State),26 must have been understood as an extension of the full marriage treaty. The facts associated with the declaration show that it was first ‘Read, published and registered in Court, yea and the Kings Atturney generall requiring the same to be put in execution’ and was then confirmed in Parliament in Paris, with Du Tillet’s signature.27 The French text ends on C4v with the words ‘Sifine Du Tillet’.28 The English text adds two short lines at the end of its translation of the ‘King’s Declaration’: ‘Imprinted at Paris, 1625’ and ‘Cum Priuiligio Maiestatis’ [B4v].29 That this publication was sold by Nathaniel Butter sheds light on the expected commercial market for its sale. In the early years of the seventeenth century Butter was involved in the production and dissemination of news in the form of tracts and pamphlets. His shop at the sign of the Pied Bull ‘was itself a kind of early news agency’.30 By the early 1620s Butter was one of a group of London publishers who sold printed news sheets based on the Dutch-style news bulletin, the coranto. In 1621 a licence to publish news bulletins was issued to an ‘N.B.’. This was part of a spread of such news publications across Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. By May 1622 ‘Butter published the first edition of a periodical variously called News from Most Parts of Christendom or Weekly News from Italy, Germany, Hungaria, Bohemia, the Palatinate, France and the Low Countries […] regarded as the true forerunner of the English newspaper’.31 In 1624, Nathaniel Butter partnered Nicholas Bourne to continue publishing Certain News of the Present Week (known also as the Weekly News). This was printed in a small, quarto-sized pamphlet or newsbook.32 It is tempting to see the publication in England of the French festival account of the wedding of Charles and Henrietta Maria, along with an English translation to make it accessible to Butter’s customers, as part of an attempt to satisfy their hunger for news and current affairs. This is reinforced by the inclusion of King Louis XIII’s
26 Henri-Auguste de Loménie, comte de Brienne. 27 Jean du Tillet, Seigneur de Gouaix, knight, and counsellor in the Parlement of Paris. See Nobiliaire Universel de France, ou Recueil Général des Généalogies Historiques des Maisons Nobles de ce Royaume, Par M. de Saint-Allais (Paris: De l’imprimerie de C.-F. Patris, 1814), vol. 1. 28 ‘Sifine’ is a misprint for ‘Signé’, correctly translated in the English-language version as ‘Signed’. 29 This last phrase (here in Latin) echoes ‘Avec privilege de Sa Majesté’, which features on the title page of the original Declaration and is the standard formula used to indicate that the ‘imprimeur-libraire’ has been granted exclusive publication rights for a number of years. 30 See the articles on Nathaniel Butter in the Encyclopedia Britannica online at and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online [accessed 11 November 2019]. 31 Readers’ access to this publication was by subscription. 32 These news publications were regarded as trivial by some, including the playwright Ben Jonson, who made fun of the news industry in his masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620) and ridiculed Butter in his 1625 play, The Staple of News, in the confident expectation that his audience would recognize the allusions. In the same year Jonson was writing the court masque, The Masque of the Fortunate Isles and their Union, with its allusion to the arrival of Henrietta Maria by sea, fetching ‘the riches of the Ocean home’ (Ben Jonson, ed. by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1952), vol. 7 (1941), l. 625 (p. 728)).
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proclamation of a trade embargo on Spanish goods in France as of topical political and economic interest. Hunger for news may also explain why Butter is printing an English translation of an account of the wedding already published in Paris by one Jean Martin, who may well be the Jean Martin mentioned in Henri-Jean Martin’s book on Print, Power and People in Seventeenth-Century France as specializing in news sheets; probably the same person as the Jean Martin (a Calvinist), also mentioned, who, with Louis I Vendôme, published Nouvelles ordinaires de divers endroits in 1631 in competition with Théophraste Renaudot’s La Gazette.33 This Jean Martin, who practised as a publisher from October 1622 and was received as ‘Maître’ on 3 October 1624, is listed as ‘imprimeur-libraire’ in the BnF database, where 41 books are listed under his name, including L’Ordre et cérémonies observes au Baptesme du Prince d’Angleterre (1630). Le Triomphe Glorieux is not included in this list although it seems likely that he (or his workshop) may well have had some connection with this. It may be that the connection is complicated by the fact that, in 1625, the government in England temporarily suspended the publication of foreign news.34 This would certainly have had implications for Butter and his contacts. Was the festival book genre a way of avoiding the ban while in fact marketing news to the general public? There is a further version of this French festival book and its English translation in the British Library, a reprint published in London in 1810, with an editorial comment explaining, in hindsight, the marriage’s political implications. This copy is included in A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, on the most Interesting and Entertaining Subjects: but chiefly such as relate to the History and Constitution of these Kingdoms, brought together by John Somers (1651–1716).35 The editorial comment which follows the title page, written in the Whiggish tradition, may well have contributed to a legacy of negativity in subsequent appraisals of the royal match between Charles and Henrietta Maria, observing that: ‘This is a curious and minute account of the festivities attending an illomened contract. The French minister was disappointed of his expectation, of assuring, by this match, a steady alliance with England; and the evils with which it was fraught to the latter country proved a pregnant cause of hasting [sic] the crisis of civil war’.36
33 He was the son-in-law of the Parisian ‘libraire’ (bookseller) Jean II Berjon. No date of birth is noted. He seems to have died in 1636 (with the inventory of his estate dated 19 March 1636). I am grateful to Marie-Claude Canova-Green for her help in researching details of Jean Martin’s work as a publisher and bookseller. 34 After the suspension ended, in 1638, Nicholas Bourne and Nathaniel Butter were granted the exclusive right to print news from abroad. 35 John Somers (Baron), A Collection of Scarce & Valuable Tracts (1809–1810), vol. 4, p. 91ff, at BL 750.g.4. A second edition of the Tracts, ‘revised, augmented, and arranged by Walter Scott Esq’, was printed by James Ballantyne and Co. in Edinburgh in 1811. 36 Tracts, vol. 4, p. 92.
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A True Discourse … By far the longest and most ambitious festival book of the royal wedding is A True Discourse. This includes not only the events in Paris but goes on to discuss Henrietta Maria’s journey to Boulogne and then to and within England. It describes her arrival at Dover, her first meeting with Charles at Dover Castle and their journey towards London via Canterbury, Cobham Hall, Rochester and Gravesend. It goes on to describe the transfer of the married couple to a Barge of State for their entry to London via the Thames together with the subsequent celebrations at Whitehall. Using a vocabulary familiar in the festival-book genre, the book’s title insists that what will follow is ‘A Trve Discovrse of All the Royal Passages, Tryvmphs and Ceremonies, obserued’ during the marriage ceremonies and subsequent journey. It is unlikely that one writer could have witnessed all these events, spanning the full range of legal contracts and ceremonies as well as Henrietta Maria’s journeys in France and England. Much of the detail of the celebrations in Paris, we can infer, must also be drawn from the French account discussed above (or its translation into English), or the writer(s) may be making use of another official or eye-witness description. Of the two copies of A True Discourse in the British Library, the copy digitized as part of the ‘Treasures in Full’ section of the BL website has two distinctive characteristics.37 It includes marginalia in an almost-certainly seventeenth-century hand, together with two additional gatherings which print two addresses at Canterbury, one to Charles and the second to Charles and his bride. These speeches, given by John Finch, Recorder of the City of Canterbury from 1617,38 have been ‘tipped in’ to the body of the festival book, perhaps by an early owner. The ‘tipped-in’ pages include no marginalia. The second of the addresses (to Charles and his bride) is considered in detail by Sara Trevisan in her chapter in this volume.39 Unfortunately, the marginalia in the main body of the festival book make no additions to, or corrections of, the printed text, merely providing subheadings indicating the point reached at each stage of the narrative. What they do make clear is that at least one, presumably contemporary, reader studied A True Discourse carefully — a point borne out not just by the subheadings but by several underlined passages in the body of the text. An annotated transcript of this festival book, including the addresses by Finch, has been prepared by Ella Hawkins and is included in this book as Appendix 1.40
37 Shelfmark: 113.1.7. Format: [2], 28, [16], 29–36 pp. 40. For the website see [accessed 11 November 2019]. 38 John Finch (1584–1660), was appointed to several offices after the accession of Charles as a jurist and Member of Parliament for Canterbury and Winchelsea. 39 The pagination of the addresses is separate from the pattern of signatures used to paginate the Discourse as a whole. The main signatures are in upper case letters. The addresses, which occur between the gatherings for signatures D and E, have lower case signatures: d1r-e1r and e1v-e4v. 40 See pp. 321–42 below. Ella Hawkins’s transcription was supported by the University of Warwick through an Undergraduate Research Student Scholarship (URSS award).
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A True Discourse: Its Structure and Content There is no title-page indication of the authorship of A True Discourse. In one copy, the inserted speeches at Canterbury are, as noted, attributed to John Finch. I have seen no persuasive evidence to suggest that the festival book as a whole may be attributed to Finch. As in the French-language account and translation, the opening paragraph of A True Discourse places the royal wedding in context [see A3r-A3v]. It presents the ‘happie and long wisht for’ wedding as a ‘remarkeable’ [i.e. worthy of note] and ‘glorious’ blessing ‘wherewith it hath pleased the Diuine Goodnesse to cloath and adorn our Nation’. It also expresses ‘the hope of a most flourishing Issue’, which will underpin a union between Great Britain and France that ‘may worke terror amongst our aduersaries’. The over-riding emphasis here is on celebration and ‘beholding, as in a goodly Myrrour, the full pourtrature of all our joyes’ [A3v]. Such celebratory discourse, with its emphasis on spectacle and display, suggests that the writer had an eye on the commercial saleability of his work, together perhaps with garnering support in Britain for this highly significant and controversial dynastic union. A True Discourse sets out for an English readership the importance of the betrothal and marriage as well as foregrounding the public presentation of the wedding and its acceptance in France. It side-steps religious and political tensions underlying the occasion by focusing on sheer spectacle and the sumptuous clothes and lavish feasts in Paris, as well as the journey undertaken by the bride to London. Henrietta Maria was only 15 years old at the time of her marriage, and Charles ten years her senior. By bringing together a collage of key events, and evoking private encounters as well as formal diplomatic exchanges, the writer suggests that, behind the arranged dynastic marriage lay a strong emotional attraction between the couple that could lead to a long union. The Wedding Contract In her essay on festival books in Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly distinguishes between ceremony and spectacle, both of which she shows are appropriate to festival.41 She defines ceremony as an officially sponsored process by which festival can be seen as presenting to its public, on formal state or religious occasions, a political stance implicitly endorsed by the body of the people and by virtue of this fact carrying the force of law. Such ceremonies include weddings, investitures, coronations, baptisms, and funerals and involve public affirmation beyond a private or family context. The ceremonies recounted at the beginning and end of A True 41 J. R. Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewring (eds), Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004; e-book 2010), vol. 1, pp. 3–17 (pp. 5–6).
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Discourse — betrothal and the endorsement of the marriage contract — exactly fit this ceremonial brief, with the marriage contract receiving both French and English approval. The writer makes clear the individual steps taken in France and England at each of the crucial contractual moments. The first of these concerns the formal agreement written into the betrothal of the royal couple. A True Discourse sets out this event in remarkable detail, specifying the principal French participants as they assembled in King Louis’s Presence Chamber, with two English ambassadors, for the delivery of the Contract of Marriage.42 The contract was opened and ‘publikely read by the Secretary of the Kings Cabinet in a high and audible voice’, all the ‘Couenants and agreements [were] concluded vpon’ and ‘the Contract was allowed and ratified by the Lord Chancellour, who made a congratulatory speech in honour of that daies Ceremonie’ [A4v-B1v]. The writer explains that the ambassadors then ‘withdrew themselues into the Duke of Cheureuse Chamber’ and ‘communicated vnto the Duke the Contract’. After this, Chevreuse, with the ambassadors ‘and diuers other Noblemen of great ranke and place’ [B1r], returned to the King’s Presence Chamber and formally presented ‘his procuration, and shewed the authoritie and Commission which the King of great Britaine had giuen him, being in a certaine scedule annexed and fixt vnto the Contract, which after the King had read, hee allowed and signed also: so did the great Lady her selfe the Queene of France, and the Queene Mother, the Duke of Cheuruse, to whom the proxy belonged, and both the Embassadours for England’ [B1v]. This process was then completed and confirmed by the Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld who, as Grand Almoner of France, ‘attyred in all his pontificall roabes, after the custom and manner of the French Nation performed the Contract and published the affiance [troth-plight] in a most stately and reuerend manner, to the infinite ioy and contentment of all the beholders, and the vnspeakeable comfort and prosperity of both the happy Kingdomes’ [B1v]. The author goes on to note that ‘forthwith our Ladies Church [Notre Dame] in Paris is chosen for the Celebration and finall conclusion of the euer-happy mariage’ [B2r]. This public ceremony is matched at the end of A True Discourse by two pages, seemingly more hastily written than the rest of the book, recounting the occasion in June 1625 in London at the Banqueting House in Whitehall when, on the occasion of a great feast attended by the principal wedding participants, including the Duc de Chevreuse, ‘the Articles of the Marriage were read there in publique assembly, and approued by the King and the French Embassadors’ [E4r]. The aspects of the marriage that cause the writer more difficulty are those that require acknowledgement of the confessional differences between the bride and groom. For the most part, A True Discourse avoids such matters, perhaps as part of a conscious decision that all the events should be presented in a
42 This formal presentation marked the conclusion of lengthy negotiations in which at least one of the English ambassadors, the Earl of Holland, had been actively engaged for many months.
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positive, even joyous, light. Particularly important for this festival account are the locations created as part of the wedding’s ephemeral architecture — outside Notre Dame, in the nave and in the choir. These structures could be viewed by the general public as well as serving to enhance the solemn ceremonies ratifying the union of Charles and Henrietta Maria. Their iconography and use had to take account, in ways regarded as essential by both parties, and by their families, courts, and nations, of the religious teachings endorsed by the Protestant Church in England and the Catholic Church in France, and which in turn were needed to underpin this dynastic marriage and its related treaties. The specially constructed, canopied dais ‘at the entrie of the great porch of Notre Dame’ is given particular attention: ‘to this Canopie or Vealt [vault] royall the King and Monsieur his brother conducted the Royall Bride their sister, and placing her vnder it, they left her till some ceremonie were finished, then they resigned her vp into the hands of the Duke of Chereuse, to whom the Cardinall de la Roche Foucault came and performed all the ceremonies of marriage according to the orders of the Church, and the royall ceremonies of the French Nation’ [C2r]. These ceremonies were witnessed by all participants as well as the general public.43 The group then moved inside the church and processed to the choir ‘along the gallerie, principally erected for that purpose […] iust through the middest of the Church’ [C2r]. Here the writer emphasizes the witnesses present from different official bodies within the French judicial, civic, and academic hierarchies seated on opposite sides of the choir. These included ‘the Presidents of the Parliaments of France’ [C2r], the ‘Councellors of the high Courts of Parliament’ [C2r], ‘the Prouost of the Merchants of Paris’44 [C2v], ‘the Sherifes of the Citie of Paris’, and ‘principall Magistrates which were of especiall note both in the Citie and in the Vniuersitie’ [C2v]. The attendance of these dignitaries is presented as an important earnest of the French nation’s consent to the marriage. Ambassador Morosini’s letter informs the Doge that inside Notre Dame ‘were the ambassadors of Spain, your Serenity and Savoy’ and ‘the residents [resident representatives] of the Emperor and Mantua were there, seated upon a bench behind the ambassadors’,45 so underlining the place of the wedding on an international stage. To this point all the ceremonies served what must have been perceived as a cross-confessional purpose and were attended by all who had signed the marriage contract, including Charles’ proxy, Chevreuse. From the sumptuous detail
43 Marc Antonio Morosini, Venetian Ambassador in France, wrote to the Doge and Senate that it had been arranged that Chevreuse ‘should go away on the completion of the ceremony without [i.e. outside Notre Dame], accompanied by the [protestant] English and Dutch ambassadors, who were also present at the ceremony without, very richly dressed’ (6/16 May 1625, Paris), in British History Online at [accessed 1 August 2018], p. 44, item 61. 44 Effectively the mayor of Paris. 45 See note 43 above. This quotation confirms Morosini’s account as that of an eye witness as well as indicating the significant role ambassadors played in political and diplomatic aspects of international relations.
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lavished on the spectacle that formed an integral part of the day’s celebrations (see below), the writer of A True Discourse turns to a bare description of the moment when Chevreuse and the two ambassadors left ‘the [French] K. the Q. and the Q. mother’ on another raised, canopied dais (‘scaffold’), and ‘after they had seene euerie ceremonie fitted, they withdrew themselues into the Archbishops pallace vntil the whole seruice was ended, & then they returned againe to the K. & Queene’ [C2v] when the ‘French deuotions were ended’ [C3r]. Chevreuse was a Catholic46 and would normally, in his own right, have been able to attend the remainder of ‘the whole seruice’ but, as proxy for the King of Great Britain — and therefore a representative of Charles’ Protestant faith — he could not participate.47 This is the only place in the festival book where the author resorts to something approaching note form, abbreviating the titles of those present. Henrietta Maria is not mentioned in this short paragraph although the ‘French deuotions’ were surely according to her faith a crucial part of the religious occasion. One could be forgiven for thinking that the writer of A True Discourse hoped to bury contentious confessional differences in the sheer detail of the lavish description of the occasion. Spectacle and Magnificence An emphasis on spectacle is, as Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly observes, characteristic of the festival-book genre. Writers do their best to evoke such occasions in as much detail as may be achieved, with their narratives standing in for what would now be lavish visual and news-documentary explanations of the symbolic or traditional elements featured. Such festival-book accounts enabled a larger section of the public to appreciate occasions of state in all their splendour, and even to be given a sense of ownership in their country’s standing on the international stage. They also helped to promote beyond the confines of the courts themselves the status of social and diplomatic hierarchies within court circles, documenting manners and fashions, talking about ‘court news’ and gossiping about ‘who’s in, who’s out’48 of influence and favour. In these respects, A True Discourse runs true to festival-book form. The importance of presenting the magnificence of the two courts of Britain and France is underlined by frequent descriptions of the clothes worn, the 46 Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse and Prince de Joinville, was a member of the Guise family as well as a kinsman of Charles I. His Catholic faith (see Histoire de la Maison Royale de France) is mentioned in the records of the Paris Parlement in 1627, when they registered the 1612 royal edict granting him a peerage. 47 The account of the wedding in the Mercure françois notes that Chevreuse and the ambassadors went into Notre Dame after the initial ceremony of the platform outside. They went as far as the ‘porte du chœur’ and bowed to the King and Queen before withdrawing to the Archbishop’s palace. Le Mercure François, ou, la Suitte de l’histoire de la paix, 25 vols (Paris: Jean & Estienne Richer, 1611–1648), vol. 11 (1625) [for the years 1625–1626)], p. 359. 48 The Tragedy of King Lear (Folio version), 5. 3. 13–17, quoted from The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
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location and detailed circumstances of the banquets attended and the number of named nobility present. As Erin Griffey notes, ‘Display permeated every aspect of the early modern court: in the bodily presence of the monarch […] and in the ceremonial clothing and crown jewels that embodied authority’.49 So, for example, Henrietta Maria, on the occasion of the agreement of the contract in the Louvre, wore garments that were exceeding rich and sumptuous, her Gowne being of cloth of gold, cut vpon cloth of siluer,50 and richly embrodered all ouer with Flower de Luces of gold, and chased and interlaid with Diamonds, Rubies, Pearle, and other rich Iuelrie of an inestimable valew. Her Traine was borne vp by the young Lady of Burbon, her dear Kinswoman, and a Ladie of exceeding great beautie and wonderful admiration [A4r-A4v].51 Meanwhile Charles’ proxy, Chevreuse, at the formal betrothal, here serving as a representative of Britain, matches this magnificence: ‘himselfe most richly attired, and though the [back]ground was blacke, yet was the imbrodery of admirable value, and abundance of Diamonds and other Precious stones bestowed within the same, but especially vpon the panes of his breeches and the tagges of his points, which were praised [appraised] at an infinite world of treasure’ [B1r]. As we shall see, such descriptions go on to feature significantly in the descriptions of the wedding ceremony at Notre Dame. Indeed, A True Discourse is consciously pitched to draw the reader in by its concern with fashion and all the trappings of wealth and power, complemented by detailed cameos of the behaviour of Henrietta Maria, the young bride. There is on the writer’s part, it seems, at least an eye on the sales potential of such a festival book. Performing the Proxy Wedding, Paris 1625 In A True Discourse the formal wedding ceremony is described as a narrative of the events ‘performed at these great Nuptials’ [A3v]. Performance involved a complex mise-en-scène including, as mentioned above, the construction of two stages and a raised, galleried walkway; sumptuous costumes in a range of colours, covered in jewels and often ‘powdred ouer with golden Flower de Luces’ [B2r]; control of lighting effects, so that the positioning of the flickering candles inside Notre Dame made the costumes of the richly bejewelled participants sparkle; perfumes and burning candle wax which heightened the sensory pleasures of the occasion. This theatricality was reinforced by the order and choreography of the 49 Erin Griffey, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 1. 50 Griffey explains the significance of the use of cloth of gold and cloth of silver in her chapter in this volume, ‘“All Rich as Invention Can Frame, or Art Fashion”: Dressing and Decorating for the Wedding Celebrations of 1625’, along with the importance of ‘the inherent value of both the textiles and the precious stones’ in the garments of the royal wedding party (see p. 138). 51 Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon, Condé’s daughter (1619–1679).
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processions, with the participants presented as more spectacular in appearance as they were more elevated in the hierarchy of the state. It was reinforced, too, by a rich soundscape of musical instruments and military fanfares. The singing of the religious service and, indeed, the entire service itself provided a spoken, sung and chanted script for the wedding (complete with stage directions and use of properties). The sumptuous visual effects are vividly evoked as the writer describes the church as hang’d all ouer with wonderfull rich Arras, cloth of Tissue, cloth of Gold, and cloth of Siluer; there was also in the same Church raised vp vpon goodly pillasters and gilt columbs [sic] a most rich and stately gallery or Scaffold of state, which extended from the first entry of the Archbishops house to the very Quire or vppermost end […] The Pillars and railes which did vnderprop this gallery were at the top couered with a very curious [intricately worked] Purple or Violet coloured Sattin […] and at the bottoms they were ouerspread with very fine white linnen and many burning tapers of waxe flaming about the same, so that the Church seemed like the Pallace of the Sunne, described by Ouid in his second Booke of the transmutations of shapes [i.e. Metamorphoses] [B2r-B2v].52 It is possible that the writer of A True Discourse was allowed inside the church to see the ephemeral architecture created for the occasion but it seems he was not inside Notre Dame for the processional entry and the religious service. He feels it important to explain the sources of his information in a sentence set apart from the rest of the account by being indented as a one-sentence paragraph: ‘Through this Gallery the whole pompe and body of the Royall and vnmatchable solemnity was to passe, which I haue thought good briefly to set down as I receiued it from those which were Noble eye witnesses of the same’ [B2v].53 For the order of the procession the writer of A True Discourse may well be drawing on the list set out in the French festival book, discussed above, or its translation into English.54 It may also be the case that the writer is deliberately including as much detail as possible, in order to feed into a fascination in Britain with French fashion and lavish princely behaviour arising from the newly sealed alliance.55 The account records the presence of lords and knights of ‘the great and renowned Order of the Holy Ghost, in the rich robes of their Order […] with their Palkes or Mantles of watchet veluet all most brauely embrodered with
52 See also Griffey’s chapter in this volume, especially pp. 139–40. As Griffey explains: ‘A similar elevated walkway had been deployed for the 18 August 1572 wedding of Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre at the same cathedral, with the wedding on a dais on front of the west doors’ (p. 139). 53 I have adopted the pronoun ‘he’ for the writer of A True Discourse, but my use of it is as a generic indicator of authorship, as there is no evidence as to the identity or gender of the writer. 54 As the events related in the second part of A True Discourse took place well beyond the time-frame covered by the French Festival book and the English translation, it is probable that A True Discourse was written, and published, later than these other accounts. 55 Each of the principal participants is identified in the editorial annotations to the festival book in Appendix 2, below.
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Flower de Luces of gold, and their other garments shining with precious stones and rich in Iuelrie’ [B3v].56 There were seven Heralds at Arms present and the two great Marshals of France, the English ambassadors ‘in white cloth of siluer’, and the Duc d’Elbeuf. Representing Charles came the Duc de Chevreuse ‘in a sute of most rich perfumed blackecloth, cut vpon cloth of gold, and lined with rich Tissue; vpon his head he wore a Cap of cloth of gold, on which was fixed a Iewell of most inestimable value, euery Diamond being so glorious, that it dazelled the eyes of all that gazed upon it’ [B4r]. Indeed, the writer is convinced that Chevreuse, in his sumptuous attire, ‘seemed to burn and bear a living flame about him’ [B4r]. The sheer scale of the procession and the numbers of participants are vividly evoked, along with the procession’s overall shape and choreography. The formation is configured as an hour-glass — a not unusual processional choreography for the time. The hundred Switzers of the French king’s guard led the procession in their royal livery, followed by ranks of musicians and the knights of the Order of the Holy Ghost, groups of nobles and ladies. The much smaller group of Louis XIII followed ‘in his owne Person, in Royall garments of Estate’ [B4v]’ with, at his right hand, ‘the most Excellent Princesse his sister’ (Henrietta Maria) and, on the princess’s right hand Monsieur, the King’s brother. Then, processing alone, came Marie de Médicis, the Queen Mother of France, ‘very grave, yet richly attired’ [B4v]. The isolated splendour of the Queen Mother must have been striking both as an indication of her authority within the court as the dowager queen mother, and her political influence as a former regent of France. She was followed by three further members of the younger generations of the royal family, the Queen of France, whose gown was embroidered with gold and silver and decorated with precious stones, together with two younger princesses who carried the Queen’s train. From this spectacular grouping, demonstrating in visual and material splendour the hierarchy of the royal family of France, the procession filled out once more as the main protagonists were followed by more ladies, duchesses and gentlewomen ‘which like so many faire Planets mouing in their seuerall orbes, made all the place like the Heauens sparkle with renowne and glory about them’ [C1r]. After them, came yet more noblemen and gentlemen and then the king’s principal personal guard. It is noteworthy that, in the midst of the French courtiers’ garments in rich colours, and their lavish use of gold, only the two English ambassadors required to witness the union, James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, one of King James’ favourites, and Robert Rich, Earl of Holland, wore ‘white cloth of silver’. As a result, they stood out clearly among their more colourfully dressed fellows.
56 The Ordre du Saint-Esprit or Ordre des chevaliers du Saint-Esprit, sometimes translated into English as the Order of the Holy Ghost, a chivalric order founded by Henri III of France in 1578. (This should not be confused with the Order of the Holy Ghost, a Catholic religious order with responsibilities for running hospitals across Europe).
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Henrietta Maria, the Royal Bride The writer of A True Discourse includes several references to Henrietta Maria, perhaps in response to her presence and bearing, or possibly in an attempt to make her more appealing to a largely Anglophile readership. This positive tone begins with the title page of the book, where the reader finds a quotation from Virgil: ‘O quam te memorem virgo. O Dea Certe’ (adapted from Aeneid I, 326–27). The lines, addressed to Venus in the Latin epic, can be translated as ‘How should I name you, Virgin? Assuredly a Goddess’ — thus offering a compliment to Henrietta Maria appropriate to this courtly setting. The words may also for a knowledgeable audience evoke memories of Prince Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s The Tempest who, while mourning what he believes to be the death of his father, first catches sight of the young Miranda.57 Struggling for words he says he believes her ‘Most sure the goddess/ On whom these airs attend!’ The near-quotation of Virgil’s ‘O Dea Certe’ is striking. In real life, Charles, recently bereaved following the death of his father, finds romance in the person of the fifteen-year-old princess of France. The allusion to The Tempest, if it were recognized, would be understood as flattering to both parties.58 The French match, the author of A True Discourse hopes, will bring peace and harmony as ‘we finde our Kingdome fortified against the threatnings of Enuie, our throne established with the hope of a flourishing Issue, and the hearts of all true subiects reuiued with the memorie of this blessed Match, and Coniunction’ [A3v]. This positive, sympathetic tone continues as the writer reports on the response of ‘the most Excellent Lady’ [A4r], Henrietta Maria, when she is sent for by King Louis on the formal occasion of her betrothal. The princess’s appearance and demeanour proved memorable as she entered the Chamber59 accompanied by her royal kinswomen and ‘in reuerend and solemne wise’ did ‘obeysance to the King her Brother, in which action of humilitie a man might haue beheld all the glorious beames of Maiestie and sweetnesse’ [A4v]. In A True Discourse, emphasis on family, duty, and dynasty is set in a context of wealth, beauty — and humility. Writing with a British audience in mind, the festival book encourages both sympathy and respect for the fifteen-year-old princess as she is drawn into a dynastic marriage contract that will take her away from her home and country. As such it plays its part in shaping how she might be perceived by the general populace in personal rather than political or confessional terms.
57 The Tempest, 1. 2. 424–25, quoted from The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. 58 It may be worth noting that The Tempest was performed as part of the wedding festivities for the marriage in 1613 of Charles’ beloved sister, Elizabeth, to Frederick, Elector Palatine — 12 years earlier than the events recorded in the festival books discussed here. Associations between the two royal marriages may well have lingered, however, in court circles, particularly as the 1625 marriage alliance with France could, it was hoped, lead to French support against the Habsburgs as they tried to oust Elizabeth’s husband from his place as King of Bohemia. 59 See p. 166, above.
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The First Meeting This attention to personal detail is echoed in the festival book’s description of the first meeting between Charles and his new Queen in the Privy Chamber at Dover Castle. From 13/23 May preparations had been underway for the Queen’s arrival in Dover. Kevin Sharpe notes that, ‘Secretary Conway reported musicians being sent to Kent for the Queen’s reception at Dover, while the news writer John Chamberlain informed Sir Dudley Carleton of the “great preparations for shows and pageants” to welcome’ her.60 Yet the writer of A True Discourse makes no reference to these ‘shows and pageants’. Instead he devotes almost two pages to the couple’s first meeting on 13/23 June. He describes the ‘Queene being full of all joyfull expectation’ [D3] and that, at this first encounter, she threw her selfe into his [Charles’] armes with that boundlesse and vnexpressable affection, that virtue, modestie, and all the perfections which can crowne the best and most excellent creature, might there haue learned the worthiest rules both of honour, true loue, and obedience [D3r-D3v]. She then ‘threw downe her selfe vpon her knees’, ‘giuing vp into his sacred protection, her life, libertie, seruice, and euerlasting obedience’ [D3v]. The writer’s tone here is one of romantic delight. It is not clear how much, if any, of the encounter he witnessed. What is clear is that he is celebrating a union of romance and tenderness — a perfect love story: What tongue or pen is able to expresse that ioy wherewith he receiued her, and her deare protestations, for scarcely could you say shee is now vpon her knees, when with all the tendernesses which an immaculate and vnspotted affection could expresse, hee presently tooke her vp into his armes, kist her againe, and gaue her those deare expressions of a neuer changing loue, that the beholders might see how each others heart flew out at the windows of their eyes, and […] lodged themselues in each others bosome [D3v-D4r]. It is worth quoting the festival book’s writer in full here as it seems necessary to separate the rhetorical excesses, and idealized wish-fulfilment attributed to the ‘beholders’, from the events that occurred at this meeting.61 This idealized account is surely exaggerated, yet it is cited as a true report, by Kevin Sharpe among others. On the other hand, there seems to be no justification for J. P. Kenyon’s negative response to this royal encounter when he notes that the ‘gawky adolescent’, Henrietta Maria, ‘at the sight of her new husband […] burst into
60 Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 232, cites The Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1625–1626, p. 19. 61 See Sara Wolfson’s discussion of the wedding journey and, in particular, the reality of this meeting in her chapter in this volume, ‘The Welcoming Journey of Queen Henrietta Maria and Stuart-Bourbon Relations, 1625–1626’, especially pp. 189–97.
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tears’ — presumably, though Kenyon doesn’t specify, of apprehension rather than joy.62 In A True Discourse the generous, romantic description of the couple’s meeting sets the tone for the remainder of the book as the writer repeatedly returns to the delightful personality of the new Queen, from her behaviour at Barrome Downe (Barham Down in Kent, to the south-east of Canterbury), ‘where were assembled all the English Nobilitie, and many Ladies of Honour and high place’[D4r] and the ‘King and Queene in great State rode betweene them, giuing such respect and grace to euery one of deseruing qualitie, that euery one stroue in their prayers and praises, to let the world vnderstand the infinitenesse of their ioy and comfort’ [D4r-D4v]. Both on the way to Canterbury and, some days later, to Cobham Hall, their route was ‘strewed with greene rushes. Roses, and the choisest flowers that could be gotten, and the trees loaden with people of all sorts, who with shouts and acclamations gaue them a continuall welcome’ [D4v].63 Later, they left the city of Rochester for Gravesend, where a Barge of State waited at the bridge over the Thames to transport the couple to London.64 All the nobility, including ‘a world of Ladies and Gentlewomen’ [E2r] took their leave of the couple ‘and kissed both their hands’ [E2r]. Again, the author of the festival account stresses the ‘excellent disposition of the Queene’, noting that ‘so royall and bountifull’ was her ‘grace and fauour’ that ‘to euery Ladie that came to kisse her hand, shee bowed her selfe downe and kissed their cheekes’ [E2]. Again, on the river journey, ‘during all this long passage, both the King and Queene stood publiquely in the open Barge, and not onely discouered themselues to euery honest and chearefull beholder, but also with all Royall affabilitie and grace distributed their fauours to all those which came to admire them’ [E3r]. Throughout his account of the journey to London the writer of the festival book stresses the welcome offered to the couple, emphasizing civic receptions and orations, sounds of ordnance and the spectacle of fireworks in addition to laying emphasis on the crowds who gathered to see them. At one moment a journalistic incident took place when the royal barge shot the bridge at the Tower of London. There the ‘throng of spectatours was so great, that about two hundred being in a shippe that lay almost drie, and leaning against the Wharfe, they with their waight and motion ouerthrew the Shippe into the Thames’ [E2v-E3r]. Relatively little attention is given, however, to each of the entries into cities and the gradual progress of the journey. Perhaps more surprisingly,
62 J. P. Kenyon, The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1958; third impression, 1968), p. 63. 63 See also sig. E1r. Perhaps reminiscent of Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds ‘strewed’ cloaks and tree branches in his path as he rode into the city. 64 Zuane Pesaro, Venetian ambassador to England, wrote to the Doge and Senate on 17/27 June that the royal couple would travel to London ‘without going to Greenwich, that place being infected with the plague’. In his dispatch he describes the Royal Barge as ‘practically a small model of your Serenity’s Bucintoro’, in British History Online at [accessed 1 August 2018], pp. 78–95, item 125 (translated, on the website, from the Italian original).
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no attention is given to the Protestant blessing confirming the royal marriage in a small-scale, private ceremony that acknowledged the necessity for the new King’s faith, as well as that of his Queen, to be seen to carry appropriate political and spiritual weight.65 The writer does, it’s worth noting, give space to the banquet held at Whitehall Palace, with almost two pages being devoted to ‘The Feasting of the Duke de Cheueres, and the two French Embassadours, with the declaration of the Mariage of the King and Queene’ [E3v]. The sheer scale of the spectacle seems to replicate features of the betrothal, wedding, and feasting in Paris, emphasizing, in a similar vein, the opulence of the fashions and the numbers of nobility present as well as the magnificence of the setting. The King and Queen, accompanied by the Duc and Duchesse de Chevreuse and the two ambassadors ‘with all the rest of the Nobilitie and Ladies, as well English, as Scots [acknowledging Charles’ Scots ancestry]66 and French’ [E3v], were all dressed in ‘most glorious attires and brauery, and such like as neuer before hath been seene in England’, with ‘the Iewels of the Duke de Cheueres […] reported to be worth an hundred thousand pounds’ [E4r]. As for the setting, the great Banquetting-house of Whitehall was prepared, and hung very richly with hangings of Silke and Gold, where at the one end of the house was placed the Chaires and Cloth of State, at the other end a sumptuous Cupbord [display stand] of Plate in manner of an arch; in the middle of the house was placed one other Cupbord, not so great, but of a farre greater value, being Basons, Ewers, Cups, Salts, &c. all set with Iewels, and of Christall at the root (sic, perhaps a misprint for ‘foot’) [E4r]. The arrival of food was heralded by drums and trumpets, with the feast extending to ‘three great seruices’ with ‘musicke playing all the while’ [E4v]. The occasion ended with dancing ‘for the space of one houre’ [E4v], rather in the manner of an English masque. Beyond the account of the sheer spectacle and the lavish entertainment offered, these pages have a particular importance as they report the legal formality of the marriage contract from the perspective of the English church and parliament. As in King Louis’s Privy Chamber at the Louvre the legal details received public record and assent, so in Whitehall, we are told, the Articles of the Marriage were read ‘in publique assembly, and approued by the King and the French Embassadors: After the which blessing being giuen by a Bishop, the King kissed the Queene in presence of the whole people. After which they retired to the Priuie Chamber, while the dinner was prepared’ [E4r]. As it is today, the moment when the wedding was sealed with a kiss was expected and celebrated. The ceremony is seen to be complete. It was important, too, that this was done in the presence not just of the ambassadors but of Chevreuse as proxy 65 Margaret Toynbee, ‘The Wedding Journey of King Charles I’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 69 (1955), 87. 66 See J. R. Mulryne’s chapter in this volume, ‘Paradoxical Princes: Charles and Henrietta Maria, Personality and Politics (1600–1625)’, pp. 64–65.
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bridegroom who, by his involvement, provided the necessary continuity across so many disparate occasions.67 As Sharpe remarks, ‘Many must have hoped and expected that a formal state entry and coronation would soon follow’.68 In this, people were to be disappointed.69 Divergent Discourses While the French festival book focuses on the betrothal and marriage, emphasizing the key legal ceremonies and principal noble and royal players, the author writer of A True Discourse elaborates on, and extends, the range of occasions covered. In particular, he adds a travel narrative as Henrietta Maria makes her journey to England by sea and land, and then follows the traditional waterborne route up the Thames from Gravesend to London. A True Discourse focuses on Henrietta Maria and adopts a familiar festival-book theme of long-desired union leading to marriage. It is accordingly more expansive in its rhetoric than the more documentary news-style of the French book, which could be seen as appropriate to an account created by a court secretary or writer with similar skills and background. The True Discourse assumes the readers’ familiarity with the established etiquette of royal entries and entertainments, merely mentioning these features in passing. The writer seeks, instead, to give a sense of authority by the inclusion of numerous Latin phrases and biblical allusions.70 These, in turn, feed into a descriptive discourse including the personal qualities of the young Queen, seeking to place her in a royal line which routinely made claims to Divine Right. He even attributes influence over the winds to her as the Channel is calmed simply by her presence for the crossing from Boulogne to Dover.71 In A True Discourse nothing is allowed to undermine the positive tone. There is little to suggest the political complexities of the negotiations between Britain and France and no hint of the tensions within Britain in the context of a Catholic marriage. Richelieu was directly involved on the French side in the marriage negotiations in 1624, seeking to gain better conditions for English Catholics. The Duke of Buckingham, for his part, was impatient to seek an alliance with France against the Habsburgs, even without the support of factions in the 67 He was to be rewarded with a knighthood in 1626. 68 Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 233. 69 ‘The Queen’s bishop had wanted to preside at her coronation, but George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, denied permission. As a consequence, Henrietta Maria refused to take part in a Protestant ceremony, leaving Charles to be crowned alone’ (Sharpe, Image Wars, p. 234). 70 Translated in the textual annotations in Appendix 1. 71 This discussion extends for two pages [sigs D1v-D2v], making it one of the most detailed commentaries in the entire book. Readers might have perceived a similarity here with James I’s legendary voyage from Leith (outside Edinburgh) to the coast of Norway where his bride, Anna of Denmark, had been forced by storms to abandon her sea crossing to Scotland, following her proxy wedding to James in Copenhagen in 1589. It seems that Henrietta Maria, like James, was rumoured to have the power to calm storms, one of the miracles also attributed to Jesus (see Matthew 8. 23–27, Mark 4. 34–41 and Luke 8. 22–25). The currency of the story in the early Caroline period is suggested by Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1632.
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English Parliament opposing the French match over confessional, and economic, matters. By December 1624 the two crucial negotiations, for the marriage and an alliance, had been completed and James formally agreed to the marriage articles at a ceremony in Cambridge — but not before he had agreed to give a written promise to free his Catholic subjects from persecution.72 The most striking absence from A True Discourse is any mention of the Duke of Buckingham. George Villiers, a favourite of both James and his son, was a principal player in the negotiations from the outset. As Lockyer explains, once the papal dispensation for the French wedding had been issued and the details of the contract had been agreed, ‘all that remained was for Buckingham [as expected proxy for Charles] to go over to Paris and to bring back Henrietta Maria’. Buckingham sent off his coaches towards Dover in mid-March.73 No one could have predicted the dramatic turn of events that followed. Before Buckingham set out for Dover ‘he received the news that James was seriously ill at Theobalds’ and ‘immediately changed his plans and rode post-haste to the King’s bedside’, motivated no doubt by political considerations including his own future.74 In the event, Buckingham did not travel to Paris until after James’ funeral, by which time the proxy wedding had already taken place and Henrietta Maria was ready to leave. On 14/24 May Buckingham eventually arrived in Paris to fetch the new Queen, a task in which he was frustrated. He stayed in the Hôtel de Chevreuse (Chevreuse’s Paris town house)75 for a week, during which there were numerous festivities. Lockyer points out that as Charles’ representative Buckingham’s fashions had to ‘outshine all competitors’ and notes that ‘such was the rage [in Paris] for everything English that even the hunting-cap which Buckingham wore […] became the height of fashion for a time’.76 Buckingham’s presence in Paris does not feature in the festival book. Nor, perhaps more understandably, does any reference to his series of diplomatic meetings with Richelieu during his stay, in the ultimately unsuccessful quest of obtaining assurances that France would form part of a league of anti-Habsburg powers and not to make a separate peace with Spain.
72 This written promise of toleration for Catholics in England did not form part of the official marriage articles. ‘It was referred to, in fact, as an Écrit Particulier and its exact status was by no means clear’ (Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 205). James was in any event not well placed to carry out his promise, even before death put a decisive stop to his influence. 73 For the lavish preparations made by Buckingham to stand as proxy for Charles see Griffey’s chapter in this volume, p. 136. 74 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 233. See also this chapter, p. 154 above. 75 The house, located in the rue Saint-Thomas du Louvre, was constructed by the architect Clément Métezeau (see George Bonnefons, Les Hôtels historiques de Paris: histoire, architecture (Paris: Éditions Ligaran, 2016)). There is a short account of Buckingham’s stay in the Hôtel de Chevreuse in Sauval, Histoire des antiquités de la ville de Paris, vol. 2 (1724), pp. 103–04. 76 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 236. Buckingham also took the opportunity to acquire some rare plants and had a meeting with the artist Peter Paul Rubens from whom he commissioned an equestrian portrait of himself. A seventeenth-century copy of Rubens’s sketch, one of several, now survives in the Kimbell Art Museum, Texas, the original having been destroyed by fire in 1949.
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The absence of any reference to Buckingham’s time in Paris may be explicable if the writer of A True Discourse relied largely on the Relation of the Glorious Triumph as his source for events in Paris before and during the wedding day. As mentioned, Buckingham was not in Paris for the formal contract and proxy wedding and there is no mention in the Relation of the Glorious Triumph of what took place between the wedding and Henrietta Maria’s arrival in Boulogne. Less explicable, perhaps, is that there is no reference to Buckingham in A True Discourse after Henrietta Maria embarked for England, given that her retinue included the Duke’s mother and sister.77 As Lord Warden and Admiral of the Cinque Ports, it was Buckingham’s responsibility to oversee preparations at Dover Castle for the arrival of the new Queen before she travelled to Canterbury and on to London. Also surprising in a festival book purporting to be a true and authoritative record is the omission of any reference, to the consummation of the wedding — an element essential to the legal status of a dynastic union. If the Relation of the Glorious Triumph is the main source of information for the author of A True Discourse, the absence of any record of how Henrietta Maria passed the days immediately before and following the proxy wedding and her subsequent journey across France and on to Dover is readily explicable. The French account makes no mention of the potentially controversial fact that Henrietta Maria, the incoming Queen of England, retired to the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in Paris both in the lead-up to the wedding and as she waited to leave on her journey to England. She was instructed, both in a letter from Marie de Médicis and by her chosen religious mentors, to pray that Charles would be converted to Catholicism.78 Her personal grand almoner, the Bishop of Mende, headed the substantial group of religious advisors who accompanied her to England, while Father Pierre de Bérulle, Henrietta Maria’s spiritual guide and founder of the Congregation of the Oratory of Jesus and Mary Immaculate, was appointed as the young Queen’s confessor.79 A Catholic household of some size would be likely to face opposition in English religious and political circles. But all that was for the future. The writer of A True Discourse may well have known about the popular undercurrent of discontent that the wedding was likely to encounter. He may have judged, however, that such speculation had no more place in a festival account than does the fact, equally unmentioned, that plague in London in May and June 1625 threatened to disrupt public celebrations.80
77 For a discussion of the royal train which greeted Henrietta Maria see Sara Wolfson’s chapter in this volume, pp. 189–93. 78 See C. Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen’, The Court Historian, 5 (2000), 15–28. 79 Zuane Pesaro wrote to the Doge and Senate on 10/20 June, noting that ‘In her train the queen has a bishop and twenty-four Bérullists or fathers of the Oratory, Jesuits being absolutely excluded’, in British History Online at [accessed 1 August 2018], pp. 78–95, item 114 (translated, on the website, from the Italian original). 80 See Karen Britland’s chapter, ‘A Ring of Roses: Henrietta Maria, Pierre de Bérulle and the Plague of 1625–1626’, in this volume, pp. 85–104.
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The lasting impression for a reader of A True Discourse is one of optimism, positivity, and a sense of unity, re-enforced when the writer concludes the main substance of the book as follows: And thus at last the King and Queene came to the Kings Palace at White-hall, where they were receiued with all the acclamations of ioy that might bee, and where I am now inforced to leaue them with this true and euer heartie prayer, that it would please God to blesse them together with daies of the longest extent that euer made happie any mortall creature, to send them faire and flourishing Issue, and when they shall of necessitie be translated from this life, that they may raigne with God in glory euerlasting. Amen [E3r-E3v]. This conclusion and, indeed, A True Discourse as a whole — like other festival books of the early modern period written in a context of national and international political and religious tension — presents a consciously positive discourse contributing to a sense of national and international unity, however fragile this might in fact turn out to be. By the time A True Discourse was published some of the squabbles over precedence among those who travelled in Henrietta Maria’s retinue and among English courtiers and noble families who felt they should be included in her close circle had died down. In the days and weeks which followed, the size and priestly membership of Henrietta Maria’s retinue pushed the English Parliament’s barely concealed anti-Catholic stance to its limits. It is unlikely that any of the participants in this marriage and state alliance foresaw that within three years the fragile Stuart-Bourbon entente would have collapsed, Buckingham would have approved action by English troops in France against Louis XIII’s troops in support of the rebels in Huguenot-held La Rochelle, Mansfield would have lost Cadiz, France would make difficulties and procrastinate over the second instalment of Henrietta Maria’s dowry and trousseau, and Buckingham himself would be assassinated. Nor, on the other side of the coin, could court circles in England and France have expected that this royal wedding would result in Charles and Henrietta Maria drawing closer in a strong bond of loyalty and love, and the longed-for dynastic line being secured, even as England slid towards the morass of civil war. Festival books are not in the business of prediction, even if they may, as here, seek to influence a national and international mood and alliance.
c ha pter 6. diverg ent discourses
Bibliography Early Printed Books
Epithalamia Oxoniensia In Auspicatissimum, Potentissimi Monarchæ Caroli, Magnæ Britanniæ, Franciæ, et Hiberniæ Regis, etc. Cum Henrietta Maria, Aeternæ Memoriæ Henrici Magni Gallorum Regis Filia, Connubium (STC 19031, Oxford: 1625) Marcelline, George, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum (London: Thomas Archer, 1625) Le Mercure François, ou, la Suitte de l’histoire de la paix, 25 vols (Paris: Jean & Estienne Richer, 1611–1648), vol. 11 (1625) [for the years 1625–1626)] A Relation of the Gloriovs Trivmphs and Order of the Ceremonies obserued in the Marriage of the High and Mighty Charles, King of Great Brittaine, and the Ladie Henretta [sic] Maria, Sister to the most Christian King of France. Together with the Ceremonie obserued in their Troth-plighting, performed in the Castle of the Louure, in his Maiesties Chamber there (London: Thomas Snodham, 1625) Sauval, Henri, Histoire et recherches des antiquités de la ville de Paris, 3 vols (Paris: C. Moette, 1724) Le Triomphe glorieux & l’ordre des Ceremonies obseruees au mariage du Roy de la Grand’ Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du Roy. Ensemble l’ordre tenu aux fiancailles [sic.] faictes au Chasteau du Louure, en la Chambre de sa Majesté (Paris: De l’imprimerie de Jean Martin, 1625) A Trve Discovrse of all the Royal Passages, Tryvmphs and Ceremonies, obserued at the Contract and Mariage of the High and Mighty Charles, King of Great Britaine, and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady Henrietta Maria of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of France. Together with her Iourney from Paris to Bulloigne, and thence vnto Douer in England, where the King met her, and the manner of their enterview. As also the tryumphant Solemnities which passed in their Iournies from Douer to the Citie of London, and so to Whitehall, &c. (London: John Haviland, 1625) Primary Sources
Ben Jonson, ed. by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1952), vol. 7 (1941) Morosini, Marc Antonio, Dispatch to the Doge and Senate in Venice (Paris, 6/16 May 1625), Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, ed. by Allen B. Hinds (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1913), vol. 19 [1625– 1626], British History Online at [accessed 1 August 2018], p. 44, item 61 (translated from the Italian original) Nobiliaire Universel de France, ou Recueil Général des Généalogies Historiques des Maisons Nobles de ce Royaume, ed. by M. de Saint-Allais (Paris: De l’imprimerie de C.F. Patris, 1814), vol. 1 The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)
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Pesaro, Zuane, Dispatch to the Doge and Senate in Venice (London, 10/20 and 17/27 June 1625), Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, ed. by Allen B. Hinds (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1913), vol. 19 [1625–1626], British History Online at [accessed 1 August 2018], pp. 78–95, items 114 and 125 (translated from the Italian original) Somers, John, A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, on the most Interesting and Enter taining Subjects: but chiefly such as relate to the History and Constitution of these King doms (London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809–1810; 2nd edition, 1811) Secondary Studies
Bonnefons, Georges, Les Hôtels historiques de Paris: histoire, architecture (Paris: Éditions Ligaran, 2016) Cressy, David, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) Griffey, Erin, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015) Hibbard, Caroline, ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Translation from Princess to Queen’, The Court Historian, 5 (2000), 15–28 Kenyon, J. P., The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1958; third impression, 1968) Lockyer, Roger, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London: Longmans, 1981) Martin, Henri-Jean, Print, Power and People in Seventeenth-Century France, translated by David Gerard (London: Scarecrow Press, 1993) Miller, Miriam, ‘Thomas Snodham’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 20 vols (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 20, p. 428 Mulryne, J. R., Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewring (eds), Europa Trium phans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2004; e-book 2010) Peacock, John, ‘The Visual Image of Charles I’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 176–239 Plomer, Henry R., A Short History of English Printing, 1476–1898 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Company Ltd, 1900), online at [accessed 11 July 2018] Samson, Alexander (ed.), The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) Sharpe, Kevin, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010) Smith, Helen, ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Sturdy, David J., Richelieu and Mazarin. A Study in Statesmanship (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Toynbee, Margaret, ‘The Wedding Journey of King Charles I’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 69 (1955), 75–89
Sara J. Wolfson
Chapter 7. The Welcoming Journey of Queen Henrietta Maria and Stuart–Bourbon Relations, 1625–1626 The welcoming journey of Henrietta Maria in June 1625 stands as a microcosm of the problems that plagued the integration of the young Catholic Queen into British Protestant society. Above all, the purpose of this journey was to establish patronage ties between the new Queen and her subjects, as well as to reinforce Charles I’s own patron–client relations as the succeeding monarch to the throne. As Kevin Sharpe has argued, the succession of a new monarch was a ‘fundamental change in the political climate — the event which decided who would grow in the sun of royal favour and who would wither in the cold of obscurity’.1 Although Sharpe focused upon the organizational structure of Charles’ household, the arrival of a new Queen consort posed similar opportunities for access, patronage, and influence.2 By emphasizing a more socially defined understanding of the political, where interactions with the monarch were crucial to the governing process, Henrietta Maria’s initial encounters with her British subjects take on a much wider political significance for the court.3 Yet as Sir Roger Mostyn shrewdly observed in a newsletter written merely two months prior to the Queen’s arrival, the French intended to have ‘all her servants or most of them of her owne countrey men’.4 As we shall see, contemporary concern over the confessional character of Henrietta Maria’s secular appointments underpinned the preparations and events that occurred during the Queen’s journey from Boulogne to London. This chapter argues that the confessional differences between Charles and Henrietta Maria prevented the usual process of assimilation that accompanied the arrival of a foreign Queen consort. Ironically, as this study will show, a key priority of the marriage negotiations was the resolution of potential problems
1 Kevin Sharpe, ‘The Image of Virtue: The Court and Household of Charles I, 1625–1642’, in David Starkey (ed.), The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987), p. 226. 2 For a discussion of the opportunities attached to Henrietta Maria’s Bedchamber appointments see Sara J. Wolfson, ‘The Female Bedchamber of Queen Henrietta Maria: Politics, Familial Networks and Policy, 1626–1641’, in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds), The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 311–41. 3 See Smuts’s chapter above, p. 32, for a further discussion on this point. 4 Sir Roger Mostyn to [Sir John Wynn?], 29 April 1625, National Library of Wales (NLW), 9060E/1336. Sara J. Wolfson is a Staff Tutor and Lecturer in History at the Open University. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 179–204 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119190
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brought about by a cross-confessional alliance. The progress, however, revealed that the tensions prevalent within post-Reformation society could not be overcome by marital diplomacy. Yet a welcoming journey was traditionally an occasion where a queen would grant household offices, or at least suggest appointments to her husband. Anna of Denmark’s journey from Scotland to England on the succession of James VI to the English throne as King James I in 1603 was crucial to the incorporation of English patron–client relations within the Jacobean court. Here Anna appointed two English women to her Privy Chamber offices independently from her husband.5 Similarly, Anne of Cleves’ wedding progress in 1539 was accompanied by a lobby for Privy Chamber posts among Henry VIII’s courtiers.6 In contrast to these former Queens, Henrietta Maria’s ability to appoint officers from her husband’s court was restricted by the terms of the Stuart–Bourbon marriage treaty of 1624, which forbade non-Catholics from holding office within her household.7 Rather than being an occasion of integration for the young Queen, the wedding journey highlighted instead both her foreignness and Catholicism. On reaching London, the Queen dismissed all the Protestant courtiers who had attended upon her from Dover, being resolved to admit only Catholics into her Privy Chamber departments.8 Over the next year, Charles and the Duke of Buckingham, the royal favourite, made repeated attempts to place Protestant women within high-ranking positions around the Queen. The success of these efforts was demonstrated by the fact that by the summer of 1626, the bulk of the French Catholic household was forcibly dismissed and, in its place, a new, predominantly Protestant establishment was formed.9 The outcome of the first year of marriage provides a useful context in which to frame a discussion of the Queen’s wedding journey. The removal of the households of foreign Queens consort was not unusual in the history of premodern Europe.10 5 Helen Payne, ‘Aristocratic Women and the Jacobean Court, 1603–1625’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 2001), pp. 20–35. 6 Retha M. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 111–13, 119–20, 127–30. 7 For an English translation of the Stuart–Bourbon marriage treaty of November 1624, see: HMC, Calendar of the manuscripts of the most honourable the Marquis of Salisbury, preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, Part XXII (London, 1971), pp. 197–200. The marriage treaty in French can be found in Paris, Archives Nationales (AN), Série K: Monuments Historiques, Princes du Sang (K) 539, no. 41b. 8 Thomas Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of Charles I, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1848), vol. 1, p. 81. 9 For a detailed discussion of the removal of the bulk of Henrietta Maria’s French household, see R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–37; R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘The French Match and Court Politics’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), pp. 13–28; Sara J. Wolfson, ‘Aristocratic Women of the Household and Court of Queen Henrietta Maria’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Durham University, 2010), chapter 1; Sara J. Wolfson, Caroline Court Women, 1625–1669 (forthcoming, Manchester University Press). 10 Maureen M. Meikle, ‘“Holde her at the Oeconomicke rule of the House”: Anna of Denmark and Scottish Court Finances, 1589–1603’, in Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (eds), Women in Scotland c. 1100–1750 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), p. 105; Edward Corp, ‘Catherine of Braganza and Cultural Politics’, in Clarissa Cambell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 55.
C h a p ter 7. The Welcomin g Journey of Queen Henrietta Ma ria
The arrival of a foreign entourage not only undermined the role of the subsidiary court as an alternative place of patronage and influence for the domestic nobility, but it also introduced alien political allegiances at the centre of power. In 1404, Joan of Navarre saw her ‘French, Bretons, Lombards, Italians and Navarrese’ servants dismissed by vote of Parliament for fear that they would betray state secrets to Henry IV’s enemies.11 The dismissal of Henrietta Maria’s principal officers followed this traditional pattern. R. Malcolm Smuts has shown how Charles’ purge of his wife’s household represented fears about state security in the aftermath of the Parliament of 1626, as well as Buckingham’s desire to consolidate his power base within the Queen’s court.12 Understanding how the Stuart and Bourbon courts sought to respond much earlier than 1626 to the dual issues of the Queen’s religion and her socio-political integration within the Caroline court forms the heart of this chapter. In doing so, this study draws upon Dagmar Freist’s exploration of the Stuart–Bourbon marriage treaty of 1624 and its connection to anti-Catholic discourses surrounding Henrietta Maria in the late 1630s. Freist’s emphasis on religion and popular discourse offers a unique interpretation of the marriage treaty away from a typical military and diplomatic analysis.13 This chapter adds to this debate, by showing how the Catholic issue was never restricted to the late 1630s, as many scholars argue, but was in fact the product of the Stuart–Bourbon alliance and the marriage negotiations surrounding Henrietta Maria’s household appointments.14 The cross-confessional nature of the alliance forced both Britain and France to demonstrate that their dynastic approach towards each other was confessionally justified and did not compromise the ideological stance of either polity. The welcoming journey reinforces the significance of queenship and marriage against what John Watkins has called ‘the formation, maintenance and disintegration’ of diplomatic ties between polities.15 As this chapter shows, these diplomatic ties were forged during the marriage negotiations and also physically, in the interaction between the Queen, the King, the French household, and the Stuart court during the wedding journey. In recreating the wedding journey it is necessary therefore to engage with the ideas of cultural scholars who emphasize
11 ‘Henry IV: January 1404’, in Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. by Chris Given-Wilson, Paul Brand, Seymour Phillips, Mark Ormrod, Geoffrey Martin, Anne Curry and Rosemary Horrox (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), British History Online at (Membrane 13) [accessed 26 October 2019]. I am grateful to Dr Ellie Woodacre for this reference and a discussion on the introduction of foreign royal households. 12 Smuts, ‘Henrietta Maria’s Circle’, pp. 17–18; Smuts, ‘French Match’, pp. 22–26. 13 Dagmar Freist, ‘Popery in Perfection: The Experience of Catholicism — Henrietta Maria between Private Practice and Public Discourse’, in Michael Braddick and David Smith (eds), The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain: Essays Presented to John Morrill to Mark his 65th Birthday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 31–51. 14 I am grateful to Prof. Michael Questier for a discussion on this point. 15 John Watkins, After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca: Cornell Uni versity Press, 2017), p. 4.
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the importance of visual symbolism in comprehending behaviour.16 Edward Muir’s analysis of early modern rituals ‘as an aspect of language that communicated meaning’ is essential to this analysis.17 Henrietta Maria’s reception represented a key moment where both Britain and France had an opportunity to address the practical problems raised by a mixed royal marriage and, in effect, neutralize the Queen’s foreignness and Catholicism. The wedding progress reveals, then, how various participants related to each other in the cross-confessional culture of post-Reformation Europe.18 Consequently, recent work on interfaith marriages in the early modern period is helpful to this study. Writing about Dutch seventeenth-century mixed marriages, Benjamin Kaplan has shown how they ‘raised in the most intimate, concrete terms’ how interfaith marriages functioned within the home.19 While acknowledging that mixed unions posed a threat to each church’s aim to confessionalize across society, Kaplan shows how these marriages were often personally and religiously successful, resulting in an exchange of religious ideas and conversions between churches.20 Though Caroline Hibbard has demonstrated that this was the case for the Caroline court, particularly after the expulsion of the bulk of Henrietta Maria’s French Catholic household, the wedding journey is typically explored in terms of conflict.21 For Hibbard, the lack of integration between Henrietta Maria and her new court was culturally inevitable, with the wedding journey heralding ‘the frictions’ that would characterize the first year of the royal marriage.22 The forcible removal of Madame de Saint-George, the Queen’s French governess, from the royal carriage at Dover and her replacement with Caroline court women have been credited by historians as a particular point of contention. Originally considered a structural issue, more recently the carriage scene has been placed within Buckingham’s efforts to insert his own female kin around the Queen and gain influence over her household.23 Others have argued that Henrietta Maria’s initial policy of separation from her British subjects during her reception was based on her identity as a French Catholic chaste princess.24
16 See in particular Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015). 17 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 10. 18 For a discussion of this term, see C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist and Mark Greengrass (eds), Living with Religious Diversity in Early-Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 19 Benjamin J. Kaplan, ‘“For They Will Turn Away Thy Sons”: The Practice and Perils of Mixed Marriage in the Dutch Golden Age’, in Marc R. Forster and Benjamin J. Kaplan (eds), Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Steven Ozment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 116. 20 Kaplan, “For They Will Turn Away Thy Sons”, pp. 116–17. 21 C. Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty: Henrietta Maria and the Transition from Princess to Queen’, The Court Historian, 5 (2000), 15–28. 22 Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty’, 18. 23 Smuts, ‘French Match’, p. 23. 24 Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 15–19.
C h a p ter 7. The Welcomin g Journey of Queen Henrietta Ma ria
While scholars are correct in their assumptions that the wedding journey from Dover to London marked a souring of Stuart–Bourbon relations, this chapter presents an alternative analysis of the wedding journey. Here we will ask whether the conflict that ensued was in fact inevitable, or the result of unforeseen factors, which were not necessarily fatal to the functioning of the marriage as a dynastic project.25 Rather than focus solely on the carriage scene, the chapter builds upon ideas of religious accommodation put forward by Reformation scholars to suggest that the Bourbon and Stuart regimes approached the marriage alliance in this manner.26 Placing the wedding journey within its proper context moves the debate away from short-term events that occurred during the progress to a broader awareness of the largely underexplored marriage negotiations centred upon Henrietta Maria’s household arrangements. Analysis of the Queen’s progress reveals the very delicate balance between issues of religion and realpolitik that France and Britain faced with the largely unprecedented example of a royal mixed marriage. Without doubt the arrival of a foreign household was a perennial point of conflict for international queens, but in Henrietta Maria’s case, the additional issue of confessionalism hardened the parameters in which she could operate and draw upon for precedent. In this way, this chapter contributes to a growing historiographical awareness of the complex circumstances in which the royal marriage took place and the political consequences of the religious toleration granted to Henrietta Maria’s household by the Stuart regime.27 Consequently, by examining the Queen’s first encounters with her British subjects at Boulogne, Dover, Barham Downs, and Canterbury, this chapter shows how relatively minor questions of court protocol were essential in the struggle to establish the exact meaning of the marriage alliance. The Stuart–Bourbon Marriage Negotiations of 1624–1625 In order to understand the problems that occurred during Henrietta Maria’s welcoming journey, it is necessary to examine first the marriage negotiations of 1624 to 1625 relating to the Queen’s household. It is only by exploring the unresolved debates centred around the Queen’s personnel, the organizational
25 I am grateful to Professor Questier for a discussion on this point. 26 For ideas of religious toleration and accommodation during this period, see Adam Morton and Nadine Lewycky, ‘Introduction’, in Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (eds), in Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England — Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 1–27; Anthony Milton, ‘A Qualified Intolerance: The Limits and Ambiguities of Early Stuart Anti-Catholicism’, in Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 85–115; Sara J. Wolfson, ‘Practical Proselytising: The Impact of Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the Caroline Court, 1625–1626’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), pp. 43–63. 27 For the most recent revision of the political circumstances within which the marriage took place, see Smuts, ‘French Match’, pp. 13–28; Michael C. Questier, Dynastic Politics & The British Reformations, 1558–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 420–32.
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structure of her Privy Chamber, and the extent to which Buckingham’s interests would be accommodated within the French household that key issues of discontent during the wedding progress can be explained. As will be shown, the failure to settle these issues was based upon the competition for hegemony between the Stuart and Bourbon courts. This competition took a variety of forms and dominated the marriage negotiations both before and after the formal signing of the marriage treaty in November 1624. The problems ranged from the lack of consensus among early modern courts over officer duties and titles, to questions of precedence over the organizational structure of Henrietta Maria’s Privy Chamber. Perhaps the most important area of debate was the confessional and, to a lesser extent, national character of the Queen’s entourage. James’ agreement to the religious concessions granted to Henrietta Maria’s household, as well as to limited toleration for English Catholics within a secret document called the Écrit particulier, meant that the Queen’s provision was linked to much broader political and foreign policy considerations.28 For Britain, an alliance with France represented an abandonment of the Jacobean policy of peace with Spain pursued since 1604. Instead, the Stuart crown looked to France to join an anti-Habsburg league for the restoration of the Palatinate to James I’s son-in-law, Frederick V.29 On France’s part, the marriage treaty had sought to safeguard Henrietta Maria’s Catholicism by guaranteeing that her household would be comprised of only French Catholic officers and servants chosen by Louis XIII.30 James’ agreement to French demands over his daughter-in-law’s household prevented, in effect, her smooth transition as Queen of Great Britain even prior to her departure from Paris. France’s desire to safeguard Henrietta Maria’s conscience against potential threats of heresy permeated decisions during the marriage negotiations over the types of officers chosen to accompany her overseas. Fears over Henrietta Maria’s temporal and spiritual household were exacerbated by Louis’s oath to Pope Urban VIII, promising to protect his sister’s Catholicism.31 Although the treaty placed the initial selection of the Queen’s officers formally with Louis, the ambassadorial correspondence highlights the important role that Marie de Médicis played in her daughter’s household arrangements. This is most clear in the deliberations over the office of a ‘tiring lady’. While the title ‘tiring lady’ appears in the correspondence of Charles’ ambassadors extraordinary at the French
28 A manuscript copy of the Écrit particulier can be found in Paris, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Paris (AAE), Correspondance Politique-Angleterre (CPA) 28, fols 35–36. A similar point regarding the Queen’s provision is made in Valentina Caldari, Michael C. Questier, and Sara J. Wolfson, ‘Introduction’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), p. 9. 29 The best account of this reversal in foreign policy can be found in T. Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 57–105, 197–261. 30 AN, K 539, no. 41b. 31 J. Dagens (ed.), Correspondance du Cardinal Bérulle, 3 vols (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer; Louvain: Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 1937–1939), vol. 3, pp. 513–18.
C h a p ter 7. The Welcomin g Journey of Queen Henrietta Ma ria
court, James Hay, first Earl of Carlisle, and Henry Rich, first Earl of Holland, the name fails to reveal its structural importance to France.32 Primarily, this is because the title is misleading, as the Earls were in fact discussing the French office of a lady-in-waiting. Oliver Mallick has shown in his analysis of Anne d’Autriche’s court how the various categories of definition complicated the post of lady-in-waiting, such as ‘dame d’honneur (lady of honour), the dame d’atour (lady-in-waiting) and the surintendante (surintendant)’. For the purpose of this discussion, it is the former two categories that are of relevance to the marriage negotiations and impacted upon relations during the welcoming progress.33 In general, the ambassadors opposed the Queen Mother’s efforts to introduce a lady-in-waiting into the Caroline court, as this office was simply not in use in England. Nonetheless, the Queen Mother’s authority remained steadfast when she insisted that her daughter would ‘bring it into fashion for other princesses at that Court in the future’.34 The negotiations over the dame d’honneur reveal the lack of regulation across Europe over officer titles and duties, which, as we shall see, would impact upon the Queen’s interactions with her husband once in England.35 Whereas the office of ‘tire-woman’ appears in the Stuart court, its application was very different from the various duties of a dame d’honneur. It certainly was not analogous with the high-profile post of this particular category of lady-in-waiting. Only one instance of a tire-woman can be found in the early accounts of Anna of Denmark’s household for 1603–1604, where a Marie Mountjoy, a tire-woman, was paid ‘for a helmet for her Majesty & divers trimmings for the Ladies of her Majesty’s mask at Twelfthtide’.36 Eventually, a compromise was achieved once Holland and Carlisle understood more fully how the duties of a dame d’honneur complied with Stuart courtly practices. At first, the post of ‘tiring lady’ was likened to a maid of honour and then to a chamberer, on account of the personal duties connected to the role of dame d’honneur, such as the dressing of a queen. Even so, the financial and administrative authority, as well as the constant access that a dame d’honneur enjoyed to their royal mistress, led the ambassadors to conclude that a ‘tiring lady’ was not comparable with the lower status of either British office. Accordingly, it was agreed that the highest-ranking female officer
32 The ambassadorial debates over this office can be seen in the following sources: Memorial delivered to Sir George Goring touching Henrietta Maria’s household, October 1624, The National Archives [TNA], State Papers [SP] 78/73, fol. 271; Short notes for Secretary Conway’s consideration in the making of his dispatch, TNA, SP 78/73, fol. 335; Memorial for Sir George Goring, n.d. [1625], TNA, SP 78/74, fol. 123; Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice (hereafter CSP Venice), ed. by Rawdon Brown (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1864–1947), 18, pp. 612–13 (no. 855). 33 Oliver Mallick, ‘Clients and Friends: The Ladies-in-Waiting at the Court of Anne of Austria (1615–1666)’, in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds), The Politics of Female Households Ladiesin-Waiting across Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 234. 34 CSP Venice, 18, pp. 612–13 (no. 855). 35 A similar point is made by Mallick in ‘Clients and Friends’, p. 234. 36 TNA, Land Revenue (LR) 6/154/9, n.f. (24 June 1603–29 Sept 1604). I am grateful to Helen Payne for this reference.
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of Henrietta Maria’s household, the groom of the stool, would fulfil the post of ‘tiring lady’.37 Madame de Saint-George was appointed to this office and cited within the Queen’s establishment list signed at the Louvre on 16/26 May 1625 as her ‘dame d’honneur’ as well.38 To all intents, France received a significant structural and confessional concession with Madame de Saint-George’s office. The Bourbon court believed that the constant access of Henrietta Maria’s secular household, particularly the right of entry of women, would safeguard the Queen’s religious practices.39 As Caroline Hibbard has argued, French anxiety over Henrietta Maria’s immediate entourage was tied up with the unprecedented agreement of sending a ‘young princess from a Catholic court to marry and live among heretics’.40 The choice of Madame de Saint-George to serve as groom of the stool was unsurprising in light of her trusted service within the royal nursery, as sub-governess for Princesses Christine and Henrietta Maria from 1610.41 Indeed, the important confessional purpose attached to her post was reflected in Madame de SaintGeorge’s promise to the Queen Mother that she would never leave Henrietta Maria’s side in England.42 Regardless of the Venetian ambassador’s accusation that Marie’s favour prevailed ‘over merit and worth’ in the selection of her daughter’s officers, it was clearly confessional factors and trust that directed Madame de Saint-George’s appointment.43 Any infringement on Madame de Saint-George’s post would clearly be a major issue of discontent for France. Even with the privileged access conferred on Madame de Saint-George, the articles of marriage had in fact provided a confessional loophole for Charles that he hoped to fulfil during the welcoming progress. The selection of initial 37 ‘That touching the Office of a Tiring Ladie, It is conceived that it is supplied in that of the Groome of the Stoole’, TNA, SP 78/74, fol. 123. See also TNA, SP 78/73, fols 271, 335. 38 Henrietta Maria’s establishment list signed at the Louvre, 16/26 May 1625, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Fonds Français (FF) MS 23600, fol. 178. 39 The French ambassadors were reminded in their ambassadorial instructions that ‘la suereté de la conscience de Madame dépendant plus, après la grace de Dieu des femmes et autres officiers qui seront auprès d’elle, que des Ecclesiastiques’ [the surety of Madame’s conscience depends more, after the grace of God on the women and other officers who will be around her, than the Ecclesiastics]. Instructions to the Duc de Chevreuse and Monsieur de la Ville-aux-Clercs, ambassadors extraordinary to England, 21/31 May 1625, TNA, PRO 31/3/62, fol. 13. 40 Hibbard, ‘Translating Royalty’, 17. 41 Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria including her private correspondence with Charles I (London: Richard Bentley, 1857), p. 16; Eugène Griselle (ed.), État de la maison du roi Louis XIII, de celles de sa mère, Marie de Médicis; de ses sœurs, Chrestienne, Élisabeth et Henriette de France; de son frère, Gaston D’Orléans; de sa femme, Anne d’Autriche; de ses fils, Le Dauphin (Louis XIV) et Philippe d’Orléans, comprenant les années 1601 à 1665 (Paris: P. Catin, 1912), pp. 81, 83. 42 In a letter from Thomas Roper to Thomas Rant dated 17/27 June 1625, Roper notes how at Canterbury when the royal couple ‘bedded togeather’ there was ‘much a doe there was to gett out of the roome an olde matrone who attended on the queene, she alleaginge that she had engaged hir promise to [the] queene mother not to leave hir’. Letter 84, in Michael C. Questier (ed.), Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621–1625, Camden Fifth Series, 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 375. The identity of the ‘olde matrone’ is confirmed as Madame de Saint-George in Leveneur de Tillières, Mémoires inédits du Comte Leveneur de Tillières (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1863), p. 91. 43 CSP Venice, 18, p. 507 (no. 693).
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officers may have been dictated by their French and Catholic identity, but any additions to Henrietta Maria’s entourage were to be made only with the consent of the King of Great Britain. As the marriage treaty stated: All Madams domestique servants, whom she shall bring with her into England shalbe Catholique and Ffrenchmen chosen by the King of Ffrance, and when any dye or shalbe changed Madame shall take in there places other Catholique Ffrench-men, or English yf the Kinge of Great Brittaine agree to it.44 This stipulation placed Charles in an advantageous position to control changes in his wife’s household and to assert his authority over the patron-client relations within Henrietta Maria’s court. Moreover, James’ death in March inadvertently affected Henrietta Maria’s Privy Chamber arrangements. England and France both recognized that her train would have to be expanded accordingly to complement her position as Queen consort of Great Britain, rather than Princess of Wales.45 A month later, when the French government presented Charles with a new formation for his wife’s household, the Earls of Holland and Carlisle rejected it immediately. As Holland and Carlisle argued, by keeping the status quo, Charles could ‘make the encrease accordinge to his owne pleasure’, as was the King’s right by the articles of marriage.46 The ambassadors’ enforcement of Charles’ prerogative over his wife’s household personnel was influenced most likely by the appointment of a Protestant Caroline court woman, Isabella Cope, Countess of Holland, to Henrietta Maria’s Bedchamber.47 This appointment was made in early April through the agency of ‘the queens’, Marie de Médicis and Anne d’Autriche, as well as ‘the Lady her selfe’, Henrietta Maria.48 Although it was in direct violation of the legal, confessional, and nationalistic terms of the treaty, it was simply intended as a mark of gratitude to the Earl of Holland in order to distinguish the ‘singularity of his merit’ throughout the marriage negotiations.49 Holland’s mistress in France, Marie de Rohan, Duchesse de Chevreuse, may have even brokered this patronage through her office as Anne d’Autriche’s surintendant.50 Regardless of the honour accorded to Holland and the superseding of the confessional terms of the marriage alliance, the Countess’s appointment was met immediately with hostility from Charles and his court. The King resented France for breaking the terms of the treaty by introducing an English servant into Henrietta Maria’s court without first seeking his consent. As Goring informed Holland:
44 HMC, Salisbury, XXII, p. 198. 45 Tillières, Mémoires, p. 81. 46 Carlisle and Holland to Secretary Conway, 27 April/7 May 1625, TNA, SP 78/74, fol. 195. 47 Sir Henry Jermyn to Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, 7/17 April 1625, TNA, SP 78/74, fol. 159. Smuts also explores the appointment of Lady Holland and the implications for Buckingham in Smuts, ‘French Match’, p. 22. 48 Sir Henry Jermyn to Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, 12/22 April 1625, TNA, SP 78/74, fol. 166. 49 TNA, SP 78/74, fol. 166. 50 Victor Cousin, Madame de Chevreuse (Paris: Perrin, 1886), p. 44.
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His Ma[jes]t[y] did seeme to wonder much that such an Act was suffered to passe without his consent obtained, especially when he called to mind that the consent for English was reserved by the articles expressely to the King.51 Moreover, the display of preferment to the Protestant Countess undermined the important role that her husband’s patron, Buckingham, played in the Stuart–Bourbon alliance. In an effort to control the Queens’ blunder, Antoine Coëffier de Ruzé, Marquis d’Effiat, the French ambassador extraordinary in London, suggested that Henrietta Maria appoint Caroline court women to her Bedchamber on her arrival in England. The lack of religious specification relating to these potential appointments in Effiat’s letter can be explained through shrewd realpolitik. The ambassador pointed out that the access of British women to the Bedchamber would in fact be a great political advantage for France, thereby trumping any confessional concerns. That Effiat recommended the Duke’s wife, Katherine Manners, Duchess of Buckingham, was certainly not a coincidence.52 Though the incorporation of Caroline court women remained unsettled at the time of Henrietta Maria’s departure, the appointment of Lady Holland provided Buckingham with an opening to demand the incorporation of his own female kin and clients into the Queen’s household. On France’s part, the marriage negotiations touching Buckingham’s kin were linked with efforts to maintain the Duke’s military support for the French alliance. Indeed, Louis looked to Britain for assistance for his anti-Habsburg foreign policy and for immediate naval aid to defeat the Huguenot rebel, Benjamin de Rohan, Duc de Soubise.53 As the royal favourite for both Stuart kings and Lord High Admiral, Buckingham was a crucial ally for France. This was apparent in January 1625, when the Duke secured James’ promise to loan eight English ships to Louis to help suppress Soubise’s rebellion.54 However, in May 1625, the joining of the Huguenots of La Rochelle with Soubise delayed the handing over of the English vessels, as Charles feared that they would now be used against fellow Protestants.55 To ensure Buckingham’s friendship for France, the French government cultivated relations through Henrietta Maria’s officer appointments. From as early as September 1624, the French ministers 51 TNA, SP 78/74, fol. 159. 52 ‘Mais il sera bien aize que la Royne estant ici fait sans offenser personne encor Election de quelques unes comme de Madame la Duchesse de Bouquingan, car il y a plusieurs en cette cour qui peuvent recepvoir cet honneur qui sera utille et ne coustera rien n’estant qu’une liberté d’entrer dans la chamb[re] du Lict.’ [But it will be much easier when the Queen being here, can make, without offending anyone else, election of someone like Madame the Duchess of Buckingham, for there are several in this court who could receive this honour who will be useful and will cost nothing only freedom of entry into the Bedchamber], Marquis d’Effiat to Monsieur de la Ville-aux-Clercs, 11/21 April 1625, AAE, CPA 35, fol. 15. 53 For a detailed summary of France’s military aims, see Smuts, ‘French Match’, pp. 18–20. 54 Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628 (London and New York: Longman, 1981), p. 230. 55 Thomas Cogswell, ‘Foreign Policy and Parliament: The Case of La Rochelle, 1625–1626’, English Historical Review, 99 (1984), 249–53.
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questioned whether English Catholics could serve in Henrietta Maria’s household. Effiat suggested to Monsieur de la Ville-aux-Clercs, Louis’s Secretary of State, that the Duke’s Catholic mother, Mary Beaumont, Countess of Buckingham, and his father-in-law, Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland, be appointed to Henrietta Maria’s household in England.56 While the debates over Buckingham’s kin remained unresolved at the time of the Queen’s departure from France, they set a precedent for discussions in the future. Likewise, the offer of a post to Lady Holland implied that other Protestant Caroline courtiers could be appointed to the Queen’s service. Effiat’s correspondence indicates an underlying concern at the Stuart and Bourbon courts that Buckingham’s kin were to be prioritized first within the new Queen consort’s establishment. To all intents, then, the marriage negotiations established the Queen’s welcoming progress as a forum for opportunities to serve within Henrietta Maria’s household, as was the custom for past consorts. Although the entourage that arrived at Dover with Henrietta Maria on 12/22 June was solely French and Catholic, the conflicting interests of the marriage negotiations clearly complicated its formation. Henrietta Maria’s Privy Chamber arrangements concealed very real French concerns about safeguarding the fifteen-year-old Queen’s Catholicism. Yet, the marriage treaty both protected and undermined the confessional restrictions placed on the Queen’s household through the legal authority conferred upon Charles. Questions of foreign policy, patronage, favour, and influence on both sides of the English Channel exacerbated these confessional issues further. Any hope that the royal wedding progress from Dover to London would integrate the Queen within elite British society would have to take into consideration the unresolved problems of the marriage negotiations and treaty. The marriage negotiations demonstrate, then, that the Queen’s household was not approached as a closed institution, but rather as a place for further structural changes, where Buckingham’s interests needed to be accommodated. The extent to which the Queen’s principal French officers would tolerate Protestant contact around the young bride, however, was another factor that the marriage negotiations had sought to take into account, but, in practice, was impossible to ensure. The Welcoming Progress from Dover to London In the ceremonial rituals attached to Henrietta Maria’s welcoming progress, evidence suggests that the King and Queen shared a mutual desire, at least for a short period, for Henrietta Maria’s assimilation with her Protestant subjects. Any desire for integration would, nonetheless, be underpinned by the very real issues of the Queen’s service by Protestant courtiers — Buckingham’s kin in particular — which had been muted over during the marriage negotiations.
56 Marquis d’Effiat to Monsieur de la Ville-aux-Clercs, 17/27 September 1624, AAE, CPA 31, fols 236–37.
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Alongside the need of the royal favourite to control potential rival threats to his influence within Henrietta Maria’s court was the issue of Charles’ recent succession to the British throne. The King had to bear in mind both his inherited obligations to reward past and present servants, as well as his authority over the choice of additional officers to attend his Queen.57 These concerns were apparent in a list of names of the leading aristocratic women and men chosen to accompany Charles to greet his bride. Copies of this list were widely circulated among elite circles that were eager to hear news of the court.58 Here the King oversaw personally the names of the nobility to join the royal welcoming party. Instead of the lords and ladies being placed in their order of status, as memoranda of the aristocracy were usually composed, they were positioned out of rank, as ‘they were sometimes changed and added by the king’.59 With the marriage negotiations focusing primarily on the question of female Bedchamber posts, it is through the King’s selection of Caroline court women to comprise the wedding train where his patronage aims are most clear. Unable to direct the choice of French female officers chosen to accompany Henrietta Maria to England and aware of the need to extend the Queen’s household appropriately, now as Queen of Great Britain, the King moved quickly to assert his control over the selection of additional officer appointments to his wife’s household. Charles was clearly using the Queen’s reception as a means of restricting whom he felt would be suitable additions to her service. Accordingly, the King provided his wife with a choice of aristocratic women intended to represent the crème de la crème of British court society, the ‘magnificence’ of the Stuart court and, most importantly, the patron–client obligations prevalent there at the time of her arrival in England. The concept of ‘magnificence’ had in fact emerged as a key consideration during the wedding negotiations when France presented the British ambassadors with amendments to the Queen’s household in April. Holland and Carlisle may have rejected these overtures in light of Charles’ legal prerogative over Henrietta Maria’s additional officers, but anxieties over her servants’ noble status also played a part. As the ambassadors argued, the King ‘would haue care to see her [Henrietta Maria] provided of Seruants and all thinges els according to her quality’.60 This emphasis on ‘quality’ was linked to the bond between an early modern court’s visual culture and the idea of royal majesty. According to Smuts, in his discussion of art and the material culture of majesty, one of the major ways in which contemporaries understood ‘magnificence’ was through the ‘medieval principle that power and prestige must always be expressed through a large and impressive entourage, crowding into a great man’s house
57 Sharpe, ‘Court’, pp. 226–29. 58 A Note of such Lords and Ladies as are to attend the King to Dover for the reception of the Queen, 16/26 May 1625, TNA, SP 16/2, fols 118–19; Sir Roger Mostyn to [Sir John Wynn?], 29 April/ 9 May 1625, National Library of Wales (NLW), 9060E/1336. 59 TNA, SP 16/2, fol. 119. 60 TNA, SP 78/74, fol. 195.
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and pursuing his favour’.61 Though Charles’ household regulations of 1627 and 1631 would later reveal more specifically his awareness of how the spectacle of his court reinforced the splendour of his majesty, so too did the arrangements for the royal wedding party.62 Unlike the reception of Anna of Denmark, where the Privy Council appointed only six noblewomen to meet the Queen formally at Berwick, Charles issued orders for nearly 30 aristocratic women to accompany him to Dover.63 In terms of inherited duties, Aletheia, Countess of Arundel, Lady Thomasina Carew ‘the widow’, Lady Blanche Arundel and her sister, Lady Catherine Windsor, were the only four ladies who can be identified specifically as forming part of Queen Anna’s household in the previous reign.64 Equally, the King’s own patronage duties dictated the selection of women to accompany him to Dover, with the women of the Buckingham circle dominating the welcoming party. This included the Duke’s mother; his nieces, Mary Feilding, Marchioness of Hamilton, and Jane Boteler, Lady Ley; his step-mother-in-law, Cecily Tufton, Countess of Rutland; his sister, Susan Villiers, Countess of Denbigh; and his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Sheldon, Countess of Anglesey. The welcoming party also included the wider Villiers circle, such as Jane Savage, Lady St John, and her mother, Elizabeth Darcy, Viscountess Savage; Elizabeth Drury, Countess of Exeter; and the wives of the Duke’s clients, Lady Holland and Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle.65 Taken together, these women highlighted the cosmopolitan and interfaith character of the Caroline court. The presence of Protestant court women was balanced by what Michael Questier has called ‘notable Catholics’.66 Lady St John, Viscountess Savage, Lady Blanche Arundel, and the Countesses of Buckingham and Rutland all fall under this definition.67
61 R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Art and the Material Culture of Majesty in Early Stuart England’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 86–90. 62 J. Nichols (ed.), A Collection of ordinances and regulations for the government of the Royal Household, made in divers reigns. From King Edward III to King William and Queen Mary. Also receipts in ancient cookery (London, 1790), pp. 340–51; Ordinances for the King’s and Queen’s Households, 1627 and 1631, British Library, Stowe MS 561, fols 2–21. For a wider discussion of the regulation of Charles’ court, see Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 209–19; Sharpe, ‘Court’, pp. 226–48. 63 Payne, ‘Jacobean Court’, p. 24; TNA, SP 16/2, fols 118–19. 64 Payne, ‘Jacobean Court’, pp. 281, 284. 65 Payne, ‘Jacobean Court’, pp. 271–72; TNA, SP 16/2, fols 118–19; Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy, p. 370. Although the original list of names of lords and ladies to accompany the King to Dover included the Duchess of Buckingham, Sir Toby Matthew’s letter to her from Boulogne confirms that she was not present in the wedding progress. See Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 72, fol. 40. 66 Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy, p. 116. 67 For the confirmed Catholicism of these women see: Letter 82, Henry Clifford to Thomas Rant, 3/13 June 1625, Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy, p. 370; L. Boothman and Sir Richard Hyde Parker (eds), Savage Fortune: An Aristocratic Family in the Early Seventeenth Century (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), pp. xxxix–xl; AAE, CPA 31, fols 236–37; Cardinal Richelieu to Bishop of Mende, [August?] 1625, BnF, NAF MS 15460, fol. 4; Instructions given by Louis XIII’s command to Monsieur La Fontaine-Vernouillet, 21/31 July 1625, in E. Griselle (ed.), Lettres de la main de Louis XIII, 2 vols (Paris: Maçon, Protat Frères, 1914), vol. 2, p. 506; Letter of 22 September/
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The dominance of Buckingham’s kinship and clientele network within the royal party implies that Charles believed that French hesitancy over appointing his favourite’s kin during the wedding negotiations could be overcome. The King’s encouragement of the women of the Villiers circle was confirmed additionally in print. The French newspaper, the Mercure François for 1625, reported that the Countesses of Buckingham, Denbigh, and Anglesey and Marchioness of Hamilton were sent to Boulogne to greet Henrietta Maria on Charles’ behalf.68 Similarly, newsletters from England also identified Lady St John and Lady Savage as part of the circle that travelled to Boulogne.69 In many ways, parallels can be drawn to the unofficial party of Jacobean women who travelled north to meet Anna of Denmark at James’ accession, in an effort to secure Privy Chamber offices before their royally approved female counterparts. Still, in contrast to James I’s Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, who directed the actions of the Cecil women and wives of his clients without royal support, it was Charles himself who permitted this party to cross over to France.70 The speed with which the Caroline court women travelled to Boulogne implies that the King wanted Henrietta Maria to select these women first to her household offices. If the Queen acquiesced, these appointments would have enabled Charles to maintain Buckingham’s wider influence throughout the Caroline court, as an intermediary between himself and others. The exception to the party of Villiers women was the widow, Lady Thomasina Carew. Her presence at Boulogne indicates that the King’s desire to promote his favourite’s kin was limited by other obligatory factors, such as Lady Carew’s past service in Anna of Denmark’s court. Thomasina, like the Buckingham women, journeyed into France with royal permission, despite the failure to mention her in the Mercure François.71 While Charles may have granted Lady Carew permission to cross the channel in light of her previous court service, according to court gossip it was Lady Carew’s links to the French government, rather than Stuart court service, which prompted her decision to travel overseas. Lady Carew, often delineated with the title ‘French Lady Cary’, had resided in France when her husband, Sir George Carew, was ambassador in 1605. That Lady Carew was an intimate of Marie de Médicis was evident when Thomasina justified her journey to Boulogne, in order that she may ‘cast down herself at queen dowager’s feet, for ancient favours’.72 Yet, any attempt to remind Marie de Médicis of past 2 October 1626, in Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of Henry Duncan Skrine Esq: Salvetti Correspondence, 11th Report, Appendix, Part I (London, 1887), p. 85; Letter 24, Clerk [ John Southcot] to [Peter Biddulph], 10/20 August 1632, in Michael C. Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule, Camden Society, 5th series, 26 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 122. 68 Mercure François, vol. 11 [for the year 1625] (Paris: Jean & Estienne Richer, 1626), p. 392. 69 John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carlton, 28 May/7 June 1625, in Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, vol. 1, p. 24; Letter of 3/13 June 1625, HMC, Skrine, p. 19; Letter 82, Henry Clifford to Thomas Rant, 3/13 June 1625, in Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy, p. 370. 70 Payne, ‘Jacobean Court’, pp. 20–44. 71 Mercure François, vol. 11, p. 392. 72 Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, vol. 1, p. 24; ODNB.
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obligations either to herself or to her husband was frustrated by the Queen mother’s absence at Boulogne, only accompanying her daughter as far as Amiens where she fell ill. Despite the national and confessional restrictions placed on Henrietta Maria’s service by the French, the women travelling to Boulogne certainly gambled that office was possible within the new Queen’s household. The value that members of the Stuart court placed upon these first initial meetings with the Queen would seem to have been met with a similar significance by Henrietta Maria and her train. In a letter to the Duchess of Buckingham dated 9/19 June, Sir Tobie Matthew recounted the warm welcome that the Villiers women received at Boulogne. According to Matthew, Henrietta Maria greeted the Countess of Buckingham in particular with a ‘strange courtesy’, presenting both her ‘wit’ and ‘sweet lovely’ nature to her new subjects.73 Even if it is impossible to say with complete certainty whether Henrietta Maria recognized the Duke’s central role in the French match, Matthew’s letter indicates that the Bourbon court in general reinforced France’s official policy of friendship towards Buckingham at Boulogne. Henrietta Maria’s brother, Gaston, Duc d’Orléans, complimented the Duke’s mother by visiting the Countess in her lodgings, while the Duchesse de Chevreuse waived her right of precedence in favour of the Countesses of Buckingham and Denbigh. As Tobie Matthew noted, this was a high honour on the Duchesse’s part, as she was not only surintendante of Anne d’Autriche’s household, but was also related to the Stuarts through her marriage to Claude de Lorraine, Duc de Chevreuse.74 Chevreuse’s great-aunt, Mary of Guise had married James V of Scotland, thereby making the Duc and his wife cousins to the Stuart King. This treatment of the Duke’s female kin suggests that the French were willing to accept Charles’ promotion of the Villiers women to office within his wife’s establishment. Without question, the unresolved debates over the allocation of offices to Buckingham’s female relatives, Catholic or Protestant, had certainly left the issue of whether they could formally serve the Queen open. Mutual hopes for social reciprocity continued in the immediate introductions between Charles and Henrietta Maria at Dover Castle on Monday 13/23 June. Writing a year after this event to Marie de Médicis, Charles noted his own satisfaction upon meeting his bride: I could not expect more testimony of love and respect than she showed me; to give you one instance, her first request in private was, ‘That she, being young and coming to a strange country, both by her years and ignorance of the customs might commit many errors; therefore she entreated that I would not be angry with her for her faults of ignorance, before I had, with my instructions, learned her to avoid them, and desired me in these cases to employ no third person, but to tell her myself, when I found she did anything
73 Sir Tobie Matthew to Katherine Manners, Duchess of Buckingham, Boulogne, 9/19 June 1625, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 72, fol. 40. A printed copy of this letter can be found in: Anon, Cabala, sive, Scrinia sacra mysteries of state and government (London: G. Bedel and T. Collins, 1654), p. 254. 74 Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 72, fol. 40.
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amiss’. I both granted her request and thanked her for it, but desired she would treat me as she asked me to treat her.75 While Charles’ letter was written ultimately to justify the removal of his wife’s entourage in July 1626 and must, therefore, be used with caution, it indicates nonetheless an assumption that the King believed, at least at first, that his marriage would be based upon personal exchange. Henrietta Maria’s willingness to engage with her new female subjects was also apparent in her preparations to receive the Stuart court at Barham Downs. The Queen ordered Carlisle to write to Charles ahead of her arrival to discover which ‘ladies she is to kiss and who are to kiss her hand’.76 By the close of 1625, as Britland has argued, the Queen would later use the welcome kiss as a method to signal ‘her position through resistance, a resistance figured as a refusal to participate in the giving of physical favours (the welcoming kiss) or through a refusal to speak’.77 During the preparations for the wedding progress, however, it was intended as a token of royal favour, as well as a desire to partake in social and personal interactions with her new British subjects.78 The honour of receiving the welcoming kiss was noted by Sir John Finet, Charles’ Master of Ceremonies: within two or three miles of it on Barham Town were attended (for their meeting, & reception) by the Lords & Ladies mentioned, these latter presenting themselves from a fitting distance (where the queen stood) to her Majesty, each in their ranke, with three low reverences kissing her hand, & her Majesty them for their greater honour.79 The ceremonial ritual of the welcome kiss created opportunities for physical proximity between the Queen and her new subjects that the traditional tale of conflict has overshadowed within Stuart historiography. To all intents and purposes Henrietta Maria’s immediate arrival at Dover boded well for the Queen’s engagement with her new homeland. The ambassadorial reports noted how Dover Castle, which would lodge the Queen on her first night in England, had been magnificently prepared for the royal visit. The Comte de Brienne recorded that Henrietta Maria and her train were greeted to a
75 Cited in Agnes Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, 8 vols (London: Colburn & Co., Publishers, 1851), vol. 5, p. 212. Gesa Stedman also notes Charles’ initial satisfaction upon meeting Henrietta Maria at Dover, see Gesa Stedman, Cultural Exchange in SeventeenthCentury France and England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 31. 76 Earl of Carlisle to Charles I, 30 May/9 June 1625, in Appendix I, Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers Preserved in the Bodleian Library, ed. by W. H. Bliss, W. D. Macray and F. J. Routledge, 5 vols (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1869–1932), vol 1, p. 8. 77 Britland, Drama, pp. 30–31. 78 For the importance of reciprocal interactions and gestures see: Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, ‘Gifts and Favours: Informal Support in Early Modern England’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), 295–338. 79 Sir John Finet, Finetti Philoxenis: som choice observations of Sr. John Finett knight, and master of the ceremonies to the two last Kings, touching the reception, and precedence, the treatment and audience, the puntillios and contests of forren ambassadors in England (London: Printed by T.R. for H. Twyford and G. Bedell, 1656), p. 153.
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magnificent supper with the castle decorated with royal furnishings.80 According to Toynbee, ‘no cost had been spared’ for the Queen.81 Later accounts of the Queen’s initial hours in England would suggest that Henrietta Maria’s welcome was missing the customary splendour due to a daughter of France. The Queen’s lord chamberlain, Tillières, complained in his Mémoires that Dover Castle was ‘un vieux bâtiment fait à l’antique’ [an old building made in the ancient style], where the Queen was poorly lodged with inadequate furnishings given her status.82 Of particular concern to Tillières was the contrast between the great riches of England that Holland and Carlisle had spoken of in France and the apparent lack of grandeur accorded to Henrietta Maria’s reception in England.83 Tillières’ Mémoires were coloured by the confessional and political concerns that arose during the royal progress from Dover to Barham Downs on Tuesday 14/24 June, thereby obscuring the sense of accommodation that both sides had pursued since the marriage negotiations and explaining the conflicting accounts of Henrietta Maria’s time in Dover. Any hopes of additional British appointments were soon terminated by Charles’ order to remove Madame de Saint-George from the royal coach at Dover and replace her with Protestant court women of higher social status.84 This single act promoted deep anxieties within the French household over structural precedence, the threat of Henrietta Maria’s conversion to Anglicanism, and Buckingham’s influence within the Queen’s household — all issues that had formed a major part of the marriage negotiations.85 Charles’ order reveals how he was adamant that Stuart courtly procedures over rank and status would be observed within his wife’s establishment. Whereas France believed that Madame de Saint-George’s unlimited access to the Queen was safeguarded through her post as groom of the stool, this conflicted with the British court practice that no single aristocratic woman had the right of unlimited access.86 Even Madame de Saint-George’s status within the French nobility, as the heir to her father’s barony of Monglat, failed to give her precedence over British aristocratic women of a higher social status.87 It was precisely this desire to 80 Claude Bernard Petitot (ed.), Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’Histoire de France, depuis l’avènement de Henri IV jusqu’à la paix de Paris conclue en 1763; avec des notices sur chaque auteur, et des observations sur chaque ouvrage, 1st series, 52 vols; 2nd series, 78 vols (Paris: Foucault, Libraire, Rue de Sorbonne, 1819–1829), XXXV, pp. 406–07. 81 Margaret Toynbee, ‘The Wedding Journey of King Charles I’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 69 (1955), 84. 82 Tillières, Mémoires, p. 89. 83 Tillières, Mémoires, pp. 89–90. Toynbee, ‘Wedding Journey’, 75–89. 84 Tillières, Mémoires, p. 90; The Duc de Chevreuse and Monsieur de la Ville aux Clercs to Louis XIII, 27 June/7 July 1625, AAE, CPA 35, fols 246–47. 85 Tillières, Mémoires, pp. 90–91. 86 ‘Qu’elle [Henrietta Maria] desiroit bien fort qu’elle [Madame de Saint-George] l’accompaignast partout, bienquil [Charles] luy eust esté respondu, que ce n’estoit pas la Coustume’ [That she [Henrietta Maria] strongly desired that she [Madame de Saint-George] accompany her everywhere, although he [Charles] replied to her that it was not the custom]. See AAE, CPA 35, fols 246–47. 87 A discussion of Madame de Saint George’s status can be found in the following accounts: Cardinal Richelieu to Marie de Médicis, July 1625, in M. Avenel (ed.), Lettres, instructions diplomatiques et papiers d’État du Cardinal de Richelieu, 6 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1853–1867), vol. 1, p. 150.
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assert Caroline courtly procedures upon Henrietta Maria’s household and surround the Queen with women of ‘better Quality’, namely, the Marchioness of Hamilton and Countesses of Buckingham and Arundel, which resulted in Charles removing Madame de Saint-George from the royal coach.88 Beneath the King’s order was also the implicit desire to promote Buckingham’s interests within the Queen’s household, a point that was made strongly by the French ambassadors extraordinary, the Duc de Chevreuse and Monsieur de la Ville-aux-Clercs. In respective letters to Louis XIII, Marie de Médicis, and Cardinal Richelieu sent upon reaching London, they pointed out that British structural precedence was of lesser importance than the desire to force Madame de Saint-George to cede her place to the house of the Duke. The French ambassadors argued further that the exclusion of Madame de Saint-George counteracted the articles of marriage, which stipulated that Henrietta Maria should be served exclusively by French Catholics.89 Despite remaining within the Queen’s carriage at Dover, henceforth, Madame de Saint-George was forbidden to accompany Henrietta Maria in the royal coach when the King wished to ride with his wife.90 The French ambassadors’ efforts to secure the Queen Mother’s help, in raising Madame de Saint-George to the rank of Countess, evidently came to nought.91 What appears as a relatively minor quarrel over precedence had much wider socio-religious meaning when considered against Madame de Saint-George’s confessional role to protect Henrietta Maria’s religion and the question of Buckingham’s kin gaining office within the Queen’s court. On Henrietta Maria’s part, her change of attitude was not immediately apparent during the wedding progress, as she dispensed the ‘welcome kiss’ at Barham Downs in the aftermath of the carriage scene. Ambiguity over Henrietta Maria’s actions was reflected furthermore in the Protestant and Catholic versions of the feast held at Canterbury. As Britland points out, the Catholic newsletter of the event related that Henrietta Maria had avoided eating meat on Midsummer’s Eve, while a Protestant version stated that the Queen ate both the venison and pheasant that the King carved for her.92 All uncertainties over the extent of Henrietta Maria’s integration were resolved when the wedding progress reached 88 Toynbee, ‘Wedding Journey’, 85. Although Henrietta Maria’s biographers suggest that Madame de Saint-George was forced to relinquish her place in the Queen’s carriage for the Countess of Denbigh and Duchess of Buckingham, only the Marchioness of Hamilton and Countesses of Arundel and Buckingham were selected by the King to ride within the royal coach. See for example, Alison Plowden, Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s Indomitable Queen (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001), p. 34; Elizabeth Hamilton, Henrietta Maria (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1976), p. 53. For a discussion on Madame de Saint-George’s status, see the Duc de Chevreuse and Monsieur de la Ville-aux-Clercs to Louis XIII, 15/25 June 1625, BL, King’s MS 136, fols 3367. 89 See BL, King’s MS 136, fols 345, 337; AAE, CPA 35, fols 241–42. 90 Instructions given to Monsieur de Blainville, ambassador extraordinary to England, 25 August/4 September 1625, in Avenel, Lettres, vol. 2, p. 129. 91 ‘[N]ous addresserons à la Royne mere [de] le Roy nous la supplier de faire un effort, et damander quelle soit faicte comtesse’ [we will refer to the Queen Mother of the King to beg her to make an effort, and demand that she [Madame de Saint-George] be made a Countess], Monsieur de la Ville-aux-Clercs to Cardinal Richelieu, 16/26 June 1625, AAE, CPA 35, fols 241–42. 92 See Karen Britland’s chapter within this collection, p. 89.
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London. When Dr Meddus, a London news writer, reported that Henrietta Maria’s officers refused to admit non-Catholics to her Privy Chamber on reaching the capital, the attack on Madame de Saint-George’s access to the Queen undoubtedly fuelled this announcement. It was within this context that Buckingham first petitioned the Queen for office on behalf of his closest female kin: the Duchess, the Countess of Denbigh, and the Marchioness of Hamilton.93 When rumours circulated in July that Lady Denbigh would replace Madame de Saint-George as Groom of the Stool, the carriage scene at Dover certainly gave credence to these reports.94 Throughout the wedding preparations and in the aftermath of the wedding journey, access and influence around Henrietta Maria’s person were key goals for Buckingham. The Duke recognized the potential significant role that the Queen would play should the royal marriage be a success.95 Over the next year, the French household would resist on confessional and political grounds all efforts made by the Stuart crown to insert these three Protestant women around the Queen. Any desire by France to satisfy the Duke and gain the speedy release of the English vessels to deal with its internal Huguenot problem could not overcome genuine confessional fears about placing Protestants around the Queen. When Richelieu tasked the French ambassadors, the Queen’s Confessor, Pierre de Bérulle, and her Grand Almoner, Daniel du Plessis de La Mothe-Houdancourt, Bishop of Mende, with the decision over whether to grant offices to the Countess and Duchess of Buckingham, it was agreed that only the Duke’s mother would be offered a post. Though a crypto-Catholic, the Duchess’s alleged Protestantism led to fears that the presence of Huguenots around the Queen would offend Catholics and threaten the Queen’s own Catholicism.96 These debates were heightened by concerns about espionage when Soubise sought refuge in England in October 1625.97 In the end, Henrietta Maria’s integration within her new court could only be achieved, as Hibbard quite rightly points out, when Charles dismissed the bulk of his wife’s officers in July 1626. Evidently, the various conflicts during the wedding progress over efforts to assimilate the Queen within her new court contrasted significantly from the preparations that characterized her welcoming reception. This analysis has shown how a mutual desire for integration was pursued on both sides with consideration 93 Tillières, Mémoires, pp. 93–94. 94 Henry Wynn to Sir John Wynn at Gwydir, 16/26 July 1625, NLW, MS 9060E/ 1356. 95 For further discussion on Buckingham and the French household prior to its dismissal see Smuts, ‘Henrietta Maria’s Circle’, pp. 17–18; Smuts, ‘French Match’, pp. 22–26; Wolfson, ‘Aristocratic Women’, chapter 1, pp. 18–66. 96 Cardinal Richelieu to Bishop of Mende, 10/20 July 1625, BnF, NAF MS 15460, fols 1–2; Abbé Michel Houssaye, Le Cardinal de Bérulle et le cardinal de Richelieu, 1625–1629 (Paris: E. Plon, 1875), pp. 27–29. 97 Zuane Peraro to the Doge and Senate, 27 September/7 October 1625, CSP Venice, 19, p. 178 (no. 260). ‘A quoy la royne est resolue de s’opposer et po[u]r la seureté de sa Religion et pour sa liberté particuliere, celles qu’on y veut introduire n’estans que des Espions domestiques’ [To which the Queen is determined to oppose and for the safety of her religion and for her personal freedom, those that they want to introduce there only as domestic spies], Bishop of Mende to Monsieur de la Ville-aux-Clercs, 11/21 October 1625, AAE, CPA 36, fol. 107.
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for the unresolved structural, political, and confessional issues of the marriage negotiations, but was ultimately terminated by these very same factors. These debates were essential in the struggle to establish how the terms of the marriage negotiations should be interpreted once Henrietta Maria was in England and who had precedence over her household structure and personnel. Though ignored within Stuart historiography as a political event in itself, the removal of Madame de Saint-George from the royal coach highlights the personalized nature of early modern politics. Minor questions of court precedence and protocol during the wedding progress had much larger ramifications for Stuart–Bourbon relations. By granting France confessional concessions regarding Henrietta Maria’s household in the hope of pursuing his anti-Habsburg agenda for the relief of the Palatinate, James ultimately undermined the role of the subsidiary court within British elite society.98 The introduction of a solely French Catholic household conflicted with the cosmopolitan nature of the Caroline court and hindered Buckingham’s monopoly of influence there. The wedding journey revealed the tensions behind an interfaith marriage alliance in post-Reformation Europe, where realpolitik in domestic and foreign policy terms must also play a part in the practical realization of the match in England. Whereas it is often noted that the ability of courtiers ‘to storm the Chamber’ limited a king’s freedom of choice over officer appointments, the authority of a Queen consort during a welcoming progress was an additional, albeit largely ignored, restricting factor.99 Over the next year, Henrietta Maria and the leading officers of her French household would seek to resist Charles’ and Buckingham’s efforts to insert Protestant Caroline courtiers within her household. By the autumn of 1626, Henrietta Maria’s household would eventually resemble the multi-confessional nature of the wedding train so carefully constructed by Charles I. The French Catholic officers who remained in England would henceforth integrate successfully within the wider patronage networks of the Caroline court, namely that of the Duke of Buckingham.100
98 I am grateful to Professor Questier for his observations on this last point. 99 C. Hibbard, ‘The Role of a Queen Consort; The Household and Court of Henrietta Maria 1625–1642’, in Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (eds), Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: the Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 399–400; Sharpe, ‘Court’, pp. 227–28. 100 Britland, Drama, pp. 55–56; Wolfson, ‘Aristocratic Women’, pp. 73–76.
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—— , ‘The French Match and Court Politics’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018), pp. 13–28 Starkey, David (ed.), The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987) Stedman, Gesa, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, The Emperor’s Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015) Strickland, Agnes, Lives of the Queens of England, from the Norman Conquest, 8 vols (London: Colburn & Co., Publishers, 1851) Toynbee, Margaret, ‘The Wedding Journey of King Charles I’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 69 (1955), 75–89 Warnicke, Retha M., The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Watkins, John, After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017) Wolfson, Sara J., ‘Aristocratic Women of the Household and Court of Queen Henrietta Maria, 1625–1659’ (PhD diss., Durham University, 2010) —— , ‘The Female Bedchamber of Queen Henrietta Maria; Politics, Familial Networks and Policy, 1626–1641’, in Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds), The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 311–41 —— , ‘Practical Proselytising: The Impact of Counter-Reformation Catholicism at the Caroline court, 1625–1626’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018), pp. 43–63 —— , Caroline Court Women, 1625–1669 (Manchester University Press: forthcoming)
Sara Trevisan
Chapter 8. Nebuchadnezzar, Charlemagne, and Aeneas John Finch’s Speech for the King and Queen at Canterbury This essay focuses on the speech delivered to King Charles I and his new wife, Henrietta Maria, by John Finch (1584–1660), for their wedding celebrations in Canterbury. Despite its brevity, this understudied oration is a dense political statement. Finch’s short speech is worth analysing in detail as an example of the complexity and intertextuality of seventeenth-century Protestant rhetoric, and of political discourse between Parliament and the King upon his succession. John Finch: His Life and Career in the 1620s Finch was an important personality in the Caroline reign. He would be appointed to several key offices after the accession of Charles I, as a jurist and Member of Parliament. His political ideas were those of a Royalist, and he was made Baron Finch of Fordwich, Kent, in 1640, for his service to the Crown, just when his relationship with other members of Parliament had begun to deteriorate. His contribution to England’s political life between 1625 and 1640 was considerable, as he was involved in the arbitration of such key disputes as that of the Ship Money. Educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge — a traditionally Calvinist college1 — and later at Gray’s Inn, Finch was patronized by Sir Francis Bacon from 1614 until Bacon’s death.2 In the mid-1610s, he was elected an MP for several cities of the south-east, including Canterbury. His biographer presents him as someone who, from his early days in Parliament, undoubtedly possessed ‘the arts of the Politician’: he was a good ‘mixer’, ‘suffered fools gladly’, possessed ‘the 1 Sir Walter Mildmay had funded its construction in 1584 as a college where preaching ministers were educated in the Calvinist tradition. Claire Cross, Church and People 1450–1660 (Bodmin: Fontana Press, 1976), p. 162. 2 Louis A. Knafla, ‘Finch, John, Baron Finch of Fordwich (1584–1660)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (2004), [Accessed 8 December 2014]. Sara Trevisan is a Rare Books and Manuscripts Specialist in the antiquarian book trade, with a focus on the late fifteenth to early nineteenth century. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 205–220 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119191
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art of acquiring friends and retaining them’ and ‘the human touch’, or a ‘way of pleasing many men, and all women’, including Queen Anna and Henrietta Maria.3 Between 1614 and 1628 Finch sat in Parliament for Canterbury and Winchelsea. He gave his speech before the King and Queen in Canterbury as Recorder of the City, a position he had held since 1617. Until then, he had been combining ‘the duties of Attorney-General to the Queen, Recorder of Canterbury, and Member of Parliament’.4 The ceremonies for the King’s wedding paved the way to Finch’s further political success. For his speech, Finch was rewarded with a knighthood in 1626, and appointed Attorney-General to Queen Henrietta Maria; to her, it seems, beside his own skills, he would owe most of his political advancement.5 Political Uses of the Bible Finch’s speech to the King and Queen in Canterbury is interspersed with biblical references. These references form a kind of secular typology, linking characters and episodes from the Old Testament to the events of the Stuart–Bourbon wedding, religious debates, and international politics. The biblical episodes mentioned by Finch were among the most frequently used in Protestant religious writing. Finch does not provide a clear-cut interpretation by means of theological authorities. In this sense, he was reflecting the tendency to a ‘rhetoric against rhetoric’ in the Reformed sermon tradition of the early seventeenth century: biblical passages were not directly quoted or their details mentioned, and exegetic suggestions were not imparted.6 At the same time, these biblical loci contain within themselves a complex exegetic tradition that made them inherently ambivalent.7 Their interpretative ambiguity in Finch’s speech led them to be suspended in meaning between the celebration of the Stuart–Bourbon union, and reservations concerning Charles’ decision to marry a French, Catholic Queen. Finch played on this ambivalence; as a good man of law and orator, he mastered the art of presenting two sides of the same situation with elegance and eloquence. The King and Queen were reported as having been impressed by the speech;8 perhaps, what the King appreciated was Finch’s
3 William Terry, The Life and Times of John, Lord Finch (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1936), p. 13. 4 Terry, The Life and Times, p. 17. 5 Terry, The Life and Times, p. 105. For further discussion on Finch’s career, see The Life and Times, passim; Knafla, ‘Finch, John’; and Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (Yale: Yale University Press, 1996), passim. 6 Carl Trueman, ‘Preachers and Medieval and Renaissance Commentary’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. by P. McCollough et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 66–67. 7 Finch’s ‘secular typology’ applies the standard typological explanation of these biblical episodes to specific political events. This is why I have opted to describe them with the rhetorical term loci — as Protestant ‘lines of argument’ — rather than ‘types’ and ‘antitypes’, as in B. K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 126–30. 8 Knafla, ‘Finch, John’.
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elegant way of voicing the obvious concerns of the Protestant community and Parliament, both of which, as orator, he was indirectly and inevitably representing. The use of the Old Testament first appears in Finch’s speech to the King, before the arrival of Henrietta Maria. Finch celebrates Charles as ‘the Son of the Kingdome’ who has taken upon himself its ‘cares and desires’.9 He then hints at Charles’ intention to summon a new Parliament after James’ death, and the prorogation of that Parliament from 17/27 May to 18/28 June, while waiting for Henrietta Maria’s postponed arrival.10 The King’s attitude towards Parliament is depicted as positive and cooperative, like a ‘balme of Gilead’, thanks to which the ‘wounds’ of his subjects ‘were healed in time’, and they were ‘incouraged (in humble and dutifull manner) to present our iust greuances vnto you, as we are deterred from creating any such out of our owne vaine or vnmannerly fancies’.11 The possibility of Charles’ cooperative attitude towards Parliament is given a miraculous effect, like that of the biblical ‘balm of Gilead’ in Jeremiah 8. 22. This reference concerns the capture of the King of Judah and Jerusalem by the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar, an event taken by the prophet to be a punishment of Israel for losing faith in God. Despairing for his people, Jeremiah asks God if they can be saved in any way: ‘[Is there] no balm in Gilead; [is there] no physician there?’12 An oil with antiseptic properties, the balm of Gilead had also entered everyday figurative language to mean a cure for all kinds of sickness, not only of the physical body,13 but also of the political. In a sermon delivered to the Commons, Anthony Tuckney explained that ‘our Physicians, they are principally our God, and our Governours’.14 In a magniloquent way, Finch is highlighting the necessity that the King’s decisions on state issues be taken through dialogue with Parliament — a habit Charles had shown to be committed to since his first active participation in policy-making in 1621, and even more during the phases of the Spanish match. Finch compares Charles to the Sun: while, when he was a Prince, his beams were ‘comfortable’ like ‘those of the Sunne-rising’, now that he was in the ‘exaltation of [his] orbe’, they hoped to find in him ‘more benigne and serene aspects’.15 Charles and Buckingham’s policy of sharing with Parliament such royal concerns as the 9 John Finch, ‘Master Iohn Finch his Speech to King CHARLES at Canterbury, May 30 1625’, in A Trve Discovrse of All the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies, obserued at the Contract and Mariage of the High and Mighty CHARLES, King of Greate Britaine, and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady HENRIETTA MARIA of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of FRANCE (London: Haviland, 1625), pp. 1–9 (p. 4). See Appendix 1, pp. 334–37, below. 10 See proceedings of 17/27 May and 31 May/10 June 1625, Journal of the House of Lords [hereafter LJ], vol. 3 [1620–1628] (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1767–1830), pp. 432–33. 11 Finch, ‘Speech to King Charles’, pp. 4–5. Finch’s references are often obscure; this may be a hint at Cranfield’s impeachment in the 1624 Parliament, for his rejection of Charles’ war plans against Spain. 12 The King James Bible (London: Barker, 1611), Jeremiah 8. 22. All quotations will be taken from this edition. 13 See Henry Roborough, Balme from Gilead, to Cure all Diseases, Especially the Plague (London: Norton and Mathewes, 1626). 14 Anthony Tuckney, The Balme of Gilead, for the Wounds of England (London: Rothwell and Gellibrand, 1643), p. 30. 15 Finch, ‘Speech to King Charles’, pp. 4–5.
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Spanish match and dealings in matter of foreign affairs had created dangerous precedents. The Commons had been shown they could decide on matters of war and its funding, and even put pressure on the councillors and peace-making policy of King James.16 In March 1625, when the Prince ‘bred up’ in Parliament accessed the throne, he became ‘a king who was expected, and who expected, to call them often’; both parties hoped to encounter a cooperative attitude.17 Finch’s speech provides an interesting rhetorical rendition of the potential mistrust that had been simmering between King and Parliament in the previous year, concerning overseas wars and religious conformity.18 Interestingly, references to the balm of Gilead appear again a few years later, when the hope for cooperation had faded. In 1627, with debates on the Forced Loan and the Anglo-French war,19 Sir Benjamin Rudyerd commented: This is the Crisis of Parliaments; we shall know by this if Parliaments live or die, the King will be valued by the success of us, the Counsels of this House will have operations in all, ’tis fit we be wise, his Majesty begins to us with affection, proclaiming, that he will rely on his Peoples love […] Men and Brethren, what shall we do? Is there no Balm in Gilead? If the King draw one way, the Parliament another, we must all sink.20 But Finch’s celebratory ‘balme of Gilead’ reflects another aspect of the question. The passage from Jeremiah continues with the sentence: ‘why then is not the health of the daughter of my people [Israel] recovered?’ ( Jeremiah 8. 22). The ‘daughter of Israel’ lamented in the passage is typologically interpreted as the healing soul in the New Testament (Matthew 11. 28–30). In one of his sermons, Lancelot Andrewes wrote that ‘there is balme in Gilead […] which serueth to cure all our spirituall diseases’, and ‘the cure of the infirmities of our soule is not performed by any strength of our owne, nor by our owne Spirit, but by the Spirit of God’.21 While Israel was a paradigm for the English Church and for the predestined English nation in the same relation to God as the Jewish nation of the Old Testament,22 in Jeremiah 46. 11 a ‘daughter of Egypt’ is mentioned, who cannot be healed either by the balm or by any other remedies, and will be 16 Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I, p. 7. 17 Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 7–10, 38, 43. 18 Michael B. Young, ‘Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625–1628’, Albion, 22 (1990), 217–35 (217–18); Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 309–12, 317–18; Cust, Charles I, pp. 40–42. 19 For further discussion of debates concerning the Forced Loan, see Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). 20 John Rushworth (ed.), ‘Historical Collections: 1627 (part 2)’, in Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, vol. 1 [1618–1629] (London: D. Brown, 1721), British History Online, at [accessed 8 December 2014]. 21 Lancelot Andrewes, Scala Coeli Nineteen Sermons Concerning Prayer (London: Burton, 1611), p. 45. There are other sermons relying on the same locus: Samuel Ward’s Balme from Gilead to Recouer Conscience (London: Haviland, 1628), and Zacharie Boyd’s The Balme of Gilead Prepared for the Sicke (London: Wreittoun, 1629). 22 Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 21.
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destroyed. On the same Protestant typological plane, Egypt was equated with the Roman Catholic Church and its inability to be spiritually healed, despite its complex system of penitence, after departing ‘from the truth of the Gospell, and faith of Christ’.23 On the one hand, Finch thus comments on the political situation, expressing the hope that the relationship between King and Parliament will be a positive one. On the other hand, he does not lose the opportunity to remark on the reservations of the Protestant community and the Commons concerning Charles’ marriage with a Catholic Queen and the subsequent closer relation with a major Catholic power. These politico-religious loci applied to national affairs, religious controversy and international policy continue to appear in the speech to the King and Queen. It is easy to intercept Finch’s attempt to touch on Charles’ ambivalent leaning towards a ‘middle way’ between the Catholic and Calvinist credos, which he had begun to pursue around the time of the negotiations for the Spanish match.24 Finch compares the ‘glory and grace’ emanating from the King and Queen to ‘the heauenly fire of Elias Sacrifice’: this fire inflames ‘the zeale of English harts’ and their ‘Enemies fear’,25 that is to say, Spain, and, one might have thought, France. The story of Elijah’s sacrifice is told in 1 Kings 18. 38–40. Elijah shows the idolatrous King Ahab and his people that the deity they worship, Baal, is not a real god. After asking the priests of Baal to prepare wood and a bull for a sacrifice, Elijah tells them not to start the fire; if he really is a god, Baal will do it. Despite the priests’ long prayers, nothing happens. Elijah prepares a sacrifice to God and the pyre is lit up by a heavenly fire in answer to his prayers. Finch’s comparison of the royal couple’s ‘glory and grace’ to the heavenly fire of Elijah’s sacrifice pays tribute to the divine role of kings, reflecting the identification of Charles as the Sun. But, in Protestant typology, Elijah’s sacrifice pointed to the fact that Baal was an idol worshipped by false prophets, and monuments of idolatry led true believers away from the direct worship of God. George Abbott, the Puritan-leaning Archbishop of Canterbury, used Baal as an example to accuse Roman Catholics of idolatry. He explained that Roman Catholic exegetes consider Baal the symbol of ‘erroneous doctrine’ and ‘heresy’, but do not see that Baal also stands for the veneration of ‘idols of gold and silver, and brasse & stone, and of wood’.26 Even the Arminian-leaning Richard Montagu, while criticizing Calvinism and predestination in the later years of James’ reign, stated nevertheless that the Catholic doctrine of the intercession of saints had no raison d’être: ‘Call vpon what Saints or Angels if you will: go serue Baal or Astaroth, if you fansie it’, while ‘We in the Church of England will call
23 Thomas Adams, Englands Sicknes, comparatively conferred with Israels (London: Griffin, 1615), p. 54; Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 130. 24 Cust, Charles I, pp. 13–16. 25 John Finch, ‘Master Iohn Finch his Speech to King CHARLES and his Queene at Canterbury, Iune 13, 1625’, pp. 1–7 (p. 1). Henceforward quoted in the main text as F and page number(s). 26 George Abbott, The Reasons vvhich Doctour Hill Hath Brought, for the Vpholding of Papistry (Oxford: Barnes, 1604), p. 7.
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vnto the Lord of Heauen and Earth, by immediate addresse, without intercession of Mediators’.27 The way in which Finch first addresses Henrietta Maria in the next paragraph — Regina votorum (F 2) — is thus relevant to the previous few lines. ‘Regina votorum’ recalls epithets of the Virgin Mary, and the practice of donating objects as voti to her in exchange for a miracle.28 For a Calvinist like Finch, being opposed to the threat of Catholicism was notably itself a sign of godliness and predestination,29 and the religious loci he used belonged to this rhetorical tradition. However, as a Royalist, he did not aim to be an extremist, as he would shortly after demonstrate at the court of Henrietta Maria.30 This concern about the union of a Protestant King to a Catholic Queen had worried the Commons ever since the French match was presented to them as something accomplished.31 Indeed, James himself had commented on the nature of ‘mixed marriages’ as early as the 1590s. In Basilikon Doron, addressed to Prince Henry, James argued that marriages between Catholics and Protestants could not work: I would rathest haue you to Marie one that were fully of your owne Religion […] ye haue deeply to weigh, and consider vpon these doubts, how ye and your wife can bee of one flesh, and keepe vnitie betwixt you, being members of two opposite Churches: disagreement in Religion bringeth euer with it, disagreement in maners; and the dissention betwixt your Preachers and hers, wil breed and foster a dissention among your subiects.32 His opinion, however, had changed in later years, as he pushed for a Spanish match for Charles in an attempt to maintain peace in Europe.33 Even when, after unsuccessful negotiations, he eventually accepted to attack Spain in aid of the Prince Palatine — pressured by the Commons, Charles, and Buckingham — James maintained the idea that it should only be done with the help of allies and that it should be non-confessional, in order to draw in the Lutheran and
27 Richard Montagu, A Gagg for the New Gospell? (London: Snodham, 1624), pp. 200–01. 28 For further discussion on votive practices in France, see Hugo Van der Velden, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). 29 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 36. 30 By the 1630s, Finch’s attitude towards the moderated Catholics had become accommodating. According to the Italian ambassadors Panzani, Finch earned Henrietta Maria’s support to become Chancellor upon promising to take no initiative affecting English Catholics without her permission. See R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s’, English Historical Review, 93 (1978), 26–45 (34). 31 Young, ‘Charles and the Erosion of Trust’, p. 221. 32 James VI of Scotland, Basilikon Doron (Edinburgh: Waldegrave, 1599), pp. 35–36. 33 Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 292. The match had been pursued since 1604 due to the pursuit of power, prestige and financial factors. See W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 315.
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Calvinist princes of the Holy Roman Empire, and anti-Habsburg Catholic nations like France.34 Finch devotes an obscure paragraph to the reasons how England and France could be united in intents: although ‘kingdoms separate in affection, are like the feet of Nebuchadnezzers Image, part yron, part clay, that neuer mingle well’, ‘No two Nations vnder heauen (the Spaniards and Mores except) giue more assurance of consaguinitie by the affections and dispositions of the people’ (F 2–3). The reference to ties between the Spaniards and the Moors can only have been ironic, since the Moriscos had been expelled from Spain in the preceding decade. There may also be an allusion to the fact that, just a couple of years earlier, Charles had tried to woo the Spanish Infanta. The reference to Nebuchadnezzar’s image comes from the Book of Daniel 2. 31–35, presenting the prophet’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of his own image: Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof [was] terrible. This image’s head [was] of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay. Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet [that were] of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. The different materials that make up Nebuchadnezzar’s image refer to the vision, in Daniel 7, of ‘the foure Beasts’ which represent ‘foure stately kingdomes’ and ‘foure Kings which shall take the kingdome of the Saints of the most high’.35 The idea of the ‘four kingdoms’ (or monarchies or Empires) had been a locus of Reformation writing and historiography since the mid-sixteenth century, and Daniel’s a favourite book for biblical exegesis pointing to the revelation of God’s plan up to the Roman Empire, when the coming of Christ would take place.36 Daniel explains to Nebuchadnezzar that his is the golden kingdom, which will be followed by three inferior kingdoms of silver, brass, and iron; this last will be destroyed and taken over by an everlasting kingdom. Biblical commentators identified the golden kingdom with Babylon, the silver kingdom with Persia, the brass kingdom with Greece, and the iron kingdom with the Roman Empire.37 34 Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution, p. 75. 35 Thomas Hayne, The times, places, and persons of the holie Scripture. Otherwise entituled, The generall vievv of the Holy Scriptures (London: Purfoot, 1607), p. 197. 36 W. Stanford Reid, ‘The Four Monarchies of Daniel in Reformation Historiography’, Historical Reflections, 8 (1981), 115–23 (115). 37 Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Danielem: that is, A six-fold commentarie vpon the most diuine prophesie of Daniel (London: Greene, 1610), p. 71; J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin (eds), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), p. 31. Interestingly, in 1621, Sir Henry Finch, John’s father, published a book called The Great Restauration of the Jews: the argument concerns the return of the Jews to Jerusalem, illuminated by the glory of Christ, and their pre-eminence over the Western empires. For this he was imprisoned by James I and released thanks to his son. Terry, The Life and Times, pp. 29–32.
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Although the fourth kingdom would be ‘strong as iron’, like iron, it would eventually ‘break in pieces and bruise’ (Daniel 2. 40). The mixture of iron and clay is also explained: And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters’ clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay. And [as] the toes of the feet [were] part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken. (Daniel 2. 41–43) In his Hexapla in Danielem, Andrew Willet presented a long exegesis of the passage. The core issue is that of dissension and division. Willett explains that, being equated with two legs, and legs being ‘perpetually diuided’ and ‘not ioyned together againe’, these kingdoms will thus remain ‘diuided and kept a sunder still’; he also suggests that ‘the mingling and tempering of the yron and clay together’ may refer to the union in marriage of monarchs representing different kingdoms.38 Finch associates England and France to an abstract image of ‘kingdoms separate in affection’, the product of their union being ‘part iron, part clay, that never mingle well’ (F 3). Although he hastens to specify that England and France can indeed enjoy a ‘happy union’, as they share the same disposition, affection, and military strength, the biblical locus he employs ultimately voices political and religious scepticism surrounding the Stuart–Bourbon marriage, or at least a strong awareness of its difficulty. Willet also provides the following interpretation of the passage, with reference to the hostile relations within the Roman Empire, between the Jews, Syrians, Egyptians, and Romans: ‘The yron and clay signified, that the kingdome should be partly strong and partly weake: but this respect of their strength and weakenesse must not haue reference to other forren nations, but to the people of God, for whose comfort, this propheticall vision was sent’.39 Daniel’s vision conveys the view of a kingdom whose spiritual identity is split in two, and it is used by Finch to bring together the difficulty of dealing with the political aims of different kingdoms and that of uniting an individual kingdom’s religious identity. After stating that ‘all ages haue found happinesse’ in Anglo-French unions, Finch adds that their mutual dissensions ‘neuer relished of others misfortune’ (F 4). This is why, Finch continues, it is now ‘the true period of time to summon our ancient affections to a new league, when the Chariot of Iehu driues so furiously, when our neighbours and allies are so neare danger if not ruine’ (F 4). Finch’s line mirrors 2 Kings 9. 20: ‘the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously’. The episode narrates Jehu’s anointment as the new King of Israel, and his defeat of Joram, present King of Israel, and Ahziah, King of Judah. While facing Jehu on the battlefield, Joram asks: ‘[Is it] peace,
38 Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, p. 68. 39 Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, p. 68.
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Jehu?’; to which Jehu answers: ‘What peace, so long as the whoredoms of thy mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts [are so] many?’ (2 Kings 9. 22). Jehu kills Joram, and enters the city of Jezreel unchallenged. He is welcomed by Joram’s mother, Jezebel, who has provocatively ‘painted her face, and tired her head’, and is looking out at a window (2 Kings 9. 30). Jehu asks three of her eunuchs to throw her down, and runs over her on his chariot (2 Kings 9. 33). The figure of Jehu and his chariot are tied to that of Jezebel, whose story is told in 1 and 2 Kings; through the latter, the Jehu episode is thematically related to the locus of Elijah’s sacrifice.40 Jezebel was the wife of King Ahab, and both supported the cult of Baal and other idols, while persecuting the prophets of the Israelites. Elijah was one of those prophets and, as we have seen, he asked the priests of Baal to sacrifice to their idol, though they did so in vain. Jezebel’s connection with Baal is the reason why Jehu condemns Jezebel’s ‘whoredoms’ and ‘witchcrafts’. George Abbott related Jezebel to the idea of idolatry — and the Catholic Church — defending instead those who are supposed priests and prophets of a true faith. Jezebel, Abbott wrote, was ‘an idolater, and a woman of much euil, yet she so plentifully extended her bounty to those, whom she reputed as Prophets to her God [Baal]’.41 Finch’s reference to the chariot of Jehu cannot be separated from the episode of the death of Jezebel, worshipper of Baal. When Finch says that ‘our neighbours and allies are so neare danger if not ruine’, he is thinking about something of which, he laments, he would not want to remind his new Queen on her wedding day: the religious wars that had been plaguing the Continent since 1618. Jehu is the King of Israel who states that he will not go for peace so long as Jezebel’s ‘whoredoms’ and ‘witchcrafts’ are so many; he did not stop until he exterminated the entire line of King Ahab. This presentation of the Continental wars resembles the apocalyptic readings given to these events by extreme religious factions in previous years; so much so that, in 1622, James I had decided to impose a ‘declaration’ forbidding preachers to deal with matters of state.42 But Finch’s reference is once again double. Through a commonplace of religious rhetoric, it reiterates the idea that conflict against the Catholic threat is what states the truth of Protestant religion, which included the possibility of a war with Spain, accepted by several members of the Commons.43 Yet, through its tone, it provides firm political critique of the bigger-scale belligerent plans that Charles had been nurturing since 1624. Jehu’s unwillingness to avoid peace before having destroyed all traces of Jezebel’s ‘whoredom’ and Ahab’s line suggests criticism against chronic wars. The following locus is derived once again from the Book of Daniel: it summarizes the overseas policy history of England and France by saying that
40 Dale Patrick and Allen Scult, Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation (Worcester: Billing, 1990), p. 68. 41 George Abbott, An Exposition vpon the Prophet Ionah (London: Field, 1600), p. 156. 42 Tom Webster, ‘Early Stuart Puritanism’, in J. Coffey and P. C. H. Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 48–66 (p. 50). 43 Milton, Catholic and Reformed, p. 36.
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[they] haue euer ballanced the affayres of Christendome, and seuerally put weight into the westerne scales; or abated them by counterpoyse as occasion of state hath required. Now they both meete in one scale, no doubt the hand of heauen hath written Mene tekel vpon the painted wall of their opposers, numbred and weighed their strength in the ballance, and found it to [sic] light. (F 5) This is a reference to the story of Belshazzar, King of the Chaldeans, who, during a magnificent banquet in Babel, ‘commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which [was] in Jerusalem’, so that ‘the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein’ (Daniel 5. 2). The golden vessels were brought to him, and as they all drank wine from them, they praised ‘the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone’ (Daniel 5. 4). Then the fingers of a hand appeared over a candlestick and wrote something on the wall — mene, mene, tekel, upharsin — which neither the King nor all his men of letters could decipher. Only the prophet Daniel could, Belshazzar was told; and when Daniel was brought to him he explained the meaning of these words: ‘MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians’ (Daniel 5. 26–28). These words foretold the ruin of Belshazzar, the last King of Babylon, according to the prophecy of the ‘four monarchies’; he was slain that same night and his kingdom given to Darius, King of the Medes.44 In his Hexapla in Danielem, Willet explains that the word mene means ‘number’: the length in years of the kingdom had been determined and had reached the end. Tekel means ‘he hath weighed’, a phrase taken from the jargon of merchants or goldsmiths, who ‘vse most exactly to weigh their gold, and that which is light, they doe reiect and refuse’; God had thus ‘most exactly tried and examined the life and workes of Balthazar [Belshazzar], and found them too light’. The hand, Willet concludes, signifies ‘the iustice of God, which […] prescribeth aforehand punishments due vnto mens sinnes, and in due time bringeth them forth and inflicteth them’.45 In his speech, Finch focuses on the nations’ weight upon the ‘European scale’, which changes according to the ‘occasion of state’ (F 5). In the past, England and France had never provided an equal balance; now they are on the same scale, and the ‘hand of heauen’ has decreed their enemies ‘wanting’, to which should follow their ruin. This passage suggests a continuing interest in the idea of political and religious dissension present in the loci of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, Elijah’s sacrifice and Jehu’s chariot. Finch is concerned with the two nations’ contrasting relationship. While Charles had signed an alliance with France, as part of the marriage negotiations,
44 For further discussion, see H. H. Rowley, Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006). 45 Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, pp. 159–61.
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promising tolerance for Catholics in England, Louis XIII had been acting towards destroying the privileges of the French Huguenots.46 In January 1625 James I had mistakenly promised to send ships in aid to France — the Stuart–Bourbon marriage having been agreed — against the Huguenot revolt of the Duc de Soubise, officially condemned by French Huguenot communities. Yet, within the next few months, all these communities had joined the revolt, so, after James’ death, the English were forced to keep their word and help French Catholics, while procrastinating the mission and trying to settle the situation internally.47 Shortly after, the fleet of England’s mercenary colonel Mansfeld was denied leave to land in France on its way to the Low Countries on an eventually disastrous anti-Habsburg expedition. Therefore, Finch was voicing the Commons’ concern about the possibility of an Anglo-French war, which would indeed take place in 1627. His further reference to Henri IV of France, Henrietta Maria’s father, is intriguing. Henri is said to have known ‘wel, and loued well this Nation [England]’, which, in turn, did him ‘faithfull seruice’ as if, by ‘secret and diuine instinct’ England had known that Henri IV would father the ‘hope of Great Britain’, a ‘companion fit for the glorie of the British Throne’ (F 3–4). Notably, Henri IV’s life had been spent amid and extinguished by religious fights. Charles I as Charlemagne One final aspect of Finch’s speech is his concluding reference to Charlemagne — the traditional model of the Catholic Emperor. In the last two paragraphs of his speech, Finch describes the King and Queen as a sort of genealogical summary of the most important royal houses of Europe. Charles reunites in himself the blood of England, Scotland, Denmark; further off the blood of Spain — ‘which perhaps doth best’, Finch continues, ‘for some springes runne clearest farre from their head’ (F 6). Henrietta Maria’s royal blood contains that of the Princes of Navarre, France, and Italy. Finch thus concludes that […] in both of you […] the two Royall branches of Charlemain, and Hugh Capell [sic for Capet] are now growne into one tree. It was a Charles [Charlemagne] brought the Empire first to France, A Charles [V] that brought it first to Spain. Non indebita poscas Regna tuis fatis. (F 6) This short passage is formed of several elements that all contribute to the creation of a complex locus for royal celebration. It contains an implicit association of Charles I to Charlemagne and Charles V (I of Spain), and a final motto taken 46 R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–38 (p. 15). See Sara Wolfson’s chapter, ‘The Welcoming Journey of Queen Henrietta Maria and Stuart–Bourbon Relations, 1625–1626’, p. 188, in this collection, for further details of the marriage negotiations. 47 Cogswell, ‘Foreign Policy and Parliament: The Case of La Rochelle, 1625–1626’, English Historical Review, 99 (1984), 242–67 (250).
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from Virgil’s Aeneid. Both these elements seal off the Stuart–Bourbon union by providing a sudden diversion and more specific interpretative line to the abovementioned biblical loci. Indeed, Finch here attempts to erase political and religious division through genealogical discourse. The figure of Charlemagne had begun to be associated with Charles I only a few years earlier. In the poem Carolanna, written in 1619 to celebrate the memory of the late Queen Anna, Charles is said to derive his blood from ‘Charles the Greate’, honoured and renowned everywhere; so, the poem continues, he should be ‘surnam’d Charlemaine’.48 Similarly, in Hugh Holland’s A cypres garland for the sacred forehead of our late soueraigne King Iames (1625), Charles is described as ‘Young Charlemaine the ioy of either nation: [England and Scotland] / Great by his birth, and good in expectation’.49 It was not perhaps the most obvious of comparisons, since, as it were, Charlemagne had traditionally been a key ancestor in the genealogies of the two major Catholic powers in Europe: France (through the union with the line of Hugues Capet), and Spain, with the Habsburg royal line and its numerous offshoots.50 After a long speech assessing the similarities and differences of England and France, now brought together by the Stuart–Bourbon union, Finch concludes by associating Charles I to two Catholic Holy Roman Emperors. A pamphlet composed around the same time to celebrate the Stuart–Bourbon union devotes a couple of pages to the ancestry of Charles and Henrietta Maria. The princes of France are praised for being the first that added Christian religion to others conquests, and adorned that rare foundation with the faith of Christ, the primest ornament of any principalitie, by which meane the hearts of the Gaules (who for the most part embraced the Gospel) were as much united to him by favour, as his was to God by faith.51 Charlemagne, in turn, ‘repaired the ruine of the empire, and was confirmed King of France and Emperour of Rome, to the great advancement of religion, and comfort to the commonwealth’.52 Charlemagne was also the first king in Europe to employ for himself the epithet ‘pius’, which he had drawn from Virgil’s Aeneid.53 It seems then that the celebratory element highlighted here is the traditional Christian commitment of the Princes of France qua exemplary religious piety. In his speech to Charles, Finch had similarly remarked very poetically on the religious piety that kings must possess: ‘Princes indued [sic] with morall vertues are like Diamonds, rich but rough and vnpolished’, and it 48 James Maxwell, Carolanna, that is to say, A poeme in honour of our King , Charles Iames, Queene Anne, and Prince Charles (London: Allde, 1619), C2v. 49 Holland, A cypres garland, B3r. 50 Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (Yale: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 42. 51 Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum (London: Eliot’s Court Press, 1625), p. 57. 52 Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum, p. 56. 53 Tanner, The Last Descendant, p. 42.
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is only ‘the knowledge and feare of God’ that adds ‘true luster and sets them faire’ (F 5). Just like James I had been a defender of the ‘true faith’, so Charles too would have to be known for his religious ‘zeale’ (F 2, 5). Charles I can be as great as a Protestant Charlemagne by imitating, in his own realm, the latter’s religious piety.54 But, beside piety, the figure of Charlemagne came with another attribute — imperialist and religious war — as he had wanted to extend the Frankish empire and lead Crusades to the Holy Land. The quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid points to this theme. After putting Charles on the same religious and political plane as Charlemagne and Charles V, Finch adds: ‘Non indebita poscas regna tuis fatis’ (F 6). This is a revision of the words that Aeneas spoke to the Sibyl of Cumae concerning the fortune of the Trojan settlement in Latium: ‘Non indebita posco regna meis fatis’, or ‘I aske nothing but kingdoms due / That destinie doth me giue’.55 Finch’s alteration through the negative subjunctive in the second-person singular — ‘non poscas’ — instead of the original first-person present tense — ‘posco’ — creates the opposite meaning, that of discouraging Charles from doing so: ‘you should not ask for anything but kingdoms that are due to you by destiny’. The Virgilian quotation therefore extracts from the Charlemagne model the idea of war, leaving instead the importance of religious piety. This final statement summarizes the rationale of Finch’s speech, as a Royalist, Calvinist, and Member of Parliament upon the celebrations for Charles’ marriage. Through dense rhetoric, Finch voiced the underlying Protestant scepticism towards the match with a Catholic Queen, turning biblical loci into a means of political criticism. Yet, Finch also attempted to advise the King on how to maintain the cooperation of the Commons: loyalty towards his ‘true religion’ and the decision not to take part in expensive and chronic religious wars. A well-wishing hope that would be disappointed at the first meeting of the so-called ‘useless Parliament’, a few weeks later.
54 Tanner, The Last Descendant, p. 42. 55 Thomas Twyne, The thirteene bookes of Aeneidos (London: Creede, 1607), A2v.
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Bibliography Early Printed Books
Abbott, George, An Exposition vpon the Prophet Ionah (London: Field, 1600) —— , The Reasons vvhich Doctour Hill Hath Brought, for the Vpholding of Papistry (London: Barnes, 1604) Adams, Thomas, Englands Sicknes, comparatively conferred with Israels (London: Griffin, 1615) Andrewes, Lancelot, Scala Coeli Nineteen Sermons Concerning Prayer (London: Burton, 1611) Boyd, Zacharie, The Balme of Gilead Prepared for the Sicke (London: Wreittoun, 1629) Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum (London: Eliot’s Court Press, 1625) Finch, John, ‘Master Iohn Finch his Speech to King CHARLES at Canterbury, May 30 1625’, in A Trve Discovrse of All the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies, obserued at the Contract and Mariage of the High and Mighty CHARLES, King of Greate Britaine, and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady HENRIETTA MARIA of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of FRANCE (London: Haviland, 1625), pp. 1–9 —— , ‘Master Iohn Finch his Speech to King CHARLES and his Queene at Canterbury, Iune 13, 1625’, in A Trve Discovrse of All the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies, obserued at the Contract and Mariage of the High and Mighty CHARLES, King of Greate Britaine, and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady HENRIETTA MARIA of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of FRANCE (London: Haviland, 1625), pp. 1–7 Hayne, Thomas, The times, places, and persons of the holie Scripture. Otherwise entituled, The generall vievv of the Holy Scriptures (London: Purfoot, 1607) Holland, Hugh, A cypres garland For the sacred forehead of our late soueraigne King Iames (London: Okes, 1625) James VI of Scotland, Basilikon Doron (Edinburgh: Waldegraue, 1599) Journal of the House of Lords, vol. 3 [1620–1628] (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1767–1830) The King James Bible (London: Barker, 1611) Maxwell, James, Carolanna, that is to say, A poeme in honour of our King, Charles Iames, Queene Anne, and Prince Charles (London: Allde, 1619) Montagu, Richard, A Gagg for the New Gospell? (London: Snodham, 1624) Roborough, Henry, Balme from Gilead, to Cure all Diseases, Especially the Plague (London: Norton and Mathewes, 1626) Rushworth, John (ed.), ‘Historical Collections: 1627 (part 2)’, in Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, vol. 1 [1618–1629] (London: D. Brown, 1721), British History Online, [accessed 8 December 2014] Tuckney, Anthony, The Balme of Gilead, for the Wounds of England (London: Rothwell and Gellibrand, 1643) Twyne, Thomas, The thirteene bookes of Aeneidos (London: Creede, 1607) Ward, Samuel, Balme from Gilead to Recouer Conscience (London: Haviland, 1628) Willet, Andrew, Hexapla in Danielem: that is, A six-fold commentarie vpon the most diuine prophesie of Daniel (London: Greene, 1610)
c hap ter 8. n eb uc hadn ez za r, cha rlemag ne, a nd a enea s Secondary Studies
Cogswell, Thomas, ‘Foreign Policy and Parliament: The Case of La Rochelle, 1625–1626’, English Historical Review, 99 (1984), 242–67 —— , The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988) Cross, Claire, Church and People 1450–1660 (Bodmin: Fontana Press, 1976) Cust, Richard, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) —— , Charles I: A Political Life (London: Routledge, 2007) Force, J. E. and R. H. Popkin (eds), Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001). Gardiner, S. R., A History of England under the Duke of Buckingham and Charles I, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1875) Knafla, L. A., ‘Finch, John, Baron Finch of Fordwich (1584–1660)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), [accessed 8 December 2014] Lewalski, B. K., Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) Patrick, D. and A. Scult, Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation (Worcester: Billing, 1990) Patterson, W. B., King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Reid, W. Stanford, ‘The Four Monarchies of Daniel in Reformation Historiography’, Historical Reflections, 8 (1981), 115–23 Rowley, H. H., Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006) Russell, Conrad, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History 1509–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) Sharpe, Kevin, The Personal Rule of Charles I (Yale: Yale University Press, 1996) Smuts, R. Malcolm, ‘The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s’, English Historical Review, 93 (1978), 26–45 —— , ‘Religion, European Politics and Henrietta Maria’s Circle, 1625–1641’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 13–38 Tanner, Marie, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (Yale: Yale University Press, 1993) Terry, William, The Life and Times of John, Lord Finch (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1936) Trueman, Carl, ‘Preachers and Medieval and Renaissance Commentary’, in P. McCollough et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
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Van der Velden, Hugo, The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000) Webster, Tom, ‘Early Stuart Puritanism’, in J. Coffey and P. C. H. Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Young, M. B., ‘Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625–1628’, Albion 22 (1990), 217–35
Kevin Laam
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the Politics of the English Epithalamium in 1625 Robert Herrick’s reputation as a singularly festive and staunchly pro-Stuart poet is emblazoned in the argument of his Hesperides, where he writes: I sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers: Of April, May, of June, and July-Flowers. I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes, Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes.1 Allusions to the traditional holiday pastimes run throughout the collection, signalling Herrick’s support of James and Charles’ efforts to protect the English Church from Puritan innovations. By the time of its publication in 1648, Hesperides could be viewed as a requiem for the royalist cause; Herrick had recently been expelled from his vicarage at Dean Prior in Devonshire, and the next year the King would be tried and executed by his own people. Yet the volume, which experiments with a stunning variety of forms through the course of its 1402 poems, does not cut along partisan lines as easily as it might at first seem — or perhaps it would be more apt to say that those lines are not as clearly drawn as the proverbial Whig narrative of the English Civil War would suggest. In 1990 Ann Baynes Coiro edited a special issue of the George Herbert Journal on Herrick that stressed the tensions and contradictions behind the work’s winsome expression of cavalier ideals.2 Leah Marcus, who in The Politics of Mirth (1986) enshrined
1 The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), vol. 1, p. 7. All references to Herrick’s poetry are from this edition and subsequently will be cited in the text by line number unless otherwise noted. 2 See Ann Baynes Coiro, ‘Robert Herrick and the Hesperides: On the Edge of the Renaissance’, George Herbert Journal, 14 (1990), i-vi. In this introduction to the special issue on Herrick, Coiro notes that ‘there are voices from almost every mid-seventeenth-century political perspective here, undercutting any univocal argument we may want to construct’ (i). Other essays in the issue that speak to the political elusiveness of Hesperides include Jonathan F. S. Post, ‘Robert Herrick: A Minority Report’, 1–21, and Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Herrick’s Cultural Materialism’, 21–50. Post warns against overestimating the pro-Laudian impetus behind the references to ritual pastimes in Hesperides, noting that Herrick’s political intentions pale beside those of contemporaries such as Richard Corbett. Crane posits Herrick’s relation to material culture (namely, his early apprenticeship as a goldsmith) as an overlooked context for understanding the poet’s ambivalent class consciousness. Kevin Laam is Associate Professor of English at Oakland University. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 221–240 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119192
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Herrick’s reputation as an apologist for Laudian ceremonialism, acknowledged in a later essay that ‘despite the pro-Caroline frame of the collection, Herrick’s verses construct a varied gallery of luminaries that cut across the broad ideological divisions of the pre-war period’.3 Recent criticism of Hesperides has continued to chip away at the collection’s royalist veneer. John Creaser, citing the numerous parliamentary supporters honoured in Hesperides, claims that ‘Herrick puts friendship and esteem before ideological consistency without a second glance, and this typifies his tolerance, even his relish and cultivation, of contradictions of all kinds’.4 Syrithe Pugh, who maintains that the work’s open espousal of divine right paints Herrick as an ‘ultra-royalist’, nonetheless acknowledges that he never in fact took up arms for the King.5 The unsettled relationship between Herrick’s work and his politics is especially salient in the poems that he wrote in the decade prior to his appointment to Dean Prior in 1629, well before the tensions between parliament and the crown erupted into armed conflict.6 Herrick’s precise stake in the affairs of state in the 1620s is unknown, as are most of the details of his life during this time. He was an avid Londoner, who frequented the literary circle of Ben Jonson. He was ordained in 1623, although he was evidently not appointed to a particular parish. He became chaplain to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in 1627, and accompanied the Duke to the Isle of Rhé on an ill-fated crusade to support the besieged Huguenots. One of the few poems in Hesperides that can be dated with reasonable certainty to this time is also one of its longest: ‘A Nuptiall Song, or Epithalamie, on Sir Clipseby Crew and his Lady’. The publication of Hesperides marked the first print appearance of the poem, which had circulated in manuscript in a longer version simply titled ‘Epithalamium’.7 Clipsby Crew made Herrick’s acquaintance at St John’s College, Cambridge in the mid-1610s, and sat for Downton in the parliaments of 1624 and 1625, and for Callington in 1626. He may have owed his seat in the Commons to William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, who held considerable clout in
3 Leah Marcus, ‘Robert Herrick’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 171–82 (p. 177). Marcus paints a more partisan portrait of Herrick in ‘Churchman among the Maypoles: Herrick and the Hesperides’, chap. 5, in The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 4 John Creaser, ‘“Jocond his Muse was”: Celebration and Virtuosity in Herrick’, in Ruth Connolly and Tom Cain (eds), ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 39–64 (pp. 43–44). 5 Syrithe Pugh, Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality: Classical Literature and SeventeenthCentury Royalism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), p. 4. 6 John Creaser, in ‘“Times trans-shifting”: Chronology and the Misshaping of Herrick’, English Literary Renaissance, 39 (2004), 163–96, argues that Herrick’s pre-Devonshire lyrics, because they often lack the expressly political bent of the later works, have been unfairly overlooked. Additionally, Creaser faults critics for reading Herrick’s poems inordinately through the lens of the civil wars and thus for dating many of them to this period based on insufficient evidence. 7 Cain and Connolly include an early copy text and a brief manuscript history of ‘A Nuptiall Song’, in Complete Poetry of Herrick, vol. 2, pp. 75–82.
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the English Epithalamium
parliamentary elections.8 Herrick’s ‘Nuptiall Song’ was originally composed to celebrate Crew’s marriage to Jane Pulteney, which took place on 7/17 July 1625, less than two months after the nuptials of King Charles and Princess Henrietta Maria of France were first celebrated at Paris. The date is significant in parliamentary history. In 1624, the royal chaplain Richard Montagu published A New Gagg for an Old Goose, a defence of Anglican doctrine against the ‘Catholique Limitors’ and ‘Romish Rangers’ who had lately sought to proselytize members of his Essex parish.9 A New Gagg was nominally a response to a pamphlet by the Catholic apologist John Heigham, but its break with the tenets of Calvinism drew the ire of Puritans in the English Church, who pressed the Lower House to investigate the matter. The controversy escalated in 1625 with the publication of Appello Caesarem, in which Montagu singled out the two ‘unjust informers’ who had targeted his work for its perceived papist and Arminian sympathies. Citing the backing of the late King, who had authorized him to answer his critics and referred the manuscript for licensing to the esteemed Francis White, Dean of Carlisle, Montagu derides ‘those Classicall Puritans, who were wont to passe all their Strange Determinations, Sabbatarian Paradoxes, and Apocalypticall Frensies under the Name and Covert of The True Professors of Protestant Doctrine’.10 In the Commons meeting of 7/17 July 1625, the report from the committee appointed to investigate Montagu’s books declared Appello ‘a factious and seditious Book, tending manifestly to the Dishonour of our late King, and to the Disturbance of our Church and State’.11 Among the grievances listed in the report was the book’s disregard for the Calvinist consensus maintained by James and upheld at the Synod of Dort. Even though Montagu categorically disavowed Arminianism in Appello, the committee determined ‘the Fire, kindled in the Low Countries by Arminius, like to be kindled here likewise by this Man’, and alleged that ‘the whole Frame of this Book is a great Encouragement of Popery’.12 The Commons called on Archbishop George Abbot to suppress the book and announced plans to meet with the Lords to discuss punishments for Montagu’s contempt, setting the stage for a series of attempts to silence and prosecute Montagu that would last throughout the decade.13
8 See Robert E. Ruigh, The Parliament of 1624: Politics and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni versity Press, 1971); and Violet A. Rowe, ‘The Influence of the Earls of Pembroke on Parliamentary Elections, 1625–1641’, English Historical Review, 50 (1935), 242–56. While Ruigh believes that Crew ‘probably owed his seat to Pembroke’ (p. 128), Rowe states that there is ‘no evidence’ for this fact (244). 9 Richard Montagu, ‘To the Reader’, A Gagg for the New Gospell? No: A New Gagge for an Old Goose, Who Would Needes Vndertake to Stop All Protestants Mouths for Euer, with 276 Places out of Their Owne English Bibles (London: T. Snodham, for M. Lownes and W. Barret, 1624). 10 Richard Montagu, Appello Cæsarem. A Ivst Appeale from Two Vniust Informers (London: M. Lownes, 1625), sig. a2v. 11 See Journals of the House of Commons [hereafter CJ], 1547–1714, 17 vols (London, 1742), vol. 1, p. 805. 12 CJ, vol. 1, p. 805. 13 For an overview of Montagu’s skirmishes with the Lower House from 1624 to 1629, see Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Richard Montagu, the House of Commons, and Arminianism’, chap. 6, in Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). According to Tyacke,
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The Montagu controversy was a flashpoint in the Calvinist-Arminian debates of the 1620s as well as a harbinger of the anti-Catholic paranoia that would shadow Charles I and his French Catholic Queen. Cyndia Clegg credits Montagu’s works for drawing the battle lines between the Calvinist and anti-Calvinist factions in the English Church,14 and Nicholas Tyacke goes so far as to state that A New Gagg was ‘without precedent’ in its damning equation of Calvinism with Puritanism.15 While Crew sat in the Commons for much of the Appello dispute, his participation in the campaign against Montagu is uncertain. The sole evidence of his direct engagement in the religious controversies of the day exists in his appointment on 8/18 August 1625 to a committee that conferred with the Lords to discuss concerns over the King’s recent pardons of Catholic recusants.16 The conference took place amid a flurry of activity on the recusant issue, during which the King responded to the ‘petition concerning religion’ that had been presented to him by both houses on July 8/18. The petition submitted eight causes and sixteen remedies for the recent influx of Catholics into the King’s dominions, with frequent veiled references to the influence of Charles’ new Queen.17 One month later the King formally responded to the petition, assuring both houses that he would attend to their concerns. Buckingham added that the King was acting ‘not to draw us on, but out of his own Conscience, and in Performance of his Father’s last Will; which was, that, when he was married,
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by the time Appello was suppressed by royal proclamation in 1629, the case ‘paled into insignificance beside the growing body of evidence that a general Arminianisation of the English Church was in process’ (p. 162). For a discussion of Montagu’s role in the polarization of the English Church that would occur under Charles I, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘Ecclesiastical Faction, Censorship, and the Rhetoric of Silence’, chap. 6, in Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Clegg argues that ecclesiastical divisions in the late Jacobean era split along political rather than strictly theological lines, with Bishop Richard Neile’s circle at Durham House supporting James’ attempts to forge a Stuart–Habsburg alliance and Archbishop George Abbot’s Lambeth Palace faction pursuing a more aggressive foreign policy. Montagu’s writings, according to Clegg, exploited the virulent anti-Catholic stance of Abbot and his peers ‘to expose the Abbot circle as controversialists who not only intended to disturb the peace of the English Church but whose control over ecclesiastical licensing also authorised controversy’ (p. 202). Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered’, chap. 6, in Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 165. Tyacke asserts that antiCatholic polemic prior to Montagu respected the prevalence of Calvinism among English clergy: ‘The concept of “doctrinal Puritanism”, as deployed by Montagu to describe Calvinism, was a neologism of therefore revolutionary significance’ (p. 165). Tyacke’s perennial critic, Peter White, questions the notion of an essential conflict between Calvinism and Arminianism that came to a boil under the Stuarts. ‘This is by no means to deny the existence of polarities’, White maintains, ‘but rather to suggest that they were concurrent and evolutionary rather than abruptly linear, that there was development within a continuing spectrum, a development to which theologians of contrasting churchmanship contributed, in spite of their indulgence from time to time in the language of polemic against each other’. See Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 11. CJ, vol. 1, p. 812. The full petition on religion, including the King’s responses to each of the articles contained therein, is included in Proceedings in Parliament 1625, ed. by Maija Jansson and William B. Bidwell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 155–60.
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the English Epithalamium
he should so respect Religion here, that he should marry her Person, and not her Religion’.18 The coincidence of Crew’s marriage to Pulteney and the commencement of the case against Montagu — and the vicinity of both events to the celebrations for the royal wedding — brings into sharp relief the tense political atmosphere against which the Crew–Pulteney nuptials took place. That tension was fuelled in large part by the confessional divide between the newly crowned King and Queen. Not enough is known about Crew and Pulteney to determine if their marriage was similarly fraught, although there is evidence that the two came from conflicting religious and political backgrounds. The bride’s father, Sir John Pulteney of Misterton, Leicestershire, served as MP for Wigan in 1601 and 1604. His father, Gabriel Pulteney, was a suspected recusant whose forced confession of faith is recorded in the Elizabethan Calendar of State of Papers in 1580.19 John Pulteney’s exclusion from local office suggests that he, too, may have been a practising Catholic.20 Crew, meanwhile, belonged to a family of staunch Puritans and parliamentary supporters, most famously his father Sir Ranulph Crew, who in November 1626 was ejected from his seat as lord chief justice for opposing Charles’ Forced Loan.21 The younger Crew’s Puritanism is further suggested by his association with Pembroke, a leader of the anti-Spanish faction in James’ court and the probable patron of numerous anti-Catholic works.22 However much or little ‘A Nuptiall Song’ may speak to the particulars of the Crew–Pulteney pairing, the topical resonance of the poem derives chiefly from its appearance in the aftermath of the royal wedding and attendant negotiations. In this paper I consider the ways that ‘A Nuptiall Song’ resonates with the religious and political tensions surrounding the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria: first by looking at some of the works expressly produced to celebrate the occasion, then by approaching Herrick’s epithalamium as an alternative to those ‘authorized’ accounts. The poem invites comparison with the epithalamia composed for the royal nuptials, not only for its close proximity to the event but also for its uncommonly frank depiction of the tensions involved in aristocratic matrimonial politics. Herrick’s poem is not overtly political, nor is it specifically about Charles and Henrietta Maria. Yet its unflinching dramatization of the power negotiations between bride and groom, as coded 18 See CJ, vol. 1, p. 813. 19 See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I, Addenda, 1580–1625; Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, ed. by Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longman & Co., 1872), pp. 34–35. 20 See ‘Pulteney, Sir John’, in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629, ed. by Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), vol. 5, p. 781. 21 See ‘Crewe [Crew], Sir Randolph’, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Academy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 14, pp. 173–74. 22 On Pembroke’s associations with Puritan clergy and MPs, see Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 264–81. For a general overview of his patronage activities, see Brian O’Farrell, Shakespeare’s Patron: William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, 1580–1630: Politics, Patronage and Power (London: Continuum, 2011).
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in its deft appropriations of Catullan erotic epithalamia, voices uncertainties over the Stuart–Bourbon union with an urgency that is generally absent from the literature formally produced for the occasion. The epithalamia issued on the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria celebrated what was, in fact, a precarious alliance between the kingdoms of Britain and France. Failed negotiations for the hand of the Spanish Infanta had foiled King James’ best hope for the peaceful restitution of the Palatinate to his son-in-law, Frederick V, and had polarized the English court into rival war and peace factions. Initial talks with the French threatened to break down over the same issue that had finally doomed the Spanish match: toleration for English Catholics. A compromise was reached in the form of a provision separate from the marriage treaty in which James privately agreed to increase liberties for his loyal Roman Catholic subjects.23 Two months after the treaty was signed, including this separate provision, the papal dispensation for the marriage arrived, but with renewed demands that the policy of toleration be declared and codified publicly. The King baulked at these demands, though in retrospect they seem justified; enforcement of the new protections was irregular, particularly after the King’s death on March 27.24 Stuart–Bourbon relations were further strained by the German commander Count Ernst von Mansfeld’s abortive campaign to recover the Palatinate. Mansfeld was key to Buckingham’s plans to secure French support for the English military effort, but the expedition was not properly financed or coordinated. Louis XIII reneged on his vow to allow Mansfeld’s troops passage through French territory, and James refused Louis’s request to divert troops to the defence of Breda. As the two sides sparred over strategy and objectives, infection and desertion thinned Mansfeld’s ranks below their capacity to serve either cause. The first test of the Stuart–Bourbon alliance ended in failure before the marriage compact was sealed.25 Meanwhile, plans for the royal wedding went forward: Charles and Henrietta were married in Paris on 1/11 May 1625, with the Duke of Chevreuse standing in for the absent King. The bride disembarked at Dover on 12/22 June, and after the marriage contract was publicly renewed at Canterbury, the royal party set off to London. A festival book of the nuptial celebrations describes the thunderous welcome the new King and Queen received as they sailed up the Thames. The peals of cannon were reportedly so loud ‘that nothing could be heard for the terror of the noice’, the smoke so thick that it ‘enterposed betwixt
23 For the full text of the ‘Escrit particulier’, see Philip Yorke, 2nd Earl of Hardicke (ed.), Miscellaneous State Papers. From 1501 to 1726 (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1778), vol. 1, pp. 546–47. 24 See Michael C. Questier (ed.), ‘Introduction’, Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics 1621–1625, Camden Society, Fifth series, 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Questier describes the situation of English Catholics in early 1625 as a ‘somewhat unstable state of partial de facto toleration’ (p. 113), not unlike what they had experienced at varying points throughout James’ reign. 25 See W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 1997), pp. 354–56.
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the English Epithalamium
the earth and the Sunnes brightnesse making an Euening at Noone day’.26 A mob of enthusiastic spectators capsized a ship docked along the route of the royal procession. Amid the fanfare, the King and Queene stood publiquely in the open Barge, and not onely discouered themselues to euery honest and chearefull beholder, but also with all Royall affabilitie and grace distributed their fauours to all those which came to admire them, so that there was not a liuing soule which did not in heart conclude and say with the Poet, Qua[m] bene co[n]ueniunt et in vna sede mora[n]tur Maiestas & Amor.27 [Majestic power and erotic love get on together very well, and they linger long in the same place]. ‘The Poet’ here is Ovid, whose oft-quoted maxim from the Metamorphoses is revised to affirm rather than deny the compatibility of majesty and love. The facile reversal of Ovid’s original meaning is emblematic of how neatly the politics of the royal match could be swept beneath the fanfare. One could not genuinely partake of the spectacle of Charles and Henrietta’s arrival at London and doubt the prospects of the Stuart–Bourbon union. The propagandist tenor of the festival books was shared by the larger body of literature issued in observance of the royal nuptials. Oxford and Cambridge both published collections of epithalamia, mostly in Latin, commemorating the historic union of the lily and the rose.28 William Browne, Robert Burton, Richard Busby, and William Strode were among the prominent names to pen verses for the Oxford volume; notable Cambridge contributors included Samuel Collins, Thomas Randolph, and James Stewart, Duke of Lennox, who leads the collection with a poem hailing the deliverance of France and England from a bloody, competitive past to a peaceful, cooperative future. A verse broadside entitled England and France, Hand-in-Hand likewise glances at the troubled history between the two nations before concluding optimistically: ‘Bonfieres call people forth, and let them sing, / England on France bestowes a Wedding
26 A Trve Discovrse of all the Royal Passages, Tryvmphs and Ceremonies, observed at the Contract and Mariage of the High and Mighty Charles, King of Great Britaine, and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady Henrietta Maria of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of France (London: John Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625), sig. E2v. [See Appendix 1]. 27 Trve Discovrse, sig. E3r. The actual line from Ovid’s Metamorphoses reads, ‘Non bene convenient, nec in una sede morantur, Majestas et amor’ [Majestic power and erotic love do not get on together very well, nor do they linger long in the same place]. The English translation of the line is from Ovid, Metamorphoses: A New Translation, trans. by Charles Martin (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 86. 28 See Epithalamia Oxoniensia in auspicatissimum, potentissimi monarchae Caroli, Magnae Britanniae, Franciae, et Hiberniae Regis, &c. cum Henretta Maria, aeternae memoriae Henrici Magni Gallorum Regis filia, connubium (Oxford: J. Lichfield and G. Turner, 1625); and Epithalamium illustriss. & feliciss. principum Caroli Regis, et H. Mariae Reginae Magnae Britanniae, &c. A musis Cantabrigiensibus decantatum ([Cambridge]: Cantrellus Legge, 1625).
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Ring’.29 The political implications of the match are expressed more directly in A Relation of the Glorious Triumphs and Order of the Ceremonies, a brief tract which pairs a glowing account of the Paris ceremony with the text of Louis XIII’s proclamation banning commerce with the kingdom of Spain.30 Charles’ one-time tutor Walter Quin added to the revels with a short collection of wedding poems in Latin, English, French, and Italian, prefaced by an emblem of the lily mating with the rose with the caption: ‘Iuncta magis florent’ [They prosper greater together]. The sexually provocative image of the two flowers doubly intertwined is tempered by the collection’s chaste rendering of conjugal accord [Figure 9.1]. For example, Quin’s ‘A Nuptiall Song, of the union of the Roses and Lillies in this Royal Couple’ retains a narrow focus on the companionate aspect of marriage: His Royall vertues doe resemble well The Roses beauty, and their fragrant smell: The Lillies colour white, and free from staine Is of her vertuous mind an Emblem plaine. No wonder then that these respects doe moue Him, honour of the Roses, her to loue; And her, the Lillies Ornament, incite His loue with mutuall loue for to requite.31 The lily and the rose are venerable tropes in Renaissance verse, frequently invoked in tandem as a figure of Petrarchan discordia concors. Shakespeare’s Tarquin beholds the ‘silent war of lilies and of roses’32 in the face of Lucrece, while Ford’s Giovanni plies Annabella with similar blandishments: ‘The lily and the rose, most sweetly strange, / Upon your dimple cheek do strive for change’.33 In Spenser’s seminal ‘Prothalamion’, lilies and roses fill out a spectrum of love’s forms, from chaste to carnal:
29 England and France, Hand-in-Hand: Triumphing, for the happy & Royall Contract of Mariage, made betweene the High and Mightie Charles, Prince of Great Brittaine, and the most excellent Princesse of France, Madame Henrica Maria, Sister to Lewis the thirteenth King of France (London: J. Trundle, 1624). 30 A relation of the glorious triumphs and order of the ceremonies, obserued in the marriage of the high and mighty Charles, King of Great Brittaine, and the Ladie Henretta Maria, sister to the most Christian King of France Together with the ceremonie obserued in their troth-plighting , performed in the castle of the Louure, in his Maiesties chamber there. As also the Kings declaration containing a prohibition vnto all his subiects to use any traffique or commerce with the kingdome of Spaine. Published in the Parliament of Paris, the 12. of May, 1625. Whereunto the originall French copie is added (London: Thomas Snodham for Nathaniel Butter, 1625). [See Appendix 2]. 31 Walter Quin, In nvptiis principvm incomparabilivm, Caroli, Britannici Imperi Monarchae potentissimi, et Henriettae Mariae, Henrici Magni, Galliarum Regis Filiae, gratulatio quadrilinguis Gualteri Quinni (London: G. Purslow, 1625), p. 6. 32 William Shakespeare, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 1997), p. 1817. 33 John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, in Five Plays, ed. by Havelock Ellis (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. 97.
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the English Epithalamium
Figure 9.1. Walter Quin, In nvptiis principvm incomparabilivm, Caroli, Britannici Imperi Monarchae potentissimi, et Henriettae Mariae, Henrici Magni, Galliarum Regis Filiae, gratulatio quadrilinguis Gualteri Quinni (London: G. Purslow, 1625). The British Library Board, General Reference Collection C.28.g.8.(4.).
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Of every sort which in that meadow grew They gathered some: the violet pallid blue, The little daisy that at evening closes, The virgin lily and the primrose true, With store of vermeil roses, To deck their bridegrooms’ posies Against the bridal day, which was not long: Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song.34 The symbolic range of Quin’s poem pales in comparison. He stresses the complementary nature of love by joining Charles’ royal virtues, represented by the roses, with Henrietta Maria’s moral virtues, represented by the lilies. The correspondence is so fast, the equilibrium so carefully wrought, as to suppress any implied erotic frisson. The conservative sensibility of Quin’s collection reflects a larger pattern that Heather Dubrow observes in her study of the Stuart epithalamium. According to Dubrow, [p]erhaps the single most revealing decision made by the authors of Stuart epithalamia […] is their rejection of the erotic wedding tradition exemplified by poems by Pontano, Marino, and Johannes Secundus […] The open eroticism of some Continental epithalamia, like the open conflict of Catullus 62, represents a kind of negative identity for the Stuart epithalamium, a road not taken: one can cite some telling exceptions, but by and large that unabashed and uncontrolled sexuality is not the value Stuart poems wish to advocate but rather the threat they attempt to control […] Stuart poets typically envision marriage as public, a source and a symbol of an orderly and harmonious society; their poems are concerned not only with the couple but also with the community, not only with sexual politics but also with politics in the more customary sense.35 The context provided by Dubrow’s analysis helps to explain how the epithalamium had evolved, under the sway of Reformation marriage discourse, into a natural vehicle for expressions of political ideology. The implications of this turn are illustrated vividly in George Marcelline’s Epithalamium Gallo-Brittanicum, which includes dedicatory letters seeking the joint patronage of Charles and Buckingham and declares on its title page that the pending nuptials of Charles and Henrietta Maria portend no less than the destruction and ruine of Antichrist, the establishment of the true Faith, the propagation of the Gospell, the restitution of the Palatinate, the ouerthrowing
34 Edmund Spenser, Selected Shorter Poems, ed. by Douglas Brooks-Davies (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 392–93. 35 Heather Dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 48–49.
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the English Epithalamium
of the Enemies designes, the erection of Peace, the increase of Plentie, and the general well-fare of all Christendome.36 Marcelline’s prose work, over 150 pages in length, gives concrete expression to concerns that are muted or altogether silent in the lyric epithalamia, in particular the concern over Henrietta Maria’s Catholicism and the effects it will have on the Caroline court. Marcelline gives numerous assurances that the new Queen will not attempt to impose her faith on her husband. ‘She knowes that She may be the crowne of the head’, he writes, ‘but She will not presume to be the head of the body’ (p. 111). Marcelline compares Henrietta Maria to her father, Henri IV, who outwardly professed Catholicism as a matter of political expediency even though ‘his heart was with God’ (p. 114). Henri was assassinated at the hands of a Catholic zealot harbouring delusions of sainthood. It is inconceivable, states Marcelline, that the trauma of his murder will not alert Henrietta Maria to the error of her ways and win her to the true faith. The political slant of Marcelline’s epithalamium is reflected somewhat more artfully in its treatment of one of the classical conventions of the genre: the encouragement of fertility. According to Marcelline, Henrietta Maria’s birth was itself a dual testament to providence and procreation. After Henri IV had been graced with four sons to fortify the French kingdom against its enemies, God sent him a daughter so that Charles and Louis together might ‘satisfie their thirstie blades with the bloud of Tyrants, and die their swords with the death of the enemies to truth and equitie’ (p. 107). The fruition of these hopes depends on the love that Henrietta Maria’s beauty and virtue inspire — that is, on her marriageability. As Marcelline explains, had She all these rare endowments and aptitudes of mariage, and yet had no inclination to wedlock, her rare gifts would be like precious iewels, which lose their luster for want of wearing, like fragrant flowers in a most delightfull garden, which are neuer gathered, but finde their tombe where they had their birth, like a root buried vp in the ground, which neuer brancheth: if She were resolued not to make an exchange of virginall for coniugall chastity, She should doe the world too much injurie in cloistering vp Christendomes ioyes, whose hopes are chiefly in Her, with Herselfe. (pp. 107–08) Marcelline proceeds to itemize what would be wasted if Henrietta Maria chose not to produce an heir: her virtue, her noble blood, her education, her dowry, and finally, her beauty. The faded jewels and unpicked flowers that he invokes to mourn her hypothetically wasted attributes are familiar topoi of the carpe diem lyric, in which the speaker raises the spectre of Time in order to wheedle 36 George Marcelline, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum or, Great-Britaines, Frances, and the most parts of Europes vnspeakable ioy, for the most happy vnion, and blessed contract of the high and mighty Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and the Lady Henrette Maria, daughter to Henry the fourth, sirnamed the Great, late King of the French and Nauarre, and sister to Levvis the thirteenth: now king of the said dominions (London: T. Archer, 1625). Marcelline’s work is hereafter cited in the text by page number.
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his mistress into sex. Yet here as in Quin’s poem, the consummation ritual is drained of sexual tension. Marcelline substitutes for the image of the reluctant maid the committed celibate, who has made a principled choice between two lifestyles; she shall be neither cajoled nor coerced into marrying. Henrietta Maria’s choice to wed, in turn, is driven by public interest, not private desire. It is an exchange of one form of chastity for another, ‘virginall for coniugall’; there is no threat of female sexuality to be contained. The determinedly chaste representation of marriage that emerges across the epithalamia composed for the wedding of Charles and Henrietta Maria scarcely seems a product of the genre whose first iterations in antiquity were unashamedly sexual, as expressed in the Greek word ‘epithalamium’, which translates to ‘at the bridal chamber’. The epithalamia of Catullus, which were the most widely imitated poems of their kind in Renaissance Europe, luxuriate in descriptions of the bride’s ambivalence prior to consummation.37 Carmina 61 comprises a veritable spectacle of erotic anticipation, as the groom conspires with Venus to initiate his halting bride into the rites of love. For each delay she is admonished to advance to the marriage bed, where awaits the promise of untold amorous licence. Carmina 62 pictures at its centre a young bride whose qualms about marriage prompt a debate over the merits of virginity. Through the course of the poem her untouched body becomes a contested space over which the two sides may stake their respective claims. A chorus of maidens decries the cruelty of tearing the young bride from her parents and subjecting her body to defilement; a chorus of youths responds that it will become sterile and futile if not duly mated. In the end, the maidens and youths concur that the bride’s virginity is not hers to control, and she is bid no longer to resist the inevitable.38 Herrick’s ‘A Nuptiall Song’ enlists the dramatic and erotic tension of the Catullan model to capture the volatile state of English marriage politics in 1625. In place of the ideal of chaste, companionate marriage, Herrick’s poem submits the image of a faltering, perhaps conniving bride who must be weaned from her coy pretensions. The passions she inflames are so intense that the marriage bed becomes the site of potential conflagration. Blessings for the couple are underlaid with fears of cataclysmic discord, in ways that call to mind the more momentous nuptials that had taken place two months prior. In fact the first lines of the poem, which herald the bride’s approach in characteristically florid language, would not be out of place in the reportage of Henrietta Maria’s arrival in London: What’s that we see from far? the spring of Day Bloom’d from the East, or faire Injewel’d May Blowne out of April; or some New 37 On the Catullan influence in early modern epithalamia, see Virginia Tufte, The Poetry of Marriage: The Epithalamium in Europe and Its Development in England (Los Angeles: Tinnon-Brown, 1970); and more recently, Jacob Blevins, Catullan Consciousness and the Early Modern Lyric in England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 38 See The Poems of Catullus, trans. by Peter Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 106–27.
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the English Epithalamium
Star fill’d with glory to our view, Reaching at heaven, To adde a nobler Planet to the seven?
(ll. 1–6)
In the second stanza anticipation bursts into euphoria as the bride comes into full view and her glories are paraded for all to behold. Yet at the end of the third stanza there emerges a darker side to the spectacle. The response it elicits turns from breathless admiration into a kind of wanton self-immolation. The bride’s onlookers breathe air so intoxicatingly sweet that it leads them to make altars of their own lust: Who therein wo’d not consume His soule to Ash-heaps in that rich perfume? Bestroaking Fate the while He burnes to Embers on the Pile.
(ll. 27–30)
The passions kindled by the bride threaten to consume all who enter her path, and by the fourth stanza, they have evidently claimed their first victim: the bridegroom, whose ‘eyes do turne / And roule about, and in their motions burne / Their balls to Cindars’ (ll. 37–39). The erotic subtext of the ceremony is made further explicit in early manuscript versions of the poem, which contain as many as seven stanzas that Herrick evidently deleted from the 1648 print version. In the first of these stanzas, the groom’s implosive reaction to the sight of his bride is preceded by a description of her blushing face; the rabid desire that she stokes is juxtaposed against the wary pace at which she proceeds: Leade one fayre Paranimphs the while hyr eyes a (guilty to somwhat) ripe the strawberies and cherryes in hyr cheekes; ther’s creame alredy spilte, hyr rayes must gleame gently thereon and soe begett luste and temptation to surfett and to hunger helpe one hyr pace and though she lag yet stir hyr homwards, well she knowes hyr harts at home, how ere she goes.39 Herrick enlists the dynamic of modesty and display to dramatize the bride’s uneasy place in the midst of the wedding proceedings. Even as her guilty eyes, blushing cheek, and lagging step betray her ambivalence towards her fate, we are assured that ‘hyr harts at home’ — presumably, with her bridegroom. Yet he is noticeably absent from this description; the gaze to which she is subject is collective and indiscriminate. The ‘luste and temptation’ that she fuels, it appears, exceed the chaste confines of the 39 Complete Poetry of Herrick, vol. 2, pp. 76–77.
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marriage bed; well before consummation ‘ther’s creame alredy spilte’. The speaker’s refusal to impute these wanton lusts to one particular person casts doubt that the bride can be truly possessed by her husband. Even while comporting herself with due restraint she is made the object of anonymous, boundless erotic projection. The bride is summarily admonished to cool the flames she has fanned. Her path is diverted to the ‘banks of Virgins’ (l. 41), where her incendiary powers are methodically doused: she is showered with roses, sprinkled with wheat, drowned with a flowery spring. The bride becomes the object of ritual praises, blessings, and divinations, and hence for the moment reclaims her status as an object of chaste veneration. The poem’s retreat from the overt eroticism of the prior stanzas culminates in the last two lines of the fifth stanza, where the imperative to reproduce is foisted upon the bride in the humblest of terms: ‘And thousands gladly wish / You multiply, as doth a Fish’ (ll. 49–50). The ruthlessly functional simile, with its embedded allusion to the miracle of the loaves and fishes, jars with the florid ceremonialism that surrounds the arrival of the bride and her presentation to her bridegroom. Moreover, it flattens her incendiary sexuality into a rote vessel of collective wish fulfillment: she is urged to propagate, not procreate. What emerges through the course of Herrick’s poem is a series of ever more laboured attempts to control and contain the bride’s sexuality. To this point she has been a cipher, an object of enthusiastic projection by stock admirers. But in stanza six she is endowed with bona fide agency and therewith entrusted to play her part in the conjugal performance: And beautious Bride we do confess y’are wise, In dealing forth these bashfull jealousies: In Lov’s name do so; and a price Set on your selfe, by being nice: But yet take heed; What now you seem, be not the same indeed, And turne Apostate: Love will Part of the way be met; or sit stone-still. On then, and though you slow ly go, yet, howsoever, go.
(ll. 51–60)
The bride is deemed wise for having plied her groom with coyness and thus made herself a rare and precious commodity. But the time has come for her to meet him halfway, and this can only be achieved by renouncing allegiance to her reliable coquetries. The command to ‘turne Apostate’ raises an enticing parallel to Henrietta when we recall Marcelline’s suggestion that the Princess, like her father, was a closet Protestant. But I am not sure that Herrick uses the language to comment on religious faith per se. It is fairer to say that the phrase reflects the pressurized state of aristocratic marriage politics, where mutual love does not emerge from some mythopoeic merging of the lily and the rose but rather requires radical agential force, something akin to
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the English Epithalamium
apostasy.40 The bride’s movements are choreographed with painstaking precision, particularly in the halting lines that complete the stanza: ‘On then, and though you slow- / ly go, yet, howsoever, go’. She is allowed to proceed forward, but only at a pace so deliberate that it guarantees her abject compliance. The precautions taken to ensure an orderly procession en route to the wedding chamber are accordingly vigilant. As the bride is guided to her chamber, the poem’s speaker orders her to ‘let the Young-men and Bride-maids share / Your garters; and their joynts / Encircle with the Bride-grooms Points’ (ll. 78–80), a sanitized version of the ill-mannered (albeit apocryphal) custom of stealing the bride’s garters and the groom’s points after the wedding ceremony. The bride can prevent a fracas by giving up her garters before they are taken. The erstwhile eager young men who would have them, in turn, are charged that no strife, (Farther then Gentlenes tends) gets place Among ye, striving for her lace: O doe not fall Foule in these noble pastimes, lest ye call Discord in, and so divide The youthfull Bride-groom, and the fragrant Bride. (ll. 82–88) The seemingly innocuous custom of the garter becomes the site of a powerful twofold anxiety. It threatens not only to cause strife between the bride and groom but also to rupture the communal bonds that their marriage is meant to forge. Over the next five stanzas, the speaker goes to considerable lengths to see that the consummation endure no such insult. The bride is neatly stripped of her flowery mantle. Throngs of sirens, cherubim, and Cupids are hastened to canopy the marriage bed, a billowy haven that tempts the young couple to drown themselves ‘in floods of Downe’ (l. 120). A celebratory toast of sack-posset is shared; according to one legend, the sack makes a man lusty, the sugar makes him kind.41 Yet even amid this impeccably designed scene of consummation, the threat of the bride’s unpredictable sexuality remains a constant presence. Stanzas 10 and 11 both glance nervously at how the wedding night might play out if the preparatory rituals are not strictly observed. If the bride’s maids do not undress her, for example, someone else will: ‘Then strip her, or unto her / Let him come, who dares undo her’ (ll. 99–100). The next stanza hints at another distressing possibility. If she is not bedded at once, her flames of desire might burn out and she won’t be ‘undone’ at all: ‘To Bed; or her they’l tire, / Were she an Element of fire’ (ll. 109–10). 40 The phrase ‘turne Apostate’ also appears in ‘The Welcome to Sack’ and ‘The Farewell to Sack’, which circulated in manuscript in the early 1620s. In the companion poems, Herrick playfully addresses sack as an object of holy veneration. In abandoning it, he turns Apostate ‘to thy love’; in idolizing it, ‘to the strickt command / of Nature’. See Complete Poetry of Herrick, vol. 2, pp. 68–73. 41 See John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions, ed. by Henry Ellis, 2 vols (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1841), vol. 2, p. 109.
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Fears of the bride’s recalcitrance are expressed most bluntly in the penultimate stanza of the poem, where the groom is authorized to take her by force: But since It must be done, dispatch, and sowe Up in a sheet your Bride, and what if so It be with Rock, or walles of Brasse, Ye Towre her up, as Danae was; Thinke you that this, Or hell it selfe a powerfull Bulwarke is? I tell yee no; but like a Bold bolt of thunder he will make his way, And rend the cloud, and throw The sheet about, like flakes of snow.
(ll. 141–50)
The bronze tower that held Danae did not keep her safe from Zeus, nor will this groom be denied access to his bride. He is instructed first to erect a barrier to his pleasure, then to tear it down, violently — and he is goaded to build it with rock or brass, materials that fortify nothing so much as the myth of his robust heroism. All that remains in the poem’s final stanza is to survey the spoils of victory: All now is husht in silence; Midwife-moone, With all her Owle-ey’d issue begs a boon Which you must grant; that’s entrance; with Which extract, all we can call pith And quintiscence Of Planetary bodies; so commence All faire Constellations Looking upon yee, That two Nations Springing from two such Fires, May blaze the vertue of their Sires. (ll. 151–60) After a brief post-coital reprieve, the young couple is once again subject to surveillance. They are urged to let in the light of the moon and stars, in the hopes that the propitious effects thereof will be seen in the children they bear. The poem casts a glance to the dynastic implications of the royal match in its reference to ‘two Nations’ that will ‘blaze the vertue of their Sires’. Such allusions notwithstanding, it is ultimately a confluence of factors that explains the topicality of ‘A Nuptiall Song’ in the context of the Stuart–Bourbon match. If Herrick did not set out to write the story of a beautiful, somewhat petulant Catholic princess triumphantly won to the true faith by her prince’s sexual prowess, he undeniably exploits the proximity of the two nuptials by casting Pulteney and Crew in the image of the newly crowned royals — and by imagining both pairings to be of dynastic consequence. The poem’s resonance with the circumstances of Charles and Henrietta Maria’s marriage stems from its coincident appearance and radical dissonance with the works issued to observe that marriage. Herrick gives voice to anxieties that were inadmissible
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the English Epithalamium
in the authorized discourses of the royal wedding and soon borne out in the dissolution of Stuart–Bourbon relations, all the while celebrating the marriage of a friend for whom he evidently felt the warmest of affection.42 His epithalamium, like the best examples of its kind, respects the strict protocols, strange customs, and strenuous negotiations that conspire to create a vision of marital harmony.
42 Herrick dedicates several poems in Hesperides to Crew, including ‘A Hymne to Sir Clipseby Crew’, ‘To Sir Clipsebie Crew’ and ‘An Ode to Sir Clipsebie Crew’, as well as an epitaph on the death of his wife, ‘Upon the Lady Crew’.
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Bibliography Early Printed Books
England and France, Hand-in-Hand: Triumphing, for the happy & Royall Contract of Mariage, made betweene the High and Mightie Charles, Prince of Great Brittaine, and the most excellent Princesse of France, Madame Henrica Maria, Sister to Lewis the thirteenth King of France (London: J. Trundle, 1624) Epithalamia Oxoniensia in auspicatissimum, potentissimi monarchae Caroli, Magnae Britan niae, Franciae, et Hiberniae Regis, &c. cum Henretta Maria, aeternae memoriae Henrici Magni Gallorum Regis filia, connubium (Oxford: J. Lichfield and G. Turner, 1625) Epithalamium illustriss. & feliciss. principum Caroli Regis, et H. Mariae Reginae Magnae Britanniae, &c. A musis Cantabrigiensibus decantatum (Cambridge: Cantrellus Legge, 1625) Journals of the House of Commons, 1547–1714, 17 vols (London, 1742) Marcelline, George, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum or, Great-Britaines, Frances, and the most parts of Europes vnspeakable ioy, for the most happy vnion, and blessed contract of the high and mighty Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and the Lady Henrette Maria, daughter to Henry the fourth, sirnamed the Great, late King of the French and Nauarre, and sister to Levvis the thirteenth: now king of the said dominions (London: T. Archer, 1625) Montagu, Richard, A Gagg for the New Gospell? No: A New Gagge for an Old Goose, Who Would Needes Vndertake to Stop All Protestants Mouths for Euer, with 276 Places out of Their Owne English Bibles (London: T. Snodham, for M. Lownes and W. Barret, 1624) —— , Appello Cæsarem. A Ivst Appeale from Two Vniust Informers (London: M. Lownes, 1625) Quin, Walter, In nvptiis principvm incomparabilivm, Caroli, Britannici Imperi Monarchae potentissimi, et Henriettae Mariae, Henrici Magni, Galliarum Regis Filiae, gratulatio quadrilinguis Gualteri Quinni (London: G. Purslow, 1625) A relation of the glorious triumphs and order of the ceremonies, obserued in the marriage of the high and mighty Charles, King of Great Brittaine, and the Ladie Henretta Maria, sister to the most Christian King of France Together with the ceremonie obserued in their troth-plighting, performed in the castle of the Louure, in his Maiesties chamber there. As also the Kings declaration containing a prohibition vnto all his subiects to use any traffique or commerce with the kingdome of Spaine. Published in the Parliament of Paris, the 12. of May, 1625. Whereunto the originall French copie is added (London: T. [Thomas] S. [Snodham] for Nathaniel Butter, 1625) A Trve Discovrse of all the Royal Passages, Tryvmphs and Ceremonies, observed at the Contract and Mariage of the High and Mighty Charles, King of Great Britaine, and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady Henrietta Maria of Burbon, sister to the most Christian King of France (London: John Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625)
Chapter 9. Robert Herrick, Clipsby Crew, and the English Epithalamium Primary Sources
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I, Addenda, 1580–1625; Preserved in Her Majesty’s Public Record Office, ed. by Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longman & Co., 1872) Catullus, Gaius Valerius, The Poems of Catullus, trans. by Peter Green (Berkeley: Univer sity of California Press, 2005) Ford, John, Five Plays, ed. by Havelock Ellis (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957) Herrick, Robert, The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) Ovid, Metamorphoses: A New Translation, trans. by Charles Martin (New York: Norton, 2005) Proceedings in Parliament 1625, ed. by Maija Jansson and William B. Bidwell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) Shakespeare, William, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 1997) Spenser, Edmund, Selected Shorter Poems, ed. by Douglas Brooks-Davies (London: Longman, 1995) Yorke, Philip, 2nd Earl of Hardicke (ed.), Miscellaneous State Papers. From 1501 to 1726, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1778) Secondary Studies
Blevins, Jacob, Catullan Consciousness and the Early Modern Lyric in England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004) Brand, John, Observations on Popular Antiquities: Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of Our Vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions, ed. by Henry Ellis, 2 vols (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1841) Clegg, Cyndia Susan, Press Censorship in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press, 2001) Coiro, Ann Baynes, ‘Robert Herrick and the Hesperides: On the Edge of the Renaissance’, George Herbert Journal, 14 (1990), i-vi Crane, Mary Thomas, ‘Herrick’s Cultural Materialism’, George Herbert Journal, 14 (1990), 21–50 Creaser, John, ‘“Jocond his Muse was”: Celebration and Virtuosity in Herrick’, in Ruth Connolly and Tom Cain (eds), ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 39–64 —— , ‘“Times trans-shifting”: Chronology and the Misshaping of Herrick’, English Literary Renaissance, 39 (2004), 163–96 Dubrow, Heather, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) Heinemann, Margot, Puritanism and Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
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Marcus, Leah, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) —— , ‘Robert Herrick’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 171–82 Matthew, H. C. G., and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Academy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) O’Farrell, Brian, Shakespeare’s Patron: William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, 1580–1630: Politics, Patronage and Power (London: Continuum, 2011) Patterson, W. B., King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) Post, Jonathan F. S., ‘Robert Herrick: A Minority Report’, George Herbert Journal, 14 (1990), 1–21 Pugh, Syrithe, Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality: Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010) Questier, Michael C. (ed.), Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics 1621–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Rowe, Violet A., ‘The Influence of the Earls of Pembroke on Parliamentary Elections, 1625–1641’, English Historical Review, 50 (1935), 242–56 Ruigh, Robert E., The Parliament of 1624: Politics and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) Thrush, Andrew, and John P. Ferris (eds), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Tufte, Virginia, The Poetry of Marriage: The Epithalamium in Europe and Its Development in England (Los Angeles: Tinnon-Brown, 1970) Tyacke, Nicholas, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) —— , Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) White, Peter, Predestination, Policy and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Sydney Anglo
Chapter 10. The Festivities that Never Were: 1625–1626* On Sunday 27 March 1625,1 James I and VI died at Theobalds House in Herefordshire. On the 29th,2 his body ‘was disbowelled’ and his organs carefully scrutinized and evaluated. There were, however, some difficulties with his skull which was ‘so strong as they could hardly break it open with a chisel and a saw, and so full of brains as they could not, upon the opening, keep them from spilling, a great mark of his infinite judgement’.3 His son and heir, Charles, was promptly proclaimed King, although one observer expressed uncertainty about the future: Wee had Thunder the same day, presentlie upon the Proclamation, and ’twas a cold season, but all feares and sorrowes are swallowed up in joy of so hopefull a successor. God bee blessed that we are not left destitute.4 According to Amerigo Salvetti, representative of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany at the English Court, James’ funeral was delayed because ‘so great a quantity of * There are at least four studies devoted to this projected pageant series. Ole Peter Grell, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), pp. 174–82, describes the decorative scheme of a pageant commissioned by the Dutch community in London, but is specifically concerned with the Dutch records and only treats more general issues en passant. Gary Taylor, ‘Lost Pageant for Charles I: A Brief Account’, in The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1898–900, concentrates on the surviving civic records, but without reference to the Dutch arch. James Knowles in the Cambridge edition of Ben Jonson’s works, treats the aborted pageants in much the same way but notes Grell’s discovery of Jonson’s involvement. Finally, Martin Wiggins, ‘London’s Labours Lost’, in his Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 65–92, provides a narrative based upon civic records and contemporary correspondence, and attempts to reconstruct the pageant series on the basis of precedents — that is the distribution of pageant stages for earlier royal entries. He uses Grell’s discussion of the Dutch pageant, and considers two speculative possibilities: first that a surviving fragment of verse by Jonson may relate to the 1625 entry; and second, that Middleton may have recycled verses, originally written for Charles’ entry, to be used in the following year for his Lord Mayor’s pageant. 1 Wednesday 6 April 1625 (New Style). 2 8 April (New Style). 3 John Nichols (ed.), The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols (London, 1828), vol. 4, p. 1036n. 4 Edward Tilman to Paul D’Ewes, 1 April 1625, Cambridge, in Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, 11 vols (London: Harding, Triphook and Lepard, 1824–1846), series II, vol. 3 (1824), p. 244.
Sydney Anglo (FBA, FSA, FLSW) is Emeritus Professor in the History of Ideas, University of Wales. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 241–254 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119193
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black cloth’ was required to dress so many people that ‘it has been found necessary to dye an infinite supply’.5 Thus the ceremony did not take place until 7/17 May, that is seven weeks after James’ death — and it is to be hoped that the embalmers knew their business. John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, preached a two-hour sermon, subsequently published as Great Britain’s Salomon6 — an ingenious but prolix tribute to the late monarch’s superabundance of brain — and, as John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton, everything was performed with great magnificence although, he added, ‘the order was very confused and disorderly’.7 At the time, of course, he could not know that even greater confusion and disorder were soon to be ushered in by a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague (which was only just starting when he wrote the letter);8 by postponements (and ultimately the cancellation) of the intended civic rejoicing at Charles’ accession; and by the prophetic disasters of the new King’s first parliament. Charles had only recently been married by proxy to Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV. On 13/23 June he received his bride at Dover Castle and then, on 16/26 June, the royal couple entered London by water. But already the Bills of Mortality recorded that, during the same week, 239 people had died of the plague. And the situation deteriorated rapidly and dramatically.9 It had naturally been expected that Charles’ coronation would take place as soon as possible, and that, on the day previous to the coronation, he would make the traditional journey from the Tower of London through the city. That procession, and the pageant series which should have accompanied it, did not take place: but it is worth outlining the chronology of the preparations for this abortive occasion before seeing what can be salvaged from the flotsam and jetsam of the pageantry that might have been but never was. First off the mark, even before the city authorities had made any recommendation, were the leading members of London’s Dutch community who laid plans — involving builders, painters, architects, and poets — for a triumphal arch to honour Charles’ marriage and the arrival of Henrietta Maria.10 That idea was soon abandoned and attention was turned instead towards the pre-coronation procession and pageantry which were set in train on 22 April/2 May 1625, when the Aldermen of the City of London decided that ‘forasmuch as it is conceived that the coronation of our dread sovereign Lord king Charles is shortly to bee solempnized’, the citizens should demonstrate their loyalty at his passage through 5 Letter of 22 April/2 May 1625 1625, in Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of Henry Duncan Skrine Esq., Salvetti Correspondence, 11th Report, Appendix, Part I (London: HMSO, 1887), p. 9. 6 John Williams, Great Britains Solomon. A sermon preached at the funerall of the King James (London: J. Bill, 1625). 7 John Chamberlain to Dudley Carlton, 14/24 May 1625, London, in The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. by Elizabeth McClure Thomson, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 2, pp. 606–09. 8 For a detailed discussion of the plague, see Karen Britland’s chapter, pp. 85–104, in this collection. 9 See Sara Wolfson’s chapter on the wedding progress from Dover to London contained within this collection, pp. 179–204. 10 Joannes Henricus Hessels (ed.), Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1887–1897), vol. 1 (1887), no. 369.
Chap ter 1 0. The Festivities that Never Were: 1625–1626
the city by preparing ‘Pagentes and other shewes and thinges necessarie toward the solempnizacon of that his Royall Coronacion in as stately and sompteous manner as hath bin heretofore performed by this Cittie unto any his noble progenitors’.11 To organize the preparations a large committee was promptly set up: seven aldermen or ‘any three or more of them’, and some 19 other livery men, ‘or any six or more of them’. These worthy citizens were instructed to informe themselves of ancient presidentes in this behalfe, and calling before them all such persons and men of learninge, quallity and experience, as they shall thinke fitt, shall consider of all matters and thinges necessarie to bee performed by this Cittie. The committee was also responsible for reporting to the Court of Aldermen from time to time for theire Councell and advise to be hadd therein as shalbe needfull, and to consider what in their Judgement the whole charge for performance of all the said services will amount unto and in what sort and by whome to bee paid. The Chamberlain was authorized to make payments to those working on the ‘intended shewes’ and, although they are not named here, we know from subsequent documentation (when the whole scheme had collapsed) that the leading figures in this enterprise were two men who had collaborated on a number of earlier civic occasions — the poet and dramatist Thomas Middleton, and the sculptor and carver Gerard Christmas.12 On 28 April/8 May the Consistory of the Dutch Church in London decided to provide a triumphal arch for Charles’ entry and, on the next day, they set up their own committee to organize the project; and members were immediately sent to hire workers and raise money. By 2/12 May they were buying paint, as well as purchasing mugs for the workmen, providing a meal for them, and hiring a boat to fetch the necessary timber. Work went ahead thereafter: but the incidence of the plague was increasing daily; the mortality bills record some 6000 deaths for July; and, at the end of that month, the Dutch operation was put on hold when a watchman was hired to guard whatever had already been built.13 Curiously, work on the Londoners’ own pageants had been halted much earlier in the first week of May when, according to Salvetti, it was recognized that the coronation would have to be postponed until the end of September and that consequently the citizens had relaxed their preparations.14 And even that proved far too optimistic as the plague continued to rage — though with decreasing
11 London Metropolitan Archives, Repertories of the Court of Common Council, vol. 39, fol. 172r-v. 12 See The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1397, 1586, 1714, 1766. They were also to collaborate in Middleton’s last pageant, The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity, in 1626 (see pp. 1903–06). 13 Grell, Exiles, pp. 176 ff. 14 HMC, Salvetti Correspondence, p. 13: letter dated 6/16 May 1625.
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severity — through October; and the Lord Mayor’s show for the Draper, Sir Allan Cotton, which should have taken place on 29 October/8 November, was cancelled. However, on 26 December/5 January, the Earl Marshal instructed the city authorities to have their pageants ready for the King’s entry which was now scheduled to take place on 1/11 February. Then, just three weeks later, while the coronation itself was confirmed, it was decided to postpone the royal entry until May, on the eve of Charles’ proposed visit to Scotland — a visit which did not, in fact, take place until another seven years had passed.15 On 2/12 February Charles went by water to his coronation at Westminster although things did not run like a well-oiled machine. His boat missed the steps prepared for his official landing; there was some confusion at the ceremony itself; and, as Mead reported to Sir Martin Stuteville, the Queen was not crowned ‘but stood at a window in the mean time, looking on; and her ladies frisking and dancing in the room’. He added piously, ‘God grant his Majestie a happy reign’ — but he did not seem confident.16 On 25 May/4 June, the Lord Chamberlain (the Earl of Pembroke) ordered the Lord Mayor to remove the pageants because they ‘do choke and hinder the passages of such as in coaches, or with their carriages, have occasion to pass up and down’;17 and on 6/16 June it was stated that ‘No further moneys’ were to be paid to Middleton and Christmas.18 Two days later the Court of Aldermen ordered the removal of the pageants, and the destructive work was rapidly put in hand. The Pageants for 1625–1626 What can we salvage from the records concerning Charles’ intended pre-Coronation Entry into London? Well, as far as the City’s own pageants are concerned, almost nothing. We have the usual London archive sources for the relevant period (the Journals, Repertories, and Remembrancia), along with a scattering of references in diplomatic and other correspondence. Yet the flimsiness of this evidence is remarkable, even taking into account the fact that the pageant series never materialized. The author of the fullest modern study of the occasion has observed that ‘Nobody writes about an event that never happened’19 — but, as a matter of fact, people often did. Yet we have no descriptions of the triumphal arches commissioned by the London authorities, despite their having been left standing (in various states of disarray) in the streets for more than a year. Their salient features could easily have been recorded by literate onlookers, 15 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, 38 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864–1947), vol. 19, p. 294 (no. 436); Chamberlain, Letters, vol. 2, p. 627. 16 Mr Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 4 February 1626, Christ’s College Cambridge, in Ellis, Original Letters, ser. 1, vol. 3, pp. 212–13. 17 London Metropolitan Archives, Remembrancia, vol. 6, fol. 86. 18 LMA, Repertories, vol. 40, fol. 256. 19 Wiggins, Drama, p. 74.
Chap ter 1 0. The Festivities that Never Were: 1625–1626
had they been interested: but, presumably, they were not. We have no records of the considerable construction work which must certainly have been carried out on those arches. And we have no copy of Middleton’s verses for the show: although an interesting case has been made out suggesting that his text for the Lord Mayor’s show of 1626 — written for the Draper, Allan Cotton — may include some material reworked from the royal series.20 This is quite likely for we know that Middleton was not averse to recycling his ideas: but, if what we have represents what Charles might have suffered during the entry, then the royal entourage did not miss much. A putative reconstruction of the series, based upon earlier shows, has also been attempted, but, in the total absence of hard evidence, all that can be done is to establish on which of the traditional sites the various arches were most probably situated. In terms of style and content it is unlikely that the search for ‘ancient presidentes’ would have gone back further than James I’s entry of 1604, while Middleton’s inventions for Lord Mayor’s pageants (despite modern editors’ claims) do not suggest that he would have exhibited much originality on behalf of Charles in 1625. Similarly, it is impossible to extrapolate, from the one surviving sculpture definitely attributed to Gerard Christmas, what his contributions would have amounted to.21 We simply do not know what the arches looked like, or what speeches were delivered. And we never can know unless one of those ‘hitherto unknown sources’, so prized by historians, turns up to enlighten us. None the less, all is not lost. Our ignorance may be complete as far as the City’s own shows are concerned but, by extraordinary chance, we have a great deal of information about the intended Dutch contributions to the pageantry: that is the arch for Henrietta Maria, planned but immediately abandoned, and the one actually built to greet the King on his anticipated pre-Coronation procession. The four specialists on whom the planning, structure, and decoration of the second arch devolved were all men of considerable standing both within, and well-beyond, the City; and on 2/22 May 1625 they met for a preliminary working lunch — the first of several meals they enjoyed together while discussing their plans. Responsible for the overall conception of the pageantry was a leading member of the Dutch community in London, Jacob Cool.22 A nephew of Abraham Ortelius the famous cartographer, Cool was a merchant whose great wealth came from the luxury end of the cloth trade, but he was also a scholar and Latinist of considerable repute, with a formidable range of learned interests — theology, history, poetry, art, numismatics, and botany — and his wide circle of friends
20 Wiggins, Drama, pp. 84–87. 21 Funeral monument to Sir Robert Crane and his two wives at Chilton, Suffolk. This monument was, coincidentally, executed in 1626. See Adam White, ‘Christmas family’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. 22 On Jacob Cool, see the article by Ole Peter Grell in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online.
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included such luminaries as William Camden, Mathias de Lobel, and Charles de Lécluse. More than 20 years earlier he had provided poetry and inscriptions for the Dutch arch at James I’s entry, and he was well acquainted with another veteran of that spectacle, Ben Jonson, who had also been chosen by the Dutch committee for their team in 1625.23 Presumably, since Cool would have had no difficulty in producing any Latin verse required, Jonson — described at the working lunch as ‘the Poett’ — must have been invited to provide English verse: but, apart from that, he needs no introduction. However, a third member of the team probably does. This was Bernard Jansen, a somewhat shadowy figure, who was possibly well known to his contemporaries as a tomb sculptor, surveyor, and architect. It has been asserted that he ‘had been involved with the building of Northumberland House in the Strand for Henry Howard, Earl of Northumberland’ and that he ‘played a significant part in the construction of one of the greatest Jacobean houses in England, Audley End in Essex’.24 These activities are not now deemed certain: but he certainly did loom large in the Dutch pageant schemes for 1625–1626. The fourth member of the group was the artist responsible for painting and ornamental decoration — ‘Il Famosissimo Pittore Francesco Clein, Miracolo dell’Secolo’.25 Whether or not Francis Clein really was the ‘Miracle of the Century’ remains an open question: but he was without doubt a painter and tapestry designer of international fame who executed a number of important historical and allegorical paintings, landscapes, and portraits for Christian IV of Denmark — some of which, including a depiction of fireworks, still survive. In 1625 he moved permanently to England and was immediately put in charge of the designs for the new tapestry manufactory at Mortlake and granted a pension for life of £100 — later increased to £250 by Charles I who also built him a residence at Mortlake. Here he was kept busy executing copies of seven of Raphael’s cartoons, The Acts of the Apostles, and other tapestry designs by Giulio Romano and Bernaert van Orley. At the same time he was also involved in a variety of artistic activities including work at Inigo Jones’ house, at Somerset House, and at the Tower; and he remained active, as a designer, painter, and graphic artist right up to his death in March 1658. The two Dutch arches are of considerable interest, not so much for their content, which is the standard stuff of royal entries, but for what they tell us about the way in which such structures were planned, fashioned, and stored.
23 On the Dutch contribution to the pageantry of 1604, see Gervase Hood, ‘A Netherlandic Triumphal Arch’, in Susan Roach (ed.), Across the Narrow Seas. Studies in the History and Bibliography of Britain and the Low Countries (London: British Library, 1991), pp. 67–82. 24 See Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840 (London: J. Murray, 1978), p. 455. This is cited confidently by Grell, Calvinist Exiles, p. 177, but for a veil of uncertainty, see Adam White’s article on the ‘Johnson (formerly Janssen family)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 25 George Vertue, Notebooks relating to the History of Art in England, 6 vols (London: printed for the Walpole Society at the University Press, 1930–1947), vol. 1 (1930), p. 117. For references to Clein, see Wendy Hefford’s article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online.
Chap ter 1 0. The Festivities that Never Were: 1625–1626
The design for Henrietta Maria is fully described in a draft, annotated by Jacob Cool, which meticulously lists all the proposed images and inscriptions for both the front and back of the arch.26 Surmounting the front elevation there was to be an equestrian statue of the King dressed as a warrior, accompanied by his ancestors, Henry VII, James IV, James V, Henry VIII, and James VI. The inscription for this scene was to be Haud unquam indignus avorum (that is ‘never unworthy of his forefathers’), a phrase ripped from the Aeneid and with a military significance scarcely appropriate either to Charles, his great-grandfather, or to his father. Charles was to appear again on the right hand side, this time in his parliament robes, receiving a sceptre from the hand of God descending from the sky. Two inscriptions were proposed for this scene — both dragged from Psalm 72: Judicia tua Regi da, O Deus! and Oppressos vindicabit — and again, given what was shortly to happen in Parliament, they now seem ironic rather than prophetic. The rest of the intended imagery — a fertile island with a cloudburst of roses and lilies; the Queen with a garland of lilies; the King with one of roses; Henri IV offering his daughter to Charles; Justice with scales and sword; Peace with olive branch; and so on — was garnished with phrases (only approximately relevant) from the Psalms, Virgil, Horace, and even Macrobius. The scheme was never carried out: but it survives as a good example of the way in which emblematic and humanist cliché could serve as a substitute for thought. So much for the arch that was not built. For the arch that was built, no plan of intention has survived: but we know that it was very much in the stereotyped mode of its immediate predecessor. The structure itself had been dismantled when no longer required; and the canvas paintings which had adorned it also disappeared when sold off at public auction in June 1628.27 Yet it was possible for a full account of the arch to be written well over a decade after that sale; and the particular circumstance which made this possible is very suggestive for students of Renaissance spectacle. Issues Arising from the Aborted Pageant Series When Cesare Calandrini, who had been appointed minister to the Dutch Church in London in 1639, came to write his continuation of Simon Ruytinck’s history of London’s Dutch community, he was able to describe the pictorial decoration and inscriptions of the 1625 triumphal arch because there was a model preserved in the Church’s library.28 The model might have been made as a record of what had already been built; but it is much more likely to have been prepared as the basis for the final work.
26 The draft is transcribed in Hessels, Ecclesiae, vol. 1, no. 369, pp. 865–69. 27 See Grell, Calvinist Exiles, p. 180. 28 See Johan Justus van Toorenenbergen (ed.), Gheschiedenissen ende Handelingen die voornemelick aengaen de Nederduytsche Natie ende Gemeynten wonende in Engeland ende bysonder tot London (Utrecht: Marnix-Vereeniging Werken, 1873), pp. 480–83.
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The architect Bernard Jansen appears to have been responsible for the model although, given the amount of pictorial detail recorded, Francis Clein must also have been closely involved. The making of architectural models is well documented as a necessary preparation for permanent buildings: Sir Henry Wotton (in his The Elements of Architecture, adapted from Vitruvius, Philibert de L’Orme and other authorities) had written: Let no man that intendeth to build, setle his Fancie upon a draught of the Worke in paper, how exactly soever measured, or neately set off in perspective; And much lease upon a bare Plant thereof, as they call the Schiographia or Ground lines; without a Modell or Type of the whole Structure, and of every parcell and Partition in Pastboord or Wood. Next that the said Modell bee as plaine as may be, without colours or other beautifying, lest the pleasure of the Eye preoccupate the Iudgement; which advise omited by the Italian Architects, I finde in Philippe de l’Orme. and therefore (though France bee not the Theater of best Buildings) it did merit some mention of his name.29 How far this technique of model-making was generally adopted for temporary structures, such as street pageants, is not known: but there are several possible, if ambiguous, hints at the practice. For the 1548 entry of Henri II into Lyon, for example, there is a reference to those who give their time ‘pour dresser les plans et modelles’;30 and for Paris in 1571 there are several references to ‘le desseingn et pourtraict’.31 The matter is rendered uncertain not only by the contemporary use of the word ‘model’ to indicate a plan or drawing as well as a maquette, but also by the English habit of indicating sculpted or moulded effigies by the word ‘picture’.32 Nonetheless, the use of architectural models in planning civic pageantry merits investigation, and it is one important issue arising from the aborted pageant series.33 And there are others.
29 Sir Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture […] from the Best Authors and Examples (London: John Bill, 1624). Cf. Philibert de L’Orme, Le Premier Tome de l’Architecture (Paris: F. Morel, 1567), chap. XI and XII. 30 See Richard Cooper, ‘Introduction’, Maurice Scève: The Entry of Henri II into Lyon. September 1548 (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), p. 18. 31 Victor E. Graham and W. McAllister Johnson, The Paris Entries of Charles IX and Elizabeth of Austria. 1571 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), pp. 333–34. 32 Sydney Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London: Seaby, 1992), pp. 113–16. 33 An ambiguous reference to Gerard Christmas’s ‘modals’ in 1631 is cited by David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642 (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), p. 256. On architectural models in general, see Martin S. Briggs, The Architect in History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), pp. 131, 166, 185, 200–04, 252–53, 265, 293; Martin S. Briggs in the Burlington Magazine, 54 (1929), 174–83, 245–52; Carlos Montes Serrano, ‘Algunas anecdotas sobre la utilización de maquetas en Inglaterra en los siglos XVII y XVIII’, Academia Boletín de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 78 (Madrid, 1994), 85–106; Henry A. Millon, ‘Les maquettes dans l’architecture de la Renaissance’, in Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (eds), Architecture de la Renaissance italienne de Brunelleschi à Michel-Ange (Paris: Musée des monuments français/Flammarion, 1995), pp. 19–74; Bernd Evers (ed.), Architekturmodelle der Renaissance. Die Harmonie des Bauens von Alberti bis Michelangelo (Berlin: Kunstbibliothek; München; Berlin: Prestel, 1995); Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 167–69, 394 n. 89.
Chap ter 1 0. The Festivities that Never Were: 1625–1626
First, there are problems with regard to the ways in which court and civic festivals are often treated by scholars. There is the all-too-common historical method of selecting out, from a mass of heterogeneous evidence, only those references which suit a preconceived purpose. For example, scholars quote knowingly from the correspondence of a keen observer of the London scene like Amerigo Salvetti, but pick out just those few lines which deal with the proposed royal entry, and thereby convey an impression that court and populace alike were almost exclusively concerned with the show. Would Charles come, or would he not? When or never? Yet, in fact, when one reads through all Salvetti’s letters of the period, it is obvious that these matters were never at the forefront of his mind. Worse still is the way a striking remark may be wrenched from its context to suggest a wholly non-existent state of affairs. I am thinking particularly of words in a letter from Joseph Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville written on 13/23 May 1626. What Mead said, and the way he has been misused, could scarcely be more significant. He wrote as follows: The Duke being in the bedchamber, private, with the King, his Majesty was overheard (as they talk) to use these words. ‘What can I do more? I have engaged mine honour to mine uncle of Denmark and other Princes. I have in manner lost the love of my subjects. And what wouldst thou have me do?’34 This has been cited, in one recent study of the London pageants for Charles I, to demonstrate that the cancelled series was a ‘public relations disaster’ — a false reading which crops up elsewhere.35 In fact, Mead was concerned solely with the crisis which had arisen from the open attacks in the Parliament of 1626 against the King’s favourite, Buckingham; the latter’s jeering and sneering at the members, especially at John Glanville; and the King’s seizure of Sir Dudley Digges and Sir John Eliot, allegedly for High Treason. The cancellation of the pageants was not even mentioned in Mead’s letter which has nothing to do with the royal entry, nor with what Charles may have thought about it — if indeed he ever thought much about it at all. Another serious issue arises from an elevated and anachronistic interpretation of what was supposed to happen in a royal entry. According to one well-known authority, the most fundamental significance of such an occasion lay not in what was shown to the King but in the fact that the King showed himself and thereby ‘entered into a transaction with the city’.36 But what contemporary observer tells us that this was really the case? Who described the pre-coronation procession in these terms? I do not know, and I wonder if anybody does.
34 Mr Mead to Sir Martin Stuteville, 13/23 May 1626, Christ’s College, Cambridge, in Ellis, Original Letters, series I, vol. 3, p. 227. 35 Gary Taylor, ‘Lost Pageant’, p. 1900. 36 R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The English Royal Entry in London, 1485–1642’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 65–93.
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It seems also to be assumed by commentators that the failure of Charles I’s procession to materialize was an especially rare occurrence; and it is true that, although civic and courtly spectacles were legion throughout Renaissance Europe, relatively few of those planned were wholly abandoned. Still, there were, in one way or another, a good many hiccups. For example, the city of Worcester devised two speeches to be delivered by a pious pageant King Henry VI and Janus to greet Henry VII in 1486. They were never delivered, and we do not know why, but it must have been a blow to the authorities who were trying to ingratiate themselves with the King after their involvement with the abortive Stafford insurrection. In 1527, when Wolsey was visiting Boulogne, a series of pageants was prepared in his honour, but he neither saw nor heard much of the performance because the noise of the celebratory gunshot drove his mule to a ‘malyncoly’, with predictable results. Given his self-esteem, he must have been deeply disappointed, as the citizens of London certainly were in 1539 when Henry VIII forbade their traditional Midsummer Show, and as the citizens of York must have been when the pageants they had planned for a visit by Henry VIII in 1541 similarly remained unperformed. On the other hand, when the civic authorities in London hastily threw together an especially tawdry pageant series for Edward VI’s pre-coronation entry in 1547, it did take place.37 But, even had the show been a splendid affair, it would not have made much difference because the young King scarcely paused to listen to any of the verses, and ‘his grace made such speed’ that some speeches could not be delivered at all. Philip of Spain, by contrast, was delighted with the eulogistic pageants for his entry into London on 18/28 August 1554, yet, only two days later, the Court of Aldermen (who were clearly not feeling well-disposed towards the Spanish monarch) decided that everything should be dismantled as quickly as possible. Of course, sickness, disasters, and the weather could also frustrate the hopes of festival organizers. Nobody could have foreseen the storms which played havoc at the Field of Cloth of Gold and Calais in 1520, nor anticipated the accident which ended Henri II’s reign at the Paris tournament of 1559. Nor could they have guessed that the tilting entertainment eagerly awaited by ambassadors and other dignitaries at the English court in April 1622 would be cancelled because James I had an attack of gout. And nobody understood, or could predict, the outbreaks of plague which resulted in the cancellation of Lord Mayor’s shows and feasts on at least six occasions between 1574 and 1625. However, the two closest parallels with the royal non-events of 1625–1626 were associated with Charles’ father and father-in-law. The pageants planned for James I’s pre-coronation ceremonial entry into London were supposed to be presented in July 1603. Everything was ready, but the show had to be
37 This series has had its apologists: for example, Jennifer Loach, Edward VI, ed. by George Bernard and Penry Williams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 33–34; and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant. Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 1999), p. 63. But see also, Sydney Anglo, ‘The Coronation of Edward VI and Society of Antiquaries Manuscript 123’, The Antiquaries Journal, 78 (1998), 452–57.
Chap ter 1 0. The Festivities that Never Were: 1625–1626
postponed because of a serious outbreak of plague, and the event did not take place until the following March. Scholars have made much of that entry: partly because some well-known literary figures — Jonson and Dekker (who hated each other), and Middleton — were involved in the conception of the pageants and the speechifying, and partly because, for the first time in England, there survives an elaborate visual representation of the triumphal arches erected for the occasion.38 James, unlike his more refined but less brainy son Charles, did endure the London entry: but it must have been a frustrating experience for the poets and artists when many songs and orations were omitted for fear of wearying the irascible monarch ‘with tedious speeches’. Moreover, it is especially important to remember that, as Dekker — writing of his published contribution — himself admits, we ‘here receive them as they should have bene delivered, not as they were’. This closely echoes the lament of Étienne Jodelle at the gap between his own inventions and the actual ‘désastre’ of the Paris spectacle he had devised for Henri II in 1558, and of Pierre Matthieu concerning his scheme for the entry of Madame de Guiche into Lyons in 1598: ‘il y a une grande distance entre ce qui s’est fait et ce qui se devoit faire’ [there is a great distance between what was done and what was to have been done].39 Historians would do well to take heed of such observations before rhapsodizing on the brilliance of civic and courtly performances. Even worse than all this was the fate of the magnificent spectacle planned by the poet Mathurin Régnier, the architects Métezeau and Francini, and a whole team of scholars and specialists, to greet Henrietta Maria’s mother — Marie de Médicis — into Paris in 1610. The triumphal arches were erected and decorated. The show was ready to roll. And Henri IV, keenly interested in the proceedings, went on a preliminary tour of inspection to ensure that everything was in order, especially the security arrangements. And that was when he was assassinated by Ravaillac. Finally, a further interpretative problem arises when we consider the main context for the difficulties facing both Charles I and the London authorities. The plague had started with some four deaths in the week beginning 17/27 March 1625, reached a peak of intensity with about 34,091 deaths between July and mid-November, and then fell away sharply from the latter half of November. And this, remember, was only the deliberately reduced official figures. Salvetti believed that ‘the Municipality conceals the truth about the real extent of the
38 The texts and illustrations have been published several times. Robert Withington, English Pageantry. An Historical Outline, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), vol. 1, pp. 222–26, has useful list of sources; the series is also discussed by Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, pp. 71–89. 39 See Margaret M. McGowan, ‘The French Royal Entry in the Renaissance: The Status of the Printed Text’, in Nicolas Russell and Hélène Visentin (eds), French Ceremonial Entries in the Sixteenth Century. Event, Image, Text (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007), pp. 29–54 (p. 29); and Margaret M. McGowan, ‘Apology, Justification and Monuments to Posterity. Le Recueil des inscriptions (1558) and L’Entrée de la reine Marie de Médicis dans Paris (1610)’, in Benoît Bolduc (ed.), Texte et représentation. Les arts du spectacle (XVe-XVIIIe siècles) (Toronto: Texte 33/34, 2004), pp. 83–103.
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plague’ and, in any case, the numbers have to be seen in the context of a population of perhaps little more than 200,000 people.40 Many of those Londoners who were able fled the city which was almost deserted, and, as Dekker observed, ‘None thrive but Apothecaries, Butchers, Cookes, and Coffin-makers’, or, as John Taylor (the abysmal poet) put it, ‘All trades are dead, or almost out of breath,/ But such as live by sicknesse or by death’.41 Indeed, William Lilly, later to achieve fame as an astrologer, was at the time a domestic servant and when his master left town he passed much of his time attending funeral sermons ‘of which there was then great plenty’.42 I have dwelt somewhat on the plague because, it seems to me, there is a tendency to treat it as something which troubled people when it was raging but was of little consequence as soon as the epidemic died down. But I doubt that either the physical or psychological trauma of living through the deaths of more than ten per cent of one’s fellow citizens — including relatives, friends, and familiar acquaintances — was so easily shrugged off, especially when terror was exacerbated by contemporaries’ total ignorance of the causes of the epidemic. Religious zealots blamed everything on human sin, and officialdom eventually proclaimed public thanksgiving to ‘allmighty God for his great mercy in staying his hand and assuaging the late fearfull visitation of the Plague’.43 But it is hard to grasp what ordinary folk really felt about God’s mercy. It is customary now to suggest that people were bitterly disappointed by the cancellation of the King’s entry. But, as a matter of fact, we know almost nothing about ordinary people’s attitude towards this or, indeed, any other civic pageant series. It is more likely that, in the aftermath of the horrors they had experienced, Londoners (already familiar with the weather-beaten and bathetic ‘triumphal’ arches) would have been largely indifferent. As for Charles himself? Well, like his father, he had little sympathy for what the chronicler Edward Hall had referred to as ‘the rude people’. He had far more pressing problems — political, financial, and religious — to contend with. In any case, once he had been crowned, a post-coronation pre-coronation procession, like his father’s, would have seemed wholly irrelevant — even absurd. On the whole, I think that everybody was better off without the show, and, given the rich field of speculation the void now offers modern scholars, I think that we are, too.
40 HMC, Salvetti Correspondence, pp. 21, 26–27: letter dated 1/11 July 1625. In 1631, according to LMA, Remembrancia, p. 389, London’s population was estimated at only 130, 280. 41 An especially useful collection of contemporary observations on the plague is given by J. Milton French (ed.), The History of the Pestilence (1625) by George Wither (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer sity Press, 1932), pp. ix–xxxvii. 42 William Lilly’s History of his Life and Times, from the Year 1602 to 1681 (London: C. Baldwin, 1822), pp. 48–49. 43 London Metropolitan Archives, Journals, 33, fol. 168v.
Chap ter 1 0. The Festivities that Never Were: 1625–1626
Bibliography Manuscripts and Archival Documents
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Journals, vol. 33 —— , Remembrancia, vol. 6 —— , Repertories of the Court of Common Council, vols 39, 40 Early Printed Books
De L’Orme, Philibert, Le Premier Tome de l’Architecture (Paris: F. Morel, 1567) Williams, John, Great Britains Solomon. A sermon preached at the funerall of the King James (London: J. Bill, 1625) Wotton, Sir Henry, The Elements of Architecture […] from the Best Authors and Examples (London: printed by John Bill, 1624) Primary Sources
Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, 38 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864–1947) Chamberlain, John, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. by Elizabeth McClure Thomson, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939) Ellis, Henry (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, 11 vols (London: Harding, Triphook and Lepard, 1824–1846) Hessels, Joannes Henricus (ed.), Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1887–1897) Lilly, William, William Lilly’s History of his Life and Times, from the Year 1602 to 1681 (London: C. Baldwin, 1822) Nichols, John (ed.), The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols (London: J. B. Nichols, 1828) Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), The Manuscripts of Henry Duncan Skrine, Esq.: Salvetti Correspondence, 11th Report, Appendix, Part I (London: HMSO, 1887) Middleton, Thomas, The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) Toorenenbergen, Johan Justus van (ed.), Gheschiedenissen ende Handelingen die voornemelick aengaen de Nederduytsche Natie ende Gemeynten wonende in Engeland ende bysonder tot London (Utrecht: Marnix-Vereeniging Werken, 1873) Secondary Studies
Anglo, Sydney, Images of Tudor Kingship (London: Seaby, 1992) —— , ‘The Coronation of Edward VI and Society of Antiquaries Manuscript 123’, The Antiquaries Journal, 78 (1998), 452–57 Bergeron, David M., English Civic Pageantry 1558–1642 (London: Edward Arnold, 1971) Briggs, Martin S. The Architect in History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927)
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—— , Burlington Magazine, 54 (1929), 174–83, 245–52 Colvin, Howard, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840 (London: J. Murray, 1978) Cooper, Richard, Maurice Scève: The Entry of Henri II into Lyon. September 1548 (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997) Evers, Bernd (ed.), Architekturmodelle der Renaissance. Die Harmonie des Bauens von Alberti bis Michelangelo (Berlin: Kunstbibliothek; München; Berlin: Prestel, 1995) French, J. Milton (ed.) The History of the Pestilence (1625) by George Wither (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932) Graham, Victor E. and W. McAllister Johnson, The Paris Entries of Charles IX and Elizabeth of Austria. 1571 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) Grell, Ole Peter, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996) Hood, Gervase, ‘A Netherlandic Triumphal Arch’, in Susan Roach (ed.), Across the Narrow Seas. Studies in the History and Bibliography of Britain and the Low Countries (London: British Library, 1991), pp. 67–82 Llewellyn, Nigel, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Loach, Jennifer, Edward VI (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999) MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Tudor Church Militant. Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 1999) McGowan, Margaret M., ‘Apology, Justification and Monuments to Posterity. Le Recueil des inscriptions (1558) and L’Entrée de la reine Marie de Médicis dans Paris (1610)’, in Benoît Bolduc (ed.), Texte et représentation. Les arts du spectacle (XVe-XVIIIe siècles) (Toronto: Texte 33/34, 2004), pp. 83–103 —— , ‘The French Royal Entry in the Renaissance: The Status of the Printed Text’, in Nicolas Russell and Hélène Visentin (eds), French Ceremonial Entries in the Sixteenth Century. Event, Image, Text (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007), pp. 29–54 Millon, Henry A., ‘Les maquettes dans l’architecture de la Renaissance’, in Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani (eds), Architecture de la Renaissance italienne de Brunelleschi à Michel-Ange (Paris: Musée des monuments français/ Flammarion, 1995), pp. 19–74 Serrano, Carlos Montes, ‘Algunas anecdotas sobre la utilización de maquetas en Inglaterra en los siglos XVII y XVIII’, Academia Boletín de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 78 (Madrid, 1994), 85–106 Smuts, R. Malcolm, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The English Royal Entry in London, 1485–1642’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 65–93 Vertue, George, Notebooks relating to the History of Art in England, 6 vols (London: printed for the Walpole Society at the University Press, 1930–1947) Wiggins, Martin, ‘London’s Labours Lost’, Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 65–92 Withington, Robert, English Pageantry. An Historical Outline, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918)
Margaret M. M c Gowan
Chapter 11. ‘A French Antique’ The Forms of Court Ballets in France, 1621–1627 Court Ballet — A French Antique? The interactions between French and English poets, musicians and choreo graphers in the decade after Henrietta Maria arrived in England have been much studied, and scholars have demonstrated how such collaboration resulted in magnificent displays which linked closely ostentatious performance with political advocacy.1 So large was the French presence in England that it is not surprising that court spectacle from across the Channel is deemed to have quickly infiltrated into English theatre habits. Yet, one of the first witnesses of a performance put on at court by ladies of the Queen’s entourage, in November 1625, suggests that French styles of dancing and the structures of their ballets left much to be desired. A rather disgruntled Katharine Gorges, wearied of the Court, described this performance as ‘but a french antique’. She explained the circumstances in a letter to her brother-in-law, Sir Hugh Smyth: My Lady Denbigh my old acquaintance and kinswoman dyninge at Langford, would needs have me promise hir that I would goe to see the Queen and the Masque, on Sunday night […] where I saw the Masque acted by the Queen’s servants all french, but it was disliked of all the English for it was neither masque nor play, but a french antique.2
1 Marie-Claude Canova-Green, La Politique-spectacle au Grand Siècle: les rapports franco-anglais, Biblio 17, no. 76 (Tübingen: PFSCL, 1993) has shown how many French artists were active in England at this time, how French poets created ballets there after Charles’ return from Spain, and the extent to which Henrietta Maria used French musicians in her spectacles, pp. 81–82, 185–204. 2 Cited in Karen Britland’s article, ‘Queen Henrietta Maria’s theatrical patronage’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 57–77; p. 7, for the citation from the Bristol Record Office AC/C.47–48. Gorges, whose friend at court (Lady Denbigh) belonged to the circle of the Duke of Buckingham, explained the circumstances to her brother-inlaw: ‘I came home next day so sicke that I kept my chamber three or four dayes after, and soe weared with the Court, that for ought I know Ile never desire to courtier more’. Margaret M. McGowan is a Fellow of the British Academy and Research Professor at the University of Sussex. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 255–277 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119194
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How is one to interpret this negative reaction? Does ‘a french antique’ imply a ballet à entrées [a succession of disparate dancing figures], that is, a ‘mishmash of antic dances’ as Karen Britland argued?3 An examination of the nature of court ballets in France in the period just prior to Henrietta Maria’s departure for England, and after the return to France of French poets and diplomats who had accompanied her on her journey, might clarify the kind of danced spectacle enjoyed at the French Court. Are there major differences in style, structure, and purpose as Katharine Gorges’ experience implies? Seventeenth-Century Definitions of Court Ballet French observers at the time were in no doubt about the nature and structure of Ballets, and their views did not conform to the notion of ‘a french antique’. Michel de Marolles who loved images and court spectacles was a great collector of works of art and an eager spectator of festivals; he dedicated to Ballet his 9th Discours from the second part of his Mémoires, and set out this definition: Le Ballet [consiste en] une dance de plusieurs personnes masquées sous des habits éclatants, composée de diverses Entrées ou Parties, qui se peuvent distribuer en plusieurs Actes, et se rapportent agreablement à un Tout, avec des Airs diferents pour representer un sujet inventé; où le Plaisant, le Rare, et le Merveilleux ne sont point oubliez.4 [Ballet consists of a dance of several masked persons wearing striking costumes; it is composed of diverse Entries or Parts which can be divided into several acts, corresponding pleasingly to a whole, with different airs to represent each invented subject, where the Pleasant, the Extraordinary and the Marvellous are not forgotten]. Here, he stresses good structure, coherence, and the concord between music, dance, and the overall theme which could range from the pleasant to the extraordinary or miraculous. Michel de Pure, in 1668, saw Ballet as an essentially wordless spectacle whose meaning was rendered solely through gesture and movement; C’est une representation muette, où les gestes et les mouvemens signifient ce qu’on pourroit exprimer par des paroles.5 3 Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 2006), pp. 32–33; she has outlined the presence of French artists in England, pp. 4–7; discusses their cooperation in masques, and has secured the timing of performances of ballets, pp. 15–50. Jean Jacquot was the first to draw attention to French influence on English spectacle: ‘La reine Henriette-Marie et l’influence française dans les spectacles à la cour de Charles Ier’, Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises, 9 ( June 1957), 128–60. See also the role of the dancing master B. de Montagut who taught Charles I and Buckingham to dance, B. de Montagut, Louange de la Danse, ed. by Barbara Ravelhofer (Cambridge: RTM Publications, 2000), especially pp. 56, 75 and 138. 4 Michel de Marolles, l’Abbé de Villeloin, Mémoires (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1656–1657), p. 168. 5 Michel de Pure, Idée des Spectacles anciens et nouveaux (Paris: Michel Brunet, 1668), p. 210.
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[It is a silent spectacle where gestures and movement show what might be explained in words]. However, he had to concede later that, although verses were originally not required, fashion had naturalized them, making them necessary to the full understanding of the work.6 He shared Marolles’ view that the structure of Ballet must consist of a series of entries ‘qui composent un Tout agreable’7 [which make up the agreable whole], and whose interest lies in the variety of figures and in the appropriateness of these to the danced steps.8 The first historian of ballet, Claude-François Ménestrier, in his analysis of the art, organized his work chiefly from the study of examples belonging to the vast collection of texts he owned.9 When he came to consider more abstractly the nature of ballet itself, he insisted on the need to blend the various arts harmoniously together so that, in their impact, they supported each other.10 It is clear from these remarks that Ballet as a suite of entries was not intended to be without plan. Nor can one underestimate the seriousness with which performers carried out the will of choreographer, poet, and composer. Performances lasted for a minimum of three hours, to which must be added those many rehearsals which had filled the daily life of the dancers for weeks before the spectacle took place. Nobles performed multiple roles which they shared with the professionals. The creation of a court ballet was a complex affair involving the collaboration of experts in verse, music, choreography, décor, costume, painting, carpentry, and hydraulics, requiring — additionally — relations with furnishers of materials, such as plumes, embroidery, paste jewels, lighting, temporary timber, and so forth. The director of all this activity was sometimes the poet, sometimes the choreographer, and (consequently) the input varied considerably. At times, music was dominant as in Le Sérieux et le Grotesque (1627) where the ‘paroles ont esté accommodees à l’air qui estoit fait’11 [words have been matched to the music which was composed]; at other times, costume design dictated both music and dancing as in the Ballet des Fées (1625) which will be examined in detail. Each art has left different traces so that the critic’s judgement is often 6 De Pure, Idée des Spectacles, pp. 266–71; it was with regret that de Pure acknowledged this development. 7 De Pure, Idée des Spectacles, p. 228. 8 De Pure, Idée des Spectacles, p. 237. 9 Claude-François Ménestrier, Des Ballets anciens et modernes selon les règles du théâtre (Paris: René Guignard, 1682), p. 272; the texts are now deposited in the Library of the Collège de la Trinité in Lyon. 10 Ménestrier, Des Ballets, p. 272: ‘On entremêle des recits aux entrées de Ballet, comme on entremêle des danses aux representations en Musique. Il faut que les uns et les autres soient liez au sujet que l’on traite’ [One mixes recits into the Ballet entries, as one mingles dances into musical spectacles. Both must be linked to the subject that is being treated]. 11 Le Sérieux et le Grotesque. Ballet dansé par le Roy en la salle du Louvre et à l’Hostel de ville (Paris: Mathurin Hurault, 1627), reprinted in Paul Lacroix (ed.), Ballets et mascarades de cour, 6 vols (Geneva: J. Gay, 1868), vol. 3, pp. 298–321 (p. 318), and in Marie-Claude Canova-Green and Claudine Nédelec (eds), Ballets burlesques pour Louis XIII. Danse et jeux de transgression (1622–1638) (Toulouse: Société de Littératures Classiques, 2012), pp. 211–56.
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conditioned by what remains. There is a tendency to privilege verses, because they have survived in quantity; because, in England, they were often the work of major poets such as Ben Jonson; and because they carry the burden of the political or satirical message. The performance of a ballet certainly provided the opportunity for poets to advertise their wares and to add poems to the original conception of the work which were then printed in a livret that might be distributed ‘aux personnes invitées pour la représentation du ballet’12 [to those persons invited to see the ballet]. The invitation to contribute is given by René Bordier, the chief poet for Le Sérieux et le Grotesque (1627), at the beginning of his text and the verses by diverse authors are collected together at the end.13 The wit and political messages which are present in all ballets of this period may be illustrated by two brief examples: the first, from Le Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (1626). Racan (the lyric poet who spent much time in England), reminds Louis XIII there that: Un jour il sera sur la terre Ce qu’est Jupiter dans les Cieux.14 [One day he will be on Earth / What Jupiter is in the Heavens]. The hyperbole, expressed in these general terms, is typical of the genre; more precise political reference will emerge from the analysis of three ballets below. The second example of social comment comes from the récit of the grotesque astrologer, danced by the Commandeur de Souvray, in Le Sérieux et le Grotesque (1627); as the astrologer dances into the hall, he uses his speech to mirror the opposition to recent sumptuary laws. Louis XIII had tried, in a succession of bills, to curtail the monies spent on luxury goods and on gambling by his subjects (and, in particular, his nobles). Here is what the astrologer says: Les astres de naguères assemblés au conseil [that is, the King’s Council] Pour donner à la Terre un ordre nonpareil, Ont fait un reglement dont la teneur est belle: Le ciel veut que le luxe et le jeu soient bannis Les bons recompensés et les méchants punis, Mais la France aussitost leur a dit: j’en appelle.15
12 Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Paris: Imprimerie du Louvre, 1626), reprinted in Lacroix (ed.), Ballets et mascarades, vol. 3, pp. 151–202, and in Canova-Green and Nédelec (eds), Ballets burlesques, pp. 97–166. 13 Le Sérieux, p. 301. ‘Au Lecteur, s’il arrive que quelques particuliers mettent au jour des vers sur le sujet du present ballet de S.M., sçache qu’ils y auront esté poussés que de leur propre mouvement’ [To the Reader: if it happens that some individuals bring out verses on the subject of the present ballet of his Majesty, know that they have been encouraged to do so only by their own volition]. 14 Honorat de Bueil, Sieur de Racan, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Antoine de Latour, 2 vols (Paris: [n.pub.], 1857), vol. 2, pp. 7–10. 15 Le Sérieux, p. 308.
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[The stars who met earlier, assembled in the Council / in order to give a peerless order to those on Earth, / have made a rule whose purport is fine: / the heavens wish luxury and gaming to be banned, / that the good be rewarded and the bad punished; / but France immediately declared; I appeal]. References to such specific contemporary issues abound in Court Ballet. Although the celebrations organized in Paris for the betrothal and wedding of Henrietta Maria were not extended over several years as for the marriage of Louis XIII himself, their scale was nonetheless considerable and the types of fêtes were varied and magnificent. A True Discourse of all the Royall Passages, Triumphs and Ceremonies, published in London (1625) gives an indication of their extent in Paris: After these infinite vollies of shot, was seene many other triumphes, as bonefires, fireworkes, feasts, musickes of all kinds, and all soundes, dancings, maskings, and all maner of revells, that France seemed to intend nothing but the present ravishing joy.16 The role of the Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis, in the organization of such revelry was significant. She had been the goddess to whom all had paid homage in the Ballet de Junon la Nopcière (23 February/5 March 1623) when Charles, as Prince of Wales, and the Duke of Buckingham had first sighted Henrietta Maria.17 She had commissioned Rubens to decorate her great gallery in the Luxembourg Palace, where the painter tried to outdo the Galerie d’Ulysse from Fontainebleau whose frescoes he had copied so assiduously.18 The gallery was to be the venue for sumptuous collations, banquets, and music prior to the wedding, whose spectacular effects were reported back to Florence by the city’s resident ambassador, Giovanni Battista Gondi.19 In the Rubens cycle, Marie de Médicis is transmuted into Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, while Anne d’Autriche and her husband are given the roles of Juno and Jupiter. The celestial
16 A True Discourse of all the Royall Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies (London: John Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625), pp. 17–18. [Reproduced in Appendix 1]. 17 Published in Marie-Claude Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII. Danse et politique à la cour de France (1610–1643) (Toulouse: Société de Littératures Classiques, 2010), pp. 203–12. Prince Charles’ letter to his father recording his presence at the performance of this Ballet is printed in T. Birch (ed.), The Court and Times of James I, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1848), vol. 2, p. 371. 18 L’École de Fontainebleau, exhibition at the Grand Palais, 17 October 1972–1915 January 1973; see nos 215, 216, and 217. 19 Gondi to Florence 21/31 May, 1625: ‘Il sera del 27 un fuoco bellissimo d’artificio […] una delle più superbe colazioni de confitture con molte altre delise di musiche et galanterie […] Le tre Regine, il Duca d’Anjou, il Duca di Buckingham, li Ambasciatori di Spagna, d’Inghilterra, et di Savoia et grand numero di Signori et Dame’ [The evening of the 17/27 (May), beautiful fireworks displays […] one of the most superb collations of sugar confections with many other musical and galant delight […] The three Queens, the Duc d’Anjou, the Duke of Buckingham, ambassadors from Spain, England and Savoy, and a great number of Gentlemen and Ladies], cited as Document 39 in Ronald Forsyth Millen and Robert Erich Wolf, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
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imagery, worked out by the Queen Mother with her advisors,20 was taken up in ballets and by Puget de La Serre in his novel Les Amours de Junon et de Jupiter, published in the spring of 1625 to anticipate the marriage of Henrietta Maria and Charles. As was customary, the celebrations included a great feast in the Archbishop’s palace, and then the court moved back to the Louvre where ballets and collations were enjoyed: ‘pour célébrer par avance la fête de l’Hymenée’ [to celebrate Hymen’s feast, in advance]. Before offering an analysis of three ballets, the particular emphasis French creators gave to Dancing and Music on the one hand, and to Costume and Décor on the other should be set out. As Lord Herbert of Cherbury, English ambassador in Paris from 1619–1624, acknowledged, French dancing was superior to all others, ‘les hommes doivent apprendre des meilleurs maîtres français’ [Gentlemen should learn from the best French masters]. Nobles were trained, from a very young age, to dance and to perform elegantly with due decorum.21 In Paris, at this time, the range of dancing abilities, evident from accounts of fêtes, was remarkable. In individual performance accuracy of steps, graceful movements, and appropriate gestures were essential, as Michel de Pure indicated: Le pas de Balet ne consiste pas simplement aux subtils mouvements des pieds, ou aux diverses agitations du corps. Il est composé de l’un et de l’autre, et comprend tout ce qu’un corps bien adroit et bien instruit peut avoir de geste ou d’action pour exprimer quelque chose sans parler.22 [Ballet steps do not simply consist of subtle movement of the feet, or of varied shakings of the body […] It is composed of both one and the other, and involves everything that an upright and well-taught body can supply in terms of gesture and movement to express something without speech]. Group dancing, culminating in the Grand Ballet, required many rehearsals to ensure full coordination, and an excellent memory to retain in the mind the complex steps and figures. Large ensembles of up to 24 performers had to be controlled by the choreographer; thus wrote de Pure: C’est là où gist l’habilité du Maistre de Dance, d’accorder ce mouvement du danceur avec son idée, avec la cadance, de l’air, et de faire en sorte qu’il ne contrarie ny l’un ny l’autre.23 [There lies the skill of the Dancing Master, to blend the dancer’s movement with his conception, with the rhythm and the air, in ways that impede neither one nor the other].
20 Millen and Wolf, Heroic Deeds, p. 8, cites the contract: Rubens is ‘to represent […] all the stories which are written down and enumerated at length in writing in accord with the Queen’s intention’ [February 16/26, 1622]. 21 For a study of this training, see Margaret M. McGowan, Dance in the Renaissance. European Fashion: French Obsession (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 22 De Pure, Idée des Spectacles, pp. 248–49. 23 De Pure, Idée des Spectacles, p. 250.
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Ballets were performed before a public of connoisseurs on the lookout for unusual steps and eager for evidence of virtuosity. Works such as the Ballet du Temps (1622) were very demanding for the dancers had to perform high leaps and entrechats while bearing elaborate costumes; as one character ironically put it: Pas un de nous ne sçait danser; Nos pas se font sans y penser […] Sans pas ny dessein, Les pieds croisés, les bras au sein Sans ordre, discours ny cadence.24 [Not one of us knows how to dance; / our steps are made without thought, / without plan or step, / crossed feet and arms on the breast / without order, speech or rhythm]. These words underline the importance of improvisation in ballets where the music invites the dancer to interpret the rhythm; in this context, the acrobatic marvels of the professional come into play. Perhaps the best evidence of dancing ability came from the number of times, as in the Ballet du Temps, dancers were obliged to perform against the rhythm, to simulate bad dancing, treading on the toes of their companions and, deliberately, missing the beat. The King’s musicians were frequent performers; Moulinié, for instance, the King’s favourite who had taught him to play, danced and played his lute in several ballets. Antoine Boësset was the chief composer in the 1620s, and much of his music survives in the Philidor collection now housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The 24 violons du roi regularly participated, and ensembles of 15–20 players provided the accompaniment to the Grand Ballet. Some works required extensive musical input, introducing dialogues and concerts into the action. David J. Buch has published the ‘Concert à Louis XIII par les 24 violons et les 12 grands hautbois’ [Concert for Louis XIII by the 24 violins and the 12 large oboes] which gives some idea of the scale of compositions heard at Court at this time.25 Much of the music for the entries and Grand Ballet of the Ballet des Fées (1625) survives: for 26 entries entitled for the ‘Ballet du Roy, 1625’, and for the Grand Ballet composed on three different airs.26 The music was not always sprightly and gay for the dancing. Often it reflected the comic nature of the character, or commented on his personality and purpose, underlining the fact that ballet was, intrinsically, a self-reflective art, fully aware of its form and constantly looking into itself. An example might be cited from Le Sérieux et le Grotesque (1627). The serenade des grotesques which follows on from the performance of the King, who played, sang, and danced, announcing ‘J’ay la musique des canons’ [I have the music for cannons], a double 24 Cited in Mark Franko, Dance as Text. Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 1993), p. 97. 25 David J. Buch, Dance Music from the Ballets de Cour 1575–1651. Historical Commentary, Source Study, and Transcriptions from the Philidor Manuscripts (New York: Pendragon Press, 1994), p. 53. 26 Buch, Dance Music, pp. 84–85.
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reference to his musical and warlike gifts.27 The grotesques, furnished with an assortment of instruments: ‘vielles, trompes marines, lanternes, grils, jambons et pieds de pourceau’, invent ‘un concert tout nouveau’ [a completely new concert]. Their noise exposes the doubtful acts committed at night, and — adding whistles, seringes and voice to their sound, they create ‘un concert fait avec choix — pour trouver nouvelle pratique’28 [a concert deliberately arranged — to find a new practice]. In all its parts, the ballet was ever inventive. As far as the décor is concerned, unfortunately comparatively little survives. For the three ballets which will be examined, it is clear that cloud machines were constructed, forests painted on the backcloth, fountains engineered amid pastoral scenes, taverns erected in wood and canvas, and silks in abundance to make pavilions for jousting. From the Comptes de l’Argenterie, for instance, 49 ells of chinese taffetas were provided for the pavilions, together with five artificial mules fabricated by Mathieu Marisse at the cost of 922 livres tournois. Horace Morel received 1355 livres tournois for ‘feux d’artifice et machines’ [fireworks and machines]. Inventiveness and strong imaginative talent characterized the designs for costumes which Daniel Rabel supplied for all the ballets danced at Court from 1615 to 1633.29 In 1619, he had received 100 livres tournois for the ‘esquisses des décors et des costumes’ [outlines of drawings and designs] for the Ballet de la Reyne. In 1625, for the Ballet des Fées his emoluments amounted to 630 livres tournois; we do not know whether this sum included drawings for decors as well as for costumes, which were very large in number. The accounts merely state for ‘portraictz et desseins’ [drawings and designs].30 The costs of scarves which were distributed during the ballet, of stockings, ruffs, masks, garters, shoes, roses, rams and mirrors which were needed by the King, ‘premiers seigneurs que pour balladins, musiciens, viollons et autres’ [principal nobles and for the dancers, musicians, violinists and others], were calculated at 2735 livres tournois, 2 sols, while the perfume liberally scattered about by the ‘bilboquets’ [ball players] cost 240 livres tournois.31 The significance of costume design will become clear as examples of self-comment emerge from the dancers themselves. In Le Sérieux et le Grotesque (1627), for instance, the ‘Bouteilles coiffées’ [bottles with headdresses] who change into 27 Le Sérieux, p. 311. 28 Le Sérieux, p. 312. 29 A major part of Daniel Rabel’s drawings for ballet was published by Margaret M. McGowan, The Court Ballet of Louis XIII (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986). Rabel was ‘ingénieur ordinaire pour le Roy en les provinces de Brie et de Champagne’ [Engineer ordinary to the King in the provinces of Brie and Champagne], so we learn from the Menus Plaisirs et nécessités de la Chambre du Roy, Année 1619, Bibliothèque nationale de France, manuscrits Clairambault 808, fols 207–20. His drawings are extensively used as evidence in McGowan’s La Danse à la Renaissance. Sources livresques et albums d’images (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2012). 30 Paris, Archives Nationales, KK 200, Les Comptes de l’Extraordinaire de l’Argenterie de 1625; the entries run in a continual sequence, unpaginated, according to the order of the entries of the ballet. 31 KK 200, Les comptes de l’Extraordinaire; the 240 livres tournois were paid to ‘Simon de Vaux, parfumier’.
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women, explain the reasons for their disguise: that is, to hide their feelings. In the same ballet, the Duc de Nemours, as Elector from Scandinavia, comments freely on the objects he carries in his dance: the rouge d’Espagne for his face, mirrors that flatter him, and watches to remind him of the passage of time: Le rouge dont j’aime l’usage Pour l’appliquer en mon visage Me rend les miroüers complaisans; Mais quand je regarde ma montre, Toutes les heures j’y rencontre Fors celles de mes jeunes ans.32 [Rouge which I love / to paint on my face / and which renders mirrors kind; / but when I look at my watch, / I see all the hours / except for those of my youth]. Or, there is his companion the Comte de Cramail whose enormous spectacles allow him to see the faults in others: Puisqu’avec ces grandes lunettes Je voy tous les deffauts d’autruy. [Since with these enormous spectacles, / I can observe all the faults of others]. As a courtisan grotesque, the Comte d’Harcourt offers a critical view of contemporary dress, explaining at length the size of his hat, enormous and disproportionate, but faithfully reflecting his immense power and physical prowess: Tous ces petits chapeaux et ces petis collets Dont un tas de mignons font leurs modes nouvelles, Ne peuvent s’ajuster qu’aux petites cervelles, Et semblent n’estre faicts qu’à danser des Ballets.33 [All these tiny hats and all these tiny collars / with which a load of mignons sport as their latest fashion, / can only belong to tiny brains, / and seem only made to dance in Ballets]. Costumes were frequently made at the expense of the noble dancer himself, but in the three ballets which will now be considered, the costs seem to have been met by the royal exchequer.
32 Le Sérieux, p. 306. 33 Le Sérieux, p. 321.
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Le Ballet d’Apollon, 1621 Le Ballet d’Apollon, danced by the King in February 1621, provides an insight into a typical danced spectacle on a mythological theme designed to convey a political message which foreshadowed the triumph of the forces of the monarch over rebellious protestants.34 The text of the ballet is preceded by a long explanation of those parts of the Apollo myth which will be represented in music and dancing. The ballet celebrates four powers of the Sun King: prediction, healing, song, and archery. Each power represents a distinct act in the ballet and each is introduced by a complex change of scenery.35 Amphion and Sirens are discovered in a rocky setting singing in dialogue (words by René Bordier and music by Antoine Boësset) before dancing together. Their ballet takes place in the hall; as they return to the stage, they sing and elicit a response from the goddess Pythie, priestess of Apollo whose job is to predict the future and promise Louis le Juste a victorious life. The art of healing is then evoked by Mnemosyne [Memory], assisted by ten musicians from antiquity; after their concert in which they appeal to the Muses, these beings are immediately visible seated in the sky upon Parnassus. The Muses sing in praise of music and poetry, and of the King, as they descend into the hall for their ballet. After their dance, they are taken up again into the clouds where they wait for Apollo to kill the Python and to prove his skills in archery. The god has accomplished this feat off stage, and — among the clouds — the Muses sing out their joy, inviting the victorious to present their trophies at the Temple of Love and to relish the ensuing festivities. These entertainments consist in the entries of 18 dancers representing artisans. Called ‘la troupe du Roy’, they come onto the stage one by one in this sequence: flowerseller, painter, silversmith, maker of darts, labourer, perfumier, chief of the blacksmiths, diviner, gardener, glazier, mirror-maker, mole catcher, sailor, coppersmith, Egyptian, bird-catcher, and chimney sweep. A heterogeneous collection of nobles, enjoying the freedom of imitating mundane trades, with the exception of the Duc de Luynes who stood out in this company as Apollo/ the shepherd providing divine martial support for the King.36 Each character receives a few lines of verse which explain their costume, their obedience to the ladies, and their allegiance to the King who, himself, danced as a blacksmith. This may seem a humble role, but his threatening words are full of fire and warning,
34 See the comments of Canova-Green, Ballets pour Louis XIII, p. 160; the text of the ballet is published in this collection, pp. 159–86, authored by René Bordier. 35 Canova-Green, Ballets pour Louis XIII, p. 163. The preface to the text makes these changes clear: ‘pour les quatre professions qu’on luy [à Apollon] donne, de predire, de guerir, de chanter, et de tirer, vous remarquerez autant de scenes aux changemens du theatre’ [For the four professions that are attributed to him [Apollo] — prophecy, healing, song and archery, you will see as many scenes and changes of theatre]. 36 The anomalous attribution of the role of Apollo to the Duke is partially rectified by referring to him as a ‘faux dieu’ [false god] in the Ballet de la Reyne [du Soleil] performed some weeks later; see the comments of Canova-Green, Ballets pour Louis XIII, p. 160.
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and his powers godlike. He asserts his capacity to fulfil all the promises made by Apollo’s priestess and he cautions his enemies not to thwart him: Jugez donc s’il coustera dur Aux mortels dont la vaine audace Entreprendra de me fascher.37 [ Judge then how it will cost dearly / those mortals whose proud audacity / dares to challenge my anger]. Once each artisan has danced his turn and all the trades are assembled together, then they perform a noble Grand Ballet where their extensive dancing experience can be displayed to the full. Thus, Le Ballet d’Apollon blends mythology with everyday concerns, mixing the serious with the light-hearted. Political messages demonstrating to the audience the strength of the monarch’s forces and his own ability to quell rebellious subjects are set alongside tributes to beauty and displays of sheer choreographic joy. The ballet projects spectacular scene changes (about which we know too little), gorgeous costumes for the gods and their companions, and accurately observed disguises for the artisans. Music played a dominant role in the concerts, dialogues, and celebration of the arts, giving way to violin ensemble accompaniments for dancing. Le Ballet des Fées des Forests de St Germain, 1625 This mixture of elements integrated into a coherent whole characterized the forms of ballet which Henrietta Maria and her entourage would have enjoyed in Paris. Many ballets were performed in the spring of 1625 prior to the Princess’s marriage; however, the only one on which we have detail is Les Fées des Forests de St Germain danced by the King in the Louvre on 1/11 February ‘pour celebrer par avance la fête de l’Hymenée’ [to celebrate Hymen’s feast, in advance]. The theme of the ballet focused on entertainment, and introduces apparently a land of make-believe, ruled by fairies. But it is a fairyland turned ugly. Sources for the ballet are abundant: a text by René Bordier ‘poète attitré à S. M.’38 [poet appointed to His Majesty]; complete accounts for the costumes and for some of the props;39 music composed by Antoine Boësset now in the
37 Le Ballet d’Apollon [Sujet du ballet du Roy] faict en la salle du petit Bourbon ce 19 Fevrier 1621 (Paris: Nicolas Roussat, 1621), reprinted in Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, pp. 159–86, pp. 176–77. 38 Les Fées des Forests de Saint-Germain. Ballet dansé par le Roy en la salle du Louvre le 11 jour de fevrier, 1625 (Paris: Jean Sara, 1625), reprinted in Canova-Green and Nédelec (eds), Ballets burlesques, pp. 65–96. See also Thomas Lecomte (ed.), Les Fees des Forêts de Saint-Germain, 1625. Un ballet royal de ‘bouffonesque humeur’ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). 39 KK 200, Les comptes de l’Extraordinaire.
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collection Philidor;40 costume designs by Daniel Rabel;41 and an eye-witness account by Michel de Marolles.42 The structure of the ballet is very clear; it is divided into five acts as though it were a play (as Ménestrier had recommended).43 Although Bordier provided most of the verses and songs, it was the Duc de Nemours who had designed the ballet, and who Marolles praised as having ‘en cela des pensées rares’ [in that, remarkable ideas].44 Each act was introduced by a fairy; in charge of Act I was Guillemine la Quintaine [or la Quinteuse] [Plate IV] (danced by the celebrated professional baladin, le Sieur Marais), accompanied by a machine, a colossus — la Musique [Plate V] — bringing onto the stage instruments required for the ballet. Marolles described this figure, explaining how the musicians/dancers who emerged from beneath her skirts detached each instrument, as required; after their performance, they disappeared to give place to other things: ‘beaucoup plus ingénieuses et divertissantes’: Il y eut une machine representant la Musique en gros, sous la figure d’une grande dame, ayant plusieurs luths pendus autour d’un vertugadin, d’où ils furent descrochez par certains musiciens fantasques, qui sortirent de dessous ses juppes; et comme ils en faisoient un concert, la grande femme dont la teste s’eslevoit jusques aux chandeliers qui descendoient d’un plafond de la salle, battoit la mesure; puis la Musique et les Musiciens disparurent insensiblement pour faire place à d’autres choses beaucoup plus ingenieuses et divertissantes.45 [There was a Machine representing la Musique as a whole, represented by a large female figure with several luths hanging around her farthingale, from which they were detached by certain fantastic musicians who came out from under her skirts; and, as they were playing their concert, the large woman whose head reached the chandeliers which came down from the ceiling into the hall, beat out the measure; then la Musique and the musicians disappeared imperceptibly to give place to other things much more ingenious and entertaining].
40 The Philidor Collection has been transferred from the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rés F. 496–97. The music of Antoine Boësset has been transcribed by Buch, Dance Music, pp. 53, 84–85. 41 Rabel’s designs have been published by McGowan, The Court Ballet. 42 Marolles, Mémoires, pp. 60–63. 43 Ménestrier, Des Ballets, passim. 44 Marolles, Mémoires, p. 60. 45 Marolles, Mémoires, p. 69. Commenting on the Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut danced by the King at carnival time the following year, Marolles reports that the Duke had asked his advice on the ballet’s design as he [the Duke] considered him an expert in the field; Marolles’ response was not as expected: ‘Je le vis donc; mais pour en dire la verité, ce ne fut pas si commodément que celuy de l’année auparavant’ [I looked at it then, but to tell the truth, it was not as appropriate as that of the previous year — that is, the Fées des Forests]. For the political overtones associated with Louis XIII’s performance of this ballet at the Hôtel de Ville, see Fabrice Cavaillé, ‘Spectacle public, munificence royale et politique de la joie: le cas du ballet de cour à la ville dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle’, in Marie-Bernadette Dufourest, Charles Mazouer and Anne Surgers (eds), Spectacles et pouvoirs dans l’Europe de l’Ancien Régime (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles), Actes du colloque, Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux III, 17–19 nov. 2009 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2011), pp. 29–41.
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Plate IV. Guillemine la Quinteuse, Ballet des Fées des Forests de Saint-Germain, 1625, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Plate V. La Musique, Ballet des Fées des Forests de SaintGermain, 1625, London, The Theatre Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum.
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Plate VI. Wood Spirit, Ballet des Nymphes Bocagères de la Forest Sacrée, 1627, Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Boësset’s music was deliberately designed to be ‘accords sans accords’, and the songs set to this music introduced seven Spanish ‘chaconistes’ among whom were the King, the Duc de Nemours, and the Grand Prior. Gilette la Hazardeuse, in charge of Games, introduced part 2 of the ballet during which Esprits Follets danced at incredible speed, moving faster than the wind, their supple bodies tumbling about the stage. This spectacle was followed by Jacqueline l’Entendue and her troupe, whose costumes were meant to reflect troubled states of mind. They were a strange collection of beings: ‘embabouinez’, empty headed with brains full of fancies; half-mad creatures danced by the King’s brother (among others); and ‘fantasques’, transfixed by love. A more robust set of figures followed Alison la Hargneuse in charge of ‘vaillans combattans’ [valiant soldiers], introduced by tambours and heralds. They hobbled in, some on mules, to try their skills in the lists — ‘courir et rompre en lices’ [run in the lists and break (lances)]. Thus, one of the nobles’ favourite pastimes, running at the ring or jousting to show off their equestrian talents, is being derided. The King himself is of this company, but the verses attributed to him make clear that he is merely amusing himself; they remind
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the spectators that he carries the symbols of France on his clothing and that, against his enemies, despite his appearance ‘je suis un Achille’. France, qui dans les mains me vois des armes peintes Dont les exploits ne sont que des jeux Ne croy que ie m’en serve avec passion: Pour moy tous passetems ont un charme inutile, Amour fera bientost place à l’ambition Et l’Enemy sçaura que ie suis un Achille.46 [France, who in my hands sees her arms painted, / whose exploits are merely games, / do not think I use them with passion. / For me all pastimes have a useless charm. / Soon Love will give way to ambition, / and the enemy will know I am an Achilles]. Appropriately, it is the fairy in charge of Dancing who introduces the final act and conclusion of the Ballet: Macette la Cabriolleuse. She boasts her musical marvels which outdo the effects of Amphion and Orpheus who, by comparison, are mere charlatans. She is accompanied by ‘bilboquets’ [players of a ball game] who, in sight of the audience, are magically transformed into Demy-dieux and, disguised thus, they perform the Grand Ballet, to the music of luths. The idea of the Ballet was to extol the most precious or important things in life: music, dance and war, reason and playing games. Poet, inventor, and designer did not forget contemporary preoccupations — new laws, and the dangers of the city at night, nor — in their play — do they ignore the presence of war, enemy nations or civil turbulence: the King, though a dancer charmed by the occasion, still promotes his dominance in military affairs. The ballet can be seen as a paradigm of what has come to be called burlesque ballet: a series of linked entries displaying all the modes of dancing from the most coordinated and elegant group dancing in the Grand Ballet to the improvised virtuosity and acrobatics of some of the turns. Noble and professional dancers perform together in a work which, although containing a good deal of gratuitous fancy touches, nonetheless has serious concerns, exploring mental chaos, physical deformity and disjointedness, moving (in each act) from disharmony and cacophony to the final danced and musical concord at the end, to the accompaniment of luths. Mark Franko47 has rightly emphasized the self-conscious nature of the ballet. To support this view, one only has to consider the essential role of costume design which immediately alerted the spectator to the character of each dancer before he spoke or moved.48 The cost of making the various disguises was high: the Comptes de la chambre en l’extraordinaire de l’argenterie note that the total costs for the Ballet, signed off by Roger du Plessis, seigneur de Liancourt (together with the Duc de La Roche-
46 Les Fées des Forests, p. 17. 47 Franko, Dance as Text, ch. IV, pp. 63–107. 48 De Pure was particularly insistent on the importance of costume to provide clues for recognition of identity (Idée des Spectacles, pp. 285–90).
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Guyon, first gentleman of the Chamber), were ‘64,829 livres, 5 sols, 6 deniers’,49 while monies dispensed on materials alone mounted to 2832 livres tournois.50 Two examples will illustrate the attention accorded to each costume based on Rabel’s designs: for Guillemine la Quintaine [or la Quinteuse] [Plate IV], the following was required; 10 ells of blue satin to make the dress 9 ells of yellow taffetas for the high collar, the top of the sleeves and the two large ruffs 8 ells of fine buckram (yellow and blue) for the dress and the ruff 50 ells of silver braid to adorn the dress 30 ells of small, shiny silver braid to decorate the collar 10 ells of white fustian to line the dress 2 ounces of silk thread 2 dozen silver buttons 2 ells of silver gauze for the buttonholes 3 pounds of sawdust to fill the hump on her back.51 For the female colossus representing la Musique [Plate V]: 15 ells of light brown taffetas to make a large dress 4 and a half ells of Chinese taffetas to make two sleeves to cover the top of the farthingale in the form of organ pipes 60 ells of wide braid, alternating gold and silver, to adorn the dress 10 ells of buckram for the said dress 3 dozen silver and gold buttons 3 ells of silver and gold gauze for the buttonholes 2 ounces of silk thread.52 49 ‘Louis Roger du plesseys, seigneur de Lyancourt et de la rocheguion premier gentilhomme de la chambre du Roy certiffions avoir arresté le present roolle a la somme de soixante quatre mil huict cens vingt neuf livres cinq sols six deniers’, KK 200, Les Comptes de l’Extraordinaire. The items of expenditure which cover the entire cost are given in roughly the same order as the ballet entries. 50 ‘Toutes lesquelles parties cy dessus declarées par la main et dont les sommes en sont tirées hors ligne montant et ramenant ensemble a lad. premiere somme de 2,832 livres’ [All these entries cited above in manuscript, and of which the sums are indicated separately in the margin, total the first sum of 2832 livres], KK 200, Les Comptes de l’Extraordinaire. 51 From KK 200, Les Comptes de l’Extraordinaire: ‘Pour quillemine la quinteuze: [sic] — Dix aunes de satin bleu pour faire une robbe de femme à 110 sols l’aune — 55 livres; neuf aunes de taffetas jaune pour faire trois fraizes a mettre au collet et haut des manches de lad. robbe avecq. deux grandes fraises a mettre l’une sur l’autre en forme de vertugadin [ farthingale] et bas de soye a 3 livres l’aune — 27 livres; 8 aunes de bougran Isabelle et bleu pour garnir lad. robbe et les fraises a 12 sols l’aune — 4 livres 16 sols; Cinquante aunes de passement dargent large a deux plumes pour chamarrer lad. robbe et les deux grandes fraizes pezant 10 marcz 6 onces 3 gros a 42 sols la marc — 21 livres 45 sols 9 deniers; Trente aunes de petit passement d’argent luisant pour chamarrer lesd. trois petites fraizes du collet et haut de manches a 1 sol 7 deniers l’aune — 45 sols; Dix aunes de futaine blanche pour doubler le corps de lad. robbe a 12 sols l’aune — 1 livre 12 sols; Deux onces de soy a coudre a 24 sols l’aune — 48 sols; Deux douzaines de boutons d’argent a 3 sols la douzaine — 6 sols; Trois livres de bran pour garnir la bosse du dos. de lad. robbe a 10 sols l’aune — 30 sols’. 52 Marolles returned to his description of la Musique: ‘habillé de violons, de theorbes et de luths, et coiffé d’un Pulpitre ou Luthin pour la Musique’ (Mémoires, p. 173). For the details of the costume, KK 200, Les Comptes de l’Extraordinaire: ‘Pour un grand collosse en forme de femme representant la musique:
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Such detail given to every aspect of dress is typical; the King’s helmet when he danced as a soldier was made from cardboard covered in taffetas; the owl53 that accompanied Jacqueline l’Entendue was dressed in ‘3 ells of black satin which was used to make the frills in the form of scales on the bottom of the body, at the top of the sleeves and doublet, and at the base of the trousers’. The garments for those who danced the Grand Ballet were exceptionally rich: the embroiderers Louis Vollemont, Jean Boitraux, and Jean Chaviz were paid 700 livres tournois for their work, while the plumes which decorated the heads of the 15 dancers cost 57 livres tournois with a further 65 livres 12 sols for the jewels set among the feathers.54 Le Ballet des Nymphes Bocagères, 1627 When Boisrobert returned to Paris after an absence of nine months, he seems to have absorbed something from the masques he had seen at the Stuart Court when he came to create the Ballet des Nymphes Bocagères in 1627.55 The idea of the ballet may well have been inspired by Jonson’s The Fortunate Isles, which had been the subject of Charles I’s masque danced on Twelfth Night, 1625. It may also have been suggested by the rich pastoral tradition which had already featured in French court performances.56 The literary ambitions of Boisrobert, protégé of Cardinal de Richelieu, are evident from the verse preface he wrote to introduce the ballet, where the poet attempts to recreate the wonderful atmosphere of grace and abundance that characterizes the Isles Fortunées (in other words, the kingdom of France). The ballet is a celebration of dance and song within a forest décor. Music from oboes introduce the first entry of wood spirits [Plate VI],57 then a ballet is performed by the gods of the glade before the nymphs, guardians of the forest,
53 54 55 56 57
Quinze aunes de taffetas tanné clair pour faire une grande robbe a 3 livres l’aune — 45 livres; Quatre aunes et demie de taffetas de la Chine pour faire une paire de manches a couvrir la hauteur du vertugadin de lad. robbe en forme de Tuyaux dorgues a 4 livres l’aune — 17.5 livres; Soixante aunes de passement large a deux tours d’or et d’argent pour chamarrer lad. robbe pesant 10 marcz moins deux gros a 42 sols la marc — 20 livres 18 sols 9 deniers; Dix aunes de bourgran pour servir a lad. robbe a xii sols l’aune — 3 livres 12 sols; Trois douzaines de bouttons d’or et dargent pour lad. robbe a 3 sols la douzaine — 9 sols; Trois aunes de gauze d’or et d’argent pour faire les boutonnieres a 3 sols l’aune — 9 sols; Deux onces de soye a coudre a 24 sols l’ance — 48 sols’. KK 200, Les Comptes de l’Extraordinaire: ‘cinq aunes de futaine blanche pour faire un habit a son porte queue representant un ch un [chat huant]’. KK 200, Les Comptes de l’Extraordinaire: ‘Pour quinze aunes et demie de Satin incarnadin pour faire quinze grands bas de soye quinze petits pourpoinctz et quinze paires de grands hauts de manches en lambrequins’. Performed by the Queen in February; text in Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, pp. 241–54. The tradition in court festivals dates back at least to Ronsard; see Canova-Green’s discussion concerning the Ballet de la Royne, dansé par les Nymphes des Jardins, in Ballets pour Louis XIII, pp. 233–40. Rabel’s design, covered in instructions to the costume makers, is typical of the drawings contained in his Album, see McGowan, The Court Ballet of Louis XIII, passim.
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come to sing of the sacred nature of their domain — among them was the Queen. Pan dances in next to remind spectators of the delights of Arcadia; he is quickly followed by a rustic ballet performed by fauns. And thus, the alternating rhythm of the work — song, dance, concert — continues with a sung dialogue between Orpheus and his troupe of hamadryads, interrupted by dances from phantoms, music and ballets by shepherds, the arrival of Procris and Cephalus, huntsmen, and the Spring with Zephyr. The succession of entries culminates in a concert which accompanies Diana as she descends from the heavens in her chariot in order to announce the Grand Ballet. A significant role is given to music and elegant dancing in this work; verses are short and to the point, admirably suited to the lyrical music Boësset had composed. The first concert sung by the nymphs emphasizes the special nature of the forest; the second with Orpheus and his hamadryads sing of beauty, but — more insistently — ‘En l’honneur du Miracle des Rois’58 [in honour of the Miracle of kings]; the final concert is sung by Diana and her nymphs in homage to the Queen Mother. Her praise is underlined by extra verses given to the Queen, appended to the text where one can also find an eloquent celebration of the King by the nymphs: ‘Roy le plus grand des Rois, victorieux monarque’59 [King, the greatest of kings, victorious monarch]. Court Ballet: A Mirror on Contemporary Concerns These three examples from 1621, 1625 and 1627 show how supple and capable of manipulation was the form of Court Ballet at this time in France. It could preserve an even, harmonious tone as in the Ballet des Nymphes (1627), or accommodate the integration of serious, comic, and satirical elements in the other ballets. The very self-conscious nature of performance and speech ensured that reflections on contemporary matters were constantly present, and — in particular — the articulation of French military superiority. Louis XIII’s successful forays against Spanish ambitions were captured through verse and through Rabel’s very precise costume designs ridiculing Spanish dress, their pretensions and loudmouth boasting. Through metaphor and self-referential comment, the failings of Protestant opposition were exposed and the King’s triumphs anticipated. During each performance, erstwhile recalcitrant nobles found brilliant moments when, disguised as a god or tradesman, they could exhibit their dancing talents, enter into the spirit of their disguise, and (although their roles were often merely supportive of the King or frankly adulatory) receiving applause for their performance, they could set aside their grievances. Ballet engendered a sense
58 Les Nymphes Bocagères de la Forest sacrée, Ballet dancé par la Reyne, en la Sale du Louvre (Paris: Mathurin Henault, 1627), reprinted in Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, pp. 241–54. 59 Nymphes Bocagères, p. 251. Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, appends verses by Malleville offered by the Queen as Diana to the King: ‘Grand Roy, grand Astre d’icy-bas’, pp. 253–54.
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of glorious well-being, inhabiting a special world where disguise, myth, music, and dancing reigned supreme. The vital role of festivities at the centre of the political strategy of the court is developed in two novels written at the time of Henrietta Maria’s wedding. Jean Puget de La Serre’s Les Amours du roi et de la reine (or de Jupiter et de Junon) anticipated the event.60 The work was structured as a series of festivals ordered by Jupiter to celebrate the marriage; there were balls where Gods performed as in a Grand Ballet, banquets and a Ballet des Foux put on by Pluto where familiar virtuosity and acrobatics were dominant. The walls of Great Halls depicted the same scenes from ballets; they were covered with tapestries showing the triumphs of the King against Protestant rebels, and the magical sounds of Boësset’s music could be heard: Mais deslors que Monsieur Boësset non contant d’avoir ravy les cœurs, par les charmes de son art, faisoit ouyr de nouveaux airs de son invention, à la louange de la Royne.61 [But, then, Monsieur Boësset, not content with having ravished everyone’s heart by the charms of his art, introduced new airs of his own composition, to sing the praises of the Queen]. Abraham Rémy’s La Galatée62 similarly looked forward to the arrival at the Stuart Court of a French princess, but he visualizes the triumphs of Louis XIII over the rebels by re-enacting Jupiter’s victory over the giants by means of a ballet. The political echoes are plain to see but they have been variously interpreted.63 Cardinal Richelieu who, by now, had emerged as a significant force in the Council of State, had viewed the Stuart–Bourbon match as a way to peace. He fought to secure the marriage for he saw the alliance as a means of strengthening France against Spanish imperialist designs, as weakening support for the Protestant cause and building up that for Catholicism; as he wrote in his Mémoires: Si ce mariage se rompoit, la religion huguenotte étoit fortifiée en France par le secours des Anglois, lequel eût empeché par ce mariage […] si ce mariage se faisoit, la religion catholique recevroit un très-grand appui en Angleterre, et la religion huguenotte seroit ruinée en France.64
60 Jean Puget de La Serre, Les Amours du roi et de la reine [Les Amours de Jupiter et de Junon] (Paris: Nicolas Bessin and Denis de Cay, 1625). 61 Puget de La Serre, Les Amours du roi, p. 428. 62 Abraham Rémy, La Galatée et les aventures du prince Astiagès. Histoire de notre temps ou sous noms feints sont représentés les amours du roy et de la reine d’Angleterre (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1625). 63 See essays published by Alexander Samson (ed.), The Spanish Marriage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006): Karen Britland, ‘A Fairy Tale Marriage: Charles and Henrietta Maria’s Romance’, pp. 123–37, sees the work as anti-Spanish and anti-imperialist, Marie-Claude Canova-Green, ‘A French view of the Marriage: A. Rémy’s La Galatée ou les Adventures du prince Astiagès’, pp. 139–50, as a transposition of real events, pp. 142–47. 64 Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, Mémoires, ed. by J. F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France sous le règne de Louis XIII, 2e série, 3 vols (Paris: Éd. du commentaire analytique du Code civil, 1837), vol. 1, p. 327 [1625].
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[If this marriage is broken, the religion of the Huguenots is reinforced in France with the help of the English, which would be prevented by this marriage […] If this marriage is secured, the religion of Catholics will receive strong support in England, and the religion of the Huguenots will be devastated in France]. Moreover, Richelieu was beginning to discover — through the works devised by Boisrobert, for example, — that Court Ballet was a political tool of some importance. From 1630, Richelieu promoted French power and military achievements in a series of Ballets, the most notable being the Ballet de la Prospérité des Armes de France (1641).65 Through dance, verse, and music in a spectacular setting, political ambitions as well as aesthetic achievement could be projected and satisfied not only before a compliant and applauding court but on a larger European canvas.
65 For a discussion of the political role of French Ballet, see Margaret M. McGowan, L’Art du ballet de cour en France (1581–1643) (Paris: CNRS, 1963), especially ch. X, pp. 169–90.
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Bibliography Manuscripts and Archival Documents
Paris, Archives Nationales, KK 200, Les comptes de l’Extraordinaire de l’Argenterie de 1625 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Clairambault 808, fols 207–20, Menus Plaisirs et nécessités de la Chambre du Roy, Année 1619 —— , Philidor Collection, Rés.F. 496–97 Early Printed Books
Le Ballet d’Apollon [Sujet du ballet du Roy] faict en la salle du petit Bourbon ce 19 Fevrier 1621 (Paris: Nicolas Roussat, 1621), reprinted in Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, pp. 159–86 Le Ballet de la Royne, Dansé par les Nymphes des Jardins, En la Grand’ Salle du Louvre, au mois de Fevrier 1624 (Paris: Jehan de Bordeaux, 1624), reprinted in Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, pp. 233–40 Les Fées des Forests de Saint-Germain. Ballet dansé par le roy en la salle du Louvre le 11 jour de février, 1625 (Paris: Jean Sara, 1625), reprinted in Canova-Green and Nédelec (eds), Ballets burlesques, pp. 65–96 Grand Bal de la Douairière de Bilbahaut (Paris: Imprimerie du Louvre, 1626), reprinted in Lacroix (ed.), Ballets et mascarades, vol. 3, pp. 151–202, and in Canova-Green and Nédelec (eds), Ballets burlesques, pp. 97–166 Le Grand Ballet de la Reyne representant les festes de Junon la Nopcière, Dancé au Louvre le 5 de mars, 1623 (Paris: René Giffart, 1623), reprinted in Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, pp. 203–12 Grand Ballet de la Reyne representant le Soleil dancé en la salle du Petit Bourbon, 1621 (Paris: René Giffart, 1621), reprinted in Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, pp. 187–202 Jonson, Ben, The Fortunate Isles, and their Union, celebrated in a Masque Design’d for the Court, on the Twelfth Night, 1625, printed in C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), vol. 7, pp. 701–29 Marolles, Michel de, l’Abbé de Villeloin, Mémoires (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1656–1657) Ménestrier, Claude-François, Des Ballets anciens et modernes selon les règles du théâtre (Paris: René Guignard, 1682) Les Nymphes Bocagères de la Forest sacrée, Ballet dancé par la Reyne, en la Sale du Louvre (Paris: Mathurin Henault, 1627), reprinted in Canova-Green (ed.), Ballets pour Louis XIII, pp. 241–54 Puget de La Serre, Jean, Les Amours du roi et de la reine [Les Amours de Junon et de Jupiter] (Paris: Nicolas Bessin and Denis de Cay, 1625) Pure, Michel de, Idée des Spectacles anciens et nouveaux (Paris: Michel Brunet, 1668) Racan, Honorat de Bueil, Sieur de, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Antoine de Latour, 2 vols (Paris: [n.pub.], 1657)
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Rémy, Abraham, La Galatée et les aventures du prince Astiagès. Histoire de notre temps ou sous noms feints sont représentés les amours du roy et de la reine d’Angleterre (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1625) Le Sérieux et le Grotesque. Ballet dansé par le Roy en la salle du Louvre et à l’hostel de Ville (Paris: Mathurin Hurault, 1627), reprinted in Lacroix (ed.), Ballets et mascarades, vol. 3, pp. 298–321, and in Canova-Green and Nédelec (eds), Ballets burlesques, pp. 211–56 A True Discourse of all the Royall Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies (London: John Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625) Primary Sources
Montagut, B. de, Louange de la Danse, ed. by Barbara Ravelhofer (Cambridge: RTM Publications, 2000) Lacroix, Paul (ed.), Ballets et mascarades de cour, 6 vols (Geneva: J. Gay, 1868) Richelieu, Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de, Mémoires, ed. by J. F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France sous le règne de Louis XIII, 2e série, 3 vols (Paris: Éd. du commentaire analytique du Code civil, 1837) Secondary Studies
Birch, T. (ed.), The Court and Times of James I, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1848) Britland, Karen, Drama at the courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) —— , ‘A Fairy Tale Marriage; Charles and Henrietta Maria’s Romance’, in Alexander Samson (ed.), The Spanish Marriage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 123–37 —— , ‘Queen Henrietta Maria’s Theatrical Patronage’, in Erin Griffey (ed.), Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 57–77 Buch, David J., Dance Music from the Ballet de Cour 1575–1651. Historical Commentary, Source Study, and Transcriptions from the Philidor Manuscripts (New York: Pendragon Press, 1994) Canova-Green, Marie-Claude, La Politique-spectacle au Grand Siècle: les rapports francoanglais, Biblio 17, no. 76 (Tübingen: PFCSL, 1993) —— , ‘A French View of the Marriage: A. Rémy’s La Galatée ou les Adventures du prince Astiagès’, in Alexander Samson (ed.), The Spanish Marriage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 142–47 —— , Ballets pour Louis XIII. Danse et politique à la cour de France (1610–1643) (Toulouse: Société de Littératures Classiques, Toulouse, 2010) Canova-Green, Marie-Claude, and Claudine Nédelec (eds), Ballets burlesques pour Louis XIII. Danse et jeux de transgresssion (1622–1638) (Toulouse: Société de Littératures Classiques, Toulouse, 2012) Cavaillé, Fabrice, ‘Spectacle public, munificence royale et politique de la joie: le cas du ballet de cour à la ville dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle’, in Marie-Bernadette Dufourest, Charles Mazouer and Anne Surgers (eds), Spectacles et pouvoirs dans l’Europe de l’Ancien Régime (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles), Actes du colloque, Université Michel
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de Montaigne, Bordeaux III, 17–19 nov. 2009 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2011), pp. 29–41. L’École de Fontainebleau, Exhibition catalogue, Grand Palais (17 October 1972–15 January 1973) Franko, Mark, Dance as Text. Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) Jacquot, Jean, ‘La reine Henriette-Marie et l’influence française dans les spectacles à la cour de Charles Ier’, Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises, 9 ( June 1957), 128–60 Lecomte, Thomas (ed.), Les Fees des Forêts de Saint-Germain, 1625. Un ballet royal de ‘bouffonesque humeur’ (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012) McGowan, Margaret M., L’Art du ballet de cour en France (1581–1643) (Paris: CNRS, 1963) —— , The Court Ballet of Louis XIII (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986) —— , Dance in the Renaissance. European Fashion: French Obsession (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) —— , La Danse à la Renaissance. Sources livresques, albums d’images (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2012) Millen, Ronald Forsyth and Wolf, Robert Eric, Heroic Deeds and Mystic Figures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) Samson, Alexander (ed.), The Spanish Marriage (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006)
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Chapter 12. Inigo Jones between a Spanish Princess and a French Queen
By the time of Henrietta Maria’s arrival in England in 1625 Inigo Jones had been Surveyor of the King’s Works for a decade. His sense of his own importance can be gathered from an engraved portrait commissioned in 1614 from the leading printmaker Francesco Villamena, when Jones was in Rome with the Earl and Countess of Arundel.1 His bust is framed by an oval set into a pastiche of a Roman funerary altar, presumably meant to suggest the prospect of posthumous fame, inscribed with his name followed by the words ‘ARCHITECTOR MAGNAE BRITANIAE’ [sic]. At this stage he was not Surveyor but had only been promised the reversion of the office (he was to succeed to it in 1615), nor had he any major architectural works to his credit; nonetheless the grand ambiguity of the Latin designation conflates the hope with the fact of momentous achievement, and underscores the challenging gaze with which he fixes the viewer. By the 1620s Jones the Surveyor already had the experience of working for one Queen consort, Anna of Denmark (who had died in 1619), initially as designer and producer of court masques and latterly as architect, his chief commission being the Queen’s House at Greenwich, which was eventually to be completed for Henrietta Maria. In 1625 he would have been expecting the new Queen to be calling on his services in both fields, theatrical design and architecture, and have hoped with characteristic confidence that his own decisive ideas on these matters would prevail on a royal newcomer who might exert considerable influence on his career. He had already made a kind of false start on both fronts. The masque Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion,2 prepared in collaboration with Ben Jonson to celebrate Prince Charles’ return from Madrid after the tortuous negotiations over the Spanish match, was scheduled for Twelfth Night 1624, but had to be cancelled 1 See Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986), pl. 34. 2 Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones. The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: Sotheby Parke Bernet and University of California Press, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 362–68. John Peacock was Reader in English at the University of Southampton, where he is now a Visiting Fellow. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 279–294 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119195
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because of an irreconcilable stand-off between the ambassadors of France and Spain about their rights to attend the performance. A year later it was salvaged and revamped as The Fortunate Isles and Their Union,3 after the match had been abandoned and a marriage alliance with France put in its place. Meanwhile the new Catholic chapel attached to St James’s Palace, originally intended for the use of the Infanta Maria, had to be, if not redesigned, at least reconceived by Jones for the use of a French consort and her particular entourage. These were not the first projects where Jones was wrong-footed by the nervous diplomacy of the Spanish match. Back in June 1623, anticipating the arrival of the Infanta in England, James I had despatched a welcoming party of the most eminent privy councillors to Southampton, accompanied by Jones and the celebrated actor Edward Alleyn, who were to arrange ‘Shews and Pageants’; sudden news of a stalemate in the diplomatic negotiations had them recalled abruptly to London.4 More productively, Neptune’s Triumph and the St James’s chapel, similarly held in suspense, were able to be recycled and made practicable in a new context. The building which we now know as the Queen’s Chapel (to distinguish it from the Tudor Chapel Royal of St James’s Palace), first used by Henrietta Maria, was carefully pondered by Jones. One compelling reason is suggested by a design which he made for Neptune’s Triumph and used again when the masque was revised as The Fortunate Isles. It shows the culminating scene, ‘a maritime Palace, or the house of Oceanus’, and is framed by ‘two erected Pillars, dedicated to Neptune’ which bear decorative motifs and monumental Latin inscriptions [Figure 12.1]5. These pillars are copied from a drawing by Federico Zuccaro owned by Jones’ colleague at court, Nicholas Lanier, who was soon to be appointed Master of the King’s Music. The drawing is a study for a large-scale canvas in the Doge’s Palace in Venice, showing the submission of Frederick Barbarossa to Pope Alexander III in front of St Mark’s Basilica6 [Figure 12.2]. Jones has excerpted just the framing device of the pillar (there is only one in Zuccaro’s drawing) for his own very different scene, but while doing so he can scarcely have failed to note that the narrative which it borders represents the submission of a monarch to a pope. This was a central issue in the negotiations over the Spanish match: the Pope had to be petitioned by the Most Catholic King to allow the marriage of the Infanta to a Protestant prince, and, from
3 Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, vol. 1, pp. 369–82. 4 John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James I, 4 vols (London: J. B. Nichols, 1828; reprint New York: AMS Press and Kraus Reprint Corporation, n.d.) vol. 4, p. 873; Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta. The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 120. 5 Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, vol. 1, p. 368, ll. 349–50, p. 365, ll. 4–6, p. 378, pl. 129. 6 E. James Mundy et al., Renaissance into Baroque. Italian Master Drawings by the Zuccari 1550–1600 (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum and Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 260–62, no. 87; James Byam Shaw, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1976), vol. 1, p. 158, no. 553, vol. 2, pl. 301.
chapter 12. inigo jones between a spanish princess and a french queen
Figure 12.1. Inigo Jones, The House of Oceanus, Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion, 1624. Photograph Courtauld Institute Photographic Survey. Copyright Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.
the English point of view, persuaded if possible not to impose on King James over-demanding conditions to do with the treatment of his recusant subjects. In designing a Catholic church for a Protestant metropolis Jones was picking his way through a minefield. Charles and Buckingham had made their clandestine journey to Spain between 18/28 February and 7/17 March, and it was later in March that Jones was first consulted about a suitable residence for the Prince and his bride. He recommended that Somerset House would be more convenient than St James’s Palace, and less costly to fit out, but it was decided to prepare both for the royal couple. In April, the Spanish ambassador inspected the two palaces, and demanded many alterations and improvements, above all a chapel for Catholic worship
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Figure 12.2. After Federico Zuccaro, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa doing homage to Pope Alexander III, c. 1582 (Oxford, Christ Church). Reproduced by permission of the Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.
in each. Jones was ordered ‘to have them done out of hand, and yet with great state and costliness’.7 His plan for a chapel at St James’s was ready by 14/24 May, when a copy of it was sent by Sir George Calvert, Secretary of State, to Madrid; and on 16/26 May, with great ceremony, foundation stones were laid by the Spanish ambassador and his son.8 It turned out that the necessity of haste, and insistent oversight by the Spanish authorities, were factors which Jones was able to take in his stride: the chapel as built, while attending to the demands of both the English and Spanish courts, accords with his own architectural principles. 7 John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carlton, 3/13 May 1625, Elizabeth McClure Thomson (ed.), The Chamberlain Letters (London: John Murray, 1966), p. 307, no. 429. 8 H. M. Colvin et al., The History of the King’s Works (London: HMSO, 1982), vol. 4 (Part II) [1485–1660], p. 248; Kenneth Scott, St James’s Palace. A History (London: Scala, 2010), p. 46.
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Figure 12.3. Inigo Jones, Queen’s Chapel, St James’s Palace, interior. Photograph London Courtauld Institute Gallery.
Although the present fittings are not original — the coat of arms now above the east window, for example, is that of Catherine of Bragança — the interior shows obvious signs of ‘state and costliness’ [Figure 12.3]. The grand Venetian window or Serliana above the altar, articulated with fluted pilasters of the Corinthian order, and the richly carved coffered ceiling with its cornice, are enhanced with selectively applied gilding. By contrast the outside is much plainer [Figure 12.4], as if to minimize or mask the function of the splendid interior as a setting for papist ritual.
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Figure 12.4. Inigo Jones, Queen’s Chapel, St James’s Palace, exterior. Photograph A. F. Kersting, Conway Library, Courtauld Institute, London.
At the same time this plainness has a self-conscious quality, as it is based on an antique precedent. The elevation of the chapel front is adapted from the church of S. Adriano in the Roman Forum, which Jones would have seen when he visited Rome in 1614; a visual record was available among Étienne du Pérac’s prints of Roman ruins [Figure 12.5].9 This image shows a round-headed window in the centre of the façade flanked by two upright rectangular windows, and an emphatic pediment with a modilion cornice, all features found in Jones’ elevation. Early modern guidebooks noted that the building had been dedicated as a church to Saint Adrian of Nicomedia by Pope Honorius I in the seventh century, and most repeated the received opinion that it had originally been the Temple of Saturn.10 We now know it, in its ruthlessly stripped back state, ‘restored’ in the archaeological campaigns of the fascist era, as the Curia Julia or Senate House;11 however, the point for Jones and his contemporaries was that it had been an ancient Roman structure converted into an early Christian church. By using it as a precedent for his chapel Jones was referring to both Roman and Christian antiquity, enacting his classicizing view of architecture on two complementary fronts.
9 Étienne du Pérac, I Vestigi Dell’Antichità Di Roma (Rome: Lorenzo della Vaccheria, 1575), pl. 3; Giles Worsley, Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 107, 111, pl. 127–28. 10 Pietro Martire Felini, Trattato Nuovo Delle Cose Maravigliose Dell’Alma Città Di Roma (Rome: Bartolo meo Zanetti, 1610), p. 155, facsimile, ed. by Stephan Waetzoldt (Berlin: Bruno Hessling, 1969). 11 Margaret R. Scherer, Marvels of Ancient Rome (New York and London: Phaidon, 1956), pp. 70–71, pl. 107–08; Amanda Claridge, Rome. An Oxford Archaeological Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 70–72.
chapter 12. inigo jones between a spanish princess and a french queen
Figure 12.5. Church of S. Adriano, in Étienne du Pérac, I Vestigi Dell’Antichità Di Roma (Rome: Lorenzo della Vaccheria, 1575), pl. 3. Photograph Warburg Institute, London.
More immediately he was paying respects to his principal clients, the Spanish court which, through its representatives, had in effect commissioned the project, even though it was King James who had to foot the bill of over four thousand pounds. By the time that Jones would have seen S. Adriano in 1614 it had become a distinctively Spanish establishment. In 1589 Pope Sixtus V, the energetic promoter of urban renewal, had handed over the neglected fabric of the church to the religious order of Nuestra Señora de la Merced (Our Lady of Mercy) or Mercedarians, launching an expensively funded refurbishment of the interior.12 The order had been founded in Barcelona in the early thirteenth century with the aim of ransoming or rescuing Christian captives from the Moors; since the conclusion of the Reconquista it had extended its activities towards the Ottoman Empire. Its occupancy of S. Adriano gradually gave rise to a more ambitious takeover: the church and its attached convent became a base for setting up a new province of the order in Italy, to be dominated by ‘Spanish religious personnel in perpetuity’, as the new provincial, Fray Hernando de Santiago, put it.13 His invasive policy having misfired, he was recalled to Spain and the Italian province dissolved;14 however the royal arms which he had affixed over the entrance and on the façade of S. Adriano remained in place, to insist that this church was still a Spanish enclave in the historic heart of Rome.15
12 Felini, Trattato, p. 155; Mariano Armellini, Le chiese di Roma, facsimile reprint of 2nd edition, 1891 (Rome: Edizioni del Pasquino, 1982), pp. 157–59. 13 Quintin Perez, ‘Fr. Hernando de Santiago predicador del Siglo de Oro (1575–1639)’, Revista de Filologia Española, 43 (1949), 5–209 (47–48). 14 Bruce Taylor, Structures of Reform. The Mercedarian Order in the Spanish Golden Age (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 381. 15 The armorial shields are still present in the view of the church in Alò Giovannoli, Vedute Degli Antichi Vestigi Di Roma (Rome, 1616), p. [110].
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As the Infanta’s projected place of worship would be a Spanish enclave in London (while prudently located far from the City on the fringes of Westminster), the architectural metamorphosis of S. Adriano into the new chapel of St James performed by Jones had a fitness which would not have been lost on those most closely involved in the matter. Many more not involved would know that James was the patron saint of Spain, making it appropriate for a Spanish bride to be received into a palace bearing his name;16 this may have been the reason why the required provision of a chapel at Somerset House was postponed in favour of first building one at St James’s. The current guidebook available to Jones in Rome in 1614 informed him, under the entry for S. Adriano, that the Mercedarian Order had been founded four centuries earlier by King James I of Aragon,17 a potential prompt, from the 1620s point of view, for the appearance of a new S. Adriano at St James’s. While Jones was allusively hispanicizing the site of the new chapel, the Spanish associations of St James were being elicited and stressed by others concerned with the royal marriage. In Madrid, the contract between Charles and the Infanta was appointed to be signed on 15/25 July, the feast day of St James, while in London the Earl of Carlisle, to celebrate the festival of their patron saint, entertained the ambassadors of Spain to a ‘magnificent’ banquet.18 This context draws in the proprietors of S. Adriano, not only through their reputed royal founder, named for the saint, but also their mission. St James was above all the spiritual protagonist of the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, having, subsequent to the reburial of his body at Compostela in the ninth century, made a miraculous appearance in the Christian army at the battle of Clavijo and helped it to victory.19
16 The original foundation from which the palace evolved was a leper hospital for women, established probably in the eleventh century, and dedicated to St James the Less. In 1209 Edward I granted the inmates the privilege of holding an annual fair for six days beginning on 24 July, as the eve of St James’s Day. This suggests that it came to be assumed that the name of the patron referred to St James the Greater, the supposed apostle of Spain, whose feast day was 25 July (the Feast of St James the Less with St Philip was 1 May); see Scott, St James’s Palace, pp. 16, 19. 17 Felini, Trattato, p. 155. The order was said to have originated with a simultaneous vision of the Blessed Virgin to King James I of Aragon, his confessor St Raymond of Peñafort, and his tutor St Peter Nolasco. Disagreements later emerged about which of the three was to be credited as founder. The Spanish translation of Felini, Trattato, singles out St Raymond, who had been canonized in 1601: Tratado Nuevo De Las Cosas Maravillosas De La Alma Ciudad De Roma […] Compuesto Por P. Pedro Martyr Felini […] Traduzido En Lengua Española por […] Alónso Muñoz […] (Rome: Bartolomeo Zanetti, 1610), p. 166. A bull of Pope Paul V confirming the privileges of the order gives credit to all three while stressing that official sanction came from King James: Bulla S[anctissi]mi D[omini] N[ostri] Pauli […] Papae V. Confirmaciones. Et Innovationis Priviligiorum. Et Bullaru[m] Ordinis Beatae Mariae de Mercede […] (Rome, 1606). 18 By this time the resident agent of Spain, Don Carlos Coloma, had been joined by an ambassador extraordinary, the Marquess of Inojosa. Calendar of State Papers Domestic, James I 1623–1625, p. 29, no. 44 (‘news that on July 15 [i.e. July 25 new style] the contract was to be signed in Spain’); p. 27, no. 30 (‘The Prince and Infanta are to be contracted on St James’s Day’); p. 31, no. 54 (‘Earl of Carlisle […] had the honour of the Spanish ambassadors’ company on St James’s Eve’); p. 31, no. 53 (‘The Spanish ambassadors […] were entertained […] magnificently by the Earl of Carlisle’). In Spain the feast day would have fallen, from the English point of view, on 15 July. 19 T. D. Kendrick, St James in Spain (London: Methuen, 1960), pp. 17–20.
chapter 12. inigo jones between a spanish princess and a french queen
The Mercedarian Order was devoted to liberating Christian captives from the Islamic lands, a mission which matched the optimistic assumption of the Spanish court that the despatch of the Infanta to London would effectively bring freedom to English Catholics oppressed under a heretical regime.20 Jones’ chapel took shape environed by a cluster of associations which, in the diplomatic struggles over the marriage, could be said to be playing to the Spanish lobby. At the same time his design is observant of his own King James’ cautions about how far the Church of England could compromise in the outward and visible dimensions of religious ritual. When the King sent two of Prince Charles’ chaplains, both of a High Church persuasion, to conduct services for him in Madrid, he required them to be flexible but circumspect: I have fully instructed them so as all their behaviour and service shall, I hope, prove decent and agreeable to the purity of the primitive church, and yet as near the Roman form as can lawfully be done, for it hath ever been my way to go with the Church of Rome usque ad aras [as far as the very altars].21 Jones understood this position very well: he made a perfect summary representation of it in the catafalque which he designed in 1625 for the King’s funeral in Westminster Abbey.22 This was adapted from a papal catafalque, that of Sixtus V in 1590, which was however overloaded with representational and ornamental features. Jones simplified it with reference to its own original model, Bramante’s Tempietto on the supposed site of St Peter’s martyrdom, a relatively plain structure which had come to be viewed as a neo-antique monument evoking an ideal apostolic era, ‘the purity of the primitive church’. The result, in Jones’ ‘reformed’ version of his papal prototype, is a kind of luxuriant primitivism, and the same quality can be seen in the chapel at St James’s, with its sober public countenance and its rich interior. Jones could respond sympathetically to the King’s position on the liturgical proprieties of a Christianity which respected its pristine origins because a similar position, expressed in social terms, lies at the heart of his own architectural philosophy: as outwardly every wise man carrieth a gravity in public places, where there is nothing else looked for, yet inwardly hath his imaginacy set free, and sometimes licentiously flying out […] so in architecture the outward ornaments ought to be solid, proportionable according to the rules, masculine and unaffected, whereas within […] varied and composed ornaments […] are most commendable.23
20 Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta, pp. 111, 126–31. 21 James I to Prince Charles and the Marquess of Buckingham, 17/27 March 1623, in G. P. V. Akrigg, Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 397, quoted Worsley, Inigo Jones, p. 134. 22 John Peacock, ‘Inigo Jones’s catafalque for James I’, Architectural History, 25 (1982), 1–5. 23 Edward Chaney (ed.), Inigo Jones’s ‘Roman Sketchbook’, 2 vols (London: Roxburghe Club, 2006), vol. 2, pp. 167–68 (I have modernized Jones’ distractingly idiosyncratic spelling); see also p. 137, where S. Adriano is mentioned twice.
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Notions about the incoherence of social identity and gender roles make this a more complex position than the King’s statement about carefully mediated eirenic compromise, but in practical terms, with the example of the Queen’s Chapel, both views are in accord. The ‘solid […] masculine’ outward demeanour of the building and the richer, more amenable ‘feminine’ interior (actually intended for a principal worshipper who was a woman) spoke to the King’s desire for a balance between apostolic and Catholic ritual forms while satisfying the architect’s criteria of good design. In the end, Jones’ conception of the new chapel at St James’s successfully addresses a number of what could have been conflicting interests. It demonstrates his own architectural principles; it responds to King James’ desire for religious compromise, especially his elastic view of the liturgical proprieties of the ‘primitive church’; and via the associations of its Spanish/Romish model it gestures amicably to the court in Madrid and their envoys in London, who were eager to see it as a beachhead secured in partibus infidelium. With the failure of the Spanish match those associations became irrelevant, and the eventual marriage of Charles to Henrietta Maria, to whose use the chapel passed, meant that it came to be thought about in a different way. As it had been prepared for a Catholic consort, the transition to another of a different nation presented no great problem: Catholicism was an international religion. At the same time the Catholicisms of Spain and France had distinctive cultural (not to mention political) characteristics. Jones had travelled in France and been able to study its reception of the Italian Renaissance tradition of art and architecture, which he continued to do through printed sources, both textual and visual.24 As his new chapel was becoming attached to the household of Henrietta Maria, he acknowledged its changed cultural ambience by adding a French accent to his design in the concluding stages. This feature is to be found in the Queen’s Closet, a private gallery at the west end of the chapel, facing the altar, from which she could assist at Mass and other services apart from the congregation below. The chimneypiece with which Jones framed the fireplace [Figure 12.6] is composed of two elements. The fireplace surround is derived from an illustration in L’Idea Della Archittetura Universale by Palladio’s disciple Vincenzo Scamozzi [Figure 12.7]. The overmantel, more frankly decorative, is in a recognizably French style.25 Its structure and ornament can be paralleled in the Livre D’Architecture of Jean Barbet; although
24 Edward Chaney and Timothy Wilks, The Jacobean Grand Tour. Early Stuart Travellers in Europe (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014); Gordon Higgott, ‘Inigo Jones in Provence’, Architectural History, 26 (1983), 24–34; John Peacock, ‘The French Element in Inigo Jones’s Masque Designs’, in David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 149–68. 25 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’Idea Della Architettura Universale (Venice: Giorgio Valentino, 1615), part 2, p. 165; John Harris and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones. Complete Architectural Drawings (London: Philip Wilson, 1989), pp. 182–85, nos 51–52; John Harris ‘Inigo Jones and his French Sources’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 19 (May 1961), 253–64.
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Figure 12.6. Inigo Jones, Queen’s Chapel, chimneypiece for the Queen’s Closet. Photograph RIBA Library, Drawings and Archives Collection.
this was not published in Paris until 163326 (and used by Jones as a design source thereafter), it exemplifies the format and the motifs which Jones uses, such as scrolled pediments, reclining angels, hanging garlands, cherubs supporting an 26 Jean Barbet, Livre D’Architecture d’Autels et de Cheminees (Paris: Jean Barbet, 1633), facsimile reprint, ed. by Theodore Besterman, 2 vols (Portland, Oregon: Collegium Graphicum, 1972).
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Figure 12.7. Vincenzo Scamozzi, design for a fireplace, in L’Idea Della Architettura Universale (Venice: Giorgio Valentino, 1615), part 2, p. 165. Photograph Warburg Institute.
armorial cartouche. The parallels suggest that in 1625, as he was perfecting the chapel for its new occupant, Jones had similar French designs supplied to or pressed on him by Henrietta Maria or her agents, prompting his first essay in the style Louis XIII. In his surviving drawing for the chimneypiece two different g raphic media are used. The entire post-Palladian fire surround and the architectural matrix of the overmantel are outlined firmly but reticently with scorelines and graphite, while the decorative features of the overmantel appear more salient, depicted with brown ink and brown wash.27 The contrast suggests that these French motifs are accretions added on to the neo-classical infrastructure. Jones’ act of stylistic deference to the new Queen has the character, perhaps inevitably, of an afterthought. Whether he was, in the language of architectural design, proffering the Queen a compliment or responding to a demand is not clear. A subsequent project from the earliest days of the royal marriage suggests constraints being laid upon him. On Shrove Tuesday 1626 Henrietta Maria and her ladies performed a French pastoral play at Somerset House, followed by a masque. The play was Arténice, by Honorat de Bueil, Seigneur de Racan, first performed in Paris in 1619 and published in 1625.28 The Queen’s production was mounted by Jones, who 27 Harris and Higgott, Inigo Jones, pp. 184–85, no. 52. 28 Honorat de Bueil, Seigneur de Racan, Racan, II. Les Bergeries, ed. by Louis Arnould, (Paris: Droz, 1937); Jean Parrish and William A. Jackson, ‘Racan’s L’Arténice, an Addition to the English Canon’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 14 (1960), 183–90; Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta
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Figure 12.8. Inigo Jones, Proscenium and standing scene, Arténice, 1626. Photo graph Courtauld Institute Photographic Survey. Copyright Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.
designed the temporary stage and theatre space, the scenery, and probably the costumes. Only one of his drawings survives: a set-design framed by a proscenium [Figure 12.8], a detailed and elaborate scenic composition.29 It relies on a variety of visual sources, most notably the three scenic types, corresponding to the three basic dramatic genres, represented in the architectural treatise of Sebastiano Serlio, whose illustrations of the Tragic, Comic and Satyric (i.e. pastoral) Scenes were hugely influential in European scenography from the sixteenth century onwards.30 Jones makes a disconcerting mélange of all three of Serlio’s Scenes, mixing the vernacular domestic architecture of the Comic with the antique classicism of the Tragic and the rustic woodland cottages of the Satyric. Disparate items are marshalled into a perspective scheme, but the result is miscellaneous and awkward. Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 35–52. 29 Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, vol. 1, pp. 385–87, pl. 135. 30 Serlio Sebastiano, Sebastiano Serlio On Architecture, ed. and trans. by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), vol. 1 (Books I–V), pp. 83–91.
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To compare the design with the text of the play is to realize that Jones has attempted to fit the various shifting locales of the action into a single scenic composition. One can identify the pastoral village with its shepherds’ huts, the grander house of Lucidas the rich suitor of Arténice the eponymous heroine, the temple of the Bonne Déesse who is the presiding divinity of the region, and in the background the ruins which are the haunt of the magician Polistène. It seems odd that Jones, who had by now 20 years’ experience in mastering the technology of scene changes, should opt for such an old-fashioned and constraining solution to the problem of multiple locales. The reason would seem to be an intervention by the Queen. Arténice had first been performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne, where the dominant scenic convention was that of décoration simultanée: the various locales of a dramatic narrative were represented all together in one overall scenic composition, unified by a perspective scheme, and the action focused attention on whichever part became relevant at a given moment.31 Jones has adopted this practice, for the first and only time in his long and usually commanding involvement with the Stuart court theatre. It appears that the Queen, fresh from the theatrical culture of Paris, required him to do so. These were early days in their relationship. Jones’ later work on the Queen’s second (and eventually preferred) chapel at Somerset House and on her pastorals and masques of the 1630s has an inventiveness and assurance which suggests that they came to terms over issues of style and culture.32 The unsettling transition from a Spanish to a French match did not, in the end, leave the self-styled ‘Architector Magnae Britaniae’ on the back foot for very long.
31 Pierre Pasquier (ed.), Le Mémoire de Mahelot. Mémoire pour la décoration des pièces qui se représentent par les Comédiens du Roi (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005). 32 Harris and Higgott, Inigo Jones, pp. 193–215; Peacock, ‘French Element’, pp. 154–62.
chapter 12. inigo jones between a spanish princess and a french queen
Bibliography Early Printed Books
Barbet, Jean, Livre D’Architecture d’Autels et de Cheminees (Paris: Jean Barbet, 1633), facsimile reprint, 2 vols (Portland, Oregon: Collegium Graphicum, 1972) Bulla S[anctissi]mi D. N. Pauli […] Papae V. Confirmacionis. Et Innovationis Priviligiorum. Et Bullaru[m] Ordinis Beatae Mariae de Mercede […] (Madrid?, 1606) Du Pérac, Étienne, I Vestigi Dell’Antichità Di Roma (Rome: Lorenzo della Vaccheria, 1575) Felini, Pietro Martire, Tratado Nuevo De Las Cosas Maravillosas De La Alma Ciudad De Roma […]. Traduzido En Lengua Española por […] Alónso Muñoz (Rome: Bartolomeo Zanetti, 1610) Felini, Pietro Martire, Trattato Nuovo Delle Cose Maravigliose Dell’Alma Città Di Roma (Rome: Bartolomeo Zanetti, 1610), facsimile reprint, ed. by Stephan Waetzoldt (Berlin: Bruno Hessling, 1969) Giovannoli, Alò, Vedute Degli Antichi Vestigi Di Roma (Rome: [n.pub.], 1616) Scamozzi, Vincenzo, L’Idea Della Archittetura Universale (Venice: Giorgio Valentino, 1615) Primary Sources
Calendar of State Papers Domestic, James I 1623–1625 (London: Longman, 1859) Chaney, Edward (ed.), Inigo Jones’s ‘Roman Sketchbook’, 2 vols (London: Roxburghe Club, 2006) Nichols, John, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols (London: J. Nichols, 1828), facsimile reprint (New York: AMS Press and Kraus Reprint Corporation, n.d.) Orgel, Stephen, and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones. The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: Sotheby Parke Bernet and University of California Press, 1973) Pasquier, Pierre (ed.), Le Mémoire de Mahelot. Mémoire pour la décoration des pièces qui se représentent par les Comédiens du Roi (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005) Racan, Honorat de Bueil, Seigneur de, Racan II. Les Bergeries, ed. by Louis Arnould (Paris: Droz, 1937) Serlio, Sebastiano, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, ed. and trans. by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), vol. 1 (Books I–V) Thomson, Elizabeth McClure (ed.), The Chamberlain Letters (London: John Murray, 1966)
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Armellini, Mariano, Le chiese di Roma (Rome: Tipografia Vaticana, 1891), facsimile reprint (Rome: Edizioni del Pasquino, 1982) Britland, Karen, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Chaney, Edward, and Timothy Wilks, The Jacobean Grand Tour. Early Stuart Travellers in Europe (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014) Claridge, Amanda, Rome. An Oxford Archaeological Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Colvin, H. M., et al., The History of the King’s Works (London: HMSO, 1982), vol. 4 (Part II) [1485–1660] Harris, John, ‘Inigo Jones and his French Sources’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 19 (1961), 253–64 Harris, John, and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones. Complete Architectural Drawings (London: Philip Wilson, 1989) Higgott, Gordon, ‘Inigo Jones in Provence’, Architectural History, 26 (1983), 24–34 Kendrick, T. D., St James in Spain (London: Methuen, 1960) Munday, E. James, et al., Renaissance into Baroque. Italian Master Drawings by the Zuccari 1550–1600 (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum and Cambridge University Press, 1989) Parrish, Jean, and William A. Jackson, ‘Racan’s L’Arténice, an Addition to the English Canon’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 14 (1960), 183–90 Peacock, John, ‘Inigo Jones’s Catafalque for James I’, Architectural History, 25 (1982), 1–5 —— , ‘The French Element in Inigo Jones’s Masque Designs’, in David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 149–68 Perez, Quintin, ‘Fr. Hernando De Santiago predicador del Siglo de Oro (1575–1639)’, Revista de Filología Española, 43 (1949), 5–209 Redworth, Glyn, The Prince and the Infanta. The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003) Scherer, Margaret R., Marvels of Ancient Rome (New York and London: Phaidon, 1956) Scott, Kenneth, St James’s Palace. A History (London: Scala, 2010) Shaw, James Byam, Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) Strong, Roy, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986) Taylor, Bruce, Structures of Reform. The Mercedarian Order in the Spanish Golden Age (Leiden: Brill, 2000) Worsley, Giles, Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007)
Gordon Higgott
Chapter 13. ‘Mutual Fruitfulness’ A Nuptial Allegory on Queen Henrietta Maria’s Bedchamber Ceiling at the Queen’s House, Greenwich The painted decoration on the ceiling of the Bedchamber at the Queen’s House, Greenwich, is the only work of its kind to survive from the palaces and buildings associated with Queen Henrietta Maria, all of which, apart from St James’s Palace and its Catholic chapel (1623–1627), have since been demolished [Plates VII and VIII].1 Executed between about 1637 and 1640, the ceiling incorporates royal arms, personal emblems, and monograms in a complex scheme of grotesque and stylized ornament of antique and Renaissance inspiration. Of particular interest are the four cartouches at the angles of the soffit, each with a different impresa, consisting of an allegorical motif and a Latin motto on a banner beneath [Plate IX A, B, C and D]. The mottoes form a single statement when read anti-clockwise around the soffit from the west to the east sides, although the exact sequence is not easy to determine. They are, on the west side: ‘mutua faecunditas (mutual fruitfulness)’ [A] and ‘ardet aeternum (burns forever)’ [B], and on the east side ‘spes reipublicae (the hope of the state)’ [C] and ‘cum odore candor (splendour [or beauty] with fragrance)’ [D]. The cartouches are part of a decorative border that was intended as a frame for a large ceiling canvas by the Bolognese artist Guido Reni (1575–1642), Bacchus
* I am most grateful to Pieter van der Merwe for commenting on several drafts of this paper and for surveying the ceiling to establish its dimensions. My sincere thanks go to Elizabeth McGrath for her valuable comments on the Latin mottoes in the cartouches, and to Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Erin Griffey, Suzanne Higgott and Jeremy Wood for their helpful comments on the text and the reference material. 1 The fullest published account of the Queen’s House is in John Bold, et al., Greenwich. An Architectural History of the Royal Hospital for Seamen and the Queen’s House (New Haven and London: Yale Uni versity Press, 2000), pp. 34–93. See also Pieter van der Merwe, The Queen’s House (London: Scala Arts and Heritage Publishers Ltd, 2017), a concise and well illustrated history of the building. The only detailed discussion of the iconography of the Bedchamber ceiling is by Sophie L. Carney in ‘The Queen’s House at Greenwich: The Material Culture of the Courts of Queen Anna of Denmark and Queen Henrietta Maria (1603–1669)’. Doctoral Thesis, University of Roehampton, 2013, Chapter 3, ‘The Queen’s Bedchamber in the Queen’s House at Greenwich: A Case Study of the 1630s Decorative Scheme’. I am grateful to Dr Carney for her advice at an early stage in this study. Gordon Higgott is an independent architectural historian specializing in design practice in the early modern period. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 295–320 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119196
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and Ariadne on the Island of Naxos. This subject had been chosen for the Queen by Cardinal Francesco Barberini in Rome in early 1638, but when the painting was delivered to him in August 1640, he found the artist’s rendering of the subject ‘lascivious’ and declined to send it to her. It never arrived at Greenwich and, while its fate is clarified below, its immediate replacement was Giulio Romano’s Daedalus and Icarus, already in the royal collection. The present ceiling painting, by an unidentified artist and traditionally called Aurora Dispersing the Shades of the Night, was installed in the early eighteenth century, having been painted (or at least adjusted) to fill the void created when the Daedalus and Icarus was sold as part of the royal family’s goods in 1649–1651 and subsequently lost. Reni’s Bacchus and Ariadne is known from an etching by his assistant, G. B. Bolognini [Plate X], and a smaller-scale copy by the same artist in a private collection in Montevideo, Uruguay. New information on the dimensions of Reni’s lost painting shows that it would have been significantly larger than the in situ framing of both the eighteenth-century Aurora and its lost Giulio Romano predecessor [Plate XI]. The four cartouches would have been close to the angles of Guido Reni’s canvas and must have been intended to offer a commentary on the Bacchus and Ariadne myth, while also conveying a message about the fruitful union of Queen Henrietta Maria and King Charles 12 to 15 years after their marriage. By this time they had living children, and since 1632 they had celebrated their growing family in portraits commissioned from the royal painter, Anthony Van Dyck. In what way did the ceiling of the Queen’s House Bedchamber offer a commentary on the progeny of the King and Queen? This chapter will examine the ceiling and its decoration within the context of the villa of which it is part, and will consider the cartouches in the light of what is now known about Guido Reni’s lost masterpiece. Queen Henrietta Maria’s Villa at Greenwich Palace The Bedchamber ceiling was painted during a final phase of work on the building after the main fabric had been finished in 1635 [Plate XII and Figure 13.1].2 The Surveyor of the King’s Works, Inigo Jones, had begun this unusual H-plan villa in October 1616 as a garden retreat for Queen Anna of Denmark during the summer hunting season but left it unfinished at ground level when the Queen fell ill just 18 months later (she died in 1619). Queen Henrietta Maria received
2 See Bold et al., Greenwich, pp. 34–93; George Chettle, The Queen’s House, Greenwich. Being the Fourteenth Monograph of the London Survey Committee (London: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and the Survey of London, 1937); and Howard Colvin (ed.), The History of the King’s Works (London: HMSO, 1982), vol. 4 (Part II) [1485–1660], pp. 114–15 and 119–22. For more recent assessments of the design history and functioning of the villa, see Gordon Higgott, ‘The Design and Setting of Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House, 1616–1640’, The Court Historian, 11 (2) (December 2006), 135–48; Gordon Higgott, ‘Inigo Jones’s Designs for the Queen’s House in 1616’, in Malcolm Airs and Geoffrey Tyack (eds), The Renaissance Villa in Britain, 1500–1700 (Reading: Spire Books, 2007), pp. 140–66.
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Figure 13.1. Plan of the Queen’s House at first-floor level in 1635–1640, Greenwich. © Alan Fagan and Gordon Higgott.
Greenwich Palace, its hunting park and associated lands in August 1629 in a delayed settlement from her marriage four years earlier.3 She engaged Jones as her personal Surveyor, paying him a pension of £20 a year, and in June 1632 she issued the first of a series of warrants to her Master of Works, Henry Wickes, as advance payments for the completion and decoration of the building, the last in March 1638 for £1000 bringing the total to £7500.4 She paid Jones a bounty of £100 in March 1634 when the main structure was well advanced. He received another gift of £100 in the accounting year 1 October 1637 to 30 September 1638, when work on the interiors was in hand, and a final gift of the same amount in the corresponding period from 1639 to 1640.5 The Queen’s personal financing of the works has left a gap in the historical record for the completion of her villa. No accounts from that period have come
3 Susan Alexandra Sykes, ‘Henrietta Maria’s “House of Delight”: French Influence and Iconography in the Queen’s House, Greenwich’, Apollo, 133 (May 1991), 332. 4 Jones’ pension is first recorded in the Declared Accounts for 1629–1630: TNA SC6/CHASI/1696. He is presented as ‘her’ surveyor in the Declared account for 1630–1631: Wynnstay MS 174 (Account rolls of Sir Richard Wynn; reference kindly supplied by Erin Griffey). Colvin, King’s Works, vol. 4, p. 119, citing National Library of Wales, Wynnstay MSS, nos 175, 176, 179, 181, 183; see also Bold et al., Greenwich, p. 53. 5 The payments to Jones were on 6/16 March 1634 for £100 (SC6/CHAS1/1698), 22 June/2 July 1638 for £100 (SC6/CHASI/1701), and a £100 ‘bounty’ in the 1639–1640 year (Wynnstay MS 185: Account Rolls of Sir Richard Wynn; declared 22 July/02 August 1641). This final payment may relate to work on the Bedchamber ceiling at the end of that period.
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down to us from the royal Office of Works for the tasks and materials, dates and names of personnel involved, save for minor payments for picture frames and other moveable items.6 Nevertheless, there is clear evidence that the Queen changed the emphasis and directional focus of the two-part lodging around the time Jones completed the architectural shell in 1635. A stone plaque carved ‘Henrica Maria Regina 1635’ over the central arched window on the north side signals that this front, in the palace garden, would be an entrance in its own right, and would, in due course, take precedence over the south range in the hunting park, which was originally conceived as the main approach. Over the next two years Jones added a balustraded terrace to the north range, facing the River Thames, with a central staircase to provide direct access from the Queen’s Garden of the palace to the Great Hall of the villa.7 He designed chimneypieces for rooms at both levels in this range and provided the first-floor Cabinet Room and its closet with enriched timber beamed ceilings and carved entablatures.8 By 1639 Jones had overseen the fitting of Gentileschi’s nine paintings on The Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown in the soffit panels of the beamed ceiling that he had designed for the Great Hall.9 In the same period, however, no decorative work was undertaken in the principal apartments in the south range. Jones had provided this half of the building with a large open-well stone staircase and a loggia at first-floor level for viewing the hunt in the park. The two ranges — separated by a public road between the Queen’s Garden and the Park — were connected by a central bridge room. But the south range remained bare until a major reordering of the building for King Charles II and Catherine of Bragança, begun in August 1661, when outer bridge-rooms were added to create suites of apartments for the King and Queen on the upper east and west sides of what thereby became a more integrated square block.10 The immediate spur was for the temporary re-accommodation of Henrietta Maria on her post-Restoration return to England in July 1662, when she reoccupied the adjusted villa until September that year, but using a new Bedchamber in the south range. The Decoration of the Bedchamber When work stopped at the Queen’s House sometime in late 1640 or 1641 the original Bedchamber, on the west side of the north range, was the most richly decorated of all the principal chambers in the villa. The Cabinet Room, on the east side, does not appear to have fulfilled its intended purpose as a formal reception 6 See Bold et al., Greenwich, p. 65. 7 Jones’ initial design for a rusticated door in the front basement wall of the terrace is dated 1635; see Bold et al., Greenwich, pp. 54–55 and fig. 75. 8 For Jones’ chimneypiece designs, two of which are dated 1637, see John Harris and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones. Complete Architectural Drawings (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1989), exh. cat., nos 72–76, pp. 228–35. 9 Bold et al., Greenwich, pp. 65–68. 10 Bold et al., Greenwich, pp. 76–79.
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space. It was named the ‘Cabinet roome’ by Jones on his sketch design for its chimneypiece in 1637,11 but in 1639 it was described vaguely in two separate documents as ‘the Queenes room with glases’ (a reference to mirrors fixed on the walls).12 The room was left unfinished in 1641 after Jacob Jordaens, in Antwerp, had sent only eight of the 22 paintings of the legend of Cupid and Psyche that King Charles had commissioned for the walls and ceiling. The King had begun this complex and anonymous commissioning process in November 1640, around the time the decoration in the Bedchamber was being completed.13 The only contemporary reference to the decoration on the ceiling of the Bedchamber is an entry in the account book of the King’s master mason, Nicholas Stone, in July 1639, which mentions ‘the Bedchamber whar the rouef [roof] is painted’.14 The ceiling would have been painted by artists in the team of the Sergeant-Painter, John de Critz, who included Matthew Goodricke, George Carew (or Cary), Thomas de Critz and Edward Pearce senior (fl. 1630–d. 1658). Pearce was an interior decorator who was also employed as a scene-painter for the settings of court masques and plays designed by Inigo Jones. By the mid-1630s he had become a pre-eminent member of the Sergeant-Painter’s team and was especially active at the Queen’s palaces, notably at Somerset House from 1636 to 1638.15 In 1640 he published a suite of 12 designs for decorative friezes, and
11 Harris and Higgott, Inigo Jones, no. 75, pp. 220–21, titled by Jones, ‘Grenwich 1637 / Cabinet roome above / behind the round stair’. The scale of this preliminary design shows that it can only have been for the principal chamber, and not — despite long misunderstanding — for the adjoining small closet, east of the round stair (and later knocked through to the 1662 East Bridge Room). As with Jones’ design for the chimneypiece of the Bedchamber closet on the west side, it probably had a simple fire surround with console brackets and an enriched frieze below the mantel shelf; see Harris and Higgott, Inigo Jones, no. 72, pp. 228–29; and Bold et al., Greenwich, pp. 63–64. 12 Bold et al., Greenwich, Appendix 7 ( John Webb’s transcript of the instructions to Jordaens ‘for the paintings in the seeling of the Queenes roome with glases at Greenwich 1639’). The other such reference is by Nicholas Stone, to ‘the rom with glases’ in July 1639; see Walter Spiers, ‘The NoteBook and Account Book of Nicholas Stone’, The Walpole Society, 7 (1918–1919), p. 118. 13 See Dora Schlugleit, ‘L’Abbé de Scaglia, Jordaens et “L’histoire de Psyché” de Greenwich-House (1639–1642)’, Revue Belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, 7 (2) (April to June 1637), 139–66; Bold et al., Greenwich, pp. 74–76; Hans Devisscher and Nora de Poorter (eds), Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), Volume 1. Paintings and Tapestries (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1993), pp. 9–12; and Erin Griffey, On Display. Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (New York and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2015), p. 109. The evidence for the delivery of eight pictures is in the list headed ‘Pictures at Greenw[i]ch’, in the Parliamentary Inventory of 1649–1651. The contents of this list of nine items suggest it refers to the Queen’s House. The fourth item is ‘Eight peeces in one. roome. P[ainte]r. at [£200]; see Oliver Miller (ed.), The Inventories and Valuations of the King’s Goods, 1649–1651, The Walpole Society, 43 (Glasgow: The University Press, 1972), p. 137. 14 Spiers, ‘Note-Book and Account Book’, p. 118. 15 In an account for decorating the Queen’s apartments at Somerset House in 1637–1638, nearly a third of the costs of decorative works in the Queen’s apartments were paid to Pearce alone (£45 0s 19d of £147 15s 3d; TNA, E351/3271). His tasks included painting ‘with foliage 31 ½ pillausters’, ‘writing the Queen Majesties name in the tables of the Chimney pieces in the old presence and privy chamber in gold’, and for painting ‘4 shields [cartouches] in the table [overmantel] in the Chimney peice’. For the documentary evidence for Pearce’s work as a decorative painter, see Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837, 2 vols (London: Country Life Ltd, 1962), vol. 1, pp. 206–07, and pp. 40–42.
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in 1647 a suite of grotesque panels which he had etched himself.16 Four of the latter were discovered in the Rijksmuseum collections in the late 1990s. They reveal a sophisticated artist capable of devising multi-layered compositions of grotesque ornaments. These etched designs are similar to those on the Bedchamber ceiling and on the ceiling of the Single Cube Room at Wilton House, Wiltshire (1649–1651), where Pearce is known to have painted grotesques.17 The scrolling acanthus and cartouches at the ends of the soffit panels of the Bedchamber ceiling are close to motifs in his suite of decorative friezes of 1640, in particular plate 12 of this suite showing a female bust in a cartouche with a cornucopia sprouting from its scrollwork border [Plates XIII and XIV]. The primary focus of the Bedchamber would have been the chimney breast, with a chimneypiece and a framed painting above. The present chimneypiece is a 1980s cast replica of a 1630s example at Charlton House, Greenwich, which may have been taken there from the Queen’s House in 1662 (perhaps from the Cabinet Room rather than the Bedchamber).18 Jones’ two designs for the chimneypieces of the Bedchamber and its adjoining closet are similar to the Charlton House example in omitting a fixed overmantel frame. The overmantel frame was an integral component of contemporary French chimneypieces that were known to Jones from prints and drawings sent from France in the mid-1630s.19 He adapted several of these examples in designs for chimneypieces with overmantels at Somerset House and Oatlands Palace in 1636, and in two initial studies for examples at the Queen’s House, one of which is dated 1637.20 Omitting the overmantel from the Bedchamber chimneypiece left the wall above
16 For these prints, see Simon Jervis, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Book of Engraved Ornament’, The Burlington Magazine, 128 (1986), 894–900 and figs 49–60; Peter Fuhring, Ornament Prints in the Rijksmuseum, Volume II, The Seventeenth Century, Part I (Rotterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2004), nos 600–11 (1640 set) and 612–16 (1647 set). For a full discussion of Pearce’s output as a draughtsman and designer, see Gordon Higgott and the late A. V. Grimstone, ‘Drawings by Edward Pearce Senior (fl. c. 1630–d. 1658): Painter, Decorator and Interior Designer’, The Walpole Society, 82 (2020), pp. 1–113. 17 John Aubrey, writing in the 1680s, described Pearce as having been responsible for ‘all the grotescopainting about the new buildings’. See John Britton, The Natural History of Wiltshire by John Aubrey F.R.S., edited, and elucidated by notes, by John Britton (Wiltshire Topographical Society, 1847), p. 85; reprinted in K. G. Ponting (ed.), Aubrey’s Natural History of Wiltshire: A Reprint of The Natural History of Wiltshire by John Aubrey (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1969). The traditional attribution of the Single Cube Room ceiling to Matthew Goodricke is erroneous as it is now known that the painter died in 1645 (see Mary Edmond, ‘Limners and Picturemakers’, The Walpole Society, 47 (1980), pp. 175–76). 18 John Newman, ‘Strayed from the Queen’s House’, Architectural History, 27 (1984), 33–35. The scrollwork cartouche of the chimneypiece is similar to that carved in wood in the frieze of the chimney breast of the Cabinet Room. 19 See John Harris, ‘Inigo Jones and his French Sources’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 19 (May 1961), 253–64. 20 Harris and Higgott, Inigo Jones, nos 63, 64, 69, 70, 75 (‘Grenwich 1637 / Cabinet room above / behind the round stair’) and 76; pp. 206–09, 220–23, 232–35.
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Plate VII. The Queen’s Bedchamber, looking west in 2014, the Queen’s House, Greenwich. © Gordon Higgott.
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Plate VIII. The ceiling of the Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich, c. 1637–c. 1640, by Edward Pearce senior (attrib.) and others in the team of the Sergeant-Painter, John de Critz, 5.94 m × 9.95 m, oil on plaster and wood; with a central ceiling painting of Aurora Dispersing the Shades of the Night, Anon., early eighteenth century, oil on canvas, 1.9 m. × 4.12 m. North is on the left, but as the ceiling is shown in reflected view from below, west is at the top and east is at the bottom.. © NMM, D4949.
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A
D
B
C
PLATE IX A–D. The four cartouches in the angles of the ceiling soffit, in their positions on plan, with north at the top and west on the left; marked A, B, C, D, in the sequence they were intended to be read, from north-west (A) to south-west (B), then from south-east (C), to north-east (D), the Queen’s Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich. © Gordon Higgott.
PLATE X. Giovanni Battista Bolognini (c. 1650s), after Guido Reni’s Bacchus and Ariadne on the Island of Naxos (1637–1640), etching on paper, 49.2 cm × 106.0 cm, with a dedication to Carlo II, Duke of Mantua, and the addition of his coat of arms at top centre. Etching on paper. 49.2 cm x 106.0 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum, Inv. 1874,0808.704.
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PlatE XI. Overlay of a reconstructed outline of Guido Reni’s lost painting, Bacchus and Ariadne on the Island of Naxos, on the image in Plate VIII. © Gordon Higgott and NMM D4949.
PlatE XII. The Queen’s House, Greenwich, from the north-west in 2014. © Gordon Higgott
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Plate XIII. The south-east angle of the ceiling soffit, showing the corner cartouche and the central roundel with an ‘HMCR’ monogram, the Queen’s Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich. © Gordon Higgott
Plate XIV. Edward Pearce senior, design for a decorative frieze, published by Robert Peake in 1640, etching on paper, probably by William Faithorne, 9.3 cm × 27.9 cm, Plate 12 of 12. © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1951-195D.
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Plate XV. Central and east side of the frieze and cove above the chimney breast on the south side of the Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich. © Gordon Higgott.
Plate XVI. Decorative frame in the centre of the north cove, enclosing a cartouche with the arms of France, conjoined in a heart-shaped shield with those of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and surmounted by a French crown, the Bedchamber, the Queen’s House, Greenwich. © Gordon Higgott.
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Plate XVII. The Portland stone pediment over the door to the bridge room on the first-floor gallery of the Great Hall, with a cartouche and heart-shaped shield showing the royal arms of France conjoined with those of England, Scotland, and Ireland, surmounted by an English crown, the Queen’s House, Greenwich. © Gordon Higgott.
Plate XVIII. Trompe l’oeil architectural frame in the centre of the west cove of the Bedchamber, with a cartouche enclosing the French royal arms. Above is a female figure holding a sceptre and crown, the Queen’s House, Greenwich. © Gordon Higgott.
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unimpeded for the display of a large framed canvas, and allowed the Queen to change the painting whenever she wished.21 The chimney breast continues into the ceiling above the main cornice as a painted frieze of grotesques, at the centre of which is a trompe l’oeil black-marble plaque with the Queen’s name in gold, ‘Henrica Maria Regina’ [Plate XV]. In the cove above is a symmetrical group of five larger compartments of grotesques, those at the ends with seated female deities in four-column pavilions, while at the centre, above the plaque, is a French royal crown held up by mermaid-like supporters beneath a suspended baldachin. This regal emblem is answered in the cove on the opposite side of the room by a heart-shaped conjugal royal coat of arms in a cartouche, with the arms of England, Scotland, and Ireland on the left, and France on the right [Plate XVI]. The cartouche is set within an elaborate frame of panelled pilasters, filled with ornaments and flanked by harpies. Above is a French royal crown between scrolled half pediments. The unusual heart-shaped crest signifies the loving union of Charles and Henrietta Maria and marks the position of the royal bed, although there is no evidence of one having been installed.22 The conjoined royal arms are repeated in the stone cartouche in the pediment over the door to the bridge room on the south side of the gallery around the Great Hall, but here the crest bears up an English crown surmounted by a crowned lion [Plate XVII]. The crowned lion was the King’s impresa on the proscenium arch of Jones’ masque for Charles I, Coelum Britannicum, performed in February 1634 (see below). Its appearance over the bridge-room door may have signalled the approach to apartments intended for the King in the south range. The long axis of the Bedchamber is marked at the centres of the east and west coves by trompe l’oeil architectural frames, each with a cartouche displaying the three golden fleurs-de-lis of the Bourbon dynasty on a blue background, surmounted by a French crown. The cartouches are held up by putti against a rich backdrop of blue drapery swags and festoons, and the whole is framed by figured pilasters topped by console brackets in deep perspective view [Plate XVIII]. Above, in the east cove, is a scrollwork frame enclosing a draped female figure holding a sceptre and crown, signifying the Queen’s royal majesty. The equivalent figure in the west cove holds a palm frond, denoting triumph. Both figures may anticipate the Princess Ariadne in Guido Reni’s painting, as she was immortalized when her crown was transformed into a constellation of stars. At the centres of the west and east ends of the ceiling soffit are blue roundels with 21 See Griffey, On Display, p. 99 (on ‘big’ pictures in the bedchamber at Somerset House), p. 115, and pp. 129–32 (with discussion of her Palma Giovane, Penitent Magdalene, 186.2 × 160.6 cm, a devotional work of a type that she favoured for her bedchambers and closets). 22 Carney, ‘The Queen’s House at Greenwich’, pp. 125–26. A bed was in this position in the room from the late 1960s until refurbishment work of 1986–1990, after which a ‘chair of state’ was placed in front of the window of the west wall, opposite the door, to simulate a furnishing scheme of the late 1660s. While this position conformed with later seventeenth-century practice, it blocked the window, and was removed in another refurbishment in 1999, when the house was returned to a gallery space. See Bold et al., Greenwich, fig. 102, and Van der Merwe, Queen’s House, p. 51.
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the Queen’s monogram in gold, ‘HMCR’, consisting of ‘HMR’, intertwined with a slightly smaller ‘C’ for Charles [Plate XIII]. The gold on blue echoes the colouring of the French royal arms in the adjoining coves, while the subordinate ‘C’ appears to affirm the Queen’s pre-eminence over the King in this her personal space. The same ‘HMCR’ monogram appears over the chimneypiece in the Cabinet Room in an oval cartouche, where it is part of a continuous, gilded-blue, carved wooden frieze of scrolling acanthus with ‘HMR’ monograms (lacking the ‘C’) that alternate with fleurs-de-lis motifs at regular intervals.23 Guido Reni’s Bacchus and Ariadne on the Island of Naxos The bi-axial scheme of decoration on the ceiling as a whole directs the viewer to the four allegorical motifs in cartouches in the angles of the soffit. This soffit must be imagined with Guido Reni’s enormous canvas framed by panels of painted decoration, the whole serving as a broad canopy over the space between the royal bed and the chimney breast. The Queen had approached the Bolognese artist for a mythological scene for her Bedchamber ceiling in March 1637 through the mediation of Cardinal Francesco Barberini in Rome. Barberini’s initial choice of subject was ‘Cephalus and Aurora’ from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a legend about Aurora, the goddess of light and dawn, failing in her attempt to seduce the huntsman, Cephalus, who remained faithful to his chaste and beautiful wife Procris, and she to him, but with mortal consequences for them both.24 Barberini may have thought the tragic conclusion of this tale inappropriate as an allegory for the union of Charles and Henrietta Maria, and by January 1638 he had changed the subject to ‘Ariadne found by Bacchus’. This is a more straightforward tale from Ovid about the loving encounter of Bacchus with the princess from Crete, whom Theseus had abandoned on the island of Naxos after vanquishing the Minotaur.25 However, when Cardinal Francesco saw the completed painting in Rome in August 1640 he was dismayed, and wrote to Conte Carlo Rossetti, the papal agent in London: I have received the painting of Ariadne but, both for the story and for the way in which the artist has chosen to depict it, the painting appears to me to be lascivious. I hesitate to send it for fear of further scandalizing these Heretics [Protestants], especially since the subject was chosen here in Rome. I will have a sketch made and sent to you, and if these things bother neither the Queen nor Father Philip [the Queen’s confessor] we will have to let it appear that Her Majesty ordered everything and that I was solicitously carrying out her commands. The truth is I do not think that Guido has done 23 Van der Merwe, Queen’s House, pp. 54–55. Restoration of the Cabinet Room in 2015–2016 included reinstatement of the projecting chimney breast. 24 See Ovid, Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation, trans. by David Raeburn with an Introduction by Denis Feeney (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 7.695–862, pp. 283–91. 25 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8.173–82, pp. 302–03.
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a finer painting and, considering his age, he will not be painting any more. But, as I say, its faults are serious ones in so much as they offend decorum.26 In February 1641 Barberini was preparing to send the painting but remained concerned about its impropriety ‘in these parliamentary times’, an allusion to the Long Parliament which had assembled in opposition to the King on 3/13 November 1640.27 The offence lay in the near-nudity of the figures in a nuptial allegory that associated Ariadne and the god of wine with Queen Henrietta Maria and King Charles [Plate X].28 Ariadne is shown seated on a rock being presented to Bacchus by Venus in a gesture that signals their forthcoming union. Cupid flies overhead pointing to Ariadne’s crown of stars, held aloft by a putto. The figure of Victory, with a palm branch and laurel wreath, advances in the sky on the right. Below, a procession of bacchantes signifies the triumph of human ‘fruitfulness’ for in the sky at the left Chastity departs from the scene holding a stem of white lilies, while below her two putti are planting a vine, symbolizing fertility and fecundity. The painting was eventually sent to the Queen when she was in exile in Paris seven years later. She was obliged to sell it to pay debts in 1648, and in 1650 the widow of the purchaser (the finance minister Michel Particelli d’Émery), herself in turn scandalized by the nudity of the figures, had it destroyed by cutting it in pieces.29 It was long thought to have been completely lost, but in 2002 a fragment showing the full figure of Ariadne was discovered. It was exhibited in Rome and Bologna later that year, and in Bologna in 2018 alongside Bolognini’s smaller-scale copy of Reni’s original painting, made c. 1640–c. 1642, and now in Montevideo.30 The fragment showing Ariadne is now thought to have come from Reni’s canvas.31 It is 2.2 metres high but has been trimmed at the top of the 26 Susan Madocks, ‘“Trop de beautez découvertes” — New Light on Guido Reni’s Late “Bacchus and Ariadne”’, The Burlington Magazine, 126 (1984), 545–46, quoting Barb. lat. 8648, fol. 135r-v; letter dated 8 September 1640 (New Style, i.e. 29 August ‘Old Style’ in England). 27 Madocks, ‘“Trop de beautez découvertes”’, 546. 28 For an illuminating discussion on the ‘nuptial’ theme of the painting, see Andaleeb Badiee Banta, ‘A “Lascivious” Painting for the Queen of England’, Apollo, June 2004, 66–71. Banta argues that the painting’s subject, chosen by Barberini, was that of a marriage, with symbolic meaning for a potential union between Protestant England and Catholic Rome. It should be noted, however, that Barberini himself only refers to the painting as the ‘Ariadne’, while Carlo Rossetti describes it as ‘Ariadne found by Bacchus’ (see below). Neither describes it as the ‘Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne’, although it is plainly a nuptial allegory. 29 Banta, ‘A “Lascivious” Painting’, pp. 66–68; Madocks, ‘“Trop de beautez découvertes”’, 547. 30 See Sergio Guarino and Claudio Seccaroni, ‘Guido Reni’s Bacchus and Ariadne: An Unfortunate Original But a Fortunate Prototype’, in Andrea Emiliani et al. (eds), Bacco e Arianna. Singolari Vicende e Nuove Proposte. Unusual Events and New Proposals, exh. cat. (Rimini: NFC edizioni, 2018), pp. 49–57; and [accessed 5 March 2019]. The Montevideo copy, restored for the exhibition, is discussed by Stefano Volpin, Davide Bussolari and Cornelia Prassler on pp. 76–103 of the exhibition catalogue. 31 For an online illustration of the fragment and a brief commentary, see [accessed 5 March 2019]. Another fragment, of the two bacchantes, on the right of the composition, was discovered in 2012 and exhibited at the Moretti Gallery in London in June-July 2017; see Moretti Gallery, ‘A Queen’s
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bottom, losing part of the crown of stars and the base of the rock where Ariadne is seated. Comparative scaling using the Montevideo copy and Bolognini’s etching suggests that the fragment has lost about 20 centimetres of its original height. Assuming a height of 2.4 metres for Reni’s canvas (7 feet 10 inches), its length can be estimated as about 5.35 metres (17 feet 7 inches). The inner soffit panel of the Bedchamber ceiling, framing the Aurora, is about 25 per cent smaller than this: 1.9 by 4.12 metres (6 feet 3 inches by 13 feet 9 inches).32 This suggests that the painted panels around the Aurora must have been enlarged to accommodate Giulio Romano’s Daedalus and Icarus once this was chosen as a substitute for the Bacchus and Ariadne; for it is known that Giulio’s painting had a frame 7 feet by 14 feet when it was at St James’s Palace in 1631–1632: dimensions that fit the existing framed space very neatly.33 An overlay of the outlines of Reni’s lost canvas on the image of the ceiling soffit in Plate VIII indicates that the soffit panels, including the four cartouches, are unlikely to have been completed until a decision had been taken in the latter part of 1640 to insert the smaller Daedalus and Icarus [Plate XI]. This may have been as early as August that year, for when news of Reni’s completed painting reached London that month Carlo Rossetti spoke about it with the Queen. He then wrote to Barberini on 14/24 August to suggest that a work ‘of such beauty, and such rarity’ should not be put on the ceiling.34 He had presumably advised the Queen in the same terms. If the Daedalus and Icarus was then chosen as an
Picture. Guido Reni and European Diplomacy’ (online catalogue [accessed 5 March 2019]). This ‘bacchantes’ fragment measures 2.55 m × 1.44 m and is missing much more of the original canvas than the Ariadne fragment. It implies an original painting nearly 50 per cent larger on its short side: 3.2 m rather than 2.4 m. It has been accepted as a work by Reni or his studio and may have come from another — perhaps earlier — version of the painting; see Emiliani, Bacco e Arianna, pp. 55 and 61–63 (technical analysis by Daniele Benati). Pending further study of both fragments, it is worth noting that a painting 3.2 m on its short side would have fitted within the soffit of the ceiling as a whole, without the decorated border; see the dimensions given below. 32 I am most grateful to Pieter van der Merwe for calculating these dimensions from a survey conducted at floor level in February 2019 (with unavoidable minor approximation). The room itself is 19 feet 6 inches wide (north to south) by 32 feet 8 inches long (east to west), a proportion of 1 to 1 2/3. It is 19 feet 2 ½ inches high to the panelling around the central canvas, so very nearly a square in transverse section. The external dimensions of the soffit, to the outer sides of its wooden cornice, are 11 feet by 24 feet (3.35 m × 7.31 m); its dimensions inside the wooden cornice are 10 feet 6 inches by 23 feet 6 inches (3.2 m × 7.16 m). The frame around the Aurora measures 14 feet, centre to centre (4.27 m), which corresponds to the width of the chimney breast on the south side of the room. 33 See Colvin (ed.), King’s Works, vol. 4, pp. 119–21, where the dimensions of the Daedalus and Icarus are documented, although with the mistaken suggestion that it could have been placed in the central compartment of Cabinet Room ceiling. The painting is recorded in the list of pictures at Greenwich in the Parliamentary Inventory of 1649–1651; see Miller, Inventories and Valuations of the King’s Goods, p. 137 (item 6): ‘One peece. in ye seeleing being Daedulus Aicorus done. by Julio Romano. at [£500]’. 34 Madocks, ‘“Trop de beautez découvertes”’, 545, quoting Barb. lat. 8648, fol. 74r, Rossetti to Barberini, 24 August 1640 (presumably a ‘New Style’ date, i.e. 14 August ‘Old Style’), ‘Ho parlato con la Maestà della regina del quadro d’Arianna trovata da Bacco, fatto da S. Guido Rheno, e non credo che applicarlà a metterlo nel soffito essendo cosa così si bella, e così singolare, come la Maestà sua ne ha sentito molto discorrere, è veramente nostro gran desiderio che venga. […]’.
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alternative, the decorative scheme on the panels around the soffit would have been enlarged and adapted soon afterwards. A late adaptation of the soffit would explain the incongruous addition of three inner painted panels at each end, for these are enclosed by moulded wooden frames that are extensions of the frame around the canvas [Plate XIII]. There is also a contrast in style between the naturalistic forms and figures in the soffit panels and the smaller-scale grotesque ornaments in the compartments on the coves. Nevertheless, the cartouches were probably designed in advance as emblematic motifs around Guido Reni’s painting, for they would have been close to the angles of the picture, and their mottoes would have resonated with its themes of marriage and fecundity. The Four Cartouches The cartouches at the angles of the soffit embody the central message of the ceiling: the loving, fruitful and enduring union of the King and Queen, in a marriage that had produced splendid heirs as the ‘hope of the state’. This allegory begins at the more private western end of the room, adjoining the Closet, and concludes at the more public eastern end, with its door to the gallery around the Great Hall. In the north-west cartouche [Plate IX A], the emblem of coupled palm trees, with the motto ‘mutua faecunditas (mutual fruitfulness)’, signifies conjugal love and procreation. It can be traced back to a description of mating palms in the Imagines of the ancient Greek writer Philostrates the Elder, which was translated by the French historian Blaise de Vigenère in 1578, and also to Pliny the Elder’s description of palm trees in his Natural History, Book XIII.35 In his vivid account Pliny describes how the male palm tree, ‘with leaves all bristling and erect’, bends towards the female plant and pollinates it ‘by its exhalations’.36 The ancient belief that the date palm felt and responded to desire became the inspiration for an emblem of conjugal love, and hence fertility, in French royal iconography in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Henrietta Maria’s father, Henri IV, marked his marriage to her mother, Marie de Médicis, in 1600 with an engraving by Jacopo Fornazeri which shows the couple holding hands beneath two arching palm trees, each bearing their blasons, and with
35 See David Watkin, ‘Iungit Amor: Royal Marriage Imagery in France, 1550–1750’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, no. 54 (1991), 256–61. 36 See Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XIII, vii, 34–35; see Pliny, Natural History, trans. by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1945) vol. 4 [Books 12–16], p. 119: ‘For the rest, it is stated that in a palm-grove of natural growth the female trees do not produce if there are no males, and that each male tree is surrounded by several females with more attractive foliage that bend and bow towards him; while the male bristling with leaves erected impregnates the rest of them by his exhalation and by the mere sight of him, and also by his pollen; and that when the male tree is felled the females afterwards in their widowhood become barren. And so fully is their sexual union understood that mankind has actually devised a method of impregnating them by means of the flower and down collected from the males, and indeed sometimes by merely sprinkling their pollen on the females’. I am grateful to Marie-Claude Canova-Green for this reference, and to Elizabeth McGrath for her guidance on sources for this topic.
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Cardinal Aldobrandini between them blessing their union. In 1614 their son, Louis XIII, issued a jeton with mating palms in 1614 to celebrate his betrothal to Anne d’Autriche.37 During the couple’s marriage festivities in Bordeaux in 1615 (which Henrietta Maria attended) Louis and his bride were presented by the city’s Jesuit College with a tableau of coupled palms.38 The emblem was intended as an augur of a fertile union, for as Watkin notes: It cannot be sufficiently emphasised that royal brides are chosen for dynastic reasons to produce heirs. In this context mating palms were a delicate way of referring to the expectation of successful procreation.39 By early 1638, when the subject of Guido Reni’s painting was chosen, Henrietta Maria was the mother of five living children. These were the future Charles II, born 29 May 1630, Mary (4 November 1631), the future James II (14 October 1633), Elizabeth (29 December 1635) and Anne (17 March 1637).40 The emblem must, therefore, signify the King and Queen’s fecundity in producing heirs who would perpetuate their dynasty.41 The cartouche in the adjoining angle of the soffit, in the south-west corner of the room, nearest to the Closet, has the motto ‘ardet aeternum (burns forever)’ on a banner beneath a spherical lump of burning asbestos [Plate IX B]. Pliny in his Natural History describes asbestos as a mineral ‘the colour of iron’ that comes from the mountains of Arcadia.42 The notion that asbestos, once lit, could not
37 Watkin, ‘Iungit Amor’, 259–60, and plate 71b. 38 Described in a contemporary account as ‘plantes amoureuses, qui se joignoient ensemble par les racines & par les branches, en sorte qu’elles faisoient vne voute, sur laquelle estoit vne grosse tour’; see MarieClaude Canova-Green, ‘L’équivoque d’une célébration: les fêtes du mariage de Louis XIII et d’Anne d’Autriche à Bordeaux (1615)’, Dix-septième siècle, 222 (2004), 3–24, in particular 8–9. 39 Watkin, ‘Iungit Amor’, p. 259. 40 The five were painted by Anthony Van Dyck in 1637 in The Five Eldest Children of Charles I, a spectacular canvas, nearly two metres wide, which hung in the King’s Breakfast Chamber at Whitehall Palace; see Per Rumberg and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, et al., Charles I. King and Collector (London: Royal Academy of Arts and Royal Collections Trust, 2018), exh. cat., pp. 129, 141 and cat. 70. The Queen’s first child, Charles, died at or soon after birth on 13 May 1629. Her seventh child, Catherine, died at birth on 9 January 1639. Her eighth, Henry, was born on 8 July 1640 and died on 8 December that year. Her ninth, Henriette Anne, was born at Exeter on 16 June 1643. For Henrietta Maria’s fertility and birthing rituals, see Bonnie Lander Johnson, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 128–37; and Griffey, On Display, pp. 95–151. 41 A secondary meaning of the palm tree, emphasized by Carney in ‘The Queen’s House at Greenwich’, pp. 129–32, was that of strength against oppression in the Catholic tradition. Carney cites Henry Hawkins’s Partheneia Sacra, or The Mysterious and Delicious Garden of the Sacred Parthenes (Rouen: John Cousturier, 1633), pp. 151–53, where the palm tree is given as one of twenty-four symbols of the Virgin and ‘the invincible Champion among trees, whose chiefest point of valour considers in bearing injuries and oppressions, without shrinking’, and where it is argued that the tree shared with the Virgin and Christ the qualities of faithfulness, fruitfulness and fortitude, hence its depiction in pairs. For further discussion of Partheneia Sacra, see Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion. Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 97–99. 42 Pliny, Natural History, Book XXXVII, liv, 146; see Pliny, Natural History, trans. by D. E. Eichholz (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1962), vol. 10 [Books 36–37], p. 283.
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be extinguished appears to be a medieval addition to Pliny’s account. Camillo Camilli in his Imprese illustri di diversi of 1586 states that that this emblem, with the motto ardet aeternum, was adopted by a young Sienese nobleman, Curtio Borghesi, as an indication of la perseveranza dell’animo suo.43 At around this time, Alfonso d’Este (1533–1597), the fifth Duke of Ferrara, adopted the emblem and motto as his impresa on every piece of a maiolica service he had made between c. 1585 and c. 1600 to commemorate his marriage to Margherita Gonzaga in 1579.44 The impresa may have been known to the Queen and Inigo Jones from a brief reference to it in Giovanni Ferro’s Teatro d’imprese, published in Venice in 1623, for this work carries a dedication to Cardinal Francesco Barberini.45 As an emblem of undying love, it must refer to the King and Queen’s marriage, but it may also underline the enduring heritage of their offspring. The two cartouches on the west side of the room can be interpreted as symbolizing the two sons, Charles and James, and the three daughters, Mary, Elizabeth, and Anne. The emblem of two white lilies growing from a single stalk and pot in the south-east cartouche has the motto, ‘spes reipublicae (the hope of the state)’ [Plate IX C]. This motto is frequently found on Roman coins bearing images of children or child emperors as the future ‘hope of the state’.46 In the marriage iconography of Henrietta Maria and Charles in 1625 the white lily of France symbolized the French Catholic princess’s dynastic origins and her virtues of modesty, beauty, and chastity. It was paired with the red rose of the King of England to mark their union.47 The Queen’s white lily first appeared as her impresa on the proscenium arch of the King’s Shrovetide masque, Coelum Britannicum, performed in the Banqueting House, Whitehall, in February 1634.48 Here, however, it had an additional significance. The description of the proscenium arch in the text of the masque states that on one side of the arch was the King’s impresa of ‘a lion with an imperial crown on its head’, with the motto ‘animum sub pectore forti’ (courage beneath a stalwart breast). On the other side was the Queen’s emblem: ‘in the oval on the top, being borne up by Nobility and Fecundity, was this impresa to the Queen’s majesty, a lily growing with branches and leaves, and three lesser lilies springing out of the stem; the word, Semper
43 See Dora Thornton and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics. A Catalogue of the British Museum collection, 2 vols (London: The British Museum Press, 2009), vol. 1, cat. 240, pp. 408–10. 44 Thornton and Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics, p. 409, cat. 240: the Pilgrim Flask from this service. See also [accessed 5 March 2019]. I am most grateful to Suzanne Higgott for her advice on this topic. 45 Giovanni Ferro, Teatro d’imprese (Venice: [Giacomo Sarzina], 1623), Part II, p. 572. The volume was dedicated to Barberini in the year he was created Cardinal by his uncle, Pope Urban VIII. 46 I thank Elizabeth McGrath for this information. 47 See Marie-Claude Canova-Green’s discussion of the lily and the rose in Chapter 4 above (pp. 112–17). 48 See Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 566–97. The design for the arch does not survive, but it is described in lines 1–44 of the masque text; Orgel and Strong, Inigo Jones, pp. 570–71. For discussion of this masque and its proscenium arch as vehicles for celebrating the complementary virtues of the King and Queen in a moral setting, see Veevers, Images of Love and Religion, pp. 195–99.
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inclita virtus (ever-renowned virtue)’.49 The inclusion of ‘Fecundity’ as one of two supporters of the oval containing the impresa suggests that the emblem of a white lily with three lesser lilies springing from its stem represented the Queen and her three children in early 1634: Charles, James, and Mary.50 This interpretation provides the key to the meaning of the two lilies in the south-east cartouche. For while they could refer to the King and Queen themselves, they more probably represent the couple’s two male heirs when the ceiling was being painted, Charles and James. This reading is all the more plausible when we consider the final cartouche in the sequence at the north-east angle. It contains the impresa of three yellow irises, with the motto, ‘cum odore candor (splendour [or beauty] with fragrance)’ [Plate IX D]. This motto has been misread in the past as ‘cum odore candore (with pure fragrance)’, but in fact there is no ‘e’ at the end of word ‘candor’ in the banner.51 Moreover ‘candor’ is a noun meaning ‘splendour’, ‘beauty’ or ‘brightness’ and cannot be used adjectivally, in the sense of ‘pure’ to agree with ‘odore’, or ‘fragrance’.52 It is the subject of the phrase, and its importance is emphasized by being painted slightly larger than ‘cum odore’ to occupy half the width of the banner. Previous transcriptions have placed this motto after the one in the south-west cartouche, ‘ardet aeternum’, to create the sequence, ‘mutual fruitfulness, the hope of the state, burns forever, with pure fragrance’, a reading which implies that the King and Queen alone are the subjects of the four-part statement. But once ‘candor’ is recognized as the subject of the northeast cartouche, this motto falls more naturally at the end of the whole sequence, one that runs anti-clockwise from the west to the east sides of the soffit, with ‘splendour’ as a concluding statement: ‘mutual fruitfulness, burns forever; the hope of the state, splendour with fragrance’. ‘Candor’ is probably meant to describe the ‘splendour’ (or beauty) of all five living children: Charles and James in the south-east cartouche, and Mary, Elizabeth, and Anne in the north-east one. The phrase ‘cum odore’ (‘with fragrance’) is appropriate for the daughters, for the yellow iris was the precursor of the golden lily of the French monarchy, having been chosen (according to legend) by King Clovis I as his personal emblem and symbol of purity, following
49 Quoted extracts from Thomas Carew, ‘Coelum Britannicum’, in Dr Samuel Johnson et al. (eds), The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper: Including the Series Edited, with Prefaces, Biblio graphical and Critical, by Dr. Samuel Johnson: and the most approved translations. The additional lives by Alexander Chalmers, F. S. A. (London: J. Johnson, 1810), vol. 5, p. 626. 50 For Van Dyck’s two portraits of the three children in 1635, now in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin, and the Royal Collection, and a discussion of Henrietta Maria’s role in commissioning such paintings from the artist, see Griffey, On Display, pp. 122–26. 51 Chettle, in The Queen’s House (1937), gave it as ‘candor’, without translation, but John Charlton in The Queen’s House, Greenwich (London: HMSO, 1976), p. 30, read the motto as ‘cum odore candore (with pure fragrance)’. Both authors placed the motto at the end of the sequence. Charlton’s reading was followed by Bold et al., in Greenwich, pp. 70–73, and by Carney, in ‘The Queen’s House at Greenwich’, p. 111 and p. 131. 52 I am extremely grateful to Elizabeth McGrath for advising on the correct reading and translation of this word in this context.
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his conversion to Christianity in about 496.53 This fragrant flower affirms the French royal lineage of the Queen’s three daughters, as does the white lily for Charles and James. Both flowers carry the connotation of moral purity, a virtue that Henrietta Maria championed herself at court, as many critics have observed.54 Thus the five living children of the marriage, like the ‘three lesser lilies springing out of the stem’ of the lily of her impresa in 1634, are presented allegorically as the Queen’s personal progeny.55 Conclusion The four emblems and their mottoes can now be understood in the context of Guido Reni’s nuptial allegory, which Cardinal Francesco Barberini had planned for the Bedchamber ceiling with the agreement of the Queen in early 1638. They would have complemented the underlying themes of procreation and fruitfulness in the painting, an intention that was thwarted when Cardinal Francesco saw that Guido Reni had compromised his portrayal of these virtues through excessive nudity in the figures. The complexity of the allegory in the four cartouches makes it unlikely that the Queen would have changed anything to reflect the substitution of Giulio Romano’s Daedalus and Icarus for Guido Reni’s Bacchus and Ariadne soon after August 1640. The cartouches were, in any event, a self-contained narrative: one that has since been rendered obscure by the absence of the painting. The completion of the painted decoration of the ceiling in the later months of 1640 should also be seen in the light of growing hostility towards the Queen and her Catholic community in London in that year. During the Short Parliament in April 1640 demands had been made for the enforcement of laws against Roman Catholics. In the following month the papal agent Carlo Rossetti was forced 53 Noted by Carney, ‘The Queen’s House at Greenwich’, p. 131, citing Celia Fisher, Flowers of the Renaissance (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), p. 49. 54 See especially Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 68, 74–76, and 143–49; and Lander Johnson, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture, pp. 103–37. On p. 129 Lander Johnson transcribes the four mottoes as ‘Mutua Fecunditas, Spes Reipublicae, Ardet Aeternum, Cum Odore Candor’, and paraphrases them as: ‘The strength of the commonwealth is secured by the eternal love and fertility of Charles and Henrietta Maria, whose marriage is the source of that pure essence, the goodly perfume, which dispels disease’. In this reading Cum Odore Candor is interpreted as a ‘healing perfume’ for a Bedchamber intended for birthing rituals (p. 129), although the author acknowledges that the room was not used as such. More generally Lander Johnson argues on p. 128, ‘the four emblems […] describe the space in terms that appear to be designed specifically as a celebration not only of the fertile and chaste union between Charles and Henrietta Maria but of the space itself as pure and purifying: emblems which constitute a direct rebuttal of her detractors’ accusations that her religion and sexuality had an unchaste effect on the architectural spaces of the court’. 55 Henrietta Maria gave birth to her eighth child, Henry, Duke of Gloucester, at Oatlands Palace on 8 July 1640. He died five months later. Her experience of the neo-natal deaths of her first child, Charles, in May 1629, and her seventh, Catherine, in January 1639, would have cautioned her against adding another symbolic white lily to the two in the south-east cartouche in the weeks after Henry’s birth.
chapter 13. ‘mutua l fruitfulness’
to abandon his own residence and move to that of the Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis, at St James’s Palace. The political and religious crisis deepened in August, when the Scots invaded England, routing the King’s army at Newburn and taking Newcastle.56 It was therefore appropriate that in these troubled times Queen Henrietta Maria should choose to celebrate in the decoration of her Bedchamber the essential virtues of her marriage with King Charles: fruitfulness, enduring love, and moral purity.
56 Madocks, ‘“Trop de beautez découvertes”’, 546.
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Bibliography Manuscripts and Archival Documents
Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales (NWL), Wynnstay MS 174, 175, 176, 179, 181, 183, 185 (Account rolls of Sir Richard Wynn: Declared Accounts for the years 1630–1641) London, The National Archives (TNA), SC6/CHASI/1696, 1698 and 1701 (Declared Accounts for 1629–1630, 1633–1634, and 1637–1639) —— , E351/3271 (Declared Accounts for 1637–1638) Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 8648 Early Printed Books
Camilli, Camillo, Imprese illustri di diversi (Venice: Francesco Ziletti, 1586) Giovanni Ferro, Teatro d’imprese (Venice: [Giacomo Sarzina], 1623), Part II Hawkins, Henry, Partheneia Sacra, or The Mysterious and Delicious Garden of the Sacred Parthenes (Rouen: John Cousturier, 1633) Primary Sources
Britton, John, The Natural History of Wiltshire by John Aubrey F. R. S., edited, and elucidated by notes, by John Britton published by The Wiltshire Topographical Society (London: Printed by J. B. Nichols, 1847), p. 85; reprinted in K. G. Ponting (ed.), Aubrey’s Natural History of Wiltshire: A Reprint of The Natural History of Wiltshire by John Aubrey (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1969) Carew, Thomas, ‘Coelum Britannicum’, in Dr Samuel Johnson et al. (eds), The Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper: Including the Series Edited, with Prefaces, Bibliographical and Critical, by Dr. Samuel Johnson: and the most approved translations. The additional lives by Alexander Chalmers, F. S. A. (London: J. Johnson, 1810), vol. 5 Ovid, Metamorphoses: A New Verse Translation, trans. by David Raeburn with an Introduction by Denis Feeney (London: Penguin Books, 2004) Pliny, Natural History, trans. by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1945), vol. 4 [Books 12–16] Pliny, Natural History, trans. by D. E. Eichholz (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1962), vol. 10 [Books 36–37] Secondary Studies
Banta, Andaleeb Badiee, ‘A “Lascivious” Painting for the Queen of England’, Apollo ( June 2004), 66–71 Bold, John, et al., Greenwich. An Architectural History of the Royal Hospital for Seamen and the Queen’s House (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) Britland, Karen, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
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Canova-Green, Marie-Claude, ‘L’équivoque d’une célébration: les fêtes du mariage de Louis XIII et d’Anne d’Autriche à Bordeaux (1615)’, Dix-septième siècle, 222 (2004), 3–24 Charlton, John, The Queen’s House, Greenwich (London: HMSO, 1976) Chettle, George, The Queen’s House, Greenwich. Being the fourteenth monograph of the London Survey Committee (London: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and the Survey of London, 1937) Colvin, Howard (ed.), The History of the King’s Works (London: HMSO, 1982), vol. 4 (Part II) [1485–1660] Croft-Murray, Edward, Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837, 2 vols (London: Country Life Limited, 1962), vol. 1 Devisscher, Hans, and Nora De Poorter (eds), Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), Volume 1. Paintings and Tapestries (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1993) Edmond, Mary, ‘Limners and Picturemakers’, The Walpole Society, 47 (1980), 60–242 Emiliani, Andrea et al. (eds), Bacco e Arianna. Singolari Vicende e Nuove Proposte. Unusual Events and New Proposals, exh. cat. (Rimini: NFC edizioni, 2018). (Introduction by Mario Scalini, preface by Elena Rossoni, text by Andrea Emiliani, Sergio Guarino and Claudio Seccaroni, Daniele Benati, Raffaella Morselli, and scientific studies by Stefano Volpin, Davide Bussolari, and Cornelia Prassler) Fisher, Celia, Flowers of the Renaissance (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011) Fuhring, Peter, Ornament Prints in the Rijksmuseum (Rotterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2004), vol. 2, The Seventeenth Century (Part I) Griffey, Erin, On Display. Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court (New York and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2015) Guarino, Sergio, and Claudio Seccaroni, ‘Guido Reni’s Bacchus and Ariadne: An Unfortunate Original But a Fortunate Prototype’, in Andrea Emiliani et al. (eds), Bacco e Arianna. Singolari Vicende e Nuove Proposte. Unusual Events and New Proposals, exh. cat. (Rimini: NFC edizioni, 2018), pp. 49–57 Harris, John, ‘Inigo Jones and his French Sources’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 19 (May 1961), 253–64 Harris, John, and Gordon Higgott, Inigo Jones. Complete Architectural Drawings, exh. cat. (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1989) Higgott, Gordon, ‘The Design and Setting of Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House, 1616–1640’, The Court Historian, 11 (2) (2006), 135–48 —— , ‘Inigo Jones’s Designs for the Queen’s House in 1616’, in Malcolm Airs and Geoffrey Tyack (eds), The Renaissance Villa in Britain, 1500–1700 (Reading: Spire Books, 2007) Higgott, Gordon, and the late A. V. Grimstone, ‘Drawings by Edward Pearce Senior (fl. c. 1630–d. 1658): Painter, Decorator and Interior Designer’, The Walpole Society, 82 (2020), 1–113 Jervis, Simon, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Book of Engraved Ornament’, The Burlington Magazine, 128 (1986), 894–900 and figs 49–60 Lander Johnson, Bonnie, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
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Madocks, Susan, ‘“Trop de beautez découvertes” — New Light on Guido Reni’s Late “Bacchus and Ariadne”’, The Burlington Magazine, 126 (1984), 544–47 Miller, Oliver (ed.), The Inventories and Valuations of the King’s Goods, 1649–1651, The Walpole Society, 43 (Glasgow: The University Press, 1972) Moretti Gallery, London, ‘A Queen’s Picture. Guido Reni and European Diplomacy’ (online catalogue at ) [accessed 10 November 2019] (London, June 2017) Newman, John, ‘Strayed from the Queen’s House’, Architectural History, 27 (1984), 33–35 Orgel, Stephen, and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973) Rumberg, Per, and Desmond Shawe-Taylor et al., Charles I. King and Collector, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts and Royal Collections Trust, 2018) Schlugleit, Dora, ‘L’Abbé de Scaglia, Jordaens et “L’histoire de Psyché” de GreenwichHouse (1639–1642)’, in Revue Belge d’Archéologie et d’Histoire de l’Art, 7 (2) (April to June 1637), 139–66 Spiers, Walter, ‘The Note-Book and Account Book of Nicholas Stone’, The Walpole Society, 7 (1918–1919) Sykes, Susan Alexandra, ‘Henrietta Maria’s “House of Delight”: French Influence and Iconography in the Queen’s House, Greenwich’, Apollo, 133 (May 1991), 332–36 Thornton, Dora, and Timothy Wilson, Italian Renaissance Ceramics. A Catalogue of the British Museum collection, 2 vols (London: The British Museum Press, 2009) Van der Merwe, Pieter, The Queen’s House (London: Scala Arts and Heritage Publishers Ltd, 2017) Veevers, Erika, Images of Love and Religion. Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Watkin, David, ‘Iungit Amor: Royal Marriage Imagery in France, 1550–1750’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, no. 54 (1991), 256–61 Unpublished Secondary Source
Carney, Sophie L., ‘The Queen’s House at Greenwich: The Material Culture of the Courts of Queen Anna of Denmark and Queen Henrietta Maria (1603–1669). Doctoral Thesis, University of Roehampton, 2013
T r ans c ri be d an d an n otated by
Ella Hawkins
Appendix 1: A True Discourse of All the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies, observed at the Contract and Mariage of the High and Mighty Charles, King of Britain The Principal English Festival Book of the 1625 Wedding, Including Two Addresses at Canterbury by John Finch The text that follows is a diplomatic type facsimile of one of the festival books detailing the ceremonies and celebrations relating to the marriage of Charles I of Great Britain to Henrietta Maria of France in 1625, currently held in the British Library, London.1 It is also available as one of the 253 festival books made available on the British Library website as part of the University of WarwickBritish Library Festival Books Digitisation Project directed by Professor J. R. (Ronnie) Mulryne and Dr Margaret Shewring and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.2 During the process of transcription, a number of decisions were made as to how the original text should appear in modern print; while it is important to keep the transcript as close to the original as possible, some changes have been necessary to represent the text satisfactorily. The use of ‘v’ in place of ‘u’ has been kept as printed in the original text, as has the use of ‘u’ in place of ‘v’. The use of the long s (ſ ) throughout the text has been changed to a modern lower-case ‘s’. The formatting features retained in the transcript are the use of paragraphs, italics, and capitalization. The decorative initial letter on signature A3 has been replaced with an upper-case letter of the standard font, and the
* With thanks to Ronnie Mulryne for translations from Latin to English. 1 Shelfmark: 113.1.7. Format: [2], 28, [16], 29–36 pp. 40. 2 See . For details of the Project team see http://www.bl.uk/treasures/festivalbooks/acknowledgements.html [accessed 11 November 2019]. Ella Hawkins is a doctoral research student at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 321–342 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119197
FHG
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capitalized letter that follows has been made lower case. While the original text displays titles in a larger sized font, and some words use a larger upper-case letter at the beginning of an entirely capitalized word, the same sized font has been employed throughout this transcript. Lines used for decorative or spacing purposes have been removed. There are a small number of turned letters in the original text, for example where the printer appears to have used ‘u’ instead of ‘n’, or vice versa. These, along with a number of other presumed mistakes, have been corrected, but footnotes indicate any alterations made. The original text also features a number of handwritten notes, or subtitles, in the margin of the book. These notes, apparently in a seventeenth-century hand, serve to indicate changes of topic or sections in the description of events. There are more on the early signatures than later in the festival book. In almost every case the writing appears to have extended further out from the text, but the pages have been cropped on the outer vertical edges, presumably in the process of binding them in the quarto held in the British Library. The locations of these notes have been indicated throughout this document, and a transcript of each is included in the notes, although these are sometimes incomplete owing to the cropped outer edges of the pages. Annotations are also included to indicate the identity of each of the principal participants in the wedding celebrations. There are a number of phrases in Latin included in the original text. In the notes to the transcript, these phrases have been translated, and their sources identified where appropriate, by J. R. (Ronnie) Mulryne. The original text was printed in quarto, with occasional page signatures at the bottom of the pages. Page numbers (in Arabic numerals) also appear at the top of most pages but these are not continuous throughout the text as they are interrupted to make space for the insertion of two speeches offered to the King and Queen at Canterbury. This transcript uses the more reliable page signatures to determine the location of text in the original festival book, and these are indicated in bold text throughout.
A t r ue Di s cour se of All the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies [Title Page]
A TRVE / DISCOVRSE / OF ALL THE ROYAL / PASSAGES, TRYVMPHS / and Ceremonies, obserued at the Con- / tract and Mariage of the High and Mighty / CHARLES,3 King of Great Britaine, and the / most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady HEN- / RIETTA MARIA of Burbon, sister to / the most Christian King of / FRANCE. Together with her Iourney from Paris to / Bulloigne, and thence vnto Douer in England, / where the KING met her, and the manner / of their enterview. As also the tryumphant Solemnities which / passed in their Iournies from Douer to the / Citie of London, and so to / Whitehall, &c. O quam te memorem virgo. O Dea Certe.4 LONDON, Printed by IOHN HAVILAND for / HANNA BARRET. 1625.5 A / TRVE RELATION / of all the Royall Passages, Tri- / umphes and Ceremonies, obserued at the / Contract and Mariage of the High and / mightie CHARLES, King of Great Britaine, / and the most Excellentest of Ladies, the Lady / HENRIETTA MARIA of Burbon, Sister to the / most Christian King of France, together with / Her Iourney from Paris to Bulloigne, and / thence vnto Douer in England, / and so to the Citie of / London, &c. [A3r]
Amongst all the infinite blessings wherewith it hath pleased the Diuine Goodnesse to cloath and adorne our Nation: None is more remarkeable or glorious, then this happie and long wisht [A3v] for Vnion betweene the two great Monarchies of France and Great Britaine, since by it wee haue attained to the full height of all our hopes, all our wishes, all our contentments, and beholding, as in a goodly Myrrour, the full pourtrature of all our ioyes, we finde our Kingdome fortified against the threatnings of Enuie, our throne established with the hope of a most flourishing Issue, and the hearts of all true subiects reuiued with the memorie of this blessed Match, and Coniunction: which may worke terror amongst our aduersaries, as oft as they heare the ioynt names of Great Britaine and France, in a chearefull manner repeated.
3 ‘CHARLES’ has been underlined in pencil and a ‘K’ has been drawn beneath. 4 Adapted from Virgil, Aeneid, I. 326–27. ‘How should I name you, Virgin? Assuredly a Goddess’. Addressed to Venus in the source text. A frequent epithet for Queen Elizabeth, who is addressed as ‘Dea Certe’ in the tilt known as The Four Foster Children of Desire (1581) held to celebrate the arrival in England of the Duc d’Anjou on his (failed) wooing embassy. 5 A handwritten note appears below this text. It appears to be in a later handwriting, perhaps that of a librarian, as it notes that this festival book is (or will be) included in ‘Antiq Ceremonies vol. 8’.
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To proceed then to those Royall Passages and triumphant Ceremonies which were performed at these great Nuptials.6 It is to be vnderstood that vpon Thursday, being the eight of May, according to the French Computation, but the eight and twentieth of Aprill,7 according to our English account,8 the most Christian King of France,9 with his Queene,10 and [A4r] the Prince his onely Brother,11 and attended by my Lords the Dukes of Nemeurs12 and Elbeuf,13 the two great Marshalls of France, Mounsieur de Vitry14 and Bassompiere,15 With a world of other Noble-men, Ladies, Knights and Gentlemen, came forth of his Bed-chamber or Cabinet, into the publique Presence Chamber, where he sent for the most Excellent Lady his Sister,16 who with all Solemnitie was presently brought forth by the Queene her Mother,17 and attended on by the Princesse of Conde,18 the Princesse19 of Countee,20 the Dutchesse of Guise,21 the Dutchesse of Cheureuse,22 and the Dutchesse of Elbeuf,23 and diuers other Ladies of State, and Maides of Honour: Her garments that day were exceeding rich and sumptuous, 6 A handwritten note appears to the left of the text in black ink. This is the first of a series of notes in the margins, written in seventeenth-century secretary hand in a dark ink. These notes serve to indicate changes of topic or sections in the description of events. This note in the left-hand margin (cropped): ‘th[e] die Aprilis ~ these [gr]eat nuptials [w]ere performed’. 7 ‘but the eight and twentieth of Aprill’ has been underlined in black ink, apparently by the same hand as that in the margins. Further instances of such underlining are noted in the footnotes below. 8 A handwritten note in the right-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘[ ] the 11 most Christ[ian] [ ] of Fra[nce] the [ ] of the [ ]’. The word in the penultimate bracket has been crossed out. The number 13 has been inserted above the number 11 in what seems to be a different hand. 9 Louis XIII (1601–1643), King of France (1610–1643). The eldest son of King Henri IV of France and Marie de Médicis. 10 Anne d’Autriche, daughter of Philip III of Spain and sister of Philip IV of Spain. 11 Gaston Jean-Baptiste de France, Duc d’Anjou and, from 1626, Duc d’Orléans. As the eldest surviving brother of Louis XIII he was known at court by the traditional honorific, Monsieur. 12 Henri I de Savoie, Duc de Nemours (m. Anne de Lorraine-Aumale). 13 Charles II, Duc d’Elbeuf (of the house of Lorraine). Appointed by Louis XIII as Grand Chamberlain of France. In 1619 he married Catherine Henriette de Bourbon, known as Mademoiselle de Vendôme, an illegitimate daughter of Henri IV of France. 14 Nicolas de L’Hospital, Duc de Vitry (1581–1644). As a friend of Louis XIII he played an important role in the assassination of Concino Concini, the Queen Mother’s favourite, in 1617 and received Concini’s title of Marshal of France in the following days. 15 François de Bassompierre (1579–1646), French courtier, soldier and diplomat. He was made Marshal of France following his services during the Huguenot rising of 1621–1622. 16 A handwritten note in the right-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘The most Exc[ellent] ladie Henrie[tta] Maria his S[ister] the [ ]’. 17 Marie de Médicis, the Queen Mother. (Henrietta Maria’s father, Henri IV of France, was assassinated in May 1610, only six months after her birth). 18 Charlotte Marguerite de Montmorency (1594–1650) became Princesse de Condé by her marriage to Henri de Bourbon. 19 A handwritten note appears to the right of the text in black ink. 20 The Princesse de Conti, Louise-Marguerite de Lorraine (1577–1631). She married François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, in July 1605. Soon after his death she became Bassompierre’s mistress. 21 Henriette Catherine de Joyeuse (1585–1656). Her first husband, whom she married in 1599, was Henri de Bourbon, Duc de Montpensier. After his death she married Charles de Lorraine, Duc de Guise, in 1611. 22 Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, widow of Charles Honoré d’Albert, Duc de Luynes (d. 1621: a favourite of Louis XIII), married the Duc de Chevreuse in 1622. 23 See note 13.
A t r ue Di s cour se of All the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies
her Gowne being of cloth of gold, cut vpon cloth of siluer, and richly embrodered all ouer with Flower de Luces of gold, and chased and interlaid with Dimonds, Rubies, Pearle, and other rich Iuelrie of an inestimable valew: Her Traine was [A4v] borne vp by the young Lady of Burbon,24 her deare Kinswoman, and a Ladie of exceeding great beautie and wonderfull admiration. After the Princesse had in reuerend and solemne wise done obeysance to the King her Brother, in which action of humilitie a man might haue beheld all the glorious beames of Maiestie and sweetnesse:25 there presently entred into the Chamber the Earle of Carlile,26 and the Earle of Holland,27 being both Ambassadors28 for his Maiestie of Greate Britaine;29 and both so rich and sumptuously attired, that neither art nor wealth was able to exceed them. These two noble men in a most solemne and respectiue manner Deliuered to the King of France the Contract of Mariage, which was forthwith opened and publikely read by the Secretary of the Kings Cabinet in an high and audible voice, and then all other Couenants and agreements concluded vpon, the Contract was allowed and ratified by the [B1r] Lord Chancellour, who made a congratulatory speech in honour of that daies Ceremonie. Assoone as these things were performed, the two English Ambassadors withdrew themselues into the Duke of Cheureuse Chamber which was the Kings lodgings, when all accommodations necessary for them and that daies solemnitie was in goodly order prepared, here the Embassadours communicated vnto the Duke the Contract,30 who forthwith returned againe to the King his Master, hauing the Embassadours also with him, and diuers other Noblemen of great ranke and place. The Duke was also himselfe most richly attired, and though the ground was blacke, yet was the imbrodery of admirable value, and abundance of Diamonds and other Precious stones bestowed within the same, but especially vpon the panes of his breeches and the tagges of his points, which were praised at an infinite world of treasure. [B1v] Assoone as the Duke was come before the King (after solemne reuerence done) hee presented to his Highnesse his procuration, and shewed the authoritie and Commission which the King of great Britaine had giuen him, being in a certaine scedule annexed and fixt vnto the Contract, which after the King had read, hee allowed and signed also: so did the great Lady her selfe the
24 25 26 27 28
Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon, Condé’s daughter (1619–1679). ‘nesse’ of ‘sweetnesse’ has been underlined in black ink. James Hay, Earl of Carlisle (formerly Viscount Doncaster). Henry Rich, Lord Kensington, from June 1624, first Earl of Holland, ambassador extraordinary. ‘the Earle of Carlile, and the Earle of Holland, being both Ambassadors’ has been underlined in black ink. 29 A handwritten note in the left-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘[Th]e Earle of Carl[isle] [with] the earle of [Hol]land the Emb = [ass]adours for his Maisti[e] of Great [Bri]taine’. 30 A handwritten note in the right-hand margin (cropped and very difficult to decipher) reads: ‘The duke of Chevruse [ ] king of Great [Britain’s] kin gained [ ] of this for rank’.
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Queene of France, and the Queene Mother, the Duke of Cheuruse [sic],31 to whom the proxey belonged, and both the Embassadours for England; then all things being brought to this perfection, the Cardinall de la Roche Faucault [sic]32 attyred in all his pontificall roabes, after the custome and manner of the French Nation performed the Contract and published the affiance in a most stately and reuerend manner, to the infinite ioy and contentment of all the beholders, and the vnspeakeable comfort and prosperity of both the happy Kingdomes. [B2r] This Contract thus happily performed in the Kings Pallace of the Louure, forthwith our Ladies Church in Paris33 is chosen for the Celebration and finall conclusion of the euer-happy mariage; and that it might bee the fitter for the receipt of so great a pompe and state, it was out of hand hang’d all ouer with wonderfull rich Arras, cloth of Tissue, cloth of Gold, and cloth of Siluer; there was also in the same Church raised vp vpon goodly pillasters and gilt columbs a most rich and stately gallery or Scaffold of state, which extended from the first entry of the Archbishops house to the very Quire or vppermost end of the same Church, being a structure of such good lines,34 that art could not possible expresse any thing beyond it. The Pillars and railes which did vnderprop this gallery were at the top couered with a very curious Purple or Violet coloured Sattin, all imbrodered and powdred ouer with golden Flower de Luces, and at the [B2v] bottomes they were ouerspread with very fine white linnen and many burning tapers of waxe flaming about the same, so that the Church seemed like the Pallace of the Sunne, described by Ouid in his second Booke of the transmutations of shapes.35 Through this Gallery the whole pompe and body of this Royall and vnmatchable solemnity was to passe, which I haue thought good briefly to set down as I receiued it from those which were Noble eye witnesses of the same. First, the prefixed36 day and houre for the solemnitie of this Royall and sacred Mariage being come, and the whole pompe thereof in a full readinesse, the first that marched forth were the hundred Swissers of the Kings Guard37 all cloathed
31 ‘Duke of Cheuruse’ has been underlined in black ink. Claude de Lorraine (1578–1655), Prince de Joinville, was the third son of Henri I, Duc de Guise, and Catherine de Clèves. He married Marie de Rohan in 1622 (see note 22). He was made Duc de Chevreuse by Louis XIII in 1611, Grand Chamberlain of France in 1621 and Grand Falconer of France in 1622. He was made a Knight in the Order of the Garter by Charles I of Great Britain in 1625. 32 ‘de la Roche Faucault’ has been underlined in black ink, and there is a handwritten note in the left-hand margin (cropped) with the words: ‘Cardinall [de la R]oche Foucault [ ] mariage’. Cardinal François de La Rochefoucauld (1558–1645), as Grand Almoner of France, was entitled to conduct princely baptisms and marriages. 33 Our Ladies Church refers to Notre Dame. A handwritten note in the right-hand margin (heavily cropped) reads: ‘The place [ ] this mariag[e ] celebrated’. 34 The original text has ‘u’ rather than ‘n’ in ‘lines’, presumably a turned letter. 35 A reference to Ovid, Metamorphoses, II. 36 ‘prefixed’ has been altered from ‘perfixed’, as this is presumed to have been a mistake in the original text. 37 In 1616, King Louis XIII gave a regiment of Swiss infantry the name of ‘Gardes suisses’. This unit was officially a regiment of the line, but it was generally regarded as part of the King’s Military Household.
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in the Kings liuery of estate with their Drummes beating before and after them, the Fifes whistling, their Ensigne displayed, and all other things sutable to [B3r] a warlike preparation, for these are the Kings first, and indeede most souldier-like guard, being men of that temper and condition, that they are truly said to be borne Souldiers, liue Souldiers, and dye Souldiers. A good pretty space after them went twelue Hoboyes38 in the Kings liuery of Estate also, who playing vpon those loud Instruments strucke into some admiration, but into all delight and pleasure. Next vnto these marcht in two ranckes eight of the Kings principall Drummes in their Liueries of Estate also, and these were said to beat their Drums with that brauery and couragiousnesse, that as it was said of Alexander, that when he heard Ionicke musicke, he would start vp, call for his sword and armour, and expresse all the passions of anger and furie, so there was not an eare that heard these, but awaked the heart to thinke of heroycall atchieuements. After these marched the Kings second Guard, consisting of Frenchmen: Then came at least a [B3v] dozen Trumpets in their Liueries of Estate also, with rich Banners containing the Kings full Coat Armour, and faire Cordans of watchet silke and gold sutable to the rest in euery proportion. After these Trumpets came in a stately manner Mounsieur de Rhodes, who is the great Master of the Ceremonies,39 being wonderfully richly apparrelled, and at the least twentie of the Kings ordinary Gentlemen attending about him. Immediately after him went all the Lords, and others who were Knights of the great and renowned Order of the Holy Ghost,40 in the rich Roabs of their Order, and with their Palkes or Mantles of watchet veluet all, most brauely embrodered with Flower de Luces of gold, and their other garments shining with pretious stones and rich Iuelrie. Neare vnto these Knights went seuen Heralds at Armes in very rich Coats of Crimson Veluet, with the Armes of France, and all powdred ouer with golden Flower de Luces. Close vnto these [B4r] Heraulds followed the two great great [sic] Marshalls of France, Mounsieur de Vitry, and Mounsieur Bassompiere; and after them came alone the Duke of Elbeuf in most sumptuous attire. Then a little distance from him came (representing the Person of the Royall Bride-groome) the Duke of Cheureuse, in a sute of most rich perfumed blackecloth, cut vpon cloth of gold, and lined with rich Tissue; vpon his head he wore a Cap of cloth of gold, on which was fixed a Iewell of a most inestimable value, euery Diamond being so glorious, that it dazelled the eyes of all that gazed vpon it; about his body Bautricke-wise he wore a wonderfull curious rich Scarffe, all embrodered ouer with Roses, and powdred with Paragon Diamonds, and great orient Pearle; he wore a short cloake all embrodered ouer with gold, and set with Diamonds so wonderfull thicke and curiously, that in his mouing hee seemed to burne and
38 ‘Haut-boys’ is an archaic word for oboes (wooden musical instruments). 39 Claude Pot, Seigneur de Rhodes (?–1642). 40 The Order of the Holy Ghost: most probably the Ordre du Saint-Esprit or Ordre des chevaliers du SaintEsprit, sometimes translated into English as the Order of the Holy Ghost, a chivalric order founded by Henri III of France in 1578. (The Order of the Holy Ghost is a Catholic religious order with responsibilities for running hospitals across Europe).
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beare a liuing flame about him. After him came [B4v] the Earle of Carlile, and the Earle of Holland (being the Extraordinary Embassadors for the Maiestie of Great Britaine) and they were both apparelled in white cloth of siluer, richly embrodered and interchased with many pretious stones and wealthie Iuelry. Then came the King of France in his owne Person, in Royall garments of Estate, all embrodered ouer with gold and siluer, and almost couered ouer with rich Iewels, in his right hand holding the most Excellent Princesse his sister, who that day wore a Crowne of gold vpon her head, chased and set with Diamonds, and a world of other pretious stones, her Gowne was all powdred ouer with golden Flower de Luces: and on her other hand went Mounsieur the Kings Brother,41 wonderfull sumptuously attired, and not inferiour to any that had42 place in the Royall assembly. Next vnto the King, Prince, and Royall Bride, followed the Queen Mother of France, very graue, yet richly attired: and after her came the [C1r] Queene of France, whose Gowne was all Iulyeoly, embrodered ouer with gold and siluer, and set, and inchased with a world of pretious stones, Pearle, and other Iuelry; the Princesse of Conde, and the Princess of Countee bore vp the Queenes long Traine. And after them followed the young Ladie of Montpensier,43 and the Countesse of Soysons,44 and other Ladies of the Kings bloud, in rich gownes brodered about with golden Flower de Luces. And after them the Dutchesse of Guise, the Dutchesse of Cheureuse, and the Dutchesse Elbeuf, with a world of other Ladies and Gentlewomen, which like so many faire Planets mouing in their seuerall orbes, made all the place like the Heauens sparkle with renowne and glory about them. After these came a little world of Noble-men, Knights, and Gentlemen. And last of all came the Kings principall and chiefe Guard, consisting only of Scots45 and no other. All this royall and admired assemblie [C1v] hauing in this worthie equipage before described, aduanced themselues from the Kings Castle of the Louure to our Ladies Church, they all made a stand at the entrie of the great porch of the Church, before which was a most stately scaffold mounted whereon to celebrate the marriage, and in which place was raised a wonderfull rich and curious Canopie or vealt royall of cloth of gold richly embrodred, and held almost of an46 incomparable valew: to this Canopie or Vealt royall the King and Monsieur his brother conducted the Royall Bride their sister, and placing her vnder it, they there left her till some ceremonie were finished, then they resigned her vp into
41 See note 11. 42 ‘had’ has been changed from ‘hac’, which is presumed to have been a mistake (or perhaps a broken letter) in the original text. 43 Marie, daughter of Henri, Duc de Montpensier (who was to marry Monsieur — Gaston, Duc d’Orléans — in 1626). She died in childbirth a year later. 44 Marie de Bourbon-Soissons (1606–1692), daughter of Charles de Bourbon, Comte de Soissons and Anne de Montafié. 45 ‘Scots’ has been changed from ‘Stots’, which is presumed to have been a mistake in the original text. 46 ‘an’ has been altered from ‘and’, which is presumed to have been a mistake in the original text.
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the hands of the Duke of Chereuse, to whom the Cardinall de la Roche Foucault47 came and performed all the ceremonies of marriage according to the orders of the Church, and the royall ceremonies of the French Nation, all acclamations of honour and renowne ringing about the [C2] Church in a wonderfull manner. The ceremonies being thus finished all, the troopes and orders before rehearsed, passed in a most solemne manner vp into the quire through along the gallerie, principally erected for that purpose, and going by a direct line, iust through the middest of the Church, and euery part thereof hung and adorned with wonderfull rich cloth of Arras, being more then three quarters of gold or siluer. In the middest of the quire on both sides were placed diuers eminent and stately seates of more respect and view then any formerly repeated, on the principall side whereof sate all my Lords the Presidents of the Parliaments of France, with their morters of gold vpon their heads, and their gownes, robes and hoods of rich scarlet all lined with Ermines, and some small degree below them sat all the Councellors of the high Courts of Parliament in gownes like vnto the Presidents, and other things appropriated vnto their places. [C2v] In opposition vnto these, and in seats of like eminence, sat first alone by himselfe the Prouost of the Merchants of Paris,48 cloathed in a long roabe of Crimson and Purple, or Violet coloured Veluet, and neere vnto him the Sherifes of the Citie of Paris, and other principall Magistrates which were of especiall note both in the Citie and in the Vniuersitie. Not far from these seates, and in the quire also was mounted another scaffold or flore, being raised full three steps high, vpon which was mounted another large and goodly Canopie or Tent royall, vnder which the K. the Q. and the Q. mother, & Monsieur the Kings brother were placed and conducted this thereby the Duke of Cheureuse, and the two extraordinarie Embassadors for the maiestie of great Brittaine, who after they had seene euerie ceremonie fitted, they withdrew themselues into the Archbishops pallace49 vntil the whole seruice was ended, & then they returned againe to the K. & Queene. When the formes or ceremonies of the [C3r] French deuotions were ended, and that the acclamations of the people had caryed ioy to euery proceeding, then the whole troope returned in the same forme or equipage as they came thither vnto the Archbishops pallace, where the whole Court supped, and were entertained with all the state, pompe, and magnificence that could bee deuised.50 During all the pompe and solemnitie of which feast, there was heard such thundring vollies of Cannon, and other great shot that the ecchoing report thereof was carried many leagues off, and euen iudgement it selfe could not but stand amazed 47 ‘Foucault’ has been altered from ‘Foncault’, which is presumed to have been a mistake in the original text. 48 Provost of Merchants, headed the burgh council and was effectively the equivalent of the modern mayor. 49 An 1831 drawing of the ‘Remains of the Archbishop’s Palace, Notre Dame’ by John Scarlett Davis (graphite, and watercolour on paper) is in the collection of the Tate in London. 50 A handwritten note in the right-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘The sup [ ] of the whole Court upti[l] the [ ] [ ] [ ] ended’.
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to see and heare the wonderfull terrors which proceeded from pleasure and reioycings. After these infinite vollies of shot, was seene many other triumphes, as bonefires, fireworkes, feasts, musickes of all kinds, and all sounds, dancings, maskings, & all manner of reuells, that France seemed to intend nothing but the present rauishing ioy, & well; & truly may it be said of her [C3v] that then now she was neuer seene more pleasant, neuer more abundantly clothed with contentments and comforts. But here least I might be thought to gallop too swiftly ouer the glorie of this high state and magnificence, and like the dogs vpon the riuer Nilus to catch here and there a lap running, I will borrow leaue a little to speake of the powerfull state and magnificence of this hardly paralleld feast and sumptuous triumph. It is therefore first to be vnderstood that this glorious and royall feast was held in the great hall belonging to the Archbishops pallace, being a roome of wonderfull long extent, the table stretched out from the one end of the hall to the other, and being couered and adorned with wonderfull rich damaske, and the salts and other apparrell of infinite price and valew, the King of France sat in the middest of the table, and was serued by the grand Prior of France,51 who that day represented the person of the great Ma- [C4r] ster of France, before him marched eight drums, foure fifes, and sixteene trumpets, besides a world of clarions, hoboyes, cornets, and other loud instruments, his person was accompanied with Monsieur Beaumont,52 Lord grand Steward of the kings house, and two and thirtie other inferior Stewards of his Maiesties houshold with white staues in their hands, and other ensignes of their seuerall places. The meat was this day carried vp by the Lords, Princes, Dukes, Peeres, Marshals, and Barons of France, followed by Knights, Esquires, Gentlemen of the Court, and other inferiour officers and seruants. Now touching the particular seruices of state, you shall vnderstand that Monsier Iainuilde [Monsieur de Joinville] serued this day as the Lord great Pantler of France, the Duke of Elbeufe was Cupbearer, and the Earle of Harcourt was Caruer. The Queene mother sat on the right hand of the King, and her person was attended by the Duke of Belgard53 principall Sewer, [C4v] the Duke of Vzias,54 and the Duke of Luxembourge.55 The Queene of France herselfe sat on the right hand of the Queene mother, and was attended by the Duke of Aluine,56 the Duke Brissac,57 and the Duke
51 Alexandre de Vendôme (1598–1629), illegitimate son of Henri IV and Gabrielle d’Estrées. 52 The person referred to seems to be Charles Le Normand, Seigneur de Beaumont. However the author of A True Discourse may well have been referring to Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Soissons, who was Lord Grand Steward at the time of the wedding. Charles Le Normand is mentioned as premier maître d’hôtel for the year 1624 in Eugène Griselle, État de la maison du roi Louis XIII (Paris: Éditions de documents d’histoire, 1912), p. 12. 53 Roger de Saint-Lary, Duc de Bellegarde (1586–1646). He was Grand Equerry of France. 54 Emmanuel de Crussol, Duc d’Uzès (1570–1657). 55 Léon d’Albert, Sieur de Brantes, Duc de Luxembourg (1582–1630). He was one of the two brothers of the late Duc de Luynes. 56 Charles de Schomberg, Duc d’Alluin (1601–1656). 57 François de Cossé, Duc de Brissac (1585–1651).
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of Chaune.58 The Queene of great Brittaine sat on the Kings left hand, and was attended by the Marshall de Vittry, who serued her as great Pantler, the Marshall de Aubeterce,59 who serued her as Cupbearer, and the Marshall Bassampiere as Caruer. My Lord the Duke of Cheureuse sat next the Queene of great Brittaine, and was attended by the Lord of Rochfort.60 The Earle of Carlile, and the Earle of Holland Embassadors for the Maiesty of great Brittaine sate next the Duke of Cheureuse, and lastly Monsier the Kings brother sate neere vnto the Queene, and after him the rest of the Peeres and Princes, all which were serued and attended on in most magnificent and heroycall manner. After the solemnitie of this great [D1r] and royall feast, the King, Queenes, and Princes returned backe to the Louuer, where there was great store of Musicke, Dauncing, and Reuells, and the ioy of that daies happie and blessed vnion, depriued the night of her ordinarie accustomed dues, so that rest was in a manner quite forgotten, and the night and day were both thought too scant and confined to expresse a ioy so strong and dylated. After these ceremonies and celebrations were to the contentment of all true hearted subiects finished, the euer admired and most excellent Queene of great Brittaine,61 after some short time of repose, with a wonderfull glorious traine of Princes, Noblemen, Ladies, and all the choicest flowres of France, tooke her happie iourney towards Bulloyne, where after some trauell, and the expence of some few daies, her Maiestie arriued with great prosperitie; for in that place lay at anchor the goodly fleet of great Brittaine, [D1v] readie to waft and carrie her Maiestie ouer at her owne appointment, and in the passage of this fleet, there was one thing remarkeable, as that in their departure from England the wind rose vp so full South and South-West, being the only wind which was opposite and contrarie to their course, that but with infinite great trouble and vexation they had power to attaine to the French shore, but being there arriued, immediatly the wind rose vp full North-East, which was likewise the most contrarie wind for their returne that could possibly blow from any part of the Compasse, neither was the Contrariety of this winde of a meane and indifferent nature, but so violent, feirce and impatient that it was hardly possible for any Ship to liue or Continue vpon that roade, and although the necessity of their present occasion, the command and seruice to which was boud62 the vttermost of there obedience, and many other tyes inforst them to vse all Art, Care and wise- [D2r] dome still to continue in that place, yet was the impatience of the winds so great that in despight of all art or industry the goodly and tall ship
58 Honoré d’Albert, Sieur de Cadenet, Duc de Chaulnes (1581–1649). He was one of the two brothers of the late Duc de Luynes. 59 François d’Esparbès de Lussan, Maréchal d’Aubeterre (c. 1571–1628). 60 Henry Carey, fourth Lord Hunsdon from 1617, Viscount Rochford 1621, Earl of Dover 1628. He accompanied Charles and the Duke of Buckingham to Spain in 1623. 61 A handwritten note in the right-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘Her excelle[nt] M[aies]ties iour[ney] from Paris t[owards] Bulloyne’. 62 ‘boud’ appears in the original text with a ~ above the ‘u’, signifying the word ‘bound’.
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called63 the Prince64 spent an anchor of aboue 30. hundred weight, the Anne, the Assurance, and all the rest of65 the fleete were on drift, and all hope being cut off to continue longer in that place, and they must now looke for forraigne safetie. But Ecce quam opportunum,66 behold how great and good our God is in these fatall extremities, for in the very minute of this Desperation and Discontentment the Queene of great Britaine came to Bulloigne, and as if her very presence had dispeld the winde, or the sweetenesse of her excellent67 nature, had put into insensible things a sensible feeling of the Iniuries which might be done to her goodnes by the impatiencie of such stormy weather, presently the storme & winds ceased and the Sea became so calme and milde that not a wrinkle was to be seene vpon Neptunes face, & the windes as if [D2v] they strugled to Conduct & bring her to the place where both her royal Lords and her own wishes and the peoples longings hourely aspired and that withall ease comfort and sweetenesse, they presently rose vp so calmely and with such delicate breath that Ioyning with the gentlenesse of the easie tides all so happily concurred together that not the best wish was able to out-reach the happy euent. This obseruation being taken both by her Excellent selfe, and those carefull Princes who had the charge of her Royall Person,68 shee presently tooke her Barge vpon Sunday about ten of the clocke in the fore-noone, being the ninth69 of this instant Iune, according to our English computation, and so came a boord a goodly and stately ship, called the Prince, being Admirall, where after a world of shouts, prayers, vowes and acclamations for the prosperitie of her happie iourney; they hoisted saile, and came that day a- [D3r] bout six of the clocke in the after-noone vnto the Towne of Douer in England,70 where she was receiued with that ioy and humble respect, that neuer Queene could boast of a more generall applause. From the water shee was conducted in most stately and magnificent manner to Douer Castle, where her Highnesse reposed her selfe that night, being royally entertained both by the Towne and Countrey, and magnificently feasted and accommodated with all the delights and pleasures which the leasure of that busie affaire could giue any libertie vnto. Vpon Munday being the thirteenth of Iune,71 the72 Kings most Excellent Maiestie came vnto Douer about ten of the clocke in the fore-noone, and after
63 ‘called’ has been underlined in black ink. 64 ‘Prince’ has been underlined in black ink. 65 ‘an anchor of aboue 30. hundred weight, the Anne, the Assurance, and all the rest of ’ has been underlined in black ink. 66 ‘Behold how good and fitting thing [it was] …’. The tag carries an echo of the opening lines of Psalm 133, ‘Behold how good and joyful a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity’. 67 ‘her ex’ has been underlined in black ink. 68 A handwritten note in the left-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘[Fro]m Bulloigne [to] Dover’. 69 ‘ninth’ has been underlined in black ink. 70 ‘vnto the Towne of Douer in Engl’ has been underlined in black ink. 71 23 June (French date). 72 ‘Vpon Munday being the thirteenth of Iune, the’ has been underlined in black ink, and there is a handwritten note in the right-hand margin (cropped and difficult to decipher) which reads: ‘[ ] [ ] of c[ ] M[ai[sti[e] [ ] to Dover’.
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little short preparation, the Queene being full of all ioyfull expectation, they met together in the Priuie Chamber, where in the first incounter she threw her selfe into his armes with that boundlesse and vnexpresseable affection, that vertue, modestie, and all the [D3v] perfections which can crowne the best and most excellent creature, might there haue learned the worthiest rules both of honour, true loue, and obedience; neither did shee so soone cast her selfe into his armes, as withall instantly threw downe her selfe vpon her knees before him, giuing vp into his sacred protection, her life, libertie, seruice, and euerlasting obedience, acknowledging her selfe an73 Handmaid to his goodnesse, and that all the powers and strength both of her minde and bodie should wholly and absolutely, next vnto her God, rest euer bound to his Kingly Commandements. What tongue or pen is able to expresse that ioy wherewith he receiued her, and her deare protestations, for scarsely could you say shee is now vpon her knees, when with all the tendernesses which an immaculate and vnspotted affection could expresse, hee presently tooke her vp into his armes, kist her againe, and gaue her those deare expressions of a neuer changing loue, [D4r] that the beholders might see how each others heart flew out at the windowes of their eyes, and by adeliazan enterchange lodged themselues in each others bosome: after these pure and vnfained caressments, they fell into priuate conference, and so passed the time till dinner; which finished, the King and Queene departed from Douer, and being come out of the Towne, a gallant volley of shot was deliuered both from the Castle and ships,74 which continued so long and loud, that the very peale in the eccho carried backe her royall welcome vnto Callyes. Being come from the Towne of Douer, they came vpon Barrome Downe, a spatious and goodly place, where were assembled all the English Nobilitie, and many Ladies of Honour and high place, which being ranckt according to the dignitie of their great places, and the knight Marshall with a carefull respect keeping the vulgar from intruding or doing them offence. The King and Queene in great State rode [D4v] betweene them, giuing such respect and grace to euery one of deseruing qualitie, that euery one stroue in their prayers and praises, to let the world vnderstand the infinitenesse of their ioy and comfort. From Barrome Downe the King and Queene came the same night to the Citie of Canterburie, all the wayes whereupon they rode being strewed with greene rushes, Roses, and the choisest flowers that could be gotten, and the trees loaden with people of all sorts, who with shouts and acclamations gaue them a continuall welcome. Being come neare vnto the Citie, their Highnesses were met, and receiued by the Maior, and the rest of the Citie Magistrates, and so brought within the walles, where was pronounced before them diuers learned gratulatory Orations, and such infinite preparations made of all kindes for the general entertainment, that Canterbury seemed for that little time, a very Eden or Paradise, where [d1r] nothing was wanting that might serue ioy or delight. 73 Here ‘selfean’ appears in the original text, presumably a mistake. 74 A handwritten note in the right-hand margin (cropped) reads: The King and Q[ueene] departed fr[om] Dover c[astle] to Canterb[ury]’.
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Master IOHN FINCH his Speech to King CHARLES at Canterbury, May 30. 1625.75 Most Gratious and dread Soueraigne. Those that would keepe their spirits in a iust and true temper, vsefull for speech or action, had need of a watchfull eye vpon two principall causes of their decay, the ouer-contracting, and the too-much extending of them; whereof the last doth most impouerish and weaken: whence it commeth, that in weightie griefes the spirits being pent vp and imprisoned, haue often the doores of vtterance shut against them: but in excessiue ioy, where they spread and make hast to get forth by expression, they are commonly scattered and lost. Both these are at this time combined [d1v] against vs, your Maiesties humblest and meanest subiects. When we remember what a glorious and good King wee haue lost. A King from his cradle to those very yeeres that are the common measure of this short line of Life, exercised in all the wisdome of well gouerning. A King that hauing taken away the wall of Separation vnited two puissant and military Nations, reduced Ireland by forren plantations, gaue this Realme a large portion of the new world, and reigned aboue twentie yeares in such peace and felicitie, as was beyond the euent of former times; for euen in the happie daies of Queene Elizabeth of famous memory, her first yeares were interrupted by a Rebellion in England, and her last by a Rebellion in Ireland. A King that by his incomparable Writings, proclaimed himselfe true Defender of the Faith; and like Iosua,76 made the walles of spirituall Ierico fall downe before him. When wee but remember this (as who [d2r] can euer forget it) how are our sorrowes prest together, or who can finde any doore of speech to let his griefe forth at? Non est dolor sicut iste,77 There is no wo can parallel this. But when we turne our eies and hearts vpon your most excellent Maiestie, the true Heire of all his Princely Vertues, when in your Royall Person wee see all these blessings and fauours of God entailed vpon vs, and by this happie Coniunction now descendable to all posteritie: who can draw forth the Legions of his ioy in order, or finde a language fit for the gladnesse of his heart. He that is borne a King (most Gratious Soueraigne) can hardly attaine one point of perfection in Gouernment, the knowledge of obeying well. A contemplation which in one act of obedience in Henry the fift, (who was one of the noblest
75 For a discussion of Finch’s two speeches in Canterbury, the first to King Charles and the second to both King Charles and Henrietta Maria, see Sara Trevisan’s chapter in this volume. ‘Between 1614 and 1628 Finch sat in Parliament for Canterbury and Winchelsea [and, from 1617, was] Recorder of the city’ (See Sara Trevisan’s chapter 8, pp. 205–20). 76 For seven days the Israelites marched round the walls of Jericho. On the seventh day the city fell ( Joshua 6. 1–27). 77 ‘There is no grief like this’. An echo of a much-cited verse in the Old Testament book of Lamentations 1. 12, ‘Behold and see if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow’. This has served from at least the sixteenth century as the text of Easter sermons, and has more recently been incorporated into the libretto of a well-known tenor (or soprano) aria in Handel’s Messiah.
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Princes that euer swayed the Scepter of this Kingdome from the Conquest to his times, and he matched with a Daughter of France)78 gaue extraordinary comfort [d2v] vnto his Father, a wise and prudent King. What happinesse then hath your Maiestie sealed vs an assurance of, who hauing in all the actions of your life beene an excellent Sonne to your Royall Father, can neuer be other then an excellent Father to your people. On the Throne (for Hills best discouer Valleyes) Princes may with much aduantage, as in a perspectiue glasse draw the state of the Common-wealth nearer their sight; but when they descend from themselues, and grow acquainted with the hearts and affections of their subiects; this is to measure the Valleyes at hand, and not at distance, and doth at once winne hope of their goodnesse, and make vs in awe of their wisdome. Such were the effects of your Maiesties Princely Iudgement, when in the last (by you made happie) Parlament, and in the Assembly preceding it, your Highnesse, Exuta purpura,79 forgetting you were the only Sonne of the King, became the Son of the Kingdome, and tooke vpon your selfe the cares and desires of it. By which, [d3r] as by the balme of Gilead,80 our wounds were healed in time, and all of vs as much incouraged (in humble and dutifull manner) to present our iust greuances vnto you, as we are deterred from creating any such out of our owne vaine or vnmannerly fancies. Your Maiesties beames like those of the Sunne-rising were then most comfortable, now that your Maiestie is in the exaltation of your orbe, we cannot but hope to finde more benigne and serene aspects. But there is yet one ioy aboue all these and which seasons all our other blessings, your Maiesties so knowne and knowing zeale for true religion. Princes indued with morall vertues are like Diamonds, rich, but rough and vnpolished, it is the knowledge and feare of God only adds the true luster and sets them faire. This was our vnspeakable comfort, and a blessing England must neuer be vnmindfull of, when you our Sunne were in the West, and a full halfe yeares night clouded all our hearts with a fearefull darkenesse. [d3v] Let it not (most gratious and mighty King) be registred in your Royall heart amongst the errors of this City, that your Highnesse was heere stayed in that your Iourney, (for I see they are damp at the remembrance of it) and humbly expect to haue their pardon sealed by one gratious looke of yours. True it is, like vnskilled Astronomers, not knowing the Sunnes proper course, we had all our eyes only on the rapid motion of those times. But therein these your Maiesties faithfull subiects did but in little draw a perfect modell of the secret votes and desires of your whole Kingdome, which afterwards vpon your Highnesse returne, brake forth into flames of ioy not vnacceptable vnto you. The hearty affection of your subiects is like the soule of man, all in all, and all in euery part of your Kingdome. Vouchsafe then (most Gratious and Soueraigne 78 Catherine de Valois (1401–1437), daughter of King Charles VI. 79 ‘with your rank laid aside’. 80 Balsam named after the region of Gilead, where it was produced. It is mentioned several times in the Bible.
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Leige) as in that, so now from these your humble and faithfull subiects, the Maior, Aldermen, and whole commi- [d4r] nalty of this City, graciously to accept that Loyall and hearty welcome which the fulnesse of ioy makes dew from all, and be not displeased, if as Iacob did the King of Kings, we haue once more stayed your Maiestie till wee might receiue a blessing from you. This City (my most gratious Soueraigne) hath beene the seate of Kings and in repute amongst other Cities of this Kingdome. Velut inter ignes Luna minores.81 In King Ethelberts time aboue a thousand yeares since, it was Caput imperii sui:82 and by his donation to Austen83 made the first Archbishops Sea, in which the most part of threescore and foureteene Metripolitans84 haue kept their residence. Many of the Saxon Kings lie buried here, and since the conquest Henry the Fourth, the first King of the line of Lancaster, and that famous Edward the black Prince, who brought almost as much sorrow to France as your Maiestie hath now done ioy. Fuimus Troes,85 but by fier and a consu- [d4v] mer worse then that (Intestine86 discord and dissention) it hath beene so often torne and defaced, that scarce any footsteps of the ancient splendor are now to be discouered. Some fauours only of your Maiesties Royall Progenitors haue kept life in it, and held it vp by the Chinne. Henry the third endowed it with many ample priuiledges. Henry the sixt bestowed the Maioraltie vpon vs, from whose time downewards, Dum nos aliquod nomenque decusque Gessimus,87 forty together of the best name and bloud in this country, beare that office heere. Edward the fourth made it a County of it selfe, seuered and distinct from the rest of Kent. Your Maiesties most Royall Father (of euer blessed and happy memory) confirmed all our ancient liberties and bestowed on vs this sword, the ensigne of Honor and Iustice. The competent distance from the Sea, [e1r] and a Riuer that with no great cost might be made nauigable, shew how naturall apt it is to embrace great traffique: And since it is the stayers by which all Ambassadors of forraigne Princes and strangers ascend your Imperiall chamber of London, we hope it will one day bee held not vnworthy the high thoughts of so great and glorious a King as King Charles, to make it in some sort proportionable to the rest of that building. It had once a Mint in it, but this poore present, will quickly tell your Maiestie that is gone. Only as the glory of starrs is not alwayes in their magnitude, wee 81 ‘As shines the moon among the lesser fires’. Slightly adapted from Horace, Odes, 1. 12. 47–48 (‘ignes’ for ‘ignis’). 82 ‘Capital of its empire’. 83 The reference here is to Augustine, the fabled first Archbishop of Canterbury. 84 Metropolitan Archbishops of Canterbury. 85 ‘We were Trojans’. From Virgil, Aeneid, II. 325–26. The rest of the line is as follows: ‘fuit Ilium et ingens / gloria Teucrorum’ [this was Ilium and the mighty glory of the Teucrians]. 86 The original text features a ‘u’ rather than an ‘n’ in ‘Intestine’. This is presumed to be a turned letter. 87 ‘While we have borne something of the name and honour’.
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hope the humble Zeale with which it is offered will finde your Maiesties Gratious and benigne Interpretation. The God of Dauid be euer with King Charles, and make his throne greater then the throne of his Father. [e1v] Master IOHN FINCH his Speech to King CHARLES and his Queene
at Canterbury, Iune 13. 1625.
In all Sacrifices vnder the Law, Most High and Mightie King (Most Gratious and most Illustrious Queen) two things were of Principall vse and mysterie, Fire and Salt, one taught vs the necessitie of Zeale, the other how to make that Zeale acceptable by right guiding & ordering of it: for preposterous Zeale is like an excellent Instrument well strung, but out of tune. The glory and grace now shining vpon vs from your High Maiesties, like the heauenly fire of Elias Sacrifice,88 hath so filled our soules with ioy and gladnesse, that our humble and heartie expressions can neuer distrust your gratious acceptations, when all things concur to inflame the zeale of English harts, that we could hope, or our Enemies feare. [e2r] This happie Vnion of two great and Potent Kingdoms in this so glorious and blessed Coniunction of your most Excellent Maiesties, and this Regina votorum, this faire Daughter of France, whom our prayers and earnest expectations haue so long attended. Kingdomes are but Epitomies of the World, as families are of them, yet in good neighbours both take comfort. If we credit some remaines of Antiquity France and England haue been heretofore coioyned89 by an Istmus of land, where that small channell runs that now diuides vs. Certaine it is we may say with the Poet, Hic vertex nobis semper sublimis. One Sunne serues our turne by day, and the same Pole-starre by night: At illum sub pedibus Styx atra videt manesque profundi,90 There be that glory of many scattered kingdoms and titles in euery part of the world one: But in this neighbourhood of hearts is yet neerer then that of habitations. For kingdomes separate in affection, are like the feet of Nebuchadnez- [e2v] zers Image, part yron, part clay, that neuer mingle well.91 No two Nations vnder heauen (the Spaniards and Mores except) giue more assurance of consanguinitie by the affections and dispositions of the people, then these two, both of able bodies, and fitting spirits, free and sociable, of a sweetnesse not allayed with the dulnesse of some, nor blowne vp with the affected grauitie and pride of others, a finer and gentle temper, such as should be
88 Elias (also known as Elijah). Old Testament prophet who ascended to Heaven in a fiery chariot. His life is recorded in III Kings, IV Kings, Ecclesiastes 48. 12–15 and Maccabees 2. 58. 89 The first ‘o’ of coioyned has a ‘~’ above it in the original text, indicating the ‘n’ missing from ‘conioyned’. 90 ‘Hic vertex nobis semper sublimis … At illum sub pedibus Styx atra videt manesque profundi’ [Here the [celestial] pole is ever above us … but beneath our feet one may see the infernal [river] Styx and the spirits of the underworld]. From Virgil, Georgics, I. 242–43. 91 Refers to a dream of King Nebuchadnezzar in around 603 bc in which the king saw a great image of a man made out of different metals. The meaning of the dream was revealed to the Old Testament prophet Daniel (see Daniel 2. 31–43).
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in men that were created for Cities, and not for Desarts. Both Nations military and populous, both ioyning together able to afford many armies, without the aid of auxiliary forces. France the best Caualry of the world, and what Infantrie England yeelds, Spaine can best tell. Your thrice renowned Father, Henry the Great (Most excellent Lady) knew wel, and loued well this Nation: Nor was the faithfull seruice it did him without some secret and diuine instinct that from his loynes should come; Magnae spes altera [e3r] Britanniae,92 a companion fit for the glorie of the Brittish Throne, as at this day to our infinite comfort wee all behold. It was the Daughter of Clotarius, King of France,93 that in this Citie liued and planted the Christian Faith here. From a Daughter of France94 came Edward the third of England, a glorious and happie Prince. By another match with the Daughter of Charles the sixt of France95 did our Henry the first reconcile those differences, which the sword and warre could neuer doe betweene vs. All ages haue found happinesse in our vniting: and our dissensions neuer relished of others misfortune. But if euer, now, euen now was the true period of time to summon our ancient affections to a new league, when the Chariot of Iehu driues so furiously, when our neighbours and allies are so neare danger, if not ruine, when (Oh that my tongue could not speake it, but gratiously be pleased in the day of the gladnesse of thy heart, O Queene, to be put in minde of it) [e3v] so many Royall branches of that blessed tree that now growes in Paradice, liue transplanted, nay torne away from their owne proper soyle, and still droope by the ouer-dropping of far-spreading trees whose sappe is sower and leafe balefull. The Kings of England and France haue euer ballanced the affayres of Christendome, and seuerally put weight into the westerne scales, or abated them by counterpoyse as occasion of state hath required. Now they both meete in one scale, no doubt the hand of heauen hath written Mene tekel96 vpon the painted wall of their opposers, numbred and weighed their strength in the ballance, and found it to light. A blessing not to haue beene hoped for, but in this happy vnion of your sacred persons, in whom (as many waters that make one great riuer) the Royall bloud of many Princes is met to make perfect your greatnesse in glory & allyance. That of England Scotland and Denmarke but one [e4r] discent of, in your sacred person (Dread soueraigne) and though farther (which perhaps doth best, for
92 ‘Another hopeful [prince] for Great Britain’. 93 Emma (seventh century ad), daughter of Clotaire II and wife of King Eadbal of Kent. However it is Aldeberge (or Bertha of Kent, later canonized for her role) who is usually credited with the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England. 94 Isabelle de France (1295–1358), daughter of King Philippe IV and wife of Edward II of England. 95 Catherine de Valois. See note 78. 96 These are words from ‘the writing on the wall’ [Mene, mene tekel upharsin] at Belshazzar’s Feast as recorded in the Old Testament Book of Daniel, chapter 5. Daniel interpreted the words to mean, broadly, that the days of Belshazzar’s kingdom were numbered, his reign had been weighed and found wanting and had been ‘delivered up’ or abandoned. See Trevisan’s chapter in this volume, pp. 213–15.
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some springes runne clearest farre from their head) the bloud of Spaine also in your most excellent person (Thrice illustrious Queene) the bloud of France, Nauarre, and the greatest Princes of Italy in both of you, and not without some great and happy prediction (for Heauenly bodies in coniunction haue their glory doubled) the two Royall branches of Charlemain, and Hugh Capell97 are now growne into one tree. It was a Charles brought the Empire first to France,98 A Charles that brought it first to Spaine.99 Non indebita poscas Regna tuis fatis.100 It would ill become our ioyes to take time from yours. Be gratiously pleased (most gratious and excellent Princes) in this poore earnest, of that humble, Loyall and hearty affections, with which these graue Magistrates meete the felicity you bring vs, to take [e4v] possession of this City, our hearts, and all that is ours. And the Author of all goodnesse, powre downe vpon you and vs, the eternity of Ioyes, that the Daughter, Sister, Spouse of Kings may be heere made the Mother of Kinges, who when you are crowned with heauenly glory may sit vpon this Throne for euer. Et nati natorum, & qui nascentur ab illis:101 to the end of all Kingdomes. [E1r]102 On Wednesday the King and Queene departed from Canterbury,103 and rode in the most triumphant manner that might be to Cobham Hall, finding (as before I said) all the high-waies strewed with Roses, & all maner of sweet flowers, & here at Cobham they lodged al that night, where there was all plentifull entertainment, and nothing wanting that might adde any honour either to the King or Kingdome. On Thursday being the Sixteenth of Iune according to our Computation104 105 the King and Queene departed from Cobham all the waies prepared as hath been before shewed, and so in most glorious manner came to the City of Rochester where there was expectation of some stay; but the day being spent too farre they rid thorow the City, notwithstanding the Maior, Magistrates & Citizens of that City gaue both the King & Queene a noble & most hearty welcome, and the Recorder of the City made vnto them a most learned and elo- [E1v] quent oration, for which both the King and Queene returned back their Royall thanks and so passing away from the City a braue volley of shot and great Ordnance was deliuered from the Shippes which lay vpon the Riuer.
97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105
Hugues Capet (941–996), King of France and founder of the Capetian dynasty. Charlemagne (768–814). Charles V (1500–1558). ‘May you not offer your deeds to an ungrateful Land’. Slightly adapted (‘tuis’ for ‘meis’ and ‘poscas’ for ‘posco’) from verses from Virgil, Aeneid, VI. 66–67. ‘And the children of our children and those who shall be born to them’. From Virgil, Aeneid, III. 98 (with a source in Homer, Iliad, XX. 307). The first 2 lines on this page are struck through in black ink as they repeat the first 2 lines at the top of the page on which the first of John Finch’s speeches begins. A handwritten note in the right-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘From Canter[bury] to Cobba[m] H[all]’. 26 June (French date). A handwritten note in the right-hand margin (abbreviated, rather than cropped) reads: ‘From Cobba[m] to Rochester’.
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From the City of Rochester the King and Queene came to the Towne of Grauesend,106 where whether it was the ignorance of the Pourtereeue107 or the ouerruling power of weake (but imagined wise) Counsell, or that the preuiledge of old rusty custome, or some other knot which my weake braine is not able to vntie. I know not, but most assured it is, that neither the Portereeue nor any of his brethren gaue the King or Queene any entertainment or tender of seruice vntill their highnesses were come into the very midst and as it were the very Center of their Towne, and there they made tender of their seruice and obedience, which was receiued withall Royall alacrity both of the King and Queene, and so they passed away in state towards the Bridge [E2r] where the Barges of State attended their approach, here they dismounted, and all the Nobilitie attending on each side of the Bridge, with a world of Ladies and Gentlewomen: here they tooke sollemne leaue of the King and Queene, and kissed both their hands, but such was the excellent disposition of the Queene, and so royall and bountifull, her grace and fauour, that to euery Ladie that came to kisse her hand, shee bowed her selfe downe and kissed their cheekes. Assoone as the King and Queene were entred into their Barge of Estate, and had a little put off from the shoare, the Blocke-house which standeth vpon the Kentish shoare first let flie all her Ordnance, and sent foorth a peale, that the Rockes and Chaulkie Cliffes resounded againe, which was no sooner finished, but immediately the Block-house which standeth on the Essex shore made answere with the like Musicke, and discharged all her Ordnance; so that the smoake mixing [E2v] and meeting together, made a cloud which enterposed betwixt the earth and the Sunnes brightnesse making an Euening at Noone day. After the Blocke-houses had thus discharged all their Ordnance, then as108 the King and Queene passed along, the Shippes which lay and anchored in the way, discharged their vollies distinctly after one another; Insomuch that the vollie was hardly euer found to cease for the passage of twelue or fifteene miles together. And the neerer the King and Queene came to the Citie of London, the greater and greater still the volley increased. Lastly, a little before the King and Queene had shot the Bridge, the Tower of London let flie her Ordnance, which did so thunder109 and rattle in the aire, that nothing could be heard for the terror of the noice. The throng of spectatours was so great, that about two hundred being in a shippe that lay almost drie, and leaning against the Wharfe, they with their waight [E3r] and motion ouerthrew the Shippe into the Thames. And by the way during all this long passage, both the King and Queene stood publiquely in the open Barge, and not onely discouered themselues to euery honest and chearefull beholder, but also with all Royall affabilitie and grace distributed their fauours to all those which came to admire them, so that there was not a liuing soule which did not in heart conclude and say with the Poet,
106 107 108 109
A handwritten note in the left-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘[Fro]m Rochester [to] Grauesend’. ‘Porte-reeve’ is the Saxon word for the office of Lord Mayor. A handwritten note in the left-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘[Fro]m Grauesend [to] London Bridge’. A handwritten note in the left-hand margin (cropped) reads: ‘The Towre of [Lon]don’.
A t r ue Di s cour se of All the Royal Passages, Tryumphs and Ceremonies
Quam bene conueniunt et in vna sede morantur Maiestas & Amor.110 And thus at last the King and Queene came to the Kings Palace at White-hall, where they were receiued111 with all the acclamations of ioy that might bee, and where I am now inforced to leaue them with this true and euer heartie prayer, that it would please God to blesse them together with daies of the longest extent that euer made happie any mortall creature, to send them faire and flourishing Issue, and when they shall of necessitie be translated [E3v] from this life, that they may raigne with God in glory euerlasting. Amen. The112 Feasting of the Duke de Cheueres, and the two French Embassadours, with the declaration of the Mariage of the King and Queene. The Tuesday being the 21. of Iune,113 the great Banquetting-house of Whitehall was prepared, and hung very richly with hangings of Silke and Gold, where at the one end of the house was placed the Chaires and Cloth of State, at the other end a sumptuous Cupbord of Plate in manner of an arch; in the middle of the house was placed one other Cupbord, not so great, but of a farre greater value, being Basons, Ewers, Cups, Salts, &c. all set with Iewels, and of Christall at the root. Then about eleuen of the clock the114 King leading his Queen, accompanied with the Duke de Cheueres, and his Dutches, with the two French Embassadors, with all the rest of the Nobilitie and Ladies, as well English, as Scots and French, [E4r] in most glorious attires and brauery, and such like as neuer before hath been seene in England, so that the Iewels of the Duke de Cheueres were reported to be worth an hundred thousand pounds. The King being placed on this manner, with the Queene on his right hand, the Articles of the Marriage were read there in publique assembly, and approued by the King and the French Embassadors: After the which blessing being giuen by a Bishop, the King kissed the Queene in presence of the whole people. After which they retired to the Priuie Chamber, while the dinner was prepared, which was brought vp; after warning giuen with Drummes and Trumpets, whereunto the King, with the Duke and the two Embassadors came, the King sate in his Chaire of Estate, the Duke at the end of the Table, with one Embassadour at either hand, where in the time of Dinner the King dranke three Healthes to the Embassadors, which was proclaimed all
110 This sentence in the original text was abbreviated, with the use of abbreviation marks above the ‘a’ in ‘Qua’, the ‘o’ in ‘coueniunt’ and the ‘a’ in ‘moratur’ to indicate missing letters, to ‘Qua[m] bene co[n]ueniunt et in vna mora[n]tur Maiestas & Amor’ [How good it is when Majesty and Love have met together and dwell in one place]. This phrase runs counter to that of ‘the Poet’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book II, 846–47) whose well-known lines run ‘non bene conveniunt, nec in una sede morantur majestas et amor’ [majesty and love do not agree well together, nor do they dwell in the same place]. The educated audience at the banquet would appreciate this deliberate inversion. 111 A handwritten note appears in the right-hand margin: ‘And to White Hall’. 112 A symbol similar to a paragraph mark (¶) appears to the left of ‘The’ in the original text. 113 1 July (French date). 114 The word ‘the’ appears twice in the original text.
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ouer the house, one to the King of France, one to the Queene, and [E4v] one other to the Queene Mother. Thus being feasted with three great seruices, and musicke playing all the while, they ended the Banquet at foure of the clocke, and retired backe to the Priuie Chamber, where they continued one houre, and after the King and the Queene, the Duke, and the rest of the Nobilitie, Lords and Ladies, returned, where they had dancing for the space of one houre: which being done, the Duke returned to Somerset-house in great State, his Coach hauing eight horses, Coach-harnesse, and all being embrodered, together with three or foure score of Coaches of the richest that euer was seene in England, accompanied with diuers of the Nobilitie. FINIS.
T r ans c ri be d an d an n otated by
Margaret Shewring
Appendix 2. A Relation of the Glorious Triumphs and Order of the Ceremonies An English-Language Version of the French Festival Book A copy of a Festival Book to mark the Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria is held in the British Library at BL 605.B.17.1 The copy contains the text in two languages — English and French. The English-language text starts on sig. A3r and runs to B4v. It is followed by the French text, from sig. C1r to C4v. The title page of the English text notes that it was published in London. Printed by T. S. [Thomas Snodham] for Nathaniel Butter, to be sold at the sign of the Pyde-Bull, near S. Austen’s Gate, 1625. The French-language text was printed in the workshop of J. Martin in Paris (1625). As discussed in my chapter in this volume, the English-language text is a translation of the French-language Festival Book with slight variants in page layout and a small number of textual changes and additions apparently targeted at readers of the English text. This Appendix offers a transcription of the English translation, indicating the variants, changes and additions as appropriate. Quotations from the French-language text in a number of the footnotes to this transcription follow the somewhat sparse use of accents in the original French-language text. For annotations on the principal participants in the wedding celebrations please see the notes to the text of A True Discourse in Appendix 1 in this volume.
* With thanks to J. R. (Ronnie) Mulryne for translations from Latin to English. 1 This copy is in 4o and bound in leather (minus its front cover). The surviving back cover is in tan brown with a gilt-embossed pattern around the edges, just inset from each edge and so creating a frame-like appearance. Part of the spine also survives. It has ‘MARRIAGE OF KING CHARLES’ on it, again gilt-embossed. On the reverse of the title page is a stamp indicating that the book was ‘PRESENTED BY LADY BANKS to the MUSEUM BRITANNICUM’, the British Library’s former location. Margaret Shewring is Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy, ed. by Marie-Claude CanovaGreen and Sara J. Wolfson, European Festival Studies: 1450–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), pp. 343–351 10.1484/M.EFS-EB.5.119198
FHG
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t r a n s cr ib ed an d an n otated by ma rg a ret shewring [Title Page]
A / RELATION OF THE GLORIOVS / TRIVMPHS AND ORDER / of the Ceremonies, obserued in the Mar- / riage of the High and Mighty CHARLES,2 / King of Great Brittaine, and the Ladie HEN- / RETTA [sic] MARIA, Sister to the most / Christian King of France. / TOGETHER WITH THE CEREMONIE / obserued in their Troth-plighting, perfor- / med in the Castle of the Louure, in his / Maiesties Chamber there. AS ALSO / THE KINGS DECLARATION / containing a Prohibition vnto all his Subiects / to vse and Traffique or Commerce with the / Kingdome of Spaine. Published in the / Parlament of Paris, the 12 of / May, 1625. Whereunto the Originall French Copie is added. LONDON Printed by T.S.3 for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold at / the signe of the Pyde-Bull, neeere S. Austens / Gate, 1625. [A3r] THE / GLORIOVS TRIVMPH / AND ORDER OF THE / Ceremonies,
obserued in the Marriage of the / High and Mighty CHARLES, King of Great Bri- / taine, and the Ladie HENRETTA [sic] MARIA, / Sister to the most Christian King / of FRANCE.4 Now at last God5 being fauourable vnto [our Countrey of]6 France, hath pleased to grant what wee7 most desired so long since; [and] those thicke cloudes which seemed to obscure the lustre of our Country, and had as it were conspired to kill the fruite thereof in the very blossome, are now scattered and blowne ouer,8 together with the bad influence which threatened vs, God in his secret will permitting that two of the most mighty and potent Kingdomes of Christendome,9 2 The name CHARLES has been underlined by hand and the letter ‘K’ added, also by hand, in the righthand margin. 3 Thomas Snodham. 4 The French text has a shorter version of this title: Le Triomphe Glorieux & l’ordre des Ceremonies obseruees au mariage du Roy de la Grand’ Bretagne, & de Madame sœur du Roy. This is followed by an indication of what is to come: ‘Ensemble l’ordre tenu aux fiancailles faictes au Chasteau du Louure, en la Chambre de sa Majesté’ [sig. C1r]. 5 The words in the French text here are ‘le ciel’ rather than ‘God’. 6 Phrases that only appear in the English translation are included in this transcription in square brackets. 7 The French text has ‘elle’ (i.e. France) in place of ‘wee’. 8 The French text has ‘dissipez’, translated in the English version as ‘scattered and blowne ouer’. 9 The emphasis in the French is more direct: ‘que les deux plus puissantes Courronnes de la Chrestiente’ [that the two most powerful crowns of Christendom], rather than the translation’s phrasing, ‘two of the most mighty and potent Kingdomes of Cristendome’.
A R e l at i o n o f t h e G lo r i o u s Tr i u m p h s a n d Or d e r o f t h e C e r e m o n i e s
should be vnited together, by the most glorious Marriage that euer was seen in the world.10 Therefore now our Inuincible King Lewis the Just,11 must needs promise to himselfe all felicity, glory and happinesse heaped upon him by this Vnion.12 What [great] contentment hath France, and Great Britaine profit, to see themselues so inseparably vnited, by a more vndissoluable knot then the Gordian, and by a friendship better cimmented together, then the Stones of the Babilonian walles, founded by Semiramis? For neuer shall [A3v] any enemies be found strong enough to shake two so flourishing Kingdomes, which deriue their greatnesse from heauen, and their limits from the circumference of the Globe: Let all good Frenchmen now then reioyce, at such time as the aduersaries of our State, trembling with amazement and feare, haue their very soules afflicted with so goodly an alliance:13 And that I may leaue an eternal memory thereof vnto all posterity, I will most succinctly here declare, the magnificent triumphes and true manner of this happy marriage. ON Thursday, the 8. Day of May,14 the King came forth into his Chamber, and there appeared like the glorious Sunne, out-shining the other Starres, hauing his Queene with him, his second light: the Prince15 his onely brother, my Lords the Dukes of Nemours, and of Elbeuf, the Marshals of Vitry and Bassompiere,16 with other Lords of his Court, and sent for the Ladie his Sister,17 who came thither accompanied with the Queen her mother, the Princesses of Conde and County; the Dutchesses of Guise, of Cheureuse, and Elbeuf, with many other great Ladies. Her Gowne was of cloth of gold and silver, all poudered ouer with Flower-deluces of gold, and enriched with many Diamonds, and other precious stones, and her traine was borne vp by the yong Ladie of Burbon.18 As she entred into the Kings Chamber, with a Maiestie correspondent to her birth, my Lords the Earls of Carlile & Holland,19 Embassadours for the King of Great Britaine, came likewise also in, as richly clad as can possibly be expressed, 10 The French has ‘l’Vniuers’ rather than ‘world’. 11 King Louis XIII of France. 12 Again the English translation slightly alters the strength of the French text’s claim at this point: ‘C’est donc auiourd’huy que tant de felicite, de gloire, & de bon-heur ne promettent pas moins a notre grand Roy, inuincible Lovys Le Iuste, que l’Empire de tout le monde’. 13 In the copy of the two texts bound together in the British Library, someone has underlined the words ‘a ceste heure que les aduersaires de l’Estat tremblant de peur & de crainte, ont leur ame affligee d’v-ne si belle alliance’, and a handwritten note at the bottom of sig. C1r says that the underlined words are not translated into English. They do, however, appear in the translated text with only slight variation in phrasing, as shown above. 14 This date, spelled out in the French text as ‘Le Ieudy huictiesme jour de May’, is based on the French calendar. The English equivalent is 28 April. 15 The French text [C1v] gives the King’s brother his accustomed title of ‘Monsieur’ (in place of ‘the Prince’). 16 ‘Bassompierre’ in French text [C1v]. 17 The French text here [C1v] simply says ‘Madame’ (rather than ‘the Ladie his Sister’ as in the English translation). 18 The French text here [C1v] has ‘Mademoiselle de Bourbon’ rather than ‘the yong Ladie of Burbon’. Both notes 18 and 19 here suggest that the English translator is trying to identify the participants as clearly as possible for a non-French reader. 19 Described in the French text as ‘Messieurs les Comtes de Carlile & Milor Holand’ [C1v].
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giuing vnto the King the Contract of Marriage, which was read alowd by the Lord Chancellour,20 after the King had agreed vnto the Couenants. [This done,] the Ambassadours with-drew themselues into the Duke of Cheureuse his Chamber, which was ouer the Kings, and hauing communicated [A4r] the Contract vnto him: He forthwith repaired vnto his Maiestie, accompanied with the afore-said Ambassadors, and many other great Lords,21 apparelled in a Sute of Blacke, the Paines whereof were all garnished with Diamonds and the very tags of his points were enriched with the like. Being come before his Maiestie, he presented vnto him his Procuration, and the power which the King of great Brittaine had giuen him, which the King signed, and the Lady, both the Queenes, my Lord the Duke of Cheureuse, and the Lords Ambassadors likewise. This done my Lord the Cardinall De la Roche Foucault22 made them sure, after the manner accustomed. Now as such an vnion as this could not be performed without great pompe, and infinite ioy and contentment: So our Ladies Church23 was chosen for the Ceremonies of the accomplishment of the Marriage and was hung with rich tapistry and cloth of Gould and Siluer Tissue. Then was there a faire and long Gallery raised,24 beginning at the entry of the Archbishops palace, and reached euen vnto the Quire of the said Church: This gallery was vnder-propped with many pillars, which were couered at the top with Violet-colour Sattin, embrodered with golden Flowre deluces, and below with faire fine lynnen trimmed with waxe, through this same passed along all the Ceremonies of the Marriage as followeth. First, the hundred Suissers of the Kings Guard, clothed in his Maiesties Lyuery, their Drumbe beating and their Ensigne displayed. [After them]25 12. Haulbois clothed in the like lyuery, which rauished the hearts of the hearers. [Then] eight Drumbes couered with the like, which were so lustily beaten vp, that the most coward courages were animated with the noyse thereof. [A4v] Ten Trumpets also sounded so merrily that it reioyced all the hearers. [Then followed] Monsieur de Rhodes, great Maister of the Cermonies, brauely apparelled, and well accompanied. After him marched my Lords and Knights of the Order of the Holy Ghost, all glistering with precious stones.
20 21 22 23 24
The French text has ‘Monseigneur le Chancelier’ [C1v]. The French text has ‘Seigneurs de marque’ [C1v]. The French text has ‘Monsieur le Cardinal de la Roche-foucaut’ [C2r]. The French text has ‘L’Eglise de Nostre-Dame’ [C2r]. The French text reads: ‘L’on esleua enuiron de huict pieds de terre, vne belle & longue gallerie, qui prenoit son commencement des l’entree de la maison Archi-Episcopale, & se venoit rendre a l’entree du Cœur de ladite Eglise’ [C2]. 25 Here the additions in the English text (indicated here in square brackets, see note 6 above) are used to turn what is a list in the French text into more fluent prose but the lineation of the French list is retained as it indicates the physical pattern of the procession.
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[Then came] seauen Heraulds of Armes with their Coats of Red Crimson Velour, powdered all ouer with golden Flower-deluces. [Then followed them] my Lords of Vitry and Bassompiere, Marshals of France: [after them] my Lord the Duke of Elbeuf.26 [Then my] Lord the Duke of Cheureuse, apparelled in a Sute of Blacke-Cloath, cut and lined with cloth of Gould, with a Cap also of cloth of Gould, and vpon his head a Iewell, which dazelled the eyes of the beholders, a Scarfe spotted all ouer with Roses of Diamonds, with a short Cloake all imbroidred with Gold, and powdred with precious stones. [Then followed] both my Lords the Ambassadors Extraordinary of the King of Great Brittaine, &c. clad in cloth of siluer. [Then came] the King [of France], in a garment all imbroidred with Gold and Siluer, holding the Lady his Sister in his right hand, who had a crowne vpon her head, and her Gowne powdred all ouer with Flower-deluces of Gold: [And] Monsieur [the King’s Brother] on the other side, who led her in his left hand, being very brauely accoutred. The Queene Mother [followed next]. The Queene [her selfe,] in a gowne all imbroidred with Gould, Siluer, and precious stones. The Princesses of Conde and of County27 bearing vp the long Traine of the same. The young Lady of Montpensier.28 The Countesse of Seisons.29 Madame De Guise. Madame De Chereuse [sic].30 Madame De Elbeuf,31 with many Lords and Ladies, of whom I cannot now make rehearsall the number of them was so great. [B1r] All this Royall and generous troupe stayed at the entry of the great Portall
of the said Church, before which was a place appointed to celebrate the Marriage in, and whereon was raised a Canopie of inestimable vallew, vnder which the King and Monsieur his Brother left the Ladye their Sister, and consigned her into the hands of my Lord the Duke of Chevreuse, and then my Lord Cardinall de la Roche Foucault espowsed the Ladye with the ordinarie ceremonies of the Church. From thence all the Orders aboue said marched into the Quyer through a long Gallerie which was squared out by a line, in the middest of the body of the Church all couered with Tapisterie, the richest that might be.
26 27 28 29 30 31
The Duke’s name appears as ‘le Duc d’Elbœuf ’ in the French text [C2v]. The French text has ‘Mesdames les Princesses de Condé & de Conty’ [C2v]. The French text has ‘Mademoiselle de Mont-pensier’ [C2v]. The French text has ‘Madame la Comtesse de Soissons’ [C2v]. In French the spelling is ‘de Chevreuse’ [C2v]. In the French text the spelling is ‘Madame d’Elbœuf ’ [C2v].
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In the middest of the said Quyer were all ready pla-ced on the one side vpon emminent seates, my Lords the Presidents, hauing their Morters of gold on their heads, and in their scarlet Robes lyned with Ermines, and the Councellors [of the Court of Parlia-ment] in the like Gownes. On the other side sate alone the Prouost of the Marchants, in a long Robe of Crimson and violet velvet, being accompanyed with the Shirifes of the Towne. In the Quyer of the said Church, was there moreouer another floore raised three steps high, vpon which was another Canopie, where the King, the Queenes, and Monsieur [the King’s Brother] were placed and conducted by the fore-named Duke of [B1v] Chevreuse & the Ambassadours, who withdrew themselues into the Archbishops Pallace vntill the Seruice was ended, and then afterwards returned to the King and the Queenes. Prayers being done, they returned all in the like order as before into the Archbishops Pallace, where the whole Court supped. During which, was heard such a noyse and thundring of Cannon, as men would have iudged that heauen and earth had joined together: In the like sort Bon-fires, squibs, and such like were not spared throughout all the streetes: and it may well be verified that France neuer sawe of so much reioycing, And God I pray, who hath euer beene propitious vnto vs, maintaine our Countrie in her greatnesse, and graunt our King a glorious triumphe over his enemies, and a large extent of his Dominions. [B2r] The Order of the Royall Feast.
THe Supper was kept in the Archbishops great Hall, and the Table reached from the one end thereof vnto the other, The King sate in the middle of the Table, serued by my Lord the great Prior,32 who represented the great Masters person, before him there marched a number of Drummes, Trumpets and Clairons, accompanyed with Monsieur de Beaumont, great Steward of the Kings House, and thirtie two others Stewards of his Maiesties House-hold, with their staues in their hands. The meate was carryed by my Lords the Princes, Dukes, Peeres, and Marshals of France, followed by the Gentlemen of the Court and their seruants. Monsieur de Joinuille33 served as great Pantler,34 Monsieur d’Elbeuf as Cup-bearer, and my Lord the Earle of Harcourt35 as Caruer. [B2v] The Queene Mother sate on the right hand of the King, serued by my Lords the Dukes of Belgarde,36 d’Vzais, and Luxembourg.
32 In the French text: ‘Grand Prieur’ [C3v]. 33 The initial letter of this name has been reversed in the French text (and has been corrected in the English version). 34 In the French text: ‘great Panetier’ [C3v]. 35 In the French text: ‘Monsieur le Comte d’Arcourt’ [C3v]. 36 In the French text: ‘Bellegarde’ [C3v].
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The Queene her selfe on the right hand of the Queene Mother, serued by my Lords the Dukes d’Alvin, Brissac, and de Chaune. The Queene of great Brittaine37 sate on the King’s left hand, serued by the Marshall de Vitry as great Pantler, the Marshall d’Aubeterre38 as Cup bearer, and my Lord of Bassompierre as Caruer. My Lord the Duke de Chevreuse sate next the Queene of great Brittaine,39 serued by the Lord of Rochefort.40 The extraordinarie Ambassadors of great Brittaine41 sate next vnto the afore said Duke of Chevreuse. My Lord the Kings Brother sate neere vnto the Queene, and next them all the Princes,42 serued in most magnificent and Royall mannor. [B3r–B4v] The Kings Declaration…43
The Kings Declaration, contayning a Prohibition vnto all his Subiects, to haue any Trafique or Commerce with the Kingdome of Spaine. Published in the Parliament the 12. of May.44 Lewis by the grace of God king of France and of Nauarre, To [sic] all unto whom these present Letters shall come greeting. Upon the complaints which haue bin made unto us by many of our Subiectes traffiquing into Spain, of a Decree made the 2.45 Of this month by our most deare & wellbe = loued Brother, and Brother in law, the Catholique King,46 unto his Officers, to seaze upon and stay in all his ports and Hauens, the Shippes, Goods, and Merchandize of the French (our Subiects:) under pretext of Re = prisalz of some summes of money, which Our most deare and well = beloued Couũn,47 the Duke [B3v] of Guise, our Gouernour and Lieutenant Generall in Prouence, did make stay of certaine Barques, not far from Marseilles, as belonging unto some Genoway Merchants: as also because they haunted the desert Hauens of our said Country of Prouence, to the preiudice of our Ordinances & Prouisions made by Our Court of Parliament of Aix: The said King pretē[n]ding that some part of ȳ said mony did appertain un = to his Subiects (which is a thing not yet verified) and part thereof unto the said Genowaies. NOW therefore, because it is a matter of great importance for our Subjects good, to preuent them from receauing any further losse or hinderance of such their seizure and detention of their Shippes and In the French text: ‘La Royne d’Angleterre’ [C3v]. In the French text: ‘d’Auloterre’ [C3v]. In the French text: ‘la Royne d’Angliterre’ [C3v]. In the French text: ‘le Sieur de R.’ [C3v]. In the French text: ‘d’Angliterre’ [C3v]. In the French text: ‘Princesses’ rather than ‘Princes’ here. This text begins on a new page and is printed in black letter font in the French text [C4r-C4v]. The running header for this section in the English text [on B4r and B4v] is ‘A Proclamation’. 44 This date follows the French calendar. The English equivalent would have been 2 May 1625. 45 This date follows the French calendar. The English equivalent would have been 22 April 1625. 46 Philip IV of Spain. 47 Cousin. 37 38 39 40 41 42 43
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Goods as is ordained in Spaine, wherein there can be no better or = der taken, then a generall interdiction of Commerce in those places, where the Merchants Our Subiects can no longer be at their libertie. WEE make it knowne, That hauing deliberated of this affayre in Our Councell, where was present Our most honoured Lady and Mother, some Princes of Our Blood, o = ther Princes and Officers of Our Crowne, Lords and notable personages of Our sayed Councell, WITH THEIR ADVICE, and of Our owne knowledge, full power and royall Authority, We have made, and doe by these presents, signed with Our hand, make [B4r] most expresse prohibition unto all Our Subiets, of what Quality and Condition soeuer they be, to haue any Trafique or Commerce in the kingdome of Spaine, of any Corne, Wine, Cordage, and generaly neither to carry thither, transport or buy any Merchandize whatsoeuer upon paine unto the Offenders, of the confiscation of their Vessels and Goods, and to bee punished according to the rigour of Our Lawes: and this to continue untill a restitution be fully made of Our Subiects Goods seazed upon in Spaine, or that by Our Letters Pattents We shall otherwise ordaine. WHEREFORE Wee charge and command all Our louing and loyall Officers in Our Courts of Parliament, that they cause these Our present Letters to be read, published and Registred, and the contents thereof to bee kept and executed each one apart, and Our general procurors or their Substitutes, to make for the due execution of the same, all diligent & necessary persuite and inquirie. Also We give charge unto Our Gouernors, and Our Lieutenants Generall in Our Prouinces, particular Captaines and Gouernors of Our Townes and places, chiefly those upon Our frontiers, and the Bayliffes, Seneshals, and Prouosts of Our most deare Cousins, the Constable & Marshals of France, or their Lieue = tenants, And unto all Our Justices, Officers [B4v] and Subiects, to assist unto the due execution of these presents: for such is Our pleasure. In Witnesse whereof, Wee have caused Our Seale to be put unto these aforesaid presents. Giuen at Paris the 23. Of Aprill;48 in the yeare of Grace, 1625. and of Our Raigne the fifteenth. Lewis. And uppon the Fowld By the King. De Lomenie.49 And sealed with the Great Seale of yellow waxe, upon double taile: And upon the Fowld hereof is written: Read, published and registred in Court, yea and the Kings Atturney generall requiring the same to be put in execution, kept, and obserued according to their tennor and forme, and collected Copies of the same to be sent to the Bayliffes and Seneshals of that Iurisdiction, to be there likewise read, published, and executed by the diligence of the Substitutes of the aforsaid generall Atturney, which he
48 This date follows the French calendar. The English equivalent would have been 13 April 1625. 49 Henri-Auguste de Loménie, Comte de Brienne.
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enioyneth to certifie the Court hereof within the month. In the Parliamement [sic] at Paris the 12. May, 1625. Signed Du Tillet.50 Imprinted at Paris, 1625. Cum Priuiligio Maiestatis.51
50 Jean du Tillet, Seigneur de Gouaix, knight, and counsellor in the Parlement of Paris. (See Nobiliaire Universel de France, ou Recueil Général des Généalogies Historiques des Maisons Nobles de ce Royaume, Par Nicolas Viton de Saint-Allais (Paris: De l’imprimerie de C.-F. Patris, 1814), vol. 1). The Frenchlanguage book has ‘Sifine’, a misprint for ‘Signé’, which is correctly represented in the Englishlanguage version as ‘Signed’. 51 The two lines following Du Tillet’s signature are not in the French version of the text.
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Index
Abbeville: 110 Abbott, George, Archbishop of Canterbury: 209, 213, 223 Ahab, biblical King: 209, 213 Ahziah, King of Judah: 212 Aldobrandini, Cardinal: 312 Alexander II, King of Scotland: 45 Alexander III, King of Scotland: 45 Alexander III, Pope: 280, 282 Alleyn, Edward: 280 alliances, dynastic and military: 27–30, 37, 43–46, 105, 117–21 Amboise: 53 Amiens, entry of Henrietta Maria: 45–46, 49, 109–10, 112 Andrewes, Lancelot: 68, 208 Anglesey, Countess of (Elizabeth Sheldon): 191–92 Anglo, Sydney: 25–26 Angoulême: 153 Anna of Denmark, wife of James I of England: 65, 136, 180, 185, 191–92, 206, 216, 279 Anne, daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 313–15 Anne, wife of John, Baron Harington of Exton: 65 Anne d’Autriche, wife of Louis XIII of France: 28, 30, 187, 259, 324, 326, 328–30 and ballets, court (ballets de cour): 78–80, 108, 115 and Buckingham, Duke of: 34, 109–10 court of: 185 wedding of: 22, 105, 136, 141, 313 and wedding celebration of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 107–09, 143, 146, 163, 165
Anne of Cleves, wife of Henry VIII of England: 138, 180 Aristotle: 132 Arminianism: 125, 223–24 arrival, journeys of: 52–55, 57; see also under Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I of England Arthur, Prince of Wales: 138 Arundel, Countess of (Aletheia): 191, 196, 279 Arundel, Earl of (Thomas Howard): 33–34, 279 Arundel, Lady Blanche: 191 Auld Alliance: 41, 43–44, 46 Bacon, Sir Francis: 205 Bailliol, John, King of Scotland: 43 ballets, court (ballets de cour): 18, 23, 27, 32, 106–08, 111–12, 115, 120–21, 124 Ballet d’Apollon: 264–65 Ballet de Junon la Nopcière: 259 Ballet de l’Adventure de Tancrède en la Forest enchantée: 124–25 Ballet de la Prosperité des Armes de la France: 274 Ballet de la Reyne d’Angleterre: 108, 115, 120, 262 Ballet des Fées des Forests de SaintGermain: 106, 257, 261–62, 265–71, 267 Ballet des Nymphes Bocagères de la Forest Sacrée: 268, 271–72 Ballet du Temps: 261 Les Dieux descendus en France: 112, 120 Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut: 258 Grand Ballet de la reyne: 78–80 Le Sérieux et le Grotesque: 257–58, 261–62
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Comptes de l’Argenterie: 262 and contemporary concerns: 272–74 definitions of: 256–63 and Henrietta Maria’s household: 255–56, 265 Barbé, Louis: 47, 54 Barberini, Francesco, Cardinal: 296, 309–10, 314, 316 Barbet, Jean: 288 Barham Down: 171, 183, 194–96, 333 Barret, Hanna, bookseller: 155 Bassompierre, Maréchal François de: 98, 324, 327, 331, 345, 347, 349 Beake, Richard: 95 Belshazzar, King of the Chaldeans: 214 Bertha, wife of Ethelbert of Kent: 123 Bérulle, Pierre, confessor to Henrietta Maria: 30–31, 86–89, 93, 121–22, 175, 197 letters to Henrietta Maria: 95–98 and plague: 90–92 Berwick: 49–50, 191 Béthune, Philippe de: 95 betrothal ceremony of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 106–07, 137, 142, 143, 156–57, 162–66, 169, 173–74, 180, 259 Blainville, Monsieur de ( Jean de Varignies): 96 Boësset, Antoine: 261, 264–65, 268, 273 Boisrobert, François Le Métel de: 108, 271 Boitraux, Jean: 271 Bologna: 310 Bolognini, G. B.: 296, 303, 311 Bordeaux: 313 Bordier, René: 258, 264–66 Borghesi, Curtio: 314 Boteler, Jane, Lady Ley: 191 Bothwell, Earl of: 47 Boulogne: 110, 161, 173, 175, 179, 183, 192–93, 250, 323, 332 Bourne, Nicholas, bookseller: 159 Bramante, Donato: 287 Braudel, Fernand: 24 Breda: 226
Brienne, Comte de (Henri-Auguste de Loménie), French Minister and Secretary of State: 158–59, 194 Bristol, Earl of: 77 Britland, Karen: 26, 30–31, 78–79, 121, 194, 256 Brotton, Jerry: 75 Broumfeld, Mary: 90–91 Browne, William: 227 Buch, David J.: 261 Buckingham, Countess of (Mary Beaumont): 189, 191–93, 196–97 Buckingham, Duchess of (Katherine Manners): 188, 197 Buckingham, Duke of (George Villiers): 29–31, 33–36, 94, 207, 210, 224, 226, 249, 259 and Anne d’Autriche: 34, 109–10 assassination of: 176 and Duchesse de Chevreuse as mistress: 29, 34 and festival texts: 173–75 and Henrietta Maria’s household: 37, 76, 96, 180–82, 184, 188–89, 191–93, 196–98 and Huguenots: 36–37, 106, 176, 188, 197, 222 impeachment of: 34 Madrid, journey to: 64, 76–80 and royal marriage: 86–87, 106, 108, 136–37 and Spanish marriage negotiations: 64, 154 Bueil, Honorat de see Racan, Seigneur de Burckhardt, Jacob: 21 Burden, Joel: 55 Burke, Peter: 24 Burowe, John, plague victim: 91 Burton, Robert: 227 Busby, Richard: 227 Bussell, Richard: 90 Butter, Nathaniel, bookseller: 156, 159–60, 343
index
Cadiz: 94, 176 Cagny, Perceval de: 53 Calais: 110, 250 Calandrini, Cesare: 247 Callington: 222 Calvert, Sir George, Secretary of State: 282 Calvinists: 35–36, 68, 76, 158, 209–11, 217, 223–24 Cambridge: 174, 205, 227 St John’s College: 222 Camden, William: 246 Camilli, Camillo: 314 Canova-Green, Marie-Claude: 23, 30, 78 Canterbury: 89, 161–62, 171, 175, 183, 196, 206, 226 welcome speech see under Finch, John Capuchins: 96 Carew (Carey), George: 299 Carew, Sir George: 192 Carew, Lady Thomasina: 191–92 Carey, George: 70 Carey, Henry, Lord Hunsdon: 65, 70 Carey, Sir Robert: 64–73, 77, 80–81 Carleton, Sir Dudley: 89–90, 93, 170, 242 Carlisle, Countess of (Lucy Percy): 191 Carlisle, Earl of ( James Hay): 78, 185, 187, 190, 194, 286, 325, 328, 331, 345 and wedding celebration of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 107, 143, 146, 168, 195 Carolanna: 216 Carpenter, Sarah: 49 Cat, Jacob, Houwelick: 139 Catherine de Médicis, wife of Henri II of France: 27 Book of Hours of: 133, 135 Catherine de Valois, wife of Henry V of England: 50, 55–56 Catherine of Aragon, wife of Arthur, Prince of Wales, and of Henry VIII of England: 138 Catherine of Bragança, wife of Charles II of England: 283, 298 Catullus: 226, 230, 232
Cecil, Sir Robert: 192 Cecilia, daughter of Edward IV of England: 47 Chalais conspiracy: 34 Chamberlain, John: 90, 170, 242 Charlemagne, Charles I as: 215–17, 339 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (as Charles I, King of Spain): 215, 217 Charles I, King of England: 31, 41–42, 56–57, 105, 119–21 accession of: 64, 106, 190, 241–42 and Buckingham, Duke of: 34–37, 64, 76–80, 136 and Catholicism and Catholic subjects: 88, 92–93, 97 possible conversion to: 17, 54, 89, 96 as Charlemagne: 215–17, 339 childhood and youth of: 23, 64–70, 72–74 and Civil War: 63, 98 and continental wars: 26–27, 208, 210, 213 coronation of: 96, 242, 244, 252 as Duke of York: 65 and first sight of Henrietta Maria: 78–80, 259 flaws of: 63–64, 80–81 and Forced Loan: 225 married life happiness: 75, 81, 125 and household of Queen: 33, 180–81, 186–87, 190–94, 197–98 quarrels: 26, 93 and Henry, Prince of Wales: 73–74 household of: 179 and Huguenots: 36, 188 Madrid, journey to: 64, 68, 76–80, 280–81, 286–87 and masques: 271, 308, 314 and Parliament: 207–09, 242 and patron-client relations: 179 and plague: 85–86, 91 portrait of: 75, 81
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and Puritans: 221 religious beliefs of: 68–70 and Scots’ invasion: 317 Scottish lineage of: 41, 64, 172 and Spanish marriage negotiations: 77–79, 154, 279, 281, 286–87 as the Sun: 141, 209 see also wedding celebration of Charles I and Henrietta Maria Charles II, King of England: 298, 313–16 Charles VII, King of France: 44, 53–54 Chaviz, Jean: 271 Cherbury, Lord Herbert of: 260 Chester, George: 100 Chevreuse, Duc de (Claude de Lorraine): 172, 174, 193, 196, 325–27, 329, 341–42 dress for wedding: 138, 140–41, 166, 168 as proxy for Charles I in wedding: 28, 106–07, 113, 137–38, 140–41, 144, 146, 157, 163–66, 168, 173, 226, 346–49 Chevreuse, Duchesse de (Marie de Rohan): 29, 34, 187, 324, 328, 345, 347 Christian IV, King of Denmark: 29, 246 Christine, wife of Victor Amadeus I of Savoy: 28, 124, 186 Christmas, Gerard: 243, 245 Cipierre, Comte de (Charles Marcilly): 100–01 Civil War, English: 63, 98, 221 Clegg, Cyndia: 224 Clein, Francis, painter and tapestry designer: 246, 248 Clovis I, Frankish King: 315 Cobham Hall: 161, 171, 339 Coiro, Ann Baynes: 221 Coke, Sir John: 94 Collins, Samuel: 227 Combe Abbey, Coventry: 65, 74 Concini, Concino: 153 conversion, religious of Charles I and Anglicans to Catholicism: 17, 31, 54, 89, 96, 122–25
of Henrietta Maria to Anglicanism: 17, 31, 125, 234 Conway, Secretary: 101, 170 Cool, Jacob: 245–47 Cotton, Sir Allan, draper: 244–45 Crannock, John, Bishop of Brechin: 48 Creaser, John: 222 Cressy, David: 31, 69, 158 Crew, Sir Clipsby: 222–23, 225, 236 Crew, Sir Ranulph: 225 Critz, John de, Sergeant-Painter: 299, 302 Critz, Thomas de: 299 Cust, Richard: 68, 74 Daniel, biblical prophet: 211–12, 214 Daniel, Samuel, Tethys’ Festival: 74 Davenant, William: 140 David II Bruce, King of Scotland: 45 Dean, Lucinda: 28 Dean Prior: 221–22 decorations, wedding: 131–32 coins and medals: 145, 145, 155 textiles in Notre Dame: 132, 139–40, 144–45, 164, 167 Dekker, Thomas: 251–52 Denbigh, Countess of (Susan Villiers): 191–92, 197, 255 departures, royal: 48–51, 57; see also under Henrietta Maria Digges, Sir Dudley: 249 Dort, Synod of: 223 Dover: 89, 110, 161, 170, 173–75, 180, 182–83, 189, 191, 193–97, 226, 242, 323, 332–33 Downton: 222 dress, wedding and coronation: 23, 131–47, 142, 162, 165, 167–68 of Buckingham, Duke of: 86–87, 136–37 of Chevreuse, Duc de: 138, 140–41, 166, 168 of Henrietta Maria: 30, 113, 131–32, 135, 138, 140–44, 142, 147, 166, 168
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of Louis XIII of France: 137, 143–44, 168 of Marguerite de Valois: 133, 135 of Marie de Médicis: 134, 135, 168 precious stones: 138, 140–41, 144, 147 Dubost, Jean-François: 29 Dubrow, Heather: 230 Dumas, Alexandre: 110 Dumbarton: 47, 49 Dunbar, William, The Thrissel and the Rose: 41–42 Dunblane: 49 Dundee: 52 Edinburgh: 51–52, 73 Edward II, King of England: 48 Edward III, King of England: 28, 45, 338 Edward IV, King of England: 47, 334 Edward VI, King of England: 138, 250 Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury: 77 Effiat, Marquis d’ (Antoine Coëffier de Ruzé): 118, 188–89 Églogue, ou chant pastoral: 119 Elbeuf, Duc d’ (Charles II): 168, 324, 330, 345, 347–48 Elijah, biblical prophet: 209, 213–14 Eliot, Sir John: 249 Élisabeth de Bourbon, wife of Philip IV of Spain: 28, 106, 146 wedding of: 22, 105, 136 Elizabeth, daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 313–15 Elizabeth I, Queen of England: 27, 64–65, 67, 71–72, 334 Elizabeth Stuart, wife of Frederick V, Elector Palatine: 22, 65, 68, 74 Émery, Michel Particelli d’: 310 England and France, Hand-in-Hand: 227–28 entries, royal: 26–27, 31, 51–54, 57, 161; see also under Henrietta Maria; James I; London epithalamia: 23, 110–12, 118, 123–25, 155, 222–23, 225–37
Este, Curtio Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara: 314 Ethelbert, King of Kent: 123 Exeter, Countess of (Elizabeth Drury): 191 Falkland: 52 Fareham: 91 Ferdinando, Grand Duke of Tuscany: 136 Ferro, Giovanni: 314 festival texts: 25–26, 153 A Relation of the Glorious Triumphs…: 156–57, 159–60, 175, 228 transcription of: 343–51 Le Triomphe glorieux & l’ordre des Ceremonies: 156–60 A True Discourse…; 155–56, 161–76, 226–27, 259 and bride: 169 and discourses, divergent: 173–76 and first meeting: 170–73 and proxy wedding: 166–69 and spectacle: 165–66 structure and content: 162 transcription of: 321–42 and wedding contract: 162–65 Finch, John, Recorder of City of Canterbury life and career of: 205–06 welcome speech for Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 23, 161–62, 205, 322, 334–41 biblical references in: 206–15 and Charles I as Charlemagne: 215–17, 339 Finet, Sir John: 194 Firens, Pierre: 113, 114, 142 fleur-de-lis: 29, 113, 135, 137, 139–41, 168, 327–28, 347 in Queen’s House, Greenwich: 308–09 Florence: 136, 259 Fontainebleau: 259 Ford, John: 228 Fornazeri, Jacopo: 312
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Francini, Tommaso: 251 Franco, Mark: 269 François I, King of France (Dauphin): 43, 138, 144 François II, King of France (Dauphin): 43, 48 Frederick I Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor: 280, 282 Frederick V, Elector Palatine: 29, 184, 226 wedding to Elizabeth Stuart: 22, 35 Freist, Dagmar: 181 Galloway, Walter, plague victim: 86 Gamaches: 53 Gardiner, S. R.: 63 Garnier, Claude, Bouquet du lys et de la rose: 111, 115, 124 Gaston d’Orléans: 28 Gaveston, Piers: 48 Gentileschi, Orazio: 30, 298 Geoffrey of Bouillon, Defender of the Holy Sepulchre: 125 Girard, Regnault: 46–48, 53 Glanville, John: 249 Gondi, Giovanni Battista: 259 Gonzaga, Margherita: 314 Goodricke, Matthew: 299 Gorges, Katharine: 255–56 Goring, Sir George: 187 Gravesend: 161, 171, 340 Griffey, Erin: 23, 166 Gunpowder Plot: 98 Hakewill, George: 68 Hall, Edward: 252 Hamilton, Marchioness of (Mary Feilding): 191–92, 196–97 Hampton Court: 86 Haviland, John, printer: 155 Hawkins, Ella: 161 Heigham, John: 223 Henri II, King of France: 250–51 Henri III, King of France: 27, 336
Henri IV, King of France (Henri de Bourbon, King of Navarre): 27, 45, 76, 81, 133, 139, 181, 216, 231, 328, 347 marriage to Marguerite de Valois: 135 marriage to Marie de Médicis: 135–36, 312 and wedding celebration of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 247, 251 Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I of England: 41–42, 45, 56–57, 78–79, 105, 119 arrival journey of: 46, 85, 89, 93, 110, 161, 170–73, 179–83, 189–98, 226–27; see also Finch, John, welcome speech and Arténice masque: 290 and Bérulle, letters from: 95–97 conversion to Anglicanism, possible: 17, 31, 125, 195, 234 of Charles I and Anglicans to Catholicism: 17, 31, 54, 89, 96, 122–24, 131 coronation of: 26, 143, 173 and court ballets: 255–56, 265 departure from France: 23, 46, 109–10, 161, 173, 175, 192 dowry of: 176 entries of: 52, 85, 161 into Amiens: 45–46, 49, 109–10, 112 into London: 26–27, 163, 171–72, 175–76, 179–80, 183, 189, 196, 226–27, 232–33, 242–44, 251, 323, 340–41 first sight of, by Charles I: 78–80, 259 household of: 17, 33–35, 37, 176 attacks on: 75–76, 100, 182–83 and Charles I: 33, 180–81, 186–87, 190–94, 197–98 expulsion of: 99–100, 106, 180–81, 197 and governess: 182, 186, 195–98 and marriage negotiations: 183–89, 198 and Privy Chamber: 180, 184, 187, 189, 197
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protection of: 53–54 and Marie de Médicis: 153 and household, selection of: 184–87 letter from: 122, 175 married life happiness in: 75, 81, 125 quarrels in: 26, 93 piety/religion of: 35, 75–76, 81, 86–89, 92–93, 96–97, 153, 155, 158, 182, 184, 186, 189, 231 display of: 26, 75, 97–99 and plague: 85–86, 90–92 portrait of: 75, 81 sexuality of: 233–36 upbringing of: 23 wedding gown see under dress, wedding and coronation see also Queen’s House, Greenwich; wedding celebration of Charles I and Henrietta Maria Henry V, King of England: 28, 50, 334 Henry VI, King of England: 45, 54–55, 57, 250, 336 Henry VII, King of England: 45, 49–50, 57, 247, 250 Henry VIII, King of England: 138, 180, 247, 250 Henry, Prince of Wales: 64, 73–74, 210 Hernando de Santiago, Fray: 285 Herrick, Robert, Hesperides: 221 ‘Nuptiall Song’: 222–23, 225, 232–37 Hewett, Richard: 100 Hibbard, Caroline: 17, 91, 182, 186, 197 Higgott, Gordon: 23 Hill, Christopher: 63–64 Hobbes, Thomas, A briefe of the art of rhetorique: 132 Holland, Countess of (Isabella Cope): 187–89, 191 Holland, first Earl of (Henry Rich): 29 Holland, second Earl of (Robert Rich): 107, 143, 146, 168, 185, 187, 190, 195, 325, 328, 331, 345 Holland, Hugh, A cypres garland…: 216
Honorius I, Pope: 284 Horace: 247 Huguenots: 30, 34, 36–37, 81, 106, 121, 176, 188, 197, 215, 222, 274 Hundred Years’ War: 44, 54–55 Isabelle de France, wife of Edward II of England: 48 James I, King of Aragon: 286 James I, King of England ( James VI, King of Scotland): 54, 68, 72, 141, 168, 184, 198, 208–09, 213, 217, 247, 250, 336 Basilikon Doron: 210 and Calvinists: 223 death of: 17, 33, 106–07, 154, 174, 187, 207, 226, 241–42 entry into London: 245–46 and Huguenots: 188, 215 isolationist policies of: 111 and Mary Queen of Scots, his mother: 67 and Protestant alliances: 35 and Puritans: 221 Spanish diplomacy of: 32–33, 210 and Spanish marriage negotiations: 77, 79–80, 154, 210, 226, 280, 285, 287 succession to English throne: 27, 64, 180, 192 wedding of: 136 wedding of daughter Elizabeth: 22, 35 James II, King of England: 313–16 James I, King of Scotland: 44–45, 47–49, 55 James II, King of Scotland: 44 James III, King of Scotland: 47, 56 James IV, King of Scotland: 47, 52, 56, 247 James V, King of Scotland: 28, 46, 50, 247 marriage to Mary of Guise: 43, 48, 51, 193 James VI, King of Scotland see James I, King of England Jansen, Bernard: 246, 248
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Jehu, King of Israel: 212–14 Jeremiah, biblical prophet: 207–08 Jesuits: 31, 88, 96, 98 Jezebel, Queen of Israel: 213 Joan Beaufort, wife of James I of Scotland: 45, 47 Joan of Navarre, wife of Henry IV of England: 181 Joan of the Tower, wife of David II Bruce of Scotland: 45 Jodelle, Étienne: 251 John, Baron Harington of Exton: 65 Jones, Inigo, Surveyor of King’s Works: 23, 30, 246 and Arténice, production of: 290–92, 291 and Coelum Britannicum: 308, 314 and Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion: 279–81 portrait and bust of: 279 Queen’s House, Greenwich: 279, 296–300, 308–09, 314 St James’s Palace, Queen’s chapel: 280–90, 283, 284, 289 Westminster Abbey, catafalque for James I’s funeral: 287 Jonson, Ben: 222, 246, 251, 258 The Fortunate Isles and their Union: 111–12, 271, 280 and Neptune’s Triumph for the Return of Albion: 279–80 Joram, King of Israel: 212–13 Jordaens, Jacob: 299 Kaplan, Benjamin: 182 Kenyon, J. P.: 63, 170–71 The Kings Cabinet Opened: 98–99 The Kings Declaration containing a Prohibition: 156–59 Knoppers, Laura: 99 Kronborg Castle: 136 La Porte, Pierre de, valet of Louis XIII: 107, 110 La Rocheguyon (Roche-Guyon), Madame de: 53
La Rocheguyon (Roche-Guyon), Duc de (François de Silly): 269–70 La Rochefoucauld, Cardinal François de: 144, 163, 326, 329, 346–47 La Rochelle: 34, 36, 52–53, 106, 125, 176 Laam, Kevin: 23 Lachrymae Londiniensis: 86, 90 Ladislaus IV, King of Poland: 138 Lanier, Nicholas: 280 Le Beau, I., Adieu de la France à la Serenissime Reyne de la GrandBretagne: 124 Lécluse, Charles de: 246 Leith: 51–52 Lennox, Duke of ( James Stuart): 33–34, 227 Leo X, Pope: 144 Les Ponts-de-Cé, battle of: 153 Liancourt, Seigneur de (Roger du Plessis): 269 Lilly, William: 252 Lindsay, Sir David: 52 Linlithgow: 52 L’Orme, Philibert de: 248 Lobel, Mathias de: 246 Locke, Thomas: 89, 93 Lockyer, Roger: 63, 174 London: 73–74 Charlton House, Greenwich: 300 entry into: 26–27, 163, 171–72, 175–76, 179–80, 183, 189, 196, 226–27, 232–33, 242–44, 251, 323, 340–41; see also pageants, aborted Greenwich Palace: 136, 279; see also Queen’s House, Greenwich St James’s Palace: 280–90, 283, 284, 289, 311, 317 St Paul’s Cathedral: 138 Somerset House: 281, 286, 290, 299–300, 342 triumphal entry arch: 26–27, 242–43, 245–48 Westminster: 286 Westminster Abbey: 287 see also plague
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Longueville, Duc de (Henri II d’Orléans): 136 Louis, Dauphin of France: 44, 46 Louis IX, King of France, Saint: 122, 125 Louis XII, King of France: 45, 136 Louis XIII, King of France: 17, 28, 30, 33–34, 89, 93, 98, 118–21, 172, 184, 196, 226, 228, 231, 258, 261, 328, 345, 348–49 and architectural style: 290 and ballets, court (ballets de cour): 258, 261, 264–65, 268, 272–73 in festival texts: 157, 159, 163, 165 and Huguenots: 106, 176, 188, 215 and Marie de Médicis, his mother: 28, 153 and Saint Louis: 125 and trousseau of Henrietta Maria: 132 wedding to Anne d’Autriche: 22, 105, 136, 141, 143–44, 146, 259, 313 and wedding celebration of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 106–07, 109, 136–37, 139, 163, 165, 168 Louis I Vendôme: 160 Macrobius: 247 Madeleine de St Joseph, Mère: 91–92 Madeleine de Valois (of France), wife of James V of Scotland: 43, 48, 50–51 Madrid see Charles I, Madrid, journey to Malborne, Jane, plague victim: 91 Malleville, Claude, Ballet de la Reyne d’Angleterre: 108, 115 Mallick, Oliver: 185 Mallowgh, David, King’s shoemaker: 86 Mansfeld, Ernst von, Colonel: 215, 226 Marcelline, George, Epithalamium Gallo-Britannicum: 31–32, 113–14, 119, 125, 230–32, 234 Marcus, Leah: 221 Mareschal, André Feux de joye de la France: 112, 119, 123–24 Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI of England: 45, 54–55
Margaret of Scotland, wife of Dauphin Louis: 44, 46, 48–49, 52–54 Margaret Tudor, wife of James IV of Scotland: 47, 49–50, 56 Marguerite de Valois, wife of Henri IV of France: 81, 133, 135, 139, 141, 143 Maria, Infanta, daughter of Philip III of Spain: 68, 77, 79, 154, 280–81, 286 Marie de Médicis, wife of Henri IV of France: 30, 34–35, 96, 98, 106, 109, 146–47, 153, 163, 165, 168, 192–93, 196, 317, 330, 347 and ballets, court (ballets de cour): 120, 272 coronation of: 134, 141, 143 exile in Blois: 153 and Henrietta Maria household of: 184–87 letter to: 122, 175 marriage negotiations for: 29 and Louis XIII, her son: 28, 153 portraits of: 29–30, 146–47, 259–60 regency of: 27–28 wedding of: 136, 312 Marie Louise Gonzaga, wife of Ladislaus IV of Poland: 138 Marischal, Earl (George Keith): 136 Marisse, Mathieu: 261 Marolles, Michel de, Mémoires: 256–57, 266 marriage negotiations for Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 29–30, 32, 87–89, 106, 118, 181, 183–90, 198, 214–15 Marshall, Peter: 69 Martin, Jean, printer: 156, 160 Martin V, Pope: 43 Mary, daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 313–15 Mary I, Queen of England: 43 Mary, Queen of Scots: 43, 67, 138 Mary of Guise, wife of James V of Scotland: 28, 51–52, 193 Mary Tudor, wife of Louis XII of France: 45, 136 Matarel: 106–07
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Matthew, Sir Tobie: 193 Matthieu, Pierre: 251 Maurer, Helen: 55 McGowan, Margaret M.: 23, 27 Mead, Joseph, Reverend: 90, 92–93, 100, 244, 249 Meddus, Dr, newswriter: 197 Mende, Bishop of (Daniel du Plessis de La Mothe-Houdancourt): 33, 93, 175, 197 Ménestrier, Claude-François: 257 Mercedarian Order: 286–87 Métezeau, Clément: 251 Middleton, Thomas: 243–45 Milborne, Richard: 68 Montagu, Richard: 209, 225 A New Gagg for an Old Goose: 223–24 Appello Caesarem: 223–24 Montagu, Walter: 34 Montdidier: 109 Montreuil: 110 Morel, Horace: 261 Morosini, Marc Antonio, Venetian Ambassador: 164 Mortlake: 246 Mostyn, Sir Roger: 179 Moulinié, Étienne: 261 Montbazon (Mount Bason), Duc de (Hercule de Rohan): 79 Mountjoy, Marie, tire-woman of Anna of Denmark: 185 Muir, Edward: 182 Mulryne, J. R. (Ronnie): 23, 321–22 Murray, Thomas: 68 Naseby, Battle of: 98–99 Nebuchadnezzar, King of Judah and Jerusalem: 207, 211–12, 214, 337 Nemours, Duc de (Henri I de Savoie): 266, 268, 324, 345 neo-Platonism: 24 New Historicist scholarship: 24 Newburn: 317 Newcastle: 317 Niort: 53
Northumberland, Earl of (Henry Howard): 246 Oatlands Palace: 300 Oglander, Sir John: 90 Oratorians (French Congregation of the Oratory): 86, 88, 90, 93, 96, 98, 175 Orgel, Stephen: 24 Orléans, Duc d’ (Gaston): 136, 193 Orley, Bernaert van: 246 Ortelius, Abraham: 245 Ovid, Metamorphoses: 227, 309, 326 Oxford: 89–90, 227 pageants, aborted: 280 issues arising from: 247–52 plans for: 242–47 Panofsky, Erwin: 23 Paris: 250, 290, 292, 323; see also festival texts; wedding celebration of Charles I and Henrietta Maria Le Parnasse triomphant: 112, 115, 123 Passe, Willem van de: 116 Payton, Edward, Discours of Court and Courtiers: 143–44 Peacock, John: 23 Pearce, Edward, senior: 299–300, 305 Pembroke, Earl of (William Herbert): 33–34, 222, 225, 244 Penni, Francesco: 144 Pérac, Étienne du: 284, 285 Perth: 47, 49, 52 Pesaro, Zuane, Venetian ambassador: 89–90 Petrarch, Francesco: 228 Philip, confessor of Henrietta Maria: 96 Philip II, King of Spain: 250 Philip IV, King of Spain, Prince of Asturias: 22, 43, 48, 105, 136, 146 Philippe IV (le Beau), King of France: 43, 338. Philippe (le Bon), Duke of Burgundy: 44 Philostrates the Elder: 312 Pike, Daniel, plague victim: 85
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Pike, Edward, plague victim: 85–86 Pike, Elizabeth, plague victim: 85–86 Pike, Joseph, plague victim: 86 Pike, Samuel, plague victim: 86 plague: 17, 26, 85–86, 96, 242–43, 251–52 Catholicism as cause of: 90–92 and poverty: 93–95 Protestantism as cause of: 92 Pliny the Elder, Natural History: 312–14 Plymouth: 94 Potter, John, plague victim: 91 Pourbus, Frans, the Younger: 141 Puget de La Serre, Jean, Les Amours de Jupiter et de Junon: 260, 273 Pugh, Syrithe: 222 Pulteney, Gabriel: 225 Pulteney, Jane, wife of Clipsby Crew: 223, 225, 236 Pulteney, Sir John: 225 Pure, Michel de: 256–57, 260 Puritanism: 68, 221, 223–25 Queen’s House, Greenwich: 23, 279, 304 bedchamber decoration of: 298, 306, 307 nuptial allegory painting: 295–96, 299, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 308–17 building of: 296–98 plan of: 297 Questier, Michael: 191 Quin, Walter, In nuptiis principum incomparabilium: 228, 229, 230, 232 Rabel, Daniel: 261, 265, 270, 272 Racan, Seigneur de (Honorat de Bueil): 258 Arténice: 290–92 Randolph, Thomas: 227 Raphael: 134, 144–45, 246 Ravaillac, François: 251 Ré (Rhé), Isle of: 34, 222 Reeve, L. J.: 76 Régnier, Pierre: 113, 251 Rémy, Abraham, La Galatée: 273 Renaudot, Théophraste: 160
Reni, Guido: 295–96, 304, 308–13, 316 Retz, Cardinal de ( Jean François Paul de Gondi): 110 Richelieu, Cardinal Duc (Armand Jean Du Plessis): 29–30, 33–36, 93, 118, 121, 196–97, 271 assassination plot against: 334 and Huguenots: 36–37, 274 and Marie de Médicis: 153 Mémoires: 273–74 and wedding celebration of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 108–09, 146, 173–74 Robert I Bruce, King of Scotland: 45 Rochester: 161, 171, 339–40 Romano, Giulio: 144, 246, 296, 311, 316 Rome: 310 S. Adriano church: 284–86, 285 Sistine Chapel: 144 Rossetti, Conte Carlo: 309, 311, 316–17 Rubens, Peter Paul: 29–30, 134, 135, 141, 146, 259 Rudyard, Sir Benjamin: 208 Russell, Conrad: 63 Rutland, Countess of (Cecily Tufton): 191 Rutland, Earl of (Francis Manners): 189 Ruytinck, Simon: 247 St Andrews: 51–52 St Bartholomew Day Massacre: 81 Saint-George, Madame de ( Jeanne de Harley), governess of Henrietta Maria: 182, 186, 195–98 St John, Lady: 191–92 Salvetti, Amerigo, Tuscan resident in London: 91, 94, 141, 241, 243, 249, 251 Samson, Alexander: 77 Sancy, Père de, confessor to Henrietta Maria: 93, 96 Santiago de Compostela: 286 Saumur: 90 Savage, Lady Jane: 191–92 Savage, Viscountess (Elizabeth Darcy): 191
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Scamozzi, Vincenzo: 288, 290 Scottish Wars of Independence: 45 Serlio, Sebastiano: 291 Shakespeare, William: 70 ‘The Rape of Lucrece’: 228 The Tempest: 169 Sharpe, Kevin: 24, 154–55, 170, 173, 179 Shewring, Margaret E.: 25, 29, 321 Sinclair, William, Earl of Orkney: 48 Sixtus V, Pope: 285, 287 Smuts, R. Malcolm: 76, 181, 190 Smyth, Sir Hugh: 255 Snodham, Thomas, painter: 156, 343 Somers, John: 160 Soubise, Duc de (Benjamin de Rohan): 36, 188, 197, 215 Southampton: 280 Souvray, Commandeur Jacques de: 258 Spenser, Edmund, ‘Prothalamium’: 228, 230 Spinola, Ambrogio: 94 Starkey, David: 32 Steuart, Sir Francis: 94 Stirling: 49, 52 Stone, Lawrence: 64 Stone, Nicholas: 299 Strode, William: 227 Strong, Roy: 24 Stuteville, Sir Martin: 90, 92–93, 244, 249 Taylor, John: 252 Thirty Years’ War: 17 Tillet, Jean du: 159 Tillières, Comte de (Tanneguy Leveneur): 195 Titchfield: 90–91, 93 Tours: 52–53 Toynbee, Margaret: 195 Treaty of Perpetual Peace: 56 Tregian, Charles: 94 Trevarion, Elizabeth, wife of Sir Robert Carey: 64 Trevisan, Sara: 23, 161 Triomphe des François et Anglois: 117–19, 123
Troyes: 50 Tuckner, Anthony: 207 Tyacke, Nicholas: 224 Tyburn gallows: 97–99 Urban VIII, Pope: 88–89, 97, 121, 154, 184 Van Dyck, Anthony: 75, 81, 296 Venice: 280 Victor Amadeus I, Duke of Savoy: 29 Vigenère, Blaise de: 312 Villamena, Francesco: 279 Ville-aux-Clercs, Monsieur de, French Secretary of State: 189, 196 Virgil: 247 Aeneid: 169, 216–17 Vitruvius: 248 Vollemont, Louis: 271 Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen: 162, 165 Watkin, David: 313 Watkins, John: 181 wedding celebration of Charles I and Henrietta Maria: 105–09, 138, 156–58, 166–69, 173, 223, 226, 228, 242 images of: 110–17, 113, 114, 116 see also decorations, wedding; dress, wedding and coronation; epithalamia; festival texts welcome speech see under Finch, John Wheeler, Robert: 100 White, Francis, Dean of Carlisle: 223 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury: 71 Wickes, Henry, Master of Works: 297 Widdrington: 73 Willet, Andrew, Hexapla in Danielem: 212, 214 Williams, John, Lord Keeper, Bishop of Lincoln: 33 Great Britain’s Salomon: 242 Winchelsea: 206 Wind, Edgar: 24 Windsor: 89–90
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Windsor, Lady Catherine: 191 Wolfson, Sara J.: 26, 32–33, 52–53 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal: 25 Worcester: 250 Wotton (Wootton), Sir Henry: 78–79 The Elements of Architecture: 248 Yates, Frances: 21, 23–24, 37 Young, John: 49–50, 56 Zuccaro, Federico: 280, 282
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